Digging out from another white dump? Join the club!
The good news, supposed to be anyway, is this is pretty well the last gasp of Ol’ Man Winter. Yeah, sure! Most of us remember more than once snow falling on the May long weekend. Now, that is the last gasp!
But generally speaking, it’s all spring and summer from here on. We know so because the weather people said so. Yup!

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“Hello, is this Facebook?”
“Yes it is. How may I help you?”
“This is Diane at CRA, the Canada Revenue Agency. I want to know if John Q. Dofer in High Prairie is cheating on his taxes.”
“I’m sorry, Diane. We don’t have that information. But I can tell you how many people in the High Prairie postal code area have a ‘high probability’ of cheating on taxes.”
“That isn’t very good. I already have an idea of that from our own statistics. I need something better. Like real names and addresses.”
“Well Diane, we can tell you how many who cheated talked about cheating in Facebook or looked for tax ideas on Google. And of those, who bought new vehicles in the past six months. How many went on holidays. How many stayed in hotels in Edmonton and when. How many own businesses. How many work part-time. How many work full-time. How many just left their jobs. How many have money in the bank. How many don’t.”
“That isn’t very good for us. In fact, we already have a whole bunch of that information, if not all of it. In fact, we even know what streets or range roads they live on. The only thing we don’t know is if they cheated on their taxes, so that’s why I called you. From everything I hear and read, I thought you would really be a lot more help.”
“Well Diane, I am sorry you feel that way. But, I will pass you over to our business section. If you want help sending personal ads to each of the cheaters, you will have to pay for it. But I am sure they will be more than happy to help you for a small amount of money. That’s what we are here for. Have a nice day.”

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Artificial Intelligence [AI] is going to save us all!
It’s true, because Facebook founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg tells us so. Or at least, AI is going to make sure our Facebook posts are nice and clean and ads do not encourage us to buy the wrong product or vote the wrong way.
Oh, good heavens!
As they say in the movies, “It’s nice we are being watched over, but who is going to watch the watchdogs?”
Zuckerberg says he will soon hire 20,000 people to police posts on Facebook. And it will take at least five years to make a difference, even with the help of AI that has yet to be invented.
A few months ago, Zuckerberg was faced with pretty well the same problem he gets today – invasion of privacy and bad people doing bad things with Facebook posts and information. At that time, his answer was to hire 3,000 new bodies to keep an eye on things. Ha, ha!
Just to give you an idea, the average number of Facebook posts sent each day is about 10 billion: 20,000 people reading those posts to protect us against hate crimes, bad guys and girls, malicious content, racism, threats and on and on means each person hired will have to read 500,000 posts per day.
Do you think that’s really going to happen without regulation and laws and much spending of money?
Not at all!
Interestingly, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations and other professional media deal with this expense every day as they try to bring you ‘real’ news.
So, why should Google or Facebook get a free ride?

Have a great week!