Now for a few words from the world's leading cyber guru

Don Tapscott isn't kidding around when he claims to be the world's leading cyber guru.

He has absolutely convinced himself of it.

Have a look at some of his recent insights.

We've been in the early stages of a massive transformation the entirety of Don's career. My grandmother saw more massive transformation in her lifetime than I will see in mine, and she went to her reward well before Don and Al Gore invented the internet.

The most effective work systems are now social and collaborative, just as they were when the pyramids were built. Just as they have been since Grok and three buddies realized that they could take down that mastodon if they worked collaboratively.

A billion people use social media every day. Several hundred thousand working at the NSA have jobs spying on those billion.

We are all collaborating like never before? Any evidence for that? Does Don just make shit up that he thinks will sound good to the corporations that hire him as a motivational speaker?

As knowledge becomes more distributed, so does power. Really?

People are becoming smarter....

Of course they are! And it's all because they are accessing the internet with their smartphones and making a handful of internet and smartphone providers obscenely rich with their monthly tribute. Oddly enough, those internet and smartphone providers are the folks who butter Don's bread!

Coincidence?

We need to bake integrity into corporate DNA. Just like Mom bakes her motherly goodness into her apple pie.

And how is this for a mind-fuck; we need to rethink executive pay packages so corporate leaders are motivated to do the right thing.

No we don't Don; we need to send them to jail for a long time when they don't.

But that's not a message they're going to pay to hear from guys like yourself out there on the speakers circuit.

The industrial age created an inert citizenry. The digital age creates an active citizenry. That must be why voter participation rates are broadly declining in every advanced democracy.

As you can readily see, "cyber guru" threatens to knock "economist" out of the top spot for the bullshitter's dream job.

Globe and Mail back-pedaling on Royal Bank's foreign worker scandal

The Globe and Mail seems to be in damage control re: the story that embarrassed one of Canada's iconic bastions of capitalism last week. Two of the paper's heavy hitters have opinion pieces in today's edition that go to credibility-stretching lengths to downplay the substance of that scandal.

Doug Saunders has it neatly wrapped up. The real problem with outsourcing is that we need the foreign workers to stick around longer. After all, we were all temporary foreign workers at one time, according to Doug.

His fatuous reference to guest workers in Germany in the 1960's neglects to mention that the West German economy had full employment at the time, a phenomenon starkly absent from the Canadian situation today. Were Canada in full employment Saunders might have a point. It isn't and he doesn't.

Then we've got Margaret Wente, The Globe' s in-house plagiarist. She spins a compelling yarn about how it's not avaricious managers displacing workers with their opportunistic abuse of the TFW program; it's technology!

Yup, it's all about computers and algorithms. The entire effort smacks suspiciously of the glib foolishness that Don Tapscott has been peddling for at least twenty years.

Oddly enough, once we leave the opinion pages The Globe has buried another article about the Temporary Foreign Worker program deep in the business section.

Finally we get to the meat and potatoes of the matter. Quoting several actual economists, Tavia Grant informs us that the TFW program displaces Canadian workers and drives down Canadian wages... which is so blatantly obvious that even a pot-addled hillbilly blogger figured it out ages ago.

And that's why Canadians are pissed off about the Royal Bank firing Canadian workers and outsourcing their jobs.