In this TED Talk Dan Ariely presents his research into what motivates people to do work and how they feel about their workplace. The findings are interesting because it’s not necessarily what people do but the reactions to what has been done that provides motivation.
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$3.1 Billion is missing according to a damning audit of the Harper Government. Let’s see what political pundits recently have said about audit failure: Federal government audit ‘severely critical’ - The Star headline “The independent audit [...] speaks for itself, and we accept its conclusions and recommendations,” said Jan O’Driscoll, spokesperson for the Minister. [The auditor] called the lack of records “inappropriate for any recipient of public funds.” - The Star “I cannot in my lifetime recall such a devastating audit. [...] A stunning indictment.” - Ian Lee of the Sprott School of Business “It (Read more…) Have you ever heard of the island of Saipan? It is an American territory in the pacific, where I had never heard of it until an email arrived from Walt Goodridge, who offered me two ebooks to review. One tells the story of a Chinese woman working in textile factories in Saipan. The other is a children’s book about a Philippine boy who wishes to be reunited with his father who works in Saipan.The books are great books. The children’s book, by Bonnie Riza Ramos, is called The Boy Who Dreamed to be With His Parents on Saipan and it captures both happiness and sadness. The boy has what he calls a long-distance family, and he dreams of being reunited with his father who works in Saipan. Yet this goal takes his mother away from him too for a while in order to obtain the training and work experience for the job she wants in Saipan . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: the complicated problem of sweatshops Have you ever heard of the island of Saipan? It is an American territory in the pacific, which as a Canadian I had never heard of it until an email arrived from Walt Goodridge, who offered me two ebooks to review. One tells the story of a Chinese woman working in textile factories in Saipan. The other is a children’s book about a Philippine boy who wishes to be reunited with his father who works in Saipan.The books are great books. The children’s book, by Bonnie Riza Ramos, is called The Boy Who Dreamed to be With His Parents on Saipan and it captures . . . → Read More: Christy’s Houseful of Chaos politics » Christy’s Houseful of Chaos: the complicated problem of sweatshops If Justin Trudeau was more concerned about winning the Liberal leadership than winning the next election, not only would his party have more registered supporters, but 2015 would almost certainly look more rouge. It may seem counter-intuitive to blame the ever-popular Justin Trudeau for the Liberal Party’s lower than expected supporter registration numbers, after all his campaign was so successful in signing them up, but in resting on his laurels and saving funds for the next election, Trudeau is exactly the person to blame. The current problem for the Liberals is that of the almost 300,000 Canadians who signed up . . . → Read More: The Scott Ross: Liberals Should Blame Trudeau For Few Supporters The other day I sent off a bunch of handwritten letters. They varied depending on whom I wrote them to. The one to the Ontario NDP leader, Andrea Horwath, went like this. Dear Ms. Horwath, Though I am not personally on Ontario Works, I have many conversations with those who are. They are scared. Rents are increasing and the money they receive is not nearly enough. They need an immediate increase in funding, but that’s not what I’m writing about. I’m writing to say that when someone on Ontario Works ends up homeless and couch-surfing, she should be allowed to save . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: an open-letter about social assistance in Ontario All the attention focused on how costly it is to make pennies is worth less than any piece of copper. For much of last year the most popular cited reason, the go-to justification for scrapping the penny was that making one costs more than what it’s worth. Simple economics, or even simple logic shows that is completely false. Government officials and media often reported that because it cost 1.6 cents to make a penny Canada was losing money with every one it minted, however that’s not how printing and coining money works. Making a penny at the cost of . . . → Read More: The Scott Ross: Penny Wise, World Foolish: Pennies Never Cost A Cent A few days ago I had a conversation with a woman on Ontario Works (welfare). She described what she goes through in order to get emergency dental care. She has to go first to her worker and a funding card. Then she goes to try to find a dentist that will accept the funding. Not all dentists will accept it since the government will pay the dentist only 50 – 60% of the ODA fee guide rates and the dentists are basically being asked to subsidize the government’s program by accepting half rates. Even once she finds a dentist she has . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: What is social assistance really about anyway? Via YouTube: Dan Mathews has done us all a favor, with his educational documentary, as he reveals common misconception in how we deal with banks. Watch and laugh as Dan catches our politicians off guard with some simple questions. These questions are simple, but you’d be surprised who actually has trouble answering. In the end READ MORE One Model of How Things Work I’m thinking today about work, both productive work like building houses or caring for sick people, and less productive work like packaging bad mortgages for resale or designing marketing strategies for cigarettes. I’m thinking about this because I’ve read a number of comments recently from people on facebook saying things like that work is available for anyone who wants or that there’s too many people not working. I’m thinking about the phrase “all mothers work.” It’s a phrase I’ve heard in response to the idea that mothers are divided between those who really . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: work: both paid and unpaid There’s a bit of hand wringing going on around Facebook amongst typically the anti-Harper crowd. Normally I’d join in, because it’s worth wringing hands over practically everything our Prime Minister has going wrong in our country. One thing he’s managed to not get wrong, is ending the penny. It’s a relic, and I’m very much for preserving history, but I don’t need to carry historical currency in my pockets when it is worth only a fraction of what a penny was worth when I was a kid in the 1980s. Why shouldn’t you worry about retailers making at most a . . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: Don’t Care About Penny Salami Slicing “Writers deserve to get paid for their work” says a popular blogger in defense of putting her blog behind a paywall. The arguments and comments made by her fans and detractors alike fascinate me because they touch on several important issues such as what work is and what we use money for. While some online forums, resource webpages and newspapers do use paywalls, the majority of us are unused to paying for blogs. Yet we are willing to pay money for books and magazines, so why not blogs? One could imagine an internet where five or ten cents is automatically . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: blogging about blogging A Swiss-based company has introduced credit card size sheets of gold that can be broken like a chocolate bar into 1 gram pieces, and they are rapidly growing in popularity across Europe – especially in Germany, where the people still remember the massive devaluation of the currency and the pain of hyperinflation. The current market [...] I went last week with some friends into the Ontario Disability Support Program office (ODSP) and the Ontario Works (OW) office. It was my first time being in the building. I was struck by the difference between the carpeted and better furnished ODSP office and the bare floored empty waiting room of the OW office, as though the very rooms themselves where meant to emphasis worth of one group of clients over the other. Clients on ODSP receive almost double the amount a person on Ontario Works receives, and they are not required to apply for job after job as a person on OW is. When the provincial government talks about merging the two programs, I hear people on ODSP voice their fear. They are scared to be treated as people on OW are. I was stuck also by the security measures. The secretary is behind glass. There are meeting . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: thoughts after a visit to the social assistence offices I’m getting ready to return the book Paved With Good Intentions: Canada’s development NGOs from idealism to imperialism by Kikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay back to the friend who lent it to me, but I want to make a few notes about ideas I found interesting. I know a different friend who blogged about the same book, so I want to include a link to his blog here too, though I’ve been careful not to read his assessment of the book till I finished writing mine. The book outlines several ways in which development NGOs actually assist imperialistic motives. . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: my thoughts on Paved With Good Intentions: Canada’s development NGOs from idealism to imperialism So, myself, Joey Oberhoffner, Derrick Jacobson (@AlbertaAltruist), Marc Doll (@DollHouseYYC), and Stephen Anderson (@StephenDAnderso) got together to eat tacos. For charity. For every taco eaten we’d get our pledges to donate. Pretty simple. Also, pretty awesome. With an anonymous donor matching up to $5,000, we just had to eat as many tacos we could. And [...] The Conservatives have had a (deservedly) rough week, and it’s about to get more rough next week. The Council of Canadians’ court challenge is Monday. The Prime Minister closed out the final news cycle hour this week by actually taking questions from the press, (which has hardly ever happened before). The Conservatives procedural pushed a public petition calling for a Royal Commission inquiry into Robocalls, to next week. Will they prorogue first? .@impolitical Yeah, this from a PM who had a convicted fraud, Bruce Carson, advising him on oil matters. @pmoharper #cdnpoli #nexen— Saskboy . . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: ConCalls: Week of Hell #RoboCon 
 China, Conservatives, crime, democracy, election, f-35, Greens, Harper, MacKay, media, Money, News, newspapers, oil, politics, Robocon, Uncategorized, United States My children watched part of Back to the Future III a few days ago and afterwards expressed surprise at the amount of walking on train tracks that happens in the show. “Isn’t that dangerous?” they asked and I fumbled to explain how the absolute risk wasn’t that high but that it was still a completely unnecessary risk, and thus why we don’t do it. Then I was watching an episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9 and noting the scenes where the two kids, Jake and Nog, are always sitting on the balcony above the promenade, dangling their legs down, and all I could think of watching it is, why don’t they put a different type of railing up? Sure, they have Odo the security officer telling the kids to move, but wouldn’t it be more efficient to have a plexiglass barrier instead of the two horizontal rails? So I’m . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: safety, efficiency, cost of human lives and work As I was becoming involved with my local Coalition Against Poverty, I found myself surfing the webpages of other poverty reduction groups. The Peterborough Poverty Network has a wonderful poster listing 101 Ways to Reduce Poverty. Many of their suggestions are local to Peterborough, but some of them are relevant anywhere. Some of them are not so much reducing poverty as helping to reduce the effects of poverty. I want to share a few of their suggestions, and a few of my own: A couple of their suggestions: Lobby your sports teams, clubs, etc to provide a few free memberships each year. Carpool. . . . → Read More: Another Step to Take: A Handful of Ways to Reduce Poverty Canada is holding out its hands asking for change, our country is in poverty and it needs our help. Where other countries are working to reduce their poverty like responsible world citizens, Canada is doing nothing. And worse yet it can’t even hope to lift itself out of poverty because Canada doesn’t even know what poverty is. Unlike other developed countries including the United States and many European nations, Canada doesn’t have an official poverty line. Unable to quantify progress, our country is like a beggar on a street corner, only collecting enough money from taxpayers to scrape by and . . . → Read More: The Scott Ross: Canada Is Missing The Poverty Line Now @JephMaystruck is reppin' the book Brandwashed by Martin Lindstrom – solid read #SYPElunch— Jackson Middleton (@KiltedBroker) September 19, 2012 Everything in our world is a commodity – everything is either bought or sold and will be recommended or not. #SYPElunch— Jackson Middleton (@KiltedBroker) September 19, 2012 I read Jackson’s comment about Maystruck’s presentation and “Brandwashed”, and it stuck out in my mind. It came back to me when Hedges talked about it last night, and I found the comment in a speech he gave at UofT almost two years ago, before Egypt’s uprising took place. . . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: Commodity In the Real World fuel economy standards.jpg A proposed rule by the Obama Administration to raise fuel economy standards for cars and “light-trucks” is facing mounting attacks by Republican lawmakers. The proposed rule would require all newly manufactured automobiles that fall under the car or light truck category to achieve a minimum gas mileage of 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025. The crusade against the new CAFE standards is being led by Republican Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Issa claims that the new standards amount to “coercion” of the auto industry. . . . → Read More: DeSmogBlog: Fuel Economy Standards To Save U.S. Consumers Billions, Create Jobs, Yet Republicans Say Too Expensive Focus groups are good at focusing. If there is a strong racist voice in the group, they might start to focus on race. When I heard the news this morning mention the Bank of Canada changed the image of a woman on the $100 because she wasn’t white-bread enough, I thought I must have missed something. I couldn’t understand what the point was. That’s because there isn’t a point. It’s pointless racism, plain and simple, and formalized by the Canadian bank. (I also immediately pulled one of the $100 bills I keep from under my pillow {kidding}, and checked . . . → Read More: Saskboy’s Abandoned Stuff: The Problem With Racists science-and-money.jpg As a whole, Americans have an unfortunate tendency to distrust scientists. The number of those who distrust science and scientists is skewed heavily by ideology, with self-identified “conservatives” overwhelmingly saying that they don’t trust science. DeSmogBlog’s own Chris Mooney has spent an enormous amount of time and energy devoted to finding out why science has become so controversial, and has compiled a great new book explaining why certain sectors of the U.S. population are more prone to denying many scientific findings. And while most of the distrust that Americans have for scientists and science in general is . . . → Read More: DeSmogBlog: Fracking Industry Paying Off Scientists For "Unbiased" Safety Studies Ryan Romney.jpg With the selection of Wisconsin Republican Representative Paul Ryan has his running mate, Mitt Romney has effectively pushed his campaign into the climate change denying fringe. While Romney hasn’t been considered a friend of the environment since he began running for national office, his tendency towards flip-flopping made some of his more extreme, anti-environment positions rather toothless. But Paul Ryan is someone that isn’t just all talk, and what he’s saying will be a disaster for our environment. While Ryan isn’t necessarily a complete climate science denier, he is certainly classified as a “skeptic,” and oftentimes . . . → Read More: DeSmogBlog: What To Expect When You’re Electing: Representative Paul Ryan |
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