Happy Support the Flower Industry’s Gouging Practices Day!

Yes, today you get to pay extra to buy flowers. Why do they charge more today? Because they can.

In any other industry, if you decided to charge more for a commodity based on nothing more than increased demand for an item, especially when you knew it was coming and prepared for it, you’d have government watchdogs all over you like white on rice.

It is astounding to me how easily manipulated we are in this culture to do the same thing as our neighbours. If you gave your wife flowers TOMORROW, they would cost at most half what you paid to give them today. But, at the same, time, if you gave her the flowers tomorrow and explained this to her, she’d likely get really pissed off at you, and accuse you of being cheap.

Let’s be real here: what is special about Valentines Day? Read the rest of this entry »

State of Mind: Mischievous & Disgusted & Aggravated & WTF!?

By now, we have all (or at least those interested) seen the outcry over the government’s attempt to slip a new American-style DMCA-like copyright law into the Canadian law books. I would go into my take and the whole thing but I think I will save it for some time when I finally get my blog page back up and running.

Right now, though, I thought it was amusing to read a quote from a news release from ACTRA (for those of you who don’t know, that is the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists), expressing their “outrage” over the delay of the bill after Minister Jim Prentice found himself deluged with questions and complaints about his new legislation.

The entire article is here. But, the most significant quote which I found amusing was the opening line:

“The government’s about-face decision to abandon the scheduled introduction of new Copyright legislation is a detriment to Canada’s artists, and a hijacking of the policy process by a vocal minority.”

A vocal minority.

That’s what the voters in this country are, according to the “industry”.

The last I checked, ACTRA had 21000 members – and it doesn’t take much searching to find that their membership is far from unanimous in supporting the ACTRA position. Disregarding ANY other people who are concerned about this, we can look at the facebook group “Fair Copyright for Canada” and make a comparison. The group has 25588 members as of this writing.

Taking the facebook group and ACTRA’s membership numbers alone, there are more people in favour of avoiding the USA-DMCA-like billl than supporting it.

So – doesn’t that mean that effectively ACTRA is nothing more than a vocal minority smaller than the very same group they claim is not making a valid claim because they are a minority?
Read the rest of this entry »