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Cars: an unrequited love affair

Cars: an unrequited love affair Most people love cars. So much of our persona can be wrapped up in the way we transport ourselves. Most males fondly remember their first vehicle. Even if it was a piece of turd. If you had a turd in high school, you were the boss. The Sunbeam Alpine became my first vehicle. Fire engine red with fins and a 1600 cc engine. An elastic held on the front bumper. Stopping suddenly meant that the bumper bounced up and down a few times. I cannot remember why I used an elastic. It was likely an emergency fix and it was all that I had around. Inertia prevented me from replacing the elastic with some wire which would have been a far better fix. I purchased a spirometer that allowed me to ensure the volume intake of both carburetors balanced perfectly. I did this religiously without knowing if this made any difference at all. It did not matter since I attended to what I perceived its needs were. We made each other complete. English cars do not fare w...
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The Happy Hell of Other People

The Happy Hell of Other People I can easily recall the worst and best of times of my life. And they all involved other people. Some of the obvious picks are some people that are somehow in charge of some aspect of my life that I cannot simply get back. This mainly includes my surrounding environment. Such as repair shops. Or airline lost luggage counters. Let’s first start with Hell is other people. There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE!  This quote comes from Satre’s play “No Exit”. Satre’s existentialist stance did not make him a people person. But he threw one hell of a party. Or rather, his parties were in hell.   I was trapped in a hellish situation one time. Like when I was trying to enjoy Avatar at the same time that the person beside me wanted to enjoy his fast food hamburger. The assault of all the senses over a period of an hour as he slowly relished his simulated food product (Condensed Reconstituted Artificial Product or “CRAP”)....
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Cookie Law Conundrum: Do you know what your webmaster is busy baking?

Cookie Law Conundrum: Do you know what your webmaster is busy baking? Karma. I may have been a scoundrel in a previous lifetime. As penance, I voluntarily reviewed ten webpage privacy statements from five prestigious law firms, four somewhat intrusive social media organizations, and one highly regarded national magazine for lawyers in Canada. Did I say well written? That too. Cookie policies range from the buried deep within the privacy cookie jar to the flashing K-mart end of aisle cookie sale. Cookies refer to the little crumbs of text file code that websites place on users’ browsers that land on the organization’s webpage. These cookies do not contain any coding themselves, so they cannot transfer any viruses or other types of malware. But like real cookie packaging, you must read to the bottom of the ingredient list to determine what your system ingests. Cookies come in two major flavors. Session cookies store information about user page activities so that users can easi...
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GoogleLaw and Creative Destruction of the Legal Profession

GoogleLaw and Creative Destruction of the Legal Profession Google and Artificial Intelligence may not be the end of the legal profession, but boy, can you see it from here. I anticipate encountering what Schumpeter euphemistically called creative destruction. Innovation destructs archaic business models and creatively releases capital to be deployed elsewhere. A benign description of being out on the street with your law degree. Perhaps too hyperbolic, but for example Google has made a database of Federal and State case law and legal journal articles available via its  Google Scholar  search.  In their defense, lawyers can now purchase on Amazon the “ Please Do Not Confuse Your Google Search With My Law Degree” coffee mug.  For a simpler DIY approach, YouTube displays over 146 videos on Family Law. This also includes shuffle playlist for greater variety. For comparison, A.I. factors into over 38% of regular enterprise planning for mainly customer int...
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The Quintessential NAFTA negotiation guide

The Quintessential NAFTA negotiation guide The US political extravaganza has provided substantial entertainment for the world and Canadians. We have been able to distance ourselves somewhat from the rhetoric. However Canada now finds itself within the Trump World ‘Splash Zone’. NAFTA ‘tweaking’ has surfaced and to paraphrase the President, we are renegotiating the North American ‘Stupid Trade’ Agreement. NAFTA has provided great benefits to all three countries and created an economic juggernaut of more than $20 trillion GDP. But the US appears to be following a new policy that not only must they succeed, all others must fail. The recent US Trade Representative (USTR) NAFTA aspirational paper states that “since the deal came into force in 1994, trade deficits have exploded, thousands of factories have closed, and millions of Americans have found themselves stranded, no longer able to utilize the skills for which they had been trained.” This sounds similar to your spouse of 23 y...
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The New Immortals: Legal rights for Artifical Intelligence

The New Immortals Immortals shall soon walk among us. They may also crawl, roll and perhaps hover. Yes, definitely hover.  The immortals refer to artificially intelligent persons (AIPs), and by ‘us’ I mean natural persons. The European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs recent report recognized that humankind stands on the threshold of an era of sophisticated robots and other manifestations of artificial intelligence ("AI"). The Committee saw the need to legislate this area relatively quickly as self-driving cars are making their appearance. The fundamental question is what sort of legal status should be granted to AIPs. Natural persons want to avoid any “Battle of the AIPs” future scenarios. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, dramatically starts off the Committee’s report. The Committee thought that by addressing people’s real concerns up front, they could deal with the more substantive issues. The Committee recognizes that people have fantasi...
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Conducting a Character Home Tour

Conducting a Character Home Tour Our neighborhood association encourages residents to conduct house tours once a year as a fundraiser. Eager sightseers normally came in couples. So as to not generalize interest between the various genders, I will simply use gender neutral identifiers and name the people interested in the architecture “wives” and those feigning interest in the tour “husbands”. We presently own a historic character home. Apparently, no one ‘has’ a character home due to the permanent nature of such a home and the ephemeral nature of owners. These homes have their own nature and personalities and you ignore them at your peril. My wife searched for a home that would allow us to merge our household and her parents. Her mother was elderly and had arthritis while the father cared for her. The home’s 12 by 2 inch fir joists easily accommodated the weight of four fridges, four washer dryers and three hot water tanks.     I accepted the delegated ta...
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