Tuesday digest

- Mrs. H was tickled pink when she learned this morning that Eddie Murphy's "Delirious" is finally being released on DVD next week. Pre-order your own copy here.

- Today's loony left play of the day: allegations of age discrimination are flying at the University of Ottawa as two ten-year old boys have been removed from a class called "Science and Society" by the school's administration, over and above the head of the professor who knowingly allowed the children to fully participate in what has been nicknamed on campus as the "activist course".

Best to get 'em while they're young, I suppose.

- Listen up! Noted climatologists Josh Hartnell and Pink have issued a warning about the dangers of global warming.

Well, if they say so, who am I to argue?

- Separatist logic: almost 2/3 of Canada's aerospace industry is located in Quebec, ergo, Quebec should automatically get 2/3 of the cash flowing from every federal government contract having to do with aerospace.

Huh?

- Ridiculously short-sighted labour agreements are helping to drive American automakers into near insolvency. From CNNMoney.com:

... (L)abor costs the Detroit Three substantially more per vehicle than it does the Japanese.

Health care is the biggest chunk. GM for instance spends $1,635 per vehicle on health care for active and retired workers in the U.S. Toyota pays nothing for retired workers - it has very few - and only $215 for active ones.

Other labor costs add to the bill. Contract issues like work rules, line relief and holiday pay amount to $630 per vehicle - costs that the Japanese don't have. And paying UAW members for not working when plants are shut costs another $350 per vehicle.

Here's one example of how knotty Detroit's labor problem can be:

If an assembly plant with 3,000 workers has no dealer orders, it has two options. One is to close the plant for a week and not build any cars. Then the company still has to give the idled workers 95 percent of their take-home pay plus all benefits for not working. So a one-week shutdown costs $7.7 million or $1,545 for each vehicle it didn't make.

If the company decides to go ahead and run the plant for a week without any dealer orders, it will have distressed merchandise on its hands. Then it has to sell the vehicles to daily rental companies like Hertz or Avis at discounts of $3,000 to $5,000 per vehicle, which creates a flood of used cars in three to six months and damages resale value. Or it can put the vehicles into storage and pay dealers up to $1,250 apiece to take them off its hands.

Meanwhile, this op-ed from the LA Times argues that it's not favourable Asian exchange rates that have made North American automanufacturers uncompetitive but rather overunionization on top of a misread of the marketplace.

- On that note, a massive influx of baby boomers + a diminishing number of individuals in the labour force / a political culture that penalizes those who attempt to seriously discuss the limitations of government when it comes to providing universal health care and retirement benefits = we're screwed.