DIARY
My ‘hard times’ are not their
‘hard times’
by
Robert LaFrance
I have no idea why I was reading the
business section of the March 25 edition of my daily paper – I have no money -
but when I got to page D3 and read “American Express faces hard times”, I was
concerned.
It’s serious when a big company like
that goes through ‘hard times’.
The company’s share prices had
dropped twelve percent which was bad news – for the actual workers. When
share prices drop, the folks in middle management leap into action and lay off
everyone below them.
Cleaning out the crowd responsible for the drop in stock price never seems to occur to anyone, so the ones who actually do the work lose their jobs.
In this case it was four thousand persons, most with families I am sure.
Then came the real disaster. In the
next paragraph I read that analysts have cut their forecasts of 2015 profits
from $6.2 billion to $5.6 billion. No wonder they’re saying ‘hard
times’ are here. Boy, would I love to experience those hard times.
Let’s face it; hard times are here to stay. Only
last week I heard about a guy who bought a truck supposedly worth $55,000 and then lost his
job. He got another job, but it only paid $41,000 a year. He is now reduced to
watching black-and-white television to pay for that truck, his $25,000
snowmobile, rent ($650 a month), insurance ($200+ a month), and his iPhone, and iPad. Plus, let's not forget iFood.
Although the official inflation rate has been no
higher than 3% a year since 1995, I suspect the actual (not lying) rate is more
like 8.5%. I paid $10,300 for a one and a half storey house in 1980 and today
that same house is officially valued at $112,000. If inflation were truly 3% a year, its
actual book value would be $28,983.
And
don’t forget, it’s now a depressed housing market.
Another example of the brutal existence we suffer is
what news reporters referred to as ‘the NB election night fiasco’ of 2014.
Could it be that we have lost our perspective(s) and possibly our minds?
In the March 4 edition of my daily newspaper was the
announcement that although the tabulating machines worked well, the software
didn’t (the operation was a success but the patient died), so they scrapped the
software and ruined the reputations of many computer programmers.
Let’s remember that the delay was only a few hours,
five in a couple of cases, and all the recounts (hardly the fault of the
computers) confirmed what had been reported. Are we so spoiled that a
few hours make that much difference?
*************************
Someone living in the city of Saint John has put up
a website where people can vote on what is the worst street in the
municipality. He should come to Victoria County.
Earlier today I drove (limped) across Tobique
Narrows dam and thought that short road – not counting the new parts – held the
worst potholes in the area. But wait!
I then drove to New Street, at Tobique First Nation,
and saw that it would put up quite a fight for the title of Worst Street or
Road. If that were located in Saint John, that
guy would simply close down his website because it would be no contest.
Those two locations I mentioned – the dam(n) roadway
and New Street – are so bad that whoever is in charge of roads in this county
should be brought there duct-taped to the back of a 1974 GMC pickup with bad
springs, and then driven back and forth for half an hour. He, she or it would
soon decide that perhaps D.O.T. (I refuse to call it DTI – they’re just hiding)
should send out a dozen trucks to work there a week or so.
There’s no reason, given normal government waste,
that human beings should have to travel on such roads. I know of potholes,
there and on other roads such as Highway 105, that have been there since last
summer without any effort being made to repair them.
Enough for now on that infuriating subject.
*************************
Speaking of infuriating, the trial of the surviving
Boston Marathon bomber brother is still going on today, with the defendant’s
position being: “The devil made me do it”.
I am not exactly a capital punishment nut, but I
have been wondering how a chap, being
filmed all the while, can set down a bomb on the sidewalk, and minutes later
the bomb kills many innocent people, and expect anything but the death penalty.
If there weren't such a thing as the death penalty for a federal crime, that would be that, but there is.
His defence isn’t really that the Devil made him do
it; it was his brother, killed shortly after the bombing, who forced him to blew
up those kids. Hey listen, I know what he means. When I was a teenager and my
big brother Lawrence would have told me to jump off the barn, I
wouldn’t have had a choice.
-end-
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