There's a perfectly good explanation for it. Most immigration (in the UK as well as many Western nations) will be from Asia and Africa. Most people in these countries do not own cars and use public transport as they are predominantly city dwellers. Coupled with the fact that most immigration occurs when the test taker is past the minimum age of getting a driver's license - it's understandable that test takers from Asia and Africa are at a disadvantage.

And those people typically live in English-speaking-only expat enclaves that they never venture out of - no different than those who claim to have visited Mexico by way of a visit to a Cancun all-inclusive resort.

When in Montreal (or Paris or wherever), I learn just enough of the language to butcher it. Badly.

As their ears bleed from my pillaging of their respective beloved language like nails on a chalkboard, the admission of their excellent knowledge of English usually comes forth quickly.

Actually, isn't it cheaper do go bilingual anyways? With French/English and Spanish added to a product's packaging and manual, you are essentially able to sell your product to consumers in all of the Americas, Africa and much of Europe without much little or no repackaging of your product.

Recently, a thousand signatures were gathered to require English signs in Richmond (though it failed to pass in city council), so it shows that BC people are not immune to fears of language hegemony when it is perceived to threaten their own identity.

http://www.vancouverobserver.c...

Because it was the French that started the IOC. So French and English (and a 3rd host country language) would be made the official languages.

The Greek flag is always flown as the very first flag, despite them not making a showing in some of the winter games.

I used to teach music lessons to primarily homeschooled kids, and the vast majority of them were never silent about their disdain for science.

I was a childhood friend of one of the sons of the pioneer of the Christian homeschooling movement, and their beliefs were also pretty far away from you and your parents'.

To a good chunk of these people, your family would neither be defined as "Christian" or "conservative". You're clearly an exceptional case.

If any of you use the AngelCare monitoring device, there's a cord strangulation related recall.

It's true that car dealers make quantitatively less from new car sales (used car sales are much higher margin), but it's not a bad income stream once you realize that they "own" all their cars via leverage.

When they sell a Camry, they don't really pay the full $25,000 invoice (or whatever it is) to have it sit on the lot. They essentially lease it from the manufacturer. So they may be leveraging $500 of their own money or something like that to have the car sit on the lot for, say, 60 days. When the car is sold, the "loan" is paid back with the proceeds from the sale. Let's say the dealer nets $1000 after paying back the loan and after subtracting all the business overhead, they're making $1000 on a $500 investment. That's a pretty decent return. Even if the dealer only nets $250 from the sale, it's still a 50% return.

Think about this next time you feel sorry about how the dealer's not making money off new car sales.

I've always been a good car buyer and trying to buy "cream puffs" that are about 4-6 years old, so that the hardest hit of the depreciation has already been priced into the car.

However, that's getting harder these days as used car prices are through the roof. When I was shopping for my last car (~$35k), the market price I was seeing for a 3-year-old model with 30k miles was only $2000 less than a new one - even for a private party sale without the dealer markup. So it's making less and less sense to buy used, especially with the aggressive financing deals for new models.

How's that going? They've been talking about rolling that out "next year" since I was first hearing about it at school in the late 90s.

I think people like us would complain less if 1.) the DTA boxes were free for perpetuity, 2.) the DTA boxes did not downconvert the HD signal down to SD, and 3.) if it did not render existing PCTV/DVRs unusable.

But I'm the scum of Comcast subscribers, daring to only pay for the lowest package mandated by the cable franchisee agreement. Why would they care about me?

They just encrypted all the over-the-air channels on my cheapo Comcast limited basic cable package last week.

So I ordered a ChannelMaster antenna and I'm getting everything beautifully. Need to adjust a few more times to the optimum position but everything seems to be working despite the wintry weather.

Just called Comcast today to cut TV. I'm paying $16+tax per month for over-the-air TV right now, and now they'll add $10/month to my Internet bill. Still better than throwing away $6/month.

Not happy that Comcast bought off the FCC to encrypt over-the-air channels.

Same here. The bills bouncing between doctor, hospital, insurance company, lab, x-ray technician, OBGYN are just comical.

It's like my relatives in Asia emailing/phoning to express concern about some weather / storm disaster happening on the east coast when I live on the opposite coast. Or that they refuse to come visit because there's a mall shooting in some state thousands of miles away.

They even sold entire houses.