Night Music: You’re My World

Marijuana Has Gone To Pot

According to a fascinating feature in Forbes, the major legal marijuana companies are in terrible trouble — because they are growing more weed than anyone could smoke in several lifetimes.

“In just a year after Canada’s historic pot legalization, pot producers built up a massive surplus of pot. In fact, only 4% of pot produced in Canada in July has been sold!”

This has caused the business market to crash.  Aurora Cannabis is “Canada’s largest cannabis producer and one of the most popular pot stocks on earth. In fact, this stock has recently topped Apple as the favorite stock among American Millennials.” But that hasn’t saved the company stock price:

“If you look at Aurora Cannabis’s most recent financial report, you’ll see its revenue grew 52% in the last fiscal quarter, compared to the previous quarter. That sounds good… but it’s hiding a dirty secret.   Aurora Cannabis is actually dumping part of its harvest into “wholesale,” which means it is selling it for cheap… according to a line buried deep in the company’s Q4 financials.  Last fiscal quarter, the company dumped $20 million worth of pot, a 869% increase from the previous quarter. It is doing this because there’s not enough demand from consumers.”

 

The Forbes article likens this to the situation in American agriculture in the 1930s when an overabundance of product caused crops to be burned just to maintain prices at a floor level. They also suggest that the situation is likely to get worse as most large marijuana producers have invested heavily to increase production in the future.

No wonder then that in Canada, street (illegal) prices have fallen while legal dispensaries have to charge much more to meet regulatory stipulations, and thus the number of legal stores has not grown as expected and government revenues are not as they had hoped.

London Lauderettes

The always interesting Creative Review has an article on a new photographic book about launderettes in London:

 

I adore the images, but I also had strong empathy with the author’s discussion about the research:

“When I started I was very haphazard. If I went to a friend’s house or dropped my son at football, I’d look for nearby launderettes to visit. Later, I became much more methodical. I used Google Maps and online telephone directories to create a map of London’s launderettes, then I would set aside time to focus on individual postcodes and boroughs. I won’t deny that halfway through the project I was starting to doubt my sanity. Driving from north west London to the outer reaches of Croydon, Enfield and Ealing to photograph launderettes isn’t normal, and by launderette number 350 it was definitely feeling like a marathon.”

 

 

Ten Years Of Freedom

Ten years ago today, I was called into my bosses’s office and told that I was being laid off.

The locally-owned company where I had worked for a good many years had been taken over by a larger American group earlier that year, and they wanted to put their own people into senior management positions.  I wasn’t the first or even fourth senior manager to be sent packing, and I had expected this meeting all through the summer. I was almost sixty years old and bored with working for someone else. When the hammer fell, I was greatly relieved and happily accepted the generous severance pay they offered.

Luckily, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the first part of my enforced retirement. I was keen to write a history of Commercial Drive and over the next fifteen months, that’s what I did.  Along with this I helped establish the Grandview Heritage Group which kept me busy and interested.  At the same time, I wanted to become a lot more involved in local politics, knowing that a Community Plan was about to be thrust upon us.  Any regular reader of this blog will know that I was and remain deeply involved in those matters to this day.

So, I have been busy these last ten years.  But the genuine sense of freedom has been the really exhilarating feeling. I wake up when I want, dress in whatever I want, spend time with the Everloving, cook, take long luxurious naps, read, write, and relax.  We certainly don’t have the money we had when I was working, but we get by OK, and I’ll swap the money for such freedom any day.

It has been a grand ten years, and I quietly thank my old firm for laying me off when they did.