who never saw it as amnesty at all.
However, THANK YOU for the link. Very informative for most of the fellow members!!
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General discussion
Exchange rate ripoff
As Canadians, we're getting royally ripped off.
The other day at a Wal-Mart, I picked out a Hallmark card and glanced at the back of it.
The price was $3.99 US or $5.49 in Canadian funds.
How could this be?
At last check, the Canadian dollar was inching ever closer to being at par with the Yankee greenback - a mere six cents shy of that.
While fuming over the unfair price difference, I noticed a Hallmark retail rep was there stocking new cards.
She shook her head apologetically but admitted there wasn't much she could do to ensure Canadian consumers get a better break. "Maybe call Hallmark," she said.
I noted Wal-Mart currently offers 10% off the price of cards - but that still doesn't make up for the fact we should really be paying only about a quarter or so more in Canada for that $3.99 US card, not $1.50 extra.
Back in the day, I worked in "the States" and the exchange was $1 US = $1.33 Cdn.
Some financial gurus are predicting par by the end of the year.
Discussion is locked
61 - 90 of 71 Posts
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Obviously he wants pickers. Do they have to be lawbreakers?
Give us a link; I'm not going to search.
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Dave, I saw that story when it originally ran on the evening news. Wasn't the original claim by the grower that he couldn't get workers at $20 an hour? When you first used this grower as an example, I brought that up and the problems that I had with that claim. Why did $20 per hour become "well over $10?
Did you catch the story a couple of days ago on NBC's evening newscast when someone claimed that illegals were taking union jobs? I found that one funny, considering the "they're taking jobs that nobody wants" line that the same group constantly used in the past. I realize that they are seeking union support, but no wonder that I haven't seen that new line again.
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The figure that stuck in my head was $12/hr, but he may have said later that he tried 20 and I missed it. The article is unfortunately not a direct transcript of the TV piece, and in fact is considerably shorter.
-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email semods4@yahoo.com
The opinions expressed above are my own,
and do not necessarily reflect those of CNET!
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Thought, Dave... I have grown both potatoes and onions on my little farm in the past. In a sense, they are both similar in the harvest, they both grow underground. I have seen machines that harvest potatoes on big farms. My thought is: how long will it be before someone designs a machine to harvest onions, cutting out the vast majority of harvest labor required. A lot of things used to be harvested by hand but now machines have taken over. I guess it may just be a matter of the manual labor harvesting cost getting to the price point that it is more economical to design and use a machine.
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Have you looked at the price of a paperback book lately? (Even the "Blood Rites" series, now an excellent Lifetime TV series, whose author (Tanya Huff) is Canadian; both the books and show are set in Vancouver.
-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email semods4@yahoo.com
The opinions expressed above are my own,
and do not necessarily reflect those of CNET!
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Do you know something we don't know, or do all Canadians look alike?
Paperback books are addressed in the article. Too bad the writer made no effort to understand the economics behind the "problem".
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The cards and books were printed 2-3 years ago, when the Candian dollar was in the .75 to the US$ area. We're taking a vacation in the Canadian Rockies this year, and the quoted exchange rate by the travel agent was .935! So the printed $Cdn prices are about 25% too high for today's valuations.
Any question why I'm working through my State legislator to open up a precious metals investment option in our 403b plan? Apparently someone in the UT Systems office thinks buying PM stocks to hedge against a plung dollar is unpatriotic. The dollar will plunge no matter what gold does -- gold (which is priced in US$) is rising over time (non "gold-bug" brokers are predicting $750 over the next 12 months, and perhaps double that by 2010). Now think about the fact that oil is also priced in US$, and that we import now almost everything except food and housing from abroad, and imagine what's going to happen to the purchasing power of the US$.
Meanwhile, a PM fund amplifies the PM price increase. Why? Let's make it simple. Let's say gold drops in the next week to $650, then rises to $750 as some brokers predict. That's about a 15% increase in the price of gold per ounce. Now let's take a hypotheticalgold miner whose production and distribution costs total $450 per ounce. What happens to their profit? It goes from $200 per ounce to $300 per ounce, a 33% increase, slightly more than double the increase in the metal itself! (Of course, the converse is true on the way down -- when gold was briefly $800 per ounce in the early 80's, some stocks that are in the 40's-50's today were three times higher than that.
-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email semods4@yahoo.com
The opinions expressed above are my own,
and do not necessarily reflect those of CNET!
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Doesn't seem likely.
At the books and magazines section, the news was just as bad. A copy of GQ had a cover price of $3.99 US and $4.99 Canadian. Golf Magazine was going for $3.99 U.S. and $5.50 Canadian.
Canadians read magazines that wq-are three years out of date? I think there's more to it than that.
Could it be more costly for distributors to get goods to Canadian markets for whatever reason, regardless of exchange rate fluctuations? Isn't it the article writer's responsibility to find out the reasons for the "problem" he's writing about?
Not so simple, eh?
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