The outcome of a fill-up this morning at Spike and Margie's Irving at Boularderie Centre, NS. In my 50 years as a driver, the nominal price of gasoline has increased more than 22-fold. In real terms, after adjusting for the consumer price increase, the price has increased 2.94-fold....
Contrarian readers know I have no affection for the Harper Government. There are, however, occasional advantages to having hard-assed right-wingers in unfettered control. The willingness to do obviously sensible but unpopular things—like getting rid of the penny—is one of them. The penny should have been killed decades ago. Taxpayers lose money on every one we mint. Consumers and storekeepers lose 492 million hours every year handling the all but worthless chips. (Yes, I made that number up, but it can't be far off.) But...
Sometimes the movies understand issues that reporters and editors seem incapable of grasping. Like the entrenched police habit of grossly inflating the value of illicit drugs they seize, values almost always reported as Received Truth. In The Guard, John Michael McDonagh's hilarious comedy about the culture clash between an uptight FBI agent and a small town Irish cop, FBI Agent Wendell Everett, played by Don Cheadle, is briefing members of Ireland's Garda police force about a drug ship carrying $500 million worth of cocaine, when Sgt. Gerry Boyle, his small town Irish counterpart, played with impecable timing by Brendan Gleeson, interrupts. Wendell Everett: That's...
Federal government benefits in the US —chiefly Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, income security, unemployment insurance, and veterans' benefits—accounted for 17.6 percent of personal income in 2009. The New York Times today published another of its fantastic interactive charts, this one showing where federal assistance has gone over the last 40 years: what counties got what percentage of their personal income from which programs in each of those years. This screenshot doesn't do the actual chart justice, so click through to the original. An accompanying story concludes that, while social support programs once went mostly to the poorest Americans, the middle...
Nova Scotia's New Democratic Party is wasting no time making hay in the sunshine of its Bowater bailout with a direct-mail flyer that's sure to infuriate opposition parties. The one-page card, featuring a photo of Premier Darrell Dester and Queens MLA Vicki Conrad, will start appearing in South Shore mailboxes this week. It uses Chronicle-Herald headlines to highlight the Dexter Government's rescue of the financially shaky newsprint mill, contrasting it with a jaundiced appraisal of opposition efforts. The NDP government is protecting 2,000 jobs with an investment in the mill workers and the Bowater Mersey pulp and paper mill in Queens County...
In a rare instance of a local voice taking on Sydney's popular but incessantly negative mayor, a Cape Breton Post editorial criticized two recent tweets by His Worship: It was typical Morgan stuff: ...
The format of a standard business card is so inherently boring, it cries out for creative embellishment. In place of the usual 2x3-inch card, games inventer Will Wright (SimCity) hands out worthless paper currency stamped with his contact information. This bill, which Wright recently gave The Atlantic's technical editor Alexis Madrigal, happens to be from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Fittingly, it features electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla. (That's the blurred-out stamp on the right-hand side.) Why didn't we think of that, dear reader? H/T: Alexis Madrigal...
The Canadian Beaver Band offers a jaundiced musical view of Halifax's spankin' new ship contract [possibly NSW]. H/T: Charlie Phillips...
In a call to CBC-Cape Breton last week, North Shore resident David Papazian spoke a widely held but rarely voiced opinion about the $38 million project to dredge Sydney Harbor in hopes that someone will build container terminal here: The money could be much better spent fostering small business here in Cape Breton which is a much better engine of growth than these sort of mega-projects that require huge amounts of capital at the taxpayers' expense, with a whole lot of expectations and dreams and hopes that — maybe not, but very likely — will become another chapter in the probably fairly...
Air Canada did not respond to Contrarian's invitation to explain its price gouging on the Halifax-Sydney run, where it often costs more to get off in Halifax than to fly on to Toronto or St. John's (original complaint here). However, an Air Canada employee has argued forcefully that Sydney Airport (now called J. A. Douglas McCurdy Airport) "has extremely high fees and rents even for a Canadian Airport." I challenged my correspondent for specifics, and he responded: I called the YQY airport and asked how much it cost to land an airplane. There does not seem to be anything published. [An employee] said it...