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No Food for Thought

Food is something you should provide to your brain long before coming to this blog. You will find no food recipes here, only raw, serious, non-fake news for mature minds.

Don't Quit Your Day Job... but Don't Trust DQYDJ

admin Sunday January 7, 2018

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.

Mountain Equipment Coop, les feux à DEL Turtle et la censure

admin Monday January 1, 2018

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 :

Afin de pouvoir afficher votre évaluation sur notre site internet, nous devons vous demander de la modifier légèrement. Étant donné que celle-ci contient le nom d’un autre détaillant (Amazon), nous ne pouvons malheureusement pas la publier sur notre site. Nous vous invitons à soumettre à nouveau votre évaluation en retirant tout simplement le mot Amazon. J’ai copié votre commentaire ci-dessous avec le nom à supprimer surligné afin que vous n’ayez pas à le réécrire.

Peut avoir un comportement ironique si utilisé l'hiver. Appuyer sur le bouton peut ne faire aucun changement si la lampe est trop froide. Il faut parfois appuyer des dizaines de fois pour parvenir à éteindre.
C'est signe qu'il faut remplacer les piles, 2 piles CR2032. Environ 1$ chacune chez Amazon (ce ne sont pas des piles très courantes, ce sera plus cher en pharmacie).

N’hésitez pas à prendre contact avec moi si vous avez d’autres questions.

On se rejoint dehors,

Que pensez-vous de ma réponse à votre courriel? Faites-nous-en part en cliquant ici.



Alex G.
Mountain Equipment Co-op
Centre de services
1077, rue Great Norther Way
Vancouver, C.-B. Canada V5Y 1E1


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.

Féminisme exagéré

admin Tuesday December 5, 2017

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.

British Columbia's Provincial Liberals Announce Their Top Priority: British Columbia's Provincial Liberals

admin Sunday December 3, 2017

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.

BC Liberal leadership candidate Dianne Watts wrote:
If we do not defeat this referendum, there will be no majority, there will be forever a minority of BC Liberals…. Defeating proportional representation is my #1 priority. I am hell-bent on defeating it.


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

Fausse alerte, Google n'a pas fumé de joint

admin Saturday November 4, 2017

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 :

Gmail wrote:

Avez-vous oublié votre pièce jointe?

Vous avez écrit "joint" dans votre message, mais sans joindre de fichier. Voulez-vous tout de même envoyer votre message?


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 :-)

Dealing with costochondritis

admin Monday September 25, 2017

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

SMTP error 452 4.1.0 "requested action aborted: try again later #AUP504"

admin Thursday September 21, 2017

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.

Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender wrote:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

foo@example.com
host smtp.bellnet.ca [204.101.251.122]
SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<chealer@gmail.com> SIZE=2471:
452 4.1.0 requested action aborted:
try again later #AUP504: retry timeout exceeded

Autostarting Klipper on KDE Plasma 5

admin Sunday September 10, 2017
kde

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.

Tmart.com "terribly sorry" after choosing not to honor its commitments

admin Sunday August 27, 2017

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):

Tmart.com wrote:
Due to recent airline safety regulations,world airmail service is now prohibited from transporting packages containing certain purely power products such as batteries or liquid. We are striving to find other available logistics companies to deliver such items,but we are currently unable to ship to your address.


The "compensation" they offer is even worst:

Tmart.com wrote:

We are terribly sorry for the inconvenience caused by this.You can continue to choose other items you like and we will try our best to fulfill the following order.As for compensation of the inconvenience caused, we provide the 5% discount coupon for your next purchase.

Coupon Code: Se7en
Valid Date:From 2017-08-07 00:00 EST to 2017-08-31 00:00 EST


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.

Lenovo: Review your Ideapad Flex 4

admin Friday June 30, 2017

After I worked around the issue with Lenovo's Yoga Mode Control, my Flex 4 worked fine. But now that it was stable, it was time for me to proceed to the storage drive change I had planned.

The easy part should have been to physically switch the drives, right? Well, if you have ever opened a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 4, you will remember that is not the case with these laptops which are physically anything but flexible.

If you want to replace any part of your Flex 4-1570, sorry, but your weekly nightmare is coming. Unless you are reasonable and just give up.

Replacing anything will require you to remove the whole motherboard case. As Lenovo's Hardware Maintenance Manual shows, opening is possible. After removing 10+ screws, your are supposed to simply lift the case. As discussed in this forum thread, this apparently trivial step is in fact incredibly difficult and costly (both in time and risk of damaging the notebook).

Thanks to the instructions on the forum, I managed to open mine, but it took me an insane amount of time, and I still broke the case.

If you are extremely determined, secure:

  • A good starting mood, a worthy objective and much patience.
  • at least 1 hour
  • at least 1 sufficiently long nail
  • Several tools. I used screwdrivers with flat and very sharp heads (in addition to the electronic screwdrivers which will remove the screws).
  • A surface where your laptop won't move despite great force. It should not move back nor on any side.
  • Ideally, an anti-static device (of course)
  • The new parts you want to install. No, really, all the new parts. You will not want to do this twice.


I managed by starting with my nails, then using a small (electronic) flat-head screwdriver, and then a regular flat-head screwdriver. In general, your should start at the front and progress towards the back, except the most difficult part is the rear half of the Ethernet port's side. I broke my case when I got to the USB ports there. It was necessary to open the back before opening the rear half of the left side.

Good luck, seriously. And if you read this before buying, buy something else. Unless you love having your up arrow key to the left of the right Shift key (what were your designers thinking, and where in hell were your testers)!

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