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Buy Lower/Sell Higher www.MoreForMyHouse.com Bill Blogs and Rants

Bill Rinehart, Realtor®/Salesperson HomeLife/Kempenfelt-Kelly Realty Ltd, Brokerage  Local 705.436.5111 Toll-Free 1.877.436.5111

Youth-Crime and Punishment Stephen Harper proposes to throw 14 year old criminals into adult prisons. Alarm bells go off in my head when I hear that kind of thing because of my memories of another 14 year old, Stephen Truscott, who was sentenced to hang for a murder that he, alone, knew he didn't commit. The pictures of his innocent helpless eyes staring out of the newspaper photos of the day are haunting. To paraphrase a criminology professor on the TV today, because 14 year olds are still not adults and lack judgement, we don't let them have adult sex, drive, smoke, drink, or vote. How, then, can we judge their criminal behaviour by adult's standards? I'm as outraged by their criminal behaviour as anyone else is, and don't get me started on gangs, but I think the blame and the punishment should be shared. I'm intrigued by the way the Israeli's deal with youth crime: If your kid commits a crime, they sieze your house. If your kid commits a serious crime, they bulldose your house. If your kid commits a really serious crime, they DYNAMITE your house and possessions. These kids are not in trouble because they are bad kids. They are in trouble because of bad parenting. When parents become accountable for their kid's behaviour, and serve prison time for the same amount of time that their kid is spending in youth detention, there won't be kids out on the street at night with a gun in their back pocket.

Road Rage: Everyone who drives slower than us is a moron, while everyone who drives faster is a lunatic. In the aftermath of the death of a man in a road-rage incident on the 401, there was much discussion and ballyhoo from the people who do the "news" but, oddly, I didn't hear anyone off of the radio or TV talking about it. A guilty silence? I've never rammed and killed anyone with my vehicle, but there have been times when I felt like it, or pulling out a gun (which I don't own) and using on some moron. I suspect it's a widespread reaction to the frustration of sharing the road with people who seem intent on being an obstacle to us getting where we're going. One of the experts on the TV news had a remedy for road rage. I've tried it, and it really works. His solution was to not think of the other cars as being controlled by an intelligent being. I call it the 'asteroid solution.' Think of the cars around you as rocketing blocks of stone that are not under anyone's control, and that move randomly for no discernable reason. Oh, and they could kill you if you misjudge their movement or your reactions. I've been doing that for a few weeks, and it works! When another car cuts me off, or someone's grandmother is doing 100 in the 140 lane on the 400, I no longer get agitated. I become Jason Bourne and look for an opportunity to get around the obstacle, instead of trying to will them out of my way with the power of my anger. My morning commutes have become much less stressful. Try it. It works.

Don't Drive to the Gas Protest! Angry citizens all over the planet are taking to the streets to protest high gasoline prices. In most of those countries, federal taxes make up a significant part of the per-gallon or per-litre cost. If gas prices stay at $1.35 per litres in Canada, or rise higher, I'm sure there will be a national stay-at-home day in an attempt to change Dictator Harper's flippant attitude towards the job losses caused by high gas prices, and the daily pain felt at the pumps by the citizens of his country. Protests are disingenuous though if your idea of protesting the costs of driving is to drive around! Don't do a convoy down the DVP, or across the 401! Park the damned trucks! The message is, if gasoline prices stay as high as they are, the economy, and the politicians political futures are going to grind to a halt.

We used to have Tony the Tiger in our gastanks. Now they are filled with corporate greed. Gordon Gekko (Wall Street,) and the 1980's corporate crooks his character was based on, would be proud of Canada's oil company executives. What could be more brilliant than getting people to willingly overpay for your product. and fuel your corporate profits (and your executive bonuses) year after year in ever-increasing gains? At a few of the gas-stations where I fill up, there are TV screens over the pumps, playing ads. One Pizza company spent Buddha knows how much money on advertising on those pumps. But whenever I hear the jingle "Come to P.... P...., Hey Hey Hey" I now associate it with the anger and helplessness that I felt every time I filled up my tank at a higher-than-before price. (Note to advertisers: Don't pay for that!) While you and I were standing at those gas pumps, watching the prices rising, in lock-step at every gas station on every corner within a few hours of each increase, the petrochemical companies pleaded poverty. "We have to," they said, "raise the prices. It's the oil! It's more expensive!" Poor poor oil company, we thought. On some happy occasions though, the price of oil fell. Gas guzzling consumers, poor schmucks like you and me just trying to get to work and back, expected the cost of our gasoline to fall too. Ooooh, no. Sorry, they said. We'd like to, but it's the cost of the oil that's already in the pipeline that you're paying for at the pump. So we kept squeezing the nozzle and paying more. Then the Taliban burned a tire or something in the middle east and the price of oil went back up again. Bang! Within minutes, the price at the pump is up. Huh? What happened to the cheap oil/gasoline in the pipeline? It went into corporate profits. While you were filling up at PetroCan (as Canadian citizens we all used to all own a part of it) they made 86% more in profit from you than they did last year. That's just the DIFFERENCE in profit, not how much profit they make. Percentages can be deceiving. If they made only $1.00 in profit in 2006, and $1.86 cents in profit in 2007, that would be an 86% increase in profit. But, no. It wasn't a little profit that sounded big, it was record-breaking and in the billions. All of the oil companies are reporting record-breaking profits. Those profits will earn some executives nice bonuses, but they will also put money into the pockets of the company's shareholders. Who are these shareholder greedmongers who are benefiting from our financial pains? If you have a pension plan at work, or an equities RRSP, go look in the mirror. Are we richer now as shareholders, or poorer as consumers? I have no clue, but I know I will still be grinding my teeth the next time I fill my tank, and I won't be getting a Tony the Tiger keychain.

How to save time dealing with SPAM. Because of my website, I'm getting close to 2,000 Emails per day. Most of them are SPAM. I could filter them, but I would still have to review the filtered Emails to make sure the filter didn't stop a legitimate Email from a potential client. No progess there. I discovered that the people who send SPAM Emails send the same message over and over, and they only change the "sender" name for each one. They don't change the subject line. By sorting my inbox by "subject" instead of my 'sender' or 'date-received,' I have reduced my Checking-Emails time from 15 minutes to 1 minute per day.

What worried me most about electing Stephane Dion's Liberals was that when the Americans heard "Canadian Prime Minister Dion" they would think it was Celine! Stephane Dion's biggest liability is his inability to communicate verbally with English-speaking Canadians. "Yes," his supporters say, "he has a Francais accent, but so did Jean Chretien and look how long he was Prime Minister!" Jean Chretien knew that, when it was useful, he could be completely unintelligible, in either official language. He used it to his advantage when embarrassing questions were being asked about things that the opposition parties were telling us were "scandals." On the other hand, Stephane Dion chooses to be unintelligible even when he wants us to understand him. His problem is a combination of putting the emphasis on the wrong syllables, and his intelligence. If he was a dumbass, we'd all understand him. He talks in the same way that he thinks though, and when he strings a bunch of polysyllabic words together in a convoluted sentence, we're left wondering what the first word was when he's on the 15th word. If he wants us to understand him, he has to dumb it down and stick to one syllable words. Jean Chretien dumbed it down when he wanted it us to understand him. He could have chosen the Dionesque "We will endeavor to eliminate unpopular taxation strategies" but instead chose "We will axe the tax." Dion should call up his old boss and ask for some advice on communicating.

I See Useless People! A former Italian Prime Minister described state-run lotteries as a tax on stupidity. I guess we all play now and then. It's cheap entertainment to dream that your financial worries will all end tomorrow morning. Before I became a Realtor, my idea of winning the lottery would be my boss giving me a paint-ball gun and then firing everyone that I shot with it by the end of the day. Don't ever quit a job because you're fed up with the people you work with. The same people will be at the new job. They'll just have different names!

TTC = Take The Car It's not essential, it's a service. For many, if not most, Toronto Transit Commission riders, there is no car to take. The TTC is their only way to get to work and when the TTC isn't running, the daily adventure of getting to work becomes a misery. I grew up in a place that was, as my Russian friends Gary says, "out where the bus doesn't run," otherwise known as 90% of the rest of Canada. Getting around means using your own car, a friend's car, or a stranger's car (hitchhiking.) If you're lucky, your town has a taxi service and you have the money to pay for it. Torontonians got a taste of that world Friday at midnight when the TTC ground to an unannounced halt during a contract dispute with its unionized workers. Friday at midnight, I will repeat. Not Monday morning during rush-hour. So outraged and inconvenienced were the transit riders, who were "stranded" in the middle of the largest city in Canada, that the great hue and cry on Monday was to have the transit system declared an "essential service" thereby taking away its workers' right to strike. If you need to develop an appreciation for the word "stranded," I'll park you in a car on the side of Highway 17 west of Wawa, next winter, while an Alberta Clipper passes over and the highway is closed even to towtrucks. In grade-school, my grandmother walked 2 miles down the railway tracks to get to town, then another mile to the school, in subzero temperatures. So acclimatized was she to the hardship that, as an adult, when the temperature dropped to a Canadian record-breaking minus 72°F one morning, she bundled my mother up and sent her down the road to school (which turned out to be closed because of the cold. We have snow days...they had frozen school days.) People can die up north in those kinds of conditions, but they usually don't because they take responsibility for their own lives. People also die when the Ambulance and Paramedics don't show up. They lose their houses when the firetrucks don't show up. They die when the hospitals close their doors in labour disputes. That's why those are legislated as "Essential Services." Having to hail a cab hardly compares. The debate over the TTC's essential service centres on a conflict between the riders' rights, and the workers' rights. Under any constitutional system, the transit workers' right to strike is not trumped by the rights of the transit system riders to live an uninconvenienced life. The people who will benefit the most from the TTC being designated an essential service are not the riders, but Toronto's politicians. Once the TTC workers lose the right to strike, there will be no pressure on the politicians to resolve contract disputes. The workers will become disgruntled, service will degenerate, and the riders will become more disatisfied and less served by the system. If you ride the TTC, add your voice to the crowd who are saying it's not an essential service.

"Raisin' hell" used to be our plans for Saturday night. Now it's when the Raisin Bran hurts our teeth.

Stanley Tookie Williams, founder of the Los Angeles Crips gang, was convicted on multiple counts of murder and was eventually executed in a California prison in 2005. Prior to his execution, while he was waiting on death row, he suffered a cardiac arrest. He was essentially dead. Jail staff defibrillated him and brought him back to life. Hello?! It's called DEATH ROW!!! All kidding aside.... I'm not a big fan of the death penalty, but not because of any sympathy for the killers. If you kill someone I love, I will want you to be slowly lowered into a vat of boiling lava like the hero's were (until next week then that didn't happen) in the serial movies we endured when I was a kid on Saturday afternoons. Generally speaking though, if you've been convicted of killing someone in Canada, we can't really trust the conviction. Robert Baltovich is the latest innocent victim to be exonerated. Stephen Truscott is the most notorious and our country's biggest disgrace. How many others have there been in between? At least a dozen in my short lifetime have been proven innocent by science and technology. How many others are still in prison because they don't have the strength or money, or a vicious mother on the outside fighting for their innocence? In many cases, those men spent the best part of their lives in jail because of police incompetence. In several cases, it was because of police corruption, or even because the Crown Prosecutor withheld evidence that would have proven the victim innocent. I don't support the death penalty because I don't trust that those facing it are facing it legitimately. I have no faith in the Canadian criminal justice system.

I love HGTV real estate buyers. They get to look at three houses, then have to choose one and buy it. I want those buyers! The StatsCan Sleep Numbers Much was made this week, on many newscasts, about a StatsCan sleep study. I mostly heard the radio versions, on my sleepy-eyed commutes in to work over the week. The consensus of the smugly smirking reporters was that ambition, success and money were the route to sleepless nights. Die you yuppy corporate scum! A commonly referenced conclusion was that "Canadians earning $60,000 or more a year slept 40 minutes less on any given day in 2005 than someone who made $20,000." Sounds like justice for the greed and the big house in King Township. But not so. How about looking at the numbers this way instead? People who sleep an extra 40 minutes per day earn $40,000 less than people who get up earlier in the morning or stay up late at night finishing work they brought home. Or try tackling this obvious one that the reporters missed: "People who work fulltime get less sleep than people who work part-time." Ya, hello? The part time people are still sleeping when the full-time people get up and go to work. Don't believe everything you hear on the news folks. Social activist, author and magazine editor Gloria Steinem was once asked what she had learned from being a writer. "I learned not to believe everything I read," she answered. That was long before CNN, the Internet and blogging. Molson Park and Park Place Barrie was once home to a hundred acre park that hosted many summer rock concerts. It hosted Live Aid 2. It brought revenue into the city, along with tons of stoned teenagers and rock stars. The retired Molson plant on the same property was turned into the world's largest marijuana grow-op by some enterprising gardeners. Molson Park added a lot to the world's image of "Barrie," the city. It made Barrie a cool place. It's all gone. The trees, the burms around the concert site, the century-home that was the original farmhouse on the property and that in it's later years was a dining facility, are all gone; bulldozed in the name of commerce. With it gone, Barrie is just another place near the GTA. Another Brampton or Mississauga. We still have the lake of course and that's also a huge part of what makes Barrie "Barrie," but the Park Place developers took away the Woodstock element that appealed to us old-timers and added to the mystique of Barrie. Whatever they build at Park Place can't just be another business park. We already have that at Cedar Point. They have a responsibility to make Barrie better than it was before they bulldozed Molson Park. NASCAR fans and country music go together like tornadoes and trailer parks. Ripoff Mechanics WHY?! Why is it that I can take my car to three different mechanics and get three different opinions on what my car needs? Brakes are the worst! I had my brakes inspected and fixed at my dealership (bunch of crooks, more about that on another rant) and went out the door; Clean bill of health, nothing wrong with the brakes now, have a nice day. A month later I needed a safety certificate to transfer the ownership from a lease to my possession (yet another rant entirely.) I took it to another place (not trusting the dealership anymore.) A big place that sells tires, and other stuff. They had treated me well and honestly before on an air-conditioning issue, so I thought I could trust them. Oh my Buddha! You need new rear brake drums! Can't let you leave without you having them! What?!?!? OK back to the dealership and a confrontation with the manager. Brakes are a big deal in mechanic-land. To pass brakes as safe when they are not in mechanic-land is like priests diddling alter boys. The dealership manager gets his mechanics to agree that my previously OK rear drums were "borderline" and might survive one grinding but that's it. We came to an agreement and I got the safety certificate from the dealership but I have no idea what was really safe and what was not safe on my Jeep when I was done with them. Off to another place; one that Does That!. Oil change and overall checkup a month later. How are the brakes I asked? Rear drums will last for a few years! they told me. That was 2 years ago. I'm still running on the same brake drums that would not survive another burnishing 2 years ago! Yes my Jeep does still stop. I was there again today. The we-do-that place. Now they want to do work that 3 months ago they said wouldn't need doing for a while. How about the rear drums? Nah they're fine! I think we need help from the government. They can set up a gun registry and waste billions of dollars. They can set up exhaust inspection places that somehow don't have to inspect ancient gas-guzzling oil-belching stench cars, or diesel engines, but that I have to pay to have my compliant car inspected. Hello! ? It's time to set up government inspection shops with licensed mechanics who issue work orders but don't do repairs and have nothing to gain from my car's problems. You take your car to the government shop, have it inspected, then take those orders to a licensed mechanic at your favourite shop to have the work done. Do you agree? Send me your opinion! Your name or E-ddress will not be added to any mailing list or shared. UPDATE: April 8/06 There is hope! I've discovered that such inspection services do exist, but they're rare. Click on "APA Services" then "Vehicle Inspection" at www.APA.ca. Some feedback from south of the border: I live in the U.S. The mechanics are *no *more honest down here than anywhere else. They prey on the customers that do not know anything about auto repair. They cannot force the repairs on us or stop us from going somewhere else, but they will do unnecessary repairs for a nice profit. We do have emission inspection. I read in a newspaper that a professor from California did a study on emission inspection and came to a conclusion that it would be cheaper to help the offending auto owners take care of the problem then keep the inspection services. A multimillion dollar industry grew up around the inspection services and they will not get rid of it. Brian   Video killed the radio star. Then the Internet killed television. Then spam Emails and viruses killed the Internet. Then we all went back to listening to the radio. I'm guessing that's how it turns out.

Laugh at What Realtors really meant	Understand Realtor's abbreviations
Getting around the Hwy 400 closures	The Battle of the Sexes

Bill Rinehart

705 436-5111

Toll Free 1-877-436-5111