Excerpt from 1/20/2009

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

More positive statements and ideas in BHO's proclamation.

Harper propping up the big banks without debate in House.

Ottawa is putting more money into the banks on a per capita basis than Washington’s entire giant $700 billion bailout package. In that country, elected politicians got to debate and vote on the deal. In Canada, forget it. Parliament is closed.

...so taxpayers are giving $75,000,000,000 to the banks for a return on investment of half of one per cent, and for the highest-risk mortgages in the land. Last year the banks made a collective profit of $19,500,000,000.

Angry? Read more.

More doom & gloom - Google lays off 100 recruiters.

From the Vice President, People Operations on the company's blog:

We know this change will be very difficult for the people concerned, and we hope that many of them will be able to find new roles at Google. They helped build this company, new hire by new hire, and we are enormously grateful for everything they have done.

Read the ERE post here.

Mercer dissects the coalition attempt.

The truly astounding thing was, in the middle of the whole fiasco, the Dominion Institute did a poll and they found out that a majority of Canadians had no idea what was going on and in fact lacked a basic understanding of our parliamentary system. This is a crisis.

A funny man, Rick Mercer also has his sh@t together and shares some with us here.

Nortel Bankrupt!

And the post-bubble disaster is nearly complete, as Nortel Networks applies for bankruptcy protection.

The company said the process will allow it to deal with its cost and debt burden, restructure its operations and narrow its strategic focus. While Nortel said it has about $2.3 billion in cash, it owes about $4.5 billion US in long-term debt.

Here's the CBC piece.

BearingPoint in the news

Not the desired start to 2009, but the forecast looks like more tough times ahead.
Read the Washington Post piece here.

Business as usual at JJBean

The Christmas card I received from JJBean - thanks guys!

Seems WE are to blame for awful coffee.

James Hoffmann, 2007 World Barista Champion, encourages us to send back poor coffee. The aim is to trigger improvements in bean sourcing/supply, machine selection & maintenance and staff training.
Link here.