Author: Grayson
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“User Experience” is nonsense
God damn Steve Jobs! It’s hard to dredge from memory or history another huckster who left behind such a legacy of dreck. Jobs was a tireless promoter who innovated relentlessly and—as legend would have it—single-handedly changed the face of the consumer world from personal computing to animated movies to music consumption and mobile telephony/computing. Love…
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Holacracy… old wine new bottles
Found this article in the Globe and Mail (Say goodbye to hierarchy, hello to holacracy) about the disappearance of hierarchy at some “cool” businesses (such as Zappos). It’s essence is per the following definition: Holacracy is a social technology or system of organizational governance in which authority and decision-making are distributed throughout a fractal holarchy of self-organizing…
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Nutbars and Islamism
Telos is a Greek word that means “end,” as in the goal or finish. Telos is a fundamental element of practically everything. Think about what you do. There is a good chance that everything you put your energy toward: your art, your business, your studies, your… has a goal toward which you direct intent. Organizations exist with…
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Snakes on a plane (redux)
I fly fairly consistently though by no means am I row 13 troll racking up 100,000 miles a year or more. That said, I’m on enough to know that airlines squeeze people into too small a space for actual comfort. More than that, people flying on business tend toward pulling out laptops to make productive…
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The Safety Dance: one step forward; three steps back
Today’s politically correct vogue is to wring one’s hands and fulminate about how dangerous the world is and how dire the need to protect one and all from its perils. Mental health disabilities and concussions are, among other human traumas, serious stuff. But it all seems a little overdone. While the incidents of mental health…
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Foretelling decline by observing focus and attention
The National Post headline says, Canada’s language watchdog probing John Baird’s Twitter account over lack of French posts. Sadly, the headline says it all. There is, of course, a story that challenges the requirements for a “public” account to be in both official language. That is, as opposed to a “personal” account. Implicit, of course,…
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Personal Information as Money
I’m a fan of bit torrents. To be clear, I rent movies legally; I do not “share.” Still, bit torrents fascinate me because the peer-to-peer system represents thinking for what could be the next great leap in online privacy protection. The obvious problem with privacy (online) shows up in one of two types of news…
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CUPW protests lack of irony in the news
Most news outlets are carrying a story today similar to this one (CBC) that covers the Parliament Hill protests by CUPW, directed toward the Prime Minister, against the Canada Post changes to service–most specifically to the end of door-to-door delivery. CUPW’s interest: membership will decline. And, to the organization, it doesn’t matter whether that’s because…
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Sympathy and its limits
As a parent, you have to feel sympathy for the Calgary mother who found out that her son was killed in Syria. Perhaps the sympathy wanes just a little bit when you find out that the son had converted to Islam and had gone to Syria to fight the jihad and ended up dead at the…
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The “consumer” they call us…
I’m reminded by Andrew Coyne’s column this weekend of a 1970s song by Stompin’ Tom Connors that gained particular reknown as the theme music for CBC’s “Marketplace” consumer affairs program. Tom was not given credit as a bard or for foretelling the future. About 40-years later, though, and Tom turns out to be more right…
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Reasonable accommodations…
Maybe it’s because of the Polar Vortex: there has been an unusually large (a few, admittedly) number of bizarre demands for accommodation going on recently. The largest by far is what’s happening in Quebec viz. the proposed Secular Charter. The most extreme might be the demand for judicial interference to accommodate a child’s food allergies.…
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The ACLU has a job to do, no matter how odious
Only in California… I saw an article in the National Post today, Convicted sex offenders have a right to privacy, advocates say, that is repugnant on first (and second..n) read. The gist of it is that the ACLU is holding up a law passed by plebiscite a California last month by an 80% majority. The “proposition,”…
