The Generation Gap Theory

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” – Mark Twain

Famous words by Mark Twain emphasize my recent observations…

In my previous post called re-80’s, I talked about the cycles of music. I think this cyclic nature is ubiquitous. You see it in music, fashion, politics, and the economy. Not an exact duplication, but almost a refinement. Not a repeat, but a rhyme.

Funny thing is the frequency of this cycle seems to be about 25 years or so. So if this is correct it could explain a few things.

If a parent generation has children in their teens or later in their 30s, a culture gap forms between the generations. If this happens on a large enough scale, say as part of a baby boom, then it’s recognized socially as a generation gap.

Wish I had the time and resources to prove this theory. Until then this theory will simply be stuck in my head…

Gaza Woes

Was curious what instigated the protests world-wide, so I surfed for some answers.

Here’s some background I just discovered by the Human Rights Watch regarding the situation.

Year in Pictures

BBC released their best photos of 2008 related to the top stories of 2008.

Canadian Federal Candidates on Twitter

Follow the Canadian Federal Candidates on :

• Steven Harper
• Jack Layton
• Stephane Dion aka LiberalTour
• Elizabeth May
• Gilles a no-show on Twitter … didn’t picture him to be a twitter type of guy :-)

Funny thing.. as soon as I started following our PM.. he started following me:

Talk about big brother watching you…

Napoleon is dead, long live… The Borg?

Been doing a lot of traveling for work these days which gave me a lot of airplane time to listen to my audiobooks.

Currently in the middle of the book, The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

The book relates the hierarchical style of an organizations vs. a flat or community style. Lot’s of storytelling here including how the advanced hierarchical Aztec society was taken down easily by the Spanish by walking into each city and the killing their king. However, when they encountered the Apache Indians who were a distributed community society, it wasn’t so easy.

It then relates this to today with what’s happening thanks to the internet and entities like eMule and Skype.

… and the disruption they’ve caused in the music and telecommunication industries. The music industry successfully sued Napster out of the free P2P market, but only to be replaced by others who were lawyer proof.

Chop a spider’s head off and it dies… cut a starfish in half and you end up with 2 starfish. The benefits of a distributed neural network.

The A in Apple stands for Al

Al Gore (former US VP) was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts to spread the word about Global Warming.

This brought about a lot of controversy over the true criteria for the prize. Global Warming ~ Peace?

But Apple is certainly proud! … Did you know Al has been on Apple’s board of directors since 2003? I didn’t!

Technically he was awarded 1/2 the prize along with the IPCC. It’s interesting how the Nobel site declares the prize and its portioning.

Will be enough to bring Gore back to US politics? I believe so…

Family Day! Thanks Dalton

October 11, 2007, the day after being re-elected into office, Primier Dalton McGuinty declared Family Day as an official holiday in the province of Ontario. The holiday will occur on the third Monday of February. This brings Ontario’s long weekend total to 9!

I will have to admit, at the start of this election, I wouldn’t have predicted Dalton McGuinty winning after his misuse of voters’ trust, never mind running away with another majority government. But once he was in, he didn’t waste anytime in making good of one promise made September 3, 2007, to help redeem that trust.

I’m all for the extra holiday (naturally). But more importantly, I’m glad to see some light in what is often seen as the gloomiest month of the year in Ontario.

I can see the marketing wheels turning already. Yet another Halmark moment. Can’t wait for the Family Day sale at FutureShop!

What Referendum?

If you are a citizen of Ontario, did you know that you will also voting on a referendum issue this October 10th? Do you know what MMP stands for? Make sure you do your research before you vote.

Just watching The Agenda to educate myself on the issue, and I must say I’m quite impressed.

I’ve always respected Steve Paikin. Great host, also very intelligent. But now I’m also impressed with the show. After 1 hour of air time, the show goes off the air… well sort of. It continues for another 30 min online with live video streaming, chat, and the ability to submit a question to the panel of guests. I wish all talk shows followed this format.

First time I watched more than 30min of TVOntario without a purple dinosaur jumping around.

Dollar Parity + eBay = Drop in Canadian Prices?

With the Canadian dollar at par with the US dollar, will this result in lower prices on goods in Canada? As you guessed, we likely won’t see prices drop too fast up here as a result.

But with online shopping malls like eBay.com and Amazon.com (notice I said .com not .ca), what would stop Canadian shoppers from online shopping across the boarder in order to take advantage of the exchange rate?

So I decided to test it out… Yup, the book Wikinomics is 15% cheaper on Amazon.com than Amazon.ca, taxes and shipping included! However, you would receive it a lot faster by ordering from the Canadian site. Time to invest in FedEx.

Though here is one example of an immediate price drop… Canadian price of a 2008 Porsche Carrera 4S Cab. down 8% from 2007!

What a steal! … My wife unfortunately wasn’t convinced.

Machines will take over Canada!

As the Canadian dollar heads closer and closer to parity with the US dollar, the Canadian manufacturing industry is sweating buckets.

What are experts recommending? With the dollar so high, the recommendation is to take this as an opportunity to buy technology to streamline processes and reduce manufacturing costs, resulting in competitive products produced up north. Even more competitive if the dollar then drops.

Simply put, they are advising to buy machines to replace human labour… Leading us right into the hands of the machines’ evil plans! :)