I've just posted a BME update with a bit over a thousand images each in the members areas and the piercing sections (so it's today and yesterday's updates put together). Um, other than that, I got a bit of an upsetting phone call this evening, but there's not much I can do about it right now so I'm going to try not to get stressed over it.
While I'm talking about depressing things, the last time the US dollar was as low as it is now was 1992, after the Reagan and Bush era. Then Bill Clinton was elected, and the US dollar climbed steadily and leveled out strong against both the Canadian dollars and the Euro. Then George Bush got elected and September 11th happened.
After 911, the US dollar stayed strong, until the “Axis of Evil” speech at which point the Euro started to climb over the US, although the Canadian dollar stayed even… but then the US sent troops to Iraq, and the US dollar began to drop against both the Euro and the Canadian. It rebounded temporarily after the “Mission Accomplished” speech, but started to decline steadily as the troops deaths increased. After the Iraqi Assembly got elected, it rebounded temporarily against the Euro, but not against the Canadian dollar.
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One of the things that means is that if you are selling a non-American product in America (for example, if you're a Canadian business that exports), is that the change represents a loss in profit (assuming you don't increase your pricing) of about 33% (at a minimum — it is often much more, depending on the business's internal structure). I don't think I've changed BME's pricing since 1997 or whenever it was first set, but especially with bandwidth getting more expensive (due to the move to Canada after US laws became more conservative and pushed the site into likely illegality), I keep agonizing over whether I should increase it a little to compensate…
But independent of how it affects Canadian businesses, I really hope that Americans take these changes seriously when they next vote… Remember that the US can not produce enough of it's own oil, let alone enough of it's own fresh water and farm produce! I don't even want to think about how bad it could get if this economic collapse continues… fingers crossed that Bush doesn't do too much more damage (let alone invade someone else), until President Gore starts fixing things in 2009.
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