Author: Dan Dickinson

700 people with one pig? Wonderful, magical animal indeed.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Back in April I blogged about how the federal government is subsidizing a massive cull of swine. The economic wisdom behind this is pretty questionable, but that aside it seemed a huge waste. My articulate plea: “Just give it to some food banks, for chrissakes.”

Well, it turns out that some provinces are. Quebec just announced that they’d donate about 300,000 kg of pork from the cull to food banks. Ditto Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, according to the story; not sure what’s holding up the other provinces.

One of the comments in the CBC story linked above is funny:

Because it makes sense to do this, I am actually surprised it will be done.

Exactly. I’m waiting for some governmental agency to step in with a health concern, or some right-wing think tank to complain about how soft we’re being on lazy-ass hungry people.

[tags]pork farmers, pig cull, food banks[/tags]

What I've learned about this term paper

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment
  1. I’m really, really interested in this topic. This creates a paradox, since I’m incredibly uninterested in spending time writing about it.
  2. The Mogwai soundtrack to Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait (imdb) is great work music.
  3. I’m so glad I bought an Aeron chair last year. As it is my ass is sore; I can’t imagine sitting in my crappy old chair for 20 hours this past weekend.
  4. It will be very, very applicable to my company, not that it’ll make much of a difference. Not that that will stop me from sending it around to a thousand people.
  5. I would rather poke myself in the eye with a live hummingbird than spend another night working on it.

[tags]mba, term paper[/tags]

The clone wars

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Attention Toronto douchebags: you need a new wardrobe.

In the short time it took me to run three miles today, I saw four of you walk by wearing exactly the same thing: camouflage cargo shorts, pastel polo shirt w/ popped collar (this is crucial; the popped collar elevates one beyond the level of plain old wannabe and into the douch-y heavens), flip flops and aviator sunglasses. You also all had the same spiky hair.

While I admire your willingness to beat down any niggling scrap of individuality or free thinking you might’ve once been infected with, you may have taken it too far. I don’t think that even your mother could pick you out in a crowd anymore.

Baaaaaaa.

[tags]douchebag, popped collar[/tags]

Even better than cardamom made

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

More summerlicious-ness tonight, this time at Amaya. I’d heard great things about it, but…wow. Fantastic. I had the savory chaat, seafood xacutti, frozen mango mousse and a couple of Kingfishers. Nellie had the pakoras, vegetarian thali and spiced brownie. She also had a glass of wine, and T-Bone had a couple; it’s a good place to get wine as the two owners are sommeliers, and that knowledge and enthusiasm for wine seems to have trickled down to the servers.

If you want more detail, the full menu is on the Summerlicious site. I’m still full, but my mouth is watering again just reading it.

All that, and it was half the cost of our disappointing night at Lobby earlier in the week. No question about it: we’ll be heading back there soon.

[tags]amaya restaurant, summerlicious[/tags]

That's America's skinny toque, thank you very much

Dan Dickinson3 Comments

Richard Florida’s blog often points the way to some very interesting stats, but it’s rare to see a cross-border comparison like this: the percentage of obese adult population, broken by down state/province/territory.

Of the 50 + 10 + 3 regions, Canada would represent the six least obese, and eight of the top ten. I’m rather surprised by this; I didn’t think the lifestyle differences were that pronounced. I guess it’s because I tend to compare Canada to the northeastern US states, and that map gets decidedly more orange/brown as you move southeast (except for Florida, where all the Canadian retirees are bringin’ up the average!).

[tags]richard florida, obesity[/tags]

One step forward…

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

The (somewhat) good news for Canadian wireless customers: Rogers has caved and come up with a less horrid plan for the iPhone. You get 6GB for $30, but only if you sign up before Aug 31. And you still have to get a 3-year contract.

The bad news: Bell and Telus are using this opportunity, when all the ill will and reporting is aimed at Rogers, to announce that they’ll now be charging for incoming text messages, not just outgoing. From CTV:

Telus spokesperson Shawn Hall told CTV News the reason for the “moderate charge” is to “recover the cost of the investment we’re making in the network to handle the exponential growth in text messaging.”

Um, hang on. That doesn’t so much make with the, you know, sense. They’ve always charged $0.15 to send a message, right? And judging by their statement, the economics used to work. Let’s say that 5 years ago when there were (I’m making this up; the exact numbers don’t really matter) 1,000,000 text messages send, Bell made $150,000 and paid $150,000 for the infrastructure to support that (again, based on their earlier statement). Presumably that was a combination of the maintenance/operational cost and amortization on the hardware that they set up years before. So let’s say that there are now (again, making this up) 10,000,000 text messages sent; Bell would receive $1,500,000 and, unless texting hardware/software has gotten more expensive (and I’m really betting that it hasn’t), they would pay $1,500,000 to maintain it. Except that Bell will now earn $3,000,000 and pay $1,500,000, for a tidy profit (regardless of what the actual numbers are). Even if Bell has to upgrade their infrastructure to accommodate the additional volume, they can take the up-front hit and net out ahead as the equipment depreciates.

It would appear that Bell and Telus are dressing up a cash grab as a pity play. Oh, you customers love texting so much we’re just going to have to buy some new toys, but we’ll have to charge you extra. Rubbish. You’re a for-profit company, it’s well within your rights to look at the demand in the market and say, “Hey, people love texting so much that we could charge twice as much for it and volume wouldn’t go down by half, so it makes a ton of sense for our bottom line. Let’s do that.” Don’t pretend it’s to improve customer satisfaction. Look at how well that worked for banks with ATM “convenience fees”.

[UPDATE] While it’s unsurprising that the NDP would protest such a consumer-unfriendly fee, when you get the Conservative industry minister fighting you, you’ve probably gone too far.

[tags]rogers, telus, bell, canadian data rates, text messages[/tags]

I am prepeparing to kick your ass.

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

From the Globe and Mail: Going forward, rise up against crapspeak

Recently, a decree went around to local authorities in England and Wales – town and county councils, mostly – from the body that governs them, forbidding use of a long list of popular crapspeak terms. The Local Government Association sent out a list last week of 100 “non-words” for councils to avoid. According to The Associated Press, the list exhorted government officials to replace “revenue stream” with income and to avoid cryptic code words such as “coterminosity,” meaning an overlap of administrations. “Stakeholder engagement” can easily be replaced by “talking to people,” the chairman of the association said.

Almost simultaneously, a writer for the BBC’s online magazine posted a rant about the mindless cheeriness of the most popular catchphrases in business. Lucy Kellaway is on a campaign against “going forward” in particular, which, as we have noted, is used by every inarticulate person who wants to make some reference to the future. She accuses business folk, with their optimistic blue-skying and reaching out, and leveraging, all their synergies and passionate commitments to visions, of being brainlessly upbeat. “All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing, in fact, grind one down,” she writes. “The reality is that business is the most brutal it has been for half a century.”

I couldn’t agree more. I hate having to listen to this every day. Actually, “going forward” might be one of the most egregious examples, along with “leverage” and “touch base offline.” Those make me want to claw my own ears off.

[Inspired by Currency Tim]

[tags]crapspeak, globe and mail[/tags]