The last new car I bought more than 10 years cost me around $20,000 at the time. You can't get a new car for $20,000 from any of these new car dealers and the Nigerians who have taken over the used car lots want too much for a used car even up to 10 years old. The only way you can get a reasonably priced car is to import it yourself from Japan and these guys want to close that off and force you to buy their over priced used cars. Who is looking out for the small man in this country when it comes to buying small or reasonably priced cars? The government needs to decide if it is going to rely on custom duties or VAT (whether at 7.5% or 15%) as its main form of taxation supplemented by other taxes or whether it wants to get serious about income tax? Bahamians are seriously underpaid in this country as against the cost of living here, whether it's unskilled labour, skilled labour or professionals. We don't mind bringing in expat workers and then paying them grandiose salaries, moving costs coming and going, work permit and residency fees, school fees, rent or living costs, annual bonus, cost of new car or rental car, gasoline allowance, medical insurance, to name a few. What does the Bahamian worker get? Salary, maybe a pension, maybe medical insurance, maybe an annual increase or bonus, maybe a company car, maybe a gasoline allowance and that's pretty much it. Some of these expats live off the extra benefits and bank or repatriate their full salary. The Bahamian? Usually living pay check to pay check trying to stay ahead of the bill collectors and barely able to save anything. Thank God for a bank loan to cover the high end new car cost but don't lose the job or the car is gone.

Evans has no credibility as a unionist and the BCPOU really lost out when they dropped Robert Farquharson as president and replaced him with Evans back in 2008. Evans came to power on the premise that he would have BCPOU representation in URCA, the Bridge Authority and Cable Bahamas. After 9 years, He's batting 1 for 3 and he probably only got the 1 as as a consolation for not getting the PLP nomination to run in North Andros. Tactically he reminds me of Obie Ferguson where they are still using dinosaur tactics when negotiating for their members. Time's have changed but these labour dinosaurs have not kept up with the modern workplace. Collective bargaining and representation still has its place in the workplace but life has to be about more than Christmas ham and turkey.

Congratulations to Miss Jones on her accomplishment. Just goes to show that recognition will come with perseverance and hard work. It's also sometimes about being in the right place at the right time. Now that you've made your first All-Star Team, the expectation of your employers and of the Bahamian people is that you will make it every year and more. Good luck and have a successful career.

It all starts with the need for certification and qualification of the people calling themselves building contractors in this country. As recent revelations in the press have shown, anyone can jump up, hire a few men who may or may not have building skills and call themselves a building contractor, go out and get government contracts to build government office buildings, hospitals, medical centres, schools and houses at significant cost, screw up the job and never finish it without any penalty or sacrifice. Then they turn around, form another company or use another business name and begin the cycle all over again. Obviously the government needs to extend the remediation of defective work clause in their building contracts from a few months to a few years. The number of government owned buildings where faulty air conditioning and mold infestation problems occur is astounding to me for such a small country. Clearly a government department or ministry cannot function on short shift days as a regular practice. Further, incidents like these demonstrate that these departments and ministries don't have business continuity plans for disasters or the like. Unfortunately Dr Sands finds himself in a damned if you/damned if you don't scenario: his ministry can't continue to function as it is currently doing so they will have to bite the bullet and spend whatever is necessary to fix the problems. However, he would be wise to create a no-contracts list whereby his ministry does not grant any present or future contracts to the company/companies or persons involved in the original contract or any unsatisfactory repair work. Why reward or continue to reward incompetence? And the $150,000 loss of productivity is only in the short time since he took over as minister after 10th May 2017. Imagine what the cost to the public has been prior to that?

And how will NAD or anyone else notify the 50% of us that don't have access to social media, NAD's website or other forms of technology? Sorry now that I didn't get into the air cargo business because all of this tom fookery that the Americans keep coming up with makes travel to or through the USA completely unenjoyable which is why anybody with any sense buys stuff online and has it shipped to the Bahamas. Gotta have a good reason to get on a plane to or through the USA these days. I will be surprised if the government spends the $75,000 or more for this new equipment on both international and domestic travel lounges at every airport in the Bahamas. Are the Americans subjecting their passengers on domestic flights within the USA to this same level of scrutiny?

Receiving your mail is far worse than the picture that Mr. Pinder or Mike Lightbourne paint in their respective letters to the editor. I subscribe to a number of print magazines but over the past 3 years, since 2014, I have only received one or two copies of one of the magazines in any year. Consequently, since last year I have had to move to online versions of these magazines even after renewing some of the print copies while others have only just begun to expire this year. I can't believe that these magazines are still waiting to be sorted at the main post office. Children's magazines, computer magazines, professional magazines, travel, you name it. All have dried up.

But, at current prices, it will only be available to the rich folks and businesses who can afford it. If government is serious about solarization then it would ensure that every new home built, including government housing schemes, include solar panels and other alternative energy sources. That way the cost of electricity comes down and only those who don't want solar or other alternatives or can't afford it will still be buying electricity from bpl/bec. And the new electricity legislation allows for small scale reselling of excess electricity to BPL/BEC whenever URCA gets around to finalizing the scheme. Presumably the government is looking at the RFP process on a much bigger scale than a few rich folks selling their excess to BPL/BEC.

That's the beauty of democracy: that's her right although anyone who has lived through the last 5 years would be hard-pressed to agree with her

So what are people like Dread Fred and Alfred Sears really, really inferring: keep quiet, say nothing and Moody's and the other ratings agencies won't find out how bad they and their colleagues left things because it might precipitate a negative rating? This is the kind of lopsided PLP thinking that we got rid of on 10th May for at least the next 5 years. Fred and Sears are trying to keep themselves relevant in the hope that should the voters swing back to the PLP in 2022 they will be in the frontline and able to secure the leader or deputy leader positions. Tell them to get lost, we don't fall for their brand of crap. The revelation that China Construction still is no closer to completing the unfinished work at Baha Mar demonstrates that we would have been worse than clowns to have followed the PLP's Pied Piper song and dance routine when they can't get this contractor to complete anything. Fred and Sears and others like Picewell, Brave and Glynnis don't seem to have gotten the message that there are a great many of us who have a severe credibility problem with them. To follow them is to court disaster of untold dimensions.

So why has the Tribune, a newspaper respected in some quarters, given this man with no credibility so much columnar space in order to tee off on the FNM government when he was so silent for the better part of the last 5 years over the warts and defects of his beloved PLP which is in dire need of taking the mote out of its own eye before telling someone else how to rectify the problems they met in place? Please! Enough already.