Category Archives for "Ideas"

In the early days of the Ottawa Senators, it was all about creating magic in terms of building design and operation/presentation. The Palladium (now Canadian Tire Centre) was designed to model the Roman Coliseum and there was even talk about dressing servers and security personnel in Roman garb 😊 Modern game day entertainment/production in stadiums/arenas […]

Any time someone offers you investments with returns of 1000% per year, you are right to be skeptical, but this is what Australian economist “Mr 1000%” Andrew Firestone has been working on for a number of years now. He reckons he will be able to present how households can add an equivalent of $60,000 to […]

Most people know about the prisoner’s dilemma even if it’s just intuitively rather than explicitly— Two people are accused of a joint crime. Police detectives put both suspects in individual interrogation rooms. They offer each of them a deal—if you’re first to talk, you’ll get jail time of just two years. If the other party […]

The smaller the house you build, the more creative you need to be. One of my daughters is moving into her own home that is just 192 sq ft. She’ll live right next door to a small workshop (about 350 sq ft) where she will design and produce high fashion custom clothing for glamorous women […]

At the beginning of this pandemic, folks asked me what I thought would happen to real estate values. I believed office and shopping mall valuations would fall out of bed while industrial and residential would hold their own. The latter because people always need a place to live; the former because I thought nations (including […]

I am optimistic that the global economy will recover but it will be vastly different. Overall, it may not only be a more localized economy but a more productive one too as weaker players get weeded out and some industries fade while others surge. It’s also likely that the surpluses produced by revamped economies will […]

I can’t believe that other landowners/property owners haven’t figured out how to repurpose their retail space to live-work-play-make spaces, all at grade. There is demand for these types of spaces from gigpreneurs who, for example, want to work in a street-facing studio and live behind their store, all on one level (ie, the ground floor). […]

Over the Christmas holidays, I was rereading The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. I read it when I was a kid and enjoyed it, so I thought I’d see what I think of it now. It’s about five Union soldiers who escape Confederate captivity during the US Civil War in a balloon that is swept […]

I’m sure there are many people who work from home and enjoy that experience. I am not one of them unless forced to by, say, for example, Covid-19 or because of economic constraints. I had a home office for 14-months in the mid-2000s and came to really dislike it for a number of reasons, the […]

Book review of Pitch Anything, an innovative method for presenting, persuading and winning the deal by Oren Klaff, https://youtu.be/0ihMwKc2Sow With insights from Bruce M Firestone, PhD Plus, how a yoga teacher went from earning just over $30k a year to more than $100k Plus, how Prof Bruce successfully pitched the NHL for an expansion franchise […]

[This is an excerpt from Don’t Back Down, the real story of the founding of the NHL’s Ottawa Senators and why big leagues count written by Sens founder Bruce M Firestone, PhD, available from, https://brucemfirestone.com/product/dont-back-down/] You have to laugh at the expectations of leadership in the US where they expect their leaders to have a […]

Here’s an article I wrote some time ago. In it, I was trying to understand why someone might pay $171,000 more for an urban townhouse, which was essentially the same as a suburban, much less expensive one, except closer into town. Was it a rational economic choice? Here’s what I concluded… then. Today, in an […]