The heat continues here in Ottawa, with very little rain. My deal with God continues for my grass: if God wants green grass he knows what needs to happen (that is your religious comment for this Sunday).
The big news in Ottawa was the media finally noticing that the Government is going to pay out about $6B in “severance” payments as part of the new contract with PSAC. It is one of those things folks didn’t talk about much, but it’s been there a while, and now the Government is trying to limit their exposure to this. Effectively, what happened is that if a Civil Servant quit their job, they got a week’s pay for every year they had worked with the government. The first time you hear that it sounds fine, but this person quit, and I haven’t seen that anywhere else in my work travels. The program will end this year, but will cost the government a good chunk of change.
It is the All-Star break for baseball this week coming up. I am astounded by how uninterested I am in baseball, but the Blue Jays are now showing “Blue Jays game in an hour”, which is much better, it may even cause me to want to watch baseball again.
On my Twitter feed, there was a diverse set of posts that I collected:
- Money Hemorrhage (aka the scream) points out that the end of the year can end up being a very expensive time of the year (especially if you have kids).
- One of my most read articles is What Does the 4th of July Mean? I have no idea why but every year on the 4th of July my readership quintuple because of this one post.
- The Top 5 Investment Mistakes of my Life is a real oldie, but it is an example of the mistakes you can make even when you mean well.
- A real oldie is Kippers, and no it is not about salted fish, either.
- Where were you in 1967 at Expo ? I was, but I was a young lad, what will Canada be doing when we turn 150 ?
I have always wondered what Chapter 11 (a US Financial methodology) actually entails, and thanks to the Khan Academy we have this nifty video to help:
