Tag: stupidity
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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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Transparency demands are transparently opaque
What good is transparency if what it reveals is at best meaningless and at worst combustible?
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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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Red pills and blue pills
Something prompted me yesterday to dig into the “red pill” phenomenon that is at the root of just about all social upheaval in (at least) North America. In my imagination, I was going to deconstruct the ridiculousness and inconsistency of those who use this shorthand to justify their antisocial positions. I was going to spend…
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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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I use “F-Words”
I use “f-words” in mixed company. Well-bred professional, management, and executive types recoil in disgust. One might think that they would be inured to f-words. But they seem to hold themselves above all that. Of course, the most troubling f-word is not the one on the tip of your tongue now. This one sounds “eff”…
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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,…
