Samsung Galaxy Tab | Photo: GlobeandMail.com
Samsung is coming out with its new tablet called Galaxy Tab, which runs on the Android operating system. Some sources say the device could cost as much as $1,200, which would make it much more expensive than even the top-grade iPad model (64GB, 3G + Wi-Fi).
This strikes me as somewhat odd, because the Galaxy has a much smaller screen than the iPad and won’t be able to give people what they really want – Apple apps. I don’t doubt that there is a huge market for tablet computers in the near future, and the market can easily absorb several brands and models. But only Apple has the content that people are interested in. A recent poll in Europe found that most people buy the iPad to read newspapers. Reading e-books or tweeting, for example, are much further down the list.
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The world was recently treated to images from China, where workers for contract manufacturers of mostly Western companies formed their own ad-hoc unions and rose up in protest at their working conditions. Even more impressive was the fact that many of them actually won concessions from their employers, and this trend has already begun to reach out to other popular outsourcing countries like Bangladesh. In fact, companies in the West are becoming increasingly worried that this avenue to cheap labour will soon be closed off to them.
In the case of China and other cheap manufacturing countries in South-East Asia, one can see the need for workers to have a strong and united voice. The same was once true of countries in the West too, as anyone who has ever read Charles Dickens and his depictions of working conditions in England knows. But while workers in many countries around the world need labour unions more than ever, in the West unions have ceased to be a force of good and are now clearly to be assigned to the category of “evil”.
The main reason why the American automakers got into trouble in the first place was the excessive burden resting on their balance sheets from outrageous and unrealistic concessions that had been made to labour unions over the years. Autoworkers, in particular, enjoyed benefits hardly seen anywhere else in private industry, and as is true of any outlandish pay arrangements, those fat and generous pay and benefit packages could last only so long before they would break the backs of those paying for them.
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Capos. Cosa Nostra. Omertà. Pizzo. Compare. Just some of the things the Italian Mafia is known for, but Québec society, business and politics as well as labour unions seem to share in some of that Italian “tradition”.
Unfortunately, it is no exaggeration at all to make that Italian connection, because the Italian mafia is heavily involved in what goes on in Montréal, for example. The construction industry is controlled by organized crime, including biker gangs, with unions acting as intermediaries, with the difference between the mafia and unions being extremely thin these days, as both employ the same tactics. The only discernible difference between the mafia and labour unions is that, while the former cares more about raking in cash, unions spend more time flapping their gums about political issues that are far outside their bailiwick, such as their obsession with Israel, which has amounted to nothing less than outright anti-Semitism. Contracts awarded by the city of Montréal went to shady companies, and it is only thanks to the tight-knit nature of the relationship between politics and organized crime that city officials all the way up to the mayor have not been charged with corruption or worse. Not yet, but here’s hoping.
Jean Charest, "da Boss of all da Bosses"
The sordid nature of doing business or politics in Québec is not limited to cities like Montréal, though, but also reaches well into the provincial government and the federal Liberal Party, which has always been more of a Québec-centric party than a national one. However, at that level the main actors are not directly involved with organized crime (one assumes), but they have certainly made the mafia lifestyle and tactics their own. This also helps to explain why Canadians have seen especially high levels of government corruption whenever the Liberals were in power.
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This site has seen a steady increase in readers who access the content via the iPad. For those who read this site from their iPads, here’s some good news: There is now a separate “iPad Edition”.
No, it’s not an app (yet) that you can download from Apple’s app store, but you can still get the feel and functionality of a true app.
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Raising or introducing new taxes is almost always political suicide, as the recent examples in British Columbia and Ontario demonstrate following the introduction of the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST). But there are also plenty of examples that teach valuable lessons about what can happen when voters and their elected representatives decide to forgo necessary taxation: California is virtually bankrupt and can no longer afford to provide vital services, and in Colorado Springs people are now left without bus service and street lighting.
In Canada, Alberta has prided itself on not having a provincial sales tax. The people and previous and present governments have considered it unnecessary, relying instead on revenue streams from a 10-percent flat tax on personal income and royalties from the oil and gas sector. This setup may be great when things are going well, such as during boom times, but it can also prove a handicap when the economy doesn’t perform as well as it should.
Alberta is Canada’s success story, the goose that lays golden (or oily) eggs, but the province’s dependence on commodities makes its economic fortunes extremely volatile. In the wake of major discoveries of and the industry’s shift to cheaper shale gas, prices for natural gas have been less than optimal. Alberta’s treasury feels the pinch like no other. Every drop in gas prices by as little as a penny can cost Alberta several hundred million dollars in revenue. It’s the same story with oil.
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Health Resource Centre (HRC) is a privately-operated clinic specializing in knee and hip replacements. The clinic was on a retainer with the provincial government to provide private, yet publicly-funded, services to Albertans in order to reduce excessive wait times in this field.
But now HRC is in receivership, and the government washes its hands of it. As Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith explains, HRC was told by the government that it needed to increase its capacity to handle 3,500 surgeries a year, instead of 1,000. So HRC went out and leased an expensive facility. But then the work never came, HRC was unable to pay the rent and is now facing financial ruin.
Let me say, first of all, that I am a supporter of public health care. No one should ever be forced into the poorhouse because of an illness or accident. I only wish that our federal and provincial governments finally cleaned up their acts and looked towards successful models of public health care, such as in most of Western Europe, instead of comparing our system to the American one.
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Posted in Alberta, Alberta Tories, Health Care, Politics, Wildrose Alliance
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Tagged Alberta, Alberta Tories, Danielle Smith, Ed Stelmach, Health care, Health Resource Centre, HRC, Wildrose Alliance
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When people’s hearts start to bleed, their brains usually switch off and go into hibernation. This is what happened to freelance writer Jeremy Klaszus when he wrote his contribution for the Calgary Herald.
In it he writes:
In April, Arizona passed a law cracking down on undocumented migrants, making it a crime for them to be in the state at all — regardless of whether they’re involved in criminal activity.
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It’s the age-old question: How can we live longer? For as long as humankind has been around, we have tried to find ways to prolong our life spans. Ideally, we hope, there will be some special remedy or drug that will allow us to live forever. But with longer life expectancy comes the issue of mental health. More and more people do live to see past 80, 90 and 100, but most of them don’t really get to enjoy the extra years much, because their brains shut down long before.
For someone like me, who’s barely made it across the supposedly dreadful 40-year mark, the prospect of being 80 or 90 and dealing with old-age problems like dementia is still ways off. Throughout my life, though, I have watched people get on in years, and some of them did lose the ability to function as “normal” people. My grandmother on my father’s side, for example, was around 70 when she was struck down by dementia. In her case, the condition progressed with lightning speed, and if memory serves, it was within three to four months that she had gone from “all there” to having her “hard drive” wiped clean completely. She spent another ten years in a care facility before her body, too, finally died.
As my mother would say, my grandmother had never really challenged herself. Especially after losing her husband to cancer, she’d spent her days reading celebrities magazines and watching TV and generally being listless. That’s all she’d ever do. She’d let herself go, one could say.
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Rob Ford, who is running for mayor in Toronto, is in trouble. His opponents are calling him names and telling him to withdraw from the race. Why?
Here’s why:
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Disgraced and former British MP George Galloway, like all radical lefties, must really have a lot of hatred for Jews and the entire Western world. How else could you explain his constant dealings with known terrorist organizations, his repeated giving money to such organizations in full violation of international laws? And to top it all off, he’s now become toady-in-chief to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In the “interview” for Iranian TV station Press TV, Galloway did pretty much everything short of kissing Ahmadinejad’s naked butt on live TV. One could almost sense a desire in Galloway to egg on the President to push that red button that would send nuclear missiles raining down on Israel, wiping out the entire “Netanyahu gang”.
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