Only serious stuff from now on (Lying) (Nov. 6)

A new leaf - only important stuff now 

                                                            by Robert LaFrance 

            I have resolved that, from now on, I shall only write about important stuff in this column. No more frivolous paragraphs and attempted humour. From now on I will only deal with serious topics.

            Inflation for example. This is a subject we are all interested in and should be dealt with in a serious manner, and part of that topic is the Bank of Canada and its interest rate.

            As far as inflation goes, it’s all rather silly anyway, isn’t it? We go to the grocery store one week and a big bag of dog food is $8.99 and the next week it’s $13.99. Bacon is $5.49 a pound, up from $3.00 or so a year ago. And so it goes. Turn on the financial news and someone in a suit is telling me that the annual inflation rate is only 1.1%. Really?

            The price of everything I see or touch – bacon, gasoline, tuition, vehicles - rises a lot faster than that, so where do they get their figures? I can picture some men with ties and women with severe suits all in a small room in Ottawa and saying: “What shall we say the inflation rate is this month? George? Alice?” George says 1.4% and Alice says 1.1%. They flip a coin. Alice wins. Meanwhile, from the back corner, is a little voice that says: “But my rent went up twenty percent since Tuesday!” He is ignored.

            The Bank of Canada’s ‘benchmark’ (whatever that might mean in the real world) interest rate continues at the same place it has been – low – to avoid that inflation. Just last week the Bank’s Governor, Stephen S. Poloz, said they might lower it even more. I have almost a hundred dollars in a savings account, so I’m going to lose big. What if they placed the central interest rate (that the Bank of Canada charges chartered banks) at minus 2 percent? Then the banks could just take our money until we don’t have any more.

            Wait a minute. They already do that.

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            Continuing to be serious about things, I refer you to some television commercials you recently saw. On that commercial was a brand new medicine to cure an illness you never knew existed. If you tend to get nervous when skydiving, there’s a pill for that. The disease, by the way, isn’t common fear of death, but it could be called Vertical Apprehension Syndrome. You just take their little pill called Agamemnon-FX and you don’t feel a bit nervous, or conscious

            What I am saying of course – in a very serious way because, remember my resolution – is that drug companies manufacture illnesses where none existed before and then come up with a drug to cure it. Hitchhiker’s thumb? Could that be a disease? Okay, drug companies, I have come up with the name of the disease; now all you have to do is come up with a drug that cures HT whose symptoms are fatigue, a tendency to swear, and a general cynicism about people who drive on highways.

            New subject: Are we finding that we are continually having to settle for second best in the products we buy? Just yesterday a guy in a suit told me (he was in Toronto so it must be true) that the Blackberry device, which from all accounts is a wonderful social tool, may soon be gone, buried under the many other companies’ products that don’t work anywhere near as well.

            It all comes down to advertising. If Company A has a better product than company B, but Company B’s advertising is far better (more money spent), then people will choose Company B. Back in the 1980s companies had to make a choice whether they wanted to sell the videocassette recorders called Beta or the ones called VHS. Someone in Japan decided that, for marketing reasons, the standard would be VHS. So Panasonic, Toshiba, etc. all switched to VHS and soon Beta didn’t exist. Ask somebody who has used both which one was better and they will almost always say Beta.

            The very machine I am typing this serious column on is using a Microsoft Windows operating system. Also back in the 1980s and the 1990s, Macintosh operating systems were left in the dust by Microsoft because of the latter’s fantastic salesmanship. However, Microsoft systems were far more prone to viruses and still are, and Macintosh machines were much easier to use in some areas. The reason we (almost) all have PCs and not Mac computers? Advertising, but there may be justice in this case; Apple products have finally pushed aside Microsoft ones and they’re making billions.

 

            Okay, I have tried being serious, but I’m going to have to return to being silly, as in next week. Sorry about that.
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