Wealthsimple will refund up to $5s in ATM fees if you have an account there. I think it might require an account minimum, but their chequing accounts pay out something like 3% (it's pegged to the Bank of Canada rate).

Anyway, I got super sick of the fees at TD, so I've switched basically all my banking over. I feel strongly that everyone in Canada should take a look at their bank and probably switch to either a Credit Union, or some sort of online bank. It doesn't have to be Wealthsimple, just get away from the big 6 banks. They're bleeding you dry with high fees and strongarm sales tactics.

"His concerns are echoed by Mercedes CEO Ola Kallenius, who recently warned the European car industry is "heading at full speed against a wall" and could even "collapse" if the EU doesn't reconsider."

Why is everyone a capitalist believing that the market will give us the solutions we need up until the time where they were caught sleeping and now they want us to please be nice to them?

We do not have time to coddle these babies. Figure something out or die, that's not my problem. My problem is that fires get worse every year and the droughts get worse every year, and more people die in heatwaves every year.

1. That's not true
2. You'll have to back that up better

Whether you like Apple or not, the SoC is still the most powerful one on the market, the cameras are still excellent (and better than 2021 cameras from any manufacturer), the video is still better than anyone else (and has been basically forever).

Like, there are plenty of reasons to not want an iPhone and I could name a bunch if you wanted, but this is a stupid comment that completely ignores reality.

It depends on what you mean by 'innovating', I guess. They deliver a lot of functionality for a price that's much lower than dedicated hardware would. Even for small-time creators on tiktok or instagram (or even YouTube), with no modifications, the iPhones pro are probably the best video camera you can get if you can have only one thing. So yes, I guess? They're miles ahead of anyone else with stabilization, video quality and features, and that happens to be pretty useful these days.

And despite that, everyone slavishly copies their phones and their UIs, for better or worse.

It doesn't matter if you think they're bad or not, the claim that they're the centre of the tech universe has been objectively true for years. Where Apple goes, others follow.

Are we starting to see that fade a little? Maybe. Nothing that you said was a counterpoint to what you quoted, it was just stuff to (rightly) be angry about.

I'm also for this, yes. I agree that the protectionism has done us no good.

Nobody's asking to DEPEND on China, but we already import a shittonne of stuff from them, why not cars? The whole point is to untether ourselves from any industry or nation that demands that we go all-in on them. That means we import Chinese cars while they're a good deal. If they stop being good for us, we'll import something else. Or build something else. But the status quo is busted as hell.

Yeah, and range is reduced in an ICE vehicle in the winter too. The cold spares no mechanism. (Diesel is further set back because of the additives that are put in to prevent the fuel from gelling in the tank. That starts even before it gets cold.)

I don't dispute either of these things. And Cretien/Martin slashed the budget and balanced it...but set the stage for decades of housing under-development by stopping the CMHC from building social housing like they used to. Stephen Harper ALSO failed to balance the budget except when he was HANDED a balanced budget.

Again, both these parties are truly awful. We really need a proportional system so we don't end up with 4 years of bozos replaced eventually by some other bozo for another 4 year kick at the can.

I'm a fan of union jobs, but I think we might have to let this fight go. The tariffs on Chinese EVs means that a lot of our farmers are getting demolished by counter-tariffs on canola and whatnot. There's a tradeoff to be made here, and given that we really should be moving away from ICE vehicles, we may need to bite the bullet and wind down car manufacturing here. Or get some Chinese companies to set up shop so we can move the workers to those.

You ever tried to start a petrol or diesel car in -40? I hope you plugged it in overnight, or it's not going anywhere. So no matter what, you have to plug your car in when it's -40C.

A mechanical engineer can probably answer this better than me, but I'd wager that the sheer number of moving parts in a normal ICE vehicle means that -40 is actually much worse them than for an EV. I know from experience riding bicycles (in Edmonton) in the winter that basically nothing works properly below -30C. The grease doesn't lubricate anything anymore, the chain freezes, the brakes barely stop you because the compounds have no grip at that temperature. I'm sure once the car manages to get up to operating temperature things are mostly fine, but that's a lot of thermal expansion and contraction.

All of them are deeply disconnected from real life. Poilievre isn't just a career politician, he's literally held no other jobs at all. He loves talking about how the government spends too much money on whatever, and HE'S what we've been spending money on. He hates unions and loves oil, and that's it.

I didn't vote for either of these dipstick parties. They're responsible for literally 100% of the Federal governments going back to Confederation; there is nobody else to blame. There have been precious few federal governments that have made things better rather than coincidentally been in power while we MADE things better ourselves.

Okay, I see where you're coming from, and I know people like you that are very pedantic about language and I'm not going to be critical of it in particular. That's how you interpret things, okay. :)

(Also, don't think that I'm ragging on your choice of vehicle. Every time I see one that's obviously fairly old, I know it's because it's a practical choice. I don't actually have any problems with trucks over any other sort of car, I just detest that knowing what we know now, it's popular to buy huge trucks that aren't used for work, are terrible for roads and the environment, and are objectively more dangerous to people outside of the vehicle than the trucks of 20-30 years ago.)

But absolutist speech and hyperbole are well established ways to communicate; I would wager that MOST people making these statements do not mean them literally, but use it as a form of emphasis that broadly speaking, most listeners understand to be metaphorical.

Obviously, I have the same sort of tendency in my descriptions, but my argument was maybe unclear so I'll make it more plain here: in general, I do not think people are coming to their senses. I think they're being forced by economic conditions to make certain choices, and given any other option, they would still be out there buying expensive cars. Indeed, I think people are still making bad decisions and buying vehicles that they can't afford. Canadians specifically owe about $1.80 for every $1 they earn. I don't think this debt is from nowhere. The average non-mortgage debt in this country is in the tens of thousands of dollars.

I guess the problem I have with your framing is that people have made a change and now realize that being debt free and driving a paid off car is better, rather than being temporarily inconvenienced and driving the paid off car because they've been backed into a corner. I think very few people have learned their lesson, and the next time they get a chance, they will go back to making bad decisions. Yes, there will be some that have seen the light, but I think that as a proportion of the population, that segment is getting smaller, not larger.

I think there are signs of this anywhere, not least of which when you hear investors say, "this time it's different!" Or the housing boom and bust cycles. When I was a kid growing up in Alberta in the 80s, there was a bumper sticker that said, "Lord, please give us one more oil boom and we promise not to piss it away this time". Well, we had another oil boom, and we pissed it away again. And again.

And then we have people failing to understand that the reason why we don't see as many kids dying from measles is because so many of us were vaccinated, but they think it's a reason why we can GET RID of vaccine mandates.

My cynicism stems from substantial numbers of people voting against their own interests, making repeated bad financial decisions, and saying out loud how little they've learned about the world and recent history. Maybe you're more of an optimist than me. :)

Yeah, and I have no car at all. But that's not really the point.

Driving a paid off car (or not having to make car payments by not owning a car) is definitely the smart choice. I was laid off in June, and I'm still thankful that I don't have car payments to make on top of a mortgage.

But we're actually the weirdos. The AC is right: broadly speaking, when times are good, people loooooove wasting their money on cars they don't need. Look at every lifted F-150 on the roads. Mostly useless as an actual truck, bad on gas, only used to commute a few km to the office and pick up groceries. Nothing ever goes in the bed (it's too high to reach anyway), it never tows anything, and it doesn't fit in a driveway, let alone a parking spot. Then there are the luxury cars, the top-end EVs, etc.

I dunno if you've looked at the news lately, but the idea that anyone is 'coming to their senses' is just not at all true. They're sitting down and making thorough, considered plans to make bad decisions. Everyone is leveraged to the tits and has no savings. Just accept that you've made better decisions than most.

It will not kill off most coding jobs, it's probably going to make them more necessary over time.

All this is doing is creating an experience gap. Junior programmers don't get a chance to learn what it takes to ship something. There's a lot of on-the-job experience that's hard to replicate, which seems like a facile observation—if it weren't true, we'd just teach it—but I think it's something that gets forgotten now and then.

LLMs simply do not write good code right now. They don't. It's code that needs reviewing, often it needs refactoring. It requires a lot of supervision, and crucially, it doesn't learn from its mistakes in any meaningful way. So this sounds like a junior programmer but worse—I can never train it to be better, I have to rely on external forces to do that.

How do LLMs get better? By ingesting more GOOD code. But less good code is being written because more of it is being written by LLMs, and there are going to be fewer and fewer good programmers available as time goes on, because as we're discussing, there are fewer junior programmers learning to be good senior programmers.

The issue is that right now, AI Coding agents give the ILLUSION of productivity. They can only automate away the simplest of jobs; every large-scale analysis of whether or not they actually make people more productive shows that they absolutely do not, unless the only thing you count is 'lines of code produced'. But as any experienced programmer will tell you, that's a stupid metric; most good solutions are shorter. They're easier to debug and the maintenance burden is lower.

Anyone that says that a coding agent makes them more productive is saying that entirely based on vibes, not long-term analysis.

I'm not blind to the utility of LLMs; I think they make some things much easier. Learning programming languages is much faster with an LLM to help me. But they still consistently get things wrong and hallucinate APIs and function calls. You absolutely cannot trust anything they give you, and they will not notice that they checked in bad code and need to fix something on their own.

tl;dr Junior programmers will have a rough go of it for a while, but we'll need experienced programmers more than ever. LLMs have done nothing but kicked the can down the road and made future hiring more expensive.