The plummeting U.S. dollar, which is causing almost every other currency in the world to post record gains in comparison, has finally raised our collective penis size our dollar value past the $1.06 mark, hitting a 130-year high. Essentially our dollar has the highest value compared to our neighbours than it’s ever had in modern history.
Which just gives me yet another excuse to post this graphic:
I just don’t get tired of it.
TQS, the least-favourite of Quebec’s three french-language TV networks, is cutting 40 jobs across the province to get costs under control. With about 600 employees, that represents about 7% of their workforce.
It’s the same old story: Mainstream media, stocked up on vice-presidents and lots of overhead for journalistic operations, respond to their escalating costs by cutting journalists. The quality drops significantly, people tune out, and the spiral continues.
In TQS’s case, the network was losing quite a bit of money (CP says $1.5 million loss on media operations, which also include Rhythme FM radio stations), and now its owner Cogeco (which is swimming in profits from cable operations, by the way) is trying to figure out what to do with the network by getting CIBC to do a “strategic review”
CTV News (CTVglobemedia owns 40% of TQS, Cogeco owns the other 60%) has speculated that “a decision could be made to sell TQS”.
Anyone want to buy?
On Friday, Krispy Kreme closed its only location in Montreal, at Marché Central, giving its 50 employees only a few days’ notice that they would be losing their jobs.
While some herald the closing as a victory for healthy eating, and others are pointing out that it’s part of a larger restructuring, I think there’s a simpler explanation for the location’s failure:
It was built in the most pedestrial-unfriendly location for a store on the Island of Montreal.
Marché Central is one of the last great car malls in the centre of the city. Just above the Acadie Circle, the mall is barely accessible by public transit, has streets with no sidewalks, traffic lights with no provisions for pedestrians, and huge parking lots separating its buildings.
While this style works for Loblaws, Wal-Mart and Réno Dépôt, fresh Krispy Kreme is something that would appeal more to walk-in traffic downtown than a semi-suburban strip mall.
Open a location downtown, or at somewhere people walk a lot, and those donuts will sell like … hotcakes.
Those of you who want your fix can find Krispy Kreme locations at Carrefour Laval and on Auguste Ave. in Greenfield Park.
Just when you thought concentration of media ownership wasn’t such a bad thing, CTVglobemediaempire is asking the CRTC for the power to threaten to pull its cable channels off the air as a negotiating tactic with cable and satellite providers. This includes channels like Bravo!, the Comedy Network, CTV NewsNet, Discovery, MuchMusic (and the entire Much family), Space and TSN/RDS.
Aside from the outrageousness of punishing viewers as a negotiating tactic (as well as the legal ramifications of not giving us something we’ve paid for), most of these channels are licensed in a way that prohibits direct competition from other specialty channels.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If CTV wants to treat these channels like they’re private property to do with as it pleases, then the CRTC should allow free competition from other services.
I was going through my junk mail folder and I came across an email from CIBC whose subject line is in French. French-language spam is pretty rare, so I tend to give it a second look.
Turns out it’s a legitimate CIBC email (they have a copy of it on their website) having something to do with their VISA card.
And just like the Chapters email I got last month (their email provider promised to get back to me “ASAP” but I never heard from them again), it’s something I never asked for, sent to an address that gets just about nothing but spam, from a company I’ve never done business with in my entire life. Neither I nor anyone in my family does banking with CIBC, and I have no idea how they would have my email address.
Like I did with Chapters, I checked their unsubscribe process. The link sends me to this web page which asks for, among other things, my name, phone number and last four digits of my CIBC VISA credit card. All fields are, of course, required.
There’s a few problems with this:
Considering that this message seems to clearly violate CIBC’s own anti-phishing policy, as well as being outright spam, I’ve sent them an email asking for an explanation. I’ll update this post if they provide one.
I’ve copied the email to Komunik, makers of Konversation, the CIBC’s email marketing provider, demanding to know how they don’t consider this spam.
A protest by members of Mouvement Montréal Français yesterday has prompted Second Cup (in one of the shortest press releases I’ve seen in quite a while) to announce offhandedly mention that it will review its policy concerning its signs.
The tiff was caused when the coffee giant decided it would remove “Les Cafés” from its coffee shop’s signs and just become “Second Cup”. They can do this, despite Bill 101, because Second Cup is a registered trademarked, like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Future Shop.
MMF wasn’t happy with this. So they protested. No firebombing or anything like that, but they held signs and asked people to take their patronage elsewhere (Starbucks? Java U? Tim Horton’s? Dunkin Donuts?)
Good for them.
I’m no fan of Bill 101, and I oppose government over-regulation of commercial signs. But this isn’t government regulation, it’s regular citizens expressing their right to free expression in attempting to get a company to change its ways. Second Cup’s signs should be French not because the government forces it on them, but because it’s respecting the population to speak to them in their language. Imagine having English-only signs in China, or Spanish-only signs in the U.S. It’s understandable for a mom-and-pop operation or a store in an ethnic village, but for a major company it’s a slap in the face to French-speaking Quebecers.
Second Cup’s move was just plain stupid. It’s not like nobody recognizes “Second Cup” when it’s “Les Cafés Second Cup”. Instead, this smacks of a decision made by a clueless manager who has far too much free time on his hands and doesn’t know anything about Quebec politics.
Hopefully they’ll come to their senses and leave “Les Cafés Second Cup” alone.
Hey, remember last week when the city, receiving complaints from businesses along St. Laurent Blvd. that construction was running them out of business, refused to consider tax breaks because they couldn’t legally offer them on the basis of geography? (“If we give one, we will have to give one to everybody.”)
This week, the City of Montreal has announced a $60-million new “business subsidy” program, called réussir@Montréal, which would offer tax breaks for companies who expand or renovate (allowing them to not pay taxes on the increase in property value for a few years).
Here’s where it gets interesting:
The remaining $12 million of the funds would be available to merchant associations on some commercial streets the city wants to revitalize. The money would go to facade renovations and for the association to prepare a business plan.
St. Laurent Blvd. is one of the streets that would be eligible, executive committee member Alan DeSousa said. Other streets include Fleury St. in Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough and Monkland Ave. in Cote des Neiges-Notre Dame de Grace.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that sound like a geographically-targetted tax break?
First announced over two years ago, construction is beginning on the Lac Mirabel Mega Mall. Twice as large as the West Edmonton Mall, the business plan is simple: Spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a larger version of something that already exists in Montreal, but make it bigger so people will want to travel 40 minutes by car to get there instead. Expect that the sheer bigness of the project will turn it into a tourist destination and kick-start the economy of the entire region which will only get bigger with all the urban sprawl.
In Mirabel. Where no one has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a giant development project only to see it fail.
Well, at least this project is being funded privately by businesses instead of by the government. And it looks like many businesses have already signed up. We’ll see if the project lives up to the hype after it opens in 2009.
You know, I thought our government had some common sense when it came to copyright and intellectual property laws.
BoingBoing and BlogTO point to a complaint from the City of Toronto’s One Cent Now campaign for getting one cent out of the six-cent-per-dollar GST to be given to cities. Apparently the Royal Canadian Mint considers the design of the penny and the words “one cent” to be its property and is charging the campaign over $47,000 for the right to use them on its website.
Because the Mint is a crown corporation and not government directly, it can own intellectual property and charge for its use, even when that property is literally in the hands and pockets of millions of people.
In the U.S. and other countries, they don’t have this problem. Unless an image on a coin was licensed from an artist (say, it was a portrait of Elvis or something), it’s considered public domain and people can use them as they wish (so long as they’re not counterfeiting).
Even if the Mint is right in asserting its control over the image on the penny (and I don’t think it should), its request is ridiculous. No one will mistake the One Cent Now site for that of the Canadian Mint, and they’re not selling T-shirts with the penny on them. It’s political speech, and they’re justified in calling this a slap in the face.
UPDATE (Oct. 9): Datalibre.ca makes the case that even if the image of the penny was subject to copyright, it expired years ago.
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments of a post at the Instigator Blog (or as I like to call it, Yoskoblog) about a new website called Social Rank which is launching dozens and eventually hundreds of niche blog aggregator websites.
It struck a nerve for me because I’m noticing a lot of automatically-generated “blogs” pinging my posts and upping my Technorati rating. These blogs work by searching the blogosphere for keywords, scraping a quote, adding a link and sending a pingback. The posts are all of the same structure:
[Name (sometimes a random name or literal “unknown”)] wrote an interesting post today about [Title of blog post]. Here’s a quick excerpt: [excerpt from post].
I’m not sure if the business model is to get traffic through pingbacks or if they’re part of some larger splog scheme, but needless to say the pages are filled with Google ads.
I commented that people are going to be turned off by Social Rank’s websites if only because of their similarity to the autoblogs. People want aggregated content, but evaluated in some way by real people (think Fark or Digg).
A couple of bloggers also got pretty pissed because Social Rank was sending them pingbacks, which the website quickly stopped and apologized for.
The other concern is that if these websites become popular, spammers will begin to figure out ways to game the system. I imagine it’ll probably happen accidentally, a side-effect of traditional splogging methods. But once they figure it out, expect it to be exploited.
Ben made an interesting point to my main argument: Is Techmeme a splog? It’s automatically generated, with excerpts from other blogs. It has ads and is trying to make money. But it feels different somehow. It’s like Google News for blogs.
Is there a difference? Is Techmeme bad? Is Social Rank good? What is the real difference between a junk splog and a good automatic aggregation website?
For the first time in 30 years, the Canadian dollar closed above the U.S. dollar in trading today.
Yeah, that’s more about the U.S. dollar being in freefall, but it gives me an excuse to re-post my graphic:
For the weekend at least, Canadians can cross the border into the U.S. and demand “real money” instead of their silly green-coloured paper.
A Globe story about the dollar’s surge curiously linked to a Stephen Colbert video ranting about the dollar. I wanted to watch it, but the Globe’s video player “cannot be played on a Macintosh.” What is this, 1998?
For those interested, Comedy Central has the video (legally) online.
I just received this spam email from Chapters/Indigo:
At first I thought it might be a phishing exercise, since I’ve never received such an email before, I haven’t shopped at Chapters/Indigo in ages and I certainly never gave them an email address I haven’t used in about as long. But there was no “your account will be deleted within 24 hours” warning nor any request to log in. A few quick clicks confirmed that the email did in fact come from the organization.
I might be able to forgive a small-time local outfit who sent out a quick ad for itself to people in the CEO’s address book unfamiliar with netiquette… 10 years ago. This is just inexcusable. I did absolutely nothing to request this email. My best guess is that they dredged up their archives from years ago and just harvested the email addresses assuming no one would complain.
The unsubscribe process adds insult to insult. You’re asked to “sign in” using a password that you don’t know because you never signed up with them. You then go to the “forgot your password page” and input your email address. Then you click “submit” and … nothing happens. No confirmation page. No email with your password. You’re stuck on this list forever.
I have sent Chapters/Indigo an email demanding an explanation. I have also contacted Toronto-based ThinData, as the email was sent through their servers. I will update this post if one is given from either company.
UPDATE (9:30pm, 4 hours later): I’ve received an email from a VP at ThinData asking me for a copy of the email I received (do they not keep copies of the mass commercial emails they send out?). The email, naturally, came not after I emailed them as an irate web user but after they discovered this blog post. He promises to look into the matter “ASAP”.
After road work is done on Decarie Blvd. in Saint-Laurent, the borough is planning to start enforcing its by-laws on commercial signage. The law is pretty sensible, with a moderate restriction, a three-year grace period, and even some help funding new signs. That, plus the consultation and negotiation it went through with local business owners prior to enforcement makes it pretty ideal.
But the law has one additional restriction: No signs, posters or neon lights in windows. For most stores this is preferable to give it a more classy look, but what about dépanneurs?
Dépanneur window signage has gotten so ubiquitous in Quebec that the easiest way to spot them tends to be a hand-made sign in the window saying how cheap a case of Molson Dry beer is. (The linked article contains one such example.)
Can the Saint-Laurent borough really bring class to its corner stores? And what will that make them look like?
I’ve always found it odd that Canadian wireless consumers are forced to pay a “system access fee” of about $7 every month on top of their rate plan. It sounds like something that should just be included in the plan itself. I mean, would you accept it if Wal-Mart imposed a mandatory cashier’s fee, or if the public transit authorities started charging you a monthly fee for accessing their network?
Virgin Mobile is one of the few companies not to charge this fee. Their service is more expensive, but at least it’s honest, and it doesn’t force you into 3-year contracts.
Well it seems the dishonesty of telling someone a plan is worth $20 a month when it’s actually $30 plus tax has hit a nerve. Hou-Hou points us to a story about a Regina lawyer whose lawsuit has just gained class-action status.
It’s potentially the largest class-action in Canadian history, and it goes after the three cellphone giants at once, who will no doubt throw about a quadrillion lawyers on the case.
So … good luck with that.
Oh how I’ve waited for this day:
Yeah, the dollar closed at 99.87 cents, but that momentary 0.04% advantage we had is enough, and it will come again.
And yes, a high-valued dollar is bad for our export industry and it doesn’t encourage people to come shop here, but who needs a manufacturing industry when you can have a little national pride?