If you think Samsung can’t get over blowing up batteries and Telsa can do no wrong… your wrong 🙂 . Samsung moved up 28 places between 2018 and 2019 while Tesla dropped a stunning 39 places in the same period. The following research conducted by Harris Insights and Analytics with Axios Research is an annual consumer survey that ranks the the top 100 companies. It is different from most surveys because it is done in two parts. The first part…
Imagine a scenario in which a major Canadian based company is facing the prospect of being seriously damaged as a result of their own wrongdoing, nearly a decade ago, in a third world country like India or Algeria, but not inside Canada or any of its notable partners. Imagine that company lobbying to admit their guilt, change management, pay massive fines in the $250M range and have a knife held to their throat for a decade to make sure they…
The Backfire Effect is part of a larger physiological phenomenon called Confirmation Bias. Confirmation Bias is the human desire to seek information that backs up what we already believe and avoid information that disproves our beliefs. A Backfire occurs with more emotionally drawn positions, like politics or abortion, that causes us not only to disregard information that disproves our beliefs but actually see such information as an attack requiring is to further entrench our (wrong) position. In simple terms the…
In this short video we took a 10 minute discussion about the Canadian economy an focused on the discussion about how Quebec’s SNC Lavalin is treated so differently from Western Canada’s Oil and Gas industry. If you have the time, the full discussion is quite interesting and you can watch it here on the BNN Bloomberg site: PART 1 and PART 2
Do any of the people or cats in the photos below look familiar to you? They shouldn’t because not one of them is of a real. These “photo’s” are also not, as you might think, just assemblies of assorted inventory pictures like noses, eyes and hair. No, these are all effectively paintings made by two artificial intelligence (AI) engines working back and forth to perfect the images. The first AI builds and image and sends it to the second AI that…
The latest round of American Presidential Candidates has shown that those on the left of the political spectrum are just a as willing to ignore facts and as the political right. This is a potentially catastrophic death spiral. In today’s world voters need to think more and listen less as leaders on both sides of the political spectrum drive to emotion and ignore facts. Politics has always been a perception business and at its heart, the political system is a…
The China vs United States Trade war is a constant discussion in “The West” and is highly visible because it causes companies like Apple to talk about raising consumer prices. China is very different from the United States and here is why the Chinese consumer has very little concern about the Trade War: MEDIA: The Chinese Government controls the media and they are tamping down emotions. Compare this to President Trumps approach of screaming about the trade war daily which…
In the video below Canada’s top civil Servant Michael Wernick explains what is wrong with the media coverage of the SNC-Lavalin Case. He starts by explaining that there are many things in Canadian Politics that worry him: Inflammatory language “like treason and traitor” from social media and supposedly responsible politicians alike Physical violence against politicians “I am afraid someone is going to get shot this year during the political campaign” Foreign interference Reputation of people trying to help their country being…
There is much talk about “Deferred Prosecution Agreements” because of the SNC Lavalin bribery scandals. The insinuation from many media outlets is that a Deferred Prosecution Agreement lets companies go without punishment. This is far from how DPA’s actually work. Here are the top five things everyone should know about Deferred Prosecution Agreements: 1 – What a Deferred Prosecution Agreement Is: A Deferred Prosecution Agreement effectively has the company plead guilty and do whatever the Government prosecutor wants them to…
Much is being made about the 12% decline in new vehicle sales in Alberta this past December. It is being attributed to the price of “Western Canadian Select” oil collapsing in the fall of 2018 and the Notely NDP Governments response to it. Also, Oshawa Ontario’s GM plant closure has caused much news relating to how many vehicles are sold in Ontario and how the plant closure will affect GM sales going forward. We wanted to know what the numbers…
There is a lot of hype around possible political interference in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin Libyan & Algerian bribery scandals involving Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Prime Ministers Office and former Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould. However, we want to know why the Canadian Government is still so aggressively going after SNC in the first place. Karl Moore of McGill University explains in the video below that SNC Lavalin has already repeatedly admitted guilt and paid massive fines in various…
I have helped the Alberta Wild Rose a.k.a. United Conversation Party (UCP) and the Federal Conservatives in many ways over the decades. From telecom equipment, to consulting, to canvasing, to paying for advertising, to IT support, to donations, to… well you get the point. However I have found it increasingly difficult to support the Alberta UCP and the Federal Conservatives in recent years and today may have been the breaking point. I was out shoveling my neighbors driveways when I…
If the insane value gyrations, scams and exchange failures of crypto currencies have not scared you away from them, this story should do the trick. QuadrigaCX was a Canadian based Crypto Currency Exchange until a few days ago when the founder, Gerald Cotten, died and took the decryption codes to his grave. This means about CDN $200M of ‘investor’ money is forever lost in hyperspace. To make this story worse, the are some very smelly peculiarities to it: It is extremely unusual that…
The “Oil Curse” or “Curse of Oil” or “Resource Curse” is the net negative outcome that is seen with any single industry that takes over a geographic area. The central idea is that when oil is discovered in an undeveloped land, like rural Africa, the initial promise of great wealth results in rapid development and that leads to what economists call ‘externalities’. Externalities are charges that should be calculated as part of the cost of development but instead are pushed…
There is a lot of conversation around various sources of pollution but many of them have no context so you really can’t get a mental grip on how serious the problem really is. Below is a chart we built with data collected by the University of Calgary. We hope it will help you put things in perspective. This data is specific to Canada in 2015 and while the numbers are shown in the outermost ring and in the table below,…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has constant news coverage today and global thinkers like Elon Musk and Bill Gates warn of a dangerous future. A dystopian world run by robots and computers powered by AI not unlike that shown in the Hollywood blockbuster Terminator 2 is one that could come to pass, but it is highly unlikely to occur in your children’s lifetime. The original title of this article was “What’s In A Name? Change Algorithm to Artificial Intelligence & You Have your…