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| June 27/02 | The Season of Smells Considering
that our fair City’s Mayor has warned Toronto residents to dig
in for a long garbage strike, saying trash collectors could be on picket
lines until October …. is it a mere coincidence or fate that “smell”
rhymes with a certain first name? The
union brothers are indeed astute in leveraging the power of smell in
this season. Worldcom
follows the smell of Enron, regrettably, Arthur Anderson is a common
denominator. Stock markets are taking a terrible beating. Yuppies will
become desperate for other investments. I
predict that real estate will suddenly be “remembered” as
something worthwhile to own in greater quantities and further speculate
that we will soon see a return of Public Real Estate Companies in Canada,
reminiscent of the good old days of the 70’s and 80’s. I
disagree with Ira Gluskin’s allusion to real estate as a metaphoric
“latent bubble” and muse that for the time being it is more
of a blind pimple. However, eventually it will be compelled to surface. The future looks bright for professions of the land!
|
| July
12 |
City States Amid much fanfare of the benefits of smart growth, the beleaguered provincial aficionados have not had an easy time of promoting the now jaded initiatiative of Al Gore. Difficult if not impossible to grow things - if you have neither the climate nor the environment - regardless of the number of lucrative single source consulting contracts you dish out to your political and career supporters. Environment is the
buzz word and it obviously extends to more than ecological issues. It
is reasonable, is it not, My point is that City States are fast becoming powerful forces with which our "senior levels" of government will be forced to contend - at least according to the Supreme Court of Canada. How refreshing to discover that the law is not always and ass! It decided on June 28, 2001 that: Environmental protection has "emerged as a fundamental value of Canadian Society". Local governments should be "empowered to exceed, but not lower, national norms". "Barring clear demonstration that a municipal decision was beyond its powers, courts should not so hold". The Supreme Court therefore seems prepared to give municipalities (City States) wide latitude to regulate the environment. - extracts paraphrased from a Supreme Court ruling released on June 28, 2001. It seems to me that "wide latitude" implies financial latitude (taxation ). In short, what the
Feds and the Province have generously given you in Tax refunds
As individuals far
wiser than the writer previously observed, Let us welcome the City States with the recent endorsement of "wide lattitudes" granted by the law of the land! |
| Mar 12/01 | Corporate Victims The PC (politically correct) movement has reached the end of the extreme swing of the pendulum and is now, thankfully, heading back to whence it came. The proof is that there are now more ads claiming that women have reached parity with men as victims of stress, stroke and a host of other ugly things. Such laudable life accomplishments were once the exclusive territory of men. But the movement has become more sophisticated and pervasive to embrace non human life forms. Enter - a new phenomenon – the Corporation as Victim. Human rights now extend to the rights of Corporations whose sole raison d’etre is the protection of profits. Somehow things have become very silly. We have always known that the foundation of our society is the inalienable right to diligently exploit each other economically. But to shore up our fragile markets these days, we need a powerful PC strategy. If you can own the belief of victimization and craftily utilize recent precedents, your profits will now be saved. In the March 1, 2001 issue of the Toronto Star, an innocuous headline in the Business section reads “Panel to hear Loewen’s claim” courtesy of the Canadian Press. The first paragraph: “An international panel has agreed to hear a claim by funeral services company Loewen Group, that it was a VICTIM of anti – Canadian bias when a Mississippi jury imposed a $500 million penalty.” The capitalization of the word victim is mine to demonstrate the point made – a corporate victim. A similar story appeared in the Globe and Mail on February 28, 2001. Not about Loewen, but about the formidable U.S. waste management company – Metalclad. Yet another corporate VICTIM. Metalclad claims that Mexico “expropriated” its investment. Who could ever have imagined that the U.S. ruling in Washington is now being appealed by a sovereign country - Mexico - in another sovereign country - Canada - in an obscure part known as the B.C. Supreme Court? (The Canadian taxpayer of course pays for the B.C. Supreme Court) The victim strategies are clever “empowerment” tactics not just to get even but more importantly, to protect the bottom line. After all, such successful strategies reflect the culture of our times. In our times and sphere, the glue that binds the corporate VICTIM phenomenon with profits is of course NAFTA. See the article by Naomi Klein . It is well researched and makes excellent reading. But the larger question is the impact of globalization and what it does to local businesses, cottage industries and how it wipes out entire communities. Is not Canada, after all, a community of communities? It does no good to uphold the sentimentality of Mr. Fezziwig who wanted to protect a way of life. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley we must come to terms with the vested interests or perish. |
| Jan 7/01 | The Year of Organ Grinders As the new year year begins, it is appropriate to reflect on last year's accomplishments in our society of downloaded agencies and amalgamated communities to observe how they are not working. John Barber does this especially well in his recent Globe and Mail piece titled Urban Slanging - bear in mind that it was largely his investigative reporting into the ORC saga that focused attention on the behaviour of our elected officials. The scrutiny succeeded in litle more than drawing a collective yawn from our citizens after a campaign that lasted almost a year. Minor officials were found as scapegoats and eventually targetted for lawsuits. It was accepted that a high priced agency is good for just one thing. It really doesn't make any difference. We have become so desensitized to what is happening, that even after we have transposed a major tragedy such as Walkerton into the syle of episodic roman games by offering television "hearings" and journalistic analysis ad nauseam - nothing will change. The Caesars will remain in power. Because aside from being fed sensational morsels on a regular basis nothing else really matters - our journalists will provide entertainment to maintain readership and network ratings - while advertising dollars continue to flow. We get what we deserve. "The fault Dear
Brutus, lies not in our stars |
| Nov 26/00 | A
life of Elections Now that we have our Municipal elections done and expect Jean Chretien to be crowned again, we can soon go back to sleep and let things continue to chug along. There is great comfort in our Canadian political boredom. We avoid the mounting constitutional crisis that our southern cousins in the Excited States are now about to experience. It took 6 days and 36 attempts to break the deadlock in the U.S. senate to decide between Barr and Jefferson in the third U.S. presidential election. The tradition of bickering, litigious confrontation is an honest one. But at the pace we have seen . . . it may take 6 months and 36 court appeals to decide between Gore and Bush! Such are the benefits of using high technology to count votes. Yet with all the benefits of our new toys. I believe it is better to be Aztec than Hightec. Your'e not bothered by having to buy more rams and gigs all the time, and the system of government was a monarchy - not a democracy. Is our great democratic system failing us on planet earth? England's king Charles I wryly observed that: "Democracy is
a piece of greek drollery based on the belief that Unfortunately, Cromwell chopped off Charles’s head for democratic entertainment. Be that as it may,
we have certainly enjoyed wonderful burlesque shows in A good recent show is "La souffle de coco dans la visage - a la mode Canadienne " Coconut cream pie in your face - in the Canadian style, starring 'ti Jean de Shawinigan" (little John from Shawinigan) who is about to set a political record of victories due to voter boredom. Let the show go on - ..........click here for a Canadian moment |
| Oct 16/00 | You are the Borg! My recent sabbatical combined with an exercise in appreciating the market for multi unit rental accommodation in New England, gave me staggering insights into the shaping of new economies driven largely by the technological revolution. Soon websites will be a thing of the past! The Revolution (it must be said with a capital R) is awesome in its implications and how it redefines our relationships on a minute by minute basis. These days everyone is a "relationship manager". The Revolution is predatory and cannibalistic in nature. It devours and then discards the burned out symbolic manipulators (software "engineers") who sweated out a six figure income over a couple of years. They are stacked randomly on a psychiatric trash heap of exhaustion. After all, as seasoned horse players know "there's always fresh" and there are always ravenous newcomers graduating from our Computer Science temples - we can't produce them fast enough because they burn out so soon. I get into this rant after traveling some 1500 km in the silicon valley of New England nestled between interstate 495 and 95 which sweeps down from Nashua - New Hampshire to Providence - Rhode Island. The "wait lists" for 2 bedroom apartments are 2 to 3 months. The pricing is between USD $950 and $1050. Rent controls were recently removed in Massachusetts and the Kennedy dynasty has been broken to a Republican representation. You need to fill in
as many as five application forms per location and pay a $25 NON
REFUNDABLE processing fee for the landlord to check your What has all this to do with the Borg? For uninformed (non star trek fans), the Borg is a vast collective of disgusting looking humanoid creatures with tubes and pipes coming out of their eyes and noses. Dripping mucous they walk around like zombies, have no individuality. They are all wired into the great collective consciousness (the Borg) which is a repository of ALL the data that has been collected. The mission statement of the Borg is to assimilate everything (much like Microsoft). In other words, it is a future generation of an advanced implementation like ORACLE and/or SAP/R3 type databases after the drones entering the data have got them to work and lost their functional vision by sitting in front of a monitor most of their working lives. You see, just about anything around today is part of a series of databases. The question is: who
controls access to them? The scene dramatically changes every few moments. Enter a 19 year old kid, Shawn Fanning, who essentially subscribes to the New Hampshire slogan on car license plates "Live free or die". Shawn invented Napster and has enraged lawyers and legislators alike with a simple philosophy that says: "If I have bought something I have the right to share it with another person, without charging any money." see The Napster testifies. It is obvious why lawyers and legislators are enraged - or should I say outraged. Their very existence is now threatened. Could it be that
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." is finally become reality? But typical of the promiscuous nature of the species, they will blow at Napster while the world's largest law firm, Baker & McKenzie, was implementing (sucking at) NextPage's peer-to-peer technology," This is the (exponential) cannibalistic nature of the Revolution. If most of us are connected (as the Borg) all of the time, then don't you see, that websites and a whole generation of symbolic manipulators (software "engineers") are made irrelevant? We can now intantly access each other's files, data, comparables, reports, and presentations in all their multimedia glory. But we can also access interesting gossip and avoid the grind of producing boring cookie cutter stuff as in the piece written below. Brave new world indeed, while old men fool and children calculate. or as Jeremy Rifkin
asks ..... |
Aug 30/00 |
Who really does the work? Take a look at a recent ad promoting real estate sales sizzle. Click on the link to a New England Real Estate Company here Getting to the end of it and breathing normally is hardly possible. Did you notice the contemporary vernacular of: wired, videotaped,
photographed, CD ROM, The promises leave one breathless There is a cookie
cutter for EVERYTHING. There are tools, tools and yet High technology is a wonderful toolbox. But who really does the work? How many wordprocessor
documents have you seen that leave you with the I've seen many, produced many myself using cut and paste. The same is true for spreadsheets, websites, voicemail, email. We have deluded ourselves into believing that the tools are the finished product, the medium is the message (or is it massage?) The wonderful toolbox of technology is actually a toybox and the ones getting rich are the kids that make the toys. The culture is characterized by immaturity and instant gratification (endless upgrades). You are never really ahead of the game because as an end user (if you gripe) you are unwittingly part of the team that "manages relationships". You actually pay for the privilege of being a beta tester when you subcribe to "upgrades" and "updates" of a product. When is the last time you were able to hear something on the phone that was not recorded? Do you get the feeling that there is very little content, original thinking, real communication or even real work done out there? If you do, you're not alone - welcome to the condition of alienation. By now, you might suspect that with all of our advances we have actually retarded human development in our reliance on cookie cutter high tech. To buck the trend,
you need to become a renaissance man or woman and the toys? ...
oh yes, you must play but only after the work is done! |
| Aug 16/00 | Brave New Face at ORC On August 1 we visited the ORC website ..... what a transformation ...!! Slick links, slick graphics, slick PR, slick spin .... if you're searching for a word to describe the new beginning ...why ... SLICK would spring to your lips !! I would be the first to nominate it for an Oscar of slick commercial website productions ... congratulations to the deco designers and colour co-ordinators! The efforts and success in political damage control are obvious now that the "new" processes are in place - there is a new happy family to go with it. Radically different in presentation and completely redesigned from the site we visited on May 1, one is tempted to conclude from the content that the new site existed before that time. But don't believe such a rash assumption. Digging a little deeper for the truffles of available properties for sale we noticed a significant drop in available properties from 32 listings three months ago to 11 listings in August. Is it possible that
20 properties were sold over the past 3 months? Please decide for yourself by visting our comparison report No doubt a glowing sales report will be available in the Annual Report. However, it is gratifying to know that there is a Broker pool of 42 companies for the 11 properties listed - a veritable army of marketeers !! But where are the
deals ... Emile? We desperately need some bragadaccio!!
Slick indeed! Unfortunately, the previous scandals which are now making connections with water and environmental issues just will not go away and will inevitably be revived by media hounds as the legislature resumes. But a visit to the
slick new face is a must! Click here
to visit. |
| Aug 2/00 | Environmental Land Economics The fears of Safety-Kleen's financial ruin is sparking an unusually high level of interest. I say unusual because in good times(now) with the Ontario economy firing on all cylinders at a jobless rate of 5.4%, getting worried about the tax payers picking up an environmental tab is the last thing on most citizens' minds. The Globe's July 12 editorial , the spectacular growth of a 12% annual increase in garbage production compared to a meager 0.17% increase in gross domestic product makes one highly suspicious of the numbers. I speculate that the 12% is more probably an indication of the robust growth in U.S. garbage exports to Canada and a relaxation of Environmental regulations by the individuals we elected in our "Common Sense" government. The recent report done by the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy is a valiant effort to remind us that the taxpayers are likely to be nailed with cleanup costs as the large environmental management and cleanup (pardon the pun) companies fail. With the relaxation
of Environmental regulations and no government funding But what the heck! After all the reductions to income tax, we must by now surely have saved enough for a tax increase to do environmental cleanups of failed companies and hire some of those 1000 we laid off back again ...... But what about health costs? If you were told that 60% of the well water tested on your land was contaminated how would you feel .... ? But what does "contaminated" mean ..? See if you can work it all out from the piece in the Toronto Star on the intitaives taken in Durham Water Our Governments have us running like lemmings from one cliff face to the next !! |
| July 19/00 | Disintermediation How many people know the meaning of this word? I first heard it on
June 30 at the joint AOLE/CUI conference . Come to think of it, Orwell's book was more of a political rant than a novel, but brilliant in the sense that it gave meaning to "doublespeak", "technospeak" and "goobledeygookspeak". Actually, if anyone
read Robert Ringer's hilarious real estate book The meaning now becomes clear - especially if one is a real estate broker or agent dealing with the phenomenon of the web where everyone "markets" real estate without worrying about TREB, REECO, errors and omissions, ethics .... etc ..etc ..etc ... The web has become a great leveller in exposing concealed opportunism, and we are forced to rethink past methods of doing business. In partcular we need to rethink our belief in the right to exploit each other economically as the prime motivator in doing good business. Blake Hutcheson of CB Richard Ellis posited that "disintermediation" (or principals dealing directly with each other) has become a real concern to intermediaries (brokers and middlemen) as the internet continues to grow. Of course he's right to be concerned! Or hasn't anyone noticed the amount of business that's being done in financial markets via the web without "intermediation". The word is quite
different from Ringer's intimidation ..... =8-) I doubt whether you will find "disintermediation" in either Webster or the Oxford dictionary. Last January I wrote to a Vancouver Broker and observed ........."The
real estate service industries of brokerage, appraisal In Ontario I have
seen MLS services offered to Vendors So beef up on using you email and getting your IT systems to work properly. There's no turning
back. |
| July 4/00 | Download the OMB As the era of the CSR (common sense revolutuion) sputters to a close a final act of responsible stewardship of our elected Leaders would be to halve the size of the OMB, and reappoint new members on the basis of the existing proportional political representation of the three main parties. The other half might be constituted from members of the local municipal council in which an OMB matter was being heard. This type of downloading might accomplish the following: Save taxpayer dollars
Much has been written about the ancient establishment of the OMB. Our fair southern
cousins nod their heads with enthusiasm "only in Canader .... eh?" They feel smug in their belief that aliens are anything outside of the USA. Some recent press coverage may incline you to think that they have a point - at least when it comes to justifying the existence of the Board. Several years ago I hosted a breakfast for three US residential builders visiting Toronto. Being very intrigued on the purpose of their visit, I had to ask the obvious question: "What are you guys doing here?" adding that "Normally we (Canadians) travel south to copy and steal from you!" "Well .. it's like this .. " they began to explain, "We've come to learn from you - because we want to know how you can survive as builders and developers when: we get a map of subdivision
in 90 days and you wait for 3 years ... I can't remember whether
they actually did learn anything ..... I never did hear any more from them. Silence can be very eloquent ... ! |
| Jun 22/00 | Who will win ... ? One of my sophomore
courses with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
The Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. In a broad sense they are the principles of a democratic government. Executive = career bureaucrats and ministries, or what remains as a (stable) continuum when the politicians are defeated at an election. Legislature = elected politicians that are supposed to implement the policies of their election platform (not exceed them) by making new laws and to respond to their constituency during the term of their elected office. Judiciary = Judges, statute and common law which can influence and actually control the activities of the Bureaucrats and Politicians. Such a system of Government
is idealistic, democratic and imperfect, It was no accident that THREE were chosen - to avoid the cosy company of TWO by delibereately creating a crowd so that absolute power is constrained. We know that power tends to corrupt and absolute power is likely to corrupt absolutely. We have seen the ascendancy of the Legislature (Politicians) grabbing power under the slogan of a "Common Sense Revolution". We have seen the Executive (Ministries) downsized and mutilated to produce scandals in Health, Education, the Environment and in the administration of Taxpayers Real Estate. We have seen Judiciary bodies such as the OMB populated to do the will of the Politicians. The payback of campaign contributions is generous and obvious. If we didn't have mandatory elections we would now be close to a totalitarian state. We need to return to a basic understanding of what we can do to improve our system and turn our backs on the hubris generated by policy advisors and spin doctors that want to turn Government into "Business" under a slogan of "common sense". Everyone knows that common sense is really uncommon, and that Government doing Business is moronic - actually oxymoronic! To propose a common
sense revolution is the thinking of a simpleton, especially when you
vote a 30% pay INCREASE for yourself as you hold the majority in the
Legislature Today, the Legislature (Politics) controls the Executive and the Judiciary. Considering
its performance, I think a 30% pay CUT is in order But how can you immediately
fire a greedy Government? Sadly, the lesson
(as in George Orwell's "Animal Farm") ---- unless YOU as a voter decide otherwise at the next election! |
| Jun 4/00 | Common Sense Revolution Unravels? The tragedy at Walkerton and Mike's flip-flop on handling the enquiry show a mean spiritedness underlying the common sense revolution. Mike dithered on deciding a judicial enquiry or a faster paced enquiry. Suddenly after two more deaths, he wants a judicial enquiry. Had two more people not died in this tragedy - then a fast paced common sense approach to enquiries would have been used. The flip flop to a more intensive, time-consuming and costly judicial enquiry is however a politically astute move, and no doubt motivated by the mounting negative public opinion on municipal downloading. To maintain power the Conservatives need to stem the rising tide of negative public opinion. The consequences of Mike's so called "common sense" downloading crucial responsibilities traditionally in the domain of Provincial Agencies to unprepared Municipalities are ominous. It suggests that there was no "common sense" given to risk management. In the case of Walkerton the implied question is .. "had certain vital monitoring responsibilities not been downloaded to unqalified municipalities, might this tragedy have been avoided ?" Throwing money at a 12 year old and saying "now manage your life" is hardly fulfilling competent stewardship. Saying "I gave you the money and you wasted it" - is irresponsible, incompetent and callous. What good is a capital (transfer) when the transferee (municipality) was never equipped to properly use it in the first place? The common sense
revolution is starting to unravel fast as we start seeing more examples
of callous provincial indifference to the plight of municipalities.
|
May 17/00 |
Season for Scandals Over the past three months we have enjoyed a festival of scandals all related to Land and Economics. Economics is a very neutral word - often considered the "Queen" of Sciences in academia, it is naturally attractive because it avoids the boredom of moralizing so long as it continues to tell fortunes and make frequent predictions. However, the expense account of the President of TREB, and the gracious lease deal of TEDCO amid the gurglings of the sinking ship ORC may point to the end of an era of downsizing. The economy booms and Mike continues to lose his temper with greater frequency. When Tessio's life
was about to be extinguished in Mario Puzzo's Speculation on the life of the Conservative party in Ontario is a favourite pastime these days, especially so on the question of fund raising and campaign contributions ..... in the tradition of Roman military strategies. Caesar's Gallic Wars
have an object lesson today ... But Mike faces a formidable political opponent in Mel who is relentless in exposing the Provincial hypocrisy of downloading liabilities and Provincial leadership to ill equipped Municipalities, even though the threats of separating from the Province into a new City State may sound hollow, they cannot be taken lightly since Mel is using Roman strategies as well! Expectedly, Ontario voters will eventually vote Mike out - as they did with Peterson and Rae. It is the tradition
and pattern of the voters in Ontario that leaders
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| May 13/00 | In
an effort to give credit 15 Real Estate Brokers reporting to For more details and contact information click right here We wish the Ontario Government marketing efforts all the best in getting the best deal from our invested tax dollars in the Province's real estate. They sure as heck need it |
| Apr 6/00 | Doing Business
Since writing the last piece and creating a link to , The Ides of March I am amazed that another 30 or so articles have appeared in the local press. Again, I wonder if anyone really cares about accountability, and the ancient concept of good exposure to the marketplace to obtain the best sale price for selling real estate. Some of the events described in the press sound like business horror stories that make amusing bedtime reading. It leaves you with the uneasy feeling that the dollars taken from you in tax to be invested in real estate by your government was really a terrible deal when later you find that you got only half of what everyone else was getting in the market place. Very few consultants or professionals have the courage to speak out on such issues since they don't want to miss out on a "lucrative" government assignment or be black listed from an invitation to provide quotations from the consultant rosters of government agencies. However, the standard
of doing so called government "business" Nothing new really. If you want that type of business write a few cheques to the party that you think will win the next election and hobnob with persons that look to be "appointed" as senior bureaucrats in your area of consulting practice. Everyone in government, or so it seems, wants to jump on the band wagon of "doing business". It can be very lucrative and effective for doing insider real estate deals. |
| Mar 11/00 | The
Ides of March So travel the further misfortunes of the embattled ORC. But reflect for a moment. When an organization is literally butchered from a staff of 1,800 to a 185 what else could one expect - except - assassination? No matter how angrily the leaders in the Ferguson Block clench their fists and tightly close their eyes imitating Virginia in the land of OZ, no amount of foot stamping and screaming "Just make it go away!" will make the incompetence and questionable dealings of the past and present disappear in a cloud of smoke. I doubt whether the taxpayers really care anyway. Personally, I believe their expectation from government is incompetence. However, the scandalous description of government "business" by local Journalists in the past few days provide a welcome humourous March break. I invite you to peruse the scriptures of the Ides of March The flippers are back in force, and real estate is booming again. |
| Feb 15/00 | Hype and tripe endure. The evolution of the web is grounded in this principle. The smurfing and "denial of distributed service", that recently shut or slowed down Amazon, eBay, CNN and Yahoo is proof. Scarcely a week ago the world (web) was coming to an end. Today, these fears are forgotten but many high tech stocks have risen - mostly companies specializing in computer security. Amazingly, the fortune tellers of doom predict their own successes .. !! The writers of code demonstrate their power by shutting down websites (hype), and fuel growth of the security paranoia (tripe), thereby protecting their own cashflow. Learning opportunities abound, and themes repeat. Curiously, the banks and leading financial institutions knew all about the attacks since they had ample warnings. Even more curiously they were "not allowed" to talk to law enforcement agencies about their advance knowledge. Elitism is now so blatantly obvious that governments are becoming more irrelevant as each day passes. One may justly ask "To what purpose is taxation - why not pay more to the banks and eliminate taxes?" More background |
| Feb 7/00 | Hire a 14 year old Keswick boy for illicit purposes. That was the message
of the Court Order obtained by Crown Prosecutor After locking out the owner of an online business, the hacker blackmailed the owner - a computer store . . . . . (are you laughing yet?) . . . and demanded $500 to unlock his system. It raises two interesting points. Firstly, the naive
belief of a Crown Prosecutor in the "integrity" of a convicted
hacker. Unfortunately, a deluge of supplementary issues come to mind; such as privacy on the internet (there isn't any), teenage children dictating your life and the apocalyptic inversion of order in society, to name a few. To make my point of no privacy, visit THE KEYHOLE where you can be a voyeur and watch people doing searches in real time on several of the most powerful search engines. You may recognize the search patterns belonging to a relative or acquaintance ... LOL .. Although the identity of the searchers are masked, don't for a minute believe that they are unknown. The trail of browser signature, requestor, path, dialup service, email address, all the details on the searcher are readily available. Our technologies now let us get the goods on anyone, anyplace, anytime. We need to shed all notions of privacy since the new world order is totally naked. |
| Feb 3/00 | More haste less speed
If you are fed up with the lengthy wait for the loading of web pages on sites that want to waste your time, do the following tweaking with your browser: In Netscape (I'm using
ver 4.7) In Microsoft Internet
Explorer (I'm using ver 5.00.2314.1003) The downside to all this speed is that the delivery of stuff to you has now become quite bland. No racy images, no sound ..... just the bare bones and a huge amount of time liberating you from the tyranny of the monitor. The choice to revert to previous (time wasting) settings is always yours. |
| Jan 31/00 | The Golden Rule
As one ages, there is often a deterioration in brain cells. I wonder whether the aging process prompted Microsoft (Gates) to appoint TWO former US Attorney Generals to act as lead defense counsel in the government anti trust action against Microsoft. Desperate times call for deperate measures. One speculates why two former employees of the government are hired to battle the government. The strategic decision is a sardonic comment on the culture of our time and the conduct of attorneys .... GENERALS at that! Modern courses in ethical conduct promote the "golden rule" in business and professional life. But it was ever ....... "He who has the gold .. makes the rules." |
| Jan 24 /00 | Hobbesian days
The themes of Ian Fleming and the world of James Bond are alive and flourishing. Maxim, a brilliant young hacker subverts the security codes of mighty corporations. He breaks into "secure" programs steals credit card numbers and publishes them on the web. Full details are published in The New York Times at a moment in our technological evolution that Supermarkets want you to shop online using your credit cards. I recommend a brief reversion to Hobbesian days and the use of cash or barter. In a discussion of the best form of the commonwealth, Hobbes came down in favor of the monarch, where the power is invested in one person. The chief advantage is that the monarch's public and private interests correspond exactly. (Compare the granting of stock options to corporate executives, on the grounds that if they have a personal stake in the company, they will perform better.) Could it be that the Banks routinely make obscenely record breaking years in profits and staff layoffs to provide a contingency fund for characters like Maxim? |
| Jan 17 /00 | Don't upgrade
After reading about how Bill Gates "stepped down" I couldn't resist chuckling to myself. I have always hated windows. It is all such a huge time waster with all the gushing ... ooos and aaaahs over the silly distracting GUI's. Gates's luck rode on IBM's stupidity over the licensing of DOS .. and the rest .... hohum .. is history. Nevertheless, one must admire the olympic arrogance of the writers of software code and the new world order of symbolic manipulators who pontificate that the software you use controls your business ... and indeed your life. They may indeed describe or qualify existence but ... control? - I don't think so! Gimme a break from all this McLuhan gibberish like "the medium is the massage" .... (end of rant) Voice mail, email and websites all tell us that the light is on. Sadly most of the time no one is home. How can you believe this "interactive" stuff? However, if you go back to being self reliant and tighten the odd screw, and fix a leaky tap you may enjoy http://www.aveo.com/index1.htm which claims to maintain your PC .... BEFORE a disaster happens, After installing it and waiting for it to "do something" for a few days, I wrote the authors and questioned its use. Unflatteringly, I referred to the icon's new presence on my tool bar as a wart. I decided to remove/uninstall it and noticed that the wart had disappeared along with my sound control. Eventually I was able to reinstall the sound control. Goes to show you that one should not be too hasty in using version 1.0 of a product especially when there is much talk of "partnerships", "relationships" and other vague verbiage to trap the naive into becoming beta testers while sheltering a "friendly trojan". No sooner are you
finished writing a piece then more of the jigsaw puzzle becomes clear.
Could it be that Microsoft's "release" of Gates is because
of what's happening with the new "Crusoe" chip to be manufactured
by the arch enemy big blue IBM? How can INTEL compete with such cheap
power? |
| Jan 10 /00 | The decline of Professional real estate services
President
Roosevelt said "We have nothing to fear except fear itself".
Sometimes I think we have "nothing to hype except hype itself".
Search engines belong to that realm. However, a visit to http://www.searchenginewatch.com/
I muse whether Gutenberg
would have bought Marconi's business. I'm inclined to conclude .... "probably not". A Global MLS at http://www.cyberhomes.com/ threatens to eclipse the mighty TREB. It is all in keeping with Peter Drucker the Arch-guru of capitalism pronouncing that "the scarcity axiom was becoming obsolete" - refer to the Globe & Mail article page B22 January 5, 2000 where he explains how some companies "give away information and receive more revenue in another way" Perhaps we will soon
be giving Appraisal and Brokerage services away (information) in order
to receive revenues in another way. |
| Jan 3 7/00 | Day One
Firstly, let me wish all visitors to these scribblings an outstanding next millenium. I'm sure most of us connected with the business of property are glad to see the end of the nasty nineties and are looking forward with a mixture of optimism for new business, and horror of yet more high tech and digitization.
Written in a free wheeling email style - meaning that one learns to read backwards- and excercise great care in the use of expletives, I hope that the offerings on this page will amuse, inform and entertain visitors as we begin to adapt to the information age - or is it really a disinformation age? If using the web drives you crazy with all the tricks that graphics do to freeze the loading of a page you want, this FREE add on software that filters out all the junk and lets you quickly get on with your work is a "must have".
If your work involves you in strategic research and planning, I strongly recommend a visit to http://canada.com/home/
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