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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Jobs paid enough so one person could stay home is how it worked

    That’s a fantasy. In the 1800s and before there was so much at-home work to be done that it was a full time job for someone (virtually always the wife). She had to do the baking, cooking, mending clothes, cleaning, etc. all without any electrical appliances. That included no refrigerator or freezer, so shopping had to be done a lot more often. There were also no cars, so people either had to walk to do their shopping, or they used a horse. But, if they used a horse, then there was extra work related to keeping the horse alive and in good shape. Clothes were also a lot more expensive, so a lot more time was spent either making clothes at home and mending clothes that had holes, worn spots, etc. It wasn’t “to do chores and whatnot”, it was a full-time job involving more work than a typical a typical job from modern days.

    Then there was WWI, then the “roaring 20s”, which is when electrical appliances first started appearing, and then the stock market crashed and the great depression hit. During the great depression, if either the wife or the husband could find work, they were lucky, and probably had to support the whole family. During the great depression, a lot of worker protections were put in place through the New Deal. But, the jobs weren’t there.

    Then WWII hit, and for a while the US was manufacturing things for the rest of the world without being in the war itself. That helped the economy get going again. When the US joined the war, the economy was really going, but there was rationing in place so the workers who were earning money weren’t able to spend it. When the war ended, the US was in an incredibly strong position. Workers had savings to spend once rationing was removed. Every other country had had its industrial base smashed by the war. As a result, the US manufacturing was in high demand all over the world. For contrast, even though the UK was also one of the “winners” of WWII, rationing was in place until 1954.

    So, high demand for industrial workers, worker protections left over from the New Deal era, labour-saving electrical appliances being available for the first time, cars everywhere… it was a unique set of circumstances that meant for maybe the first time in history a man could work a blue collar job and have a wife who stayed at home and just did “chores and whatnot”. That lasted a few decades. People blame Reagan for a lot of it, but really by the time he was elected that golden period for blue collar workers was already ending.

    Also, keep in mind that strong protections for workers didn’t just happen. The government didn’t just decide that it would be nice to workers. Workers had to fight hard for those rights. The 8 hour day is the result of fights that were very violent. Bombs were thrown at cops. Supposed ringleaders were hanged by the government after show trials. FDR pushed for laws to protect workers because the alternative was rioting. If today’s workers want to share in the wealth, they need to riot, they need to be prepared to die. Nothing’s going to change if it’s just complaining that “this isn’t how it should be”.






  • Fuck you they were. They wanted to sell you a computer so that you’d install Office. They never wanted you to do whatever you wanted with it. They intentionally changed internal APIs to break third party software that they didn’t want people using. This is also the era where they were constantly spreading FUD about Linux, convincing people that merely using Linux meant you were legally liable for patent infringement, etc.



  • Sure, it might seem like a sprint compared to a Waterfall project where it’s a marathon, where there might be months between points where you check in with the plan and try to figure out if the software is ready to ship yet.

    I still just object to the word “sprint”. Any job where you’re sprinting over and over, week after week, where that’s the main thing you’re doing, you’re doing something wrong.


  • What makes it so annoying to me is that a sprint implies putting in maximum effort for a short time. The pace of a sprint is unsustainable over more than a few seconds.

    If you say you did “sprints” for over a year… no you didn’t. Either you sprinted for a little bit and then had to walk for a while because you’d used up all your energy. Or, you jogged at a sustainable pace for a year and just called it a sprint.




  • On that subject, does anybody hate the term “Sprint” as much as I do?

    “Sprints” are extremely quick events that last tens of seconds and are done at most once a day, but more often (in competition) a few times a month, or a few times in a day every few months.

    You don’t sprint for a full week every week. That’s a marathon, maybe an ultra-marathon.




  • It is strategic for Canada to invest in its air force because:

    1. Hmm, what happened in that far northern area? We should go check it out. Oh wait, we don’t have planes to do that.
    2. Russia attacks Finland. Finland calls for help from its NATO allies. Canada sends its air force.
    3. Every single flight from Europe to the US west coast flies over Canada. Even flights from Europe to Mexico City pass over Atlantic Canada. One of those flights stops responding and there’s a fear it was hijacked. Oh well, I guess the USAF can check it out once it crosses the border… if it crosses the border.

    You can see some of the absurdities of not having a proper air force in Switzerland. They used to have an Air Force that only operated during daytime business hours. In 2014 an Ethiopian Airlines pilot hijacked his own plane and landed it in Geneva. Italy and France scrambled to escort the plane through their airspaces. Switzerland had to just let it do what it wanted because their Air Force didn’t operate 24 hours a day.

    In fact, for a huge and nearly empty country like Canada, the air force is arguably the most important military branch. Since prehistoric times, the size of a country / kingdom / empire was defined by the region in which it had a monopoly on the use of force. If Canada wants to claim sovereignty over the entire North, and not just the Montreal to Toronto corridor, it needs to be able to notice an invasion in the north, attack anybody there tying to claim its territory, and transport soldiers up there if necessary. That’s all Air Force stuff.

    A modern Air Force might not mean fighter pilots in supersonic planes. As things in Ukraine have shown, it might instead be mostly drones.



  • There’s a joke about that:

    One economist says to the second “I’ll give you $10,000 if you eat that pile of dog shit.” The second economist reluctantly agrees, but the smug look on the other guy’s face makes him regret it. He sees another pile of dog shit and offers the first economist $10,000 to eat it. The first one agrees, $10,000 is a lot of money.

    Afterwards, both economists are sitting there, dog shit smeared on their faces. One says to the other “What a waste! We both have the same money we started with, but we both had to eat dog shit.”

    The second replies: “That’s absurd, in just a few minutes we grew the economy by $20,000!”


  • The optimistic scenario for the economy is a pessimistic scenario for the world.

    For the economy to do well would require the AI bubble to not pop. It would mean that these absurd valuations for the AI companies turn out to be correct. That all the circular financing somehow comes good and all these ridiculous-seeming bets about the future of AI turn out to be at least partially correct. It will require that the companies that fired workers to replace them with chatbots turned out to have made a good and profitable decision. It’s the scenario where Musk becomes a trillionaire.


  • Let’s be real, oil / petroleum / gasoline / aviation gas are going to be part of the economy for decades. Countries are going to get by with less oil, but not without oil. There are things like planes that really require a very energy dense source of energy. There are other things like buses and local delivery trucks that can do fine with batteries, but where vehicles are an investment that is paid off over a decade. The new ones might be electric, but the old ones won’t be replaced soon. This might have accelerated the transition in a significant way, but oil is such a big part of everything that it’s still going to be around for a long time.

    What I hope is that there are countries, say in Africa, that never really fully industrialized with an oil-based economy. Hopefully they can skip right past that and start with clean energy right from the start.