Good progress editing Future Sepsis. My first editing pass is just playing the work back using TTS. A lot of the time stuff that's correct on paper doesn't sound right when it's read aloud. After I've edited a section in this pass, I dump it into the file with the correct formatting. Lots of easy mistakes I caught.
I recorded the Audio Book of The Graysonian Ethic long after the book was finalized, and as a result editing the audio book I found a lot of mistakes, which is one reason why I decided to make that the preliminary pass.
I was going to do an AI editing pass, but after using AI a lot, I've decided against it -- I just don't feel like the language it spits out is what I'm looking for.
Final editing pass is sending it to an editor who did a good job on The Graysonian Ethic.
Once that last editing pass is done, I'll be ready to put it up for sale.
I recorded the Audio Book of The Graysonian Ethic long after the book was finalized, and as a result editing the audio book I found a lot of mistakes, which is one reason why I decided to make that the preliminary pass.
I was going to do an AI editing pass, but after using AI a lot, I've decided against it -- I just don't feel like the language it spits out is what I'm looking for.
Final editing pass is sending it to an editor who did a good job on The Graysonian Ethic.
Once that last editing pass is done, I'll be ready to put it up for sale.
Think about this: between 1990 and 1995, Microsoft completely rebuilt windows from the ground up into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
Next, between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft completely rebuilt windows again from the ground up into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
From 2001 to 2006, Microsoft completely rebuilt Windows yet again from the ground up into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
Windows 7 occurred with it in the next 6 year window, but it was more of a smoothing out of all the rough edges of the previously rebuilt windows. However, Windows 8 occurred in the next six year window, and it was once again a fundamentally rebuild windows into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
It's been over 10 years since the release of Windows 8, but when you really think about it it's been a completely stagnant product ever since.
On the other hand, this narrative really misses something else: from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Microsoft essentially had to completely change how configuration was done. From 95 to xp, they had to completely change how most things were done. From XP to 7, a lot of things are still done the same way that they were done in XP, and from 7 to today a surprising number of things are still done the way they were in XP.
There might be some good arguments against taking away the old ways of doing things, but I would push back on the idea that the only reason that nothing is moved forward is that Microsoft doesn't want to break anything. In particular, the settings app still doesn't do most of the things that the old win32 utilities did and still do, and so you aren't just going back to the old way of doing things because you're old and set in your ways, you're doing it because Microsoft has failed over nearly 25 years to produce a utility to do the same thing. In some ways if you're using just straight windows 10 or 11, it feels like you're using a janky Linux distribution from 15 years ago.
Ironically, Microsoft also tries to pretend that the problem is the user by trying to hide the old utilities version after version and people have to go chase them down because you still can't do so many very basic things with stuff like the settings app. I'm sorry Microsoft that I'm having to go back to the network connections page to set up my network connections instead of your shiny new settings app, but I need to do some stuff the majority of which you can't do from your shiny new settings app.
If it was just a matter of trying to keep things the same workflow as before then the same stuff would be in the same place, but that's not the case. Over the course of windows 10, buttons for the same thing have moved all over hells half acre, fundamental stuff like the start menu has catastrophically changed in between minor revisions of Windows all the way since Windows 8. Newark econ show up, old icons disappear, any idea that Windows is being kept the way it is because they're trying to maintain workflows evaporates upon contact with reality.
Next, between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft completely rebuilt windows again from the ground up into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
From 2001 to 2006, Microsoft completely rebuilt Windows yet again from the ground up into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
Windows 7 occurred with it in the next 6 year window, but it was more of a smoothing out of all the rough edges of the previously rebuilt windows. However, Windows 8 occurred in the next six year window, and it was once again a fundamentally rebuild windows into a fundamentally different type of operating system.
It's been over 10 years since the release of Windows 8, but when you really think about it it's been a completely stagnant product ever since.
On the other hand, this narrative really misses something else: from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, Microsoft essentially had to completely change how configuration was done. From 95 to xp, they had to completely change how most things were done. From XP to 7, a lot of things are still done the same way that they were done in XP, and from 7 to today a surprising number of things are still done the way they were in XP.
There might be some good arguments against taking away the old ways of doing things, but I would push back on the idea that the only reason that nothing is moved forward is that Microsoft doesn't want to break anything. In particular, the settings app still doesn't do most of the things that the old win32 utilities did and still do, and so you aren't just going back to the old way of doing things because you're old and set in your ways, you're doing it because Microsoft has failed over nearly 25 years to produce a utility to do the same thing. In some ways if you're using just straight windows 10 or 11, it feels like you're using a janky Linux distribution from 15 years ago.
Ironically, Microsoft also tries to pretend that the problem is the user by trying to hide the old utilities version after version and people have to go chase them down because you still can't do so many very basic things with stuff like the settings app. I'm sorry Microsoft that I'm having to go back to the network connections page to set up my network connections instead of your shiny new settings app, but I need to do some stuff the majority of which you can't do from your shiny new settings app.
If it was just a matter of trying to keep things the same workflow as before then the same stuff would be in the same place, but that's not the case. Over the course of windows 10, buttons for the same thing have moved all over hells half acre, fundamental stuff like the start menu has catastrophically changed in between minor revisions of Windows all the way since Windows 8. Newark econ show up, old icons disappear, any idea that Windows is being kept the way it is because they're trying to maintain workflows evaporates upon contact with reality.
When I first got out of college I had that sort of doe eyed attitude. I felt -- correctly -- the fact that I had managed to get through college with relatively little debt, in a field that had decent demand, and managed to get a decent enough job right out of college, had a lot of elements of pure luck and I happened to roll the dice well.
There was a time period where I went out hoping to lift up others who hadn't had the same good luck I did.
After years of sacrifice, the subjects of my charity were no closer to self-sufficiency, but we're very well taken care of in terms of grooming and gadgets, and were endowed with a deep resentment that I hadn't given even more.
For people outside my immediate family, I've learned I need to give help that's constrained by cost, scope, and time. Do a specific thing and when it's over it's over, because otherwise you become just an exploitable resource. For my wife and kids, it needs to be a leadership first approach that instills and aligns values before providing material resources. For my kids in particular, I'll be dead someday soon (relatively speaking) and they won't be able to rely on me for help for most of their own lives.
There was a time period where I went out hoping to lift up others who hadn't had the same good luck I did.
After years of sacrifice, the subjects of my charity were no closer to self-sufficiency, but we're very well taken care of in terms of grooming and gadgets, and were endowed with a deep resentment that I hadn't given even more.
For people outside my immediate family, I've learned I need to give help that's constrained by cost, scope, and time. Do a specific thing and when it's over it's over, because otherwise you become just an exploitable resource. For my wife and kids, it needs to be a leadership first approach that instills and aligns values before providing material resources. For my kids in particular, I'll be dead someday soon (relatively speaking) and they won't be able to rely on me for help for most of their own lives.
It's pretty impressive! I guess we don't even have an executive or a legislature anymore, it's all just judiciary all the way down.
Look, I'm impressed at how cute this picture is, but what I'm really impressed by is how clean that keyboard is.
Unfortunately, anyone with three quarters of a brain in Canada leaves (apparently I'm stuck at half a brain) so we end up with someone like former bank of England chair Mark Carney as head of government, and he brings back all his euro retardation with him.
I'm more expressing general frustration given what's happening here, it isn't a personal attack on you.
Up here we're in year 10 of Europeans exporting their stupid ideas. Our current prime minister was an EU citizen until a couple months ago and he's trying to implement the genocidal "who needs ICE cars anyway" policies that might make sense in western Europe, but is going to kill swaths of this country if implemented here.
I'm sick of it. Europeans don't know what the American continent is like. It isn't western Europe.
I'm sick of it. Europeans don't know what the American continent is like. It isn't western Europe.
The rail systems in China and Western Europe rely on high population densities but simply don't exist throughout most of the United States. In order to justify such rail systems in the United states, the population density of the country would have to rise by a factor of nearly 10. Actually doing that would bring about a huge ecological disaster, because much of the north American continent is already straining in a number of different critical resources such as water, and the amount of food production we could expect to see from the United States would drop catastrophically which would be a humanitarian disaster for huge swaths of the world.
When Europeans criticize Americans, they're continuing their long and storied history of trying to export their bad ideas mindlessly and end up killing a bunch of people in other continents. In the few cases that they were successful, they apologize for it later but obviously they don't feel sorry enough to stop trying to do it.
When Europeans criticize Americans, they're continuing their long and storied history of trying to export their bad ideas mindlessly and end up killing a bunch of people in other continents. In the few cases that they were successful, they apologize for it later but obviously they don't feel sorry enough to stop trying to do it.
Just a bunch of bros, hanging out, living their best lives as billionaires, doing unspeakable things to children. It's not that complicated bro, no need to overthink it!
Considering the legislative environment we live in, the only problem is that the feds wanted to fund it if he was going to off himself.
"Nooooo! Don't kill yourself!!!! It should have been meeee killing you!"
"Nooooo! Don't kill yourself!!!! It should have been meeee killing you!"
I visited a 16th century fort in northern Canada in winter once.
The snow was blowing all over. The wind was brutal worst of all, it just wouldn't stop.
I thought about what that would be like, moving from temperate Europe to this place where the winters were 6 months of Hell on earth and 6 months of bugs and other weather extremes such as extreme heat.
In some ways, Canada is more like Russia. Even people whose history is limited to neoliberal orthodoxy such as the world wars knows what happened to the Germans when they tried to invade Russia -- the weather took more men than the enemy soldiers.
For that reason, comparing Canadian ways of living to European ways of living are absurd on their face. Maybe you can walk every day in Amsterdam, but you can't walk every day in Winnipeg.
It also means stuff like EV mandates aren't going to work. Maybe it'll work in the lovely climate and densely packed populations in Europe, but Canada isn't Europe. Just like the German soldiers who died in Russia, importing these policies is going to kill a bunch of people.
Americans who know their history would know this: even further south in the US, early colonies failed because they were run like European cities and America isn't Europe.
The East Indians who are suckered into coming to live in Northern canada, the ones who don't immediately leave once they realize they've been scammed, often they end up working at the little corner stores. And they'll see a bunch of Canadian kids come in in the middle of winter, in 40 below, and they'll pick up a bunch of slurpees. Because that's part of the national character that outsiders don't understand. And unlike basically anywhere else on planet earth, the risk isn't of your slurpees melting, it's that they freeze.
And I talk a lot about the cold, but you know what? Northern Canada gets super hot as well. The same city can see -40C in the winter, and then +40C (with high humidity) in the summer. Canada is probably one of the only places in the world where you need your heater and your air conditioner on in the same day. And in between, if you're the outdoors sort, the spot between the too cold to live says and the too hot to live says are filled with swarming mosquitos, blackflies, and other bugs like noseeums.
The people who choose to continue to live up here aren't European. Not anymore. They must be something else because the laws of physics demand it.
The funniest and most brutal point is that the Europeans think the people who committed genocide in Canada and Australia are not the same as they are. Trouble is, they're the exact same arrogant idiots imposing their norms on places they won't work. In Canada, that means wannabe European elites like Carney or Trudeau implementing European policies are courting genocide because it hasn't gotten any more temperate in Thompson, flin flon, fort McMurray, the battlefords, or fort Saint john.
The snow was blowing all over. The wind was brutal worst of all, it just wouldn't stop.
I thought about what that would be like, moving from temperate Europe to this place where the winters were 6 months of Hell on earth and 6 months of bugs and other weather extremes such as extreme heat.
In some ways, Canada is more like Russia. Even people whose history is limited to neoliberal orthodoxy such as the world wars knows what happened to the Germans when they tried to invade Russia -- the weather took more men than the enemy soldiers.
For that reason, comparing Canadian ways of living to European ways of living are absurd on their face. Maybe you can walk every day in Amsterdam, but you can't walk every day in Winnipeg.
It also means stuff like EV mandates aren't going to work. Maybe it'll work in the lovely climate and densely packed populations in Europe, but Canada isn't Europe. Just like the German soldiers who died in Russia, importing these policies is going to kill a bunch of people.
Americans who know their history would know this: even further south in the US, early colonies failed because they were run like European cities and America isn't Europe.
The East Indians who are suckered into coming to live in Northern canada, the ones who don't immediately leave once they realize they've been scammed, often they end up working at the little corner stores. And they'll see a bunch of Canadian kids come in in the middle of winter, in 40 below, and they'll pick up a bunch of slurpees. Because that's part of the national character that outsiders don't understand. And unlike basically anywhere else on planet earth, the risk isn't of your slurpees melting, it's that they freeze.
And I talk a lot about the cold, but you know what? Northern Canada gets super hot as well. The same city can see -40C in the winter, and then +40C (with high humidity) in the summer. Canada is probably one of the only places in the world where you need your heater and your air conditioner on in the same day. And in between, if you're the outdoors sort, the spot between the too cold to live says and the too hot to live says are filled with swarming mosquitos, blackflies, and other bugs like noseeums.
The people who choose to continue to live up here aren't European. Not anymore. They must be something else because the laws of physics demand it.
The funniest and most brutal point is that the Europeans think the people who committed genocide in Canada and Australia are not the same as they are. Trouble is, they're the exact same arrogant idiots imposing their norms on places they won't work. In Canada, that means wannabe European elites like Carney or Trudeau implementing European policies are courting genocide because it hasn't gotten any more temperate in Thompson, flin flon, fort McMurray, the battlefords, or fort Saint john.
https://vid.fbxl.net/w/3hvdZVqm4JJjVexQbRvSpG
Not my video, but a beautiful rendition of ave maria on Cello.
Not my video, but a beautiful rendition of ave maria on Cello.
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.