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Once again I am riding in the Enbridge Tour Alberta for Cancer, raising money for the Alberta Cancer Foundation.
You can donate here!
The ACF does amazing work in the community and we would love your support!
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I can’t help but wonder if the writers of Babylon 5 saw the MST3K riff of Laserblast before writing Infection…
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Yesterday was the 45 anniversary of one my absolute favourite Pink Floyd albums: Animals. Much is made Gilmour’s virtuosity on the album but Waters’ writing is brilliant here, and would presage many great concept albums to come!
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Happy birthday 10th, Bridgy! If you’re reading this on Twitter, that’s because of this wonderful project. Thank you so much, Ryan, and everyone who’s contributed!
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My favourite Slack anti-pattern:
Person: Hey, do you have a minute for a quick call?
Me: Sure!
[15 minutes goes by]
Me: Okay, well, I need to go do something else now, but I’ll be available in 20 minutes.
Person: [attempts to call immediately]
[20 minutes goes by]
Me: Alright, I’m free again.
[10 minutes goes by]
Person: Too late, I’m busy.
Me: 😑😐😡
- Currently reading Children of Time (Children of Time #1.0) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (9781447273318)(https://b-ark.ca/OmOASa)
- Finished Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9.0) by James S. A. Corey (9780316332910)(https://b-ark.ca/qkeEIO)
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Kudos to @MarmotBasin on the switch to RFID cards! Faster lift lines, online lift ticket purchases, no more need for a lift ticket dangling from your jacket, etc.
- Currently reading Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9.0) by James S. A. Corey (9780316332910)(https://b-ark.ca/0U24Iw)
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A beautiful letter from father to son before the son shipped out to World War 2. Amazing how these words from 80 years ago carry so much wisdom that we can use today.
Blogging for the Holidays: Wrap-up
The ninth and final post in my Blogging for the Holidays project. Just a little wrap-up post to tie a bow around the whole thing.
Well, it’s hard to believe but my two weeks of vacation are coming to a close and tomorrow morning I return to the grind. It says a lot about my mental state before my break that I feel like another two weeks would be welcome, but alas, until I manage to earn myself a sabbatical or, some day, retirement, I suppose this will have to do.
As for this blogging project, I’m really glad I set myself this writing goal! For folks who have their own blog but struggle to get motivated to write, this approach–setting a queue of topics over a fixed period of time and then tackling them steadily–was very motivating and rewarding! I definitely recommend it as a fun way to get inspired.
I was particularly happy with how a theme emerged across the various posts. And I felt pretty darn smug when, in the January 1st episode of Slate Money, Stacey-Marie Ishmael, a writer and journalist who’s much smarter and articulate than me, summarized the theme of this blog series: the pandemic is making the invisible visible. I have to admit, when I heard her say that, I felt a rush of validation that maybe I was onto something!
So, where did I end up clocking in? Well, over the course of the last two weeks, counting short posts, I wrote a grand total of approximately 13700 words. Counting only long form posts, roughly 12900 or about 800 words a day. Not bad at all! And I know of at least one person who actually read most of them!1
Anyway, for folks who weren’t following this project as it was being published and want to check it out, here’s a list of the long form posts in the order in which they were written:
- Blogging for the Holidays
- Grappling with Viruses
- Grappling with Statistics
- Revisiting The Lord of the Rings
- Grappling with Misinformation
- Grappling with Supply Chains
- Grappling with Labour Markets
- Grappling with Inflation
- A New Years Post
For those few people who actually stuck it out and read these posts, either as they were written or afterward, thank you! I hope they were interesting and worth the time.
And for those folks who’ve heard me going on about these topics throughout 2021 and still read these posts, a special shout out! You’re a trooper!2
Finally, I hope everyone had a happy holidays in spite of all the difficulties of the past two years, and I truly believe this next year we’ll see things start to get better.
Have a fantastic 2022!
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My problem with work-from-home isn’t work-life balance. It’s difficulty compartmentalizing. Retaining the emotional distance that helps you avoid burn-out is hard when work and not-work feel the same.
A New Years Post
It’s a new year, my break is almost over, but there’s time for one more Blogging for the Holidays post before I do a wrap-up. Warning: this one is pretty haphazard.
I honestly have no specific ideas for what I’m going to cover in this post, but I figured as I rambled some sort of theme would present itself. Of course, that turns out to have only been marginally true, so what you’re about to experience is a disorganized set of milestones from the year that I thought up as I as writing this thing. But I thought it would be good to have something to wrap up my thoughts for the year so that I can look back and remember how I was seeing things before I took the plunge into 2022.
This will be followed up, tomorrow, with my Blogging for the Holidays wrap-up post where I’ll include links to the posts in the series, along with some closing word salad to finish things up.
Alright, so, speaking of word salad…
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/MYqiCW)
Watched Idiocracy and Don’t Look Up as our New Years double feature. Folks weren’t kidding! Don’t Look Up is like Veep: supposed to be satire but just a little too real…
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I periodically go through a caffeine fast to reset my coffee consumption. It’s worth it every time but man… the week of withdrawal symptoms is not a good time!
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I fried my WASD keyboard with a static shock and considered building a new controller based on the wasdat (https://github.com/evyd13/wasdat) only to discover the ATMEGA32U4-AU has a 1 year lead time. Thanks chip shortage!
Grappling with Inflation
The seventh post in my Blogging for the Holidays series, some ramblings about inflation.
It would be difficult to write a holiday wrap-up blog post series without a mention of inflation, which became the new boogieman in the latter half of 2021 as we’ve seen inflation rising steadily, with the rate in some categories exceeding 7% year over year.
That inflation is suddenly a problem is really quite remarkable given that 18 months ago everyone was terrified of a depression-level event as a result of mass illness, lockdowns, and so forth. But to the credit of our governments, while a lot of mistakes have been made, it’s pretty clear that many of the policies that were instituted–particularly the various financial aid packages that were put together–have done what, at the outset, would have seemed impossible: turned the threat of economic calamity into the kind of boom we all wished we could’ve seen after the 2008 crash.
But like so many of the other topics I’ve written about, this is just another example of an issue that, for my generation, is completely novel. The last time inflation exceeded 3% was way back in 1991! Meanwhile, the prime interest rate, which is a key tool for controlling inflation, is at historical lows (thanks 2008!).
For a generation that has never seen real inflation, this situation is novel, frightening, and deeply frustrating, upending yet another aspect of life that was previously familiar and consistent.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/ISOgEy)
Finally started watched Ted Lasso and yup, I get the fandom! It really is delightful and reminds me of the spirit and energy that makes me love Community and Brooklyn 99.
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You know, turkey is great, but there’s nothing like a home made turkey soup a couple of days later.
Grappling with Labour Markets
The sixth post in my Blogging for the Holidays series, some thoughts on labour and market forces, and what COVID has done to upend an old dynamic.
In my introductory post for this series I rattled off a number of topics that seemed especially interesting to me in light of the last two years of COVID, one of which being the relationship between capital and labour. A light and simple topic, obviously, but it seemed worth a post.
Standing in the shower I was thinking about my way into this subject, and then it dawned on me that my post on supply chains, and in particular the topic of supply-demand dynamics, made for a very nice segue into this topic, particularly given the conversations I’ve been having this year regarding the labour market.
I’m going to start off with a basic thesis that I suspect some might find a bit controversial, maybe even mildly offensive, but that (as I understand it) is pretty well understood in the world of economics: Labour is a market, and salaries are our price for our labour. This means that, absent government intervention, salaries are a function of supply and demand, along with all the other forces that make a market function.
This is not what anyone deep down wants to believe!
Naively, I think we’d all like to believe that the value we pay for something reflects what that thing is, in some way, intrinsically worth.
But what makes an iPhone valuable? We know from Apple’s filings that they’re achieving something like 30% gross profit margins on their consumer devices. That means we’re paying over a third more for the device than is reflected in the total costs of raw materials, labour, shipping, and so forth. And yet people still buy those devices, believing them to be worth the additional cost.
What about, say, a collectible baseball card? Intrinsically, the card is worth pennies in paper and ink. And yet there is a market in which such a thing could sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The reality is that prices reflect not just pure utility, but rather something more intangible.
To offer just a little taste of just how intangible, consider the idea of the Keynesian beauty contest:
This would have investors pricing shares not based on what they think an asset’s fundamental value is, or even on what investors think other investors believe about the asset’s value, but on what they think other investors believe is the average opinion about the value of the asset, or even higher-order assessments.
In other words, our estimate of the value of a good isn’t necessarily even based on our own idea of its intrinsic value, but rather our idea of what other people believe to be its intrinsic value.
Meta!
Well, the same is true of labour, and the forces unleashed by COVID that have turned markets for goods and services upside down have had similar impacts on the labour market as well.
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