Historically, the name came from Dave Nichol, who was president of the company for decades. He actually had a very strong hand in the selection of products that were included in the product line.

Apparently all kinds of people would pitch product ideas at him, and would taste test them and pick only ones he liked. The idea of "President's Choice" wasn't to be cheapo no name products, but unique and distinctive stuff personally picked by the company's president.

And Dave wasn't just some guy in the corner office. In his prime he was a Canadian personality, and you saw him in TV commercials. Once he left Loblaws in the '90s the President's Choice stuff lost its panache and meaning.

Often things like this are intended to be support for something else. Maybe there's something nearby that's hinged and can fold down on to it?

Death Valley appears to be a very contained thing. When I was there, the temperature in Las Vegas was 108. When we started down into the valley the temperature started to rise dramatically. Half way down, it hit 117 and I had to stop to get out to see what it felt like.

But then the temperature kept going up as we went down into the valley. We hit 126 for a while approaching Badwater, and it was 124 when we got out at Badwater.

And this was in May, around 15 years ago.

The point is that when you go there, you see that Death Valley is a meteorological phenomenon created by, and contained by the geography of Death Valley.

Yes, 108 is hot, but there was an almost 10 degree increase as soon as you crossed the ridge into the valley and started down. The idea that Death Valley climate will somehow spread to the surrounding area just doesn't make sense.

"Hey! Hey! Hey!"

As a boomer (at the tail end, admittedly), I too have lived through all of these things. Plus the other thirty years of shit that happened before it.

The world threat that was the USSR and Mutually Assured Destruction. The Vietnam War, two Gulf Wars, and 9/11.

The "Troubles" in Ireland and IRA bombings in London. The Munich Olympics Massacre. The rise of global terrorism. The FLQ crisis. Kent State. Watergate.

Acid rain. Leaded gas and smog.

15%+ mortgage rates. The oil crisis. Wage and price controls. Multiple recessions. The Dot Com bubble.

Police raids on gay clubs. Racial slurs in everyday language. Massive gender inequality.

24" black and white TVs. It took a week to find out how your photos came out. Watching f@#$ing "Tiny Talent Time" on a Sunday afternoon because there wasn't any else better on the other 5 channels (if that doesn't traumatize you, nothing will).

You had to go to a library if you wanted to look something up in an encyclopedia.

Cars without seatbelts, crumple zones, anti-lock brakes, traction control or airbags.

F*CK me. "No experience". Maybe just enough to know how much better things generally are today.

Kids always think that they know more than their parents....until they don't.

The wording of this borderline deceptive. OAS has a reasonable threshold at which the clawback starts, and by the time you get to the top end, the clawback is very close to 100% of the benefit. So those seniors up near $134K are getting like $20/month. It's not nothing, but it's not worth all the angst here.

The $179K threshold is for those who deferred the benefit, so they've had years of zero benefit earlier on. Which is a gamble that you'll live long enough to make up the difference.

Also, remember that these numbers are all AFTER the benefit is included. So a senior at the lower cutoff is actually making $73K before the benefit.

Also, also, remember that all of these amounts are taxed as income. So that senior at $73K pre-benefit is going to be taxed at the highest rate for the benefit.

Even so, it would still have made more sense to give additional benefits through GIS instead of OAS.

It doesn't have to be BYOD. The firm might willing to procure a specific machine for her. Or she might have enough clout to make them get her what she wants.

"Row headers" seems wrong to me. Maybe "row labels"?

I never expected to see a compiler in this list, at least not in 2023.

Back in 1988 I realized how rubbish Microsoft was when I discovered Borland's Turbo Pascal and Turbo C compilers. I'd previously used the MS compilers and they were multipass, multi-minutes to finish a compile. The Borland ones were single pass and FAST.

Back then, compile times could be huge, and everyone was publishing benchmarks on compiled program performance, which mattered on the hardware of the day. I never even think about that stuff these days.

Kotlin is a very easy transition, and it sorts out a ton of issues that you find in Java. Certainly easier than moving to Rust.

I always thought Timothy Zahn was an above average author, and to wrote more than a dozen of them.

I really don't get this at all.

On one hand, I get that inflation is just the expression of the supply/demand curve and that increasing interest rates makes it more expensive to borrow money and therefore lessens demand and should, theoretically drop inflation.

But...

Anyone with half a brain knows that this round of inflation wasn't caused by overheated demand. It was driven by supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, avian flu, climate change and the Ukraine war. The price of oil alone drove much of the inflation numbers, both directly and indirectly by increasing the cost of production and shipping of other goods.

Does anyone at the BOC seriously think that 10%+ inflation in groceries was caused by overheated demand? Do they seriously think that people should be buying less food to lower grocery demand and reduce prices? Do they think that people will?

Does anyone think that the 6-12 month waits for a new car that are typical now is because gazillions of people are suddenly wanting to buy all at the same time? OK, there probably is pent up demand due to the fact that virtually no new cars were available during the pandemic, and lots of people want EV cars now, but the truth is that availability is way down compared to pre-pandemic times.

I see talking heads from the finance sector on TV all the time saying stuff like, "We need to tame an overheated economy...". DO WE? And then claiming that the interest rate hikes are working because inflation has come down. Yeah, right. Far more likely is that the supply chain issues are getting resolved, and supplies are increasing.

The truth is that the BOC has only one knob that they can turn, and that's the interest rates. So they're going to turn it. And the prevailing wisdom says that it takes close to 18 months for interest rates hikes to have an impact. So the downturn in inflation that started at the beginning of the year has virtually NOTHING to do with the big jump in rates that happened last spring.

As to that 18 month lag, it's probably even longer this time around because of the mortgage situation in Canada. Those people with huge mortgages have, to large degree, 5 year terms. So a comparatively small number of those people have had to renew under the new rates. And even if rates start to come back down next year, we're still going to see an increasing proportion of those mortgagees get hit with huge increases to their payments. And that's going to suck money out of the economy - big time. Are those people already tightening their belts, before they renew? Probably to some extent, but there's nothing like seeing an extra $2K-3K come out of your bank account each month to make it real.