Category: Uncategorized
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Adidas Canada — Really, that’s the best you could do?
On behalf of parents everywhere, I want to tell the brand and/or marketing manager at Adidas Canada who authorized the FIFA World Cup ad spot featuring Ashley Lawrence they should be sorry. If you have already paid your agency: ask for your money back. The art is fine. Ashley Lawrence is excellent subject matter. The…
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Pro-Corporate Proselytization; The Best Since Christianity
Proselytization is a fancy word for outreach and conversion. For reasons that will be clear to anybody arriving because of a post on Transforminator that presaged a series of posts exploring Capitalism as if it were religion, and because of just who I am that would be unsurprising to those closest to me, I have…
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Has ‘stupid’ had its moment?
I’m certain the Globe & Mail story from Prince Rupert, BC, on 22 April needs no further adornment besides the following brief addition: Praise be. B.C. Judge Cites Stupid Defendant… and was right Judge in Prince Rupert, B.C., strikes arguments as ‘stupid’ in contempt case Best of the judge’s language: Amen.
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Fusing together the greener future
So apparently scientists at Lawrence Livermore Lab, in California, managed a fusion reaction that generated net energy–that is, more energy than went into generating the reaction. There was 3.15 megajoules energy output from the 2.05 megajoules that were input by the laser to fuse the atoms. Of course, the laser drew 300 megajoules to initiate…
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Friends, colleagues, countrymen… do you suppose you could call back?
Somebody should do a PhD thesis on the (negative) impact, let alone debasement of friendship wrought by social media. It’s impossible not to be right, though it would be restricted to academic circles because everyone who is “social” on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., would not merely deny it but viciously counter-attack. Still… Maybe I’m off-put by…
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Capitalism as religion: a thesis
Those who know me are aware of a hobby horse I’ve ridden for at least the past decade. My contention is that someplace along the way between Adam Smith and now, Capitalism evolved from an explanation and theory to a cult and a broader philosophy to a full blown religion with its own dogmas, catechisms, and…
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Intrapreneurshit
Like long forgotten songs on a K-Tel compilation, Intrapreneurship, the notion that employees of large organizations can hustle and scramble like entrepreneurs to create innovation and radical growth, is back! Of course, its day in the 1980s sun was a failure. But today’s promise is the success of Silicon Valley’s disrupting wunderkind. Should intrapreneurship actually…
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That grinding noise at Westminster Abbey? Charles Darwin rolling in his grave
A PowerPoint slide being “shared” and “liked” within LinkedIn says: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” This is a corrupted Darwinian notion I first saw first in a Globe and Mail op-ed piece entitled, Why leaders must take a different tack when managing change, contributed by Symantec Canadian General Manager,…
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Cicero, anticipating 2015…
Marcus Tullius Cicero lived and wrote between 106 and 43BC. He was a lawyer and “first man” who documented Rome under Caesar. I was doing a little research and came across the following quotation from his works. I guess, some things never change. “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is…
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Optimism and technology
[Some old thoughts, which may be “published” on other blogs, etc., notably Politik-Substance] It turns out that at least among technologists there is a clear, nearly religious moral divide on the subject of Edward Snowden and his revelations of government electronic snooping. This I found out by provoking the issue while discussing privacy at a…
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Jeffrey Simpson: bespectacled Cassandra
I met Jeffrey Simpson, the Globe and Mail National Affairs columnist, once over top of seat 14D on a flight between Ottawa and Toronto. He has no cause to remember me. I am, after all, not a name brand except probably in my own house. Besides the encounter lasted only long enough for a rapid…
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We are all Israel now
I say this at the risk of overreacting and seeming unhinged, or of being accused that just because now circumstances have “come to me,” that I am recognizing what so many others in the world have lived with for years and decades. I say it at the risk of being charged with tarring with an…
