Category Archives: rants

When it Comes To Transportation, North America is Getting Further Behind by the Day

Why? Because, if you ask a random North American what the fastest mode of travel is, he will say “plane” and when you ask him what the slowest mode of travel is, he will say “train”. And now that “safety regulations” require an average traveller to be at an airport at least 90 minutes before takeoff, if not two hours, when you add that to time on the tarmac and waiting for luggage at the other end, an average trip is at least two to three hours longer than flying time.

In comparison, you can get on the train, sit down, be moving in ten minutes, get off, and go. And if the train moved as fast as a plane, it would be faster. Much, much faster. And there’s no reason that it shouldn’t be. China has High Speed Rail (HSR) that travels at speeds up to 270 mph (the Maglev line in Shanghai, while the Harmony Express goes 250 mph). And now China is spending 745M US on domestic HSR expansion to build 19,000 miles of railway over the next five years.

And China is not alone in High Speed Rail. Japan has been doing it for years and Taiwan is also a big supporter. And it is not just Asia. HSR is also big in Europe. Germany has at least 10 lines that go 250 km/h or higher and HSR is spreading across Europe.

And now there is talk about a HSR line between Beijing and London that would go through Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, St Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Astana, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator, and Khabarovsk and get passengers to their destination in a mere 19 hours.

Just imagine what HSR could do in the US. At 250 mph, Bangor (Maine) to Los Angeles (California) would only take 11 hours. If these lines could do people or cargo, there would be no need for internal air travel, or for inter-regional truck transport. After all, flying time (which requires at least 1 connection) is 8 hours and adding in airport wait times, it’s much more than 11 hours.

But the US, like Canada (who probably can’t afford it since only a few cities have enough population to make it worth while), won’t even think about it. As a result, Europe and Asia are going to get an edge while North America falls further behind.

Another Article from the Land of D’oh – Jobs and Traffic Jams are Linked

A recent article over on the NYT blogs pointed out the stubborn link between jobs and traffic jams and noted that when the average national unemployment rate reached its lowest point (of 4.6% in 2006), the hours that commuters spent in traffic were 13% less than when the average national unemployment rate was close to its highest point (of 9.3% in 2009).

Why wouldn’t this make sense? The more people working, the more people trying to get to the same business centres at about the same time. The more cars trying to get through the same choke points in traffic flows, the slower traffic is going to go. As long as the personal vehicle is primary mode of transportation, obviously there’s going to be a big connection between employment rate and traffic jams. You don’t need a study to confirm this. Just some common sense (and, if you want to verify your common sense, a mathematical model).

Reader Education? What Was I Thinking?

I’m so naive! I thought that if I brought value to my readers each and every day, I could make a difference and build a profitable business at the same time. I thought as long as I avoided mastering the art of saying nothing and stayed off the Analyst 2.0 path, things would work out. How wrong was I?!

Forget education! The real key to financial success is stupidity and bad grammar! Cheezburger, the publisher behind LOLcats and FAIL Blog, just raised 30 Million. That’s right! 30 Million to publish pictures of cats who can’t spell and dumb failures. 

I guess SI should have jumped on the Purchasing 0.3 Bandwagon when it had the chance! Whomever succeeds the now defunct Purchasing is obviously poised for fame, glory, and riches. (And the battle is already raging …)

Want Money For Nothing?

Then take a lesson from these faggots* at the CBSC (Canadian Broadcast Standards Council) and censor classic songs from radio airplay because some prick*2 complained about the use of a word which has taken on an additional meaning in modern times.

For those of you who don’t follow global news, I’m referring to the recent decision by the CBSC to censor Dire Straits‘ classic Money for Nothing because one person in the backwoods of Newfoundland (amidst the Rocks and Trees) complained because it used the word “faggot”, which, in England, even today, is still used to refer to a bundle (of twigs, iron, or chopped meat), a junior who performs duties for a senior, and a guy (who may or may not be homosexual) who is just creepy. In the Dire Straits classic, while it is obviously being used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who has reached a station of life that he obviously does not deserve in the eyes of the song’s protagonist, it’s obvious that the contempt from which the comment springs from the song’s protagonist is non-sexual in nature and the definition (of the many that have been applied to the word since its inception almost 800 years ago) is more along the lines of “a guy who is a creep*3“. As such, there is no grounds for complaint and no grounds for censorship.

As far as I’m concerned, this decision is just disgusting. Not only was the song written well before the creation of the CBSC, but it was written before the creation of the CAB (Canadian Association of Broadcasters), which was the precursor organization. In my view, this should make the song ineligible for censorship. And even if it wasn’t, whatever happened to literary license and this thing called free speech?

While we’re at it, should we rewrite Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” which is an American classic that won the Pulitzer Prize in the year of its publication (1960) for its rather realistic portrayal of what life was like in the 1930’s in Alabama small towns? After all, from a modern perspective, the language in that book is much more offensive than Dire Straits’ use of the word “faggot” in Money for Nothing. Consider this line from Chapter 9: “My folks said your daddy was a disgrace an’ that nigger oughta hang from the water-tank!” Said with intent, it might even cross the line into hate speech, but that wasn’t the intent of the author who wanted people to understand what life was like in the 1930s.

In the same light, when Mark Knopfler use the word faggot, he was attempting to describe how hard-working labourers saw music stars at the beginning of the MTV generation. You played a few riffs, sang a few songs, and made a million dollars. They broke their backs and barely paid the bills.

Let’s not forget that a song is a story, and stories are not hate speech. They are artistic forms of communication meant to broaden our understanding of the world around us and the people in it. And if you don’t understand that, then a faggot*4 has more smarts than you do.

Have a nice day.
(And support Halifax’s own Q104 in their protest! F*ck you*5 CBSC. I hope you get one million complaints.)
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* where this blog is using the classic, now obsolete, meaning of the word faggot which was once used to refer to a “man hired into military service simply to fill out the ranks at muster” because I can’t believe they were hired on suitability for the job at this point

*2 where this blog is using the slang definition of the word which means “an obnoxious or contemptible person” because only a truly contemptuous person would complain about the use of a word completely out of context and insist that free speech be censored when no slur was made or intended

*3 note that the slang definition of creep is “an obnoxious person” and not “pervert” as some people seem to think it is these days

*4 in this case, the blog is using the other classic meaning of the word faggot, which is “a bundle of twigs”

*5 and I mean that in the most common utilization of the phrase in modern times

Ariba Redefines What?

I usually don’t make a point of promoting vendor blogs, or posts therefrom, as those posts are usually designed to promote the vendor that owns the blog (and, to be honest, the post I’m about to reference does promote the vendor’s solution to a limited extent), but this post over on Coupa Cabana (the Coupa blog) on how “Ariba Redefines What?” is totally awesome.

If you follow the press-releases (which, I must admit, I try not to as most of them are just steaming piles of marketing and PR BS, regardless of which vendor they come from), you’ll see that Ariba has recently announced that it has redefined enterprise software. (And if your first thought upon reading that isn’t Get Real! How stupid do you think I am?, then you need to read more of Sourcing Innovation’s rants, particularly my recent rant on the cloud. Or, if you don’t have time, just listen to Larry .) Puh-leaze!

If I knew where the Sourcing Maniacs were right now (as they have been missing in action for a year … they said they were going to visit their European Neighbors, and I haven’t heard from them since), I would have asked them to have their way with this announcement as Ariba is just asking for it with this one.

But, fortunately, Noah found it and he did a dissection that would make even Wacko proud. Ariba Redfines What? is a piece that truly put[s] it up to eleven.