Brokerage Account Statement

I had a big surprise when I checked my monthly brokerage account statement: one page was missing!
I called them and they said knew about the issue, it happened to everyone, they apologized, but they would not issue a corrected statement.
How come this happened? If they did not notice that one full page was missing how can you trust the accuracy of the statement?

Anyway, software bugs do happen, but they should have sent a notification about this issue so I would not have wasted time calling in (and I suppose I was not the only one) and also the employee's time.

Photos

 

Nutrition Facts

I have always wondered how accurate the nutrition facts on food items are.

Vitamin C for 140g of blueberries - % Daily Value
Compliments Organic Wild Blueberries - 4%
Bergen Farms - 10%
Snowcrest - 6%

Compliments and Snowcrest responded to my inquiry on how they determine the nutrition facts (Bergen Farms didn't).

Compliments
For the Compliments Organic Wild Blueberries the Canadian Nutrient File information was used for the nutrition facts table.  The Canadian Nutrient File is a database of nutrition information published by Health Canada for common foods.  We often use this database for single ingredient, agricultural foods such as blueberries.  Lab analysis as you described would also be an acceptable method for determining nutrition fact information and we frequently use this method as well.

Snowcrest 
We can obtain the “Nutritional facts” for blueberries from two sources.

We can send a blueberries samples to the Lab and they issue a certificate with the nutritional facts. However, We found that even the same  sample was  sent to 2 different labs and we will get different results. Some of the vitamins are very heat sensitive and the Lab procedure require heat extraction to get the nutrition data. Some of the vitamins are destroyed during the extraction process. The test is based on one sample.

The most accurate way is to get the nutrients data from the USDA web site. USDA update their web site on a regular basis. The Nutrition facts data from the USDA web site is the average result  of many test samples. Canadian Food Inspection agency does not have similar nutrient data base web site but they recognize the USDA nutrition data web site as accurate.

 

 

Conclusion: What you see is not what you get!

"Cross Canada recall issued for Europe’s Best frozen berries"

This kind of article drew my attention again.

I had the idea of a Consumer Card and decided to send it again to a few agencies.

If nothing is done it means my idea is not as good as I like to think it is :).

http://www.healthycanadians.gc.ca/recall-alert-rappel-avis/index-eng.php

Mezzetta

I liked Mezzetta's Nappa Valley Bistro. It carried a premium price but I didn't mind paying it. "I found the best pasta sauce." I had thought.

And they changed the ingredients, mainly they removed the wine, but they kept the premium price :).

 

Customer Service responded to my inquiry about the change:

Napa Valley Homemade (NVH) is Mezzetta's next generation of our Napa Valley Bistro (NVB) pasta sauce. We evolved this line based on thorough market research and analysis that indicated an overwhelming consumer desire for an all-family product that's clean, simple and natural.

To do so, we updated our label and our ingredients to be just that - clean, simple and natural. Many consumers loved our NVB sauces, but found the wine ingredient polarizing and limiting, so we removed the wine to accommodate their need for an all-family offering.

The truth is you cannot please everyone, but now their pasta sauce tastes the same like the others, and the price is almost double. They lost me as a customer and I do not understand why they could not make both: 'Napa Valley Bistro' without 'evolving' it and the 'Napa Valley Homemade'.

Watch any sports competition

Sky wins bulk of Premier League rights as value slips

LONDON (Reuters) - Rupert Murdoch’s Sky (SKYB.L) will pay 3.58 billion pounds to show 128 Premier League matches for three seasons from 2019/20 in a deal that brings to an end rampant inflation in the value of the domestic rights for English top-flight soccer.

There was speculation that a U.S. internet giant such as Amazon (AMZN.O), Facebook (FB.O) or Netflix (NFLX.O) would enter the fray.

But, unfortunately, they did not. We are in 2018 and it is still not possible to watch all soccer matches (or for that matter all sports competitions) on Internet. And I mean a sports competition anywhere in the world, not limited by your IP (the dreaded message "The broadcast is not available in your country.").

If Steve Jobs had lived perhaps he could have done something about the sports broadcasting rights the same way he did it for music. Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Reed Hastings could follow Steve Jobs' steps or perhaps they tried and it is not possible (not yet at least).

www.wired.com/2010/04/0428itunes-music-store-opens/
“When we first approached the labels, the online music business was a disaster,” Jobs told Steven Levy, author of The Perfect Thing. “Nobody had ever sold a song for 99 cents. Nobody really ever sold a song. And we walked in, and we said, ‘We want to sell songs a la carte. We want to sell albums, too, but we want to sell songs individually.’ They thought that would be the death of the album.”

www.rollingstone.com/music/news/steve-jobs-music-vision-20111007 (my bold)
Downloading music before iTunes wasn't hard, as long as you didn't mind breaking the law. But paying for a song online and storing it legally on a hard drive? All but impossible. Major labels had responded to the digital revolution by filing lawsuits against services like Napster instead of making it easier for members of the public to access music. By April 2002, the fans were starting to get pissed off – and so was Steve Jobs.
So Apple's CEO called the president of AOL Time Warner to complain. The president quickly patched in Paul Vidich, an executive at Warner Music Group, the storied label that acts including Madonna, R.E.M. and Neil Young called home. Vidich listened as Jobs snarled that the labels' digital-music services – clunky, pricey, unpopular options like MusicNet and Pressplay – had gotten it all wrong. Jobs had something better in mind, a new product that would actually get consumers to pay for online music in huge numbers. As he shared the beginnings of an idea that would eventually become the iTunes Music Store, Vidich listened in awe. "That's exactly what we need," Vidich told him.
The vision that Jobs started sketching out that day would soon redefine the future of music. Over the next eight years, Apple went on to sell 300 million iPods and 10 billion tracks via the iTunes Store, leapfrogging Wal-Mart and Best Buy as the world's biggest music retailer. And digital music helped Jobs transform Apple into the world's most powerful technology company after years as the underdog. "It was all intuitive to him," says Vidich. "He had a passion for music, and it was that passion that led him to iTunes."
....
In the months leading up to the iTunes Music Store's April 28th, 2003 debut, Jobs made it a personal priority. Many tech companies had already tried and failed to convince the labels to license their vast catalogs for online use – but none of them had Steve Jobs as their lead negotiator. "He pushed us in ways we needed to be pushed," recalls Roger Faxon, who, as CEO of EMI Group, helped license the Beatles' catalog to iTunes last year. "He sometimes didn't hold the executives in very high esteem, but he always put the creators of music at the pinnacle of the business. That's what he was trying to create – a way for their music to reach consumers."

A website with all the sports competitions does exist in fact. If the competition is broadcast, anywhere in the world, it will be on the website.

I do not know about the legality of the site, but it works (most of the time). However, I would prefer an 'official' website where I would not be afraid of being infected by viruses and malware.

Recycling Bin - Organics Only

I have noticed people put the coffee cups in the organics only bin. There are drawings on the bin depicting food, but they are very small, the photo of the girls drinking coffee is more noticeable, so I suppose most people think the cups should be put in the 'Organics Only' bin. 

I let the administration of the mall know about this and they responded very quickly:

Thank you for letting us know.  Our operations group will look into this.

SoFresh Cold Brew Café Latte

Ingredients

Cold brew coffee (Filtered water, Cold brew coffee extract), Cashew base (Filtered water, Cashews), Cane sugar, Cocoa powder, Calcium Carbonate, Natural flavour, Sea salt, Potassium citrate, Sunflower lecithin, Gellan gum, Locust bean gum, Vitamin a palmitate, Riboflavin, Vitamin d2, Vitamin b12, Zinc gluconate.

It was too sweet for my taste, but 'de gustibus non est disputandum'. Also, I would have preferred a more natural drink with only the ingredients, that I have bolded. 

Customer service replied to my inquiry about the long list of ingredients:

Our plant based beverages are all fortified with vitamins and minerals  to provide the nutrients that you need for healthy bones and optimal health. The gellum and locust bean gum are used to stabilize all the ingredients together.  The other ingredients are used for taste and mouth feel.  

Perhaps I should create my own drink :).

Nutritional Information

per 175ml serving

---

Calories / Calories 45
Fat / Lipides 1 g	2%
Saturated / saturés 0.3 g + Trans / trans 0 g	2%
Polyunsaturated / polyinsaturés 0.1 g
Monounsaturated / monoinsaturés 0.7 g
Cholesterol / Cholestérol 0 mg
Sodium / Sodium 140 mg	6%
Potassium / Potassium 135 mg	4%
Carbohydrate / Glucides 8 g	3%
Fibre / Fibres 0 g	0%
Sugars / Sucres 6 g
Protein / Protéines 0.5 g

Vitamin A / Vitamine A	8%
Vitamin C / Vitamine C	0%
Calcium / Calcium	20%
Iron / Fer	2%
Vitamin D / Vitamine D	30%
Riboflavin / Riboflavine	15%
Vitamin B12 / Vitamine B12	35%
Magnesium / Magnésium	4%
Zinc / Zinc	8%