Mitsubishi Cross-Border Roadblocks

The lease on Ashley’s Mini Cooper is up in April 2008, so we’re looking at getting a new car in the spring. I’ve always enjoyed the look of Mitsubishi cars, and now that they’re being offered in Canada (that happened a few years back) I’m seriously considering either a 2008 Eclipse or a 2008 Lancer. Given the strength of the Canadian dollar, I figured I’d check into how much the cars are selling for in the US: I wasn’t overly surprised to see a 2008 3.4 litre engine Eclipse, fully loaded, selling for $30K USD. The same car in Canada? $36K CAD. No equitable pricing there. It’s always been less expensive to buy a car in the US though, which is why some Canadians will drive down and buy their cars in the US. There are costs involved in bring a car across the border, and some paperwork hassles, but $6000 is worth a fair amount of effort.

What was surprising to me was the conversation I had with the local Mitsubishi dealership: the saleman informed me that in October of this year, Mitsubishi segmented their warranty. Previously they offered a North-American wide warranty, meaning if you bought the car in the USA, you’d still have the 10-year warranty in Canada. No longer. If I were to buy a 2008 Eclipse in the USA and bring it up here to Calgary, I’d have zero warranty. Worse, they won’t even sell me a warranty – if anything went wrong with my Mitsubishi car I’d have to take it back down to the US to get it fixed under warranty.

I understand that Mitsubishi is under pressure from Canadian auto dealers to stop this cross-border buying practice, especially with the dollar disparity, but the solution would seem to be obvious: make the prices fair in both markets so buyers don’t feel like they’re being punished (price-wise) by purchasing from a local reseller. There will always be price discrepancies in different markets, but when I can drive down to Montana in five hours and buy the car for $6000 less…that seems a bit extreme to me. I don’t like it when companies use their power to abuse the consumer, so this is definitely a strike against Mitsubishi – the Eclipse and Lancer had better test drive damn good for me to continue to want one!

Stuck in My Head: Emmy Rossum

I love music. I really love music. Silence can be nice, silence can be helpful, but when I don’t feel like silence I want to be awash in music. I stumbled, quite randomly (saw it in an Oprah commercial), across a musician by the name of Emmy Rossum, and the clip I saw had something to do with YouTube. I checked her out and this is the song I found:

Enchanting, yes? Perhaps not musically everyone’s cup o’ tea, but I really liked it. The fact that the song feels like it’s all one big introduction, but the song never “starts”, leaves the listener with an unfinished feeling. Lest anyone think that she’s a studio-diva with a rack of auto-tuners to fix her vocal sloppiness, here’s a video clip of her performing live – and her voice is solid.

Chaos Reigns In My Office

The chaos and messiness of my office is directly linked to the number of review items I have on the go at any one time. Witness the disorder…usually I have next to nothing cluttering up my desktop except for the table section on the right of the U-shaped desk. Physical hardware items I’m currently reviewing: two new Zunes, an AT&T Tilt, a 6GB microSD, an iGo Juice everywhere85, a few software packages, and a few other items. I’ve got to stop asking for new things to review – I almost had my review queue empty, then the flood gates opened up…

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More pictures after the break. I hope there’s nothing embarrassing left out. 😉 Continue reading Chaos Reigns In My Office

American Imports, Chinese Deaths

“The patients arrive every day in Chinese hospitals with disabling and fatal diseases, acquired while making products for America. On the sixth floor of the Guangzhou Occupational Disease and Prevention Hospital, Wei Chaihua, 44, sits on his iron-rail bed, tethered to an oxygen tank. He is dying of the lung disease silicosis, a result of making Char-Broil gas stoves sold in Utah and throughout the U.S. Down the hall, He Yuyun, 36, who for years brushed America’s furniture with paint containing benzene and other solvents, receives treatment for myelodysplastic anemia, a precursor to leukemia.”

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This is a scary, sobering article. It was brought to my attention over at Digital Media Thoughts, and we had a little discussion about it there. The question is, what do we do about it? Can we avoid products made by the companies who treat their workers this way? Even if you boycott a certain product, unless you write a letter to the company explaining why you’re not buying their product, they’ll probably just think they’re not marketing it enough.

This is what happen when a country has a population of 1.3 billion people, a government with a voracious desire to modernize at any cost, and no Judeo-Christian history that speaks to the value of human life. Life is disposable to a culture like that – although it’s not like some of the conditions in North America are much better. A read of Fast Food Nation (an eye-opening book) tells us that. Greed is the real problem here, like it always is. What else is new?

Partisan Politics in the Blogging World? It’s Not My Fault!

It’s funny what Google AdSense will put up on a site sometimes…

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“Rationalize Like A Pirate” Day

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Thankfully, no content-pirate that I know has given me this excuse, but it can’t be that far off given our current cultural climate…

Vista’s Irritating Me Lately

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How can Vista be reporting my network drives as being broken in the folder pane, yet functional and connected in the Computer reporting. When I closed it and opened it again (Windows Key + E), it was reporting them as being connected. The most irritating of all though? When I tried to open the network drive, I’m getting an error about the drive not being accessible (“An unexpected network error occurred.”) This is all related to some funkiness with my Windows Home Server that has cropped up and is puzzling me. There are some things that I adore about Windows Home Server, and some things that are driving me nuts.

Back to Vista: I’m thinking about doing a week-long log where I keep track of everything that puzzles/frustrates me about Vista…but I’m worried that the results might be too depressing.

A Funny and Brave Politician? Is There Such a Thing?

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I don’t think much of most politicians; integrity seems to be a foreign word to most of them. I happened to click on a link in the signature of a Pocket PC Thoughts community member who posted in my thread about WiFi (boy that’s generated some interesting commentary across my network!) and I ended up at the Web site of one of his projects: a Web site for Ken Gordon. I’d just finished the article about my New York trip, so I was rewarding myself with 5 minutes of mindless Web surfing (something I don’t do often). What caught my attention on the Ken Gordon sight was this image:

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Could it be? A politician with the stones to get into a tank with sharks? Yup! There’s the official 30 second TV spot showing him in the tank, but the really funny one is the no stuntman used video – I can’t believe how close some of those massive sharks got to him and he never flinched. I don’t care how satiated or “tame” those sharks might be, there’s still a certain level of danger and it’s not something you’d likely find me doing. He further demonstrates his sense of humour in another video spot, and some added bravery by jumping tandem out of a plane.

I don’t live in Colorado, and I definitely lean more toward the right politically, but if I could I’d vote for this guy – if he has the guts to jump out of a plane, be in a tank with sharks, and turn down $100,000 in contributions from special interest groups, he’s got more courage (on multiple levels) than 99% of the politicians out there. I hope he wins his election!

Canadian Dollar Continues to Surge, We Continue to Get Ripped Off at Retail

One of the realities of living in Canada is that we’re closely tied to the USA – we consume their TV, movies, books, music, etc. 99.99% of Canadian popular culture is identical to American popular culture. In other ways, we’re a curious mix: I think of height in inches, weight in pounds, but speed in KH/h and temperature in Celsius. As the Canadian dollar continues to surge past the value of the US dollar (this morning my bank Web site tells me that buying one Canadian dollar would cost $1.09 USD) the price disparity of many commercial goods becomes more glaring (and I become more depressed every time I see a US cheque with my name on it). You see, when we buy a book or magazine in Canada, there’s a price in US dollars and one in Canadian dollars. It never really changes, and all Canadians know they’re paying more than the currency difference indicates they should. But lately of course, things have flipped and now it’s just crazy to pay $9.99 CAD for a book that has a price of $6.99 USD on it. This is an email I sent to Amazon.ca this morning:

“I was wondering, now that the Canadian dollar is significantly stronger than the US dollar, when will Amazon adjust the prices of it’s products to reflect that? Especially books of course, because those have the highest pricing disparity. Canadians have been being ripped-off for years on the Canadian pricing of books, it’s only now that the disparity is so severe companies are being forced to act. When will Amazon?” 

I think to some degree Amazon has started to react to pricing: I checked the price of a few best-sellers, and Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America and So Can You” is $16.19 USD on Amazon.com but only $15 CAD on Amazon.ca. On the other hand, the book “You: Staying Young: is selling for $15.60 USD on Amazon.com, but $18.89 CAD on Amazon.ca. Other Canadian companies are starting to act: Indigo announced a 10-20% discount program, although that doesn’t seem nearly enough when the cover prices of books were already 30-40% off the true dollar value.

Anyone in Europe is no doubt already familiar with the realities of locally-adjusted pricing: the Euro and British Pound have been stronger than the US dollar for years, yet the prices of technology items rarely, if ever, reflect that. The VAT issue clouds the waters somewhat, but I doubt I could find a European happy with the prices they’re paying when they know how much it costs for an American to buy the same thing.

There’s a massive opportunity here for US companies: START SHIPPING TO CANADA. For years many US companies have refused to ship to Canada, but now that our dollar is kicking ass and taking names, companies that previously haven’t shipped to Canada (NewEgg for instance) or haven’t shipped certain products (Amazon.com won’t ship electronics to Canada) should be falling all over themselves to service the 30 million Canadians who now have a stronger dollar and are eager to shop for US products in US prices. Come on, bring it!