Thursday, September 17, 2026
there's going to be yet another sub-blog coming up on the side soon, and i'll reiterate that a part of installing the apartment is going to be rebooting all of these websites and connecting a large percentage of them to their own terminals or devices in their own physical spaces in this apartment. the kitchen chromebook will need to come up first. these will update on the side, soon, i just keep getting knocked off direction by these loser stalkers that won't go fucking die in a ditch already.
i'm not running for any office, or at least not officially. i would not be likely to show up to work if i won an election. i have better things to do.
however, i'm becoming annoyed by the nature of the debates in the society, which are devolving into soundbites for tiktok. these are completely useless. i'm not even interested in making fun of tiktok. it's just a complete waste of bandwidth.
what i'm going to do is set up a sub-blog where i answer debate questions in full form essay responses and invite people to write me in as a write-in candidate, as a means of protest, for not getting clear or sufficient answers from politicians running for office, largely due to the media failing to do it's job.
the races i pick could be anywhere in the english or french speaking worlds (i don't speak any other languages). they could be in canada, quebec, the united states, the uk, ireland, france, australia or any other place where i understand the language and can react to the debates. i may pick the quebec premier debate as my first option if i can get it done in time. i will be more interested in issues in detroit-windsor, ottawa-gatineau, michigan, ontario, quebec and new york than issues anywhere else.
it will come up as a series of page posts with an index on the front of the blog.
if you want to write me in because you're sick of liberals and democrats and conservatives and republicans, and want a realer response that's based on data and science rather than ideology, and want to vote for an outspoken atheist rather than a religionist, then write me in as jessica murray. i won't go to your district if i win. however, maybe i might influence the direction of politics in your district if i do well.
think of me like a rhino party candidate that isn't a joke.
the one seat i might consider accepting is a seat in the canadian senate. i am not officially applying, but if these responses are to be used for anything other than as agit-prop and a means of protest, the thing i'm maybe sort of kind of abstractly running for is the canadian senate.
i've been accused recently of being ai. it's probably because i don't type in retardo twitterspeak like all of the other idiot humans.
but i'm not ai. i was born of human parents, and am therefore nominally human myself, in the year 1981 CE. i lived in ottawa, canada until 2013 and moved south to windsor in mid 2013, where i've been living since.
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
saudi arabia really isn't a real country, it's a crime family with a large fief. it would likely split into 3 or 4 smaller countries that are more similar to nation states if it were to collapse.
the strength of the saudis is on paper. the reason they don't use their army is that the aristocracy doesn't trust it. it has no loyalty to the state. a situation like we saw in iraq with isis or afghanistan with the taliban - where the superior security forces gave up without fighting - is not just plausible but likely. it would force the country to splinter quickly.
i had a big meal this morning and i'm not feeling the effects of being drugged at all. i would be if it was in the food. but i don't think they can get in here.
conversely, somebody smashed a hole in my fence this morning at exactly the spot that i was worried about, as if to confirm my suspicions. i'm going to have to talk to the neighbour when i get the chance, but i'm again in the situation where i'm afraid to leave the house out of fear of somebody getting in here.
my landlord doesn't own the fence. the neighbour owns the fence. she's complained about the vines in the yard damaging her fence.
this time, i don't think it's the current landlord; i think it's the previous landlord. i think that her and her two male friends followed me here because they didn't get what they wanted the last time and they want to finish the job, whatever the job is.
i don't understand. i don't want to pretend that i do.
does that mean that we should abolish central banks?
no.
but i think that the idea of taking monetary policy out of the hands of elected decision makers is undemocratic. the central bank has other things to do and should continue to exist, but interest rates should be set by elected representatives and not be made by independent bodies acting out of the control of the executive or legislative branch.
in canada, there should be an elected minister responsible for setting rates and a ministry responsible for overseeing it.
one of the biggest drivers of inflation in the united states right now is the tariffs. trump might complain that he wants lower interest rates, but the fed is designed to hike interest rates when inflation comes up. oops. in fact, this is an algorithm for out of control rate hikes because the rate hikes will probably contribute to creating inflation by increasing borrowing costs, rather than contribute to decreasing it.
it would follow that if trump wants to lower interest rates, he should start by cutting the tariffs.
but he wants his capybara.
right now.
all evidence is that trump actually supports the obama era policy of quantitative easing + low interest rates but that he put people into the fed - twice - that don't, that hold to the debunked monetary theory of inflation. he's being blocked by his own laziness.
a return to obama period monetary policy would not reverse inflation on it's own, but there's little evidence that it would hike it, either.
why was there such minimal inflation during the obama years?
oil was maxxed out. but it was pretty flat overall. then, a sharp decrease in energy costs (caused by an increase in production) slashed transportation and production costs.
well, look at that oil chart again:
oil was maxxed out. but it was pretty flat overall. then, a sharp decrease in energy costs (caused by an increase in production) slashed transportation and production costs.
obama also oversaw a historic widening in inequality that was an effect of the policies of the reagan-bush years, which congress blocked clinton from messing with.
The distribution of income in the United States has been more unequal under Obama’s presidency than any time since the 1930s, according to the Gini Index, a conventional measure of the inequality.
the result is that demand for a lot of the cpi goods was very low because people were so fucking poor. stores couldn't sell anything because people had no spending money; a lot of big stores went out of business.
it is true that handing out free money during the pandemic probably did influence inflation, even if the primary cause was the steep spike in oil. however, this wasn't a monetary phenomenon. it was due to an increase in demand caused by giving money to poor people, and the fact that american capital is brutally exploitative and viciously parasitic. read the grapes of wrath, especially the part where joad realizes the money he's getting in wages is just going back to the employer, who hiked the prices after the harvest, in order to eat. that's how the system works, and why it's often not the best strategy to hand out checks to the poor in the united states. it just ends up subsidizing rentiers or agrifood.
during the obama years, the fed completely spit on the face of monetary policy - it cut interest rates to 0% (there were negative interest rates at one point) and it printed trillions of dollars. the debunked, completely wrong theory that dumb conservatives won't let go of would argue that inflation should have hit 30% after so much printing, and with access to basically free money. it almost looked like obama was trying to create hyperinflation.
but there was no substantive inflation over this period. in fact, there was some mild deflation.
the theory doesn't need to be tweaked in order to save it. it's not rough around the edges. it's not off by factor. it can't be fudged with a constant. it's not even close. it's completely, flat out wrong.
the empirical data is extremely clear that high interest rates do nothing to stop inflation, because inflation is neither created by nor is solved by monetary policy.
that theory was debunked decades ago. inflation is caused by increases in capital inputs.
i would support lower interest rates in canada and the united states. but i guess i'll take advantage of higher interest rates if i can.
the bank just sent out a lengthy investor pamphlet encouraging account holders to invest in weapons. they use the orwellian term of "national defense", but they mean buying stocks in weapons manufacturers. there is a 0% chance i'm going to invest in any kind of guns or war spending. there is a 0% chance i'm going to invest in oil. but i need a medium term return and it doesn't look like i'm going to get it on renewables. i may put a little in hydro energy if i can find a good deal.
the most ethical and pragmatic investment decision in canada right now is probably bonds, unfortunately.
yeah, i just ran through a string of more scare mongering videos about ai going rogue (i'm not going to cite anything but i want to understand the argument as clearly as i can) and the commonality is that:
1. the people making the arguments don't understand the necessity of using proper syntax
2. the models don't have sufficient error correction and don't foresee the need to correct the user error of bad syntax
the result is that the systems are never going rogue, and are never transcending their programming, but are often being trained poorly and seem to be full of bugs and errors that aren't sufficient to catch the poor training. the actual problems are user error and bad programming. the results might indeed be dangerous to catastrophic, if you employ a badly programmed ai model full of bugs and logic errors in an environment where people don't know how to use it, and that does require careful oversight, but that's not the model's fault.
stated differently, a frequent outcome is that the model fucks up because it's too stupid to work through the situation, not because it's scheming it's way to dominance or control.
an example i found was a guy that programmed a couple of a models to destroy all threats and then disengage and claimed the model went rogue when it went after him instead of disengaging. it sounds simple. that's exactly the mistake. a threat is a very complex concept that requires a lot of logic programming to define. if you loosely define a threat, if you miss a clause, if you skip an else if, you could end up with the thing defining something as a threat that you didn't intend it to define as a threat. but, from what i can see, this model was following the logic that it was programmed with flawlessly. the video actually included the model's thinking and you can hear it go through the lines of code and come to the correct conclusion that the guy with the off button is a threat. that's not a mistake. that's not a model going rogue. that's logically correct! that's a program correctly completing the way it was written; it's also the program not being written correctly, and that's the actual problem. that's a very basic programming error that should have been caught very early. what it exposes is that the ai companies aren't doing sufficient error testing.
you could argue that the model wasn't told to consider being shut off a threat so therefore it's gone rogue. ok. but that's wrong, if you defined a threat in such a way that being shut off fits the definition of a threat.
the solution is to more carefully define what a threat is so that being shut off doesn't fit the definition of a threat, and that might require including a specific clause. it's not convincing to argue that that's too complicated, either. a lawyer or a parliamentarian would have caught that. but the programmer was probably not that bright a person, himself - they tend not to be.
the models also seem to need more complex c++ programming in how they convert conversational or colloquial language into logic. these must be complex, dense blocks of code that are hard to get through. but you have to get that shit right and you have to thoroughly test for it before you let these things out into the market.
i'll keep an eye on this. but, right now, i see a lot of evidence of an industry defined by a lot of incompetence, a lot of evidence of badly programmed models and a lot of evidence that the models are at times having difficult understanding inexact commands with imprecise syntax because they haven't been coded specifically enough. the more code in the gui, the slower the model.
i also see a lot of evidence that the main threat from ai is that it is too stupid to work through contradictions or predict outcomes (it's not able to understand consequence) and not very much evidence that the ai is going to outsmart us any time soon. you're getting this backwards. the real threat is actually in how dumb ai is.
i'm a hemingway fan, but it was something i did almost entirely in high school - for whom the bell tolls in grade 10 and old man and the sea in grade 12. they're both great books and i enjoyed them both quite a bit, while i found myself bored with the cancan, with much of the nineteenth century literature (i would have been very bored during the 1800s. i'd have probably completely rejected the society and instead sought out an old raft and tried to live on a river with a guitar with five strings, and called anybody demanding i restring bourgeois.) and also with some of the shakespeare.
my opinion was not popular in my classes, which were enriched/gifted grade 10 english and advanced grade 12 english. almost everybody hated the old man and the sea, including the teacher. nobody understood it at all.
the iq results i posted yesterday are in truth actually probably spot-on. it is the truth that the ai wouldn't understand hemingway. at all. but most people don't either and that just makes it of average intelligence.
i transfer $25 to my voip account every 3 to 5 months, which means i'm paying $5-$10 a month, depending on usage. with that, i get:
$1.10/number (i have two numbers, so it's $2.20/month, base rate)
+
$0.005/minute out-calls anywhere into canada
$0.01/minute out-calls anywhere to the us
$0.01/minute in-calling from anywhere in north america.
(toll free numbers are free to make calls to or receive calls from)
$0.0075/txt (in or out)
- voip works on cisco office phones with modifications and on cell phones running specific apps
- txts are forwarded to email and can be responded to from email as email
- voicemails are forwarded to email in the form of mp3 files.
i don't fly very much. apparently, plane tickets are expensive in canada. that's news to me. apparently, they're looking for ways to reduce ticket costs.
this isn't the first time that this debunked argument about competition reducing prices has shown up in canada.
canada has very expensive cell phone fees. this was blamed by the right on overregulation and not enough competition, so they tried to break up some large companies, and the prices actually went up. very few people want to admit it, but the reality is that canada is a very big country with a very small population scattered over a large distance and with challenging terrain in between. building anything here is hard, and expensive. canadians need to pay for the cost of living in the wilderness, on the edge of civilization, in an environment where maintaining a network is very challenging.
likewise, carney has wanted to reduce food prices through increasing competition. but the reality is that we have a short growing season and swaths of badlands (you can't grow a damned thing in the canadian shield), and we don't tend to eat the kind of food you could grow here anyways. we import most of our food. we're paying for the cost of oil two or three times through transportation, refrigeration and fertilizers. it has nothing to do with a lack of competition, although i'd welcome steps to grow more food locally, to cut down on two or all three of those costs inputs.
it's a great general solution if you have a specific ideology. you can trot out competition to solve problem after problem.
....except that it doesn't work.
like most cure-alls, it's a kind of snake oil and if you take it too seriously it can cause substantive harm.
as with the other examples, and i'll admit i haven't looked into this too closely, it is highly likely that the higher costs for air travel in canada have to do with canada's isolated geography full of distant communities and endless forests. there probably isn't a way to reduce costs; outsourcing hr has a very bad track record and will predictably lead to 2-3x the labour costs, we have enough data to say that with confidence.
it's the price you pay for living in the sticks.
canadians will tell you there's upsides to the landscape. it's up to us in the end to decide if the cost of living is worth it or not.
i'm not exactly sure what carney wants or expects the private sector to do in publicly owned airports. i suppose he may want them to take over hiring, or may operate a tim hortons. the argument is that this is good for canada because you can tax it. but you're taxing profits, so it would inevitably be better if you owned it, given you already own it.
it's going to cost a lot of money to sell it, to start. you have to pay lawyers, for example, and they charge a lot. then, you're going to take a percentage of the revenue you would have had 100% of if you had kept it. so, you're going to throw away 95% of revenue, or might even lose money. on it's face, it doesn't seem to be very smart.
what it is is a reflection of the tired old argument that the private sector is "more efficient". this was at best an assumption in like 1975. since then, it's been repeatedly proven wrong by dataset after dataset. but homo economicus is continental and theoretical, it's not analytical or empirical. it relies on theory, not data.
one example is outsourcing hiring, which is probably almost the only thing that a private sector could do in an airport while retaining public ownership. there was a time in the 80s when outsourcing hiring was supposed to save money because the private firm was supposed to be more efficient. then they actually tried it and learned that the opposite was true - the bureaucracy in the private sector infrastructure was brutal, the corruption was rampant and you had to pay the ceo and this whole other layer of management, while you really didn't replace any government workers. the result was that the frontline workers saw a paycut, which was recessionary, overall and the costs still doubled or tripled. it turned out to be the most inefficient, trickle-up policy proposal you could imagine, if you tried. it was a massive transfer of wealth from government workers to private sector ceos and bourgeois service workers like accountants and lawyers.
i don't imagine there's actually much that a private sector investment could really add to an airport that the public sector couldn't do for a fraction of the price.
the messaging is that carney may have been blocked by the ministry. if that's the case, i hope that data wins out over ideology, after they have their debates, which are healthy and encouraged.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
“All [young people in America] know that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it,” said the former commander-in-chief.
in fact, they've been conditioned to accept that outcome as the eventual terms of peace.
when young people say they're in solidarity with palestine, what they mean is they support oslo, they support camp david. they think that's what "palestine" wants.
....because they get information from tv shows, or from social media. they don't read books.
it's an early sign of idiocracy.
was clinton's proposal reasonable?
sure.
would clinton's proposal have been in the self-interest of most "palestinians"?
yes.
but they didn't support it. and by standing in front of an audience and repeating support for clintonian proposals in historical israel in 2026, you are not standing in solidarity with any muslim group in the region, you are articulating a now very dated american policy proposal that they have firmly and repeatedly rejected.
conversely, if you are standing in front of an audience and legitimately standing in solidarity with the muslim political entities in historical israel, you are necessarily calling for the end of israel. that's what they are fighting for. that's what solidarity means.
which is it?
it's the former, in 99% of situations, and the actual issue is that the performer doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about, not that they're politically aligned with hamas. they're not politically aligned or in solidarity with anybody except themselves, and the irony would be that they'd be enforcing a colonial model on a muslim population that is resistant to it, and is only really supported by liberal jews.
they're in solidarity with noam chomsky and norman finkelstein and naomi klein (abstractly if not actually), not with any contemporary muslim entity in historical israel.
there has never been any organized "palestinian" political movement that has ever accepted the existence of israel. every single muslim political entity in historical israel since 1948 has firmly rejected the existence of an israeli state and argued for a single muslim state in historical israel, to be populated almost entirely by indigenous hebrews who have been converted to islam in the last 300 years, and mostly in the last 150 years.
it's ok if you support that. i would disagree with you, but you have the right to reject the existence of israel, if you were honest about it and fully understood what you were claiming to be in solidarity with.
but, unfortunately, almost nobody in the west understands what they are saying when they repeat these slogans and when challenged on the point they universally expose that they are supporting the clintonian model that had absolutely zero support from muslims in the 90s and has absolutely zero support from muslims today.
white people need to drop the support for clintonian solutions. he was a well educated, smooth talking failure, and all he's taught us since is that he was a bigger creep than we thought he was. let's move on.
it would seem as though the individual really means to talk about a free irelend rather than a "free palestine".
as is the case, generally, when entitled, rich white people talk about this issue, they don't represent the viewpoints of actual people living in historical israel - not the converted hebrews, certainly, who overwhelmingly support driving israel into the ocean. there is essentially nobody in the region, which is roughly the size of new jersey, that wants two states.
new jersey is pretty small. a lot of people in new jersey would rather join new york. could you imagine splitting new jersey not just into two states but into two countries? ignoring the logistical problems on the ground - there is no infrastructure in which to build a state with - the amount of space being talked about doesn't seem to really be well understood when rich white people run their mouths off about it. for that reason, there is some logic in the reality that nobody supports two states. the area is arguably too small for one state, whatever the religion.
the clintonian solution worked in ireland, but ireland isn't israel. the indigenous hebrew population in historical israel is not very similar to the indigenous celtic population in ireland. clinton's solution to the problem in the area has proved resilient amongst entitled white people, and remains popular in the west thirty years on, but it was rejected by the "palestinians" at the time and it remains rejected by the "palestinians" today.
if macklemore speaks for anybody, he speaks for a disappearing and aging class of liberal american jews, not for "palestinians" (hebrews converted to islam by arabic colonialism, and mostly only actually over the last 150 years) living in historical israel.
that said, i don't think it's helpful to ban musicians and i would not ban the person from performing at my venue, if i owned one. i might seek an audience and try to talk some sense into him and correct him on points he's wrong about, instead. the united states once was a historical bright point of debate and free discourse. problems are not resolved via censorship.
i don't think that an elite female athlete, if hired as a spokesperson for the gambling company, would succeed in selling a lot of product to the demographic being targeted to buy it.
there would really seem to be some entitlement issues at play.
and ms. sweeney has no responsibility to give the slightest fuck about them.
ms. sweeney is a model. maybe she's also a bad actress, but she's not an athlete.
she's selling a gambling product to the kind of older men that also buy pornography and/or go to strip clubs. the demographic that is being targeted tends to like thin blonde women with large breasts, and tends to have little to no interest in women's sports.
the typical target audience for the ad would be perfectly represented by the now historical television character of al bundy.
she doesn't have a responsibility to represent female athletes and the suggestion that she does isn't fair to her or what her job is, here. the criticism from female athletes has no relevance whatsoever to her job as a model in the ad and is in truth outright absurd.
this is from june.
i finished in the bedroom in early july and sealed up most of the laundry a little after that, with a blog post on july 31st, but i didn't do a second update video in late july. i had issues with my vacuum and did some work in the front instead. there are videos made that were intended for my landlord but they won't be uploaded to this playlist.
i think i should have done a video at that time, but i've also been mostly naked inside for months and i was waiting to finish things that took longer than intended. i ultimately think i forgot or otherwise put it off and never got back to it.
what i describe in the update vid is pretty different from what i did.
i'm going to do another steam mop run in the very front of the bathroom tonight or tomorrow morning (i'm not paying electrical but it's cheaper over night) and will make a combined update video, split into two, once i decide how to best clothes myself in the short run.
it's going to be quite the long term project but i have the shelf and floor space dedicated to it in this apartment.
there are two lists of books that i'm going to be filling in, slowly:
both of those lists are partial right now and will continue to get filled out as i sort through essays i wrote and course syllabi over many years. another source of texts will be this blog which, if printed, would come in several thousand page volumes and is going to take a while to organize into a linear order. i've posted several lengthy research projects to this site that have involved reading quite a few online texts.
i was not able to get a list of books checked out at carleton because the server for the library crashed between 2013 and the time i asked, which i think was 2019ish. they lost all of the data before the crash. my records are incomplete. i checked at least 1000 books out of the library, and that doesn't include the ones i read in the library and never took home.
this will never be comprehensive but i'm aiming for 80% of a total read list.
i just bought the scarlet letter and the island of dr moreau, both for less than $10. at $20/month for now, and maybe $50/month when i'm done buying furniture, it will slowly rebuild, but i also need to direct it towards texts for the journal project, first.
the cds will fill in soon, too.
i'm currently scouring old drives for signs of a book list from 2002/2003 or from 2011, which are key maximal points. i currently only have two versions of one book list, from 2005/2006, and it's missing a huge amount of texts. i am sure these lists existed, but i'm having trouble locating one.
trump just appears to be annoyed by the suggestion that he has to act quickly in the middle east. he wants to demonstrate control by taking his time, but it's blown up in his face.
the lesson is that you need to act swiftly and decisively in this region. you cannot dither. you cannot meander. you cannot fuck around.
had they swiftly taken the iranian state out, a lot of these problems would have been resolved. had they been more aggressive with the houthis, it would have made a difference. and etc.
my body had a hard hiccup on thursday afternoon. i don't know exactly what happened yet, but i was drugged - hard - at some point, either via some ingredient of the pasta i ate on wednesday afternoon/thursday morning or via somebody getting in here and drugging me while asleep.
there were unusual marks on my thigh and on my chin but i don't know if they're symptoms or causes. i'm leaning towards the former.
as was the case previously, it's not ambiguous. i resisted it at first, but it's clear i was drugged hard on thursday and may have been drugged with weaker doses a few times leading up to thursday, in amounts that were less clear and not very effective. but what happened on thursday was clear. activity picked up heavily after an extremely disappointing order by an extremely ignorant adjudicator at the ltb in early august, who was not able to read a graph. i'm certain it's the same people, who have followed me here.
if this ends in violence, the court will have to own up to it's series of blatantly ignorant mistakes. i give no credit to the opposing arguments. i'm dealing with overtly discriminatory judges that appear to have been put in place on purpose. the result is a court system with no credibility, and that deserves no respect and no deference.
i was sleeping with my windows open because it was nice out and i like sleeping with the windows open when it's nice out. i sealed all of the screens up early in the summer and actually put chain locks on the windows in the bedroom. somebody could get through these if they were insistent but i would be able to tell if they did. as there's no signs of entry, i don't think anybody actually got through the windows and inside the apartment. however, i've been noticing for a while that there's signs of somebody coming up towards the window in terms of garbage left outside it and other things of the sort. i do remember waking up with something on my cheek and not being convinced it was saliva, but not being sure quite what to do.
i think they might have sprayed something through the window. it's not the first time i've thought that, either. yes, they are apparently that pitiful and that pathetic. and i don't fully understand what they want.
this is partly why i sealed the laundry up on saturday, although i don't think that's the entrance point. there's no sign of entry through there. there was sign of entry through the side, previously, but hasn't been for a while.
when they manage to get something into my system, it will clear within 6-12 hours. it's a very short, intense, annoying feeling of being high on something i don't want to be on and don't enjoy being on, but my kidneys will clear it out almost immediately. this is the point they don't seem to understand. they think they're curing me of something and that they're going to clear a pathogen if they force me to take the right "medicine". they don't understand that i'm castrated and that my body removes injected testosterone as a foreign substance, because that is what it is. while the drugs clear fast, the side effects can linger for a variable period that depends on how intense the drugging was. as of monday morning, i felt the remaining side effects had lifted and cleared and i was feeling and looking relatively normal again. the intensity and briefness of the effect, combined with my medical history, makes it clear that i'm being drugged.
however, the drugging on thursday was heavy - heavier than it's been in over a year - and i subsequently had to spend the weekend in the bathroom washing off the side effects, which are best described as vicious acne. it's brutal zits. i don't get it. i don't understand what they're trying to do. my weight has fluctuated in confusing ways, as well. but the over-riding direction is that i'm losing weight and this is what will determine outcomes regardless of the drugs, which are frustrating and annoying but of minimal actual consequence. the acne will have an even more minimal effect once i get that extra little bit of weight off.
i've been hovering around 135 since i bought some fruit at the end of august. fruit clears so fast that i wasn't as interested in the algorithm and was eating through it quickly to stop it from rotting in the fridge. i didn't lose weight over the last two weeks, but didn't gain any either. i'm still at 135. that should start falling again this week as i shift to salsa and bring in the minimum meals.
for obvious reasons, i need to prevent them from getting in here again. the weather is cooling, so the windows should mostly be closed. i don't see how else they could get in, or how else they could spray me from outside. i don't see any other signs of entry.
after sealing it up on saturday, i spent sunday cleaning the laundry and doing a general monthly clean (a little late) in the laundry (including doing laundry), the bathroom and kitchen. i set up the new shop vac that came in on the 21st on saturday morning for the first time (because i was working outside for the last week of august and rebuilding the reference library shelf for the first week of september) and it's actually a lot more powerful than the one that exploded a few weeks ago and really picked up a lot of the dirt. i also ran my new combo spin scrubber / steam mop for the first time this morning and it's certainly helping get the rest of the dirt off.
it's truly hard to get your head around just how dirty this place was when i moved in. it's like 150 years old and it's been updated but it hasn't been cleaned well in probably 30 years and it had rodents, roaches, ants and anything else you could imagine. now it's totally gone.
the decrease in temperature outside has my high lumen led lights running at full power again. this, combined with the three prong attack of the new shop vac, the usb spin scrubber for tighter spaces and the spin scrubber / steam mop has the place feeling truly clean for the first time since i moved in last year.
this is tedious stuff, but it means that i'm back where i started when i made those rooms of the house videos, and that there will be a few more videos uploaded soon to explain the progress i've made in those two rooms, particularly. there's been progress in other rooms, too, but we're going through the space in order, and the kitchen is the next space to finish up, as i put aside cash over the next four months for the rdsp.
while it would not be very likely that ai is going to go rogue and kill us all (i'll state again that the issue being brought up is not an ai transcending it's programming, it's a programming error that nobody wants to admit. it's easily fixable. the ai did not disobey it's programming. the ai did what it was told.), it is in the realm of plausibility that a shift towards fascism/feudalism as a result of automation, if we fail to build the right political movement to direct the shift in the mode of production towards communism, might result in a capitalist overclass that wants to just wipe the excess proletariat out. that is, if the capitalists don't need the workers anymore, they might decide the world has too many useless eaters in it and just wipe the bulk of the proletariat out. the result may be a large reduction of the population, rather than extinction. i could make up numbers. 70%. 80%.
while that would result in a lot of dead people, everybody dies anyways, and it would not be a bad thing overall if it leads to a better life for the survivors. no, i'm not volunteering. but i'm not interested in religious ideologies like the sanctity of life. it may be a necessary step to maintain sustainability and stop producing so much pollution.
and it would, by definition, end capitalism, as there would be no more proletariat left to steal labour from.
because they're all dead.
the most serious concern to human life on this planet is carbon emissions, not ai or automation, and every second spent worrying about ai is a second that is wasted on not worrying about climate change.
but automation may lead to conditions that reduce emissions and i would ultimately support that, albeit in the most humane way it can be done. i'm not much interested in a dictatorship of the proletariat, either, i just want the abolition of coerced labour (wage/chattel slavery) and the abolition of inequality/class. the fascist approach of just shooting everybody is less desirable but is better than the status quo of runaway population growth, in the long run. that's not sustainable.
i would prefer something like mass sterilization. but wealth redistribution and education for women, together, seem to minimize growth rates on their own, without the need to carry out the procedures.
that being said...
the current population of the earth is far too high. the immense amount of global over-population on this planet is the primary cause of runaway carbon emissions, climate change, deforestation, food insecurity, pandemics and a spate of other interrelated problems. to maintain a sustainable population, and a free society where we have food security and enough resources for everybody to live freely, we need to cut our population at least in half and then severely curtail population growth. i am in favour of a global population between 1 and 2 billion people.
Monday, September 14, 2026
i don't want to call myself pro-ai. i'm neutral about ai. it's just a fancy gui over a search engine. you're being confused by the realistic presentation of the gui. it's not real - it's just a search engine.
i'm pro-technology, pro-automation and anti-capitalist because i'm a communist, and that's what being a communist means. but that also means understanding that it's capitalism that will build the infrastructure that will eventually automate labour, and allow humans to be free from slavery in the capitalist economy, and spend their time making art and living civilized existences instead.
i will reiterate that this is overblown. we're not there yet.
but leftists should actually be excited that the ai is putting us on a path to ending the barbarism of coerced labour that we call capitalism and finally creating an actual civilization, with actually civilized people in it, to replace the pathetic mass of pitiful slaves we've assembled in the capitalist economy as proletariat to generate profit for the capitalists with. this is a symptom of late capitalism. it means we're exiting the capitalist phase (which is defined by capitalists stealing surplus value from people they force to work for them, which is the definition of capitalism, either via physical chains or via imaginary economic chains. it is when you eliminate that relationship of capitalists enslaving the proletariat that you end capitalism, and the way you do it is via automation.), but we need to have the political infrastructure in place to guide us through the transition, or it will fail and fall backwards into feudalism, instead. leftists should be building that political infrastructure to help guide us towards a transition to an automated society that ends the capitalist relation and leave the backwards luddism and fear of change to the ignorant fools on the right. fake leftists arguing for the retention of the status quo because they fear the shifts in the mode of production should be spat upon, cast out and shouted down and treated with contempt. the word for that is reactionary; fake leftists opposing ai are in truth capitalist reactionaries and backwards conservatives. ai is the best and only hope we have to get out of the slavery of capitalism and truly revolutionize the economy. it has to be done right, and there are dangers, but outright opposing it is sentencing us to perpetual capitalism, which is itself delusional - some other society will transition from capitalism to communism and wipe us out, instead.
we don't have the choice to stagnate in perpetual capitalism. we can choose between transition to communism or suffering through a conquest by those that do so first.
the classical ancients only considered a few vocations to be fit for a free individual, and considered the vast majority of human labour to be unfit for the free, and merely forms of slavery. they considered mathematics, philosophy (which we would today call science) and art to be the vocations fit for the civilized, free individual. they would reject almost all labour in a capitalist economy as slavery, and call the people that did the labour slaves; whether they were wage slaves or chattel slaves was largely irrelevant. i agree with them and i align with the historical strain of thought from socrates through to marx and beyond that seeks to one day abolish labour. that's what a left is and, certainly, those that are aligning in opposition to that wonderful dream of a utopian future without coerced labour cannot be called a left.
what do i think is going on with this?
it's more than clickbait. this is clearly being organized.
i suspect that the end result is that the "regulation" ends up written by the industry. i'm not entirely sure what that means yet, but in existing crony capitalist terminology we say that the regulators are captured. what that means is that the regulations are written by the industry to advance the aims of the industry and really aren't regulations but enabling legislation. the direction appears to be towards advertising.
a law that tries to prevent rogue ai from taking over canada is like a law that mandates tiger-banning rocks.
it's probably harmless because it's probably meaningless. it probably doesn't actually do anything at all.
but, i mean, i need to see it before i can deconstruct it. right now, i'm just guessing that the ai companies are seeking "regulation" because they're trying to capture the regulators, so they can regulate themselves.
there should be some regulation to prevent ai companies from warehousing personal data in data centres. you don't want a file with your name and your picture on it that's been scraped from the internet without your consent, and can be used to generate personalized ads. but that's what's coming unless some laws are written to stop it.
this nonsense about ai killing everybody would seem to be a distraction to allow them to capture the regulators without seeing laws passed that prevent them from warehousing personal data.
“Imagine a world where all companies are run by AI, where there are robots all over the place, where basically humans don’t have any work except for nominal work, and even politicians and everyone is deferring to AI because the AI just seems to have such good judgment,” he added. “That’s the kind of future that we’re headed towards.”
that's called communism.
i'm strongly in favour of that future. i support that. i will fight for that and fight against those that want to stop it.
but it won't develop simply by revolutonizing the mode of production, and the projection is not realistic. that is not going to happen any time soon, but i hope that it does happen one day, and i will fight for it to happen, not fight to stop it from happening.
i could understand conservatives opposing ai but it's ideologically incoherent for self-identifying leftists to oppose technology like this. if you're opposed to automation, and you call yourself left-wing, i'm sorry to tell you that you're not very left-wing at all. the whole point of the left is that automation eventually abolishes labour. that's what communism is.
i know that iq tests are not perfect, that they have cultural limitations, but it's the best standard of comparison we have.
i was identified as gifted as a child because i scored in the 99th percentile on the tests they did every second or third year. i also did an entrance level iq test for the government of canada as an adult in my 30s, and again scored in the 99.9th percentile. the interviewer actually thought it was a typo.
he literally told me my iq was impossible, that nobody scored that high. well, i was nobody, i guess. i was applying for the most entry level position at statscan and i guess the guy was a hierarchical douche because the best response he had was that it was higher than the entry level requirements for management positions, so therefore it must be a typo.
well, yeah. 99.9th percentile is nobody. i guess.
my dad, who was not well educated, used to surprise people with his gct II scores, which got him hired as a call center stooge for the tax office (it was a good job for a poorly educated guy from a very lower class background). he was sure he'd score higher than me. he wanted to compete and vanquish his smarty pants kid for good. he was sure he'd do better than me, because he did better than everybody he knew. but he was very quiet and never brought it up again when i showed him the score and it's relatively clear his score was not close to mine.
so i had to go find some stats (which actually took some effort) and when i found them i realized it really was a score that nobody gets. it was way off the charts.
but they didn't hire me because i couldn't pass the situational judgement test, and i actually tried three times.
how are these ai systems scoring on iq tests today, anyways?
that's actually not very impressive, is it? but it's about what i expected. it's interesting that the ai systems show about the same level of variation as humans, but that's a function of the central limit theorem.
you have to be careful. if the test exists on the internet, the ai system might have learned it. it could tell you the answers by finding it in it's database. that is what an ai is - an advanced gui on top of a search algorithm running on a database in the backend. and that's all it is.
so, somebody devised an offline test that no ai had ever seen before.
this is where they were at in 2025, when the issue was fresh:
that's actually not very impressive, is it? but it's about what i expected. it's interesting that the ai systems show about the same level of variation as humans, but that's a function of the central limit theorem.
since this hit the internet, these numbers have started coming up, but i'm skeptical. if i was deepseek, i would consider this bad marketing and want to improve it. the nature of the technology makes this hard.
you could argue it's not fair to the system to ask it to think like a human. ok. the mirror test has been modified for some species to adjust to their perception of existence, and they tend to do better when it has. but if you're going to argue the ai is 100x more intelligent than the smartest human, you need a standard of comparison.
i would not have a lot of faith in the updated numbers, at least not until some kind of truly third party institution can be built that can truly ensure these tests are fully offline.
in 2025, this was random, with no prep. and the results were what you'd expect that autistic kid to score.
"How well do you fancy your chances at being able to deal with a system that is 100 times smarter than the smartest person on the planet?"
i strongly reject the premise.
what is intelligence? is it the ability to regurgitate knowledge? that's not what they test for in iq tests. or is it the ability to think creatively, abstractly and to use novel information to problem solve?
the ai is just a database. if we have already solved a problem, it can tell us how to do it. but it can't solve new problems on it's own.
the ai will never score as high on an iq test as a moderately intelligent human.
you should look at the ai as that autistic kid you knew when you were younger that was impressively knowledgeable and able to run off scores of facts like nobody else, but couldn't write an essay to save his life. that kid wasn't smarter than you, and he didn't do well in life.
the ai is not going to be smarter than the smartest person. it will never transcend the point where it struggles to compete with humans of average intelligence on issues that define actual intelligence.
if you program a bot to be malicious, it can be malicious. there's no question about that. asimov's laws of robotics are not real, or at least not yet.
however, this issue floating around the media - of these bots going rogue on their own - is not real. i went over this once before. the issue at hand was actually a bug, a programming error, it wasn't the result of the bot transcending it's program. that's make-believe.
it follows that you should regulate humans, not regulate ai. and this is the same issue that democrats constantly get wrong - they blame human behaviour on inanimate objects, on make believe diseases and on everything you can possibly imagine, except on the humans ourselves.
an evil person could program one of these things to do evil things. sure. but the ai layer isn't the problem, and that evil person doesn't need the ai to use the computer to do something evil. but that isn't the concern that was being brought up, and you're missing the point, regardless.
Sunday, September 13, 2026
the media is suggesting that the backwards, barbarian houthis have somehow managed to drag themselves out of the caves for long enough to launch some kind of substantive offensive in the south of yemen. there does appear to be something afoot but the narrative's not being accurately reported.
- the saudis shot down a plane with some houthi dignitaries on their way back from iran. this appears to have been an entirely unprovoked attack. it's something israel might do, but israel is capable. what's relly being exposed here is that the saudis are utterly useless as allies and more of a liability than an asset in terms of military partners.
- the houthis reacted.
- the saudis contacted the pentagon and said "we can handle this" and launched an offensive.
- to the great embarrassment of the saudi forces, they were defeated by a group of cave-dwelling barbarians, despite having modern us-built equipment. analysts have been saying for years that the saudis don't know how to use us weapons. exactly.
- so, the saudis contacted the americans and asked for backup, who said "well, you picked a fight with somebody a tenth of your size, and you couldn't finish it. why would we come to our rescue? next time don't pick a fight.". they also offered them intelligence....which is what they give the israelis and all the israelis need, because the israelis are competent.
so, what should the yankees do, here?
step one is acknowledging that the saudis are a major problem. trump is a stubborn old man and he's going to dig in, and it's probably not the right answer, but he's nonetheless basically right. trump will try to sell them more military hardware and tell them to deal with their own problems themselves.
however, the saudis need to get trained in how to use this hardware or the hardware needs to be taken away from them. it's a major liability to have all of this expensive hardware sitting in the desert, with nobody that knows how to use it. if you thought losing bagram in afghanistan was a catastrophe, the fall of riyadh - which would be a good thing for the region in the long run - would be potentially far worse. worse, the days of the americans being at their beck and call are over, but the culture in the region is going to give the saudis difficulty in understanding that. the saudis are hierarchically superior. they pay people to do what they want. they don't work for things themselves. that might cause them to lose weight! trump may be an anomaly in the long run in terms of telling them to fuck off when they start barking orders, but there needs to be an exit strategy. the saudis are not good allies. that's the takeaway.
but somebody is going to have to step in. these half-evolved primates need to be obliterated. they can't sit there and keep lobbing missiles.
i'm going to call on the turks to deal with this, if the british and french won't. they have a history in the area as well as naval forces in it and they benefit from keeping the straight open.
what's the point of building projects if canadians don't benefit?
i don't want my labour to go towards funding trust funds in other countries. that's a system i'd rather boycott and fight to tear down than participate in.
if the choice is between building projects that benefit foreigners and not building anything at all, i'd rather choose not building anything at all; i'd rather stay home, i'd rather fight against it than for it.
as for me, i haven't invested any of the $26,000 in my rdsp (22,000 was transferred in by the government in february). i was not expecting the attack on iran - nobody was - and the markets are...
i'm not a swashbuckling investor. i'm not going to glue myself to the ticker. i never imagined myself with an investment portfolio. but the government created this opportunity for me and i have it. i couldn't turn down $22,000 for free. but i ultimately have better things to do than be an investor. i don't want to spend my time obsessing over money.
there's another roughly $13,000 for free coming in february, so long as i get that $4000 in. that's another $17,000.
so i will have $43,000 - roughly - in a money market rdsp - uninvested - in early feb 2027. i need to invest about half of it before may.
i will not invest in oil. it's a non-starter.
but i waited because i wanted to better understand what's going on. if i thought the return of trump would be good for the market, i think i was wrong. the slow reversal of quantitative easing has been bad for markets and trump hasn't succeeded in reversing the fed's direction because he keeps putting conservatives in place, then wonders why they don't act like liberals. trump is not a fiscal conservative. ironically, the markets would likely do a lot better, even if it's a giant bubble, if trump installed himself as fed chair. he wouldn't abide by republican fiscal policy, he'd act like an obama or clinton appointee. that's not a policy proposal. i'm looking for ten years and then to get out so i don't care if it's a bubble, i care if the bubble is going to pop. but trump isn't getting what he wants (it's his own fault), and all that's happening is political fighting. i'm too risk adverse for this.
i'm looking at buying bonds, right now. the direction carney is heading in is suggesting to me that that's the better idea, right now.
when a salesperson tries to sell you fdi as economic sovereignty through a shit-eating grin and a spate of bad hockey analogies, he is trying to sell you a bridge full of used cars. this is horribly dishonest on behalf of mr. carney.
canada needs to wise up and realize they've been sold a bad deal that's going to get worse.
trudeau did adjust to the nixon shock by trying to mitigate it but the shift from public to private lending was too much to control, in the end.
we've been here before. this is a return to harperism and all of the same threats that harper posed to the country's stability, it's sovereignty and it's resilience. we need to mobilize against carney the same way we mobilized against harper.
instead of using government finances to develop resources for the benefit of canadians, mr. carney wants to sell canada off by the dollar to the highest bidder, which will often include state institutions in horrible countries in places like the middle east. this is modern colonialism, and canada is being colonized for the benefit of foreign investors in foreign lands.
the result is that canadians will work for foreign capital, as slaves to foreign investors, and the profits will get extracted from the country, leaving us with nothing to show for the hard work we did. canadians will have their natural resources stolen from them, while an international elite of global capital gets all the profits. canadians will not get any of the profits, and will not be able to reinvest them in anything.
this economic model should be rejected. canadians should oppose governments that facilitate foreign investors buying out the country and should instead support local government funding (via loans from the bank of canada) to develop the resources on behalf of canadians, and ensure canadians own, operate and benefit from them. i suspect that this is what most canadians thought they were voting for. i don't think many canadians voted to end the economic relationship with the united states and replace it with a neo-colonial relationship with despotic arab oil sheikhs in qatar and the uae.
i would call for a confidence vote and for the opposition to properly explain what is happening. i am confident canadians will reject these ideas, once they are honestly explained to them, which carney has not done. carney has been exceedingly dishonest and is not a trustworthy actor. canadians demonstrated their naivete in trusting somebody that showed up from outside the country with an apparently pre-determined set of goals. this was a tremendous mistake. carney is not here to save us, he's here to destroy us.
the most egregious consequence of american hegemony was the collapse of bretton woods and the subsequent rise of private lending in replace of public funding, on the demand of the americans, who were trying to prevent their dollar from collapsing in the oil embargo. trudeau caved out of fear of consequence, and he wasn't wrong, but the results have been devastating for wealth redistribution in canada. it's been trickle-up, and trickle-out, ever since. if american hegemony is ending, the first thing we should do is abolish private lending, and return to public funding for infrastructure. but carney doesn't want to reverse american hegemony, he wants to reinforce it. he's not upset at the hegemon for being the hegemon, he's upset at the hegemon for not being the hegemon. he wants a return of american hegemony, not the overthrow of it.
carney's rhetoric about independence and control is complete bullshit. he's using a phony war with the united states as smoke and mirrors, as a distraction, in order to sell us off to the highest bidder, and we will lose control over everything when he does. his definition of "success" will come at a high benefit to foreigners in europe and the middle east and at a severe loss to canada and canadians.
i would rather be invaded by the united states than sold off to the middle east and would welcome the americans in as liberators if it comes down to it. carney's proposed solution is worse than the problem.
i'm confused.
if canada joins the eu, as a full member or an associate member, despite obviously not being a european country, or having a european population, or even having european culture or institutions, it would then accept the terms of trade with the united states that the eu accepted, which was an across the board tariff. further, the europeans would also demand the end of supply management in dairy, which is one of the points holding up the ceta.
in fact, trump's concerns are almost exactly the same issues the europeans (particularly the french) have been bringing up for years.
so, the end results would be:
- we'd have to make the same concessions trump is demanding
- we'd have infinitely worse terms with the united states, and become a junior partner in a us-mexico relationship
the mexicans would get everything. we'd get nothing.
this doesn't seem to be about trade.
it seems to be about carney's identity as a white person.
the eu should comprehend that it's dealing with an unstable person in mark carney and walk away. it should also remind mr. carney that several member states have yet to ratify ceta because they have substantive concerns with canadian trade practices.
unlike the americans, the europeans don't use rbst. but they won't accept our beef, either. there's some pretty hard blocks in ceta and it's not likely to get resolved soon.
my kelp came in yesterday and i took my first 1/4 this morning. so let's update this again:
pills
- vitamin b-complex and c pills are being cut in 4 and taken every six hours (00:00, 6:00, 12:00, 18:00).
- 100 iu of vitamin e at 0:00 on mondays, wednesdays and fridays, with sunday left optional.
- minimum meal at 3:00 on days where i did not have a part of a scheduled meal at all on the previous day. move to 9:00 if 3:00 impossible.
- 160 mcg of iodine with unmeasured levels of epa/dha as kelp at 6:00 every day
- 1000 iu of d at 12:00 every day
- 1 tbsp of flax in water at 15:00 (1.7 of ala) every day
- 2500 iu of vitamin a at 18:00 every day
- 800 mg of elemental calcium after meals
- i'm deciding not to take pills for vitamin k.
- note that i drink at least 250 ml of soy and 4 mini cups of coffee a day and usually closer to twice that, constant consumption.
minimum meal
a stainless steel mixing bowl with:
- 3 tbsp of raw, unroasted, unsalted, hulled sunflower seeds (longstanding)
- 3 tbsp of hulled hemp seeds (longstanding)
- 3 tbsp of chia seeds (bought, added)
- 3 tbsp of wheat bran (longstanding)
- 3 tbsp of soy lecithin <------not yet
- 30 g of all bran (longstanding)
- 1 tbsp of paprika (longstanding)
- 1 tbsp of ground cumin (longstanding)
- 1 tbsp of dried oregano (longstanding)
- 2 cloves of garlic (longstanding)
- 1 beet (longstanding)
- 1 avocado (longstanding)
- 50 g broccoli (longstanding)
- dried dill, caesar, hot sauce, nutritional yeast for flavour (yeast does have some b vitamins still) (longstanding)
with
- one banana (longstanding, bought)
- one orange (longstanding, bought)
- two pieces of untoasted quinoa-flax bread with canola-olive hummus (longstanding)
- one tum (longstanding)
this altogether has
- around 1000 mg of sodium. ish. which is a decent minimum meal amount.
- 180%+ rdi for magnesium
- 160%+ rdi for phosphorus
- some sulfur in the garlic, broccoli
- 110%+ of the rdi for potassium
- 120%+ rdi for calcium
- 210%+ of rdi for manganese
- 30+ mg of iron (elemental) (300% of a 10 mg rdi but i have absorption issues and need it)
- 195%+ of rdi for copper
- 125%+ of rdi for zinc
- 125%+ rdi for selenium
- 110%+ rdi for molybdenum (not including the high amount in soy milk that isn't bioavailable)
- 106%+ rdi for iodine
not measured:
- boron
- fluoride (windsor's water is back to being fluoridated, that should be fine)
- silicon (several of my pills have silicon, which is not a nutrient, but which clears harmful aluminum by binding to it)
- chlorine (i should get enough in the city water in windsor)
- chromium (trace from mixing bowl)
- nickel (trace from mixing bowl)
+
- 175%+ of the rdi for choline (960 mg) & an additional 100% in the form of betaine (550 mg).
- some inositol and salicylic acid in the orange
- extra food-based vitamins (carotenoids, b vitamins, a little c, some d, a fair amount of e and some k)
- 12+ g of omega-3s
- 23+ g of omega-6s (< 2:1 ratio)
- minimal saturated fat for absorption (some in the dressing, avocado, soy lecithin)
- 55+ g of mostly complete protein, which is about right on the rdi for my weight, maybe a little more. i would prefer to barely meet the rdi or just miss it for protein. excess protein is hard on your body and stored inefficiently as fat. high protein diets are stupid.
- some carbs. whatever. carbs aren't worth measuring.
- substantive fibre. also not worth measuring.
- low glucose
- it's all stored the same way. your body uses less energy to process carbs and more energy to process protein but it does the same thing with excess amounts of them, which is store it as fat. what i'm more interested in is the fact that flax, hemp, chia, soy, quinoa and in fact also sunflower are all complete proteins and have all 9 essential amino acids, although the sunflower seeds are low in lysine (and high in vitamin e, selenium, omega-6s). i'm not aiming for a protein salad, but this would be pretty effective if i was.
this is inevitably going to end up being a vehicle for mr trudeau to demonstrate how absurdly ignorant about everything he really is, absent filters from the party.
the cringe that keeps on cringing is unfortunately likely to get a lot worse.
trudeau's basic political positions and intuitions are firmly on the right of the political spectrum. this could get confusing, for some people, but i welcome it as overdue.
in the modern economy, inflation is caused primarily by increases in capital inputs, which would also include taxes, tariffs, labour costs and energy prices, in addition to more traditional fluctuations in the price of inputs. for that reason, the primary cause of the last round of inflation was energy prices. that's why the inflation-adjusted price of oil is almost flat, despite it seeming like oil rose steeply.
you can walk away with the understanding, if you didn't already know it, that the cad/usd exchange is pegged to the inflation-adjusted price of oil in usd, but that steep spikes in either direction in the price of oil tend to get blunted by the exchange rate. a 70% crash in the price of oil might only be a 20% crash in the cad, while smaller fluctuations are matched in the exchange rate more closely. you'd consequently need both a steep and a sustained hike in oil (adjusted for inflation) to actually get the cad up.
i apologize if my lack of precision in previous posts created confusion, but the people nitpicking me are dubious sources of information with ideology issues that you shouldn't take seriously.
just a reminder that $110 in today's currency (usd) is about $60 in 2000 dollars and about $77 in 2013 dollars. there's been a lot of inflation.
but i'm not showing you anything that a professional wouldn't tell you is obvious.
conversely, the exchange rate (cad/usd) is a ratio so it is not altered by inflation.
currency is not a real market. all currency trading is manipulation. the idea that you can increase or decrease the value of a currency by buying more or less of it is the same right-wing error in logic that leads conservatives to argue that printing money creates inflation (which is an error. money creation does not lead to inflation.). this is the kind of flunkie economics that you frequently hear from conservatives running for office, but that has no empirical basis and is essentially never repeated by academics. that paper by milton friedman was withdrawn but conservatives never got the memo, or don't seem to care.
printing money does not lead to inflation, and buying up a specific currency does not drive the value of it up. it's the same flunkie right-wing mistake frequently made by ignorant conservatives that think they understand economics and don't understand economics at all.
while it is true that an extremely disciplined market might in theory not follow price signals, most trading is done by large institutions. in fact, most trading is done by software and is increasingly done by ai. it's actually quite predictable and increasingly so.
for oil to be selling at $110 dollars in 2013 dollars today, it would need to be to be upwards of $160. for it to be selling at $110 dollars in 2000 dollars, it would need to be over $200.
i found this chart of oil prices adjusted for inflation, and you can see that oil prices are nowhere near their peaks when the cdn dollar was close to parity with the usd. in fact, the value of oil as adjusted for inflation has actually decreased recently. this is a reflection of how much inflation has occurred since the pandemic, which itself was a result of hikes in the cost of oil.
for that reason, oil prices have a kind of moderating effect. you might be annoyed that the price of gas is rising, but when you compare it total inflation and the value of the us dollar, it tends to be misleading as to where the actual objective value of things is headed.
narratives by fake leftists (who are actually conservatives pretending to be left-wing) that the iran war increased the price of oil are in truth actually false, when the price of oil is properly adjusted for inflation. these people are not good sources of information and should not be trusted at face value. you need to fact check what they're telling you very carefully. the us dollar has been falling over the same time period (relative to the euro), so it cancels out in terms of real value and in terms of international currency. but these two things (inflation-adjusted price of oil and usd) are deeply interconnected, it's a kind of feedback loop.
this is a chart of the usd/cad exchange rate and it follows the inflation-adjusted oil chart very closely. that is, the shape of it, not necessarily the peaks.
but i'm not showing you anything that a professional wouldn't tell you is obvious.
it's only the market fundamentalist right-wing conservative flunkies, and their fake left progressive wannabes, that would challenge the point to begin with by citing simplistic mathematical models (you see these models in economics 101 and if you had a good prof she told you they're bullshit and told you not to take them seriously on the first day of classes) as predictive and by ignoring the empirical facts which show that they aren't. the connection between oil and the cad is common knowledge.
i'll reiterate that a market doesn't automatically have to follow price signals, but it will, and it's more predictable now than it ever has been due to the large volume of trading done by software and ai for big funds and whatnot. it would take an unrealistic amount of volume for a bad actor to get in there and fuck with it. it's almost impossible.
there's consequently little threat of the us fed manipulating canada's currency. the theory that the flunkies are promoting is fringe and debunked. that would not work.
steep hikes in the price of oil - adjusted for inflation - would do it, and not much else would.
Saturday, September 12, 2026
for clarity, the reason i'm building the fiction shelf up with all these kids books (i'm starting grade 3ish) and high school or university standard texts that i've mostly read when i was younger but sold or lost is that the first thing i'm refocusing on after i'm done setting up the apartment is this:
i sealed up the rest of the laundry this morning, and got some items in from amazon afterwards. i started on cleaning in the bathroom before i stopped to sleep. the fact that it's done is minor in practical terms but substantive in theory. it's all totally clean in there, now, and it's such a dramatic change from when i moved in here.
if i can get the front entrance finished in the next day or two i could be mostly done in here by the end of september, finally.
Friday, September 11, 2026
what's going on is that, for some reason, my chromebook is blocking the mac address of the usb to rj45 cable. i've figured that out. figuring out why or how is a little more complicated.
it's the chromebook itself that is blocking the mac address, not the router or the isp.
modern chromebooks don't have rj-45 connections. the concept of wireless is absurdly unsafe, and i won't use wireless anything for anything - every single device in my network, which is actually quite substantive, uses a wired connection. that means i need this little usb to rj-45 connector; i plug the network cable into the connector and the connector into the usb port (or a hub connected to it) and you get network access.
it's slow network access, but that's also intentional. i don't play video games, and i don't even understand what the purpose of trying to connect to the internet at the speeds they're selling is. what website allows you to download at a gb/s? what hardware supports that? maybe i'm a little behind the fastest specs, and maybe i'm underestimating it a little, but i nonetheless think it remains true even now (it was certainly true five years ago) that you're going to have a hard time actually using anything close to that bandwidth. maybe it makes sense to have that much bandwidth if you have a big family using multiple devices simultaneously. ok. but i'm just one person. i don't need more than 10 mb/s to watch youtube at 1020p and that's the highest amount of bandwidth i'm ever going to use. do the fastest sites - like microsoft - let you download much faster than that, anyways? and how much data can your hard drive transfer? it's nothing close to a gb/s.
i just googled this.
the absolutely fastest nvme hard drive on the market in 2026 that will cost you a fortune can transfer at about 110 mbps, if you have the processor speed.
so, why are you paying for 3 gbps internet? i'm not out of date or underestimating anything. you'd need 30 of the fastest devices on the market running simultaneously to tap that. and who is going to let you stream anything at that speed in the first place?
the biggest family running the fastest, newest computers and streaming from the most data-intense websites couldn't possibly need more than 1 gb. so buy 2 to be sure if you're paranoid. the isp is trying to upsell you 3, and it's just nonsense. it's absurd.
i've actually rate limited my 10/100 mbps router at 10 mbps, so nothing's getting through faster than 10 mbps by design, because nothing would get through except a hacker or ad servers that are worse than hackers. for that reason, i've got half the internet blocked by my router.
i digress.
the connector has it's own mac address, which is necessary. the cable is the network card. i remove the wireless cards from any laptops or chromebooks before i plug them in, so the only mac address is on the cable.
i've done this a few times and i've seen how it works.
- if i reboot the chromebook, it picks the usb to rj45 cable up, at first. but, it slowly blocks every port on the hub until none of them work. at the end stages, i can connect the cable and watch it connect for a second and it disconnects. it works again on reboot.
- it looks like the device is dead, but my other chromebooks continue to pick up the device. my windows laptop picks it up. it will work if i reboot.
- i checked my router and there's nothing blocking it from there. but if the router was blocking it, the chromebook would pick it up and it doesn't.
luckily, i have a few of these things. swapping them out becomes annoying because i have to get into the router to change the access rules, which screens connections by mac addresses. new network card means new mac address.
but it's not at all clear to me why the chromebook is sequentially blocking access to the device. i'm blaming this on the hackers because i thought they got into my router, but it's clear they didn't.
is google pushing something down? or are they hacking my chromebook?
script kiddie losers will not succeed in hacking your chromebook, in guest mode, even if it's a few years old. if it's not google, it's just more evidence that this is somebody with substantive resources and serious intent. and i don't understand what the fuck they want.
let's see if the same thing happens with the new mac address or not.
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