Some readers think the demise of the manufacturing industry in Australia can be traced back to the country's shift to renewable energy and the high price of energy in an energy-rich country.
From Bloomberg:
As thousands of people attended an automobile rally in Australia’s
blue-collar heartland on Sunday, many knew it was also a funeral
procession for the nation’s car industry.
General Motors Co.
will close its Holden factory in the South Australian suburb of
Elizabeth on Friday, ending more than a century of car manufacturing in
the country. Hundreds of workers will be left jobless, just weeks after
Toyota Motor Corp. shut its plant in neighboring Victoria state, where Ford Motor Co. closed two sites last year.
The closures mark the end of home-grown icons such as the Holden Commodore and the Ford Falcon driven by Mel Gibson
in the original “Mad Max” movie. But they also strike an economic blow,
especially in the rust belt state of South Australia, where recent
signs of recovery haven’t been enough to stop people leaving in droves.
If folks recall, it was South Australia that was most affected by the renewable energy push. The chickens are coming home to roost.
And with that story, a new tag.
************************************
The Recipe Page
Chef Trevor's vodka-lime-shrimp fettuccine.
From a reader. His note also included a link to an interest site, "
The Crude Life Media Network."
From the reader:
According to its homepage, the founder of "The Crude Life", Jason Spiess, a grad of ND State University, started at the
bottom [and, you might presume from the name, stayed there], delivering
the Fargo Forum. ( Can children still do that? If so, does the job have a
minimum wage requirement?)
After the degree, his new news business
grew from 9 months of work out of his RV. (Then the ND winter must have
really set in.) Haven't heard his voice, yet.
But, it would really be
fun if it served as a genetic marker, affording me voice recognition of
Maynard Spiess, one of the beloved and hilarious Minneapolis morning WCCO radio personalities, from my decade of the 60's in Minnesota, that made
it so much fun to jump out of bed in the morning. Could a son or
grandson be carrying on a family's media legacy, in "The Crude Life"?
But what was the spark from the subject line of this story that I
wanted you to feel?
Oh, yes. It was just an observation with a
possible connection to North Dakota winters:
The Italians must have almost as many recipes and words for
pasta as the indigenous people of the Arctic have for snow. (That
would be funny if I could recall the actual number of words the
Laplanders have for "snow." Where is a smart phone, when you need to
ask it something?)
I have to laugh. When I go shopping for pasta, I look at all the names of the different types of pasta, and from my perspective, all pasta looks almost the same, with very, very subtle differences.
And to think that Norwegians have just one name for "leftse" and one word for "lutefisk." As far as I know.