I have read that the maximum credit-able charity donation to a US charity is my year's total US dividend income. So there are at least 5 different dates (for the 4 distributions and 1 donation).
Do I convert each cash flow at the fx at its date, and equate the CAD? Or do I equate the USD value of the dividends vs USD donation?
Are you considering LongTerm Care insurance ... or presuming/hoping that our government system will pay for it? I live in a community with many much-older people. It has been shocking to me to see the speed at which friends' 'ability' deteriorates.
IMO it is worth reading up on the American experience. I found some websites you might read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/well/long-term-care-costs.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/well/long-term-care-costs.html = the paper referenced in the article.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/search?q=long+term+care+insurance&include_over_18=on Some Reddit posts
I hope the moderator will allow this long post.
More than a year ago I posted here for ideas how to control the predictable invasion of Foxglove after the logging of my park's forest resulted in acres of bare earth, covered in spring with rosettes of Foxglove. https://www.reddit.com/r/invasivespecies/comments/1nhm7hk/new_infestation_foxglove_choice_of_attack/ . It has been a perfect scientific trial. Effectively zero+ Foxglove at the start.
Year 1- winter: Loggers clearly brought in the Foxglove on their equipment during their winter cutting. There was no other possible source of contamination. The areas logged far exceeded the area I could attempt to save by myself, so I can compare between the 'saved vs 'let it rip' areas.
Year 1- summer: The logged bare ground areas became covered with Foxglove rosettes. I decided to spend hours pulling each first-yr rosette up with my fingers... which you will find is a real pain ... because I believe (don't know) that you have to get the bulb that is underground beneath the rosette. VERY slow work. So I did not cover much ground before I gave up.
Question1: I never tested and don't know the answer still ... Would simply roughing up the soil's surface with a 3-pronged hand-cultivator have effectively destroyed the new growth? I did not want to take the risk that it would do nothing.
Year 2- summer: Because they have a two-year cycle, this was the first summer of flowering spikes, starting late May and continuing to the end of June. But by that end it seemed that the lower seed pods were starting to open. So best to plan on being finished BEFORE the end of June. At least in the Pacific North-West.
I adopted a continuous stretch with only a short connection to a 'let it rip' area. Other than the Foxglove and trailing native blackberry, the loggers' levelled ground made moving around very easy. So seeing and getting-to each flowering plant was relatively easy.
Pulling each plant was easy ... 'chop' the 3-prong cultivator into the soil about 4" from the central stalk (or multiple of stalks). Pull out. Knock the soil from the roots. Pile up (will wilt and shrink quickly). Bees won't like you, but keep calm and carry on, and they never attacked me.
It was easy to see that my work was complete because there was little else growing.
Year 3- summer: The areas I had cleared had only a VERY small number of flowering plants. These might have been from last years' plants that only grew after my clearing, or they might have been from the very limited number of pre-existing plants on a different cycle
The areas I had NOT cleared in Yr2 summer also had flowering plants: not full blown, but (say) 10 times more than my picked area. If all the areas were on the same 2-yr cycle ... why? A good number of of them were still attached to last summers' flower-stalk ... either starting new shoots from a base curing down toward the stalk's roots, or sprouting from the sides of the dry-but-still erect stark. One stalk had collapse under their weight to lie horizontal. All along it the new flowering plants were sprouting to the sky.
That explains the difference of opinion between those who believe they continue to bloom every year vs every 2nd yr. Earlier in this spring I had pulled up all the dried spikes as I travelled though non-cleared areas. Most all were just waiting to drop with no remaining roots. But a SMALL few were still strongly attached to their roots. It must have been these stalks that created Yr3's blooms.
The problem with Yr3-summer clearing is that now travel is very difficult. The ground is hidden beneath all kinds of waist-high growth ... and it will only become MORE difficult to see and move as time goes on. And so the two-yr cycle gets broken, with plants flowering every year.
The Moral of the Story is that you really have only 1 chance to get it right ... 100% clearing in summer 2. Unless of course you are dealing with a finely cultivated garden, not an ex wild woodland.
.
I am writing the Member of Parliament for a government promotion of AI. Please give me the topics you have found where chatBots' information/understanding is factually 'wrong' or 'misleading' (specify which). I'm not looking for responses from just one particular country.
Do the various bots all give the same error?
Do you attribute the error to the bot's training on open-source material all over the web that is essentially commercial advertisements?
Can you post a web address where one example is?
Have you tried using different wording in your prompt to see if the bot would then give a correct answer?
I'm doing my homework to make sure I'm setting up an RRIF correctly .. and finding contradicting info. There seems no disagreement that the latest age for converting (setting up) the RRIF is in the year during which you turn 71. And a number of sites state/imply that your first required w/d is the NEXT year during which you turn 72 ... at the 5.4% rate.
But if you turn 72 in a year, obviously on Jan 1 you were 71. So would the first required draw, according to the charts would be 5.28%.
(https://www.woodgundy.cibc.com/en/reference/retirement-planning/rrif-minimum-withdrawal.html vs https://www.financialtools.ca/blog/blog-rrif-calculator.html )
a) Is the first required draw in the year FOLLOWING the year of set up? That would be the year during which you turn 72 and were 71 at start. The draw would be at the 5.28% rate.
b) Is the first required draw at the 5.4% rate (a year later) ... so those who are 72 on Jan 1 and turning 73 during the year?
Can someone explain to me how the creators of all the chatBots have concluded that the training material they CHOSE to use ... is factually correct ... so completely error-free that they do not need to have any system for correcting the 'truths' that they have taught the bots.
I am not interested in personally receiving the particular correct facts ... I already know them. I am interested in Jo Public receiving the true facts when he asks the bots. The powers-that-be must be loving this protection from criticism, from looking foolish (and immoral), from facing legal liability for teaching/testing/accrediting new members of their profession.
All the chatBots give wrong facts even though the provably correct information has been public for more than a decade. Leaving a comment behind a 'thumbs down' icon does nothing.
AFTER THE 11 COMMENTS..... so we all agree that the bots are full of hot-air on many issues ... but if WE know it, their creators should know it ... and surely, SURELY. they would have created mechanisms to correct the errors. How hard would that be? Don't they realize that they are freezing wrong info for all posterity? Has nobody created a website for us to document their error?
Webpages like https://happysupport.ai/blog/why-ai-chatbots-give-wrong-answers pretend that the errors are because data becomes 'out of date'. But the issue I know was proven 15 years ago. One bot explicitly said the correct source was NOT used in training ... and presumably will not in the future.
"China's Not the Problem - We Are"
https://www.nytimes.com/by/ross-douthat
I really recommend watching/listening to this interview by Ross Douthat with Kyle Chan of the Brookings Institute. It's a hour long, but you won't get bored.
This guy really impressed me. The moderator's questions were insightful and seemed to give the guest opportunity to apply what he knows to give one-off answers ... that were anything BUT 'off the cuff' or 'canned'.
Does anyone else have questions they use to test the bots, showing how many/most will give a factually wrong answer? Has anyone ever experienced a bot answering with (eg) 'some people say xyz and others say abc'?
An issue I care about causes ALL bots I have tried, to repeat the common claims in the published media (paper, magazines, big websites) and taught/tested by professional bodies. Unfortunately, the received wisdom was invented about the product before competing products were invented ... So the uniform-but-wrong answer was 'acceptably correct'. Now there is competition, but nobody quoted in the media wants to say "Oops, I was wrong for 20 years, and really .....". So the bots don't update themselves.
None of my 'thumbs down' campaigns have resulted in a response. Ideas about how to correct them?