A white Christmas might be a slim possibility for much of the country this year, but at least one other ho-ho-holiday tradition is sure to be widespread.

Christmas trees are everywhere during the holiday season, as the nordic tradition has taken root and spread across all parts of the globe. But Canada‘s winter makes the country a natural home for the seasonal favourite, whether it’s real or artificial.

The number crunchers at Statistics Canada have come up with some fun facts about one of Canada’s favourite holiday traditions.

1,738,212 — Total number of fresh-cut Christmas trees that Canada exported last year. Almost half of those came from Quebec. By way of contrast, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador did not export a single Christmas tree.

$51.3 million — The total value of all fresh-cut Christmas trees sold in Canada last year. Sales were down in every province except British Columbia. Sales were down nine per cent last year and have declined by 22 per cent since 2006.

$47 million — Value of artificial Christmas trees imported into Canada. More than $46 million of that came from China, with the rest coming from Thailand, the United States, Mexico or Vietnam.

via 7 facts and figures about Christmas trees in Canada – Business – CBC News.

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Talk Talk has topped the quarterly league table since the record began in 2010, but the telecoms company has finally surrendered its unenviable crown after a surge in complaints about its rival.

Orange, which is owned by Britain’s biggest mobile operator, EE, angered customers in the three months to the end of September after it changed the rules around its home broadband service. The company had been offering free home broadband services to its mobile customers but said in September that they would lose the free service unless they agreed to pay £14 a month to rent a telephone line from the firm.

Ofcom received around double the number of complaints about Orange than in the previous quarter, largely from customers who had expected to keep the free service until the end of their mobile contract.

“The spike in complaints came at around the same time as the company withdrew its free broadband offer, which reflects how customers felt about the changes,” said an Ofcom spokesman.

On average, 0.5 customers in every 1000 Orange customers complained about the broadband service in the three-month period, compared to an industry average of 0.24. At the other end of the spectrum, Sky and Virgin Media had the most satisfied broadband customers.

via Orange usurps Talk Talk as most complained about broadband provider – Telegraph.

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It’s hard enough to scrimp up enough discretionary cash to pay for holiday gifts. But for Ben Tischler of New York City, getting ready for the holidays also means preparing to wed his fiancee, Alicia.

It has been especially taxing since he learned that jewelry prices would be higher this season.

“Everything was more expensive than I expected. The jeweler told me the price of gold has skyrocketed,” Tischler says. “This clearly isn’t the kind of thing I can wait to buy to see if prices come back down, so I bit the bullet.”

This holiday season could be a mixed bag for consumers, retail experts say. Electronics such as big-screen televisions keep going down, but if you want that laptop that turns into a tablet — Microsoft Surface, anyone? — or that fancy new camera, expect to pay a bit more than last year. And some traditional gift items could also take more of a bite out of your wallet as stores tap into the growing trend of using well-known designers or celebrities to hawk their goods.

All in all, prices are about 2 percent higher than last holiday season, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here are eight things that will cost you more this season.

via 8 things that will cost more this holiday season – Business on NBCNews.com.

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With its 92-year-old football stadium starting to crumble, the University of Washington began contemplating a renovation half a dozen years ago. One financing idea — getting $150 million from Seattle-area taxpayers — ran afoul of state Representative Ross Hunter. The state was reducing college funding, and tuition was surging.

“We were cutting billions of dollars out of our budget, and we are going to build a stadium. Really?” says Hunter, 51, a Democrat from Medina who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “I was OK with saying ‘No.’”

That didn’t prevent taxpayers in Seattle and the rest of the U.S. from subsidizing the $250 million project anyway. Tax breaks on municipal bonds issued for the stadium, donations for construction and increased contributions tied to ticket purchases will cost the U.S. Treasury $154 million over 30 years, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. Without the exemptions, Athletic Director Scott Woodward says, he couldn’t have financed the overhaul.

As the school’s football team prepares for a bowl game Dec. 22 in Las Vegas, the field at Husky Stadium is dotted with earth movers and dump trucks. The construction shows how even some of the most soundly run college football programs benefit from indirect tax subsidies totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition to the deductions that helped fund this project, sports departments are exempt from taxes on ticket, television and other income generated by their stadiums.

via Americans Providing $154 Million for College Football in Seattle – Bloomberg.

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Plans for a 45p-per-unit minimum price were set out last month and have the support of the Prime Minister. They would mean beer could not be sold for less than 90p a can while wine would cost at least £4.20 a bottle.

The Sunday Telegraph reveals today that political pressure is growing on the Prime Minister from Cabinet colleagues to abandon the policy.

Carlsberg chief executive Jorgen Buhl Rasmussen said he is strongly against the idea, which follows a proposal for a 50p-per-unit alcohol pricing floor in Scotland that is now being tested in the European courts. “They’re the only two in Europe where we see this happening,” Mr Buhl Rasmussen said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph.

“We’re a little surprised about the UK proposal because the proposal in Scotland has been taken to court in the EU as to whether it would be in line with the free market principles.

“It could take between six and 18 months before there’s a decision so we didn’t really expect England to come out with a proposal at this time.

“But we were also surprised because we have so much evidence across Europe that price does not change or reduce abuse. What changes and reduces abuse would be education and information.

via Carlsberg ramps up pressure on PM over alcohol price plan – Telegraph.

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Research In Motion Ltd. [RIM.T +1.83%] is rolling out two new BlackBerrys next month that Chief Executive Thorsten Heins promises will make RIM competitive again in the global smartphone market.

If he is successful, a big chunk of the credit will go to a small acquisition RIM made more than a year before Mr. Heins took over in January. In 2010 RIM bought Sweden-based The Astonishing Tribe, a small but respected tech-design house, and charged it with reinventing the look and feel of the BlackBerry’s user interface.

That interface recently has garnered positive reviews from analysts, RIM partners and some outside application developers, who are testing thousands of prototypes of the new BlackBerry operating system.

Many of those early endorsements have been hedged, however, because the final version hasn’t been available. Most app developers, who are key to RIM’s success, largely are withholding judgment until after the Jan. 30 launch.

“It is going to be a massive departure from the BlackBerry experience of the past,” said Chris Eben, a partner at Toronto-based Working Group, a Web and mobile development-and-design firm that does work for RIM. Mr. Eben has used the prototype.

Odds that RIM can recapture the market dominance it once enjoyed in smartphones appear slim. Consulting firm IDC recently estimated that RIM’s share of the global smartphone market stands at 4.7%, down from 9.5% at this time last year and from more than 50% in 2009. Even among RIM’s core customer base—corporate and government clients—IDC expects shipments of Apple Inc.’s [AAPL -3.76%] iPhones to surpass those for BlackBerry by next year.

via A Swedish Tribe Aids BlackBerry Rescue Bid – WSJ.com.

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HMV is once again fighting for survival after a fresh collapse in demand for CDs, games and DVDs over the summer set the high street specialist on a perilous course that could mean it breaches the terms of its bank loans early in the new year.

Revealing a first-half loss of £36.1m, its chief executive, Trevor Moore, said tough trading conditions meant there were “material uncertainties facing the business”. He insisted closing stores or putting the retailer in administration was not currently “part of our plan” but said he was seeking to cut running costs. “I joined the group because I believe it has a strong future,” he said. “If I thought we had tried everything I would not have joined.”

HMV, famous for its Nipper the dog mascot, banks all its profit at Christmas. Analysts had previously pencilled in £10m for this year but Moore said dire summer sales meant its performance would now fall short of City estimates. Like-for-like sales slumped 10% in the six months to 27 October after suppliers held back new titles for fear they would be overlooked as the nation focused on a summer of sport. The warning sent HMV’s shares into freefall, closing down nearly 40%, at 2.49p, giving the retailer a stock market value of around £10m.

The retailer, which remains burdened with a £176m debt despite having sold off the Waterstones chain and its live music venues to raise cash, said it was “probable” it would breach its banking covenants when they were tested in January.

A breach would put the banks in the driving seat and could result in their calling in their loans. The company said it would be able to meet a £30m payment due then and had “adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future”, adding it was “currently operating within” the terms of its £220m banking facility.

via HMV battling to avoid loan term breach after summer sales slump | Business | The Guardian.

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Silicon Valley’s elite startup accelerator is getting more selective. Paul Graham recently announced that the number of companies accepted to Y Combinator, the Mountain View (Calif.) program called the “Harvard of entrepreneurship,” will likely shrink to fewer than 50, from 84, over the summer because “more things than usual broke” with the larger batch. Looking for signs indicating which applicants would run into trouble led Graham to an unusual admission of bias: The entrepreneurs that Y Combinator interviewed in the afternoon were more likely to fail than those accepted in the morning. Graham’s conclusion: “It turned out that, like judges, we were more tolerant after lunch.”

Graham’s discovery is just one example of how decisions can be influenced by unexpected factors. Hidden bias is a risk in all sorts of systems that aspire to be objective: Pharma-funded drug research finds more favorable outcomes than government-backed trials. Hiring managers are less likely to call back job applicants named Lakisha and Jamal than Emily and Brendan. University tech transfer officers reviewing the same invention are less likely to recommend commercializing it if they think the inventor was a woman. And even middle-aged white guys in Silicon Valley feel they have to dress down and shave their gray hair to compete with younger, hoodie-clad candidates for top jobs at startups.

via Hidden Bias: Why You Should Pitch After Lunch – Businessweek.

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You probably still think of it as a “cash register” – basically a fancy calculator and cash drawer that sits at the end of the shopping aisle just before the exit, which gives you the correct change on your way out.

Sure, it has a few more flashing lights than a few years ago, but it’s still essentially a machine whose only role in life is to accommodate a transaction every few minutes.

Wrong.

The modern point-of-sale (POS) system is a tightly integrated computer that almost certainly knows all about your buying history, how often you shop online and what you’re likely to buy next week.

It is also able to communicate along the entire length of the store’s supply chain right back to the factory if necessary.

Not bad for a device that has its origins in the late 1800s and was used primarily for producing a simple receipt – one copy for the merchant and one for the costumer.

via BBC News – How ‘point of sale’ became much more than a fancy calculator.

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Public perception would appear to be all for some companies. Upset the general public who you depend on to buy your products and you’ll find yourself in all sorts of difficulties.

That’s certainly the big worry which has faced Starbucks since it was revealed that it pays very little corporation tax to the UK Treasury.

Consumers have been outraged that such a profitable high street giant should be ducking and diving out of its tax obligations and, although we won’t know until it releases its results, they are bound to have been voting with their feet.

It’s not the first time such a conglomerate has irked its fans but it’s certainly the first time such a company has pledged to make such an unusual gesture.

Starbucks said yesterday it will pay more corporation tax over the next two years.Let me say that again.

Starbucks said it wants to pay more tax even though by law it is under no obligation to do so.

I know.

via Why paying tax is better for you than huge ad campaign – Editor Viewpoint, Opinion – Belfasttelegraph.co.uk.

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