You will have to self direct to do this. Open an account with one of the commission-free places, like Wealthsimple or Questrade. Anything that’s overseen by an advisor will have international equity allocations, including exposure the country to our south. They are in the middle of a historically unprecedented bubble, so I mean this is the debate you’ll have to have internally with yourself. I don’t want to invest with them either, but putting your (very obviously legitimate) hard feelings aside for a moment and thinking objectively, thats where the return is being found right now.

This is your retirement after all, and it’s not necessarily your job or responsibility to be the moral superman of the planet. No one’s going to look after you, or care about what your investments were in, and if they are going to financially rape and pillage and unlock supercharged returns through deregulation, which in turn will unlock fraud and capitalism at the cost of just about everything good, I mean it’s going to be an all time economic disaster, but a good advisor will want you to be exposed to that, because there are returns to be made.

Ain’t saying what you are wanting to do is bad (it’s very much not), or wrong, but you do have to look at this from all angles, and it’s important that you do because it affects your future well-being, long after all of this is (hopefully) over.

You’ve been what now? Vibe coding. You mean where people like me, who have absolutely no fucking idea what they are doing when it comes to programming, use a broken fantasy tool that spits out a statistical calculated interpretation of what it thinks I would want but it’s actually just a pile of slop? That kind of vibe coding? Where I can pretend to be a computer programmer!?

Wonder if I can vibe playboy next? Maybe I can vibe billionaire or be a vibe prime minister! All sorts of fantasies that AI can help make for me!

I was pretty disappointed with it too. Was obsolete basically day 1. Idea is right, the execution is lame. As is the case with the two razer products that I’ve purchased, there won’t be others, at least for this guy.

Jokes on you, because they’ll just double down, fire 25% of the workforce and whatever happens, happens. Even if it goes absolutely sideways, they golden parachute off into the sunset of whatever company that is looking to be broken next.

If your strings are 10 years old, it’s going to need a hell of a cleaning.

I generally like the music nomad kits, they are a bit pricey for what they are, but they are convenient if not anything else. You will want the Frine Fret polishing kit, because those frets just have to be nasty. You’ll also want to grab their cleaning spray, which is a good all-rounder. If you have the budget they also have this cleaning spade that’s good for getting under the strings and the fretboard when you still have strings on, like it’s good for maintenance cleans while it’s strung, but it’s not necessary either. Just nice to have.

Start with the fretboard and move down. Clean the frets, and oil it (theres youtube videos for everything).

If you don’t want to spend the money, at a minimum get a bottle of cleaner and a bottle of a fretboard cleaner if it’s rosewood - if it’s maple just use the general cleaner sparingly. You can use autosol and a rag to clean the frets on the cheap, but tape your fretboard up before you do (that’s why those music nomad fret guards are worth their weight in gold).

Otherwise it’s just common sense. Use a good microfiber cloth if you don’t want micro scratches (like the ones that come with reading glasses).

Lifetime of goodwill I believe the quote is. The OP is right on that too. I don’t know how old you are, but there’s a certain generation that allocates Nintendo an exceptional personal worth and views them as an exceptional company, due to the long standing memories that are associated with their products. Mainly the NES/Super NES era, but they had a few waves. It’s not really brainwashing, it’s literally like 20 or so years of memories with products that were key during crucial moments of our lives. So yeah, it’s a bit hard to reconcile that with the way they are acting in our modern age, honestly.

It’s dumb as shit from a business perspective. Get em hooked on it, and it’ll eventually get them buying it through a legit avenue. Emulations hardly perfected in most cases, and a legit product these days isn’t always procured at first point of touch. People would like to know if that $100 purchase you are asking of them is actually worth it, because quite a lot of the time in our modern age, it’s not.

I get what you are saying, I’m not discounting it whatsoever. I mean I’m an accountant, I could talk all day and night about ways to maximize and protect your profits and cash flows.

That said, Nintendo has to be the laziest company from a coding perspective. Their stuff is always the first of the current gens to get jailbroken, and then it’s open season. I think we should have learned by now not to fight piracy like this either, because it’s both inevitable and it’s a terrible look. The smarter companies know how to use it to their advantage. They also don’t always go thermonuclear on their perspective clientele. It’s a rotten look. Make a product that people want to buy and they’ll buy it. If you make shovelware and then price it in the AAAA tiers, I think we all know what’s going to happen…

I think it’s more addicting than cigarettes. I used to be a pack-a-day smoker once upon a time. That was a hard habit to give up. Like it took years to reprogram my body and mind to get away from it.

I’ve been continuously trying to cut down on my social media, because just like everyone else, it’s rotting my brain and affecting my moods. It’s literally just as, if not maybe even more harmful than cigarettes in most ways. It’s certainly a more potent addiction, that’s for sure, and it’s more dangerous. I mean cigarettes will kill you long term, sure. But social media will turn you into a socially inept, manipulated, raging angerbomb that is much more dangerous to yourself and everything and everybody around you than arguably cigarettes, and in a much shorter time span. You don’t even notice it either, it’s latent damage thats occurring (like cigarettes).

It’s a dopamine hit like no other too, and again, you don’t even realize it until you are self-conscious about it and working very hard at it. I’ve experimented with some powerful drugs in my lifetime, and it’s hard to explain to a lot of people because drug use rewards are more instant and much more apparent. But whatever weird brain reward system social media powers, I’m convinced it’s just as powerful of a hit as the hardest drugs. It’s certainly very very very hard to get away from.

Not that this is normal behaviour, and I mean fuck Roblox, as we all know it’s a scuzzy predatory breeding ground. But this constant narrative that video games, or music, or other types of media mediums are to blame after events like this is exhausting. It’s mental.fucking.illness thats to blame here. End of story.

Fuel that bubble, bud. It’s running out of soap.

I’d prefer at this point if Treliving did absolutely nothing, quite honestly. Let’s not setup another decade of darkness with draft picks that end up being wasted on non-remarkable players, and shitty contracts. Trade deadline never works out for the long term, that’s better dealt with in the off-season.

I’m there with them too. It’s time. It’s unsafe, it’s creating world wide political instability, they refuse to incorporate safety mechanisms and it’s literally an unsafe product to use anymore.

It’s like Kayne admiring the Nazis. He’s now claiming it’s mental illness. Makes me think that’s what this largely is. That we have a mental illness crisis, and these dopamine rich environments like social media are just exacerbating the problem.

Yes there are inflationary pressures, but come on. You don’t think companies like Loblaws, and their literally record breaking profits aren’t one of the main causes of this crisis? It ain’t helping, that’s for sure. I mean yeah 5% here and there, sure costs going up. But look at the shrinkflation too. There’s a lot of tomfuckery going on here, and it’s high time it’s brought to an end.

You aren’t getting a processor, graphics card, a motherboard, case and that ram for $699 right now, though. That’s my point. It’s more than double the cost, if not maybe even triple right now. Do you actually get double or triple the value then? Touche on the steam savings (you could even argue pirating - not condoning but just saying it’s an option, to get those savings), but are you going to actually close the gap? PC games tend to be more demanding too, plus as a PC gamer I often find games need a lot more time for optimization and need tinkering, whereas with a console they just sort of work. There’s pros and cons to each for sure, but I’m of the opinion that right now I’m more heavily on the side of the console, at least from a $ value perspective.

It’s high time this government starts wadding into this mess to fix it. We don’t need studies, we don’t need grants, we don’t need tax deductions. We need action. And it starts with Loblaws. I agree, the timing is shitty with all the other stuff that’s going on in our macro world, but enough is enough.

Go after the bastards already!

It’s a thinly veiled plan by the employer to force attrition in the workforce, while trying to keep severance liabilities to a minimum. It’s a layoff plan, and nothing else. Anyone left is a slave.

Look we collectively had a golden opportunity to change things forever, but we blew it. We blew it. Collectively as humans, we are self defeating.

Hell I’d even pack a nice little picnic lunch, and drive them down in a limousine. If that’s what it takes…

One thing that I just absolutely cannot reconcile in all of this, is the involvement of people who obviously have some sort of first or second generational immigration background, in screaming and oppressing immigration.

I know of a person who is now in the US just absolutely down the MAGA spiral. But the weird thing is, his grandparents died in a concentration camp in the second world war. He himself is now an immigrant to the US, from a country he also immigrated to earlier in life. Just absolutely droning on about…immigrants.

It’s completely baffling. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.