Blessed by the Potato

I was just out getting the car ready for winter here, since it was a nice sunny day to do it. When getting the car ready for winter there are things for safety and things for fuel economy. Plus if there’s any regular maintenance you tend to do yourself, you may want to get that done and out of the way while you can still feel your fingers.

Tires: The biggest improvement you can make for winter safety is a set of 4 winter-rated tires, and I actually changed over back in October. I was a little early, as the time to change is when you can expect the temperature when you drive to be consistently below 15°C. Since I do most of my driving at night I felt comfortable changing over earlier, and got a good deal on the tires in the process (for the new car, I got a set of Gislaved Nordfrost 5s from Steelcase Tires in Markham). They engage in “supply and demand pricing” as they put it — they say that by November the cars are lined up around the block for winter tires and they won’t be offering deals anymore. If you need tires this winter, there may still be a few places with deals around (mostly the manufacturer’s mail-in-rebates), but I found last year that the deals didn’t come back when business slowed down towards the middle of winter, so you may be stuck paying retail.

It’s also important to check your pressures regularly, both for safety and good fuel economy. I like to run my tires a little hard, as it gives better fuel consumption and wear, at the cost of a rougher ride. The number on the door jamb is a compromise number set by the car manufacturer to balance ride, fuel consumption, tire life, and the suspension parts, and should be considered your minimum pressure. Your maximum pressure is given on the sidewall of the tires, and in-between those you can find a tire pressure that meets your preferred compromise. For the fall though, I recommend going a little higher than you normally would, because pressure falls as the temperature drops. It’s easier to over-inflate (still staying below the sidewall max) on a nice warm day than to have to go out on the cold days and top-up. The rule of thumb is that the pressure drops about 1 PSI for every 5°C drop in temperature. So if it goes from +5 to -20 over the next month, you could lose 5 PSI. Not really enough to be a danger on its own, but worth watching and reinflating.

The actual math is a proportionality P₁*T₂ = P₂*T₁ — note that you have to use the absolute (Kelvin) scale of temperature. So you see that for a higher-pressure tire, the drop in pressure will be larger than for a lower-pressure one. If, for example, I was to consider 40 PSI as normal for my tires (since I do like to run a little hard), then going from 277 K (5°C) to 252 K (-20°C) would be a drop of 4 PSI, pretty close to the quick rule-of-thumb result.

Windshield: It’s vitally important that you can see, which means you’ve got to have your snowbrush/ice scraper ready to go… which means you’ve got to have it in your car before you’re miles from home in the first snowstorm of the year and belatedly remember that you need it. Likewise you’re also going to need to clean your windshield as you drive, which is where wipers and fluid come in handy. Wiper blades generally need to be replaced at least once a year, and I find the fall a good time to do that (though I forgot this year so far). You’re also going to need washer fluid that won’t freeze on your windshield (or worse yet, in the lines), so if you’ve been using the pink bug stuff through the summer, time to start mixing in the antifreeze stuff.

This is also a good time to clean the windows, especially if you’re in the habit of using any kind of cleaning solution, which may freeze later on (these days I just clean my windows with a dry microfibre cloth).

Grill blocking: It’s a less common winter prep step, one geared just for fuel economy rather than safety. The concept is that your car has been designed for a very wide variety of environments: from the dead of winter, to rolling through death valley in full sunshine with the A/C blasting. So those openings at the front of the car are letting way too much airflow through when it’s freezing cold outside, making the radiator shed more heat than it needs to when it’s freezing cold outside, causing you to burn more fuel just to keep your engine’s temperature up. If you block off some of that airflow by insulating your engine compartment, you can improve warm-up time, save on fuel, and as an added bonus, help keep some of the salty slushy muck that gets kicked up off the road out of your engine bay.

For most cars, once the temperature is consistently below zero, you should be fine blocking well over half of the radiator, even under heavy loads (e.g., long hill climbs). Above zero, and you could risk overheating in some cases. If your car has a temperature gauge, watch it when temperatures start to rise; if it doesn’t, you may want to play it safe by not blocking except in the dead of winter, or get a Scanguage to monitor your temperatures.

The Prius (and I’m sure other hybrids) has a bit of a twist, as it has two radiators: one for the engine coolant, and one for the inverter. You do not want to block the radiator for the inverter: that’s a “cooler is better” component. For the Gen 3 (2010 and later), that means blocking the lower openings (the ones below the front license plate), but not the upper ones. I believe the Gen 2 is the opposite, but check that yourself to be sure.

As an aside, this step is even more important for a hybrid than a regular car, as a regular doesn’t have too much trouble staying up at temperature, even in the winter. A hybrid though will be shutting the engine off completely when it can, but for emissions control reasons it will have to keep the engine at operating temperature, a goal made all the harder by the cabin heater drawing off heat. So the benefit of shutting the engine off will be reduced in the winter as the car will cycle it on more just to keep temperatures up if you don’t block the radiator.

Battery: Due to the effect of the cold on your battery’s charge and the difficulty in turning over your engine, if your battery is going to go, the time it will give up the ghost will be in the middle of winter. If your battery is weak and due for replacement, you may want to replace it now. If you roll with one of those handy boosters (e.g., the Eliminator) in your trunk, then remember to charge it up!

Miscellaneous: I know that when it’s cold outside, I don’t want to spend any more time going over my car than I have to. I tend to get a little more neglectful of checking my fluids and tire pressures than I am in the warmer seasons, so this is a good time to check that all those other fluids are topped up. Also check on your first aid kit and flashlight, and replace stuff as needed. If you get into an accident, winter’s the time you’re going to need that little silvery mylar blanket, so make sure you’ve got one. If you don’t, ask anyone you know who runs marathons, they give them out like candy at those races. I like to wax my car in the spring, since the winter time seems to eat it all off. Waxing in the fall is also good because that water-repelling layer also helps repel snow and ice — I have a much easier time brushing the snow off the roof and hood at the beginning of winter while there’s sill some wax left there than I do by the end (and yes, you must brush the snow off the roof too!).

Have I missed any winter prep steps that you like to do?

I was just stepping out of my house when a woman across the street yelled out “Ritchie! No, come back here!” and the squeal of tires as a car came suddenly to a stop. I couldn’t see who or what she was chasing, so my heart jumped into my chest hoping it wasn’t a small child that ran out.

Then she bent over and picked up a small dog, and walked back to the sidewalk scolding Ritchie. When she set him down I saw that he was in one of those little two-wheeled doggie carts for dogs that have broken their back legs and said to myself “OMG Ritchie, you dumb god-damned dog! You’ve done that before, and it went poorly! Why don’t you learn?!”

It was not a good week for the diet, as my love of candy and deals conspired with the arrival of half-price Halloween candy. Combined with more than a few all-nighters as I struggle to make timely progress on that thesis thing, and the end result is that I’ve gained back all the weight I lost at fat camp the Turkish conference.

The Ontario government just came out with a lucrative scholarship program… for foreign students. At $40k/year, it is a very rich scholarship indeed. For comparison, the next-best provincial scholarship is the OGS program at $15k/year (which foreign students are also eligible for). I’m not opposed to the government trying to recruit foreign students, but I don’t think a program that’s nearly three times as lucrative as what’s out there now should be exclusive to foreign students… why not allow Canadian students at Ontario schools to compete side-by-side, as with the OGS? Don’t we want to recruit the best students period to Ontario universities, no matter whether they’re from Ontario, the rest of Canada, or a foreign nation? Plus there’s always the issue with foreign students that we may be putting out the money to educate them, just to have them take that investment back to their home country when they graduate. A better program for getting talent to Canada may be the other Ontario initiative of late, allowing master’s students to apply for permanent residency without needing a job offer.

Canadian Capitalist embedded a good lecture about index investing in his latest wrap-up post. One of the minor points made was that index investing doesn’t make for good newspaper or magazine articles, so there’s a whole industry that has an interest in reporting on active management. I have to say it’s the same for bloggers — though I do index a large part of my portfolio, I only ever seem to talk about the stock picking side.

The Globe has a short article about Toronto’s condo market. True to form, I will pick out parts, and then proceed to spread fear. “Insiders suggest that, in some areas, investors accounted for up to 60 per cent of sales in those newly launched projects and with about 4,000 new suites coming to market, the impact was indeed profound.” Yowzah, on one hand, that’s a lot of investors. On the other hand, why aren’t the other 40% also investors given the issues with pre-construction? Anyhow, what I found even more alarming: “So what drove investors to […] plunge back into the market? The chief factor […] was price. Believe it or not, the index price for condos actually dropped $14,608 in September from August to stand at $410,730. Bit of smoke and mirrors really. Average price per square foot stayed nearly constant at around $493. The price drop came from builders creating smaller suites – about 831 square feet or 10 per cent smaller than August.” I’m already appalled by how small the new condos around are. Granted, I like my space and my stuff (after all, right now I’m filling a small 2-bedroom apartment all by me onesies), but I don’t think that this is going to go well for people when the units are actually built at some indeterminate point in the future and find out how small 10% smaller than “already too small” is. Plus of course, the implication that even “investors” are getting priced out of the market.

Speaking of being a housing bear, MoneySense has an article on Canada’s housing market online now. It’s 4 pages, because of course putting it all in one or two wouldn’t fit on the internet. As you can probably guess, I agree most with the advice about just simply waiting longer if you don’t already own a home — even most of the bulls don’t think the market’s going to run away from you, so there’s no rush. I agree least with the advice about shorting the banks or home furnishing companies to hedge against a falling market. While I can totally see the logic behind the banks doing poorly if the housing market goes down, it’s a dangerous trade to get into, which kind of goes against the idea of hedging your housing exposure.

Even the CREA is now calling for activity and prices to decline next year.

All that negativity out of the way for the Canadian side, if you haven’t been paying attention to the foreclosure crisis in the States (and it’s always a “crisis” these days), then you should be. Yes, it’s another example of just how deep into the lake of batshit crazy the US system went — which doesn’t help my recurring theme — but it’s just insane that these companies are basically stealing houses. Foreclosing on houses without mortgages even. Even when a house should be foreclosed on, they’re not engaging in the proper notice procedures, which would give people the chance to defend themselves, or at least move out (there was one case of a locksmith showing up to lock the person being foreclosed on in the house; they didn’t even check if the house was empty before changing the locks!). Barry Ritholtz has been providing good summaries of the stories as they come out, including this one about the process servers lying in their affidavits that testify that they did indeed serve notices to the homeowners. Cases are coming to light where that is demonstrably false, including some where people have visa stamps in their passports that prove they were out of the country when the alleged serving took place.

Like Netbug, I played Force Unleashed 2 and found it lacking. It was short, but moreover, kind of boring. I found the various large mech enemies annoying — while they could be killed in fairly traditional ways, you generally had to find a way to trigger their special quicktime event sequence death scene. If you didn’t, they were incredibly powerful. The regular stormtroopers were very weak (which I suppose is to be expected), and kind of fun to find new ways to kill them, but I also found some of the other enemies tough. The snipers in particular seemed to do way too much damage from way too far away, and the other force users were too good at defense. There was really no middle ground when it came to the opposition. In general I found that there was no technique or timing to the basic lightsabre attacks/combos, which did seem to be present in FU1 — this time around, just mash X until you get lucky and slip past their defenses. Also, every one of the other lightsaber-wielding enemies had two sabers. Come on, Lucas. And as to the length, it was not only a short game overall, but very poorly paced — it seemed like fully half the playtime was spent in that epic go-nowhere duel with Vader at the end. So, how short was it? Well, I didn’t time it, but I finished the game in a week. The same week I spent in all-night thesis sessions at the lab, with all my free time from two nights spent at curling. I had maybe 4 hours of playtime, mostly interrupted time at that, as I was mostly playing while dinner was in the oven, and then again for a bit as I was digesting before heading back to work…

Rogers is getting into the home security field. Interestingly enough, over 2 years ago I was part of a survey that was asking about how to brand and price a Rogers home security offering. I’m surprised that it took so long from that step to the roll-out. The paranoid part of me wonders if maybe it’s somehow deeply flawed.

An interesting science article in the Globe today as well about electrical stimulation improving math skills. The MSM article didn’t cite the publication, so here’s the abstract. When I read the Globe’s story, I thought they were talking about a direct electrical stimulation (i.e.: DBS), but it turns out to be a non-invasive transcranial stimulation. I’m surprised a weak, external, DC stimulation does anything at all. I’m going to have to read more on TDCS… some other time.

Canadian Dream (free at 45) is having a 1000th post contest, giving away a Kobo e-book reader.

Finally, a request of you: please suggest a topic for me to blog on. I feel like I may be getting stale railing against real estate, but at the same time it’s just so easy to do since these articles tend to get under my skin somehow. I’d like to blog more while thesising to keep the fingers moving (and hopefully the other writing muscles to get this thing done), but often feel just as blocked here as when staring at the flashing cursor in Word. Also, if anyone knows of a good easy-to-use captcha plug-in for WordPress 1.5 I’d be happy to try it, as the spam comments have been getting ridiculous lately (200/day and climbing!).

From RFD, but not an uncommon viewpoint:

Basically, the argument of the pro-bubble crowd here has been: ‘it happened in the US, therefore it must happen here’. But they fail to appreciate the magnitude of the mortgage mess that created the US bubble. Canadian banks are much more prudent, and we never had that sub-prime mess here. It is safe to say that 99% of home-buyers here are able to afford their mortgage payments in the long-term, therefore there is no ‘bubble’.

One sad thing about the US subprime contagion was that it lead many to believe that such terrible, terrible mortgage lending was a necessary condition for a real estate bust to take place. It’s entirely possible to have a real estate bubble form even with ostensibly sane lending — we had it happen here in 1989, and several times before that. Back then property speculation was much harder to accomplish than it is now… but it still happened. Bad lending standards can make bubbles inflate faster and higher, and the waves of foreclosures that then follow can make the correction sharper and deeper, but the bad lending is not the bubble. Over paying for real estate (or whatever asset is in question) for whatever reason is the bubble.

Imagine if you would a small, remote town. Let’s call it “Ft. Mac” for the sake of this example. Then, have some event happen that changes what people are willing to pay for real estate in that town, for instance the opening of a new business, call it “Tarco”, that’s paying high wages to workers. More people decide to move to Ft. Mac, chasing the money. But, there aren’t enough houses built and ready for the influx of new workers. People get into bidding wars for houses, paying far more than they ordinarily would so they they can get a shot at one of the lucrative jobs with a roof over their heads too. The construction guys move in and start building more houses. Eventually though, the hiring spree at Tarco peters out, and the influx to the town stabilizes. Now when a new worker comes to town and is looking for a house, they’re the only one bidding. Without the insanity of a bidding war, they don’t see the logic in paying 5X their income for a house in Ft. Mac, and so they don’t… prices fall back down.

This little story is the core of how price distortions can happen and later correct. No need for the construction guys to over-build and create a glut of houses that will never be lived in (though in real life that often happens and makes the bubbles worse); no need for speculators to buy houses and take out mortgages they have no intention of servicing (but in real life the speculators would probably show up too), and then get foreclosed on when they can’t flip for a profit. It doesn’t have to be real estate in the parable, it could be playstations, internet stocks, or tulip bulbs. Leverage definitely adds to the severity of these situations, especially when handed out like candy on Halloween, but it’s not a necessary part to the story.