Next time you’re cursing the abysmal luggage handling at Pearson, this analysis of the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 may help put things into perspective. It began with baggage handling staff turning up late for their shift because they were unable to find parking places, and got worse from there: Once into the baggage sortingcontinue reading
March 2008 Archives
A Paler Shade
Christian Lander, Torontonian co-creator of the eerily accurate site Stuff White People Like (check out the full list, including David Sedaris and standing still at concerts, here), reveals the source of his inspiration to the Globe and Mail: I grew up in Riverdale in Toronto, and Riverdale pretty much captures the entire concept of whatcontinue reading
Same eggs, wrong basket?
There’s no question Ontario needs to move on from the auto sector, and we certainly have the people — more CFAs than any city in the world except New York, i.e., far more than are actually required in the world’s 15th largest financial hub. But is a time of great turmoil in the markets andcontinue reading
Fixing Immigration
The next possible trigger for a federal election, buried in Bill C-50, the budget implementation bill, is legislation to amend the Immigration Act. Anyone with half a brain sees the need for changes to our current points-based system, which with agonizingly slow speed selects the cream of the crop from immigration applicants, leading successful immigrantscontinue reading
Alberta skeptics
Another Canadian housing bubble blog, this one more active. Calgary Real Estate Blog is written by a petroleum engineer and promises “quantative” analysis. That typo aside, the blog is clearly written, and features some nifty charts — check out the topic “Predicting Canadian recessions using financial variables”, for example. In other news, it seems I’mcontinue reading
The C-word
In the markets is capitulation. And it’s definitely underway now. Huge investment bank Bear Stearns to be sold to JP Morgan for nothing close to its Friday closing price of $30-ish per share, but for $2 per share. If there’s any reason it’s not just $1 per share, it’s not obvious. The only reason seemscontinue reading
The tyranny of fake politeness
Sunday morning, Museum station. Stairs are under repair. An elderly couple stand on the one escalator, and move sharply over to the right side to allow others to pass on the left. A young woman begins to pass on the left, then hesitates, as she realizes (to her apparent horror) that the fabric of thecontinue reading
The escalators are getting restless. And hungry.
And they like their meat well-aged — Rate Of Escalator Injuries To Older Adults Has Doubled “What really surprised us was the reckless behavior exhibited by some older adults on escalators,” said Dr. Steele, associate professor of epidemiology in the IU School of Medicine’s Department of Public Health. “One emergency department reported a fall bycontinue reading
It was Glaukos who spoke first, dude…
Here’s an entertaining and very weird website, with a whole new take on the Iliad. I ran across it in a review, in New York Magazine, of a book called Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks From the Wild Web, by one Sarah Boxer (review also linked below). http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/44480/ http://underodysseus.blogspot.com/2006_04_09_archive.html
Crunch, then squeeze
It sounds like an unpleasant exercise routine. But instead, it’s this move by some major British lenders, which sets new limits on mortgage borrowing in response to the crunch the banks themselves are facing: Borrowers with little or no equity in their homes face big increases in repayments when their existing deals end after Lloydscontinue reading