The idea that Canadian postal workers can possibly gain anything from a strike is enough to make you shake your head in disbelief.
Perhaps most telling is the ho-hum reaction from the public. Until recently, many people were unaware that this was even an issue. For most of us a strike would be, at worst, a minor inconvenience.
Long gone are the 1970s, when postal strikes were feared as a major blow to the economy. Back then, a labour disruption was akin to holding the country hostage.
Still, intractable disputes seem to be a habit at Canada Post. The latest was in 2011 when rotating strikes and lockouts ended with back-to-work legislation and major concessions by employees. Sympathy from the public was underwhelming.
What once made the post office so important was its monopoly on letter delivery. But as we all know, email, electronic billing and direct deposit have decimated revenue from that sector.
According to a 2013 report from the Conference Board of Canada, the only bright spot is an increase in revenue from delivery of parcels due to the popularity of online shopping. Even so, it sees this as a blip and predicts an annual operating loss of $1 billion by 2020.
Parcel delivery is not like letter delivery — it is highly competitive. If a strike takes Canada Post out of the picture, businesses will simply turn to alternative services. And once they move away, it will be tough to lure them back.
Cutting costs seems to be the only way out. A change in government has delayed plans to phase out door-to-door delivery, but now Canada Post wants to reduce labour costs by switching to a cheaper pension plan.
The situation at Canada Post is by no means unique. Post offices in many countries are struggling with how to make the transition to new technology. Part of that transition should involve helping long-time workers land in a good spot.
In this case, a strike would make things worse. What really needs to happen is for employees and managers at Canada Post to work together to find a solution that transcends self-interest. They’re up against something that’s bigger than both of them.
Robert Colvile has written an excellent essay about the role of the media in the British referendum on membership in the European Union. The way he sees it, newspapers — the old media — were the clear winners.
Tabloids and broadsheets alike thundered their positions on the referendum on an almost daily basis. And most of them thundered in favour of leaving. Television, meanwhile, politely gave equal time to both sides. New media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter barely made a ripple.
As an aside, though, it’s sad to note that after the referendum, people in Britain suddenly started using Google to search the phrase: “What is the EU?” It makes you wonder if many them actually understood what they voted against.
Their next step is to search for information on how to get the heck out of England.
Getting back to newspapers — according to Colvile, the Leave campaign targeted the power of the press for a good reason.
The goal was not merely to shape the agenda, but to motivate the newspapers’ readerships which, while smaller than they once were, also are disproportionately important. The best predictors of support for Brexit were age, wealth and class: The older, poorer, and less educated you were, the more likely you were to vote to Leave. That made the Telegraph and Mail’s older audience (average ages 61 and 58 respectively as of 2014) invaluable—just like the Sun’s working-class one.
If that demographic seems eerily familiar, you’re probably thinking about Donald Trump supporters. In the U.S., though, there is a different dynamic with the media. News sites are desperate for clickbait and TV networks are desperate for ratings. That allows Trump to play them like a fiddle. Reporting his outrageous statements is good for business.
Canada seems like a modern oasis of calm by comparison. The old media tried hard to convince us to vote for the Conservatives in the last federal election, but newspapers here have become such a tepid force that they were largely ignored.
(How sad have Canadian newspapers become? The National Post botched its next-day coverage of the referendum with the headline: Polls Point to ‘Remain’. )
In contrast, Justin Trudeau was all over social media and won the hearts of a new generation. Voting among young Canadians increased by 18 per cent.
Still, regardless of the country, we ignore the discontent of the disfranchised at our peril. We need to build economies where all sectors of society benefit. If many people are left behind, if they don’t see any reason to buy into the future, then of course they’ll be tempted to tear it all down.
Newspapers took a hit when they lost a big part of their revenue from classified ads to websites like Kijiji and craigslist. They still have flyers to support them, but it’s just a matter of time before the Internet figures out a way to take those away, too.
Apple’s App Store recently featured flipp as an “essential” app — giving it that extra exposure most developers can only dream of. So I had no trouble finding it, installing it on my iPhone, and marvelling at how closely it resembled the real-life experience of using flyers.
The Toronto-based company, founded in 2007 by former Microsoft engineers, claims to be supported by “some of the largest venture capitalists and retail executives in the world.”
At their website you can find the flyers for your location by inputting your postal code. You can sort them by subject, and make “clippings” by clicking on items you’re interested in. In some cases, there is the option of buying the item online.
The app (available for iOS and Android) does all this and more. You can stash away coupons, make a shopping list and scan in your loyalty cards. You can also narrow down the number of flyers to your favourites.
I was impressed, first of all, with the number of flyers available. It appears they have all the major outlets in Kamloops covered.
The flyers are laid out the same way as they are in print. You can flip through them and set aside items that catch your eye. The ability to buy online is convenient — especially since the thing you want might not be available in the local store even if you went there. For clothing, you can be sure of getting the size and colour you want.
Even more impressive is the ability of the app to search for individual items regardless of who is selling them. For example, a search on “broccoli” gives you a good idea of which store has the best deal.
A killer feature would be the ability to sort by savings. Shoppers would love to check out a section called “50 per cent off” — regardless of what it contained.
The thing that bothers me about the app is the presentation of flyers in the same way as they are in the print world. This might be a transition phase, but really there is no such thing as a flyers in the digital world. There are simply lists of things for sale. It’s annoying that the clippings present information in inconsistent ways. The prices, for example, might be shown in different fonts and different sizes or maybe not at all.
For a bargain-hunting app, this seems a bit archaic. I have a feeling we’re stuck with this for now because retailers don’t want to go to the expense of creating a digital layout for their flyers. One day, though, the tables will be turned and we’ll see sale items presented in a way that makes sense for computers — perhaps a gallery that you can flip through and sort. It will be newspapers that have to make do.
And as they say in the description of flipp at the App Store, using print flyers would “cost the lives of many innocent trees.”
The word “webmaster” seems hopelessly old-fashioned. It brings back memories of under-construction GIFs, visitor counters and “enter” links you had to click on just to get past the home page.
Plus, the idea of one person being master of an entire website is in some cases just plain impossible. Many sites these days are far too big and complicated to be the responsibility of one person alone.
Still, I can’t help but agree with Justin Jackson — it’s great to be a fucking webmaster.
You can write whatever you want whenever you want. You don’t have to worry about Facebook algorithms deciding who gets to see your post. Anyone who comes to your site will see whatever you want them to see.
You can write things that are politically incorrect. You can use salty language. You can write in-depth think pieces. Facebook frowns on all of these, and you can count on them being demoted into obscurity.
The other great thing about being a webmaster is that you can make your site look however you want it to look. Take a bit of time to learn HTML, and you’re no longer dependent on bland WordPress or Tumblr templates. If you want a corny GIF on your home page, you can go ahead and put it there — front and centre.
Becoming a webmaster is actually quite easy.
Apps
Text editor: You need this to type out your HTML code. Your computer comes with one pre-installed. On a PC, it’s called Notepad. On a Mac, it’s called TextEdit.
You can also download free text editors. I currently use Atom, which is designed to be used by the whole family — just watch their video. Back in the 1990s, I started with PageSpinner, which you can use for free if you don’t mind the occasional shareware nag. It’s great for beginners because it helps generate the code for you.
FTP client: You need this to upload your HTML to a server. There’s a free one for Mac and PC called Filezilla. Another one called Cyberduck might be easier for beginners. This was my first. I liked it because of the friendly interface.
HTML
Don’t be afraid of HTML. It’s not programming — it’s just markup you put in your text so that web browsers know what to do with it. Without the markup, you text would display in one giant blob, all the same size. HTML makes sure that it displays with headings and paragraphs.
In fact, you could get away with learning just three HTML tags — the ones for headings, paragraphs and links. Even links are not totally necessary, but links are why the web was invented in the first place.
So how do you learn? Go to W3 Schools, copy and paste their example into one of the afore-mentioned text editors and save it as index.html. Right-click on the resulting file and open it with the web browser of your choice.
What you’ll have is a perfectly good web page that looks good to anyone who sees it. Of course, once you get a taste of the power of publishing, you’ll want to learn more. Just keep going with the W3 Schools lessons.
Web hosting
Your web pages need to be uploaded to a server so everyone on the Internet can see them. This can get complicated because there hundreds of web hosting companies to choose from, and of course you have to pay.
I got my start on a service that came free with my Shaw Internet account. It’s gone through some changes, but apparently still exists. Do a Google search for the name of your Internet service provider plus words like free web space, and you might get lucky.
For me this was the perfect playground in which to hone my web skills. It’s one thing to preview your work in the privacy of your home, but quite another to put it out there for all to see.
If you do wind up having to pay for web hosting, resist the temptation to sign up for one of their pre-built websites. True webmasters build their own fucking websites.
It’s hard to be a fan of someone best know for shutting down newsrooms and laying off journalists. But Postmedia president and CEO Paul Godfrey just might have a good idea.
He appeared before a Commons committee to make a plea for more federal government spending on newspaper advertising. He also asked for a system of tax breaks for businesses that advertise in newspapers.
I know about this because I read it on CBC’s website. Yes, the CBC that is subsidized by Canadian taxpayers to produce news for TV, radio and the Internet — but not print. The CBC that reported it will receive a “cash infusion” of $675 million over the next five years from the Liberal government.
Apparently, those same Liberals who didn’t think twice about straight-up cash for the CBC had a hard time imagining even roundabout support for newspapers.
Said Liberal MP Adam Vaughan: “There have been no fiercer critics of subsidies to the media than the Toronto Sun and the National Post. How do you square your editorial position with your corporate position?”
Godfrey had to explain that newspaper columnists are allowed to express opinions that don’t jive with those of the owners. I wonder if anyone at the CBC (Rex Murphy? Rick Mercer?) has ever criticized the government.
We’re told that taxpayers should be glad to support the CBC because it promotes national unity. To varying degrees, Canadians have bought into this argument. Local newspapers promote democracy and community, so it shouldn’t be a hard sell for taxpayers to support them as well.
The problem is that newspapers aren’t the only ones in trouble. Local TV stations are also facing hard times. And what about all the little news sites eking out a living — should they get help, too?
It might be tricky, but I say yes. We could figure it out.
A virtual reality screenshot from Surviving Solitary. From the Globe and Mail.
Welcome to a sprinkling of links — all pointing toward what appears to be our inevitable future.
Geoff Watts, having reached a certain age, writes about life with robot companions. It won’t be long before mobile computers designed to look human are looking after the elderly and infirm.
Would we be able to get used to that? The answer may lie in research into our relations with animals. Our pets are not human, but we sure treat them as if they were.
Who hasn’t shouted at a failing machine? The first vehicle I owned was a decrepit van that struggled even on modest inclines. More than once when driving the wreck I found myself putting an arm out through the window and using the flat of my hand to beat the door panel – like a rider on a horse’s flank. “Come on, come on,” I shouted at the dashboard. Only later did I contemplate the absurdity of this action.
Speaking of people over 65, they’re more adaptable to technology than you might think. A survey in the United States shows that since 2011, people in this age group using social media has tripled from 11 per cent to 35 per cent. At this rate, it won’t be long before seniors have caught up with young adults (18-29), who are at 90 per cent.
One of the old-timers among social media, Twitter, has moved to a different category in Apple’s App Store. It’s gone from Social Networking to News. So what’s up with that?
Despite becoming a household name, Twitter is struggling to find a way of staying afloat — or at least make enough money to satisfy shareholders. Skeptics say the move is a way of highlighting the Twitter app as the top download in the News category.
But there might be more to it. Twitter is much loved by journalists and news junkies because it is a reverse time line. They’ve been fiddling with this formula lately, but basically you can count on the top item being the newest.
Regardless of whether the top tweet is from a friend or a major network, you can always count on getting the latest. For many of us, that’s the definition of news — so it makes sense to be in the News category.
Meanwhile, other social media are doing just fine. Among the 10 most valuable private companies in the world — as listed by the World Economic Forum — are Snapchat and Pinterest.
Number one, by the way, is Uber, the ride-sharing service that’s disrupting the taxi industry. Condolences from the news industry.
These start-ups get a lot of attention, but it’s good to see mainstream media investing in technology that keeps them relevant. A good example is the Globe and Mail’s virtual reality experiment called Surviving Solitary.
Using a virtual reality headset, you can experience what’s it’s like to be imprisoned in solitary confinement. The New York Times and the Guardian have similar projects.
I foresee a future where virtual reality enables us to experience the news first-hand — not just an artist’s rendering. We might, for example, be able to explore the aftermath of an earthquake half-way around the world.
Of course, by the time that becomes commonplace, I’ll need a robot companion to fetch my headset for me.
Some Canadians are acting like spoiled children over the fact that Netflix is actually enforcing its own rules.
No, you aren’t allowed to use VPN to watch content reserved for other countries. This is in the terms of service you agreed to when you signed up for Netflix.
But many Canadians went ahead and paid for VPN service anyway, somehow thinking that it was OK to break their agreement with Netflix. I guess some of us figured that Netflix wasn’t serious, that they were just paying lip service to their own agreements with content providers.
Now it turns out they were serious after all. If you try using a VPN to watch shows on the U.S. version of Netflix, you get blocked.
(VPN, for the uninitiated, stands for virtual private network. It allows you to pretend that you are accessing the Internet from another country, thus circumventing restrictions based on geography.)
Outraged subscribers haven taken to social media to announce that they are leaving Netflix. How dare they treat us like second-class citizens.
Second class? That reasoning comes from that the difference in the number of shows offered to Americans vs. Canadians — despite being charged about the same amount. In the U.S., you get to choose from 7,000 shows. In Canada, it is a mere 4,000.
Never mind that 90 per cent of it is junk that you would dream of wasting your time on. Never mind that you could never watch that many shows in a lifetime. Apparently, there are a few gems that they get, but we don’t. It also works the other way around from time to time — but never mind that, too.
This leaves me to wonder where the Netflix quitters intend to go. There are a couple of Canadian streaming services— Showmi and CraveTV. They cost a bit more and rarely produce excellent original content of the kind that can be found on Netflix.
Cable TV is still as big a rip-off as ever, even with new regulations forcing cable companies to offer a $25 package. That’s three times what you pay for Netflix, and the shows — if you find any you like — are swamped with annoying ads. You would be further ahead, in terms of value and choice, paying for all three streaming services.
Neflix CEO Reed Hastings calls the complainers “a very small but quite vocal minority. It’s really inconsequential to us.”
I’m inclined to believe him. All you have to do is look at the data. A total of 190,000 Canadians cut the cable in 2015 — an 80-per-cent increase over the year before. The two main reasons are the high price of cable and the convenience of Netflix.
The controversy over ad blocking flared up when Apple made it possible for iPhone users to download apps that delete advertising from websites. There was a surge in interest, but it levelled off and publishers breathed a sigh of relief.
But now along comes Brendan Eich with a plan to not only block ads but replace them. He claims this will help publishers, but they aren’t buying it.
Eich was previously best known as the inventor of JavaScript, a programming language that brings interactive elements to websites. He was also the co-founder of Mozilla, a non-profit group that develops the Firefox browser as an open source project.
His latest project is a new web browser called Brave. He would like to convince you to use Brave instead of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari or even Firefox. And why would you do this? The promise is super-fast browsing because all ads and trackers are blocked be default.
Of course, there are already extensions and plug-ins that do this, but the plan is for Brave to go a step further and replace those ads with ads of its own. Somehow these will be better ads — less intrusive and less of a drag on page loads.
Publishers are upset. The way they see it, advertisers paid for that spot on their site, and they don’t want it taken over by someone else. The Newspaper Association of America, which includes some papers in Canada, has declared it “blatantly illegal.”
Our sites and mobile applications provide news reporting, photojournalism, video content and feature writing that is researched, reported, edited and produced an extraordinary cost. Our industry spends more than $5 billion per year on reporting in the United States alone. We distribute that reporting online for free or at highly subsidized rates, in no small part due to revenue from online ads.
I agree with the blatant part, but I’m not so sure about illegal. Replacing someone else’s ads with your own is an audacious move. Still, Eich has an answer.
His first assertion is to point out that not all ads are replaced: “We do not tamper with any first-party publisher content, including native ads that do not use third-party tracking.”
In sum, and contrary to the misstatements of the NAA letter, Brave is the solution, not the problem, for users and publishers. We provide speed, privacy, protection from malware, and a new, anonymous payment model that helps the whole industry and publishers in particular, compared to the status quo.
Basically, he’s saying that browsers and other software have long been able to take bits and pieces of web content and rearrange them the way we like. A good example is RSS feed readers. They pull in content from all over the web, allowing you to read content without even visiting the website it comes from.
It’s hard to decide which side to take in this battle. Brave is promising publishers 55 per cent of the revenue from ad replacement. Given their strong opposition, publishers obviously don’t see that as a good deal for them.
This whole thing would have worked out much better if Brave had negotiated an agreement with publishers before going public. If publishers were on-side, they would actually be encouraging people to use Brave.
As it stands, this could turn out to be a tempest in a teapot if few people actually download Brave and use it. Google successfully used Chrome to push aside Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to become the most widely used browser. Safari is popular on mobile, thanks to being the default on iPhones. And Firefox still has many fans with its emphasis on privacy.
It’s hard to imagine Brave making much a dent in that kind of competition without the support of those it claims to help.
I was going to write a review of a free new app called Cleartext, but that plan fell apart — mainly because it’s almost impossible to type in more than a few words without getting blocked.
Cleartext allows you to use only the 1,000 most common words in the English language. The idea is that anything you write with those words will be instantly understandable by anyone.
I thought I’d be a smarty-pants and write this blog post in Cleartext. I wanted to start with something like: “I’m writing this post in a text editor . . .” Right away it wanted me to use “I am” instead of “I’m.” Fair enough. But then it wouldn’t allow either “text” or “editor.”
In fact, it wouldn’t even allow me to type in a sample sentence on the app’s website.
Still, I was intrigued because Cleartext is based on a the idea behind a book by one of my favourite cartoonists, Randall Munroe of XKCD fame. He has a book called Thing Explainer that takes really complicated subjects and explains them using only the 1,000 most common words.
A great example is Up Goer Five — a diagram of a rocket ship with all the parts described in a way that a child could understand.
I was also reminded of the story behind Green Eggs and Ham. On a bet with his publisher, Bennett Cerf, author Dr. Seuss restricted the vocabulary of the book to just 50 words. It was published in 1960, and remains one of the most popular children’s books ever.
So there’s nothing wrong with the inspiration behind Cleartext. With a few tweaks, it might actually be useful. (It doesn’t even accept some of the words used by Munroe — “escape,” for example.)
The downside is that restricting your vocabulary can rob your writing of richness and precision. Given a choice, I would rather use one word that means exactly what I want it to mean. The alternative is to use more words that give only an approximation of the meaning.
I saw an exchange on Twitter recently about the meaning of “electrocution”. Look it up on Google and the first result will be an excerpt from Wikipedia explaining that it means “death caused by electric shock.” It’s actually based, in part, on the word “execution.”
Still, it’s quite often used to mean a bad electric shock that requires hospitalization. All you have to do is scroll down a bit in the search results to find news stories that use this meaning. From Global News, for example, we learn that: “Man suffers significant burns during electrocution incident.”
Since he didn’t die, we can’t really say he was electrocuted. But language has a way of evolving, so purists may have to get used to its secondary meaning: “The word is also sometimes used to describe non-fatal injuries due to electricity.”
I can let that one pass but will always cringe when I see “lay” misused. I constantly hear about people “laying” on the bed, or deciding to “lay” low. My question is: what are they laying? Bricks? Eggs?
When you lay, you have to lay something. If it’s just something you’re doing yourself, then “lie” is the word you want. I wonder if we can blame this state of affairs on Bob Dylan.
In 1969, Dylan started singing, “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.” I’m pretty sure he just wanted her to lie down. But I have to admit, “Lie, lady, lie” would never have caught on.
Bonus link: Ever wondered how many words you know? Try Test Your Vocab.
I’ve only ever followed one Twitter bot, and even then only briefly. Some had created a Twitter account and programmed it so that it automatically replied to people who had misspelled “sneak peek” as “sneak peak.”
The last tweet from Stealth Mountain was delivered in January 2014 to @CBSBigBang, and it said the same thing it always did: I think you mean “sneak peek.”
The funny part was that many people took this correction personally and answered the bot with comments ranging from peevish to vitriolic.
In the past few years, Twitter bots have grown in popularity and complexity. There’s a whole community of bot makers that you can follow with the hashtag #botALLY.
A bot created by Microsoft (“her” name was Tay) managed to make headlines last week when it started spewing wildly inappropriate language after just one day of existence. @TayandYou was supposed to be the simulation of a nice young woman, but instead sounded more like a racist, sexist troll.
How did this happen? The short explanation is that the bot’s artificial intelligence was designed to learn from interactions with other Twitter users. They taught it to use this language.
That might lead you to believe that the world is an awful place where not even innocent Twitter bots are safe. But Microsoft saw this as not just an experiment in technology but also in cultural environments.
Tay was not the first artificial intelligence application we released into the online social world. In China, our XiaoIce chatbot is being used by some 40 million people, delighting with its stories and conversations. The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment?
So a similar bot survives and thrives in China, but crashes and burns in the United States.
OK, you might be thinking, so maybe the world isn’t such a terrible place after all — just one particular country. I’m not sure that jives with reality, though. Americans I’ve met seem open and generous. It’s possible they lead secret lives as Internet boors, but I don’t think so.
A more likely explanation could be that Americans like to game the system. They live in a free-for-all capitalistic society where you need to have a pretty good idea of how the system works if you want to get ahead. Without much of a social safety net, the penalty for not knowing can be severe.
It seems that within hours of Microsoft’s bot being released, some people figured out how to game it with the command: “Repeat after me.” From there it was easy to take advantage of a vulnerability in the artificial intelligence. Microsoft engineers thought they were smart, but others proved themselves smarter.
The result is that Microsoft has shut down @TayandYou as it ponders ways to make improvements.
The company might want to start by consulting the veteran bot makers at #botALLY. They’ve been down this road already, and have vowed that their bots will be well behaved. For one thing, they share an open source blacklist of slurs.
Of course, the bot makers in this group also enjoy relative anonymity. Microsoft bots will always have a big target on their backs.
