My wife wanted to upgrade so we both got new Series 9 this year. Her Series 3 went to her mom as an upgrade to a Fitbit, and I figure I’ll keep wearing mine at work until it gets smashed or otherwise dies. All of our Macs are well past macOS support, but no real plans to upgrade until an old one actually dies, or some killer feature prompts an upgrade.

What are the gas and electricity rates in your area? In Sask, we’re paying about $0.16/kWh for electricity and about $6.40/GJ. There’s about 278 kWh in a GJ, so the electricity cost works out to about $44/GJ, or about 7 times the cost of gas. A good coefficient of performance for a heat pump seems to be about 3, and modern gas furnaces are easily above 90% efficiency so the actual cost difference for gas to electric heat is about 1:3.

Now, newer houses are better insulated, so your heating load on a 2012 build is going to be a lot lower than a 1977 build. You also didn’t mention your heat source. Ground source pumps are pretty good efficiency year round, but cost a lot for the initial install, while air-source pumps have a large seasonal variation in their efficiency, which is particularly troublesome in central/northern Canadian climates.

Yep, in Sask right now natural gas is about 1/7 the cost of electricity, which means at best a heat pump only costs about 2x as much to run as a modern gas furnace. Maybe as our grid transitions to renewables and carbon prices rise those costs will become even or shift towards benefiting heat pumps, but I suspect at this point you’re not going to hit break even over the typical life of a heat pump. Much more affordable to stick with gas for now, and maybe start moving to heat pumps 10 years from now. Same argument for water heaters, gas is going to be cheaper than a heat pump for most cases. Maybe new builds lean towards a heat pump because it doesn’t need venting which minimizes HVAC needs, and/or if a person has a solar system that minimizes their electricity costs.

There’s also methods to potentially shelter some of that too. If a person has RRSP room and doesn’t actually need the whole amount available you can use that to delay paying the tax and hopefully reduce the rate paid. You can also make some investments within a TFSA, which means no taxes owed on the growth. Both of those options have caps on contributions so they’re a great for low-moderate income earners to minimize their taxes, while higher income earners can only shelter a portion of their income.

That’s the argument, but it doesn’t really hold water to me. That would lead to an environment where those with little capital get taxed on their entire income, making it hard to save more capital. Those that already have lots of capital could then leverage that capital to generate a tax-free(or limited tax) income, which seems like exactly what we’re trying to avoid. We do have TFSAs which do allow us to grow our assets tax free, and they’re limited to prevent those with excessive capital from dodging their entire tax burden.

To some extent, you might want it the other way around, those providing labour and covering basic living expenses should pay limited taxes(which is kind of how things work now when you consider the basic exemptions, GST rebates, child tax benefits, etc.) while those who have essentially a passive income should pay a higher rate. The argument for the current capital gains taxation is that you want to encourage people to invest in things like a business that grows the economy, rather than purely financial vehicles like bonds and loans that mostly just concentrate wealth without contributing to a healthy economy.

This is what I was going to say. It’s good to know if a message chain is going over Apples E2E encryption or regular SMS that’s completely transparent to the carrier. There’s also a fundamental technological difference that allows group messages over iMessage, but not over SMS. iOS 18 supporting RCS helps a lot, but I still think it’s a good idea to have an easy way to differentiate iMessages vs RCS vs SMS due to security and functional differences.

On the other hand, providing capital increases the value of the labour applied. Giving a tradesperson and additional capital might mean they can afford better tools that allow them to work more quickly, accomplish more per hour of labour and therefore be able to charge more for that hour while the customer simultaneously pays less for the task being done. The tradesperson is then able to pay back that capital plus some gains for the person providing the capital. Everybody wins, the investor gets more money than they started with, the tradesperson earns more after paying back the investment than if they hadn’t taken it in the first place, and the customer gets a lower rate for the tasks that need to be performed.

The problem is when we let that scale up to the point of there being people with essentially endless funds to spend on things like mega-yachts and ridiculous mansions, while others aren’t even getting their basic needs met. The answer to me isn’t removing the benefits of capital income at all, but adding some progressive taxation to keep the net income more modest, and maybe some stronger/target employment regulation so the capital holders aren’t getting rich off labour that’s supported by government social programs.

I think it’s important not just for the consumers benefit but also the employees working in that industry. If it’s purely a profit motive then you get things like poor wages and working conditions where the employer can use “competition” as an excuse to keep wages low and reduce overhead by not prioritizing things like safety and environmental sustainability. When people have the option of working for a crown corporation that does prioritize safety, sustainability, and good work environments then private industry has to be able to offer comparable compensation and work environments to the crown corporation. The crown corp has an inherent advantage of being able to operate in a profit neutral manner, while the private industry has to be able to actually do something better than the crown corp to be competitive.

This is my answer to pretty much everything. Create a consistent baseline both in terms of consumer services/pricing and for employee work environment/compensation. Then let private industry compete with that crown corp. perfect example, the state of telecommunication services in Sask. Sasktel offers cell, internet and cable TV services while private companies compete along side them. The private companies have to actually be competitive(or at least convince customers that they are) with Sasktel if they want to capture any significant market share. They’re also competing with Sasktel to hire employees into similar roles, so they have to provide competitive wages and work environments. Prices in Sask tend to be lower than elsewhere due to Sasktel’s presence.

I don’t see what we wouldn’t have similar results in other industries, as long as the government actually allows it to happen and doesn’t just sell off the crowns to create a short term budget surplus or reward their buddies in competing private industries.

Could also be skewed the other way if it’s only about wage and not total compensation. Higher paid positions tend to also have good benefits like healthcare, vacation time, pensions, etc. that are on top of the stated wage. Lower wage positions often don’t have those same benefits.

Most are in my experience. Permanent position really just means there’s no pre-arranged end date for the position as opposed to say covering a maternity leave where you’ve been specifically given that position for just until the permanent employee comes back. Unless otherwise negotiated any permanent employee can be let go with 2 weeks(depending on provincial regulations) notice.

Maybe $300/month, or $3600/year for groceries. Maybe another $200/year each for prescriptions, alcohol, and general housewares to cover the non-grocery items. $150 profit on $4200 of revenue would be about 4% margin. Doesn’t seem that high to me but I also don’t really know how that compares to other businesses in the same market.

I think the biggest one is some departments already have a GPS tracker type thing that’s launchable from a squad car. Then it’s just a matter of deciding if the risk of engaging in the chase is higher or lower than the risk of the suspect escaping. It’s also worth considering that never engaging in a chase makes it simple for people to avoid arrest simply by driving away, so there has to be some expectation in a suspects mind that it might not be worth running.

Hmm, hard to quantify since I’m not sure how much of the population does a significant portion of grocery and other shopping at Loblaws, but in that context it doesn’t seem so bad. If we taxed those profits completely that only puts an extra $50 in everybody’s pocket each year, which doesn’t seem like it’d really have a large financial impact on many households.

Is there anywhere one can get more context in this? Seems to me like Superstore tends to be one of the more affordable options, so how do we reconcile that with them taking excessive profits? Are they doing enough volume compared to the competition that they’re that far ahead in economy of scale, have they been able to convince their staff to accept significantly lower compensation compared to the competition? Is this just people’s dissatisfaction being pointed at the biggest player even though the whole market follows the same trend?

Agreed that pricing is something that needs to be addressed, but subsidizing individual orders through Canada Post isn’t a good solution. Better to subsidize bulk shipping to the local stores to bring down the price at the shelf. That’d get residents a better return for the amount of subsidy spent.

On the other hand, console generations often provide a hard cut-off for compatibility. You can’t always use previous gen accessories with a new console, and those accessories are usually only comparable with that console. I can’t play my Wii games on my switch, nor use the controllers and other accessories. This is kind of inherent to consoles in that they’re meant to be a consistent platform that allows developers to maximize performance by knowing that each console is going to be pretty much the same. With iOS though the software evolved from the idea of desktop software that runs on a variety of devices. Developers develop with the idea that their software will be used on devices with differing hardware and performance. It’s a completely different paradigm. With computers, people expect that the one they buy this year will be better than the one available last year, but they also don’t feel the need to buy every revision(aside specific performance heavy use cases), they decide on their own replacement schedule. That’s the paradigm that the iPhone came from, regular iterations, occasional major revisions, and long term support/backwards compatibility with previous models and accessories.

I feel like that’s a bad example as consoles tend to be household items rather than individual ones. Regular releases mean that people can choose their upgrade schedule and always have a recently released product available. Good example is cars, manufacturers release a new version of each model every year, but the differences are fairly minor. Then every 5-10 years they do a major revision to the model that’s a significant change. This way most people don’t feel put off when they buy a 2-3 year old model and a revision come out the following year, but a person can buy a new model after 5-10 years and feel like they got a significant upgrade from the previous one.

I’m not that knowledgeable about finance and economics, but I feel like the flight thing is overblown. If it’s a company based in Canada making profits outside of Canada, bringing those profits back and deciding to leave then that would be a loss. If it’s a company based in Canada and making profits in Canada and they decide to leave, either we can still tax a cut of their business before it leaves the country or some Canadian alternative can fill the gap. Of course this all assumes there’s somewhere else to go that’s more favourable, and I don’t see a 16% increase in the inclusion rate tipping that scale for a large portion of businesses.

Maybe we should reconsider the environment we provide that would both make that increase significant enough to have a business leave for somewhere else, and also that it’s cheap enough to modify operations that way. Are all the staff going to come too, or is this just some Hollywood accounting that offshores assets with no real change in operations.

Sask Apprenticeship and Trade Certification Commission has a similar policy of no electronic devices in the classroom. They can be outside the classroom during breaks(of which there are many). You’re allowed to have them on you, and leave class to take or make a call if you consider it important enough, just can’t have them out in the classroom. While it would have been nice sometimes to have access to network connected devices to supplement the classes, I can also understand the arguments around privacy, and distraction particularly among children/teens.