With the rise of social media in today’s world, we are also seeing the rise of many companies cracking down on how their employees, prospective or current, use these tools.  The debate on how companies should be able to interact with what their employees do on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter came up in a panel discussion outlined by Chris MacDonald in his blog post “Ethics, law, and social media in the workplace”.

In my opinion it should be understood that there is a clear separation between the life of an employee within the workplace and the life they host outside of it, including online.  My biggest quarrel with companies deciding what can and can’t be posted to social media is it takes away the definitive quality a facebook page or twitter account is meant to create for an individual.  Your friends on facebook don’t want be subscribed to a figurehead of a company, they’re subscribed to a real person whose likes and dislikes can’t always coincide with the ideal image a company might want to portray.

Adding to this, when companies limit their recruitment to people with “clean” social media accounts, they’re not hiring the full person.

Word Count: 201      Ethics, law, and social media in the workplace

After reading Tudor Barcan’s blog post “Booming Estimates: Another Canadian Export Threatening To Dethrone Maple Syrup”, I was reminded of a quote from a great blogger that once said, “Here is another example why it is a good idea to properly understand a topic before blindly writing about it”.  With American energy independence on the rise, it is Canada whom is the most at risk both according to the article and to my earlier blog post, “The American Dream a Nightmare for Canada”.

Unfortunately for us, while we account for roughly 30% of the 10 million barrels of crude the US imports a day, that number is set to drop to only 5.5 million by the year 2030.  With our exports so focused on the US and so much money invested in oil extraction and refining, now is not the time for us to try and diversify where we get our energy from.

Our economy is going to take a blow, that’s for sure, but how we respond will be what defines our energy production in the next decade.  I think our best option is to become more efficient with what we have today so we can afford a green tomorrow.

Word Count: 200       Canada sees risk in U.S. oil boom and Booming Estimates: Another Canadian Export Threatening To Dethrone Maple Syrup

With Facebook’s population having risen to over 1 billion as of October 4th, it has undoubtedly become one of the world’s most influential forms of social media in an incredibly short time.  I don’t think when Mark Zuckerberg first created it however he would have envisioned it to be able to have the effects it had in the recent capital tax protests in France, as outlined by Varun Banthia’s post, “France’s Pigeons”.

I think it’s a remarkable achievement to say that in this day and age we need not trek into the streets to protest, which can result in violence like we saw with the 2011 UK riots, showing you don’t need to flip a car to get your government to change.

I disagree with Varun in the sense that I think we all wish to believe if our policy makers are making decisions that the majority of the public does not want, we should have some ability to tell them so.  Hollande came into office saying he wanted to create jobs, yet this capital tax would have discouraged investment into entrepreneurship which would in turn create jobs.  I don’t see it as backtracking, more as being steered back down the right course.

Word Count: 200                            France’s Pigeons and Rolling Back a Tax Increase via Facebook

Ever since the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, America has unfortunately been made to realize how vulnerable their reliance on foreign energy makes them.  For so long they have yearned for independence, but until recent technological changes they have been reliant on primarily Canadian and Saudi oil.  Now while the US looks to be walking towards one of the biggest oil booms in their history, Canada stands as the one with all to lose.

A huge part of our economy has been built around the premise of exporting oil to the US, an average of 2,324,000 barrels of crude oil were shipped a day to the US out of a total of around 3,580,000 produced.  With the US becoming less reliant on their northern neighbour to meet their energy needs, we lose the ability to fund our already ridiculously expensive ventures into oil sands which has already cost a staggering $125 billion.

I’d expect from this a few things, firstly an urgent need to diversify who we export our products too, as suggested by the article.  Secondly, as energy currently accounts for 6.8% of our GDP, a restructuring to our exports like this will surely be a blow to our spending in the coming years.

Word Count: 199        Canada says US oil boom illustrates need to diversify energy exports

With the recent election over, it’s time once again for America to focus its attention back to its deficit.  Moves are already being made by the Obama administration to remedy the deficit by hiking taxes back up once the Bush tax cuts expire, however many think the move is too drastic.

The term “fiscal cliff” has made its way into the mainstream as a way of describing what will happen when the government imposes the $670 billion worth of tax hikes and spending cuts come January 1st, however there’s still no agreed upon method for achieving them.

I think the biggest problem for the US at this point is realizing that they can’t just outright cut spending to key areas such as healthcare in order to extend tax cuts.  The US has an increasingly aging population that is going to be a huge drag on healthcare costs in the near future, so to start cutting out spending on the sector now would be ludicrous.

Most importantly the Republicans need to understand that keeping taxes at Bush levels is too idealistic with this demographic change incoming, taxes need to be sacrificed in order for the government to meet the social needs.

Word Count: 199                             Tax Reform: Opening Bids

With its abundance of natural resources left relatively untapped, it seems Brazil is one of the newest players to take an increasingly large interest in Africa.  Most might claim that historically ventures into the third world have been controversially exploitative (namely in the case of China), however I think that this is a misnomer.

The truth is these African countries are in dire need of foreign investment, unfortunately they’re at a point where they have all these natural riches lying under them yet they have neither the financial capital nor the proper infrastructure to be able to extract them.  The entrance of developed countries such as Brazil and China, whether the majority of the wealth is being funneled back home or not, is going to play largely into how quickly African countries will able to develop the infrastructure they need to be able to start doing the job themselves.

I think our perception of how business is done between the developed and developing world is largely skewed because of such misconceptions.  There’s almost a tyrannical image synonymous with African mining popularized by movies like “Blood Diamond” that does these countries no good.  They need investment, we need resources, simple trade.

Word Count: 200                 Brazil in Africa: A new Atlantic Alliance

Facebook introducing “want” button

Facebook has recently decided to test out a new function that would allow users to share and even buy items off of the website.  The function, a simple “want” button on Facebook advertisement, would allow advertisers a chance to tap into the endless depths of Facebook’s billion+ users (or at least a portion of them).

I’ve been waiting for a move like this for a long time, Facebook has been overvalued for far too long, spiking up to a valuation of around $104 billion before its IPO.  Facebook has so much influence that to scare away investors with ludicrous claims like that is doing nobody any good.  What Facebook needs to do is embrace this new idea and implement it in a way that makes people want to click want on things they really want, there needs to be an incentive to click otherwise it will go disregarded like advertisements now, but not one that makes people want to click everything.  Maybe you would get a limited amount of wants a day and by wanting something you accumulate points towards rewards.  The amount of points could also be based on how many others want it, which would encourage you to tell your friends.  Just a little idea, but a good step in the right direction.

Google makes first foray into credit business

Google took a staggering step forward Monday as it announced the launch of its credit business for the first time.  The business will be used to finance purchases of its online advertising, offering customers between $200 to $100,000 a month to pay for Adwords.

Preceded by Amazon a week ago, this step signals a new era in online competition as companies fight to secure new business.  The problem Google’s treasurer, Brent Callinicos, seems to think exists is that small businesses don’t have the financial capital to be able to risk expanding themselves online online.  What Google is doing is giving these small businesses a chance to extend a little bit with less risk than traditional banks might offer (due to their low interest rates), while actively securing their business by controlling their loans.

It seems these internet moguls are now getting to a point where they’re starting to act like banks, which is a scary thought when you think of the average life span of these kind of businesses.  I think that the dotcom industry still has a long way to go in proving that they can stay solid before I would open up a line of credit with them.

Samsung VS Apple

Samsung and Apple were making big news recently with Samsung’s loss to Apple in a patent lawsuit concerning 8 of Samsung’s “Iphone like” smartphones, including the Samsung S2, which infringed upon Apple owned patents,  The total in consolation money that Samsung was forced to pay Apple came to a staggering $1.05 billion that surely rocked the Korean giant, however clearly not as hard as Apple might have intended.

It seems that in the aftermath of the lawsuit sales for Samsung’s new Galaxy S3 smartphone have actually bounced upwards to even outsell the Iphone in certain places.  While this might not exactly account for a re-compensation of the money Samsung lost to Apple in the lawsuit (or anything close to it) it does speak for something about the company itself.

I think Chowdry’s analysis of Samsung consumers simply wanting to buy it up with expectations of it becoming unavailable falls short in that it doesn’t address the underlying principles that are making people do this.  People are showing that they are able to differentiate Samsung smartphones on a very noticeable level by acting in this way, which tells me that while Samsung’s smartphone business might have taken a blow, the brand still rides strong.

Controversial chemical plant resumes production in China

As this is my first blog post ever I’m not really sure how to go about this, however I guess I don’t have a choice but to give it my best shot.  Today I was reading through some archived CNN articles and happened to stumble upon a sort of gem among the masses.  When I first read it I thought to myself, “What better to talk about for a first post than the topic of ethics in one of the largest EMERGING economies of our era!”    It seems to me that the word EMERGING holds the greatest weight here.  China has clearly come a long way in the past decade in terms of their economy, however to me this article was very revealing in that it boldly showed the depressing side effects of such a strong emergence.  Ethically the Chinese are faced by a very difficult decision, whether they relocate the plant with the risk of a huge financial backlash from the likely bankruptcy of private giant Fujia Dahua Petrochemical, or they risk the lives of their citizens by leaving the carcinogen producing plant so close to the residential areas of Dalian.