Fire Safety

When it comes to fire safety the last thing you want to be is legal. Legal kills. The Titanic was legal when it sank with not enough lifeboats for all taking about 1500 to their death. People died without smoke and carbon monoxide detectors before they became mandatory. So you want to be more than legal. You want to be safe.

Under Ontario’s fire code smoke alarms are required outside all sleeping areas and on each other floor. Carbon monoxide detectors are required near all sleeping areas in residences with fuel-burning appliances. That’s all that is legal for owners of private residences.

Here’s what you probably should do. For starters aim for two or more smoke alarms per floor. The reason behind this is it provides more warning time that may save your life and your home. For example let’s take the basement. If your smoke alarm is at the foot of the stairs and a fire breaks out in the laundry room it takes precious seconds, maybe even a minute or more, depending on the circumstances, for it to be detected. By having a smoke alarm in the laundry as well as other places in the basement you get more warning.

The same goes for having one working carbon monoxide detector on each floor. Again the principle behind this is more warning whether asleep or during the day. The earlier the warning the better the outcome.

Here’s an excellent page on smoke alarms from the French River Fire Department: http://www.frfd.ca/smoke-alarms.html  and here’s a link to Ontario’s Carbon Monoxide Alarm Questions And Answers:  http://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/english/FireMarshal/CarbonMonoxideAlarms/QuestionsandAnswers/OFM_COAlarms_QandA.html

Other things to consider, which aren’t legally required, but advisable:  Get a general purpose extinguisher for each floor, plus a separate one able to put out typical kitchen fires. My cousin was able to put out a small fire in his kitchen because he had one. Get an escape ladder for upper floors. When building a new house or retrofitting an old one consider adding a sprinkler system. This will put out fires quickly once they start. A fire escape plan is also very useful as well as fire drills, especially with children.

The best fire safety device is prevention. If you smoke quit. Don’t leave cooking or candles unattended. Regularly maintain your furnace and other fuel burning devices. Keep combustibles away from heaters, stoves, toaster ovens and the like. Don’t overload electrical circuits and maintain your wiring. Wiring usually wears at plugs, light switches and light fixtures. Check them every few years to make sure the coating hasn’t worn. Dispose of ashes from fire places and barbecues in metal containers after dosing them thoroughly with water. This is not a definitive list, but it is a good start. Finally if something doesn’t seem right fix it. The life you save may be your own.

The Four Sisters Of Alternative Investing

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! So yell the Four Sisters of alternative investing – Elliott Wave International, Weiss Research, Dent Research and Safe Wealth. And they have sky supports and bunkers to save you, all for a price of course.

The basic premises of the Four Sisters are that there is going to be a great depression and that high levels of debt will be the basic cause of it. All four of them believe in the wave principle and urge people to think for themselves; don’t follow the herd as Robert R. Prechter of Elliott Wave International is forever saying.

I whole hardily agree with them that there is going to be a new great depression and that high levels of debt are at least a trigger for it. I also follow the wave principle, also called cycles. It makes sense and you can see it in the ups and downs of the market and in individual commodities and stocks. And I owe a big debt of gratitude to Prechter in particular for getting me to think on my own and that includes not necessarily agreeing with him and the others.

The Four Sisters remind me of the four gospels in the Bible as three of them are very similar, with the fourth being quite different. Elliott Wave International, Weiss Research and Dent Research all offer trading advice and services, while Safe Wealth basically wants to be your safe deposit box (or your bank) for your wealth. Elliott Wave, Weiss and Dent are also constantly coming after you with offers, while Safe Wealth doesn’t and their communications aren’t as frequent.

I have no problems with what they’re doing. I subscribe to their free stuff and I briefly subscribed to a newsletter from Elliott Wave International. They definitely have their place. However, I find it amusing that three of the sisters keep on coming out with new “secrets” to make money, especially Weiss Research. How many secret ways to legitimately invest does Wall Street have? Also Elliott Wave, Dent and Weiss all practice a sense of urgency. That is they have things for “a limited time only” and “this is the final day” for this incredible offer. I’ve often felt like telling them please promise that this is absolutely my last chance at this offer.

They also sometimes contradict each other. Harry Dent of Dent Research recently sent out an email saying that housing prices could fall 33% this year, while Larry Edelson of Weiss Research claims that rising mortgage rates will increase housing demand. (I’m still trying to figure that one out.)

They also have a one size fits all approach. For all of them central banks are one of the roots of evil, this includes the Bank Of Canada. Unbeknownst to them the Bank Of Canada could actually save Canada make the country perhaps the only G7 country not to go bankrupt. This could easily be accomplished by the simple expedient of having the federal government and the provinces return to borrowing from the Bank, as they used to do, instead of on the open market. Incidentally Canada is the only G7 country to own their central bank.

The biggest problems I have with them is that they talk about debt, but don’t really deal with the cause, except to blame it all on government spending and the central banks. The only one who takes a stab at the underlying cause is Dent Research. Harry S. Dent claims the problem is caused by an aging population. People spend and earn differently at different times in their lives. I agree with him. To his credit Dent says that the answer is not increasing the population as we are facing a global food shortage if we don’t get the population down.

However, they almost completely ignore the environment, except in passing, and down play human caused climate change and peak oil.

So while the Four Sisters all have something going for them, use them with caution as they all suffer from tunnel vision.