Featured on this week’s menu: restaurant red tape removal; pipelines to profits; road rage over academic indulgences in China; and universal employability ratings
I’ll drink to that
Yet more good news from the red tape reduction brigade: B.C. restaurants no longer have to provide separate lounge areas for cocktail customers.
They’ll also no longer need a special permit to host comedians, musicians or other live entertainment.
Who knew they needed one to begin with? More to the point, who knew why bureaucrats required them to need one in the first place?
But then who knew or knows the rationale behind the many arcane rules governing liquor consumption in B.C.? The no-permit-for-live-entertainment rule still includes the stipulation that patrons be prohibited from participating in the show.
Why, ask the great-unwashed treading water in the Sargasso Sea of red tape, would that caveat remain? What could be more entertaining than patrons newly freed from separated lounge areas participating in live entertainment?
Not much.
But the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, and steps are being made on the road to a promised land of modernized drink laws in B.C.
Just don’t mention the wine-in-grocery-stores mess. It will set hair spontaneously ablaze atop the heads of anyone who considers a good cabernet an essential part of a civilized meal.
In the meantime, a chorus or two of “Tremble, King Alcohol” from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union is in order.
Profit in the pipeline
Something stiffer than a good cabernet might be needed for energy industry enthusiasts following news this week from the Oil Price Intelligence Report that Kinder Morgan’s (NYSE:KMI) Trans Mountain Pipeline could cost as much as $6.8 billion. That’s up from a previous estimate of $5.4 billion. However, Kinder Morgan said the pipeline would still make economic sense – an upbeat view in light of crude oil futures retreating to US$45 per barrel as data from the American Petroleum Institute (API) showed U.S. crude stocks rising by 2.6 million barrels and the Bloomberg Commodity Index of investor returns sinking to levels not seen since “Apple Inc.’s best-selling product was a desktop computer."
Pileup on China’s anti-corruption drive
But surely someone was having fun this week. And, yes, indeed, they were. A bit too much fun, according to the forces of righteousness in China, where the Party (but not that kind of party) accused a trio of Beijing academics of “hedonism,” “breaching party discipline” and otherwise thumbing noses at Chinese president Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive.
The gang of three was outed for driving fancy cars, throwing lavish receptions and otherwise partying like it was still 1999.
Subsequent naming and shaming and sackings from the Communication University of China included the university’s Communist party secretary.
According to The Guardian dispatch, the list of too-much-fun-for-words transgressions resulted in “chaos in financial management and expenditures far exceeding income.”
Get thee to a nunnery, Communist sinners!
Employability abilities
Such fiscal chaos would neither be tolerated nor fomented, one hopes, in the major universities listed in the new QS Quacquarelli Symonds Graduate Employability Rankings.
According to QS, a global provider of specialist higher education and careers information, research on the project to provide insight into employability for graduates from the world’s major universities began in October 2014. Rankings criteria included a university’s reputation among employers, employer partnerships, employer presence on campus and graduate employment rate.
The United States led the list for 2016 with Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University taking the top three rankings.
Other notable top finishers: China’s Tsinghua (9) and Peking (15) universities, neither of which had any fancy cars parked on or near campus.
Top ranking for Canada: McGill University (24) and the University of Toronto (34); top ranking for B.C.: the University of British Columbia (50).
Conspicuous by its absence in the rankings: the school of hard knocks – a top 10 contender in most business minds outside the halls of academe.
