Pace the Globe and Mail’s John Partridge, a lovely man, a lede like this always makes me question whatever follows: You should probably ignore all the headlines you have seen shrieking about the vast amount of cross-border shopping — physical and online — triggered by the soaring Canadian dollar. Really? Why? Because Stats Can sayscontinue reading
Streetcars, redux
The Queen’s Quay East streetcar plan, discussed earlier is taking shape, at least the north-south link toward Queen’s Quay (link; link). Hopefully it’s completed fairly promptly (I know, I know) – the Cherry St. streetcar loop by itself is just silly. I assume, though this isn’t directly stated, that this will be a version ofcontinue reading
RSS, Mr. Bean!
Environment Canada hurtles rashly into the 21st century:
Watching ducks walk
A story in the Globe today reports on a study of how consumers make decisions about what to buy. The study posits that consumers choose products they identify with — the “in” group — and shun ones in the “out” group. In one experiment, the group of Canadian: study subjects used and graded identical penscontinue reading
Chanukah Sameach!
… from the folks at New York’s Balducci’s.
Ah yes, Canada’s huge movie piracy problem…
Five months after the law came into effect, after “weeks of private investigation,” Canada has arrested exactly one person for videotaping a movie in a theatre. One arrest. One. If the cinema owner in that story is correct that it’s put a major dent in the level of piracy in Montreal, and the movie distributors’continue reading
For all your bludgeoning needs
From CBS Marketwatch: World of Warcraft Visa. This comes from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft and gives cardholders points toward free game time. For every 1,500 points earned, the cardholders gets one free month of play time.
The mean streets of Halton region
Police shoot man in Oakville park at two-thirty in the morning, Oakviller expresses disbelief that real life takes place in her Legoland-like hometown: The woman, who asked not to be named, said she usually takes her 2-and 3-year-old boys for walks in that forest. She said her family moved to the neighbourhood because it wascontinue reading
Separated, but living in the same house
Oh, I do love a good theory. Especially when it’s clearly spelled out in a way that makes it easy to poke holes in. So thanks to BMO Nesbitt Burns’ Doug Porter for his irresistible musings on decoupling: Despite the tight linkages, there are four reasons to believe domestic growth will fare better than thecontinue reading
What a coincidence!
From Saturday’s Financial Post: It was one of those rare coincidences which cause the view to completely change. The same week in early November that the loonie hit a record high of US$1.10, Canada reported a record quarterly drop in its trade surplus — it fell by more than a third to $10.7-billion in thecontinue reading