Extra Credits
Published on 17 Dec 2018Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon
Krampus’s name is growing popular in the United States, but most of us don’t really know what he does OR that he is partners with St. Nicholas himself. He is in fact just one of many Christmas demons…
December 19, 2018
Krampus – Christmas Demon – Extra Mythology
Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
HMCS Haida – Guide 027 (Special)
Drachinifel
Published on 13 Aug 2017The most successful Canadian warship, HMCS Haida, is the subject of today’s video
The robotic narration on this video is painfully irritating!
Update, 14 February 2021: Drachinifel updated the narration at some point after I posted the original.
QotD: Maple-flavoured corporate welfare
There’s that word: “investments.” That’s what Canadians — Ontarians and Quebecers, certainly — have been trained to expect in these situations: An elaborate mating dance culminating in a greasy press conference where corporate leaders hail bold new provincial and federal “investments” in the company and its workers and its world-beating widgets. Critics are assailed as uncaring and testily reminded that every jurisdiction subsidizes the widget industry.
Traditionally, this is later followed by outrage when it emerges the company has used taxpayers’ bold investment to pay out lavish bonuses or dividends. In the fullest version of the performance, the company just pulls up stakes and leaves town anyway — sometimes having fulfilled its stated obligations, sometimes not, but always leaving behind a bad taste and a per-employee subsidy rate that makes no sense in hindsight.
If the company is Bombardier, it might extract lavish subsidies from government for an airplane project on the theory the Canada needs an aerospace industry, then turn around and sell the project to a foreign competitor for basically nothing.
Chris Selley, “A reminder that governments don’t ‘invest’ in businesses. It’s just corporate welfare”, National Post, 2018-11-28.