No Food for Thought

Last year I started working for an organization more than 10 km away from home. After asking my local dealer about the hybrid bike I had bought second-hand a decade earlier and being told it wasn't worth 100 CAD, I decided it was time for me to buy a new bike.

After much research, I settled on the first proposal from the dealer, a Marin Fairfax SC1. With a 489 USD MSRP, the model is inexpensive, but Wirecutter's review of performance hybrid bicycles convinced me it was a great choice.

The SC1 is a clear upgrade over my previous hybrid. For commuting, the worst problem was the quick release wheels and seatpost. I managed to get these replaced with attachments needing a hexagonal key for 15 CAD (not quite secure, but getting true protection was not affordable). I got Evo mudguards which cover plenty from the local dealer for 32 CAD and a new kickstand since this bike won't fit the usual model attached on the wheel's axis.

After a few months of usage, I was about to write I couldn't find any flaw in the SC1 when the rear brakes degraded. The same local dealer who had sold me the bike told me the brake pads needed replacing. I didn't get new pads yet, but the pads do look used, and I'm a little annoyed to be told I should replace these after less than 5 months of non-continuous usage, with well under a megameter traveled. In the end, the 1 weak point mentioned by the Wirecutter, brakes, which I thought wouldn't really matter, seems to constitute a significant con indeed.

But I remain very satisfied, and I must thank Wirecutter for its incredibly comprehensive and high quality guide.

In 2016, Don't Quit Your Day Job... asked Start with us: how do you know you can trust DQYDJ?

In October 2017, I searched for historical data on ROI to convince my mother to be less conservative in her investment. The most interesting tool I found was DQYDJ's S&P 500 Historical Return Calculator.

When I presented the data to my mother, I realized the data did not make sense. I apologized, stopped, then looked at the data again with much focus. Eventually, I understood what the results mean. In fact, the statistics are even more useful than my initial understanding. But unfortunately, nothing in the tables nor in the accompanying text invalidates my initial interpretation.

I then showed the calculator to a brilliant friend who knows personal finance at least as well as I do, and asked him to explain his understanding of the results, without directing his answer. His interpretation was the same as the one I made initially. Undoubtedly, the calculator is misleading. And badly misleading. If the -6% 10-year minimum return is understood as the return of the worst year from 2008 to 2018, it is very far from the reality, which is -38% (2008). Making financial decisions based on this bad interpretation could easily lead to bankruptcy.

So I scrolled through the comments at the bottom of the page and found none reporting this issue. I was about to write one when I realized that the page did not allow new comments. In fact, it seems impossible to comment most DQYDJ pages.

So I went to the Contact Us page, which offered a form to send a message. I informed DQYDJ of their issue with comments through that form. Months later, the calculator remains misleading, and DQYDJ did not even reply to my message. And guess what - DQYDJ has been posting numerous new articles meanwhile.

I am sure that DQYDJ is actually trying to help its readers. This issue is clearly unintended. Unfortunately, finance is not a simple topic, and trying to help someone with finances can easily have the opposite effect in the end. DQYDJ's calculator is not wrong. If DQYDJ was targeted at economists, I would not be denouncing. But DQYDJ claims its audience includes beginners, and its calculator has the "Personal Finance" tag.

Investing its resources in creating new material while failing to give minimal care for existing material is an inexcusable management issue, and for that, my answer to DQYDJ's question is unfortunately that DQYDJ cannot be trusted.

En tant que propriétaire de 2 feux à DEL Turtle, j'ai publié une évaluation du feu arrière à DEL rouge Turtle de MEC sur MEC.CA.

J'ai ensuite reçu le courriel qui suit :

Désolé, Alex, mais si vous ne pouvez publier mon commentaire, je ne peux pas vous dire ce que je pense de votre réponse. Et je ne pourrai pas non plus continuer à aider vos employeurs au risque d'être à nouveau censuré par des gens appliquant des règlements sans discernement.

Le féminisme encourage généralement les femmes à se faire confiance, pour égaler les hommes. Si ce féminisme typique est bien vu, décourager les hommes serait sans doute exagéré.

C'est pourtant dans cette voie que nous amène la journaliste Noémi Merci en signant l'article « Vas-y, t'es capable! », publié dans le numéro de décembre 2017 du magazine L'Actualité, étude à l'appui.

Les inégalités entre sexes s'expliquent par de nombreux facteurs, mais si la disparité entre prétentions masculines et capacités en est un majeur, il faut maintenant se demander pourquoi l'allocation du pouvoir se laisse influencer par ces prétentions.

In the fall of 2018, British Columbia voters will be voting in a referendum on proportional representation. This is of course a threat for members of parties favored by FPTP. It is not a surprise that threatened parties oppose reform. What is surprising is to see them admit just how important disproportional representation is to them.

Not health care.
Not economic growth and prosperity.
Not the People. Nor its will.

J'ai pris connaissance de l'étude High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities. Malgré les limites méthodologiques de cette étude préliminaire, je l'ai signalée à un ami extrêmement intelligent mais souffrant d'une grave allergie qui vit à l'autre bout du Canada, en lui écrivant un courriel par l'interface web de Gmail. En déclenchant l'envoi, j'ai été surpris de voir apparaître :

Curieux, j'ai relu mon message et rapidement compris que l'inquiétude de Google provenait de ma conclusion :

Philippe Cloutier wrote:

Prends ça du bon côté; bin vite on va pouvoir se fumer un gros joint ensemble légalement, question de retrouver un QI plus viable pour un p'tit bout

During fall 2015, I developed chest pain. In a matter of 2 or 3 days, pain went from null to highly disabling. I was then told I had developed costochondritis, which I had never heard about. Possibly as a result of strenuous exercise, or playing tennis.

At peak intensity, lying in the most comfortable position was painful if I didn't pay attention to my breathing. I then applied ice, took a couple sick days, NSAID, and about as fast as it had came, the pain went away.

Mostly. Unfortunately, ever since, I frequently experienced lesser pain on and around the affected rib, in particular when exercising, but also sometimes when doing everyday movements, unpredictably. This was worrying enough that I diminished/changed my exercises to avoid worsening the situation. Unfortunately, 3 months ago an acute costochondritis struck again (probably just a relapse).

This setback is quite frustrating, but on the positive side, I took it more seriously and it allowed me to study and understand what caused pain. Put simply, pain occurs when the breast is inflated. Which means that breathing is painful, but not if you breathe only with the belly. In the acute phase, breathing abdominally rather than apically will allow you to breathe without pain.

This is very simple to do once, but very hard to keep doing, since most of us don't breathe consciously. To force myself to stop breathing apically (with the top), I even strapped my chest with a lace, which can work.

Another source of pain is torsions. One thing which is very clear during the acute phase in the pain caused by rising and laying down, if you're used to doing so without using your hands (i.e., if you use your abdominals). An important lesson if you experience pain rising and lying down is that torsions are a lot less painful when your chest is deflated. But naturally, we tend to inflate the chest before rising or lying down. When you suffer from costochondritis, you should either switch positions without torsion, or go against that tendency and deflate your chest before rising or lying down.

If you exercise your abs, you should also expect pain, since most involve flexing the abdomen, and we tend to do that with the chest inflated. Exercising the abs while breathing abdominally is difficult or impossible. An alternative is to do the "plank" (static exercise on your forearms).

Good recovery

If your SMTP server on Bell is failing to send mail from a web application with an obscure/misleading error like the following, just avoiding a foreign sender address (like @gmail.com) may solve.

If you've upgraded to Plasma 5, you'll want to:

1. First get rid of the broken new default clipboard manager which is very similar to Klipper. Sorry, I forgot how I managed that, but it's possible.
2. Start Klipper
3. Finally, get Klipper to start automatically... which is also non-trivial. To achieve that, exit Klipper, and when asked whether Klipper should start automatically, obviously agree.
4. If you're like me, enable Synchronize contents of the clipboard and the selection

And that, my friend, completes the path to go back to an experience as sane as KDE 4, at least in clipboard terms... if you manage to get Ctrl+Alt+V to bring up Klipper, and accept that selecting text using the keyboard will update the clipboard.

When I found the replacement battery I needed for my laptop on Tmart.com, I verified before since I didn't know the store. The first review I found was positive, so I bought. Unfortunately, I did not realize the BBB's rate for Tmart.com is "F", and for good reasons.

As indicated here, Tmart doesn't ship you what you bought. In my case, over a month after my order, they refunded me. The reason they invoked is terrible (no, I did not request a shipment to the skies or to another planet):

The "compensation" they offer is even worst:

That's right. A 5% discount from a worthless company valid for 3 weeks.

But the worst part? They are still "offering" me the very same product, supposedly shipped to the very same impossible-to-reach location.