Music

In my book, popular music is in free fall decline. I'm trying not to sound like a grumpy old man but between American Idiots Idol and rap music, the quality just isn't there in general. What happened to basic rock n'roll? Who's the next Springsteen, Eagles, etc.? Commercial radio stinks. Oh, you can still find good music; you just have to look much harder. I personally use sites like amazon.com (look for a CD you like and then find links to similar artists) or satellite radio stations like CBC's Adult Alternative, which is available on Star Choice, channel 915. Most mainstream music played on the radio today is either 10 years old, or karaoke remixes of previous hits. As Stephen Fearing said at a concert I recently attended,"The difference between a Canadian singer songwriter and a medium pizza is that a medium pizza can feed a family of 3". Sad but true.

NFL Labour Unrest

The Profootballtalk website does a much better job of keeping up with all NFL happenings than I can. One of the stories that they cover is the potential labour unrest in the NFL come 2011. What I'm more concerned about is the potential uncapped year in 2010 and what it might mean for my favourt sport.
For those who aren't aware, the NFL has a "hard" salary cap. That means that team can only spend so much on salaries each year. This ensures that you don't have a system like baseball, where a few teams buy up all the top players. Every fan has a resonable dream of his or her team compeeting for the Super Bowl. The current labour deal ends in 2011 and 2010 is scheduled to be an uncapped year. The union has said if things get to that point, no salary cap would be accepted in the future. To me, this has the potential to spoil the goose that laid the golden egg. I really hope cooler heads prevail and they get a new deal worked out before 2010.

The Economy

Dan Brown and I have both blogged previously that people are neither inherently good or evil; they are inherently greedy. Nothing proves this point more than the current bad economic times. Cases in point include:

• GM CEO receiving $23 Million to leave his job
• AIG Employees accepting bonuses, despite the bailout funds and negative publicity
• Automotive employees not understanding that excessive wages are contributing (but not the only cause of) the Big 3 Failings
• Corporations quietly outsourcing jobs to India, China, Brazil and Argentina (amongst others)

There are many more. In the end, we have only ourselves to blame. We all want to retire with lots of savings from RSPs. RSPs are often containers for Mutual Funds. Mutual Funds are basically a bunch of financial "experts" gambling on which stocks will go up & down. How does a stock go up? The compnay makes more proffit than last year or makes a better "widget". The common business practice nowdays seems to be to cut costs to raise profits. Great; but that's done by outsourcing jobs; possibly your job or my job But hey, your RSP went up in value right?
A publically traded company must make more proffit than last year. Just making a proffit isn't good enough in "the shareholders' eyes". Privately held companies don't have to do that. They have only to answer to the owner(s) of the company. As my dad used to say, if you go to the bank, they will guarntee you x% return on your money. None of the mutual fund companies, etc. can guarntee a return. You may not make as much as the statistics show you will with stocks, but you have a guarntee and unlike our friends in the US, our banks are nation-wide and far less likely to go bankrupt.

First Post

This is my first post on this blog. It's my intention to update it regularly with my thoughts and observations on various topics of interest to me. My personal favourite discussion topics include

• NFL football
• Politics
• Music

I'll do my best to update it regularly.