News and Opinion in Black and White

And the only answer they seem to have is cutting jobs. Looking at GMs range of vehicles in Europe and they are not bad at all, not class leaders but they do look quite nice. The driving experience is typical Vauxhall, ie dull, but the cars are comfortable even if the interiors do seem cheap. Whats the answer for GM, well first things first they have to make quality cars. You cant compare the quality of Toyota vehicles with GM, Toyota is much better, more equipment, better build quality longer lasting. They need to address the quality of their cars before they do anyting.

It shows how clueless and directionless the International Olympic Committee is. They show a complete ignorance to the general opinion of the World’s populous, i.e. freedom, equality and fairness. What a contradiction that China gets the Olympics. Ill ignore the human rights abuses that are alleged of the regime in China. So instead, let’s look at the smog issue. The biggest problem that the IOC see with the pollution is the harm it cause to athletes, sorry, but what about the health of the people that have to live with it everyday, perhaps my opinion of the Olympics is woefully optimistic, but part of their mandate is to make the World a better place. So why, instead of the stupidly selfish and blinkered view of the athletes health only, why don’t they also try and improve the lives of the people who live in the area where the Olympics are held. They should have set standards years and years ago. OK China could be shortlisted for a potential Olympic host, but for them to be successful they have to sort out their pollution issues for a minimum of 5 years before they are realistic contenders. Of course this didn’t happen which brings us to the real reason why the IOC awarded the Olympics to China. 

Money. And perhaps this is ultimate anti Olympic philosophy. The Olympics are supposed to be above money, money is supposed to be an irrelevance to the core principles of free and fair competition between amateurs. OK so the day of the amateur is gone but that doesn’t mean the philosophy can be thrown to the wind, especially when there is such an obvious issue which can be solved with a bit of pressure and of forward thinking. 

Trip 1: Cardiff. Simple as that. Depending on how far you are coming to get to Cardiff this could be a day trip or a weekend break.

What’s Cardiff got to offer? Probably the nicest central shopping district in Britain. Name a town or city which you think is nice and Cardiff will beat it. Fantastic architecture, super clean, super organised, the layout (semi-organic, semi-planned) could been done better, massive variety of shops from one store businesses to your national chains. On top of the shopping Cardiff has probably got the best nightlife in Britain. OK some people are saying how can that be right? Look at the music scene in London! OK your right but for shear variety of pub and clubs in a compact area, it really cant be beaten.

Bit of a culture vulture? Cardiff has a spectacular opera house, spectalucar civil engineering (Cardiff Bay) One of the most well kept castles in Britain smack bang in the town centre. The millenium stadium which is both spectacular from the outside and inside not to mention it seats over 70,000 people and cost 250 million to build whereas the new Wembley can seat 90,000 but cost nearly a billion to build. The millenium stadium is not just a stadium for the rugby team, it shows how well run Welsh organisations can be.

If you like your sports, the atmoshere throughout the day and night on the streets and pubs is second to none when there is a Six Nations International (home or away game). If you want a more relaxed weekend avoid the Six Nations weekends

Where to stay? the Angel Hotel is as good as anything

…I didn’t. Where did this attitiude come from? I got shafted on my pay deal so it’s correct that you get shafted as well. Complete nonsense but it’s the exactly the type of mentailty big companies want us to have. Make it socially unacceptable to complain about your low pay rise. How did we get so brainwashed?

Of course the argument against is “if you don’t like it you can leave”. A completely immoral stance to have. A job is not a shop you go into where, if you dont like the staff you leave. In a job you invest what, 25% of your waking life in making sure you do a good job. You make friends with the people you work with, you make friends with the people you deal with outside of the company, you get to know your job intimately. And the answer is, if you don’t like it you can leave? Complete nonsense, unless your manager is the owner you have just as much right to work for that company as him or her.

Obviously big business promote this idea that its “Capitalism”, a free market economy. If people don’t like the pay deal they can leave, well NOT if you take your social responsibilities seriously as an employer. I have nothing against capitalism, but just because its capitalist, doesnt mean its acceptable that social responsibility and peoples emotions come a distant second.

As the saying goes, united we stand, divided we fall, lets support each other instead of peddling the wishes of corporations by saying it every man for himself. As big businesses know, the key to succes is co-operation.

What exactly has Microsoft got to gain from purchasing Yahoo! The only thing I can see is econoimies of scale from combining the activities they carry out in parallel at the moment. Games, News, Chat etc etc. But this is not the problem for either Yahoo! or Microsoft. They do chat, games, news etc etc very well.

 The problem they have is sub standard search technology. A meger between Yahoo! and Microsoft is not going to solve their problem. This merger makes very little sense. Sure they will be more efficient but the problem is they don’t generate anywhere near the revenues they want.

 The worry for Yahoo! is that they don’t have a plan. Well, at least that I can see. Has anyone from Yahoo! identified their problems and how their going to solve them? I mean with a Microsoft bidding for them, now is surely the time to tell people what their future plans are and show how a Microsft takeover is such a bad idea. But I haven’t heard anything.

 If anything the ideal partnership would be for Google to take a controlling stake in Yahoo! and let the companies run seperately.  This would be a utopian situation for Google. Their problem is that people only spend a fraction of a time on their site compared with visitors to Yahoo! Google’s problem is they dont want to comprimise the users search experience. Run the two as is and show Google adwords on Yahoo!. Lets be honest here. Google adwords is decades ahead of Yahoo! in paid advertising both in terms of philosophy and execution. This would be a real cost saver for Yahoo! as they would no longer have to spend money on maintaing and developing their paid advetising programme.