Canada Agrees To ‘Sweeten’ The Pot
The CBC reports that Canadian politicians have a deal ready
The federal government and Ontario have reached a deal to offer proportional funds to Canada’s auto industry if a proposed $14-billion US aid package is approved in Washington, Industry Minister Tony Clement said Friday.
Speaking to reporters in Toronto, Clement said the proposed aid to Canada’s ailing auto sector would amount to approximately 20 per cent of the U.S. proposal, or about $3.3 billion Cdn.
So the Conservative government of Canada gets it, while Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee is opposed to helping US manufacturers. Senator Corker had no problem voting to give hundreds of billions to Wall Street with no strings attached so executives could get their million dollar bonuses, but helping auto workers who actually cost about $28/hour is too much to tolerate.
9 comments
WWOSCD?
what would Orson Scott Card do?
To determine that would require knowing his current level and types of medication.
Why anyone listens to and takes directions from novelists is beyond me. What part of “fiction” don’t people understand? I like to think of OSC as the illegitimate child of L Ron Hubbard and Ayn Rand.
It’s especially interesting when people praise what is essentially pedophiliac S&M (e.g. OSC’s original Ender novella and novel, various other of his short stories and other works). The dude has issues in his psychiatric cottage. Not that all of us don’t, but his closet is way big…
LOL Yup! And that goes double for the father of Scientology! all those gullible morons. LMAO All the Big Ron wanted was to get laid, often and with as many protein based lifeforms as possible (he wasn’t terrible fussy in that department). 😉 One only has to read his ‘Mission Earth decology’ to realise what a twisted mind he had.
I can think of several others you can add to the ‘bastards’ (literally) list Bryan. I’m sure he must have sired many. He wasn’t big on *prevention*. 🙂
Religion sure has served him well, as it does for many. 🙂
PS. Sorry for the lack of comments (or perhaps it’s a relief for some;) ), but I’m being inundated by Drop Bears. (Ha! And you thought they were only found in Fourecks Bryan!) *sigh* The week from hell is an apt description. But, this made me smile… so this comment was deserving. 😉 Tankchoo! 😀
I just don’t understand how a rich fantasy life qualifies someone to be an expert on anything other than a rich fantasy life. The same goes for a lot of people who are generally considered geniuses in a particular field. Suddenly people are seriously listening to them in all kinds of other situations.
I like Paul Krugman, and he just won the Nobel in economics, but I wouldn’t accept his advice out of hand for fixing a problem with a toilet or surviving on the tundra. I don’t trust until after I verify.
OSC has a lot of unresolved issues and he is depending on many things other than logic to resolve them. After he gets himself sorted out, maybe he can talk about others.
Been there, Kryten. This time of year generally sucks in the IT world. People want things done before the end of the quarter, but no one feels like working and shipping is all screwed up. Go to the beach and let the sun bake away your troubles for an afternoon.
The beach would be nice. I miss the beach… I used to live a 10 min walk from the water’s edge. 🙂 However, it’s been raining non-stop for two days (which is good) and our new extension flooded (that’s bad) because the roof leaked. I got so annoyed yesterday I went for an hour long walk in the rain (I usually like rain actually. But it was quite windy also, which makes it annoying).
Most of my technical issues happened because everyone decided to release urgent security/bug updates at teh same time! Apache, MySQL, PHP, Python, Perl, Java (JRE) and bloody Windoze! And the Windoze updates rolled my JRE r10 update back to 7 which broke some important scripts! I had to trawl through a couple hundred new Windoze policy changes the M$ update made to get my dev system working properly again! I hate Gates and hope he and all who love him rot in hell for eternity.
I share your views on *knowledgeable people* sticking to what they know, but I am happy to hear their *opinions* (and equally happy to ignore or scoff at them)! IMNSO, you have very few knowledgeable experts driving anything in the USA, you have only self-opinionated gossip merchants. 🙂
Apparently, our Gov recently approved a bailout package for the Automotive industry here, including dealers facing ruin because the credit companies won’t extend them credit to buy new stock. The worst offender is apparently GE Money. What a big surprise… not. They must be one of the biggest finance sharks in the finance ocean. I dunno why we are bailing out the car makers, they are American mostly anyway (Ford, GM & Dodge, and I think Dodge only import). The Jap and Korean ones are apparently OK. *shrug*
I had to screw around with my latest Java updates to get a couple of utilities to work again, but what I’m doing is going to be “localhost” so I don’t have all of the other problems. MS is the most arrogant group of people who have ever been in the industry. They just can’t imagine anyone not wanting to do things their way, which is why they can’t break out into other areas – people don’t want to give up all of their control.
Opinions are fine. Everyone has an opinion, which is nice. It’s when someone with no history of accomplishment in a field expects to have their opinion accepted as fact because they have been successful at something else that sets me off, especially when it comes to politics and economics, although nutrition isn’t far behind.
The only “pundits” that appear in the US media with any regularity are all failures. These are people who have been wrong about everything for years, yet we are all required to listen to them.
As for the Asian car makers, if they work like the Asian hardware companies, they want to make every penny they can and generally they finance their own dealer networks. The dealers will still need loans, but those loans come from banks affiliated with the manufacturers so that the parent conglomerate makes all of the profit available from selling anything.
i miss the beach too. i used to live 10 steps from the waters edge. ok, maybe it was 20 steps.
i’ve mostly done the ‘buy american’ thing with my cars, but my toyota was the best car i ever had. and for my last road trip, when i called up the car rental company and asked them for their smallest car with the best gas mileage, they gave me one of the korean ones, i forget whether i ended up with a kia or a hyundai, but it was an excellent car — climbed all the mountains in west virginia, zipped down the coast, and took me all over philadelphia.
My Mother’s Honda was assembled in Canada, so the nameplate isn’t telling you a lot. The engines for most of Ford’s small cars are either Mexican or Asian in origin.
My US assembled Toyota truck that I bought new in 1987 is still being driven by a neighbor on a 60 mile commute every day, and it still only requires 2 gallons of gas to do that. You can’t buy a small truck like that any more, all of them have been enlarged.
If you want a small car, you have to buy a non-American brand, and if it is sold in the US it has passed all of the safety and emissions requirements, including California’s, so it’s as clean as it gets.