progressdeveloper

Thinking about the considerable travel plans we have coming up, we decided to give rover.com a try. It's a web site/app that aims match people who want to earn extra money walking dogs, with people who have dogs needing walking. (It has occurred to me how many business - I guess, in a way, ALL businesses - exist to match up those willing to do something with those who need that thing done).  Anyway, Rover hooked us up with Robin, who seems great. Our idea is to have her take Stelly once a week until we leave for Australia, and, daily in our absence. First rover walk went well. I wondered how rover keeps people from using them to establish contact and then pay outside the app to avoid their service fee. It turns out Robin a staunch advocate of rover. Rover does things like uses a Strava-like GPS reading to produce maps of the walk, eg. to prove that the walk really happened. Good idea.

I was listening to American History Hit's explanation of the 2nd amendment (the gun one), and it was quite interesting. I basically love AHH. According to AHH, its huge importance, the fact that everyone is always talking about it, the fact that it is the one amendment that almost everyone knows about (there are 27 total), is relatively new; it was ratified in 1791, but for most of the intervening years, wasn't particularly discussed. I knew there was some debate about the actual intention of the writers of the amendment, and I knew that there was a concept of "originalists": present-day jurists (eg SCOTUS judges) who believe in interpreting the Constitution according to (what they perceive as) the original intent of its writers. I knew that the exact meaning of "militia" is part of this debate; did they really intend for every Tom Dick and Harry to be carrying guns around Walmart to, in theory, defend themselves against a) other citizens b) their own govern...

Really enjoying S3 of The Diplomat - the more I see that show, the more I like it. It seems Hal is on his way out of the story, which makes me sad, but the important thing is that the unspeakably hot Keri Russell is still front and centre. I am tempted (I won't) to start watching it from the beginning because I think I missed some bits of the first two seasons.

  Easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Not quite up there with Mission to Mars, Interstellar, Ad Astra, and Congo - but in the next category down. I could go on, but I won't. It's rankly amateurish and awful in script, acting, casting, music, and camera angles. And boring. 'nuff said. If you had the misfortune to see it - what, in your opinion, was this train wreck trying to say? Was it pro-liberal or Trumpy? I think it was neither. I think it was trying to say something like - even with good intentions, the world is complicated, and even liberal people with the best of liberal credentials sometimes do bad things. The internet seems to mostly agree. I like this review from The Guardian: " It is worryingly muddled and contrived, perhaps in need of further script drafts to excavate a clearer and more satisfying drama inside...  they are all doing their considerable best, each frankly hampered by the unfocused and uncertain characterisation in the material its...

I have been watching what is happening with the Richmond-Cowichan-First Nations decision and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that this is wrong on almost every level and will end badly for everyone concerned. The only level on which it is not wrong is that, yes, terrible things happened, terrible situations still exist, and we need to do something about both of those things. But not this. Among other things, if we continue on this track, we will end up with a Donald Trump-style government.

It's been a while since I have been down the power engineering rabbit hole, but today, I went for it; with the goal of improving my understanding of what, exactly, RMR means. It turns out that it's meaning is subtly different in Canada than USA (or at least, in BC). Here goes. It's super cool! --- RMR stands for 'Reliability Must Run', and broadly speaking, it refers to a situation where an older generation unit must be kept in service despite no longer being economic. Utilities often choose to have RMR's because of local reliability constraints. Broadly speaking, nobody ever wants to have a single point of failure, so, not only must the system not have enough capacity, every element must be (at least) duplicated. If removing a no longer economic unit would compromise that redundancy, and therefore reliability, then, an RMR is required. The word "local" here is key. Absent this constraint, BC Hydro could buy all the power it needs, even if it were to l...

I was making my blood donor appointment (I really like doing this, it makes me feel like a better person haha) and chanced on these stats *which are from the US*. The implication seems to me that a huge # of people doing it once and then never go back. Things are of course very different in USA in that there, it is legal and normal to pay donors (or, perhaps I should say, vendors/suppliers) for their blood.  In Canada, it is also legal to pay for blood - but it's not legal to pay the donor. That is to say, a significant % of our blood supply is purchased from the USA. So we do pay donors, but only indirectly, and they are by definition not Canadian. This seems to me like a fairly clear case of something that, despite the obvious risks (that could, presumably, be managed), and despite seeming a bit disagreeable, should 100% be completely legal here. Donating blood has made me almost indifferent to needles, which is a good thing. Canadian Blood Services is supremely well run, in my o...

I am so hyped up on marathons these days that I'm registered for the next 2, in YVR and Victoria. In Canada, many major cities have marathons, but they are almost all in the same months as YVR and Victoria. Running two marathons in the same month sounds like a worthy challenge, but one I am not quite prepared to face just yet. The US has several marathons per month in various states, and it would be super fun to have a reason to parachute into, say, Omaha or Des Moines, but, I consider US travel still more or less forbidden, which makes me so sad, and honestly, I am not sure this situation will change anytime soon. My guess is we have a Trumpian, if not Trump, government for at least another 2 terms. If you are willing to do anything, you can achieve an awful lot. Meanwhile I am in "rest mode", hoping to recover my right knee, and down to 5km a day for a bit. I feel like 10km is the more ideal distance for me, but at the moment, I am holding it back. Instead, I am experim...

This week's Money Talks consisted of interviews with 2 of the 3 nobel laureates in Economics. The gist of their achievement was some work explaining the question of why and how the industrial revolution sparked such as a massive increase in productivity. The answer seems sort of self-evident, but the argument is that humans had seen many many advances over the centuries, the printing press being one relatively trivial example, and none of them sparked the kind of sustained increase in standard of living that started with the IR (more or less). Their answer is that the IR coincided with an explosion in the willingness of our species to share information, in many ways - for example, industrial competition is a form of information-sharing, along with more obvious systems such as the way academics generally publish for the benefit of all. They prattled on quite a bit about the importance of "schumpeterianism", which is the idea of "creative destruction", where compe...

  We went to see "Eleanor the Great". Based on the trailers, I really wanted to see it - I was fooled. It was, as the Russians say, "not terrible not great". I did not care for the lead (pictured) and I thought the message was a bit confused. Is it about the holocaust? Power of long term relationships? Grief? Old people? Fathers and daughters? All of the above? It did not feel quite right. But it did, more or less, hold my interest ... 6/10, barely recommend. Director was Scarlett Johansson, who, fun fact, is married to Colin Jost of ultra-not-PC jokes on SNL fame.

Oh, I found my splits on the RVM web site! They are suspect because Strava shows a total per km time of 5:56, and, I am pretty confident Strava is correct (the distance is more accurate than the RVM distance, WEIRD, and, the total time is only 1:46 different. Oh well. Anyway, the gratifying thing is: this steadily descending speed per km is exactly the opposite of what happened in the YVR marathon and exactly what I was hoping for.

Near the beginning, with Ben, in the crowd, BC parliament visible in the background. Near the end, on the waterfront (Dallas Road, I think). The field has thinned considerably. A few K to go. Note the bib#: coincidentally the street address of the house I grew up in in Dunbar. Third marathon completed successfully! As usual, I was super-nervous and did all the little superstitous as well as practical things. Eat a lot the night before. Have near-new runners. Tape up the nipples (TMI?) in case of rain (there was a fair amount). Above all: never, ever, ever wear the event swag (in this case, a really nice jacket - the YVR one was a kinda ugly and cheap-feeling T shirt) during the race. As Sam said, imagine if you went down and the paramedics had to cut your marathon t-shirt off you before you finished. They would probably just leave you in the gutter in disgust! This race felt much, much different from YVR because I ran the first 10 with Ben. The RVM is quite different in that the full (...

It's the eve of marathon #3, the RVM. I will be running the first 1/4 with Ben (for whom it will be the first 1/2). Forecast is not great. I have to remember to tape up my nips! As always, I am fairly nervous, but I had a super full day with DaveE and SteveB, which kept my mind off it. I don't want to jinx anything by writing much more. As always, I'll be happy just to finish! More after!

Another day, another first face-to-face meeting with someone from Latin America that I have been talking to for years. This was their first trip to YVR - here for four days, ostensibly to see a concert. Federico is from Buenos Aires and is married to Carolina, also from BA. They moved to Calgary a couple of years ago and, while "who can say", it seems they are probably here permanently. He is an engineer, currently working on oil projects, and she is an architect, working on home renovation projects. They are both quite a bit more positive on Canada than my Chile friend. We talked a LOT and, being old, I can't remember a lot of the details, but one thing that stands out: While mostly positive on the Canadian immigration process, some resentment for the strong preference shown to anyone who speaks French and/or (ideally and) is a refugee vs an economic migrant (like them). It's easy to fake refugee status eg. by claiming to be gay (hard to prove) from a country where t...

  10/10 cannot recommend highly enough! Hilarious from the opening shot; not a flat moment throughout; loved the ending. When I saw Andy Samberg was in it, I knew it would be good, and it was!!! A comedy, whereas the previous version "The War of the Roses" was, I am pretty sure, a drama and, if I remember right, a pretty mean-spirited one. Key to how much I loved this movie was that the titular couple were British living in USA, and all their friends were USA.

In my vague quest to read everything written by Idrees Kahloon, I read this Harvard article from 2018: Harvard Idrees Kahloon Austerity tl,dr: an influential expert asserts that austerity is relatively useful when it means spending cuts, and relatively destructive when it means tax increases. "A reduction in spending on the order of 1% of GDP is associated with a loss in GDP of less than 0.5 percent; a  tax increase  of similar magnitude tends to decrease GDP by 3 percent." However: "The repeated estimates put forth by economists vary widely enough to allow individuals to continue believing what they wish."

I am not overly fussed about this kind of thing but I noticed that my home internet speed, as reported by speedtest, varies hugely - and, more importantly, is never more than about 200mbps. (Downloading. Uploading, it's about 1/4 of that, but that is fair enough ... I guess? It's a well known face, and reasonable, that the internet is optimized for downloads, on the assumption that most people consume much more than they produce. Hey, this is also arguably true of the entire western economy, not just internet content! But I digress...) My "Popular" plan with Rogers/Shaw advertises 500mbps, more than double measured reality. I wonder what kind of wiggle room they have, and, if these claims are ever properly audited. In any case, Rogers/Shaw has become quite-flaky since their merger - not sure if it is fair to blame that, but it is what it is. By "flaky" I mean: internet goes offline 3-5 times per day for about a minute. It always comes back. But it's anno...

As I may have mentioned, I restarted my dormant Atlantic subscription, solely because one of my most admired podcasters, Idrees Kahloon, defected from The Economist to The Atlantic. (I have no idea, but my guess is that he did so because his wife, who just gave birth, is also an Economist podcaster - also one of my favorites, her name is Alice Fulwood and she is by far the most "fun" Economist employee that I know of, which is perhaps a low bar). If you are interested, here is an article Idrees wrote a while back for the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/are-americans-more-trusting-than-they-seem I am also catching up, sort of, on a pile (8-10) of Atlantics from my last subscription that I didn't read entirely. I have to say, reading The Atlantic is just so pleasant. It's like a nice walk on the beach on a sunny day, pure happiness, vs. The Economist can be more like the daily 10k - good for you, no doubt, but enjoyed more in retrospect than du...

There is an actual Big Ass Lake. It's in Nova Scotia, about 60km NE of Halifax.