Happy Halloween!

 
Since I won't be going out in costume this year - check out the images from Worth1000.com for Halloween. Posted by Picasa

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Canadian Delusion: Why the $725 Billion AI Race is Exposing our Polite Myth

Image
1. Introduction: The Crack in the Postcard For decades, the "Canadian Brand" has been our most successful export. It is a carefully curated postcard of stability—a polite myth of a "serious" country where public institutions are trustworthy, and governance is a delicate, virtuous balance. But of late, the postcard has begun to show deep, jagged cracks.There is a growing, uncomfortable gap between Canada’s self-image and its actual economic performance. This is the "Relatable Problem" of the modern era: an obvious decline in productivity and competitiveness that we are asked to treat as "compassion" or "good governance." To understand why the floor feels like it is giving way, we must look past the press releases and into the stark mathematical reality of the global technology race, the exodus of our best companies, and the geography trap that keeps us acting like a submissive resource colony. 2. The 1,000-to-1 Math: Why Our "Nation...
Read more

"A bit is a bit is a bit"–Right? Unless you try to buy it in Canada.

Image
There has been a lot of hot air coming from the old media about how the issue of UBB is end users wanting to get something for nothing by opposing the big ISP providers rate grabs. Over at the Legion of Decency – Jim Henshaw puts the case succinctly. One of our largest ISP's -- Shaw -- charges $47/month for a package that will deliver 100 Gb to your computer before additional charges are applied for downloading additional bits. That would make the Shaw price $0.47 per Gigabyte. If a Shaw subscriber happens to go over that limit, they're charged $2.00 per additional Gb. The same as Bell but less than one half what Rogers has listed on its rate sheet. But if "A bit is a bit is a bit" then this seems somewhat out of line. Just how out of line becomes clear when you learn that it actually costs a Canadian ISP about $0.03 to deliver a Gigabyte to begin with. Which means -- why is a Shaw subscriber already paying more than a 1000% mark-up on those first 100 Gb? And...
Read more

Best of 2019 "Mayors Won't Rule the World"

Image
https://quillette.com/2019/11/27/mayors-wont-rule-the-world/ Published on  November 27, 2019 Mayors Won’t Rule the World written by  Joel Kotkin Earlier in this decade, cities—the bigger and denser the better—appeared as the planet’s geographic stars.  According to Benjamin Barber , author of the 2013 book  If Mayors Ruled the World , everyone would be better off if the ineffective, aging nation-state were replaced  by rule from the most evolved urban areas . This, Barber argues, would provide the “building blocks” of global governance run by a “parliament of mayors.” In reality, the validity of the “back to the city” meme was never as pronounced as its boosters believed. And now it seems, if anything, to be reversing—first demographically, then economically—as workers and key industries seek more affordable and congenial environments. Furthermore, many elite urban centers are diverging, sometimes radically, from national norms which produces a...
Read more