Blessed by the Potato

Fired Up! was actually, surprisingly… good!

I had really no hopes for the movie based on the previews, it just looked like a low-budget low-class teen sex and gross-out comedy. But for whatever reason, I gave it a shot, and it is genuinely funny. It actually has some warmth to it, and it’s hard not to like the characters. The gross-out stuff is kept to a minimum, and while lots of shenanigans are implied, the sex is kept off-camera too, so kids can actually watch it (though I don’t know about the unrated version I linked to above).

The basic premise is two jocks (and these are the skinniest football lugheads I’ve ever seen) who actually possess some wit and charm decide to ditch spending their summer sweating away at football camp, and go off to cheer camp instead to get girls. Along the way they get to know the girls and, while hilarity does ensue, they also grow up a bit.

Awwww.

It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s also not the annoying fart movie that I was expecting, so it’s well worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet.

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Well, this was a very pleasantly cool summer. I didn’t spend nearly enough time outside enjoying it, and didn’t get all the summer reading I had hoped to done — boy do I miss the days of being a kid and having the summers off to do nothing but play video games and read. Here are the books I did get around to:

Warning, spoilers follow!

One Jump Ahead, Mark Van Name – this was a good military sci-fi read about a kidnapping, a nano-bot enhanced mercenary soldier, and his sarcastic sentient combat tank. It wasn’t particularly special, it’s not the sort of book you’ll be talking about with your friends years later, but it was very readable and enjoyable, well worth spending some alone time with on a sunny afternoon. I’m planning on picking up the next book in the series, Smiling Jack, if that adds any weight to the quasi-recommendation.

Bitterwood, James Maxey – this is mostly a fantasy tale about a dragon empire ruling over humanity, with a few sci-fi twists along the way. After losing his family to the dragon overlords, Bitterwood goes on a decades-long dragon-killing revenge quest… which unfortunately leads to him killing the king’s favourite son, which drives the dragon king to decide to exterminate humanity. Humans and sympathetic dragons must work together to stop the madness of the dragon king… Another good, quick read without much to complain about. I enjoyed the mis-mash of sci-fi and dragons and archers. Apparently there are two more books following this, but Bitterwood doesn’t look to have been written specifically for a trilogy, it stands pretty well on it’s own, and while it was fairly good, it didn’t leave me itching for more. Maybe next summer :)

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson – This has been the best fantasy read of the summer for me. A very engrossing novel about an empire with an immortal emperor, who, as OSC puts it “if not evil, is nasty and arbitrary”. A slave rebellion seeks to overthrow the throne, lead by a powerful “allomancer”, one of the only ones in the slave caste’s ranks (in this world, powers are hereditary, and typically only nobles possess them). I found the system of magic that he’s created to be very engrossing — it’s magic, it’s powerful, but it’s also clearly limited, and possessing its own set of rules and trade-offs. The whole time I was reading about the magic system I was thinking of what a great RPG this world would make. It’s a real page-turner, and we’ve already picked up the rest of the trilogy: Well of Ascension and Hero of the Ages, but I can’t read them yet because Wayfare called dibs! Yes, the books are better than the titles. While I hadn’t heard of him before, Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to complete Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (which I also haven’t heard of). This is apparently a big deal. Whatever, I enjoyed the book and I’ll be sure to read through his other stuff!

Trade Pact Universe #1 Thousand Words For A Stranger, Julie Czerneda – I hadn’t heard about Julie Czerneda until she got a mention on John Scalzi’s Whatever, and that was unfortunate. She is a good writer (and Canadian), and I quite enjoyed the first book in her “Trade Pact Universe” series, about telepaths and space pirates. Some of her descriptions of telepathy (especially the “M’hir” — even reading silently, my mouth didn’t like trying to make sense of that “word”) rubbed me the wrong way, but the writing and dialogue is otherwise top-notch, and I’ve already picked up the second book in this series, as well as the first in another:

Species Imperative #1 Survival, Julie Czerneda – I liked this one a bit more from the “concept” side of sci-fi, but really didn’t fall in love with the plot or the characters — the main character seemed to just follow along without questioning what was happening to her enough, up to the point of running off to an alien world without ever getting a satisfactory answer to why a salmon researcher was so uniquely important to a galactic question. Maybe that’ll be answered in the next book of the series, but I started to get fatigued from the suspension of disbelief required to continue to not get pulled out of the story wondering why all the other characters were so worked up over the protagonist. Though from the concept side of things I did like her (brief) descriptions of the alien species, FTL travel, and a future earth where wilderness areas are rabidly protected. And there was an awful lot of duplicity on the part of the minor characters. It ends on a cliff-hanger, and even then I’m not sure I’m going to follow-up with the rest of the trilogy.

As you may have noticed, I’ve signed up as an Amazon affiliate, and the links above will take you directly to the Amazon page for each book. I don’t want that to influence whether or how you buy your books, and while all the books here were at least decent summer reads, I wouldn’t give a book a good review just to try to get an affiliate sale. However, if you are going to buy any of these, and if you might use Amazon, then might I suggest using the links here? The site gets a 4% kickback from any purchases made.

“It sure was nice of everyone to pull over so they could drive through all the wreckage.”

“That’s just apocalyptic courtesy.”

Just so you don’t forget, here are some main points of courtesy that you should follow in the event of the apocalypse (whether that’s zombies, plague, nuclear holocaust, or sentient machine overlords).

1. Pull your car over. Should you find yourself on the highway or otherwise commuting when the end of days comes — and if there is any kind of advanced notice, this is likely as would-be survivors flee the cities — be sure to pull your car over to the side of the road. Emergency crews and plucky, hardened survivors alike will need to scream between rows of wrecked cars as fast as possible, and if your vehicle is still rusting away in the centre of the lane, then nobody is going to be happy.
2. Lock the doors, but leave the key. Nobody fleeing from zombies wants to have to sleep in a tree, so do the kind thing and give them access to your house or flat by leaving the key in an obvious place, such as above the doorframe or beneath the welcome mat. Be sure to lock up however, as mindless hordes may find their way inside, turning your potential end-of-days-inn into a nightmarish trap. Even moderately intelligent fiends will have trouble working the locks, let alone finding the key. And that’s assuming the zombies haven’t eaten their own hands out of boredom. Intelligent hunter-killer robots, aliens, werewolves, and vampires (who are not otherwise forbidden from entering homes uninvited) won’t be stopped by such a ploy, but then, they won’t find an easily smashed or vapourized locked door much of a barrier either. Round doorknobs are best able to foil the maldextrous, including zombies and velociraptors, but can also trip up survivors coated in sticky blood or who are losing hand grip due to cold or spreading paralysis. And please, don’t be clever with the fingerprint readers or retina-scanners — even in the absence of the apocalypse, someone always figures out a way around those, and it often isn’t pretty (and when it is pretty, it’s nearly trivially easy, like stealing your wine glass).
3. Leave the gun, loaded. In nearly all end-of-the-world scenarios, survivors will need guns to battle zombies, demons, giant irradiated ants, aliens, terminators, or rival bands of insane, hungry raiders. So do the polite thing and pick yourself up a gun, even if it’s just a humble shotgun, and leave it in an obvious, easy-to-reach place, such as above the front door or over the fireplace mantle. The more ammo the better, but at the very least leave it fully loaded: the horrors that await are not always patient.
4. Stock some food. My mom learned this at an early age, since growing up on PEI you could never be too sure when a snowstorm or zombie cow invasion would strike, and how many days you’d be trapped for when it happened. My mom’s rule-of-thumb is to keep enough canned or dried food on hand to last each normal member of the household 8 months (I’ve never heard of the plows taking quite that long to clear the roads, even on PEI, but maybe things were different then). This might not be enough food should the sun be blotted from the sky and crops fail, but the important point is that it will last long enough that whoever sets up a temporary fortress in your house will probably have to move because the hordes have found them, and not because they ran out of a local supply of food. More selfishly, that’s probably enough food to let you hole up and wait for the fools that only stocked 6 months worth of food to start eating each other, significantly thinning the competition for resources before you have to resort to scavenging yourself.
5. Post clear warning signs for haunted, cursed, or otherwise dangerous areas. If your vacation retreat just happens to lie overtop a fissure to hell, be sure to make a large warning sign to that effect, and post it at all entrances to your property. You would feel really bad if trespassing, fornicating teenagers accidentally let a drop of blood (or eww, other bodily fluids) touch the unholy ground and free the evil contained within. They would likewise be super-pissed if they were reading through your private journal later to find that you knew about it all along, which could leave you open to serious legal liability should any remnants of civilization remain.
6. Fire. Fire is almost always a bonus, whether as a source of heat and light for survivors to cook by and tell stories, or to throw at relatively flammable plagues of insects or zombies. Always keep multiple sets of lighters and/or matches handy, as well as fuel. Wood is always a popular choice for a stationary fire, but something liquid or an aerosol will be needed if you find yourself in need of giving fire away, like a pretty orange present. Be careful though! You don’t want to accidentally drop a Molotov cocktail and burn down your only refuge against the darkness.
7. Books. You may be amazed at the amount of data you can put on a hard drive, and you might love the interaction of a blog, but when the power’s gone, and an EMP has killed all the electronics, nothing beats a good book. You can do yourself and those that might take up residence in your house a huge favour by creating a small library of your own — books on how to serve man, make gunpowder from stuff you might find around the house, and how to rebuild society from the ground up will be in particular demand, as will first aid guides and human-alien translation dictionaries. It never hurts to have too many: those you don’t read you can always burn!
8. A Shovel. We survived the dinosaurs by being small and living underground, and damnit, that’s the same strategy that will see us through the dragons and/or machine empires too. If you can build your existing house with several sub-surface levels, that’s probably the preferred solution, as you may also be able to pre-arrange for electricity and clean water with the right kind of infrastructure. Failing that, it’s always handy to keep a few shovels around. Be sure to call the gas company and mark out any nearby buried mains in advance, as they’re unlikely to answer the phone when the apocalypse comes. Even if you don’t take to subterranean life, the ability to dig holes is always handy for burying corpses, hiding treasure, and planting mines.
9. Die a good death.Let’s face facts, folks: assuming the end times are not too horrific, we all want to be rugged survivalists. But by its very definition, the apocalypse is going to kill most of us off, one way or another. The odds overwhelmingly suggest that you are going to be one of the ones to die in the first massive wave signaling the end of human civilization. In the event of nuclear fire, natural disasters, or an alien invasion, it isn’t likely that you’ll have much say in how you find your death, nor is it likely to matter much. But if a plague of zombies strikes, do be sure to find a way to die without joining the ranks of the undead. Trust me, the last thing your friends want to do is bash in your brains and set your corpse on fire so you won’t eat them. I can’t say I’d follow my own advice if faced with the situation, but if you find yourself captured by killer robots, don’t spend the last few miserable weeks of your existence slaving away in their factories building more killer robots to finish off humanity — find a quicker, nobler death. Nobody, but nobody, wants to wake up moments before their own death to find they’ve been cocooned and an alien monstrosity is eating them from the inside out. Three words: self-destruct device. A switch you can activate with your tongue and a small amount of explosives either in your pockets or surgically implanted can give you the merciful death you’re probably moaning for right now without even knowing it, and also take a few of those sumbitches down with you.
10. Stay sane. Seeing everyone and everything you ever loved vanish in a cloud of smoke or puddle of green ooze is extremely traumatizing, and it’s bound to play on the psyches of even the most grounded people. It’s ok if you go a little off the rails — some crying and screaming is par for the course. However, a group of people all losing their shit at once is never a pretty thing, and trust me, human sacrifice never makes it all better. While painting cryptic, taunting messages on the walls with your own blood (or ugh, other bodily fluids) can help relieve cabin fever when going outside means certain death, it’s not going to help the fragile psyches of the survivors that come across your decrepit lair. Even if the cake really is a lie.
11. Alcohol ain’t for drinkin. I’m just saying, alcohol is far too valuable as a disinfectant and flammable liquid to go just drinking your cares away in the first few nights after the apocalypse arrives. Pip up there lad, it’s only the end of the world! A hard night of boozing won’t change the fact, and you could deprive yourself of dozens of good homemade bombs in the process! That goes doubly for those of you that will, of course, perish — the survivors care little for your temporary numbness, and your selfish attitude might cost them the war, whatever it happens to be against!

These are all points of common apocalyptic courtesy, but not many people are aware of them — after all, you really only ever get to live through one apocalypse. Even if you don’t survive, which is likely, you owe it to the remnants of humanity to make their job repopulating the planet as easy as possible.

Along with these rules are the common-sense ways to avoid the apocalypse in the first place, such as not building labs that study highly infectious alien zombie agents near (which includes under!) large population centres. It’s always important to have failsafes and backups: for instance, why not build two world-saving asteroid-smashing rockets? Or heck, ten — consider it an economic stimulus! Avoid single points of failure, especially where such a failure could destroy the world. Think: if your demon prison is powered by the moon, what’s your backup in the event of an eclipse? If only one man knows the call-back codes to your nuclear bombers that are already in the air, what happens if he has a stroke or goes totally batshit loco? If your invincible army of unstoppable sentient and ill-tempered robots only have one weak spot on their backs, why not do everyone a favour and paint it bright orange or make it flash?

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It’s been a while since I spewed my incoherent thoughts out about a potential investment, and that’s due in no small part to the fact that a) most of my readers don’t want to read through these boring things, and b) I’ve been embarrassingly wrong in a number of cases: Priszm turned quite badly against me, and I’ve been kicking myself for going to all the trouble of trying to put a value on POT and AGU, only to see the price go to that level just days after the post, and yet I didn’t buy any due to fear.

For the last few months I haven’t bought anything other than a few little incremental savings into TD’s e-series index funds: we did have two vacations this summer and some car repairs. I still don’t have much money to invest, but I’m thinking of selling some other stocks that have rallied lately (esp. my bank stocks) since I think they might have run their course… but I don’t have anything else waiting to put the cash in!

One company that I’ve seen others recommend is Shoppers Drug Mart (SC).

From the consumer’s side, I’ve liked Shoppers: their stores are usually well stocked, their store brand items are good alternatives, and the stores themselves are often conveniently located with good hours, clean and well-lit. They have their own well-liked rewards card program, and many of their sales are little more than bonus optimum points (they don’t have to do hard discounting to get people in the door). For a long time I considered them a fantastic convenience store: open late, yet with good prices on stuff like snacks and over-the-counter drugs. It’s been a long time since I’ve considered them as a drug store, since their pharmacy counter charges an arm and a leg to fill a prescription (and indeed, anecdotally I’ve noticed that they don’t have much traffic to the pharmacy). Their beauty counter is over-priced, but does great business anyway, I suppose it is high-quality. However in the last year or so I’ve been disappointed by the convenience store side of shoppers, as their non-sale prices on a lot of items has gone up 25+%, so I’ve been shopping there less often for fewer things (basically now I only go if there’s a big sale/bonus points day).

Pretty much every report/analysis I’ve seen rates them a buy, and that’s largely on the basis of their growth. However, I’ve looked briefly a few times and haven’t been wooed: a fair bit of growth is already priced in with a 16X PE, and that’s at it’s current near-low (Shoppers is one of the few stocks to not enjoy a big rally this year). On the surface, it always looked to me like one of those stocks that runs along great until they hit the slightest bump in the road and “correct” hard. Their same store sales growth has been an impressive 5-7% for each of the last several years; on top of the growth in existing stores they’ve been opening new stores to the tune of 5-10% per year — that’s a lot of growth, about 15% per year to the bottom line. However, I have a bit of a personal issue with projecting exponential growth out too far into the future: at some point, that kind of growth has to slow down, and I don’t like holding a stock when “multiple contraction” sets in — as great as a company might be at that point, holding the shares might be painful.

One worrying sign is that all the insider activity over the last few months has been to sell. It’s not a huge portion of the float, only about 0.1% of the outstanding shares have been sold, but it is a little worrying that the insiders don’t want to own SC. Also, I was surprised to see that nearly half their revenue came from the pharmacy side of the business; as a customer I don’t like it — if consumers look to cut expenses they might find numerous other pharmacies that are cheaper to fill their scripts, like I did — and as an investor I’m a little cautious since the pharmacy side is subject to “political risk”.

When it all boils down, Shoppers does seem to be a well-run business, and their rewards program is staying good, which keeps people loyal. It also helps that it’s the only rewards program I know of that gets the cult-like atmosphere going with “exclusive” bonus points days and refer-a-friend programs. I don’t like the P/E over 15, especially in this environment, so I’m going to sit on the sidelines and just watch until the price gets down to $39 or so; maybe it never will, and I’ll be making the mistake of avoiding a paying a good price for a great company in favour of seeking a great price on something that isn’t so great. It wouldn’t be the first time. However, I’ll try to avoid repeating my AGU mistake, and now that I’ve set a price that I think is a good value, I think I will actually buy if it hits that, unless something material comes out (such as new legislation).

On a completely different note, Wayfare was curious as to how I was doing with the active management side of my portfolio, and indeed it’s been a while since I checked myself. Looking back to January, 2008 (a baseline date I selected since it’s about when I changed how I deal with my investments and also before the crisis really got going), the TSX is down 20% and the S&P500 is down 30%. I’m only down about 8% myself. That’s assuming that all contributions that have been made over the last year and a half or so were present at the beginning — buying in slowly during a down market would have given me a boost due to pure luck in market timing even if I had a passive portfolio. The contributions over that time aren’t insignificant: between putting my cash savings and new savings into the market (aside from a small emergency fund, I’m 100% equities now) they’re nearly 70% of my starting portfolio value. I created a Google Finance portfolio with just XIC in it to mimic what would have happened if I had spread out the contributions evenly over the 20 months: this is about the best-case scenario for passive investing, since I actually put the bulk of the cash into the market long before the bottom was in, and since the TSX did better than the S&P500. Nonetheless, I still (narrowly) beat it: the XIC portfolio is down ~9%, which is a better measure since it also includes dividends.

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A recent post at Toronto Realty Blog hit on a touchy issue: discrimination against rental tenants. The Star reports on the goings-on at the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

This is something that is important to me, as I am (a) male, (b) a student, and (c) have a cat. That puts me into several categories of discrimination, as it seems every landlord wants a female professional with no pets.

And I have to say: I can see the other side on that, as there are students (especially some males) who can just destroy a property — ruin a whole neighbourhood, for that matter. Broken bottles in the street and driveway, holes and graphitti on the walls, kitchens and washrooms that don’t get cleaned for years, and bass music to rattle your teeth all through the night. That’s not fair to anyone, the landlord in particular. There have been a number of student neighbours through the years that I would have love to have had evicted, and I wish sometimes that it was just a little easier for landlords to evict truly destructive tenants. However, not all males/students/pet owners are like that, so it’s also not fair to discriminate based solely on those surface features — and there are girls who are every bit as destructive (as Ben would surely demonstrate). I’m a good tenant: my cat is clean (and declawed), I pay rent on time, I keep the place in good repair, and just fix minor things on my own rather than bug my landlord.

I also have good references and credit to prove it.

And I think that’s where the first fine line starts to form: everyone has to live somewhere, and it’s not fair to discriminate against people and prevent them from renting or evict them just because of their race, gender, age, or pet. You have to actually evaluate the individual. As a landlord, especially a small one where the number of units you control wouldn’t form a valid statistical sample, I don’t think the government is ever going to force you to take a tenant you don’t want, as long as you give them a fair shake. But telling a person to buzz off just because of their race, age, pet, or other such factors is discrimination, and it’s not right.

In his post, D. Fleming says:

You know what else? I don’t rent to guys either. Boys, males, men, or gentlemen. […] Women are cleaner, quieter, and less likely to have ten friends over for UFC 101 and have a spontaneous ten-man tag-team match and put holes in the wall. I only rent to women, no questions asked.
[…]Is this discrimination?

[emphasis mine]

And of course: Yes, it is. I don’t want to begrudge a business person’s ability to make money, and I don’t want to force them to accept bad tenants or bad risks, but as commenter Dave (#6) pointed out, how is this different than a business not wanting to hire a woman because she’ll just get preggers and go on mat leave? There’s a line where prudent risk management slips into blanket discrimination, and a “no questions asked” policy is definitely on the discrimination side! Individual businesses may have to accept that to live in a society free from (or with a minimum level of) discrimination, they might have to be a little flexible in their standards to be more inclusive, and that might come with costs. As taxpayers, perhaps we should consider sharing those costs: it would be hella hard to enforce, but a default/excessive damage insurance fund for landlords from the government might be something to consider, similar to how EI helps pay for mat leave benefits.

Landlords in Ontario can’t demand security deposits, and I’ve seen enough abuses of those that I can see why — it’s very easy to inflate repair costs (especially when it’s your own time you’re charging for), and to include things that should be considered normal wear and tear. Once the landlord has the deposit, it’s very difficult for the tenant to get it back. There are of course issues from the other side, for landlords to seek reimbursement for damages from bad tenants after the fact, but they can do that. Especially if there is a lot of damage, like what’s seen in the student ghetto every spring around campus, then it becomes worthwhile to pursue the small claims court/tenant tribunal to get the money. With students and other low-income tenants there is the “you can’t get blood from a stone” issue, but by the same token, you probably couldn’t ask for a $10k security deposit, either.

However, the rent is negotiated on an individual basis, so landlords can charge more (or discount less off asking) to account for the increased risk, the same way that car insurance policies are way more expensive for boys under 25. People with bad credit, no job security/history, or poor references might have to take a risk-adjusted (advertised) rental rate, whereas better prospective tenants might be able to negotiate a discount.

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know the government can’t force a landlord to take a tenant they don’t want for whatever reason — if for no other reason than the relationship would be soured after the proceedings to make that happen. They can fine people though. There are issues with the OHRT, the rules, the processes, and the protections for both sides — nothing is perfect after all — but the fact that blanket discrimination is wrong isn’t one of them. However, the focus isn’t on these minor issues of preferences for gender or against students, where often a person can get a place to call home, even if not a particular unit. Rather, the OHRC is focusing on the people who can’t get housing at all: those on welfare, or with mental illness, so I don’t think D. Fleming has anything to worry about, even after publishing his discriminatory rental practices. “Where there are legitimate reasons for particular housing providers to deny housing to an individual, there still remains a societal and governmental obligation to make sure that this person is adequately housed.” The human rights guys are not out to go after individual landlords (especially small ones with just a handful of units), except in the cases where specific, egregious complaints have been made, but rather are looking at the problem society wide.

Some final quotes from the primary source:

Screening practices were a major concern for both tenants and landlords. Both
tenants and housing providers noted that the Code does not clearly set out
specific acceptable and unacceptable requirements and questions.

The Commission recognizes that housing providers have a legitimate interest in
being able to use non-discriminatory tenant screening techniques to select
tenants. The Landlord’s Self Help Centre noted that the process of screening
prospective tenants is a fundamental business practice used to manage risks and
stave off potential financial loss. A wide range of housing providers indicated that
it was important for them to be able to assess whether tenants would be able to
pay for rental units and keep them in good repair.

Housing providers were also concerned that they could be viewed as having
discriminated against someone because of a Code ground even if they have
rejected the tenant because of legitimate reasons such as bad references or
obviously inadequate income. Accordingly, there was an interest in having
greater certainty about what is and is not allowed. As the CMHA, Ontario noted,
the requirements must be flexible and balanced to protect the human rights of
tenants while at the same time protecting landlords from potential hardships.

So it looks like we’ll just have to wait to see what they decide on as they mull these issues over.