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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months ago

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“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #ai #automation #humans in the loop #centaurs #reverse centaurs #labor #ai safety #sanity checks #spot the mistake #code review #driving instructor

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tkachuktkaching · 3 months ago

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A few of the highlights

After he threw the pitch in the Marlins game in Miami which he was still recovering from a shoulder injury (right after he got traded) he went into his back yard and and practiced and threw 5 pitches to prepare but he's much healthier than two years ago.

Some talk on Jayson Tatum and how he makes 6 times as much as him and he always knew he was destined for the big time in the NBA and he was always a stud.

They always talked as kids about making the nba and nhl respectively.

The video was technology class in 7th grade before high school.

His dad wanted to go with him to the baseball pitch and his mum was out of town.

He loved hanging out with jayson and catching up for a few hours.

He talked about Sherwood in 2020 he tried a few brands, he helped with the design process and was their first hockey player since their rebrand.

He talked going to Raising Cains, he was partying and going to eleven and without sleep and he had agreed to do things prior to the final. He talked about all the opportunities to do extra signings and things.

He decided to a interview with sports net and decide to give a shout out, he loves the people in Calgary and hates the people in Edmonton and he got family in Winapeg including his Grandpa.

He was excited to play in the charity golf tournament, he loves Charles Barkely and playing with TJ Oshie and the Kelcie brothers were cool.

And how he ended up singing We Are The Champions with Charles Barkley.

He was excited to meet the different people from the different sports.

He got engaged on the Thursday before game 1 in the playoffs and flew in his parents and fiancé's parents had a big celebration then went no booze for the whole playoffs and plans to do that again.

His special memories of the playoffs were the off ice stuff playing poker the comradeship with the guys.

He's sad the teammates that left but excited they got the offersheet and got paid and set for life and is excited to see them for dinner when they see them.

He was pissed after game 5 because he didn't want to go to Edmonton but he was so confident ahead of game 7 he wanted to do it for his family that got him there, he talked how his dad and Brady walked him to his car and wanted to do it especially for them.

He drives to the arena on his own he goes early getting there 4 hours early. Sam Bennet got a mention for liking to sleep and goes much later.

How incredible the emotions of his family and being the first tkachuk to win the cup,

Bringing his dad into the lockeroom was what it meant to him and his whole family.

Singing Brady praises for being so supportive and believes Brady will win it, he's too good not to, he's built for the play offs, and wants to be there when he does.

Literally everybody from Calgary reached out to him after the cup win even Darrell (Sutter).

Praising his old youth team London Knights and what they did for him and other players.

He heard from players he heard from or know and Robbie Thomas and people that won before Vllady got a special mentions he was a great veteran presence and okie too.

He talked the Paternark fight, and how it happened and Monty's involvement. He says there's no rules just beat the shit out of each other.

He'll never forget this year for the rest of his life.

He confirmed Brady did not touch the cup though there were a few close calls due to being drunk.

He says he's so much better health than this time last year, he's excited about this year.

He his fiancee and Brady are going to visit Taryn this Friday he says she won't listen to his interview so it won't ruin the surprise and talks how good she is a field hockey. Her preseason has started.

He loves to watch Barky in practice and is learning to do things and a special mention of Kucherov of Tampa one of his favorite players.

He wants to improve scoring from further out like Brady.

He's getting more recognised now but it's good and he's enjoying it.

He's being working on jumps, working on his skating, sprints and being strong weights but jumps.

He got in trouble for putting the cup in the ocean but the cup caretakers only told him afterwards but they understood but he got great memories.

The whole family sacrifices so much for hockey players and the Tkachuk name is on the cup forever it's forever.

#matthew tkachuk #florida panthers #cam and strick podcast #chatty Matty #Spoilers

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prototypesteve · 3 months ago

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Solo Travel: Find Magic.

Venturing out on a solo vacation can be daunting. There’s a shit-ton of adulting you’ll need to do:

It’s up to you to make your flight. It’s up to you to not lose anything. It’s up to you to stay hydrated and healthy and mindful and motivated.

It can be easy to give in and say “hard nope” and stay home, even if you really want to start travelling solo.

How do you get past all that, and find the will to save up, plan, gear-up, get a passport or a reliable road-trip vehicle, and go? Magic. You believe in magic and you let yourself want it.

When I was in my late teens I was in a waiting room and idly flipping through a magazine (it was the late 80s). I turned the page and there was a two-page tourism ad with a massive photo of Lake Louise, in Banff National Park. Supernaturally milky blue water, tiny red canoes, backed by a colossal wall of mountain capped by an ancient glacier. I remember murmuring aloud, “I want that.” I wanted to feel what that photographer felt. I wanted awe. I wanted magic.

Years later, I finally had enough of my shit together to go there, and it was everything I expected, and it made all the hard adulting worth it. (I wound up moving to Calgary so I could go to Lake Louise any time I wanted to.)

Photo 1: Lake Louise, Alberta. (This is from 2012, and taken with an old iPhone 4S, but it most closely resembles the view I saw in the magazine ad.)

In 2003, I saw a video about Tofino and Pacific Rim National Park. By 2003 I had plenty of experience going on budged-friendly road trips to Vancouver, where I’d stay in the (at the time, affordable) Jericho Beach Hostel. But Tofino would cost more, require a longer vacation, and take me way out of my “there’s always a city close by” comfort zone. But I wanted to see real waves, walk through a real coastal rain forest, and see the ocean fog roll in. I wanted magic,

Photo 2: My (used) 1998 Pontiac Sunfire, and a budget kayak, and my mediocre Norco mountain bike, somewhere at a rest stop along the trans Canada Highway, in British Columbia

By 2005 I had the right gear, a decent budget, and enough self-confidence to drive out and hike down sketchy wooden stairs to Half Moon Bay near Uclulet and see the actual Pacific Ocean—not the Salish Sea between Vancouver and Vancouver Island—for the first time. That week I felt the magic of being at the edge of my world. It made all the adulting easy.

Photos 3 & 4: The first time I saw the Pacific Ocean without Vancouver Island or the Olympic Peninsula lining the horizon, and the first time I saw fog move in over Vancouver island from the Pacific Ocean,

Ever since my 8th and 9th grade teachers told us stories about the old Globe theatre, I’ve dreamt of seeing a play in the rebuilt Globe in London (back then, even rebuilding the Globe was still a dream that wouldn’t be finished until the late 90s). But I live an ocean away, in Canada, I’m introverted, and no matter how much money I make, I have always felt like I’m out of my class-depth at any social gathering. Wrong childhood neighbourhoods, wrong schools, wrong career field. It took me until my 2nd trip to England to work up the nerve to buy a ticket to see a play at the Globe. I wanted to be there like one of the people I imagined during English class as we studied Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, and The Scottish Play. I wanted the magic.

Friday night, August 23, 2024, I spent two hours almost dizzy with a flood of feelings I’m going to need months to process, because I sat in Bay H, Row C, Seat 29, at Shakespeare’s Globe, in London, and watched a beautiful, perfect, magical performance of Much Ado about Nothing, and like I said, I’m going to be sorting out my feelings about this for months.

Yes there’s the Osemanverse overlap, Much Ado appears in Loveless. There’s the Aroace angle, watching two seemingly aro characters get shipped by their friends and family, bla bla bla. There’s a lot. But whatever. For me the magic was being the adult who teenage-me grew up into, sitting there in my seat that I absolutely belonged in, on my trip that I put together for myself, to chase down dozens of my other lifelong dreams, sitting there, and feeling that I was allowed to be there, and then delighting in the magic of live theatre, compounded by the magic of loving myself enough to push through every excuse not to be there.

Photos 5, 6, and 7: The Globe Theatre (there’s no photography during the performance, and I don’t think I’d have bothered, if there was.

Find your magic. Thrive. It doesn’t have to cost a lot: My first solo trips cost me a tank of gas and a tenting campground fee, or a night’s stay at a hostel. It doesn’t need to be risky: Backpacker hostels and modern hotels often have more sophisticated security than your home or workplace. It doesn’t have to be ambitious: Maybe it’s lunch at a diner in a small farm town nearby, maybe it’s a low-key late summer concert in a park, maybe it’s building that sandcastle you never got to build because you grew up far away from water. Whatever it is, go find it! Let it change you.

#solo travel #asexual travel #aromantic travel #asexual #aromantic #aroace #banff national park #lake louise #tofino

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cuttergauthier · 2 years ago

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New Jersey Two

Jack Hughes x Female Reader

This is chapter Two of Four

Can read chapter one here

Warning: Ex, fluff, cursing, Non supportive parents? Let me know if i missed any.

This has been in my draft for a while, I finally finished it.

word count: 1.4k

let me know what you guys think🤍

I just got to my apartment, thankfully I was able to find a beautiful affordable apartment that was fully furnished. It was now 8 p.m. and I was starving so I decided to order some pizza, for how late it was the wait was still 45 minutes.

While I was waiting for my pizza to get here, I took a quick shower since I was just in a plane. I changed into some comfy grey sweatpants and a tight white long sleeve shirt. I threw my hair in a bun I was too exhausted to wash it tonight, so I’ll just do it tomorrow when I wake up.

Once I was ready the I heard a knock on the door, I opened the door I paid the delivery boy and closed the door.

I sat down on my couch and turned on the tv and started to eat. I put on my brother’s hockey game since Ottawa was playing Calgary tonight. They were leading 2-1 in the second period.

I continued watching the game until it was over. Ottawa won 3-1 so I texted my brother to tell him congrats. I threw away the trash and went to bed. I could worry about everything else tomorrow I was too exhausted to worry about anything else right now.

The next morning, I woke up refreshed so I jumped in the shower. Thankfully I still had another two week before class started, I wanted to make sure I could settle in and find my way around the city before I got busy with classes. Once I got out of the shower and got ready for the day, I looked on google to try and find a coffee place that was close since I got in late last night I didn’t have the chance to go get groceries.

I found a place that was only a five-minute walk so I grabbed my purse, jacket and keys and made my way to the coffee shop. I got myself a small breakfast and a cold brew before sitting down at the table next to the window.

New York was beautiful especially during winter, it was snowing today, and it was beautiful. I looked up nearby grocery stores, and once I was done eating, I made my way there, thankfully the grocery store was only 10 minutes from my apartment, so it wasn’t hard walking back.

Once I got back to my apartment, I unloaded my groceries and forgot that I needed to buy some utensils since I had none, I found a store, but it was a little further away, so I ordered an uber.

Thankfully it wasn’t a long drive, once we got to the store, I paid the uber and went inside to do a little shopping. I spend about an hour there before calling another uber to go home. I found everything I needed, I was finally adulting, when I was in Michigan my parents’ house was close enough to campus so I would just drove to campus when I had classes.

The day was coming to an end, so I made myself diner and facetime some family and friends for a while. Then I thought I should facetime Luke and tell him what I did today. Luke has always been like a little brother to me, he can be annoying, but I love him regardless.

“Hey sis, how was your first full day in New York?”

“pretty good, I went and bought groceries and then went to the store to buy some utensils so I could actually make myself some food” I said which made him laugh

“You’re getting old sis” he said which made me gasp

“shut up Luke, I’m only 2 years older than you” he was smiling

“I’m glad you’re happy”

“me too”

“you should really think about telling Jack, he’d be happy to see you”

“Luke…”

“I know you don’t want to see him, but he’s my brother and I know he misses you, he asks about you every time I talk to him”

“If I ever see him around I’ll talk to him, but I really don’t want to have to call him or text him to let him know I’m here”

“fine… I have to go it’s getting late and I’m exhausted, so good night I’ll talk to you later, love you”

“love you too lukey”

He was right it was getting late, so I went to bed happy for a successful first day in New York and excited for another one tomorrow.

Today I was going to go to time square and explore New York. I’ve always dreamed of living in New York and now I’m finally here.

I got ready for the day and ordered an uber. The uber driver got me to time square and I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was.

I thanked the driver before he left and I started exploring the city. I found some stores I loved and made my way inside, I might as well shop since I’m here.

I bought a few new pieces of clothing and I didn’t need but they were to cute not to buy, as I made my way out of the last store time square was already packed and I bumped into someone’s chest.

“Dude you really need to start watching where you’re going” some guy said laughing

“Nate shut up it’s not my fault” someone said, and I recognized his voice it was Jack.

I looked up and saw Jack I didn’t think I’d run into him especially in Time Square. He looked at me and I saw him freeze. He was with who I assume are some of his teammates.

“Jack you okay man” who I recognize as PK Subban, Jack snapped out of it making him look at PK then back at me.

“Y/n?” he said in disbelief

“Hey Jack… long time no see” I said shyly

“yeah, no kidding, what are you doing In New York?”

“We’ll let you guys talk, were going to go to Sunglass hut” another one of the guys said before they walked away.

“umm… you want to walk and we can catch up while we do so?” I ask nervously

I didn’t know if he would say yes, and I honestly didn’t know if I was hoping he’d say yes or if he’d say no.

“yeah that sounds good, I can catch up with the guys later.” He said with a small smile

“So what brings you to New York? Are you here with some friends for new years?” he asked curiously

“um… no i’m actually here alone… I finally convince my parents to let me move to New York so I could go to Columbia university.” I said smiling

His eyes widen with a smile making its way on his face.

“Really? That’s amazing you always wanted to go to Columbia” he said happily

“Yeah, I got them to agree so I transferred I got here 2 days ago, I’ve always wanted to live here so I thought I’d explore the city”

“I’m happy for you, it’s about time you follow your dreams. How come you didn’t tell me you were moving here?” he asked lowkey hurt

“honestly I don’t know, we haven’t seen each other in over a year, so I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to know… even though every told me to tell you” I replied

“Of course, I would have wanted to know. You have no idea how much I’ve missed you. You were my girlfriend and best friend, I’ll I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy” he said which made me smile

I had missed him too; he was my person every time I had good news or bad news, he was the first person I wanted to tell. He’s been in my life since we born, there’s nothing I wouldn’t have done for him and him for me.

“I missed you too” I replied smiling

“Well now that we are close by we can catch up”

“definitely”

We kept walking and talking we stopped at a coffee shop, we sat down and talk for a little while before he got a call.

“I have to go, but you have my number use it” he said smiling

He gave me a hug before leaving. I finished my coffee before deciding it was time to go back to my apartment.

I went to bed happier than ever, I thought I’d be sad to see him again, but I couldn’t be happier.

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tomorrowusa · 3 months ago

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Canada's Conservative party created a video as a backdrop to a speech given by Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. The video purported to show an idealized version of Canada which illustrated points in Poilievre's speech.

A much closer look revealed that images in the vid were of Russian fighter jets, a British royal park, an Italian hunter, California cattle, a Venezuelan sunset, Indonesian mountains, a Slovenian construction site, a Ukrainian student, a North Dakota suburb, and a Serbian classroom.

No information is available on the country of origin for Pierre Poilievre's cowboy hat.

In terms of depicting Canada, the vid was an enormous fail. They did somehow manage to correctly depict a Canadian gas station and a Canadian flag.

BTW, any amateur astronomer beyond the novice level would quickly notice that the sunset in the vid could not have taken place north of the Tropic of Cancer which is at 23.44° N latitude; the Tropic is between Florida and Cuba. The southernmost point in Canada is Middle Island, Ontario in Lake Erie (41.68° N).

Canada’s Conservative party has deleted a social media campaign video with a heavily nationalist message after much of the video featured scenes from other countries, including Ukrainian farmers, Slovenian homes, London’s Richmond Park and a pair of Russian fighter jets. The video, titled “Canada. Our Home” was initially posted to X on Saturday, with various scenes overlaid by a speech from the party leader, Pierre Poilievre. The Conservatives, who lead the governing Liberals in the polls, are preparing for what is widely expected to be a bitterly contested federal election. Soon after the video was posted online, viewers pointed out much of the footage depicted as “Canadian” was easily traced to places outside the country. A thread on X by the Calgary-based user @disorderedyyc compiled at least 13 inconsistencies, adding: “If you’re making a video about the Canada ‘we know and love’, you should be using actual Canadian footage.” Among the gaffes: a “Canadian dad” driving through the suburbs was actually stock footage from North Dakota in the United States, a clip of children attending class was shot in Serbia, the “Canadian-built” homes were under construction in Slovenia, and a university student “late for class” was filmed at a post-secondary institution in Ukraine.

Here's the vid, preserved before the Conservatives could remove it.

youtube

The party deleted the video soon after the wave of criticism, but users preserved it online. A Conservative party spokeswoman, Sarah Fischer, confirmed it had been removed. “Mistakes happen, as you can see here,” she said. The New Democratic party deputy ethics critic, Charlie Angus, derided the video. “I’m calling on Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre to clearly and publicly commit to ending the use of phony, fake, manufactured digital content to support his campaign and denounce any external efforts to do the same,” he said in a statement.

#canada #conservative party of canada #video #pierre poilievre #canadian politics #epic fail #gaffes #sunsets north of the tropic of cancer

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ofcalcbs · 10 months ago

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✦ JACK MULHERN, CIS MAN, HE/HIM ✦ CALEB WILLIAMS the TWENTY SEVEN year old has been in willow’s edge for FOUR YEARS and was a BOYFRIEND to JUNE, the deceased family. whispers on the streets are that the VALET at THE GRAPEVINE who lives in WILLOUGHBY COMPLEX are said to be EMPATHETIC and UNMOTIVATED but i guess we’ll find out for ourselves.

basics.

full name: caleb joseph williams

known as: caleb, some family members call him cj

age: twenty seven

pronouns: he/him

gender: cis man

hometown: calgary, alberta

current residence: willoughby complex (current roommate: levi towsley)

occupation: valet at the grapevine

connection to the willows: june's boyrfriend

zodiac: pisces king

vibe: kind hearted intention vs impulsive action

fc: jack mulhern

a lil more.

caleb spent most of his childhood just outside of calgary, alberta living a relatively mundane life. a simple working class family that was doing everything it could to teeter its way into middle class.

he has one older brother, jackson, who was as good and as mean as older brothers can sometimes be. but regardless caleb idolised him from a young age. he wanted to be just like him even when, and maybe especially when, it annoyed him.

which is how he ended up getting into hockey. he was copying jackson, and this was one of the times where it annoyed the absolute shit out of him. and in the beginning, that was why he stuck with it. but turns out he really enjoyed it and was pretty dang good at it too once he was in it for the game and not pissing off his brother. also might have helped that his brother quit a couple years later too.

ever since he was a kid he's had this sort of energy that invites conversation, that invites vulnerability. a kindness, a casualty to his being. and maybe that's why he was the first to figure out his parents were headed towards divorce. long drives with just his dad to away games, he was probably told far more than a teenager should be told about his parents problems and specifically his dad's frustrations. but he heard them all the same, turning to take whatever emotion it made him feel out on the ice

trying to avoid talking a shit load about hockey so basically: ended up entering junior leagues during his parents divorce, a very convenient excuse to get out of the house and live with different billet families during his final years of high school lmao. but the further he got into serious hockey playing, the further self doubt started to seep in. realistically professional sports was an insane thing to try and make a career in, but he'd never thought of anything else either. so he pushed through the self doubt for years. trading around, moving around, just going through the motions. doing what he was told, and trying not to let go of that tiny hope that one day he'd make it.

but eventually he did let go. earlier than some, later than others, caleb quit hockey at the age of 23. sick of not having any sort of permanency to his life, feeling like he had no solid connections with anyone, etc etc. riding that impulsive decision making he took his mom's first suggestion to go stay with his uncle in south carolina. something about not wanting to get stuck in a slump in calagary but also just it was a place he'd never been before so fuck it why not. he stayed with his uncle for his first year in willows edge while he found his feet, before moving out to an apartment of his own in the willoughby complex.

it was also around this time he first met june. he'd of course heard of the willows, their name was literally on everything. but he'd avoided actually interacting with the big names where he could. at first he didn't realise she was a willow. she was just a girl with a flat tire, someone that needed help and he didn't see any sense in letting her call someone when he could do and he was right there.

they continued to run into each other, and admittedly some of it might have been purposeful on caleb's part. she was a captivating girl, there was no denying it. they became closer over time, until eventually caleb made another impulsive decision to ask her out. in the same decision he decided maybe he would stick around willows edge just a little longer.

their relationship was good, it was fun, and caleb loved having someone around like her. he'd do anything and everything she wanted, anything to support her, anything to love her. truthfully he adored her, but similarly to how he felt about hockey, didn't feel like he was all he needed to be to be in her life forever. sometimes the fact that she was dating him, that she liked him, loved him even maybe, was surprising to him. he wasn't anything great, so how did he deserve this? most of the time june quelled his doubts, made him feel better, motivated him to do things that made him feel better too. but that didn't mean the doubt wasn't still deep in his stomach.

maybe that's why he kissed june's friend, iris. just to ruin a good thing so he could stop feeling like he didn't deserve it. or maybe it was because he had feelings for iris too, maybe he'd had them for a while. he didn't know. and he didn't know what he would tell june but he knew that he should – but too little too late it seems.

tldr: mood when u quit the only thing you know because you realise you're probably never gonna go pro and don't know if you ever wanted to and now have no real drive in life but you meet a girl and you really like her and little by little that motivation comes back but then she dies ?!?!??!! anyway now you're back to no motivation bc that sucks oops

pinterest.

#willowsedgeintro #about #this is chaotic but hey thats the vibe babey

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pagesofkenna · 2 years ago

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@uchuuryokou said: "whats your hockey team"

(answering publicly so I can make everyone else see lmao)

we're the Coachella Valley Firebirds!!

we were put together in this last year as an American Hockey League (AHL, 2nd tier professional league) affiliate team of the Seattle Krakens (NHL) because someone thought it would be fun to build a world-class state-of-the-art ice hockey arena in the middle of the desert!

things I want to say bc I can't even organize my thoughts around this:

this is out first pro sports team in our area for ANY sport. previously if you wanted to support a local team/go to professional games, you had to drive two hours up to Los Angelos. something about having a team IN my hometown* (and the arena a five minute drive away from me!) has made me FULLY understand the sports home team pride. I bought over 100 bucks worth of merch just on a whim lol

*my hometown technically! they're not the Palm Springs Firebirds or the Coachella Firebirds or the Indio Firebirds, they're repping the WHOLE Coachella Valley!! one of their taglines is 'One Valley. One Team. Rising Together' and it's so cheesy but I'm so into it this is our team lets gooooo

BIRD MASCOT

whenever two teams are competing but I don't officially support either side, my order of operations for picking a team to root for are 1) loved one's team, 2) bird mascot, 3) cat mascot, 4) green logo, 5) how do I feel about the state/city playing. the Firebirds hit BOTH of my first two categories in one!

FIREBIRD MASCOT it's such a good marrying of the hot desert climate with the ice hockey sport (given the Firebird comes from Slavic folklore)! they do a lot of 'fire and ice' imagery in promo material, and the team we're competing with this week ALSO have fire in their imagery/official colors, so when we play them we wear 'ice blue' and there's blue flames on the scoreboard. our branding team is so good

(I recently started working for a company that's based in Rochester, New York, and their AHL team is the Rochester Americans. you can see how bad team names/mascots can be in this league lmao)

our team is actually good! we got a lot of investment money so we managed to get lots of players with NHL experience, some really good coaches I think, and we're second overall in our division! I don't know enough about how hockey works to know WHY we're doing so well but I'm proud of our boys!! 😭

the only two games I've been to have been against the first overall in our division, the Calgary Wranglers, who are ALSO a new team this year and they're ALSO very good (clearly). the thing that really stands out to me from both those games is how clean and precise the Wranglers play. they're so coordinated! i hate them! compared to them, we're so sloppy, all over the place, fumbling passes and leaving our goalie to do all the work protecting the goal

(our goalie is very good obv we love him, but he shouldn't have to be doing so much work! our boys need to pull it together!)

generally I feel like our boys don't coordinate well (and they're also not as fast) so I joke that they all think they're the main character in the inspirational sports movie that is our first season. but also. could they please stop fumbling passes i swear

on Monday night we played our third game in this series against the Wranglers and it went into triple overtime, they played until midnight, before we finally landed another goal and won the game 3:2!

Wednesday, the game I went to, the Wranglers landed a goal halfway through second period, and we lost 0:1. it was so close!! we defended well but also so did our opponents!

that ties this series of games at 2 wins for the Firebirds, 2 wins for the Wranglers, with the final tiebreaker game TONIGHT. if we win, we go on to represent our entire division up against another division to play for the Calder Cup. if we lose, our season is over and the Wranglers move up. obviously we've got to win; it's a home game and everything! i'm SO stressed about this!

#cv firebirds #coachella valley firebirds #hockey

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sparkleplatypuswriter · 1 year ago

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Ok now that my squee has calmed down, and I got verified — some thoughts.

The rest of the world (and quite frankly, the average Torontonian) really does not understand how utterly limiting it is to the Canadian public for artists to play a handful of shows in only Toronto.

Canadian geography is epic. We’re 1.6 percent larger in land mass than the U.S. with a tenth of its population strewn about. We do not have the means for affordable or sustainable transportation throughout our country (or rather, politicians do not prioritize this). There is a failing rail system that takes over a week to traverse the country at quadruple the price of flying. And our bus service? That died a few years back.

So that leaves flights.

Flying in Canada is brutally expensive and mostly unattainable for any working class (or hell at this point, middle class) person or family.

I grew up on the West Coast of Canada, and I never flew within Canada. My family could not afford it. We only ever visited our neighbouring province a handful of times. That drive was nearly 20 (!) hours, and the town we visited was on the border of the neighbouring province (that is, the closest you could get to my home province while still being in another province). Going to Toronto may as well have been the equivalent of going to the moon. As I got older, I went to Asia twice at a fraction of the price it would have cost to go to Toronto. Why? Canada doesn’t have the population to sustain cheap flights within our own country EVEN WITH a heavily government subsidized airline.

On top of all this, flights are long. Toronto is a five hour flight from Vancouver *if* you have no layovers. It can be upwards of 10-12 hours otherwise. Factor in the time difference of going that far west to east and you lose an entire day or more.

Now, I’m not saying Taylor (or other artists in her range) should play every provincial and territorial capital (but oh it would be great if they did!). But at the very least, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver definitely have the demand and infrastructure for stadium shows (all are former Olympic host cities — you know who is not? TORONTO). Even then, there are so many folks who are too far from even those places, but it would be a (humble) start.

I know this is a post about Taylor Swift but it really does come down to concepts much bigger than this including the accessibility of art (which lets be real the Eras tour isn’t financially accessible anyways), urban-rural divides, Western alienation, and a sense of identity we cannot have as a country when a “Canadian” leg of a tour is considered a handful of dates in Toronto (but hey, don’t get me started on the problematic concept of national identity in a colonial country on unceded Indigenous territory — or do, but that will be unpacked in another post).

YoU cAn JuSt Go To A bOrDeR cItY sHoW iN tHe U.S. — Sorry no. Our dollar is much lower than the American dollar. Tickets with the exchange rate would be more horrendous than they already are AND not everyone feels comfortable visiting the the U.S. right now.

*end rant*

#the eras tour #canada #taylor swift #more dates please #canadian swiftie #don’t get me wrong #I still desperately want to go

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megbox · 2 years ago

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2022 Year In Review

Previous Posts: (2021)(2020)(2019)(2018)(2017)(2016)(2015)(2014)(2013)(2012)(2011)

As I sit here to write this, I am devoid of any profound takeaways or overarching themes to assign to 2022. It's not that nothing happened. On all accounts, it was actually an incredibly eventful year. But in some ways, it feels like all the same stuff. I continue to fall for the wrong people and act out when they behave exactly how one might predict them to. I continue to love running. I continue to advance in my career. I guess the new things about 2022 are that I have had to reckon with some serious changes to my lifestyle due to underlying health conditions that I have only recently become aware of, and I took on the additional challenge of starting graduate school. However, both of these things ultimately push me to be a better person. Particularly graduate school has been the kind of wake up call my brain needed. I can complain all I want about being busy but the reality is that I fucking love it. I love learning statistics and getting a 94% on my assignment and contributing in class discussions and reading articles and actually having takes on them because I'm a real deal professional. It's been good for my ego, if anything else.

And so I present once more: the annual year in review.

January

Sigh. Until I sat down to write this, I completely forgot that I had an entire boyfriend at the beginning of 2022. When I find myself lamenting about the lack of romance in my life, quickly remembering Bryan always does the trick to snap me back into reality. On paper, it should have worked out. Bryan was (is) a great guy, he cared about me and went out of his way to demonstrate that to me. He liked to run. He brought me flowers on Valentine’s Day and once drove two hours out of his way from Canmore to Calgary and back just to drop me off before he went ski touring. We spent a week together in his family’s absurdly beautiful Canmore condo, quarantining after Maddy woke up on January 1 with a positive COVID test after we’d been sharing drinks all night, watching Netflix documentaries about climbing, going in the hot tub, ordering ramen and having a ton of sex.

Dating him felt like dunking my face in ice water. It felt like finally seeing a movie that everyone else has been talking about for years and all the little references in other movies make sense in your brain. It was like… you can ask for that from a boyfriend? And as much as I enjoyed the way he liked me, my stupid brain could not figure out a way to reciprocate those feelings. My friends told me to wait it out, they reminded me that I tend to choose the wrong people and that maybe a slow burn is exactly what I needed. They were totally right. And so I resolved to wait, to give things an earnest chance to develop. But they didn’t. I realized I needed to break up with him when Maddy and I were driving back from Edmonton after a weekend visit with our then-boyfriends. As Maddy gushed about how great of a weekend she had and how she couldn’t wait to see Audla again, I stared at my reflection in the car window, nodding along but feeling a sense of dread creep over me as I reconciled with the fact that I was definitely going to have to break up with the nicest guy I had ever dated.

Hm, January was relatively uneventful. I did a lot of very cold winter running, and Wordle took over my life and the lives of my loved ones.

February

A spin studio opened up approximately one minute away from my apartment in Mission with an unlimited first month deal for $39, so I recall February as the month I became a spin class bitch. February was bitterly cold, and I was still working from home at the time with no other gym membership so it came at a good time. I do love spin class. I went almost every single day, sometimes twice a day. I like the electronic remixes of every song, I like the choreography, I like staring at myself in the mirror on the bike thinking “yes, bitch! Get it!”

I broke up with Bryan. On Valentine’s Day, actually. It was kind of strange. He was in Canmore for a bachelor party the weekend before, and had planned to spend the evening of Valentine’s Day with me because a) girlfriend and b) prevent driving 4 hours from Banff to Edmonton after bachelor party. So even though we had “broken up”, I said he was welcome to still stay here. He definitely thought he was getting laid. I guess you can’t blame him, but… he was not. That was the last day I saw him. We keep each other on social media and toss each other a Strava kudos here and there and that is just fine by me. He has a new girlfriend now who appreciates all of the wonderful things he does the way he deserves.

Ironically, both of these things led to the almost-immediate resurgence of a past lover. Like a karmic message from the universe – here was someone who I never questioned my attraction to. But I’d given up on it when I met Bryan. He lived only a few blocks away from me, and works as a paramedic out of a nearby hospital. As if on cue, he emerged one morning on 4 Street, walking past me in his North Face coat and black Vans. We locked eyes for a split second as I left spin class at 6:50am. Extreme restraint was exercised in not turning around to watch him after I realized who it was. I laughed at the coincidence, smirked, sent a few “Omg guess who I just saw?” text messages and forgot about it. He messaged me a photo he’d taken on our first date with no context a week later.

The Olympics were also on in February and I delighted in spending a lot of time watching snowboarding, skiing, and figure skating while I ate soup dumplings. The Olympics even inspired me to take my own cross country skiing lesson through Active Living at the University. Frankly, a bold move because I signed up all by myself and drove out to Kananaskis and tried a new thing which is highly uncharacteristic. I vividly remember thinking my car was going to run out of gas, and mentally preparing for how I was going to deal with that on Highway 40 with no cell service, I was counting down the kilometres when as if by fate a gas station appeared on the side of the road. I could have cried. I would’ve been so screwed.

March

From March 4-6, I completed the Goggins 4x4x48 challenge. I attempted it last year and failed, and so I was determined this year to do things right. To increase accountability, even though it pained me to do this publicly, I did it as a fundraiser for CommunityWise. I would say that the first ~4 rounds were fun. Lucas stayed over and ran with me outdoors for the midnight and 4:00am runs. There is something so deliciously unhinged about running four miles at 4:00am through the streets of Rideau Park, blasting ABBA. Lucas was also the person waiting for me at the very end of the challenge almost two days later, with a package of macarons and a smile. I feel this experience cemented Lucas and I as really close friends. My quads were aching so hard I could barely walk, I was so sleep deprived that by night two I was in the worst mood and just snapping at everybody, but miraculously we got it done. 77km in 48 hours, and I raised over $1,000 for CommunityWise. I took the Monday off of work but oddly, didn’t even need it. Will I be braving the Goggins challenge again? No. Well… never say never. But also, never.

I also facilitated my first ASIST workshop in March. By a lot of standards, this is an unremarkable thing. But for me, I have a lot of pride in being certified to facilitate ASIST because I feel like it is such a representation of my professional development as a social worker. Two days, eight hours of facilitation per day and it’s not easy. But having jumped through the hoops to become trained, and really just being trusted to teach people these skills and walk them through these difficult conversations. It is one of the most tangible ways in my job I get to actually help my community and have an impact and it feels good. Selfishly, the feedback I receive after every ASIST feels so validating and I’m very proud of myself for having this skill and being an ASIST trainer.

Paramedic Man (also known as, The Short King) and I hung out a few days after I’d finished the Goggins challenge. I remember it was International Women’s Day, and he’d playfully roast me and I’d say, “you can’t say that on International Women’s Day.” I went to the fancy liquor store in Mission and told the salesperson I had a first date, he recommended some wine and said it will for sure get you laid. He was right. I settled into the familiar anxiety of an unpredictable, bread crumb-y situationship. I didn’t think about Bryan at all.

April

I made an unhinged decision (shocker) and accepted an offer from a different previous lover (look, if you take one thing away from this Year in Review, let it me that I am a slut) to come visit him in Squamish over my birthday weekend. I want to be explicitly clear that accepting this offer was not sketchy. Emma and I had met him on our trip the previous summer and he was a perfect gentleman. Carbon restructuring engineer with a penchant for cocktails who took us to a secret cidery. I was legitimately excited but that trip turned out to be the biggest flop of all time. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such rampant alcoholism up close like that. I don’t know if I didn’t notice it back in August or if things had taken a decline since last summer. The first night was actually good. He picked me up, having just “come from work” he said, and we had a few drinks at the condo he shared with his roommates and their dates, and then we went to a beautiful concert at the Brackendale Art Gallery. We split a bottle of wine and he showered me in compliments and I was like hell yeah, this is what I came here for. The next morning, he was… incapacitated. Literally. He was rocked by such a forceful hangover that there’s simply no way the only alcohol he consumed was that wine. He was literally tremoring! He had promised me a hike to a secret sauna that only the locals knew about. When we finally managed to get him out of bed around 2:00pm, we set out to find the sauna, he forgot where it was and then called it quits. We went for sushi lunch and he ordered a glass of chardonnay and then said he couldn’t stomach anything else. We got back to his place around 4:30pm and he put Rush Hour 2 on Netflix and promptly fell asleep. His roommates had begun their nightly ritual of drinking immediately upon getting home from work so I went down to join them, leaving him in bed. They drank, and drank, and drank. I was so desperate to get the fuck out of there. He was supposed to drive me into Vancouver the next morning to catch my flight but his roommates were going to Whistler to go snowboarding. At one point, clearly having realized I was having the worst time of my life, he asked if I’d be okay with it if he bought me a bus ticket and dropped me off. I was overjoyed. I went to bed and he did not return until 4:00am. My bus was at 6:00am. He was absolutely still drunk when he dropped me off at the bus. I waited until I was within city limits, blocked him on Instagram and have never spoken to him again. Lesson learned. However – the funniest thing to come out of that whole experience was that I was in such shock at the disarray of this man’s life since August that I was constantly updating my friends and I just put everyone in a group chat. At one point I sent a photo of his couch and kitchen counter to illustrate my point and the roasts that came out of that… honestly, maybe worth it.

April was also a special time because I received my acceptance to the Master of Public Health program at the University of Alberta. Just a few days before my birthday! I had kind of forgotten about that application, to be honest, and at that point had no idea how I was going to arrange it with work or pay for it or any of those details. But I can’t deny that receiving that email made my day. It felt good to have a plan, a next step. And you can’t deny that an MPH holds a lot more weight than a BSW or a fricking journalism degree.

May

Okay, May was actually a very important month of this year. So many of the major things that unfolded over the year can be linked back to origins in May.

Of particular note, the Pet Rabbit Debacle. Paramedic Man knew just how to activate my anxious attachment style and kept making plans with me only to cancel at the last minute. I got mad at him for this and he promised to make it up to me. He came over but was clearly distracted by something on his phone. He kept apologizing, and though I didn’t ask any questions he offered the excuse: “My friend’s pet rabbit ate something potentially poisonous and she’s just freaking out.” I said to him, “if you need to go, you can go” but he declined. At one point, I asked what the rabbit’s name was. “Scully,” he said. “Like, from X Files?” “Yeah, exactly.” I was annoyed. It sounded like the worst possible excuse you could ever use to get out of a date but then he didn’t even have the courage to actually leave. I resolved to stop putting in any effort with him. In the coming days, the Instagram algorithm gave me a precious gift. It’s a tale as old as time, really. He posted something on Instagram, a comment from a girl I recognized as his ex-girlfriend, I visited her page, she posted a photo of a pet rabbit, the rabbit has an account of its own, the rabbit’s name is Scully. The puzzle clicked together in my head. Part of me was like, okay, so the rabbit is real. The other part is like, but… it’s his ex’s rabbit. Now this is where the meddling begins. I noticed she had a mutual follower with a friend of mine from the Famoso days. I texted him, “how do you know her?” Innocently. He said, “she’s my manager at X bar, why?” I asked him, “do you know if she has a boyfriend?” “Yeah, insert Paramedic Man’s name here. Why?” Oops.

I also signed up for (was recruited for, actually) the Kananaskis 100 Mile Relay. Which was really the impetus I needed to get running more seriously in advance of Sinister 7 after having a very lazy spring.

I presented at a conference on May 14, on my Peer Listening program and how to embed peer support into larger networks of formal support. Other post-secondary staff workers attended from all over Alberta. Another check mark for professional development and social worker pride.

On May 16, I donated blood for the first time! This was perhaps the most crucial moment of my entire year, and in a domino effect kind of way, truly changed the course of my life forever and no, I am not kidding. The actual first donation was very uneventful. I walked to the blood clinic, focused on a grey spot on the wall while they took my blood and tried not to faint, downed a Sprite and some Cheetos and went on with my life. Because I am a data nerd, I downloaded the GiveBlood app. A few days later, my “stats” appeared in my account. Hemoglobin. Bleed time.

I spent the May long weekend in Meota, Saskatchewan with Ali, her mom, her stepdad, and his dad, Maurice. We referred to it as her “bachelor party.” It was the kind of perfect weekend that you can only have with someone you love and trust so dearly. I felt like a little kid again, returning to the lakes of Saskatchewan. We went fishing and although I caught a fish both times, I screamed whenever it came near me. Ali and I filmed TikTok dances on the deck late at night. We watched a hockey game and explored the tiny town of Meota with its beautiful golf courses. We went “jeeping” – a Saskatchewan pastime I had not yet experienced but instantly loved until we went to explore a creek and instantly got covered in ticks. If I get Lyme disease, it’s from that creek, for sure.

June

June meant a lot of running. It was like the running equivalent of staying up until 4am the night before a big exam trying to cram knowledge into your brain. Emma’s team from BLG for the Kananaskis 100-Mile Relay had asked me to run a leg, and we had Sinister 7 coming up in the first weekend of July. I had really slacked off in the spring, so I was forced to reconcile this by committing myself to 5-6 weeks (an abysmal amount of time for this calibre of race, unfortunately) of dedicated training. Knowing what I know now about my health at this time of the year, it makes sense why it did not really work. But I appreciated past-me’s hustle.

The actual day of the K-100 was one of my favourite experiences of the year. I asked the team captain, Jared, if I could ride with him in the crew car. We spent like, sixteen hours together in that car. Jared and I had known of one another for a long time through Emma and through the larger running community in Calgary but that day was the first time we had actually had the chance to meet. I have perhaps never hit it off with someone so quickly. Someone else whose idea of an amazing day is to run 100 miles of Highway 40 with your friends in the summer. My leg went… okay. I took off SO fast, way too fast, and then the rest of my leg was uphill so I did a lot of walk/jogging. It’s actually so sad that this race came at this point in the year. I am capable of so much MORE. But hopefully at some point in the future I am offered an opportunity to redeem myself.

But the absolute best part of June and also one of the best parts of this whole year was that Ali and Cody got married! I had the honour of being a bridesmaid and it was such an incredible day. The bridal party got to Ali’s early and in typical Ceaser fashion there was an absolute SPREAD of every conceivable breakfast and brunch item your heart could ever desire. We got hair and makeup done, drank a lot of mimosas, listened to a lot of romantic pop music, shared a lot of tears. When the torrential downpour started 90 minutes before the ceremony, everyone bit their tongues. Riding to Reader Rock Garden with Matt and another one of the bridesmaids as the rain hit the windshield so fast the wipers could barely keep up, and the cab driver cringed and said, “you said you guys are going to an outdoor wedding?” And it was silent. But in the most beautiful stroke of luck, the sun broke through the clouds like five minutes before the ceremony and Reader Rock Garden was absolutely glistening with fresh raindrops falling off of every radiantly green leaf and flower and my fake eyelashes. I sobbed… absolutely SOBBED when Ali walked down the aisle and through most of that ceremony. Ali is my first friend to get married which somehow just makes sense. But to see it all come together just did something special to my heart. It helps that she married the best guy in the entire world who I also love dearly. Watching something like that happen just makes all of the tears you cried together about much shittier dudes feel irrelevant, barely a blip on the universe of life.

July

So, so much happened in July. It earns bullet points:

I participated in my very first Sinister 7! Sinister 7 was such a fucking trip. It felt like being on the amazing race. Seven Kings Popping Off did exactly what we said we were going to do and absolutely popped off, finishing third (but then were bumped up to second because the second place team was all dudes and were incorrectly registered... #men) for the mixed relay teams. 161km and thousands of meters of elevation gain over seven runners. I contributed objectively the least to this win. If I am being honest, runningwise I did not have the most fun at Sinister 7. I performed poorly, injured myself, and was basically just like the personality hire of the team. Again, I know I am capable of so much more and I look forward to one day being able to show that. But the actual experience of being at the race was incredible. The camaraderie between our team, meeting Elspeth who ran a 50-miler and then hit the Cowboys tent at Stampede the next night, having Reid come out and stay with us and absolutely CRUSH his leg. I felt delirious by the end of it, trudging back into the Airbnb at 3:00am, my drunkness long dissolved.

THEN we visited Eugene for World Athletics Championships. God, there's so much I could write but my focus and patience in crafting this year in review is waning. Highlights: MEETING CRAIG ENGELS AT THE NIKE STORE. Seeing the Canadian men's 4x100m team upset the Americans in the final. Lovely's Fifty Fifty.

And then I topped off my wonderful trip away with a return to Big Valley Jamboree. Inspired by my wonderful friends. Lots of magic mushrooms were consumed. "Chef's Table." The death of Matt's Van. Tim McGraw. Love. Friendship. Margaritas.

August

I decided to focus on heart-rate based training after being in Oregon (and Sinister 7) and seeing all of these effortless distance runners in Alton Baker Park. Again, knowing what I know now about my health, it makes sense that this did not really work. But I have to admit the heart rate training did recalibrate my approach to running. It did amazing things for my stress levels, my mileage was extremely high. While it may not have helped my heart rate come down, there is absolutely merit to integrating phases of heart rate based training in the future and that was valuable learning.

I started school! And what a start it was. A two week, intensive, eight-hours-a-day block week course in which they simulated a flood and gave us harsh deadlines and made us work in teams of twelve. This experience was rendered even more stressful by the fact that what had started out in such a wholesome, lovely way with Jared had now lapsed into long response times. Or just no responses at all. I was simultaneously frustrated with his behaviour and frustrated at myself for letting yet another boy get in the way of being able to apply myself to my work, to my program, and to my own wellbeing. A simple, “hey, we should hang out soon J” text message to somebody who has been pursuing you left unanswered for an entire week. I hate who I become when this happens to me. Checking my phone incessantly. Then muting the notifications anyway because then maybe it’ll spontaneously be there. But it’s not there, ever. The response I was so desperately craving came a week later when I was at Globalfest with Connor. I don’t think we should pursue this. I don’t want to compromise the friend group or our running group. Cue eyeroll. Like, just tell me her name already. I say that now but admittedly, I was pretty devastated.

Another great part about August was that we played in a slow pitch tournament in Okotoks. This was the birth of our new team: Hawaii 5-Slo. Which is the product of a divorce from our previous team, We’d Hit That, where the competitive assholes among us split from the let’s-just-drink-beer-who-cares. I don’t think I need to clarify which team I ended up on. The tournament was actually crazy because it was torrentially bad weather. At one point, we ended up in the Blackfly tent being plied with free 7% bottled margaritas as we watched our paltry tents across the field get whipped by the wind. We played a few games, did poorly, attempted to wait it out and ultimately bailed to spend the night at Megan Kemper’s place in Okotoks which was ABSOLUTELY the right move. We ordered pizza, I took a shower, slept in a real bed. The best part of this tournament was that the team who defeated us in the second morning approached me after the game and asked if I would consider playing with them for the finals because they needed an extra girl. I said yes, went to finals, WON! and made a whole bunch of new friends. I even drove from that game into the city to play another game with them for their CSSC league that night, and continued to sub for them through the fall season.

September

This is where the story of this year becomes much more concerned with my health. In early September, I went for a second blood donation. During the pre-test, they measured my hemoglobin as is standard practice and the nurse noted to me that mine was quite low. No cause for concern, he said, but maybe check it out with your doctor. When my stats showed up in the GiveBlood app (because of course I check my stats), I noted that my hemoglobin was like, really low. Low enough that if it was any lower they would not have taken my blood that day. So I called and got an appointment with my family doctor. She waved it off but said she’d do a blood test just to check. I left the office requisition in hand and promptly stuck it to the side of my fridge on a magnet where it stayed for many many weeks.

The rest of September is a bit of a blur, to be honest. This is where I began the delicate juggling act of full time work, school, running, and just generally living my life.

October

So many things happened in October!

On October 1, I moved to Bridgeland into a really nice little two bedroom apartment with Maddy. Let me tell you, people, Bridgeland is where it’s AT. I had been sleeping on this neighbourhood but it’s easily become my favourite place I have ever lived. I brought all my furniture and Maddy brought all her knick-knacks and plants and our apartment is so fucking cute. My extroverted self also definitely appreciates having a friend and a roommate around. Some people might view moving in with a roommate after living on your own as like, a step backward. But after that lonely pandemic – why would I not take a nicer place, cheaper rent, and company? Please. Definitely one of the best choices I made this year.

I also ran in the Grizzly Ultra! I ran on a team with Rob, and Emma ran her first 50k ultra as a soloist. It was an incredibly beautiful day out in Canmore, like could not ask for a better day. I ran way better than I thought I could! And Rob and I managed to come third for the mixed teams (we really should have come second if I had hustled a little harder at the end). Emma did so well in her solo race and then we went back to the hotel room and drank beers and watched Forrest Gump on the hotel television.

Taylor Swift released Midnights on October 22. I went to a listening party at Carly’s and enjoyed every millisecond of it but especially how excited Carly was.

I played in a snow pitch tournament which, in typical CSSC slow pitch tournament fashion, was a mess. They even had it earlier this year to lessen the chances of this happening but there was SO MUCH SNOW. And it was thick, wet snow. The ball would basically immediately stop wherever it landed on the pitch. It made for an interesting day, that’s for sure. But we managed to win the tournament. And I slept with my teammate after. So, that actually makes me 2 for 2 in getting laid after snow pitch tournaments. And all is right with the world.

I woke up on the morning of October 29 to not one but two late night messages! One of which was from Jared. It’s like clockwork. Give it two, maybe three months and you wake up to a message like the one I got. You would think I would learn. But of course, I never do.

November

In November, I finally got around to getting my blood test and was confirmed to be suffering from severe anemia iron deficiency. This made sense. Symptoms began to piece together a story explained from the viewpoint of anemia. That mid-afternoon tiredness I thought I was curing with a “adrenal cocktail”? The unreasonably high heart rate and lack of progress despite months and months of dedicated training? The coldness and numbness? The frequent headaches? The change I felt when I started on iron pills was incredible.

I also registered for the Saskatchewan Marathon in November, which was scary and exciting at the same time. Me, former racer of the 100m and 200m dash, taking on the 42,200m.

More happened with Jared and I in November but I honestly… don’t want to talk about it. And this is literally my blog so I can write whatever the fuck I want. Let’s just leave it at: he wasn’t very kind. I wish it had never happened.

December

So, here is where the life altering news comes in. In the absence of any glaring cause for anemia, it is standard practice to screen for celiac disease. This is because people with undiagnosed celiac disease often have damage to their intestines that is causing the malabsorption of nutrients. My doctor explained this to me and requested that I have another blood test done. I was so certain that I was not celiac that I did not think anything of getting this test done.

But on December 6, 2022 in my office on My Health Records – I was shocked to see that my level of antibodies were literally off the charts. They were so high they were at a level unmeasurable to the test. I texted my brother. “That’s positive for celiac.”

On December 7, 2022 a call from my doctor’s office. “You’re sure it can’t be anything else?” I asked, desperate. “This is pretty much what we would call a slam dunk, from a diagnostic perspective,” she told me. What ensued was a 72-hour mental breakdown that rivals any heartbreak or trauma I’ve been through before. I don’t know how to explain it. I could. not. stop. crying. Could not stop thinking about everything I can’t do. Everything I can’t eat. Everything I can’t participate in. I had to take like, 10 melatonins just to sleep at night. I cried every time someone said something to me at work. I hid in my office and forced myself to eat Lara bars. But I also just didn’t eat for three days because food suddenly seemed scary, and like the enemy. If I am to be completely honest, I think a large part of this emotional reaction to the diagnosis was also sadness at thinking about my poor body. It may not have felt sick but it was really sick. And I knew something was wrong. Would I have guessed this? No. But I think about all of the work I put this body through and how much I cherish what it does for me and allows me to do. And the fact that I have been really sick. For maybe a really long time. Made me sad. So it was grieving but in a way, also relief. With diagnosis comes labels. It comes restrictions. It comes lifestyle changes. But it also comes answers, explanations, cures. Celiac disease is the only auto immune disease for which there is a full cure. Just don’t eat gluten and your intestines heal and life goes on.

Another piece of life altering news that I got actually a few hours post-celiac diagnosis was that I got a huge promotion and a $12,000 raise at my job. This promotion and raise is absolutely deserved. I work really fucking hard and have been really underpaid at this job for a long time. But given that I’m in a union, it took a lot of advocating for myself and proving my worth to my team in order to be in this position. We are NOT in Kansas anymore. This is serious, real deals social work and I am extremely proud of myself for working my way up to this level in just three years.

2023

In 2023, I look forward to taking control of my health and seeing what a gluten free life does for my mind and body and spirit and intestines. I am already seeing huge progress in my running and I can’t wait to build on it and just… be healthy.

I have SO many good concert tickets in 2023. Death Cab for Cutie (twice), Alvvays, Andy Shauf, Blink 182, Taylor fricking Swift, The Postal Service. Lots of music related travel. A tentative trip to Palm Springs for Stagecoach at the end of April. So much to look forward to.

I also am excited to dedicate myself to marathon training and see what I can do on May 28in Saskatoon!

#personal #megbox #year in review #2022

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raccoon-robyn · 6 months ago

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I'm gonna add some more explanations of our slang that I can think of! And all of these are coming from an autistic person who lives in a small town in the middle of nowhere, so take it with a grain of salt unless you want your character to come from southern Alberta (aka, basically Canadian Texas where the biggest event of the year is a giant rodeo in Calgary)

Double double: a coffee with two sugar and two cream packets. Usually from tim Hortons since they're probably within a 5km drive anywhere you go in a city

Yeah no: means "no, I don't wanna do that." Can come across as rude depending on your tone

Yeah no yeah: means "yes, I heard you, I agree" and it can be used in most contexts

Yeah yeah yeah: usually a derogatory "no" and (in my experience) used to slightly be grumpy with someone's nagging or if they're being a jerk

No yeah no: also a "yes" but can used in a consoling manner or trying to reassure someone of something. Like saying, "Yeah, I totally get it, that really sucked" or "yeah, I'll get this done for you, don't worry!"

"Sneakers" or "runners": they refer to the type of shoe you would wear to gym class or a sports event that doesn't require cleats or other types of specialty shoes (dance shoes, bowling shoes, etc.). I think they can be called tennis shoes in some parts of the world.

"Quad" or "four by four": image below

I can't think of anything else, so other Canadian people should add to this!

Dammit, people, if you’re going to write a Canadian character, you can’t just throw “eh” in wherever. It’s not a verbal tic - it has a very specific semantic role.

In brief, “eh” does one of two things:

Turn an imperative into a request. e.g., “Pass me that wrench, eh?”

Turn a statement into a question. e.g., “Cold out there, eh?”

In the latter case, there are several situations where it’s commonly used:

The speaker is not sure that the statement she’s just made is correct, and is asking the listener to confirm. e.g., “That’s about forty kilometers West of here, eh?”

The speaker is checking that the listener is still interested and wishes for her to continue, but does not expect any specific response. e.g., “So then this freakin’ moose shows up, eh?”

The speaker is being sarcastic. e.g., “You really thought that one through, eh?”

When used in this way, “eh” is roughly equivalent to appending “isn’t it?” (“doesn’t it?”, “didn’t you?”, etc.) to the end of a sentence; interestingly, it also functions very much like the Japanese “ne”, which has a nearly identical effect when appended to a statement.

Now you know.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months ago

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Precaratize bosses

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SUNDAY (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Combine Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them" with the truism that in politics, "every accusation is a confession" and you get: "Every time someone accuses you of a vice, they're showing you who they are and you should believe them."

Let's talk about some of those accusations. Remember the moral panic over the CARES Act covid stimulus checks? Hyperventilating mouthpieces for the ruling class were on every cable network, complaining that "no one wants to work anymore." The barely-submerged subtext was their belief that the only reason people show up for work is that they're afraid of losing everything – their homes, their kids, the groceries in their fridge.

This isn't a new development. Back when Clinton destroyed welfare, his justification was that "handouts" make workers lazy. The way to goad workers off their sofas (and the welfare rolls) and into jobs was to instill fear in them:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/welfare-childhood/555119/

This is also the firm belief of tech bosses: for them, mass tech layoffs are great news, because they terrorize the workers you don't fire, so that they'll be "extremely hardcore" and put in as many extra hours as the company demands, without even requiring any extra pay in return:

https://fortune.com/2022/10/06/elon-musk-jason-calacanis-return-to-office-gentlemens-layoffs-twitter/

Now, there's an obvious answer to the problem of no one taking a job at the wage being offered: just increase the offer. Capitalists claim to understand this. Uber will tell you that surge pricing "incentivizes drivers" to take to the streets by offering them more money to drive during busy times:

https://www.uber.com/blog/austin/providing-rides-when-they-are-most-needed/

(Note that while Uber once handed the lion's share of surge price premiums to drivers, these days, Uber just keeps the money, because they've entered the enshittification stage where drivers are so scared of being blacklisted that Uber can push them around instead of dangling carrots.)

(Also note that this logic completely fails when it comes to other businesses, like Wendy's, who briefly promised surge-priced hamburgers during busy times, but without even the pretense that the surge premium would be used to pay additional workers to rush to the restaurant and increase the capacity:)

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/feb/27/wendys-dynamic-surge-pricing

So bosses knew how to address their worker shortage: higher wages. You know: supply and demand. For bosses, the issue wasn't supply, it was price. A worker who earns $10/hour but makes the company $20 profit every hour is splitting the surplus 50:50 with their employer. The employer has overheads (rent on the shop, inventory, advertising and administration) that they have to pay out of their end of that surplus. But workers also have overheads: commuting costs, child-care, a professional wardrobe, and other expenses the worker incurs just so they can make money for their boss.

There's no iron law of economics that says the worker/boss split should be 50/50. Depending on the bargaining power of workers and their bosses, that split can move around a lot. Think of McDonald's and Walmart workers who work for wildly profitable corporate empires, but are so badly paid that they have to rely on food stamps. The split there is more like 10/90, in the boss's favor.

The pandemic changed the bargaining power. Sure, workers got a small cushion from stimulus checks, but they also benefited from changes in the fundamentals of the labor market. For example, millions of boomers just noped out of their jobs, forever, unwilling to risk catching a fatal illness and furious to realize that their bosses viewed that as an acceptable risk.

Bosses' willingness to risk their workers' lives backfired in another way: killing hundreds of thousands of workers and permanently disabling millions more. Combine the boomer exodus with the workers who sickened or died, and there's just fewer workers to go around, and so now those workers enjoy more bargaining power. They can demand a better split: say, 75/25, in their favor.

Remember the 2015 American Airlines strike, where pilots and flight attendants got a raise? The eminently guillotineable Citibank analyst Kevin Crissey declared: "This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers":

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/american-airlines-flight-attendants-bash-citi-analyst-who-put-shareholders-before-workers-14134309

Now, obviously, the corporation doesn't want to offer a greater share of its surplus to its workforce, but it certainly can do so. The more it pays its workers, the less profitable it will be, but that's capitalism, right? Corporations try to become as profitable as they can be, but they can't just decree that their workers must work for whatever pay they want to offer (that's serfdom).

Companies also don't get to dictate that we must buy their goods at whatever price they set (the would be a planned economy, not a market economy). There's no law that says that when the cost of making something goes up, its price should go up, too. A business that spends $10 to make a widget you pay $15 for has a $5 margin to play with. If the business's costs go up to $11, they can still charge $15 and take $1 less in profits. Or they can raise the price to $15.50 and split the difference.

But when businesses don't face competition, they can make you eat their increased costs. Take Verizon. They made $79b in profit last year, and also just imposed a $4/month service charge on their mobile customers due to "rising operational costs":

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/1c53c4p/79bn_in_profits_last_year_but_you_need_an_extra/

Now, Verizon is very possibly lying about these rising costs. Excuseflation is rampant and rising, as one CEO told his investors, when the news is full of inflation-talk, "it’s an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

But even stipulating that Verizon is telling the truth about these "rising costs," why should we eat those costs? There's $79b worth of surplus between Verizon's operating costs and its gross revenue. Why not take it out of Verizon's bottom line?

For 40 years, neoliberal economists have emphasized our role as "consumers" (as though consumers weren't also workers!). This let them play us off against one-another: "Sure, you don't want the person who rings up your groceries to get evicted because they can't pay their rent, but do you care about it enough to pay an extra nickel for these eggs?"

But again, there's no obvious reason why you should pay that extra nickel. If you have the buying power to hold prices down, and workers have the labor power to keep wages up, then the business has to absorb that nickel. We can have a world where workers can pay their rent and you can afford your groceries.

So how do we get bosses to agree to take less so we can have more? They've told us how: for bosses, the thing that motivates workers to show up for shitty jobs is fear – fear of losing their homes, fear of going hungry.

When your boss says, "If you don't want to do this job for minimum wage, there's someone else who will," they're telling you that the way to get a raise out of them is to engineer things so that you can say, "If you don't want to pay me a living wage for this job, there's someone else who will."

Their accusation – that you only give someone else a fair shake when you're afraid of losing out – is a confession: to get them to give you a fair shake, we have to make them afraid. They're showing us who they are, and we should believe them.

In her Daily Show appearance, FTC chair Lina Khan quipped that monopolies are too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Philosophers of capitalism are forever praising its ability to transform greed into public benefit. As Adam Smith put it, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The desire to make as much money as possible, on its own, doesn't produce our dinner, but when the butcher, the brewer and the baker are afraid that you will take your labor or your wallet elsewhere, they pay more and charge less.

Capitalists don't want market economies, where they have to compete with one another, eroding their margins and profits – they want a planned economy, like Amazon, where Party Secretary Bezos and his commissars tell merchants what they can sell and tell us what we must pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Capitalists don't want free labor, where they have to compete with rival capitalists to bid on their workers' labor – they want noncompetes, bondage fees, and "training repayment agreement provisions" (TRAPs) that force their workers to stay in dead-end jobs rather than shopping for a better wage:

\https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Capitalists hate capitalism, because capitalism only works if the capitalists are in a constant state of terror inspired by the knowledge that tomorrow, someone smarter could come along and open a better business, poaching their customers and workers, and putting the capitalist on the breadline.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

Being in a constant precarious state makes people lose their minds, and capitalists know it. That's why they work so hard to precaratize the rest of us, saddling us with health debt, education debt, housing debt, stagnating wages and rising prices. It's not just because that makes them more money in the short term from our interest payments and penalties. It's because it de-risks their lives: monopolies and cartels can pass on any extra costs to consumers, who'll eat shit and take it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#overinflated

A workforce that goes to bed every night worrying about making the rent is a workforce that put in unpaid overtime and thank you for it.

Capitalists hate capitalism. You know who didn't hate capitalism? Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels. The first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is just these two guys totally geeking out about how much cool stuff we get when capitalists are afraid and therefore productive:

https://pluralistic.net/SpectreHaunting

But when capitalists escape their fears, the alchemical reaction that converts greed to prosperity fizzles, leaving nothing behind but greed and its handmaiden, enshittification. Google search is in the toilet, getting worse every year, but rather than taking reduced margins and spending more fighting spam, the company did a $80b stock-buyback and fired 12,000 skilled technologists, rather than using that 80 bil to pay their wages for the next twenty-seven years:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Monopoly apologists like to argue that monopolists can rake in the giant profits necessary to fund big, ambitious projects the produce better products at lower prices and make us all better off. But even if monopolists can spend their monopoly windfalls on big, ambitious projects, they don't. Why would they?

If you're Google, you can either spend tens of billions on R&D to keep up with spam and SEO scumbags, or you can spend less money buying the default search spot on every platform, so no one ever tries another search engine and switches:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Compared to its monopoly earnings, the tech sector's R&D spending is infinitesimal:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor-glom-of-nit/#capitalists-hate-competition

How do we get capitalists to work harder to make their workers and customers better off? Capitalists tell us how, every day. We need to make them afraid.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

Image: Vlad Lazarenko (modified) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_Street_Sign_%281-9%29.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #petard #precarity #cares act #stimulus #market discipline #competition #too big to care #antitrust #labor #trustbusting #consumer welfare #every accusation is a confession

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captmacsglen · 9 days ago

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Sailing Lessons Calgary: A Comprehensive Guide to Getting Started

For many, the thrill of navigating open waters by harnessing the power of the wind is a dream. While Calgary may be landlocked, it’s home to beautiful reservoirs and lakes that make for an exciting sailing environment. Whether you're a complete beginner or looking to refine your skills, Sailing Lessons Calgary can turn that dream into reality. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about finding the right Sailing Lessons Calgary, what to expect, and how to prepare for an unforgettable experience on the water.

Why Choose Sailing Lessons Calgary?

While Calgary may not have access to ocean waters, it boasts several lakes and reservoirs ideal for sailing. Lessons here offer a unique experience, blending the charm of the prairies with the thrill of sailing. From Glenmore Reservoir to Ghost Lake, Calgary offers a variety of locations for sailing that can give you a solid foundation in the sport.

Where Can You Take Sailing Lessons Calgary?

There are a few key spots in Calgary that provide professional sailing lessons. Here are the primary options:

Capt Macs

Situated at the Glenmore Reservoir, the Capt Macs is one of the most popular places for Sailing Lessons Calgary. They offer a range of courses for all ages and skill levels, from beginner to advanced. The school also provides group classes and private lessons.

Calgary Yacht Club

Located at Chestermere Lake, just a short drive from Calgary, the Calgary Yacht Club offers comprehensive sailing programs. They’re known for their well-structured courses and highly experienced instructors, perfect for those looking to get serious about sailing.

Ghost Lake Sailing Club

Another excellent option is the Ghost Lake Sailing Club, which offers classes and private lessons. Ghost Lake’s stunning backdrop makes it an ideal spot to learn, especially for those who enjoy a scenic sail.

Types of Sailing Lessons Available

Whether you're just getting your feet wet or you're an experienced sailor looking to polish your skills, Calgary’s sailing schools offer courses for every level. Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

Introductory Courses

These classes are designed for complete beginners. You'll learn the basics, including essential sailing terminology, knot tying, boat handling, and understanding wind directions. Introductory courses often start on smaller boats that are easier to maneuver.

Intermediate Lessons

For those who have some sailing experience, intermediate lessons build on your knowledge. These courses teach skills like tacking, jibing, and basic navigation, preparing you for more advanced sailing environments.

Advanced Courses

Advanced courses are ideal for seasoned sailors who want to deepen their knowledge and take on challenging conditions. You'll focus on advanced maneuvers, navigation, and handling larger vessels, perfect for those interested in racing or longer excursions.

Youth Programs

Most sailing schools offer specialized programs for children and teenagers, combining fun activities with basic sailing skills. These programs aim to foster a love for sailing early on, often culminating in fun races or events.

Private Lessons

Many facilities in Calgary offer private sailing lessons. These are a great option if you’re looking for personalized instruction or want to accelerate your learning curve with one-on-one coaching.

What to Expect from Your First Lesson

Starting your first sailing lesson can be exciting and a bit overwhelming. Here’s what to keep in mind:

Safety Training: Before you step on a boat, your instructor will cover basic safety protocols. You’ll learn about life jackets, emergency signals, and general water safety.

Sailing Terminology: To navigate effectively, you’ll need to learn basic sailing terms like “port,” “starboard,” “tack,” and “jibe.” These terms will help you understand instructions more easily.

Hands-On Experience: Most beginner lessons involve a lot of hands-on learning. Expect to spend time practicing with knots, steering the boat, and adjusting the sails.

Understanding Wind and Water Conditions: Your instructor will explain how to “read” the wind and water conditions, which is essential for safe sailing. You’ll learn how different wind directions impact your boat’s movement and how to adapt accordingly.

Preparing for Your Sailing Lessons

If you're gearing up for your first sailing lesson, here are a few tips to help you get ready:

Dress Appropriately: Wear clothes you don’t mind getting wet, as there’s a high chance you’ll get splashed! Opt for lightweight, breathable layers, and consider bringing a waterproof jacket.

Sunscreen and Sunglasses: Out on the water, the sun’s reflection can be intense. Protect your skin with sunscreen and wear polarized sunglasses to shield your eyes.

Footwear: Choose non-slip, closed-toe shoes. Boat decks can get slippery, so sturdy footwear is a must.

Bring Water and Snacks: Staying hydrated is key, especially on warm days. Bring a bottle of water and some snacks to keep your energy levels up.

Benefits of Taking Sailing Lessons

Learning to sail is more than just mastering a sport—it’s a life-enriching experience. Here are some of the benefits of taking sailing lessons:

Enhanced Confidence: Sailing requires focus, quick decision-making, and resilience. As you improve, you’ll gain a tremendous sense of accomplishment and self-confidence.

Physical Fitness: Sailing is a full-body workout that strengthens core muscles, improves balance, and builds endurance.

Mental Wellness: Being on the water has a calming effect, making sailing a great way to relieve stress and clear your mind.

Community: Calgary’s sailing community is welcoming and passionate. By joining classes or clubs, you’ll connect with other sailing enthusiasts, forming friendships that extend beyond the water.

Finding the Right Instructor

The quality of your instructor can make a big difference in your sailing experience. Look for instructors who are certified and have plenty of experience. The best instructors combine technical knowledge with a friendly teaching style, making learning enjoyable and engaging. Ask for recommendations, read reviews, and don’t hesitate to ask your prospective instructor about their sailing background.

Sailing Events and Community in Calgary

Calgary has a vibrant sailing community with events throughout the season. The Calgary Yacht Club and Capt Macs frequently organize races, social events, and regattas, creating opportunities for new sailors to engage with others and experience the thrill of competition. Participating in these events can be an excellent way to apply your skills and learn from more experienced sailors.

Conclusion

Sailing Courses Calgary provide a unique, rewarding experience for individuals of all ages and skill levels. With its scenic lakes and dedicated sailing schools, Calgary offers everything needed to learn the art of sailing, even in a landlocked area. Whether you're a complete novice or looking to improve your skills, taking Sailing Lessons Calgary can open up a world of adventure, new friends, and unforgettable experiences on the water. Get started today and let Calgary's waters be the gateway to your sailing journey!

#Sailing Lessons Calgary #sailing courses calgary

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