TransCanada Pipeline Project To Bring Crude Oil To Eastern Canada Welcomed By Government

This Sept. 19, 2011 aerial photo shows a tar sands mine facility near Fort McMurray, in Alberta, Canada. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Jeff McIntosh)

TORONTO, April 2 (Reuters) - The Canadian government said on Tuesday it was encouraged by TransCanada Corp's announcement that it plans to move forward on a plan to convert and build pipeline infrastructure to transport crude oil from Western Canada to eastern Canadian markets.

The project could potentially eliminate Canada's reliance on the higher priced crude oil that it currently imports to supply East Coast refineries.

Calgary, Alberta-based TransCanada, on Tuesday said its Energy East Pipeline would have the capacity to transport as much as 850,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

"Our government strongly supports initiatives to construct energy infrastructure to transport western Canadian oil to the east," said Canada's Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, during a press conference. "It is in the national interest to replace higher-cost foreign crude with lower-cost Canadian crude to consumers and refineries in Quebec and Atlantic Canada."

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Mitchell Weiss: What Government Should Relearn From Business -- (And It's Not Efficiency)

Chief of Staff, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino

When, eventually, sequestration has passed and Washington and its watchers have moved on to the next big debate, alongside all the recriminations there will be this: the familiar calls for government to demonstrate more of the effectiveness that we see in the most successful private sector companies.

The clamor won't be altogether misguided. After all, the best-run companies might have a thing or two to teach this D.C. drama's main players about leadership, negotiation, and protecting our (national) brand.

Of course, government has long looked to business for new ways of managing. Benchmarking was a key feature of President Clinton's effort at Reinventing Government. Public variants of outsourcing were pushed as part of George W. Bush's President's Management Agenda, and President Obama appointed the country's first Chief Performance Officer.

So it's a fair bet that when the sequester's dust has settled, government may once again turn to (or have thrust on them) the latest business bestsellers as "how-to" guides for avoiding the next crisis. Though positive results cannot be guaranteed, it is good when private sector ingenuity is offered up -- amidst other solutions -- for consideration by the public sector. American business remains the country's most vibrant source of innovation.

Problem is, where government is now most likely to look -- and where the private sector seems most poised to push -- is in the wrong place. Government has traditionally looked to business for tools and techniques to help improve productivity and cut costs through greater efficiency. Lean Six Sigma, which even made its way into a candidate pledge in the last presidential campaign, is one in a series of such business-to-government waves. Big data is rolling in after it. But these are the wrong tools for the job that now needs doing. What government needs most right now -- what it will need especially after the sequestration debacle -- are tools that build trust.

Pew's January 2013 poll drives this point home -- their survey found that a mere 26 percent of Americans trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. Post-sequestration, the only thing harder to envision than trust numbers climbing rapidly is that government officials can lead without it.

The failed deficit dialogue over the last year has shown us that staggering budget deficits at the federal level and huge unfunded pension and health liabilities in states and cities can't be bridged by squeezing the next nickel (or even 10 trillion of them) out of government operations. Addressing these challenges will require reasonable dialogue, debate, and, ultimately, decision-making about the scope of what we want as a country and how we want to pay for it. Business strategies focused on process and efficiency won't help the country manage that.

There is, however, a new wave of business techniques more suited to the job. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino has embraced these lessons with an engagement-driven strategy dubbed New Urban Mechanics. Companies that have learned how to foster community, cultivate trust and engender participation -- they hold the real lessons government needs now.

There is, of course, a certain irony here. After all, community, trust, and participation are (or were) the tools of the trade of government in the first place. Cities and towns -- with their squares, community groups, and network of relationships -- knew the value of "social" centuries before Facebook figured it out. It turns out that what the public sector can learn from the private sector, the private sector actually learned from the public sector.

Government would do well to look at businesses that are innovating best and fastest in the area of engagement. And as they do, business managers should take note. Millions are being invested by Cisco, IBM, Phillips, and other global companies to help cities and countries operate efficiently. Some of these efforts look too tech- and operations-laden to solve the biggest challenges. The next wave of successful public-private partnerships won't be top down, process-driven and systems-heavy. Businesses that learn to help government cultivate and harness its own strength -- in community -- will serve our democracy best and succeed for their own stakeholders.

This article originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review.

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Government Drops Insider Trading Probe Of Media Companies, Baffling Investors

The dismissal of an investigation into major media companies suspected of giving clients a sneak peek at crucial data drew great surprise on Wall Street, where traders make their living profiting from blips of information moving at the speed of light.

Federal authorities had been pursuing allegations that various media companies -- including Bloomberg LP, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones and Co. -- leaked key economic data to select investors, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. But the investigators dropped the probe, according to the paper, in part because they could not conclusively determine that investors were able to use the advance look at the numbers to extract profits.

Wall Street analysts pronounced that explanation baffling, noting that in modern markets -- fueled by high-frequency trading and robotic transactions -- a mere fraction of a second can be enough to execute trades worth billions of dollars.

“We have certainly reached a point where information advantage in millisseconds, possibly microseconds, definitely means a difference,” said Zach Ziliak, an attorney at law firm Mayer Brown in Chicago, which advises clients on issues surrounding high-frequency trading. “The millions that have been invested in microwave communication between New York and Chicago is a testament to the fact that firms expect to make a profit on informational advantages measured in microseconds.”

It’s difficult to determine how much such an edge could mean in dollars and cents. But the meltdown suffered in August of last year by market-maker Knight Capital offers an example that helps illustrate how quickly firms relying on algorithmic trading can make or lose money: When a trading algorithm went awry, the company burned through $440 million in just over 45 minutes.

According to the Journal, federal investigators were trying to determine if the news outlets were taking unemployment and economic data provided to them by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and sending it off to clients a few milliseconds before they were allowed to publish the information.

The BLS provides a select group of news agencies with sensitive statistics every month in advance of its legal 8:30 a.m. issue time, allowing reporters to write articles to coincide with the data's public release. But news agencies are forbidden from breaking the embargo, lest the information be used by capital markets traders to gain an edge on competitors.

Spokesmen for two of the companies named in the report, Dow Jones and Reuters, told The Huffington Post they were not aware of an ongoing federal investigation. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, said that upon noticing some shortfalls in the way the government was securing data in 2012, the news organization "suggested solutions to secure their system and they thanked us for alerting them to the issue."

According to the Journal’s report, the government couldn’t link patterns seen in trading to specific actions by the media companies, and, equally important, didn’t feel it “could prove in court that a time advantage for a trader of a sliver of a second -- as little as a few thousandths -- was enough to conduct profitable trades on confidential information.”

"I don’t know how they could argue that having the information out a second before couldn’t make a difference," said Jason Roberts, a software consultant in Los Angeles who spent most of the past decade building trading systems. "It's like saying you don’t know how much speed is a part of the NFL."

“It’s absolutely amazing they would say that because we've shown it a million times over to be true,” said Eric Scott Hunsader, founder and CEO of market research firm Nanex, which has developed specialty software that can look at market activity at the microsecond level.

Hunsader also points to the behavior of the trading tape in markets for equity futures and Eurodollar options throughout 2011 as evidence that select firms were given statistical data in advance of the official release time. It's “obvious as night and day,” he said, that such activity occurred.

It's not only people with roots in Wall Street trading floors who saw the government's reported explanation for dropping its probe as suspect.

“Seconds now matter, and the incentives are there," said Keith Hall, who was a commissioner at the BLS from 2007 through early 2012 and is now a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. For Hall, the issue goes deeper than the fact that traders might be making money off insider information. He believes it puts into question the integrity of at least part of the federal government.

“This data belongs to the American public. Taxpayers have paid a lot” to have it collected, he said. “And it’s a real problem if the government is making this information available to some before others -- even if accidentally -- and they’re profiting from it.”

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Alex Jones, Radio Host Who Wants Piers Morgan Deported, Says Government Creating Gays With Chemicals

We've heard a lot of ridiculous things about where LGBT people come from and what they're capable of (see the slideshow below), but Alex Jones' claim that the government is creating gays with chemicals takes conspiracy theories to a new level.

The InfoWars radio host grabbed the spotlight in recent weeks after slamming CNN's Piers Morgan for making comments against pro-gun advocates and he even went so far as to try to get him deported back to the UK. Now Jones is raising eyebrows again after a series of clips from several years ago began to recirculate on the Internet this week.

In the videos he claims the government is "encouraging homosexuality with chemicals so that people don't have children" and that he has the documentation to prove it. Upon cutting open a juice box to show the plastic membrane supposedly filled with said chemicals he concludes, "After [little boys] are done drinking your juices, [they're] ready to go out and have a baby... [they're] ready to put together a garden of roses... [they're] ready to go put lipstick on..."

Jones is also worried about MSG in Kettle Chips and fluoride in spring water.

In another clip he states that troublesome chemicals are seeping into water ways and even turning male frogs into female frogs. Research has shown that chemicals found in common weed killers have been proven to "feminize" male frogs, but it is not clear if the same effects could take place with humans.

While we're still waiting for experts to come up with a definitive answer as to why people are gay or straight (and we may never know), we've never come across anyone -- other than Jones -- who thinks it is due to drinking government-engineered juice boxes. What do you think?

(h/t Queerty)

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