Category: ~cestlavie

Just general thoughts about Life, the Universe and Everything.

The Triple Action of Interest Rates

As the saying goes: Don’t Fight the Fed.

Here is my rather naive understanding of how Interest Rates influence equity markets and why I’m still bearish.

Let’s have a look at a very simplistic example of the following company:

Share price: $100
EBIDTA: $10/year
Debt: $100 (variable interest rate: 2% = $2/year)
Dividends: 3% = $3/year (payout rate is only 37.5%, nice!)
To keep things simple, the company pays no taxes.
—
Bottom line: after all the payments, we end up with $5 extra dollars every year.
$10 – $2 – $3 = $5.
Pretty amazing.

What happens when interest rates start going up?
For example, from 2% to 5%.
Continue reading “The Triple Action of Interest Rates”

RIP X?

Source: #RIPTwitter

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, my first thought was that this was the beginning of the end for him.
Up until recently, I was using Twitter (mostly in read-only mode, thanks to the RSS feature of nitter).
But since Elon is aggressively cutting costs and destroying Twitter‘s functionality, third-party apps basically stopped working or have lots of limitations.
Most accounts I was following on Twitter have some kind of blog or alternative anyway, so…
Bye-bye, Twitter, or what?

Canada Emergency Business Account

Canada Emergency Business Account aka CEBA aka Helicopter Money for Small Businesses.

The CEBA program offered interest-free loans of up to $60,000 to small businesses and not-for-profits.
For eligible CEBA borrowers in good standing, repaying the balance of the loan on or before December 31, 2023 will result in loan forgiveness of up to 33 percent (up to $20,000).

Source: https://ceba-cuec.ca

The original date for repayment was December 31, 2022, but

The Government of Canada has extended the December 31, 2022 repayment date to December 31, 2023 for CEBA loan holders.

Kicking the can down the road? Oh yeah!
Continue reading “Canada Emergency Business Account”

Canadian Real Estate and Interest Rates

Bank of Canada, yay!

July 13, 2022, another Bank of Canada meeting and a huge 1.0% (cool kids say 100 basis points) Interest Rate hike.
Four rate hikes, 2.25% in total so far, and it is still 2022 on my calendar!
Must be good for your Savings Account and bad for your Mortgage…
Continue reading “Canadian Real Estate and Interest Rates”

Беларусь -1%

В моём посте про корону в 2021 я решил проверить статистику населения Беларуси и оказалось, что численость населения уменьшается.
В 2020 году даже население Минска сократилось на 10к человек.
Что ж, а вот и статистика на 2022:

В 2021 году население островка стабильности, только официально, уменьшилось на ~94к!
С 9,349,645 человек до 9,255,524.
Население Минска в 2021 уменьшилось на ~13к, второй год подряд население Минска падает, хотя до этого всегда росло, бо все, кто хоть немного с мозгами, ехали в Минск.
Официальная статистика, конечно, привирает и наверняка не учитывает тысячи уехавших, которые как бы ещё в Беларуси, но уже нет.
Так что да, население Синеокой в 2021 году уменьшилось на 1%, а то и больше.

O Canada

I was thinking of going to Banff and Jasper National Parks many times, but each time I was postponing the visit and going somewhere else instead.
My thoughts were always the same, that they were here in Canada, so I could go anytime.
Finally, this “anytime” has come!
In a short 2 weeks vacation I was able to see breathtaking views of Banff and Jasper Parks, plus visit not too rainy Vancouver and Seattle along the way.

Here is a short video of me skipping a stone across Moraine Lake.


I think I had at least 5 bounces.
I could probably do better, but, you know, it was a bit windy and there were some ripples on the lake… 😀
Funny enough, only after watching the video in slow motion, I’ve realized that the stone was spinning!

🍁 Happy Canada Day! 🍁

This is Scootterre!

Back in 2016/2017, I’ve spent 5 months traveling around Asia: China, Japan, but mostly South Asia, like Thailand, Indonesia, and a bunch of other countries.
The two longest stops were the island of Koh Phangan in Thailand, where I’ve stayed for about a month, and Bali, Indonesia, where I’ve spent almost 2 months. (and did a visa run to Australia… a bad idea! 😀 )
Both islands are full of spectacular views and fun things to do, and the most popular mean of transportation on both islands is a scooter.
Continue reading “This is Scootterre!”

Real price of a smartphone

My old BLU Vivo Air test phone became too old, both physically and “mentally”.
The battery is playing tricks showing 40% in one moment and then dropping to 0% another and Android version is 5.0.2, which is soon will become unsupported even by my own games.
At the moment I still set minSdkVersion to 19 (Android 4.4 KitKat), but targetSdkVersion is already forced by Google to be 30.
Btw, in OpenFL it is done in project.xml file:

<config:android minimum-sdk-version="19" target-sdk-version="30"></config:android>

A neat list of all the Android/API versions can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history.

Continue reading “Real price of a smartphone”

Gambling on interest rates… no more!

Real estate is kind of a national obsession in Canada (like everywhere else). Those, who have already bought the house, feel like they won a lottery, those who haven’t, still dreaming to win.
Both are checking prices and trends regularly.
Interest rates are as low as they can get, but prices went up a lot.
Checking from time to time what’s on sale around me, I can’t stop wondering how prices can be so high.
Anyway, I’m not writing about gambling on real estate today. 🙂
Continue reading “Gambling on interest rates… no more!”

Last post in 2018 :)

So, I was able to switch both Solitaire games to HTML5, and they look and function much worse then Flash versions, but have no choice anyway.
Putting updated version to Google Play caused lots of complaints, as usual…
OpenFL still has some nasty bugs, like it crashes a lot on Android 4.4 specifically, and I don’t know why.
Next year I should move all of Mahjong games to OpenFL/HTML5 and finally start developing something new.

Amazon is shrinking.
They have closed Underground program.
Also they stopped distributing PC/Mac games, without any notification. Sounds like a big corp, that doesn’t care.

Google Ads getting worse as well. Their Video Ads often freeze and don’t allow users to play, causing lots of problems to me, as I have to block these ads manually.

Cool-hazckers still trying to brute-force my website, more then 600 IPs blocked and counting! 😎
Someone also trying to break SSH and mail server. Fail2Ban helps a lot here.
On a positive side, finally I have properly setup my mail server and it now cuts 95% of spam!
Also an email from Apple was rejected, cause they can’t properly setup they mail server… or is it me?

Did I mention every Big Tech company here?
Ah yes, Facebook… well I don’t like it. 😀

Anyway, hope everything will change for the best next year! Right??? 🙂
Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

YouYouWin

YouYouwin has recently bought “exclusive” license for almost all my games.
I just don’t understand, why they call it “exclusive”.
They simply took games “as-is” with all the links and logos, just asked to remove ads and leaderboard. They don’t even require to add their own logo.
Of course, the price is low too, the average price was ~$15 per game. 🙂
Also, they have added their own ads to the games, and pay %40 commissions to developers.
Let’s see, how it’s gonna work.

DISCLAIMER: The content in this blog represents the opinion of the author. No information here should be used for any purpose except for entertainment.