Canada is a country with substantial tailwinds, but also substantial headwinds.
The current prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, had an ad with famous actor and comedian Mike Myers in this years election campaign. The two have something in common: neither of them have spent much time in Canada in the past 10 years. Myers moved to the US once he got some success, and Carney was a Goldman Sachs investment banker at the start of his career in the US, spent some time in Canada, and then moved to Europe. This speaks to the reality that Canada has a big problem with brain drain. Once people get to a certain level of success, they tend to leave.
Part of the cause of the recent trouble was actually Canada's immense success. In the 2000s, the federal government under the liberals managed to balance the budget and paid down a considerable percentage of the federal debt, crime was relatively low, Canada hit most lists for one of the best places in the world to live, and opportunities particularly in the oil sands meant that normal people could go out into the world and do very well for themselves. In a situation like that, a lot of people are going to feel some level of guilt knowing that there are still other people who are suffering. This is how successful countries end up with a leader like Trudeau in charge.
The housing problem by itself has also been something of a double ended sword. Housing makes up an overwhelming amount of Canada's economy these days, because it's something very easy for the government to prop up. Make it harder to build and easier to buy, and prices go up. Import people from around the world, and prices go up. Let people raid their retirement savings for a down payment, and prices go up. Meanwhile, the government can collect taxes on the million dollar homes and all the businesses that end up surrounding those homes. Prices nation-wide peaked around 850k for a single family home. This ends up being a boon to the government and to a few boomers who bought 50k homes in the 90s, but it's bad for the economy when you need to come up with 1500/mo to live in a basic apartment in a second or third tier city.
Those high housing prices aren't the only high costs. Canada has a huge and overbearing state, and a jealous one too. The United States generally has free trade between states, but Canada does not have the same between provinces. You can have a product manufactured in Manitoba that cannot be sold in Ontario or Saskatchewan. Moreover, for products such as crude oil which Canada has an abundance, it is proven essentially impossible to build pipelines to get those resources to appropriate markets within Canada, so Canada ships those resources to the United states, the United States builds pipelines and the like, and then we buy it back from The Americans. The Canadian Federal government, after implementing sweeping new legislation to make it more difficult to build things like pipelines ended up purchasing one of the major pipeline projects. I believe that they did so in order to show Private industry how easy it was to complete a pipeline. In reality, it prove that even with the full power of the federal government behind it, they barely got the project done. Ontario's greenstone field contains generational levels of wealth, but it has been stuck in the ground for decades because the various levels of government can't agree on how to let Private industry make use of those resources.
Canada was once a major center of tech. At the beginning of the computer era, it spawned companies such as ATI and Adlib, and later on companies such as Nortel and blackberry. Today, the Canadian government has passed numerous laws to explicitly censor the internet and implement corporate socialism whereupon in return for being allowed to operate in canada, successful American companies pay a tithe to unsuccessful Canadian companies of course selected by the Canadian government.
To make up for the fact that GDP cannot be produced with innovation or productive industry, the Canadian government makes up for it by importing an overwhelming number of people. The Canadian population was roughly stable at about 40 million people, in order to increase GDP the government embarked on an unheard of amount of immigration, over a million people every year. This did result in higher gdp, but it also resulted in lower per capita GDP and it was self-evidently a direct causal element in rising cost of living.
All of this doesn't look that bad for the state, but in spite of massive increases in the number of people employed by the state in the last 10 years, most people don't work for the state. As a result, investment in the country takes a downward spiral where companies in Canada have a much harder time attracting investment compared to comparable companies in the US or Europe. This means that there are fewer opportunities overall, which means fewer opportunities for tax income, which means the government tightens its grip further, which means fewer attractive investment opportunities, and so on and so forth. Entire regions of the country have been hollowed out.
Which brings us back to the university and college education. What we are seeing with the extremely high levels of education in Canada is not a virtuous country that values education. What we are seeing with the extremely high levels of education is a feedback loop where people require overwhelming amounts of money just to survive, and so people make major time and money investments into education in the hope that it will give them the opportunity to join one of those high paid professions that will let them get the million dollar mortgage for their forever home. Meanwhile, pure economics says that the more you have of a thing the less valuable it is, and so in spite of having all these educated people, they're just aren't enough elite jobs to go around.
And so that is why Canada is so highly educated and yet is doing so poorly.
The current prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, had an ad with famous actor and comedian Mike Myers in this years election campaign. The two have something in common: neither of them have spent much time in Canada in the past 10 years. Myers moved to the US once he got some success, and Carney was a Goldman Sachs investment banker at the start of his career in the US, spent some time in Canada, and then moved to Europe. This speaks to the reality that Canada has a big problem with brain drain. Once people get to a certain level of success, they tend to leave.
Part of the cause of the recent trouble was actually Canada's immense success. In the 2000s, the federal government under the liberals managed to balance the budget and paid down a considerable percentage of the federal debt, crime was relatively low, Canada hit most lists for one of the best places in the world to live, and opportunities particularly in the oil sands meant that normal people could go out into the world and do very well for themselves. In a situation like that, a lot of people are going to feel some level of guilt knowing that there are still other people who are suffering. This is how successful countries end up with a leader like Trudeau in charge.
The housing problem by itself has also been something of a double ended sword. Housing makes up an overwhelming amount of Canada's economy these days, because it's something very easy for the government to prop up. Make it harder to build and easier to buy, and prices go up. Import people from around the world, and prices go up. Let people raid their retirement savings for a down payment, and prices go up. Meanwhile, the government can collect taxes on the million dollar homes and all the businesses that end up surrounding those homes. Prices nation-wide peaked around 850k for a single family home. This ends up being a boon to the government and to a few boomers who bought 50k homes in the 90s, but it's bad for the economy when you need to come up with 1500/mo to live in a basic apartment in a second or third tier city.
Those high housing prices aren't the only high costs. Canada has a huge and overbearing state, and a jealous one too. The United States generally has free trade between states, but Canada does not have the same between provinces. You can have a product manufactured in Manitoba that cannot be sold in Ontario or Saskatchewan. Moreover, for products such as crude oil which Canada has an abundance, it is proven essentially impossible to build pipelines to get those resources to appropriate markets within Canada, so Canada ships those resources to the United states, the United States builds pipelines and the like, and then we buy it back from The Americans. The Canadian Federal government, after implementing sweeping new legislation to make it more difficult to build things like pipelines ended up purchasing one of the major pipeline projects. I believe that they did so in order to show Private industry how easy it was to complete a pipeline. In reality, it prove that even with the full power of the federal government behind it, they barely got the project done. Ontario's greenstone field contains generational levels of wealth, but it has been stuck in the ground for decades because the various levels of government can't agree on how to let Private industry make use of those resources.
Canada was once a major center of tech. At the beginning of the computer era, it spawned companies such as ATI and Adlib, and later on companies such as Nortel and blackberry. Today, the Canadian government has passed numerous laws to explicitly censor the internet and implement corporate socialism whereupon in return for being allowed to operate in canada, successful American companies pay a tithe to unsuccessful Canadian companies of course selected by the Canadian government.
To make up for the fact that GDP cannot be produced with innovation or productive industry, the Canadian government makes up for it by importing an overwhelming number of people. The Canadian population was roughly stable at about 40 million people, in order to increase GDP the government embarked on an unheard of amount of immigration, over a million people every year. This did result in higher gdp, but it also resulted in lower per capita GDP and it was self-evidently a direct causal element in rising cost of living.
All of this doesn't look that bad for the state, but in spite of massive increases in the number of people employed by the state in the last 10 years, most people don't work for the state. As a result, investment in the country takes a downward spiral where companies in Canada have a much harder time attracting investment compared to comparable companies in the US or Europe. This means that there are fewer opportunities overall, which means fewer opportunities for tax income, which means the government tightens its grip further, which means fewer attractive investment opportunities, and so on and so forth. Entire regions of the country have been hollowed out.
Which brings us back to the university and college education. What we are seeing with the extremely high levels of education in Canada is not a virtuous country that values education. What we are seeing with the extremely high levels of education is a feedback loop where people require overwhelming amounts of money just to survive, and so people make major time and money investments into education in the hope that it will give them the opportunity to join one of those high paid professions that will let them get the million dollar mortgage for their forever home. Meanwhile, pure economics says that the more you have of a thing the less valuable it is, and so in spite of having all these educated people, they're just aren't enough elite jobs to go around.
And so that is why Canada is so highly educated and yet is doing so poorly.
I'm kind of surprised. I finished the first draft of Future Sepsis tonight.
Final word count is 67,912 words.
The original plan was for 60,000 words completed 1,000 per week starting in January and ending sometime in early 2026. Obviously I was able to have some very productive weeks.
Planning to edit in 3 passes using different techniques for each pass to catch different potential problems in the work, then I'll have to start all the legwork of getting it out there.
For anyone who goes "This dummy writes too much in his posts", just imagine -- I've been writing this much outside of my posts! :P
Final word count is 67,912 words.
The original plan was for 60,000 words completed 1,000 per week starting in January and ending sometime in early 2026. Obviously I was able to have some very productive weeks.
Planning to edit in 3 passes using different techniques for each pass to catch different potential problems in the work, then I'll have to start all the legwork of getting it out there.
For anyone who goes "This dummy writes too much in his posts", just imagine -- I've been writing this much outside of my posts! :P
My life is in a strange spot right now. One moment doing simple shapes and colors, and 30 seconds later I'm working on a hard sci-fi bio-thriller set 100 years in the future.
After I learned what one of these anchors makes in a year, I now believe that 16 million dollars isn't nearly enough of a fine for what they did.
I expect the first draft to be done later this month, not a lot of words left to write. I spent some time today building the cover. When I completed The Graysonian Ethic, the editing passes went really fast and it was time to go to press quickly, so I figured I'd take the opportunity while my brain isn't quite ready for this week's words.
The matrix sequels are basically a leftist meme, using a lot of words to say nothing.
With the Liberals in charge, the only weapons of war they could bring to bear would be weaponized snark and catty comments. Unfortunately I am under the distinct impression that neither of those can be compared favorably to nuclear weapons or Abrams tanks.
I want to be clear about something, I wasn't really disagreeing with anything you said, I was just jumping into the conversation because this is my jam. :p
It all comes back to the question: "if a malevolent demon wanted to manipulate me into thinking all kinds of absurd things, how can I be sure I even exist at all?", it's an extreme skepticism that anything can be known at all.
But even if the empirical world is an illusion (it largely is), if you can sit and think about whether you're being manipulated then at least something that is "you" must exist to think those thoughts. It may or may not be the embodied self you think you are (and in some ways that's an illusion too -- you are the amalgamation of billions of individual cells working in concert), but *something* that is you must exist.
It isn't about externally validating someone else's existence, it's about proving to yourself that you can at least know that you exist.
It's a problem that comes up when you start questioning everything, that everything means everything. Everything means that you need to question what your eyes and ears tell you, it means that you need to question what your skin feels, what your nose smells, you need to question whether you exist at all because if you are questioning everything then you have no basis to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that even you yourself exist unless you can derive it from some logical basis.
You end up with a similar problem from the ought-is problem in ethics. I spent many years trying to think of some way that you could prove mathematically and scientifically that there was a certain way of living that was objectively correct, and the reality was that in the movement of atoms and stars, you will never find a reason not to fall into degeneracy. The place you find that meaning is within yourself because you're a human being made of human being components.
Ironically, modern era philosophers like Descartes largely ended up falling into the materialist/empiricist framework so you can take the fact that you think as proof that you exist, but you can't take the fact that you feel love as proof that love exists.
But even if the empirical world is an illusion (it largely is), if you can sit and think about whether you're being manipulated then at least something that is "you" must exist to think those thoughts. It may or may not be the embodied self you think you are (and in some ways that's an illusion too -- you are the amalgamation of billions of individual cells working in concert), but *something* that is you must exist.
It isn't about externally validating someone else's existence, it's about proving to yourself that you can at least know that you exist.
It's a problem that comes up when you start questioning everything, that everything means everything. Everything means that you need to question what your eyes and ears tell you, it means that you need to question what your skin feels, what your nose smells, you need to question whether you exist at all because if you are questioning everything then you have no basis to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that even you yourself exist unless you can derive it from some logical basis.
You end up with a similar problem from the ought-is problem in ethics. I spent many years trying to think of some way that you could prove mathematically and scientifically that there was a certain way of living that was objectively correct, and the reality was that in the movement of atoms and stars, you will never find a reason not to fall into degeneracy. The place you find that meaning is within yourself because you're a human being made of human being components.
Ironically, modern era philosophers like Descartes largely ended up falling into the materialist/empiricist framework so you can take the fact that you think as proof that you exist, but you can't take the fact that you feel love as proof that love exists.
Shroedingers country: it's simultaneously the nicest place on earth and so horrible that we should allow everyone living there to move here until Trump says something about it and the waveform collapses.
If my wife and kids ever stop referring to me that way I'll disown them for trying to gas me up too much.
Looks like that guy from ac/DC took unbelievable amounts of acid.
Which he did I'm sure, but not enough to cause this.
Which he did I'm sure, but not enough to cause this.
The source file is included, the drawall routine does it all as I recall. Definitely did the graphics in pure QB, with all the slowness that entails.
The only thing that might be assembly is the key handler. I really don't remember at this point, because I remember spending some time on an assembly key handler, but I also remember spending some time on a pure QB key handler. There was no native multikey routine so you had to poll the keyboard interrupt directly. I think an assembler keyboard routine would use interrupts to catch every key press and unpress whereas a QB routine has to poll the keyboard and is limited by the execution rate of the main game loop.
I guess, also the music. After Windows 2000 was released, any conception of using MS-DOS for music went out the window, so I think the dos version has a little visual basic program that looks for commands in a file in the root directory of the game, and then either plays or stops playing the music based on the commands in the file.
The only thing that might be assembly is the key handler. I really don't remember at this point, because I remember spending some time on an assembly key handler, but I also remember spending some time on a pure QB key handler. There was no native multikey routine so you had to poll the keyboard interrupt directly. I think an assembler keyboard routine would use interrupts to catch every key press and unpress whereas a QB routine has to poll the keyboard and is limited by the execution rate of the main game loop.
I guess, also the music. After Windows 2000 was released, any conception of using MS-DOS for music went out the window, so I think the dos version has a little visual basic program that looks for commands in a file in the root directory of the game, and then either plays or stops playing the music based on the commands in the file.
This is a container of corn we bought with supper at Kentucky fried chicken last night. Visine shown for scale. It cost us $3.40 for this tiny thing!
