New World Every Day

Kony 2012, the now viral – and controversial – internet sensation of the moment. Where the hell did THAT come from? While others battle it out over the YouTube monster, consider for a moment that Kony 2012 may be more than the sum of its parts. This is a generational thing. The folks born into the internet age, the people who know the world in no other way, are starting to come of age. They are my daughter at 15 years old. She has no memory of not being on the internet by computer or mobile. Eventually, this generation was going to grow into a force using the net in ways no one had ever dreamed possible. This new...
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Gas prices are rising. I suppose we are used to it by now. But this particular jolt  in the pocketbook makes no sense (he says, as if rising prices ever do). In the clutch of a historic economic recession, the demand for oil and oil products has been steadily falling across the western world. Less economic activity, less oil consumed. There is also real evidence emerging that commuters are commuting less, and that everyone responsible for a gasoline powered engine is husbanding it more. Going for a drive is now an event that needs considering. And yet, the price of oil continues to climb. One reason for this seeming anomaly is lost in the mysteries of monetary policy and...
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In 2005 Facebook was a new and exciting company still far from the 850 million online users it would have in 2012. Facebook founder and creator Mark Zuckerberg was flush enough with chutzpah to commission a homeless graffiti artist, David Choe, to dress up the new company headquarters with some edgy, sexually charged graffiti. Zuckerberg gave Choe the choice of being paid in cash or in stock options – Choe could accept a handful of paper promises that he could redeem for stock should the company someday issue stock, a distant and remote possibility at the time. For reasons only he understood, homeless Choe accepted the magic beans and turned down the cash. Seven years later, Facebook has launched...
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The Canadian housing market is clearly in a “bubble”. Who cares? Nobody. Nobody cares. The reasons for a Canadian housing bubble are simple, and the reasons nobody cares are equally simple. People should care of course, but they don’t and that’s because of the peculiar features of both housing, and bubbles. Each are angry spouses in an irreconcilable marriage in which only the children get hurt. The evidence for a housing bubble in Canada are everywhere. They are dramatic and compelling. In a world which has suffered a historic collapse in asset prices across the industrial west, where you can stand on the Canadian side of the Detroit river and visually see across the water the utter devastation the...
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For those who dream of someday being a rapacious capitalist pig, here is your opportunity to test your skills in the child eat child global marketplace. Maximize your profits selling useless crap to ignorant westerners by cutting and slashing your morality, ethics, and empathy. How low can you go? Test your resolve and max out those profits at the expense of child labourers who are clearly only too happy to get sick and die for a few bucks a week. “Sweatshop” is a wonderful game for all ages and free to play online but be warned, it’s not as easy to rape and pillage as you imagine, especially with an irritating music score that only adds to the moral...
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It’s one thing for igloo dwelling Occupy protestors to decry the ills of Capitalism in Davos Switzerland, where the kings of free markets have come annually for 40 years now to celebrate their good fortune. After all, the freezing protestors are among the 99% of shmucks who have to eke out a living under its crumbling tenants. But it is another thing entirely when those kings of global finance begin to admit that perhaps, the revolting masses may indeed have a point. Rumours were rife that all was not smug in the traditional mansions of power, however as the Davos conference unfolds, one after one, CEO’s, Politicians, and cufflink encrusted shadowy men of shadowy purpose have lined up at...
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