In today’s National Post, and elsewhere around the net, there is much commentary about the upcoming Copenhagen Conference where the UN and the Climate Change Priesthood will try to guilt the western world into signing on to a treaty that will cripple their economies and transfer wealth to the developing world.

• Peter Foster does a good job of explaining why the TD / Suzuki / Pembina report likely underestimates the economic consequences of trying to reduce carbon emissions.
• Kevin Libin and John Ivison do a good job of pointing out that Canadians need to wake up to the economic cost we will all be asked to bear.  Ivison also makes it clear that the government needs to provide clearer leadership on this subject and be more honest with the people.
• But the best is from Jack Mintz, who lays out the truth – not every nation is going to agree to curtail economic growth in the name of maybe reducing climate impacts a century or more in the future.  And the ones that do will suffer economic pain as industry moves to places that don’t restrict economic performance.  For any western country to sign on to this is economic suicide.
• The worst is Jim Harris, who claims that technological innovation is going to magically solve our problems.  He incorrectly compares the improvements in productivity created by the industrial revolution to the hoped for improvements in energy efficiency.  The fact is, a lot of energy use is extremely efficient.  Household furnaces are now available with >90% efficiency.  You can’t get to 100%.  The laws of thermodynamics say so.   You can’t insulate buildings to lose or gain no heat from their surroundings.  There is a limit to energy efficiency because delta S (entropy) must rise.   Coal or gas fired power plants can be up to 60% efficient – more requires circulating low grade hot water to heat buildings.  But that means moving the power plants to where the people are, which costs money because we already have 100 years of infrastructure built up.  It’s not going to change overnight.

Canada should skip the Copenhagen conference altogether.  The draft text of the treaty tells us enough that we don’t want to go near it.  We don’t want UN bureaucrats in Geneva or New York imposing sanctions or demanding tribute to the green gods because we don’t want to impoverish ourselves by shrinking the economy.

Net Neutrality is a growing issue, and watching Glenn Beck (yes, he is a blowhard, but sometimes he asked questions that need to be asked) last night I discerned that the term Net Neutrality is being used to two separate and unrelated concepts:

1. The original meaning (as I recognized) was the the Internet should be “neutral” to content providers and that the providers of the network should not treat data packets differently based on where they came from or what kind of content they contained.  It should not matter whether my data packet is part of a service that competes with a service the network provider offers .  It should not matter if the network provider offers the same kind of content (say, commentary, video, phone services) as another firm that doesn’t own the network.  The network provider should not be allowed to restrict access to the network to protect their competitive offering.  Now, this wouldn’t be as important if there were more network providers in the marketplace – but alas, in most places there are at most two firms who own portions of the backbone of the net, and in many only one.  Therefore, the monopoly (or duopoly) of network providers should be prohibited from restricting competition by content providers.  This is a freedom issue, and one that isn’t really a question of left or right.  It’s more libertarian vs. monopolist (whether the monopolist is the state or a corporation).
2. The second is the one I was made aware of on Glenn Beck’s show.  This is the issue of the Internet being neutral, or balanced, in the content it actual carries, along the lines of the old FCC fairness doctrine, or similar CRTC rules that prevent(ed) radio stations from leaning too hard to the left or right.   To me, this is political operatives, usually those in power, regardless of their position on the political spectrum, wanting to restrict access to content they find offensive or uncomfortable.  This is just censorship by another name.  The state should not be interfering in commentary or content that is on radio, television, the internet or in old fashioned print.  The free exchange of ideas is a critical part of our modern civilization – and if you destroy that you are undermining the foundations of how we got to where we are today.

So I say, I’m all for Net Neutrality version 1, but definitely not for version 2.

As for the recent CRTC decision saying throttling is OK as long as it’s use is transparent to the customer – I say bollocks!  The network providers will be able to hide this by simply saying “your network performance meets our targetted metrics” and I doubt they will ever set it up so that I know by the minute whether their throttling algorithms are affecting my data streams.

Terence Corcoran, in another of his excellent descriptions of the flaws of government bureaucracy, explains better than I can why the eHealth fiasco in Ontario is doomed to fail (as such things have failed elsewhere).  But the best part is this quote from Arnie Aberman:

It is unlikely that the government will succeed in developing one big EMR project — a better approach is to develop standards for communication between software and then let the market produce many different EMR products. After all, that is the way the financial industry succeeded in automating banking.

I have another idea.  Why don’t we let the banks manage the health care spend?  We need to make the money follow the patient – what better way than to give each consumer a credit card that is only good for health care.  When they get services, they present the card and the hospital or doctor bills to that account (which goes to the state insurer).  That way we can track exactly where the money is going.  And the banks will only charge us 1-2% for the service.   Seems better than trying to build a single monolithic network of a system.

In Wednesday’s Post, there was a letter from an economist with the United Steelworkers, Erin Weir, claiming that there are no labour shortages.  Today there may not be, although I would argue that Saskatchewan still has an unemployment rate so low that it is below the natural rate of unemployment.  In recent years, all of the western provinces were below the natural rate and therefore suffering labour shortages.

The problem that this union economist (i.e. socialist) has is that she still appear to believe in the fairy tale of “full employment”.

Additionally, with the immigration rate near 150,000 working age persons per year, the decline in employment is not as severe as it might seem.  It also won’t take long ( a year or two, perhaps) for Alberta and BC to be right back in the heat of economic growth that leaves unemployment below the natural rate.

The mobility problem in Canada is mostly about making it too attractive for people to stay in areas of high unemployment – essentially distorting the natural rate with government welfare.

OK – all of those who think that the government should create some kind of reason or regulation that would prevent the sale of Nortel and it’s wireless technology to Ericsson of Sweden – take a pill!

Nortel is an empty shell of a company, that is bankrupt and has gone through more than one accounting scandal in recent years.  It is a very good example of bad management.   It needs to be absorbed by a successful firm.  And RIM is not that firm.  RIM didn’t want to play by the rules that the bankruptcy court set out, while others (notably Nokia and Ericsson) were.  The bankrupty court did it’s job in balancing the rights of Nortel’s creditors and shareholders – of which RIM was neither and therefore doesn’t have any standing to complain.

And the opposition parties are simply using this as fodder to fire at the government, hoping anything will stick to Mr. Harper.  But there is no reason why Nortel’s technology or assets are important from a national security or national interest.  And government interference will tarnish Canada’s image as a fair and good place to do business.  What foreign firm is going to be willing to invest in this country if the government goes around deciding (for purely political reasons) to interfere in such transactions?   They will be fewer in number, and direct foreign investment brings money into Canada and increases our standard of living.

Just say yes to Ericsson’s purchase of Nortel wireless!

OK – another “Government trying to protect me from myself” issue has pissed me off.  I cannot purchase 2,4-D (Killex) or glyphosate (Round-Up) products in Calgary at any store, either due to municipal or provincial regulation, or simply fear mongering pushing the retailers into stopping the sale of these useful and safe substances.

Health Canada says 2,4-D is safe.  So why are the provinces and municipalities banning it?  Because eco-terrorists have lied to scare everyone into thinking they are toxic.  Part of my mind is tempted to give up and let the weeds take over my yard and become the seed-source for the entire neighbourhood.  Of course, then the city will come and tell me that I haven’t done my social duty to keep the city pleasant…   But I can’t because their rules prohibit me from doing this the easy way.

Does this remind anyone of the logic of the looters in Atlas Shrugged?  Who is John Galt?

While I am not involved in the specific field, I found the book “Why New Systems Fail: Theory and Practice Collide” educational.

This brief text is written in a casual style that makes it easy to read, while at the same time seeming less “professional” and less likely to be taken seriously by senior executives in corporations that might be about to make the mistakes the author, Phil Simon, clearly identifies.  But he does identify a lot of completely valid reasons why new enterprise software implementations are not the successes that are hoped for when they are begun.

However, based on my experience in the engineering and construction business, where we execute large, complex projects, many of the lessons are transferable (and in fact seem strangely familiar).  Failure to plan effectively, failure to consider that things will not go perfectly, failure to schedule with some slack or float to allow for recovery should things go off the rails during one stage or another.

Additional flags are about not selecting consultants or providers based solely on the apparently up-front cost – the idea of you get what you pay for appears to be as true in enterprise software as it is in heavy construction.

Having also spent some of my career trying to develop, implement and support data management software for engineering (not exactly enterprise class) and discovering that we had all the same problems – significant underestimation of the resources it would take to accomplish the task, failure to ask enough questions of the commercial-off-the-shelf software vendor about what the product could and couldn’t actually do (or how much customization it might take), and failure to sufficiently understand the problem we were trying to solve – which resulted in what Mr. Simon would call either a “Big Failure” or and “Unmitigated Disaster”.

Anywho – if you are interested in enterprise (or other) software development and implementation, or any manner of project execution – this is a good read.