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.
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
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.
i don't think canada benefits from undoing patriation or returning to being some kind of colony of europe. canada wasn't really an actual country until 1982, and our "constitutional documents" until that point were just acts of the british parliament. we had to have our laws ratified by the british through most of the 20th century. i think most canadians alive today don't even know that, they think we became a country in 1867, but we really didn't. it really wasn't until 1982 that that actually happened.
the 1982 constitution is also dramatically superior to the 1867 "constitution", as it contains a substantive bill of rights.
turning the clocks back to an era of european colonialism in canada may be what carney wants, but it's not what anybody voted for. in 2026, the proportion of european-descended canadians is continuing to shrink, as well. it's not just a step backwards, it's a step backwards into the dark.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.
that's a verbatim quote from a social media post that was obviously a marketing stunt.
i looked into this much more closely a few months ago. i am not an ai expert but i've read the textbook and done the homework assignments for a graduate level course on ai, and i am a quasi-expert on computer mathematics (the theory behind ai). i'm about as good of a source as you'll find outside of finding somebody that works in industry. i understand what they're saying, can deconstruct it and can analyze it. and i'l tell you that what they're describing isn't likely to kill you. but it does look like it's likely to hack your personal devices to generate hyper-personalized ads.
i repeat: this technology could be a paradigmatic shift in how corporations advertise their products and could be a multi-billion dollar industry in creating personalized ads. this bs about computers taking over the world looks like smoke and mirrors when they get accused of stealing personal data.
"i didn't do it, the ai did it."
right. hey, they got 11 of 12 jurors to fall for "post-partum psychosis". how hard can it be to convince a jury that the ai stole your data, not amazon or google or microsoft?
i don't see the use for this technology, as an individual, and i don't foresee ever having any legitimate use for it. but, i'll tell you - if you think the ads are bad now, wait until the ai really gets running. you'll be dreaming ads - and you'll wake up to sales pitches.
as for the russians themselves, occam's razor suggests their propaganda analogy is probably more due to laziness and ignorance than malevolence. they were trying to make a point; but the analogy is utterly terrible.
i do not stand with ukraine and would not sacrifice a single hair on the head of a single canadian to protect ukraine from russia. canada does not have shared cultural or historical ties with ukraine. ukranian self-defense is not in canada's self-interest. ukraine is not a member of any defense cooperation agreements that canada is in and canada therefore has no legal obligations in ukraine.
the russians should have used texas or cuba as an analogy, not canada.
while the comparison of canada-us relations to ukraine-russia relations is ridiculous and not grounded in history or fact, there is a very strong analogy that is impossible to overlook, and it is that russia's relationship to ukraine is directly and overwhelmingly comparable to canada's relationship with quebec. quebec's size was inflated with the inclusion of parts of rupert's land. lower canada, which also included most of labrador, was more comparable in size to ukraine, but slightly smaller. that said, canada is much smaller than russia, so the ratio remains static as both sides of it decrease.
a smart sovereignty movement in quebec would take everything that the federal government has said about russia imposing itself on ukraine and throw it back in it's face, as it has aggressively created the arguments for it's own collapse, by following the direction of bad russian propaganda, that it should have instead easily deconstructed.
i was hoping that the removal of chrystia freeland would make the canadian government a little less gungho on this crimean war bullshit. i guess not. rather, it's becoming increasingly clear that the canadian government is intentionally comparing itself and even defining itself as similar to ukraine, and the united states as similar to russia.
16 Sudan 1,878,000
to suggest this is unhinged would be an understatement. it requires a severe distortion of both current and historical facts to get to that conclusion. worse, it was the kremlin that originated the comparison, which then showed up on a spate of alt-left websites and youtube channels that are clearly on the kremlin's payroll, that routinely post nonsense and that lack any sort of credibility as news organizations. the apparent truth that an analogy devised by russian propagandists appears to be at the core of current canadian foreign policy opens up a legitimate question: to what extent are canada's decision-making civil service members being influenced by dubious alt-left internet sources, much of it ultimately being russian propaganda? the chinese don't have the infrastructure to do this yet, but the kremlin has huge media tentacles and piles of useful idiots on the payroll, and they have never dropped the alt-left bent they had during the cold war. it's clearly more effective than an attempt to influence conservative media voices. the arab fascists realize this, too - they go after dumb, naive leftists. they don't even try to sway conservatives, despite being ultra-right wing.
i'm not going to list examples. i could give you a list of 200 alt-left news personalities on youtube (mostly) that are obviously getting pay checks from moscow if i sat down with it. i can't prove it but it's clear enough from listening to them. this would include talking heads, authors, academics and in some cases the youtube news sites themselves. this is far more credible interference than the nonsense pushed by rachel maddow about russian bots on facebook (which has largely been debunked and discredited). this payroll of useful idiots is a network set up by the soviets, that never entirely disappeared and has returned as the primary means of russian influence in the west, after the banning of russian television, which i found to be relatively moderate, compared to the crazy shit you can see on fox news.
but whether it was the kremlin that made the comparison in arguing that canada is to the united states as ukraine is to russia - as it was defending it's actions in eastern europe - or not, what are the facts here? just how awful is the comparison?
in a list of countries by gdp, where does ukraine stand?
45. Portugal 380,637
46. Nigeria 377,365
47. Kazakhstan 360,456
48. Finland 337,669
49. Algeria 317,713
50. Greece 307,554
51. Iran 300,293
52. New Zealand 278,636
53. Hungary 271,122
54. Iraq 264,784
55. Cuba (estimated)
56. Ukraine 225,337
57. Qatar 217,416
58. Morocco 194,333
59. Uzbekistan 181,502
60. Kuwait 172,920
.
.
.
64. ecuador
65. dominican republic
66. puerto rico
67. guatemala
as we can see, ukraine is a very small country, economically, with a gdp comparable to that of cuba or iraq, and significantly less than that of iran or kazakhstan. the comparison to kazakhstan - which is practically empty and has been run by a ruthless dictator for decades - is important to make, as ukraine and kazakhstan are the next two largest successor states of the soviet union, after russia.
while it has recently fallen out of the top 10, canada has historically had one of the largest and most powerful economies in the world.
this comparison would consequently appear to be fairly unhinged, but it would also suggest that canadians are dramatically underestimating ourselves. what else would we expect from a country that puts statues up everywhere of a guy that died less than halfway through a cross-country marathon? we constantly align ourselves with losers and failures and then wonder why we're falling out of the top tier of global economies.
the ukrainians are clearly losers. they're a small, insignificant country that might be better compared to cuba, or even to ecuador or guatemala, than to the large and wealthy country of canada.
how much bigger is canada than ukraine in terms of size?
1 Russia 17,098,246
2 Canada 9,984,670
3 China 9,596,960
4 United States 9,525,067
5 Brazil 8,510,346
6 Australia 7,741,220
7 India 3,287,263
8 Argentina 2,780,400
9 Kazakhstan 2,724,910
10 Algeria 2,381,741
11 Democratic Republic of the Congo 2,344,858
12 Saudi Arabia 2,149,690
13. Greenland (Denmark) 2,166,086
14 Mexico 1,964,375
15 Indonesia 1,904,569
16 Libya 1,759,540
17 Iran 1,648,195
.
.
.
45 Ukraine 603,550
the answer is 16.54x the size.
for reference, this is the size of some areas in north america with historical independence movements:
alaska: 1,723,337
quebec: 1,542,056
texas: 695,662
alberta: 661,848
(ukraine: 603550)
california: 423,970
ukraine is more comparable in size to alberta, texas or california than it is to canada.
what is the basis of the comparison?
canada and the united states share the same language (just like russia and ukraine)
the russians would agree, but the ukrainians would not. most ukrainians would find the idea offensive, although it is largely correct. ukrainian has often been categorized, scientifically, that is by linguists, as a dialect of russian. ukrainian nationalism has rejected the claim, and it's worth pointing out that ukraine has a large polish-speaking region.
canada and the united states have a shared history as allies in members of alliances or in the same empire (just like russia and ukraine)
that is the argument the russians want to make, and there is some truth to it, but not recently. in fact, ukraine largely aligned with the nazis in world war two and it sought independence during the russian revolution but couldn't get it. ukraine as a country developed out of the collapse of mongolian power and has historically been more of an idea (the frontier, or the borderland) than an actual country. ukraine and russia were both colonized and built by swedes, were both converted to byzantine christianity, were both conquered by the mongols and both emerged from the collapse of mongolia as a geopolitical entity, but russia emerged as a nation state and ukraine (the border region) emerged as an idea that is something like the extension of austria (the eastern lands). what made ukraine not austria is that it was orthodox and not catholic, like russia, so therefore not in the sphere of papal supremacism, which was a secular concept until the age of reason (the pope was a kind of emperor that would depose and install rulers in client states, which ukraine was not one of). ukraine was then conquered by russia at roughly the same time as the american revolutionary war and has been under direct russian rule since about 1800, excluding a few years of tentative independence. since 1991, the russians have sought to integrate ukraine via membership of various groups, and have been in a proxy war with the americans over which direction the borderlands ate going to lean, which has included coups launched by both sides. ukraine has seen a large buildup of nato military weapons that threaten russia directly.
this is not very similar to canada, which has never been ruled by the united states and which has no foreign weapons in it at this time, but is actually deeply militarily integrated with the united states via nato, norad and other arrangements.
to the extent that the comparison holds at all, it's backdated to c. 1200, before the mongol invasion. it's worth pointing out that a more united rus might have been more successful against the mongol attack, and that the infighting between the swedish colonies contributed to the ease of the mongolian conquest. it's further worth noting that the mongolians were by this time using chinese built weapons and that the so-called mongolian invasion of russia was in truth really a chinese invasion of russia.
if you want some more useful comparisons.
ukraine is a democracy fighting for freedom against a corrupt and autocratic russia (like canada fighting against the us)
again, unhinged is an understatement. this is objectively absurd, it is insane and crazy, but it provides a window into the mind of the pmo, which seems to be a very paranoid and very scary place.
ukraine has essentially the same political system as russia. it is beset by corruption, fraud and kleptocracy. elections in ukraine are neither free nor fair. zelensky has actually suspended democracy, like a typical dictator does. media freedom is minimal. it's system of conscription is despotic and tyrannical.
canada, by contrast, is a stable democracy with a good voting system and the united states, for all it's problems, is still a free society, and still one of the freeest in the world.
if there's a comparison to draw here, it may be that ukraine's system of conscription has similarities to the one that lead to the conscription crisis in canada during the first world war. that system of conscription is seen today in canada as a mistake and as a historical wrong that our political leadership has never fully taken responsibility for.
this may be a good time for carney to apologize to canadians - and to quebeckers specifically - for the state's decision to conscript canadians in world war one and send them off to their death, as cannon fodder, in a senseless war that had no purpose and can never be repeated. it's a good time for the pmo to confirm that it will never kill off another generation of young canadians for no reason ever again.
---
so, this is a headscratching argument, at best. canada is a dramatically bigger and more prosperous country than ukraine is, and the idea that there's an analogy to make requires making russocentric arguments that would actually enrage most ukrainians, and are in truth historically unsound.
is the ghost of igor gouzenko running the pmo?
or does the civil service require better standards and need deeper protection from foreign interference via online propaganda?
el nino is not a cause of climate change. a strong el nino is an effect of anthropogenic climate change.
ocean currents in the pacific will have some effect on the local temperature and weather patterns in the eastern pacific, and perhaps an indirect effect on weather in the western pacific.
there is no statistically significant historical data, no discernible mechanism and no logical cause and effect relationship between el nino and temperatures or precipitation patterns in eastern north america. that is climate denialism, and it's right-wing propaganda. it's utter bullshit.
but keep an eye on ocean temperatures in the atlantic. higher ocean temperatures in the atlantic (as a result of global warming) will have an increasingly moderating effect on areas further inland and that's an effect that should increase to a very statistically significant signal in the upcoming decades.
it is not likely that the warming atlantic will be nullified or reversed by melting ice from greenland. that is likewise a right-wing myth.
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
it is absolutely imperative that the philistines in the gaza strip and the converted hebrews in historical israel stop blaming the israeli state for what's happening and instead take some responsibility for the consequences of their own behaviour.
the recent polling is a smidgen of hope.
but the rhetoric from entitled bourgeois politicians in europe and canada is not helping in that outcome.
as canadian and european bureaucrats produce yet another statement of support for a two-state solution in the historical israel, it's never been clear who they are speaking for so much as it's been repeatedly clear that they are speaking against israel.
polling amongst "palestinians", who are mostly arab speaking hebrews, in the geographical space of historical israel and historical philistinia has repeatedly shown that large majorities - 70%, 80% - oppose the two state solution and rather want to drive the indigenous israeli population into the sea. it was yasar arafat that opposed the idea when clinton presented it. the israelis were willing to sign off on it. so, they certainly aren't speaking for "palestinians".
for many years, they would have actually been speaking for liberal jews, although even liberal jews have taken a step back over the last three years or so. today, they might increasingly be speaking for unelected despots in distant countries that otherwise refuse to help the "palestinians", but they would hardly care about statements released by european dignitaries, and they don't generally have much invested in the issue.
almost nobody anywhere today supports two states. it's an idea that is dead on the ground and that nobody in the region is trying to save. the fact that the europeans keep bringing it up is the only thing stopping it from evaporating entirely.
so, it seems that they were actually probably talking to themselves. patting themselves on the back. high-fiving themselves.
they can appear to themselves, every day, on closed circuit tv. to make sure they're still real!
except, wait.
there's some polling out of the gaza strip this week. it's still an outlier. but for the first time in decades, it suggests that a (very slim) majority of "palestinians" think terrorism isn't in their self-interest. they are apparently even tying this to israel's justified response to the terrorist attacks on oct 7th, 2023.
now, this is one poll. but it's a little bit of hope that they might be capable of learning and adjusting and might be willing to vote for a democratic solution. that would be a dramatic shift in direction from a population that has consistently been yelling WE DON'T WANT PEACE for decades, and which has been ignored the whole time by western politicians that would rather talk to themselves in the mirror.
that would be pretty optimistic. and i doubt anybody saw the polling ahead of time.
so i'm left to ask this point blank.
who does anita anand and mark carney claim to represent on the ground in historical israel in their support for a two-state solution in the region?
jamieson greer is right in pointing out that carney's reaction is unhinged and emotional, and not careful or thought through.
is trump worse than mckinley or hoover? no. he's not worse than bush II. he's not worse than reagan. he's about the same as clinton.
going off on rants about the sky falling and the global order rupturing because you didn't get the deal you wanted right this minute (but will get it if you wait a few years) is not careful, steady leadership, it's governing via hysterical fits. it's the mirror image of trump himself.
a couple of weeks ago, the weather forcecasters were trying to argue that el nino results in colder than average falls in eastern north america, by pointing out that the long term averages were 0.1 degrees lower in the last handful of el nino years.
0.1 degrees.
they've never taken a statistics course, clearly.
now, as the forecasts have firmed up and it's clear that eastern north america is going to have a warmer than normal fall, it's because of el nino.
this schrodinger's el nino is a complex phenomenon, indeed.
the chinese have publicly stated that they want to depopulate north america and colonize it with chinese people. they consider it terra nullius.
this is not a solution. they are infinitely worse than the americans, and it's not because they're too communist, it's because they're hyper-capitalist. i would oppose this, as a socialist.
there has never been a more unequal society that exploits it's working class worse than modern china. they're better described as a fascist state than a communist state.
this is alarming and i again need to call for a non-confidence vote.
these losers are hacking my router again.
i don't want to waste my time competing with people. go away.
i'm frustrated and depressed that they won't leave me alone. i don't want to compete. i don't care. i want to finish setting up my apartment and i want to focus on creating art.
competitive behaviour is boring.
what have i been doing?
my last updated plan was aug 20th:
that (the b complex) should be here in late august. i have enough fortified nooch to last until then.
the upside of this is that it's also cheap - $75/year, or under $10/month.
i don't currently plan to take choline pills. but i also purchased a 100 count bottle of 100 iu of vitamin e for $10, which is about a year's supply, at every third day. that should be here tomorrow.
the shop vac should be here today and the new dustbuster should be here tomorrow.
i also bought a pile of hemp seeds, which was the last pantry item, and some more juice, which i've been drinking through fast because i'm sick, which came in this morning with another bag of concrete, which should let me finally finish setting up the garage.
my book shelf in the end couldn't stand the weight of the math textbooks. so, i'm going to move them in here until i finish cataloging them. i have two further shelves like this and will both set up a new one and try to strengthen this one. the metal poles are caving in. it's just more weight than it can stand. there are engineering solutions.
but i have to file some documents tonight as well.
so my plan now is to:
1) finish those documents
2) finish patching the holes in the garage, vacuum, get the carpet down, set the tables up, get the couch out, set the bike rack up, move the bikes in
3) set the furniture up in the library/charging area and around the studio (without installing any instruments or computers yet), set the furniture up in the rest of the kitchen, set the furniture up in the side entrance
4) finish sealing up the laundry. it's been sitting a while and i'll understand better what the remaining challenges are. and there's a new vac coming in.
5) clean the floors in the bathroom and kitchen with the new steam mop. summer should be milder from now until november.
6) clean the bedroom, including laundry
7) clean myself
8) get back to the cataloging of books and cds, including rebuilding the coffee table book
9) then work through the coffee table book sequentially to make sure all purchases are installed, and then finish in the kitchen. the last thing i set up was the first of three metal and vinyl bookcases. i will try to build the next two a little stronger, so they don't fall apart or cave in. it's a steel structure, but the connections are weak and liable to fall open. the connections need to be stronger. i think the next thing might be finally using the tablesaw i bought to cut through some wood and install some shelving. i am still looking at installing a dishwasher, a pop maker and a hot/ice cappuccino maker, amongst other smaller updates. the console table i bought for the last apartment is likely going to have appliances on it and the zoom area will be moved to the carpeted area in the front instead.
so, i was:
- waiting to get a vacuum i could use in the garage before i finished up in there, including working through a last bag of concrete
- waiting to get a shop vac i could use in the laundry before i finished up in there, too
- noting my bookshelf was broken and needed to be rebuilt
- planning on sequentially (1) finishing in the garage, (2) finishing in the library, (3) getting the shape of the studio in place, (4) finishing in the side entrance, (5) organizing the kitchen, (6) finishing in the laundry and then cleaning in the laundry and in the bathroom, (7) showering, (8) cleaning the bedroom, (9) shifting to the typing and cataloging.
that's not quite what's happened, or not yet.
i finished the documents on aug 21st and then spent the weekend and start of the week in the garage patching up remaining holes and installing some insulation. i made a substantive amount of progress, but stopped near the end of the week (around the 27th) to let the concrete dry a little. i realized i was going to need to get some better tape before i could get the cardboard up on the joists because the wood was so old and the packing tape wasn't sticking to it. unfortunately, my chromebook completely crashed on the 27th, and i lost several months worth of tabs in the process. shortly afterwards, the usb key i use to transfer documents around imploded. it looks like a cia firmware virus and is likely connected to these stalkers that are drugging me. i don't want to pretend i understand what is going on, but i've been convinced for a while that this is an international incident and that these people think i'm something i'm not.
odsp and cohb money for september came in on the 28th and the 29th of august so i spent these days buying food, vitamins and materials, like more tape. i intended to then get back to finishing up on the garage.
however, i noticed on the afternoon of the 30th that the deadbolt to the front of the house was intentionally damaged so that it doesn't turn, in an apparent attempt to break into the house. i consequently made a video to send to my landlord on sunday evening and had to sit inside to wait for the upload to finish. when it was done, it was too late to keep working on the garage, so i got something to eat instead, and completely shifted the way i was eating, temporarily, for the next week or so. my diet is shifting to mostly fruit for the next couple of months to catch up until it balances back out to normal. i may have ended up sleeping most of the day on the 31st.
i believe it was later in the day on the 31st, after 19:00, that i decided to rebuild the bookshelf first. i realized the shelf was failing because the metal poles were connected with cheap plastic connectors but i had to take a better look at it to understand the problem. there are these plastic pieces with round holes/sockets that you push the metal poles into and which connect the metal poles to each other; some of these connections are snug and fit tightly, but the plastic pieces in the middle of the shelf are too loose, and come apart very easily. it's consistent; it's a design fail. it might be why it was cheap. as the connection was not snug, when i put heavy textbooks on the metal shelving, the gravitational force created by the weight of the books was pushing the poles out of the socket and disconnecting the unit. to rebuild the shelving unit, i needed to tighten that connection, so it couldn't come loose as a result of weight pushing down on it.
i initially tried to squeeze it together with a pair of wire cutters, but that didn't work well. so, i ended up using most of a bottle of airplane glue to paste every single one of the metal poles into both sides of a plastic socket, like i was building a model plane, and then strengthened it all over with duct tape.
it seems to have held.
i then spent the next several days cataloging these textbooks at librarything, and putting them back up on the shelf. i was largely done cataloging on the morning of the third when i stopped to sleep in the morning. i will need a second one of these shelves immediately as the first is now completely full, and it's going to require some extra costs for crazy glue and duct tape, but i want to finish in the garage first and then clear the items out of the hall by moving them into the garage in order to make more space for it.
i fixed the lock myself on the 2nd.
however, a major rain storm came in on the afternoon of the third and dumped a huge amount of rain on the front porch, exposing some leaks from around the door into the garage. it is not the first time i've noticed this, but it only pours like that very occasionally here. i'm actually glad i caught it while i was in the middle of doing it. i kept most of the water out of most of the space, but there was a small area i hadn't finished yet and also a region i had overlooked. further, it exposed the need to address rainproofing the door itself. then, when the rain stopped, somebody broke the deadbolt again and i actually filed a police report about it early on the 5th. so, i needed to place a pause on working in there for a few days, which was fine, as i wasn't done cataloguing the books. as of early on sept 7th, i had a list of over 500 texts in four major overlapping categories
- reference library (the shelf i just fixed)
- fiction shelf (the shelf i'm building in my bedroom for novels)
- read but unowned (these are books i took out of the library for academic reasons, or downloaded pdfs of)
- books that disappeared (books that were stolen, lent out, sold or damaged in storage (and disappeared) at my parents from 2011-2013)
i still need to catalog the manuals for my devices and i can also use librarything for cds and will do that in parallel to discogs. it is a cleaner system than discogs, although discogs has some unique features, too. i would like to use both systems, not to choose.
i also have not added the pile of fiction texts i compiled for grades 3-13 or gone over course notes for the 13 years of university courses that i took. i'm also continuing to try to find lists dated to 2011 and to 2002. that 500 book list is still quite minimal, overall. i actually have quite a lot to add to it, still, but i am done cataloging the books i currently physically have in my actual possession at this time.
there is a link to the librarything pdf here:
my chromebook unfortunately crashed a second time on sept 7. i spent the rest of the day on the 7th and 8th rebuilding, sleeping and eating and, as of sept 9th, i've been able to rebuild only mildly, while i reconstruct a new workflow.
my updated work flow is as follows:
1) rebuild tabs on the chromebook i lost on monday morning.
2) call the landlord in the morning and get an update on the front door. wait until it's clear what they're doing.
3) continue searching external media, etc for old book lists and then go through school files backwards to update the list as much as possible, for now. this list will, by its nature, always be incomplete.
4) as i can't finish in the garage until i get a clearer understanding about the door, i can't clear out the hall, and can't replace the items in the hall with the things that will go there.
5) i can build the shape of the studio up.
6) i can't clear out the front entrance or organize the kitchen well, yet.
7) however, i can finish in the laundry and should shift to that next.
8) i still have work to do in the garage and can't shift into working on the computer in the bedroom until it's done, but i can stop to shower nonetheless if it's going to be a few days.
i also need to note that the summer is almost over and disappeared fast than i'd like. i did absolutely nothing all summer, unfortunately. these disgusting retards continue to sit upstairs and jerk off and there's no sign that they're going to go away. in fact, there's increasing indication that a violent confrontation will be required to defend myself.
but what that means is that i need to focus on getting money into the rdsp for the rest of the year. i need to get $4000 in by the end of the year. that means i won't be spending money on buying things, but will rather be focused on ensuring that everything i've purchased already is properly installed.
that means that once i get the things described done - finish the laundry, finish the garage, rearrange the space, clean everything - done, i'm going to be sitting down to type for quite a while, and not doing much else.
i made a choice to do the bookshelf first. it's put together now. i should get the tabs rebuilt in the next few hours, and then should be able to finish up in the laundry by the end of the morning. how much more i can get done and how quickly depends on what i can learn about the situation when i call the landlord.
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
if i were the eu, i would tell canada upfront that it's proposals are driven by eurocentric identity politics, are economically irrational and that there's no benefit to either party in signing a free trade agreement.
canada may benefit by greater integration into a kind of nordic union that includes russia, the us and the uk, excludes southern europe and is focused on arctic cooperation but that will have to wait until the stupid war is over.
the historical luddites, like the historical populists, were really not precursors to marx or bakunin (the populists were chronologically later, but you get the point). they don't even fit under the definition of "utopian socialism" that engels contrasted against the "scientific socialism" of marx, which has been a misnomer to this point but is still the direction that proper socialists and anarchists need to take to be proper. it's a little bit hard to get it right, but if your socialism isn't scientific, it's not proper socialism.
the luddites were brownshirts. they were nazis. they were fascists. like the historical populists, they were very religious. they were a late medieval, pre-modern (if just barely) development of historical barbarism and one of the earliest demonstrations of what we refer to today as the extreme fascist right.
luddite ideas showing up in fake leftist circles should be raising alarm flags. when this shit gurgles up, it's not a left, it's an extreme right. worse, it's consistent with other extreme right ideas infecting and co-opting the fake left, to produce what has become an increasingly ideologically coherent extreme right.
chomsky saw this coming a little but he avoided taking it on. chomsky was pretty hard-headed and not afraid to get into a debate, but he didn't want this fight. the person that really took this issue on, and whose writings on the topic are invaluable at this point, was hitchens, who was almost prophetic at points, despite getting the basic point wrong in iraq. dawkins has been wrong about hormone science and women's rights, but he identified a lot of the fake left issues before they were serious concerns.
the broader society should see these fascist attacks on the use of technology as dangerous and as an extreme warning signal that we're on a path towards collapse and self-harm.
socialists and communists and anarchists would not have any opposition to the increased use of technology in society at all. that is not a left-wing position.
the left would support socializing the production of technology, increasing automation and the eventual jump to the superproduction of consumer goods for the benefit of the working class. the basic idea on the left is that increases in technology will lead to decreases in costs (including via economies of scale) and that this, combined with the elimination of profit and the abolition of private property, will ensure that the consumer goods made in the factory are accessible to the proletariat operating the machines, so that we don't have this depressing reality where we enslave a dominant portion of the population to make goods for the elite, which they can never afford. the auto workers should be able to afford to buy the cars they make.
luddite nonsense expressing a fear of change about the "dangers of technology" is as right-wing, as backwards and as conservative as you can get. it is in direct opposition to any sort of leftist theory and has no remote resemblance to it.
i mean, carney claims he wants to replace the united states with other countries through expanded trade deals.
but then he attacks the domestic industry with these outrageous tax hikes and sells it by wrapping himself in the flag, and pushing this chauvinistic nonsense about competing. how does he expect them to compete in foreign markets? they won't be able to, because of the local tax policies.
but he's then opening up our markets to goods from horrible places like indonesia and the uae, that literally have actual slaves in their production process and put actual poison in their food. those are going to flood the market at rates similar or lower to chinese goods, and they're going to displace the canadian goods that can't compete because of the tax rates.
these trade deals he's signing, in conjunction with the counter-tariffs, are just going to contribute to the effects of the trade war, not mitigate it. then he clarifies by pointing out that what he actually wants is "foreign investment", which is newspeak for selling canadian assets to foreign investors. it's apparently intentional. the policy is apparently designed to make canada for sale.
i couldn't create a worse policy for canadian businesses and canadian workers if i tried.
but if you're invested in some indonesian palm oil exporting agrifood company, you just got a foot into the canadian market, and preferential conditions that could even start to harm the canola industry.
we're under serious attack by our own government in ways that trump could never do by himself. all trump can do is tax his own people, which would have a minimal effect on us. but the policy path canada is choosing is going to severely damage profitable, successful canadian economic sectors with the apparent intent of opening them for sale to foreign investors, at minimal harm to the american exporters.
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