Category: politics
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Did nobody think this consultant procurment would be a bad look?
Ottawa paid nearly $670,000 for KPMG’s advice on cutting consultant costs Whoever initiated the contract probably did what (s)he was told to get best practice thinking on “on ‘IT cost optimization.’ That report included supporting documents on IT contractors, domain utilization, printer consolidation, software asset management and suggestions for reducing costs in each area.” Whoever…
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Why Capitalism (1): The Pre-Capitalist West
The development—creation and evolution—of Capitalism was hardly preordained. But it is too easy to look backward and conclude that where are now was inevitable. Nothing is inevitable. So why then? The question warrants a look at conditions leading to the birth of capitalism. We will eventually need to dedicate time to capitalism’s evolution to…
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Lab Leaks and Red Herrings
Since 2020, I, like everyone else in North America, have been treated to a regular though slowly diminishing force feeding of “news” about the “Lab Leak” source for the COVID pandemic. At first, when it was novel (like the Coronavirus underlying the pandemic), it made me wonder. Today, it makes me wonder—about the people obsessing…
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Easily digestible conspiracy and pseudo-insight: strong misdirection?
Misdirection. A few days ago something exploded over the Kremlin. It was such an elaborate pantomime of an attack that only the willful, gullible, or compelled would not make common league with the conspiracists to consider the whole episode remarkable bullshit. That Russia immediately took to its airwaves and any other channel that would sustain…
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Contributing to the cyber security conversation
My firm, Institute X, responded and provided a paper to the Canadian Government’s Consultation on Cyber Security. It’s a considered white paper that assumes government should do what it’s supposed to do (public safety and security; and support Canadian industry). We suggest that an “unreasonably” high standard for cyber security and directed support toward the…
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Innovation advice… really?
It’s incomprehensible why a serious broadsheet exposes a 1000-word space to the maundering of a senior bank executive except to recall that the business broadsheet is a forum for recitations of faith. When a high priest needs a pulpit, a serious broadsheet provides one. How else to understand Victor Dodig’s contribution to the “innovation” echo-chamber…
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Asymmetric policy action: cars and drivers
I would offer to write a brief piece for Policy Options, The Walrus, or some other such magazine but have no desire to spend the time documenting the self-evident, which will be obvious later, just to appear “well researched.” Instead, I’ll write here and content myself with distributing the link. Here’s the premise. Governments of all sorts…
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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,…
