Strategist, polyamorist, ergodox, permaculture & agroforestry hobbyist, craft ale & cider enthusiast, white settler in Canada of British descent; a wanderer who isn’t lost.
Two of Canada’s most visible Crown corporations, Canada Post and VIA Rail, seem to have lost their way. Both were created to knit together a vast and sparsely populated country, ensuring that every Canadian, no matter how remote, had access to essential services. Yet today, both have turned their gaze inward toward big-city markets, downgrading or abandoning the rural, northern, and remote communities they were meant to serve.
The problem is not simply poor management. It is a deeper contradiction in how we think about these federal institutions. Are they public services, funded and guaranteed by the government for the benefit of all? Or are they commercial enterprises expected to operate like businesses, focusing on profitability and efficiency?
Canada Post was once the backbone of national communication. Its universal service obligation was understood as a cornerstone of Canadian citizenship: every town and hamlet deserved a post office, and every address would receive mail. But with letter volumes collapsing and courier giants competing for parcels, Canada Post has shifted its focus to the most profitable markets. Rural post offices are shuttered or reduced to part-time counters in retail stores, and delivery standards in remote regions are steadily eroded.
VIA Rail’s story follows the same pattern. Founded in the late 1970s to preserve passenger trains when private railways abandoned them, it was meant to provide Canadians with a reliable and accessible alternative to highways and airlines. Instead, successive governments have treated VIA as a subsidy-dependent business rather than a national service. The Québec–Windsor corridor receives ever more investment, while iconic transcontinental and regional services limp along on political life support. Communities once promised rail access now watch the trains roll past them, or disappear entirely.
This retreat from universal service runs against the spirit of equality that Canadians expect from their public institutions. The Charter of Rights may not explicitly guarantee access to mail or transportation, but the principle of equal citizenship surely demands more than a market-driven approach that privileges Toronto and Montréal while ignoring Thompson or Whitehorse.
What’s going wrong is simple: Crown corporations are being managed as if they were private companies, not public trusts. Efficiency metrics and financial self-sufficiency dominate decision-making. National obligations are left vague, unenforced, or quietly abandoned. Governments praise the rhetoric of service while starving these corporations of the dedicated funding that would allow them to fulfill it.
Canada is not a compact, densely settled country where commercial logic alone can sustain public goods. It is a nation stitched together across vast geography by institutions that recognize service as a right, not a privilege. If we want Canada Post and VIA Rail to serve all Canadians, we need to stop pretending they can behave like for-profit businesses and still fulfill their mandates.
That choice is ultimately political. Parliament must decide: either redefine these corporations as genuine public services with modern mandates and stable funding, or admit that rural and northern Canadians will always be left behind.
Until then, our Crown corporations will continue to forget their purpose, and with it, a piece of the Canadian promise.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to convene hundreds of senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025, has generated a remarkable amount of debate inside the Pentagon and across Washington. The meeting, which included the presence of President Trump and was framed as a morale-building rally, combined populist language with concrete policy shifts. It emphasized a return to what Hegseth called a “warrior ethos,” a reduction in the number of four-star commands, and a strategic redirection of defense resources toward homeland security over foreign commitments. While the spectacle of so many generals and admirals gathered in one place caught the public eye, the real story lies in the competing interpretations of what the meeting signified, and how valid the dissent from senior officers truly is.
At its core, the criticism of Hegseth falls into two broad categories. The first category consists of genuine policy and operational concerns. These objections focus on the risks that arise when a new strategy is imposed quickly and without the depth of consultation that military leaders expect. The United States has spent decades building a global presence through NATO, alliances in Asia, and security partnerships in Africa. If those priorities are suddenly reduced or redirected, adversaries may perceive weakness and act opportunistically. The suggestion that homeland defense should take precedence over overseas commitments alarms many planners, who argue that credible deterrence abroad is what ultimately keeps the homeland safe. Just as concerning is the physical risk created by concentrating so many senior leaders in one place. In the age of terrorism and cyber conflict, the idea of creating a single point of failure for military leadership is regarded by many as reckless. These criticisms may reflect institutional conservatism, but they also have clear strategic validity.
The second category of dissent is tied more closely to career prospects, budgets, and organizational prestige. Cuts to four-star commands, for example, reduce opportunities for senior officers to rise to the top. The reallocation of funds away from long-standing overseas headquarters threatens programs that have sustained careers, institutional identities, and congressional ties for decades. Even the cultural objection to Hegseth’s “warrior ethos” rhetoric can be read partly as discomfort with his outsider tone and partisan style. Military leaders accustomed to more technocratic language may find his populist approach off-putting, regardless of whether it improves or harms operational effectiveness. These complaints do not necessarily mean that the officers raising them are wrong, but they reveal how intertwined personal advancement and policy debate can be within the senior ranks.
Where the picture becomes most complicated is in the middle ground, where career concerns and operational risks overlap. Morale and cohesion, for example, are partly about career security but also affect how well units function under stress. Similarly, questions of alliance credibility have both strategic weight and institutional implications, since overseas commands are often the most prestigious assignments available. Resistance to Hegseth’s agenda is therefore not neatly divisible into “valid” and “self-interested” camps. Instead, each issue carries elements of both, and part of the task for civilian leaders is to distinguish which objections point to genuine threats to U.S. security and which reflect the understandable resistance of an entrenched bureaucracy to change.
Taken together, the dissent underscores a deeper tension in American civil-military relations. Civilian control requires that appointed leaders set strategy, even when the uniformed services disagree. Yet history also shows that ignoring the professional judgment of senior officers can lead to miscalculations with high costs. Hegseth’s critics argue that he lacks the operational grounding to make decisions of such magnitude, pointing to his background in politics and media rather than command experience. Supporters counter that his outsider perspective allows him to break through bureaucratic inertia and push reforms that insiders would never accept. Both views contain truth, and the outcome will likely hinge on whether Hegseth can translate his rhetoric into workable policy while maintaining the confidence of enough of the officer corps to keep the system running smoothly.
If we weigh the dissent carefully, perhaps half of it points to genuinely significant strategic risks. The dangers of over-focusing on homeland defense, of weakening alliances, and of creating leadership vulnerabilities are all concerns that would trouble any responsible planner. Roughly another third of the pushback reflects predictable resistance from senior officers whose career trajectories and command prerogatives are being cut short. The remainder, perhaps the most interesting portion, lies in the overlap between institutional interest and national strategy. Issues like morale, cohesion, and alliance credibility matter both for the personal interests of officers and for the effectiveness of the force as a whole.
To clarify the distinction, here is a risk-versus-resistance map that separates concerns into those that are primarily policy/operational risks (valid dissent) and those that are largely career/budget resistance (self-interest). Some issues occupy a middle ground, blending both.
Concern
Description
Importance
Strategic de-prioritization of China, Europe, Africa
Reducing focus on alliances may embolden adversaries
High
Homeland defense emphasis
Over-focus on domestic security may leave overseas contingencies underprepared
Medium-High
Concentration of leaders in one location
Creates a single point of failure for leadership continuity
High
Rapid strategy changes
Abrupt shifts risk operational gaps
Medium
Expertise gap
Political appointee-led decisions may lack operational grounding
Medium
Reduction of four-star positions
Cuts limit career progression and prestige
Medium-High
Budget reallocations
Funding shifts threaten existing programs
Medium
Cultural pushback
Resistance to “warrior ethos” rhetoric
Low-Medium
Media restrictions
Press control raises concern about accountability
Medium
Morale and cohesion
Impacts operational effectiveness but also career dynamics
Medium-High
Alliance credibility
Affects U.S. global standing, but objections partly tied to overseas commands
High
The Quantico meeting, then, should not be read simply as a populist stunt or a bureaucratic clash. It is a moment when the future of U.S. defense policy is being tested in real time. Hegseth has chosen to frame his reforms in the language of ethos and toughness, signaling a shift toward domestic focus and leaner leadership structures. The officer corps is responding with a blend of genuine strategic caution and predictable institutional resistance. Observers must separate the noise of career frustration from the signal of authentic national security risk. Whether Hegseth can achieve that balance will shape not only his tenure as defense secretary but also the long-term posture of the United States in an increasingly unstable world.
As a teenager in the late 1970s, I watched a BBC drama that left a mark on me for life. The series was called 1990. It imagined a Britain in economic decline where civil liberties had been sacrificed to bureaucracy. Citizens carried Union cards; identity documents that decided whether they could work, travel, or even buy food. Lose the card and you became a “non-person.” Edward Woodward played the defiant journalist Jim Kyle, trying to expose the regime, while Barbara Kellerman embodied the cold efficiency of the state machine.
Back then it felt like dystopian fantasy, a warning not a forecast. Yet today, watching the UK government push forward with a mandatory digital ID scheme, I feel as if the fiction of my youth is edging into fact.
The plan sounds simple enough: a free digital credential stored on smartphones, initially required to prove the right to work. But let’s be honest, once the infrastructure exists, expansion is inevitable. Why stop at work checks? Why not use it for renting property, opening bank accounts, accessing healthcare, or even voting? Every new use will be presented as common sense. Before long, showing your digital ID could become as routine, and as coercive, as carrying the Union card in 1990.
Privacy is the first casualty. This credential will include biometric data and residency status, and it will be verified through state-certified providers. In theory it’s secure. In practice, Britain’s record on data protection is chequered, from NHS leaks to Home Office blunders. Biometric data isn’t like a password, you can’t change your face if it’s compromised. A single breach could haunt people for life.
Exclusion is the next. Ministers claim alternatives will exist for those without smartphones, but experience tells us such alternatives are clunky and marginal. Millions in Britain don’t have passports, reliable internet, or the latest phone. Elderly people, the poor, disabled citizens, these groups risk being pushed further to the margins. In 1990, the state declared dissidents “non-people.” In 2025, exclusion could come from something as mundane as a failed app update.
The democratic deficit is just as troubling. Voters already rejected ID cards once, when Labour’s 2006 scheme collapsed under public resistance. For today’s government to revive the idea, in digital clothing, without wide public debate or strong parliamentary scrutiny, is a profound act of political amnesia. We were told only a few years ago there would be no national ID. Yet here it comes, rebranded and repackaged as “modernisation.”
And then there’s the problem of function creep. In 1990, the Union card didn’t begin as an instrument of oppression; it became one because officials found it too useful to resist. The same danger lurks today. A card designed for immigration control could end up regulating everyday life. It could be tied to financial services, travel, or even access to political spaces. Convenience is the Trojan horse of coercion.
The government argues this will tackle illegal working and make life easier for businesses. Perhaps it will. But at what cost? We will have built the very infrastructure that past generations fought to reject: a system where your ability to live, work and move depends on a state-issued credential. The show I watched as a teenager was meant to remind us what happens when people forget to guard their freedoms.
This isn’t just a technical fix. It’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between citizen and state. Once the power to define your identity sits in a centralised digital credential, you no longer own it, the government does. That should chill anyone who values freedom in Britain.
We need to pause, debate, and if necessary, reject this plan before the future we feared on screen becomes the present we inhabit.
VIA Rail recently trumpeted a new “pilot project” meant to shave half an hour off the Montréal–Toronto run. The idea was to run nonstop trains between the two big cities, bypassing Cornwall, Brockville, Kingston, and Belleville. The announcement was pitched as a bold experiment in “efficiency,” a nod to the 70 percent of surveyed passengers who supposedly wanted quicker travel between downtown cores.
But almost immediately, the wheels came off. Citing “operational constraints” with their partner CN, VIA Rail suspended the project before it even left the station. On paper, this looks like a technical hiccup, another example of Canada’s fragile rail system bending to the priorities of freight traffic. But in reality, the plan itself was the problem. It was never about serving Canadians, it was about copying European or Japanese rail gloss without any of the context, backbone, or infrastructure investment those systems require.
For decades, communities along the corridor have depended on trains as lifelines. Students in Kingston, retirees in Belleville, families in Cornwall – these aren’t “optional” stops. They’re the heart of what passenger rail is supposed to do: connect Canadians, not just shuttle executives between two large metro centres. The whole point of a public Crown corporation like VIA Rail is to balance speed with accessibility, ensuring that smaller communities aren’t stranded in the name of shaving 30 minutes off a trip for a select few.
Even politicians, often slow to notice transit tweaks, raised red flags. Brockville’s mayor called the nonstop plan “concerning” and Conservative MP Michel Barrett branded it “unacceptable.” They weren’t wrong. Stripping out regional stops would have meant sidelining thousands of riders, effectively telling entire towns they were expendable in the rush to serve big-city commuters.
The irony is that the project was marketed as modernization. But modernization, in a Canadian context, should mean strengthening regional ties, upgrading track infrastructure, and finally breaking free of freight’s stranglehold on passenger rail, not copying a TGV fantasy while underfunding the very communities that give the corridor its economic and social weight.
Instead, VIA Rail now looks like it tried to leap forward without noticing the tracks were missing. Worse, its apology to passengers rings hollow. The real apology is owed to the communities it dismissed as speed bumps, to the Canadians who still believe public transportation is about more than corporate surveys and flashy PR lines.
In the end, the scrapped nonstop pilot is a lesson: if VIA Rail wants to serve Canadians, it needs to remember who those Canadians are. They’re not just the 70 percent who want to get to Bay Street faster. They’re also the people in eastern Ontario whose taxes help keep VIA afloat, and who deserve not to be treated as collateral damage in a misguided chase for efficiency.
Sometimes slowing down isn’t failure, it’s service. VIA Rail might want to remember that before the next “pilot project” takes off.
On December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in what is now southwestern South Dakota, the U.S. Army’s 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Lakota people led by Chief Spotted Elk, also known as Big Foot. What began as an effort to disarm a frightened group seeking refuge ended in slaughter. Eyewitness testimony, contemporary reports, and later historical study make clear that more than a hundred Lakota were killed outright, and estimates of the dead range commonly between 150 and 300, with many of the victims women and children. The column of Hotchkiss rapid-fire artillery on the ridge above the camp turned what might have been a chaotic surrender into an indiscriminate killing field. The event has been characterized by historians and by survivors’ accounts as a massacre, not a conventional military engagement.
Within months, the army rewarded participants. Between March 1891 and 1897 the military issued a disproportionate number of Medals of Honor for actions tied to the Wounded Knee operation. Nineteen medals were awarded specifically for Wounded Knee, and 31 for the broader 1890 campaign. Modern historians have long questioned the propriety of these awards. They point out the disproportion when compared with other actions, the context of civilian slaughter, and the fact that late nineteenth century standards for the medal differed dramatically from today’s criteria. Those facts do not erase the moral question at the heart of this controversy. The medals were given for killing civilians during what many contemporaries already described as a tragic, shameful episode.
For more than a century Native American leaders, scholars, and advocates have demanded that these honours be rescinded. They argue that keeping official military decorations for actions that amounted to the killing of noncombatants perpetuates a sanitized narrative of conquest and erases the suffering of the Lakota people. The push to revisit the medals intensified in 2024 when Congress and the Defense Department initiated reviews of honours awarded during Indian wars. Those reviews are not about rewriting history, they are about whether the United States wishes to continue officially celebrating actions that modern standards and moral judgment deem unconscionable.
Into that fraught moral and historical space stepped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with a blunt, public proclamation on September 26, 2025. He announced that the soldiers who received Medals of Honor for Wounded Knee will keep them and said the soldiers “deserve those medals.” The decision was presented as a closure to the controversy and as a defense of martial valor. But treating the medals as a neutral technicality betrays two failures. First, it ignores the weight of historical evidence and eyewitness testimony that Wounded Knee was, by any honest reading, a massacre that included large numbers of noncombatant deaths. Second, it substitutes a crude politics of honour for a sober assessment of what military decorations are meant to signify. Medals of Honor are supposed to commemorate extraordinary gallantry consistent with the laws of war. When the conduct being commemorated is the killing of women and children in a one-sided action, the moral legitimacy of the award is rightly in doubt.
Hegseth’s statement also displays a troubling detachment from the consequences of symbolic government acts. Official honours are not only personal rewards; they are public memory makers. Keeping these medals intact, while dismissing Native American calls for redress, sends a message about whose losses count in the American story. It is one thing to argue that you cannot retroactively apply modern sensibilities to historical actors. It is another to claim that the government should continue to sanctify actions widely recognized at the time as morally ambiguous or wrong. The choice to uphold the medals is not neutral. It privileges a narrative of conquest and martial glory over truth, accountability, and reconciliation. Contemporary Native leaders and organizations denounced the Pentagon’s decision, noting how it wounds descendants and undermines efforts at national healing.
A final point. Government honours are mutable instruments of civic character. The United States has in many other instances chosen to correct honors that later ethical standards rendered inappropriate. To choose not to correct here is to place precedent over conscience. Furthermore, Hegseth’s framing, that the decision preserves the dignity of soldiers, rings hollow when the dignity of the victims is excluded from the calculus. Respect for soldiers and respect for victims are not mutually exclusive. A mature republic can acknowledge the bravery of individuals without perpetuating institutional honours that legitimize immoral collective actions.
Wounded Knee is not merely an historical footnote. It is a continuing wound in the national memory. How a nation treats its darkest episodes tells us as much about its present character as its triumphs do. Preserving medals awarded for conduct rooted in massacre is not an act of courage. It is an abdication of moral leadership and a refusal to allow public honours to reflect justice. Hegseth’s September 26, 2025 statement helps explain why calls for truth and reconciliation remain necessary. Those calls do not demand erasure of history. They demand honesty and a willingness to let national symbols reflect a fuller, truer account of what happened at Wounded Knee.
Sources: Hegseth decision reporting and reactions. Associated Press. Hegseth says Wounded Knee soldiers will keep their Medals of Honor. Contemporary reporting and Native response. Reuters. Native Americans condemn Pentagon move to preserve Wounded Knee medals. Contextual and historical overview. Britannica. Wounded Knee Massacre. Primary accounts and museum histories. National Library of Medicine / Native Voices timeline and National Park Service battlefield materials. Medal of Honor lists and army records. U.S. Army Medal of Honor listings for Indian Wars and Wounded Knee citations.
The British Isles produced an array of bagpipes, each rooted in the culture of its region. Among the most distinctive are the Scottish smallpipes and the Northumbrian smallpipes. At first glance they are close relatives. Both are bellows blown, quieter than the Highland pipes, and intended for indoor playing. The differences in construction, style, and history show two distinct musical lives that remain proudly regional.
Origins and history
The Scottish smallpipes are often called the parlour pipes of Scotland. Their ancestry links to older bellows blown instruments that were common across southern Scotland and northern England from the 17th century onward. The rise of the Great Highland Bagpipe pushed many smallpipe traditions to the margins and by the 19th century the instrument was in decline. A folk revival in the late 20th century revived interest in the smallpipes and modern makers redesigned chanters and drone systems to suit ensemble work in concert keys such as A and D.
Scottish Smallpipes
The Northumbrian smallpipes developed a distinct identity in England’s far northeast. Key innovations set them apart. The chanter is closed at the end. When all holes are covered the pipe falls silent. This allowed pipers to play with an exceptional staccato articulation. In the 18th century makers added keys to extend the range to two octaves. Northumbrian music of hornpipes, reels and local dances suited this technical development and local societies maintained the tradition through times when many other regional instruments faded.
Northumbrian Smallpipes
Musical role and style
In performance the two instruments sometimes share repertoire. Both are suited to domestic music making and are quieter companions to fiddles, flutes and guitars. Both benefited from the revival movements of the 1970s and 1980s and many modern players cross boundaries, performing Scottish tunes on Northumbrian pipes and Northumbrian tunes on Scottish smallpipes.
The Scottish smallpipes favour continuous melodic flow with ornamentation drawn from Highland piping. Grace notes and rhythmic shaping create a sustained, singing quality. The Northumbrian smallpipes favour precise articulation. The closed chanter allows true staccato and rhythmic clarity. The keyed chanter invites chromatic notes and a wider range, which opens the pipes to arrangements beyond the purely traditional repertoire. Side by side comparison
Feature
Scottish Smallpipes Scottish
Northumbrian Smallpipes Northumberland
Power source
Bellows blown, suitable for longer indoor sessions
Bellows blown, also designed for quiet, indoor playing
Roughly nine notes in a scale similar to Highland piping
Often extended with keys to reach up to two octaves
Drones
Typically three drones in a common stock tuned to the chanter
Often four or more drones with individual shut off stops
Tuning
Commonly built in A or D to match session instruments
Varied pitches possible with flexible drone options
Ornamentation
Highland style grace notes and sustained ornamentation
Clean articulation and rapid ornaments enabled by closed chanter
Repertoire
Scottish airs, marches, reels and dance tunes
Northumbrian hornpipes, reels, jigs and local tunes with chromatic possibilities
Cultural roots
Linked to Lowland and Highland piping traditions
Strong regional identity in northeast England and Northumberland
The charm of these two smallpipe traditions is how they embody the same instrument family with very different musical personalities. The Scottish smallpipes give a mellow, flowing voice that suits ensemble and session work. The Northumbrian smallpipes offer an articulate, technically rich approach that keeps a strong local repertoire alive. Both show how folk instruments adapt and endure while remaining true to their roots.
Further Reading
Francis Collinson. The Traditional and National Music of Scotland
Colin Turnbull. The Bagpipe, a history of the instrument
Anthony Fenwick. The Northumbrian Bagpipes, their development and makers
Northumbrian Pipers Society. Collections and tune books used by local pipers
Hamish Moore. Articles and essays on the modern revival of the Scottish smallpipes
The rise of high-speed fibre internet has done more than just make Netflix faster and video calls clearer, it has opened the door for ordinary people to run powerful technologies from the comfort of their own homes. One of the most exciting of these possibilities is self-hosted artificial intelligence. While most people are used to accessing AI through big tech companies’ cloud platforms, the time has come to consider what it means to bring this capability in-house. For everyday users, the advantages come down to three things: security, personalization, and independence.
The first advantage is data security. Every time someone uses a cloud-based AI service, their words, files, or images travel across the internet to a company’s servers. That data may be stored, analyzed, or even used to improve the company’s products. For personal matters like health information, financial records, or private conversations, that can feel intrusive. Hosting an AI at home flips the equation. The data never leaves your own device, which means you, not a tech giant, are the one in control. It’s like the difference between storing your photos on your own hard drive versus uploading them to a social media site.
The second benefit is customization. The AI services offered online are built for the masses: general-purpose, standardized, and often limited in what they can do. By hosting your own AI, you can shape it around your life. A student could set it up to summarize their textbooks. A small business owner might feed it product information to answer customer questions quickly. A parent might even build a personal assistant trained on family recipes, schedules, or local activities. The point is that self-hosted AI can be tuned to match individual needs, rather than forcing everyone into a one-size-fits-all mold.
The third reason is independence. Relying on external services means depending on their availability, pricing, and rules. We’ve all experienced the frustration of an app changing overnight or a service suddenly charging for features that used to be free. A self-hosted AI is yours. It continues to run regardless of internet outages, company decisions, or international disputes. Just as personal computers gave households independence from corporate mainframes in the 1980s, self-hosted AI promises a similar shift today.
The good news is that ordinary users don’t need to be programmers or engineers to start experimenting. Open-source projects are making AI more accessible than ever. GPT4All offers a desktop app that works much like any other piece of software: you download it, run it, and interact with the AI through a simple interface. Ollama provides an easy way to install and switch between different AI models on your computer. Communities around these tools offer clear guides, friendly forums, and video tutorials that make the learning curve far less intimidating. For most people, running a basic AI system today is no harder than setting up a home printer or Wi-Fi router.
Of course, there are still limits. Running the largest and most advanced models may require high-end hardware, but for many day-to-day uses: writing, brainstorming, answering questions, or summarizing text, lighter models already perform impressively on standard laptops or desktop PCs. And just like every other piece of technology, the tools are becoming easier and more user-friendly every year. What feels like a hobbyist’s project in 2025 could be as common as antivirus software or cloud storage by 2027.
Self-hosted AI isn’t just for tech enthusiasts. Thanks to fibre internet and the growth of user-friendly tools, it is becoming a real option for everyday households. By bringing AI home, users can protect their privacy, shape the technology around their own lives, and free themselves from the whims of big tech companies. Just as personal computing once shifted power from corporations to individuals, the same shift is now within reach for artificial intelligence.
The past seven days brought wins on the pitch, hard lessons about infrastructure security, big sporting firsts and renewed climate focus. Below are five date-checked items from Saturday, September 20 to Friday, September 26, 2025, drawn from primary reporting so you can follow the facts and the context.
🏈 NFL to host regular-season games in Rio starting 2026
The NFL committed at least three regular-season games in Rio de Janeiro over a five-year span beginning in 2026, with the first expected at Maracanã Stadium. Why it matters: This is a major step in the NFL’s globalization strategy and signals serious investment in Brazil’s fan base.
🏟 Sold-out Twickenham cements the UK as a hub for women’s sport
The Women’s Rugby World Cup final at Twickenham drew more than 80,000 spectators, breaking attendance records and underlining the UK’s strength as a venue for top-tier women’s events. Why it matters: It shows that women’s sports can fill major stadiums and attract large audiences, changing the economics of media rights and sponsorship.
🖥 Cyberattack disrupts check-in systems at major European airports
A cyberattack on September 20 disrupted check-in and boarding systems at airports including Brussels, Berlin and London Heathrow, forcing manual processing and flight delays. Why it matters: The incident exposed vulnerabilities in travel infrastructure and the real costs of digital disruption in critical services.
🌍 New York prepares for a record Climate Week amid political headwinds
New York readied dozens of events, UN forums and activist actions for Climate Week starting late September, despite political tensions around environmental policy. Why it matters: Climate Week remains a key forum for mobilizing civic and corporate pressure on climate action and policy.
🚴 UCI Road World Championships held in Kigali, marking the first time in Africa
The UCI Road World Championships began on September 21 in Kigali, Rwanda, the first time the event was hosted on African soil and including new women’s U23 categories. Why it matters: Hosting the worlds in Africa reflects cycling’s geographic diversification and could accelerate development of talent and interest across the continent.
Closing thoughts: This week combined sporting milestones with urgent reminders about infrastructure resilience and the continuing centrality of climate diplomacy. Sport continues to expand its global footprint while attackers probe digital weak points and activists press for policy action. We will keep watching how these threads evolve and what they mean locally and globally.
In contemporary organizational theory, the capacity to share knowledge efficiently is increasingly recognized not merely as a good practice, but as one of the central levers of influence, innovation, and competitive advantage. Influence in the workplace is no longer determined solely by formal authority or proximity to decision-makers; it hinges instead on who opens up their ideas, disseminates outcomes, and builds collective awareness. Knowledge sharing, properly conceived, is a social process that undergirds learning, creativity, and organizational agility.
Why Sharing Still Matters Even with advances in digital collaboration tools, hybrid work environments, and more explicit knowledge management policies, many organizations continue to wrestle with information silos, “knowledge hoarding,” and weak visibility of what colleagues are doing. These behaviors impose hidden costs: duplication of work, failure to capitalize on existing insights, slow adoption of innovations, and organizational inertia.
Empirical studies confirm that when organizational climate is supportive, when centralization and formalization are lower, knowledge sharing behavior (KSB) tends to increase. For example, a recent study of IT firms in Vietnam (n = 529) found that a positive organizational climate had a direct positive effect on KSB, while high degrees of centralization and formalization decreased knowledge‐sharing intentions.
Moreover, knowledge sharing is strongly associated with improved performance outcomes. In technological companies in China, for instance, research shows that AI-augmented knowledge sharing, along with organizational learning and dynamic capabilities, positively affect job performance.
Theoretical Foundations & Diffusion of Influence A number of established frameworks help us understand both how knowledge spreads and why sharing can shift influence within organizations. • Diffusion of Innovations (Everett Rogers et al.): This theory explains how new ideas are adopted across a social system over time via innovators, early adopters, early majority etc. Key variables include communication channels, time, social systems, and the characteristics of the innovation itself. • Threshold Models & Critical Mass: Recent experiments suggest that when a certain proportion of individuals (often around 20-30%) behave in a particular way (e.g. adopting or sharing an innovation), that can tip the whole system into broader adoption. For example, one study found that social diffusion leading to change in norms becomes much more probable once a committed minority exceeds roughly 25% of the population. • Organizational Climate & Intention/Behavior Models: Behavior intentions (e.g. willingness to share) are shaped by trust, perceived support, alignment of individual and organizational values, and perceived risk/benefit. These mediate whether knowledge is actually shared or hidden.
Barriers & Enablers Understanding why people don’t share is as important as understanding why they do.
Barriers include: • Structural impediments like overly centralized decision frameworks, rigid hierarchy, heavy formalization. These reduce the avenues for informal sharing and flatten the perceived payoff for going outside established channels. • Cognitive or psychological obstacles, such as fear of criticism, loss of advantage (“knowledge as power”), lack of trust, or simply not knowing who might benefit from what one knows. • Technological and process deficiencies: poor documentation practices, weak knowledge management systems, lack of standard archiving, difficult to locate material, etc. These make sharing costly in terms of effort, risk of misunderstanding, or duplication.
Enablers include: • Cultivating a learning culture: where mistakes are not punished, where experimentation is supported, and where informal learning is valued. Studies in team climate show that the presence of an “organizational learning culture” correlates strongly with innovative work behavior. • Leadership that is supportive of sharing: transformational, inclusive leadership, openness to new ideas even when they challenge orthodoxy. Leaders who make visible their support for sharing set norms. • Recognition, incentive alignment, and reward systems that explicitly value sharing. When sharing contributes to promotions, performance evaluations, or peer recognition, people are more likely to invest effort in it.
Influence through Sharing: A Refined Model Putting this together, here is a refined model of how sharing translates into influence: 1. Visibility: Sharing makes one’s work visible across formal and informal networks. Visibility breeds recognition. 2. Peer Adoption & Critical Mass: Innovation often needs a threshold of peer adoption. Once enough people (often around 20-30%) accept or discuss an idea, it tends to propagate more broadly. Early informal sharing helps reach that threshold. 3. Legitimization & Institutionalization: When enough peers accept an idea, it begins to be noticed by formal leadership, which may then adopt it as part of official strategy or practice. What was once “radical” becomes “official.” 4. Influence & Reward: As an individual or team’s ideas get absorbed into the organizational narrative, their influence increases. They may be entrusted with leadership, provided more resources, or seen as agents of change.
Recent Considerations: Hybrid Work, Digital Tools, AI Over the past few years, changes in how and where people work, plus the integration of AI into knowledge-sharing tools, add new dimensions: • Remote and hybrid setups tend to magnify the problems of invisibility and isolation; informal corridor conversations or impromptu check-ins become less likely. Organizations must work harder to construct virtual equivalents (e.g. asynchronous documentation, digital forums, internal social networks). • AI and knowledge-management platforms can help accelerate sharing, reduce friction (e.g. discovery of existing reports, automatic tagging, summarisation), but they also risk over-trust in automation or leaving behind tacit knowledge that is hard to codify. • Given the increasing volume of information, selective sharing and curating become skills. Not every detail needs to be shared widely, but knowing what, when, and how to share is part of influence.
Implications for Practice For individuals aiming to increase their influence via sharing: • Embed documentation and archival processes into every project (e.g. phase reports, lessons learned). • Use both formal and informal channels: internal blogs or newsletters, but also coffee chats, virtual social spaces. • Be willing to experiment, share preliminary findings; feedback improves ideas and increases visibility.
For organizations: • Build a culture that rewards sharing explicitly through performance systems. • Reduce structural barriers like overly centralized control or onerous formalization. • Provide tools and training to lower the effort of sharing; make knowledge easier to find and use. • Encourage cross-team interactions, peer networks, communities of practice.
Final Word Sharing is not just a morally good or nice thing to do, it is one of the most potent forms of influence in knowledge-based work. It transforms static assets into living processes, elevates visibility, enables innovation, and shapes organization culture. As the world of work continues to evolve, those who master the art and science of sharing will increasingly become the architects of change.
References: Here are key sources that discuss the concepts above. You can draw on these for citations or further reading. 1. Xu, J., et al. (2023). A theoretical review on the role of knowledge sharing and … [PMC] 2. Peters, L.D.K., et al. (2024). “‘The more we share, the more we have’? Analyses of identification with the company positively influencing knowledge-sharing behaviour…” 3. Greenhalgh, T., et al. (2004). “Diffusion of Innovations in Service Organizations.” Milbank Quarterly – literature review on spreading and sustaining innovations. 4. Ye, M., et al. (2021). “Collective patterns of social diffusion are shaped by committed minorities …” Nature Communications 5. Bui, T. T., Nguyen, L. P., Tran, A. P., Nguyen, H. H., & Tran, T. T. (2023). “Organizational Factors and Knowledge Sharing Behavior: Mediating Model of Knowledge Sharing Intention.” 6. Abbasi, S. G., et al. (2021). “Impact of Organizational and Individual Factors on Knowledge Sharing Behavior.” 7. He, M., et al. (2024). “Sharing or Hiding? Exploring the Influence of Social … Knowledge sharing & knowledge hiding mechanisms.” 8. Sudibjo, N., et al. (2021). “The effects of knowledge sharing and person–organization fit on teachers’ innovative work …” 9. Academia preprint: Cui, J., et al. (2025). “The Explore of Knowledge Management Dynamic Capabilities, AI-Driven Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge-Based Organizational Support, and Organizational Learning on Job Performance: Evidence from Chinese Technological Companies.” 10. Koivisto, K., & Taipalus, T. (2023). “Pitfalls in Effective Knowledge Management: Insights from an International Information Technology Organization.”
When I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1991, I did so on an H-1B visa. The program was brand new at the time, created to ensure that highly skilled professionals could move quickly into positions where American companies faced genuine gaps in expertise. My own case reflected that original vision perfectly. The U.S. firm that acquired my UK employer needed continuity and leadership in managing the transition of products and markets. I was the senior person left standing after the American parent stripped away the British management team, and my experience as product manager made me indispensable.
The process worked with remarkable speed, and the offer was more than fair. A $75,000 salary in 1991, equivalent to nearly $180,000 today, was a clear acknowledgment of the skills and responsibilities I brought with me. The system was designed to secure talent, not to undercut wages, and for me it delivered exactly what was promised: a career-defining opportunity and a way for an American company to gain the expertise it needed to thrive.
But what worked so well for me in 1991 has, over the decades, drifted far from that original intent. The H-1B program was meant to bring the best and brightest from abroad to fill roles that were difficult to source domestically. Instead, it has increasingly become a pipeline for large outsourcing firms that import entry-level workers at far lower wages than their American counterparts. Where the original standard was senior-level knowledge and proven skill, many visas now go to contractors whose roles could often be filled within the domestic labor pool.
This misuse creates what one former U.S. immigration official has called a “split personality disorder” for the program. Roughly half the visas still go to companies that genuinely need high-level specialists and can offer long-term careers, but the other half are captured by consulting firms whose business model depends on renting out lower-cost workers. That shift undermines both American workers, who see wages suppressed, and skilled foreign professionals, who are often treated as interchangeable resources rather than valued contributors.
The lottery system has further distorted the program. Once a simple way to fairly distribute a limited number of visas, it has been gamed by firms flooding the system with multiple applications. The recent drop in lottery bids, after the government cracked down on such practices, revealed just how much abuse had taken hold.
If the H-1B visa is to remain credible, it needs to return to its original purpose: rewarding specialized knowledge, proven expertise, and long-term commitment. Proposals to allocate visas based on wage levels rather than random chance would be a step in the right direction. They would align the system once again with its founding principle: bringing in the kind of high-value, hard-to-replace professionals that the U.S. economy truly needs.
My own journey in 1991 demonstrates the potential of the H-1B program when it is used as intended. It was a bridge for talent, a tool for competitiveness, and a life-changing opportunity. But unless it is reformed, the program risks being remembered not for what it enabled, but for how it was exploited.
The Rowanwood Chronicles 