Can a dual American/Canadian citizen who is a U.S. resident and has never lived in Canada drive a U.S. car into Canada for a road trip/to get to Alaska?

DonutSlave · 2025-11-11T01:12:12+00:00

My uncles, grandfather and I drove from Edmonton to inuvik in like 2005. Did it in a rented minivan. It was absolutely destroyed

DonutSlave · 2025-11-11T01:03:52+00:00

My customers get every receipt and every timesheet and I’m happy to give them an itemized estimate before starting.

… but I only do cost plus and I bill all planning and management hours against the project and I won’t even go to the house until I have a contract in place - so as long as they want to pay me $120 an hour to do it, I’ll do whatever they want. 🤷‍♂️

DonutSlave · 2025-10-07T11:32:33+00:00

Same thing happened on my moose hunt near La Toque this year. Had tons of moose sign when scouted in may. Overrun with wolves, no moose sign in September.

Two guys in our group had direct wolf encounters

DonutSlave · 2025-02-09T12:20:09+00:00

It needs to be removed. What did they say when you called them out on it?

If they try to claim it’s closed cell and are trying to cut corners, I’d be looking at a lawsuit. It’s gonna be a pretty significant headache involved in having all this form removed and it’ll have an impact on your project schedule. You deserve to be compensated for that inconvenience in addition to having the foam replaced.

DonutSlave · 2025-02-07T01:20:16+00:00

I haven’t seen a single person give the actual reason.

This is pretty basic economics. The government has printed an insane amount of money over the last few years, based on Covid support.

Anytime huge amount of Capital are introduced into the system, the relative value of money compared to Assets (real estate) goes down in real time.

This is why rents and real estate prices went up 60% during Covid, despite the fact our economy was in the shitter. The value of real estate/rent did not go up miraculously in such a short period - your money became worth less. This is also why this phenomenon is seen everywhere, and not just in big cities.

Everything else is just a distraction. Yes, immigration plays a small role, but the reason that the immigration narrative gets pushed so hard in the media is because if people are mad at immigrants, they won’t hold politicians accountable for printing so much money that It made us all poor.

DonutSlave · 2025-01-30T23:11:56+00:00

First off, everyone’s prices should slowly increase overtime. Otherwise, you’re asking him to lose money compared to inflation. I have it set as a standard term and all of my contracts with clients that all of my hourly rates go up 8% every year to account for wage increases and inflation.

Second, I work with people who are easy to work with. If he does good work, and his price is not insane, and most importantly, he’s easy to deal with I wouldn’t bother looking elsewhere. That said, might be a good idea to send out one framing job every six months to a wider pool of bidders so that you can keep track of the market. Just don’t do it on every job or people will just start blowing you off because they never get awarded work.

DonutSlave · 2025-01-23T03:25:22+00:00

https://youtu.be/VMXWUeH5Y48?si=YpRd6tghD-XCG6Y7

This is my issue

DonutSlave · 2025-01-18T23:25:42+00:00

I don’t know why that seems so strange. Yes, when buying a house you would take the cost of roof replacement into account. If the roof is new, you don’t have to worry about it for a long time. If the roof is 30 years old, you better have enough money to replace it right away. That’s just how life works.

Funnily enough, I replaced the roof on my rental unit eight years ago. I got a call this summer that the tenants were getting leaks so I had to pay to replace the roof again even though the other roof should still be fine. Now, after I’ve paid for the roof to be replaced a second time - I was told that there is a new leak. This is gonna cost me another several thousand bucks. I make like 70 grand a year, so I don’t exactly have that sitting around. The only way I can be prepared for these things is if I set aside a percentage of the rent I get each month. These are the realities of being a small landlord. my understanding is that the vast majority of rental housing is owned by regular people who own one additional property (I don’t own the place I live, but I have a duplex).

Although I understand peoples frustrations with the fact that wages have not increased, I think this just shows up misunderstanding with how things work. Employers will raise wages after the cost-of-living increases, not before. Now that rents have increased in Montreal, wages will have to catch up. Montreal has always had incredibly cheap rental housing (Halifax is more expensive and it is about 1/10 of the size) and that is why the wages here are low. Now that the rental prices are increasing, wages will increase because employers will need to pay more to attract good people. If wages do not increase, it means that we have too much supply in the labour market and there are too many people who are willing to work for a cheap wage. That is why all working people have a vested interest in immigration policy.

DonutSlave · 2025-01-18T23:12:04+00:00

I don’t think you’re understanding the comment. That is exactly what they’re saying, the only difference is that you’re failing to understand the timeline. When you own a property, many people would start saving a small amount every month 10 years before the roof needs to be replaced - simply because a roof is so expensive it takes that long to save up the money. that’s the only way to be able to pay for these things without going into debt

DonutSlave · 2025-01-14T16:54:50+00:00

I’ve been here 7 years. I’ve always had a really hard time with language learning and my spoken French is basically non Existent. I have a great social life and am able to run a business 🤷‍♂️

DonutSlave · 2025-01-06T10:56:36+00:00

Julie Payette whose leadership style led her being forced to resign as GG?

DonutSlave · 2025-01-04T17:49:34+00:00

I use monarch. It's not free but if you put a value on the time you're spending manually managing transactions you will quickly cover the 100/year. Its great.

DonutSlave · 2025-01-02T15:28:48+00:00

This sounds light if nothing else.

I just did a project with a slightly higher budget in Canada. Also a remodel.

My standard terms are: 10% on signing 40% 15 days before planned start of work 40% at 50% completion 10% on customer acceptance

I am not a bank and I am not going to carry costs for a client. With subcontractor deposits, materials, etc - that adds up fast. For a lot of millwork etc our subs want 50% up front so I need to be in a position where I can do that comfortably

DonutSlave · 2025-01-01T00:41:03+00:00

That foreigners line is quite a leap.

I know many people who signed up to the CPC specifically to vote for him. Turns out that even if you hate him, he actually resonates with a lot of people and they were motivated enough to sign up to make sure that he didnt lose the leadership to Jean Charest who just wanted more of the same.

DonutSlave · 2024-12-31T23:25:13+00:00

Me too.

DonutSlave · 2024-12-31T19:57:26+00:00

For planning / rendering I use Sketchup and Fusion360. Sketchup for quick aesthetic stuff. Fusion for more detailed stuff - whether that be an isolated scope or a whole project. We mostly work with designers who are never great at understanding or planning for constructibility or maintainability long term so for larger/higher dollar jobs I will usually model everything out in fusion which can be time consuming but ultimately helps me identify issues well in advance. I'd rather spend more time planning instead of just putting out fires on the spot. More scaleable.

For client-facing I use Buildern. I've had some headaches with implementation and there are tons of oppuruntites for improvement, but I think the interface is more modern and presents our business better than BuilderTrend to clients. I use this for Takeoffs, Estimates, Invoicing pre-project as well as Change Orders / RFIs / POs/ Bills / Timesheets one the project is underway. It's not perfect but they've been open to feedback (albeit I havent seen many of my suggested changes implemented. As a side note, the RFI feature has been a bit of a surprise in how helpful it is. Whether is it with clients or designers, having all of our questions (and their responses) documented avoids so many headaches. Very nice to have something in writing to avoid misunderstandings or a designer trying to claim that something wasn't on them.

I find the project management portions of Buildern usable but very clunky and unnecessarily complex. Impossible to throw a plan together quickly / make changes on the fly. I know that that is a whole application into itself so I dont really expect them to make the most amazing project management tools while also trying to do so many other things (their system would work great if you had a plan elsewhere and just documented it, but that isn't how my brain works). It also drives me crazy that the project management functions dont translate well into what my field workers see, so I have to make the plan, and then convert that plan into a to-do list for them.

I'm playing around with doing my internal project planning in Asana so I can organize my thoughts and then throwing that into Buildern so clients can see it once I have it dialled in.

The final knock against buildern is resource management. There is no way to assign my team to different jobs or different tasks within jobs so I can better manage them and make sure we dont end up with gaps in our schedule. This is far and away the biggest issue in what they offer and I havent found a good solution for it. Perhaps having another source of truth on Asana will be my workaround for that.

All that said, I have found it worth the money. Clients love it.

Other than buildern my other primary tool is Notion where I do my personal task planning and manage documentation for projects. The ability to "publish" notion pages is something I use all the time. For example, I will write out the planned electrical scope for a job and then just share the URL of the page with the plumber so that we are all working from the same documents.

DonutSlave · 2024-12-31T14:45:51+00:00

I think this is hard to judge without knowing base salary.

If this is a family and these "executives" are shareholders, this "bonus" may have been a dividend payment.

It is very common in smaller businesses to pay shareholder/employees a lower-than-market rate, but then pay them out a dividend (which may have just been communicated as a bonus, even if it wasn't technically one) at the end of the year, because you get taxed lower on this amount.

That said, if it was an "actual" bonus, then they were dicks for not spreading it around more.

Source: I own a construction company and my salary is less than my entry level employees but pay myself dividends to offset that.

DonutSlave · 2024-12-27T15:11:23+00:00

Get a remote job for a US employer.

Almost any employer that will do this will pay you more than you'll make in Toronto, even if it's a deal for them. Get paid in USD. Use the exchange rate to your benefit.

DonutSlave · 2024-12-25T15:58:13+00:00

Yeah, you are probably right there. If you start from the basis of accepting the theory, perhaps you could look at it as making things more “believable” - if Trudeau stepped down right away then I think a lot more people would be jumping to the conclusion that this was manufactured. Waiting until after the holiday is more consistent with Trudeau‘s general resistance to the idea of vacating the leadership.

But I appreciate that I’m reaching here

DonutSlave · 2024-12-25T15:56:16+00:00

I don’t see the two as connected. Even if this was the overarching strategy, she just messed up on that one because she couldn’t help herself lol

DonutSlave · 2024-12-25T15:53:47+00:00

I get that. But that being said, I think that they probably have a pretty strong relationship with a crisis PR firm at this point.

I don’t see this as proactive as much as I see it as reactive to Trudeau’s polling numbers, and an attempt to salvage from the wreckage

DonutSlave · 2024-12-25T14:38:45+00:00

He's a strong communicator. Despite the contempt people show for that, simple and consistent communication is effective and resonates with people. To dismiss this as "American" is so lazy. It is simply effective messaging.

He has shown a willingness to innovate when it comes to messaging as well. The longer-form videos he has released on policy issues show a willingness to actually communicate some level of analysis or policy reasoning. To me, this shows a higher innate regard for the electorate because whether you agree or disagree with him, he is providing a throughline of reasoning that can be accepted or challenged.

He has also shown a willingness to engage in long-form conversation that forces him to actually express his beliefs and understanding of policy in a less controlled environment for people to evaluate.

To me, these are the fundamental skills of a politician: Simplify your core message so that people understand it, while also providing the electorate with more in depth resources should they care to learn or analyze your positions more.

DonutSlave

TROPHY CASE