🏃♂️ Pool is closed today, so swapped in a long run
Finished reading: Orbital by Samantha Harvey is enthralling. Nothing much happens and yet so much about humanity, science, and our place in the universe is explored 📚
Finished reading: At the Trough: The Rise and Fall of Canada’s Corporate Welfare Bums by Laurent Carbonneau is a timely read, given Canada’s challenges 📚
🔗 The leader in your mirror by Paul Wells
We put too much burden on our leaders, and it makes them act silly. They shouldn’t be the perfect weapon of our vengeance, or the model of every virtue we admire but never quite get around to practicing. They don’t need to know everything. They can’t possibly get everything right on the first try, and we court trouble when we ask them to pretend they’ve managed the trick.
Riverdale Collegiate Institute. 📍
🏊♂️ Night swim
Finished reading: The Dog Sitter Detective Takes the Lead by Antony Johnston is a delightful murder mystery. Quite the cleanse after reading The Mercy of Gods 📚
Lights On by Annaka Harris is a fascinating “audio documentary” exploring the idea that consciousness is a fundamental building block of the universe, rather than emerging from complexity. Like Harris herself, I find the idea almost too wild and I’m not yet convinced. That said, the topic is fascinating and the documentary is really well done
Just posted on Six Colors: What to watch if you’re churning through Apple TV+
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/04/what-to-watch-if-youre-churning-through-apple-tv/
A good list from Jason Snell. And, agreed that Bad Monkey was much better than expected.
Finished reading: The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey is a really promising (though often bleak) start to a new sci-fi series about humans (presumably) overcoming an alien invasion 📚
I’m late to this, but glad to see Milo Beckman is back with the video series on Math Without Numbers
Currently reading: Taking a break from a seven-book streak of non-fiction to read The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey 📚
🚴 After watching the dog slip and slide on the ice in the backyard, decided to swap today’s scheduled run for a Zwift ride
Finished reading: The Future of Us by Jay Ingram is a broad overview of how science and technology is affecting all parts of our lives from food, to transportation, and to health. I’ve read deeper books on the individual topics. This one provides the overview 📚
📖 The latest Sutherland Quarterly book has arrived: At the Trough: The Rise and Rise of Canada’s Corporate Welfare Bums by Laurent Carbonneau. Likely going to be a provocative and frustrating look at government policy
🎶 The Rush 50 release is delightfully epic and much more than a greatest hits collection. Fun to hear their really early stuff again and to revisit later songs that didn’t get enough attention.
🏃♂️ Tried a new route on today’s run
That Severance Season 2 finale is 🔥
🇨🇦 Boosting our productivity and protecting our sovereignty
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Canada is clearly at an inflection point. We neither asked for nor wanted this, but ignoring it and carrying on isn’t a solution. So, what should we do? I’m in favour of a big rethink, via a Royal Commission. Given how long this would take, though, we need to get going on at least investigating options.
Here, then, is my list. Note that I’m absolutely not an expert and I’d get voted out of office immediately if I ever managed to become a politician. So, I provide these in the spirit of contributing to a national conversation. No doubt there are better ideas out there. Let’s pick some and start trying stuff!
- Eliminating inter-provincial barriers to trade is the obvious one and evidently could be done within a month. Simultaneously frustrating and emblematic that something debated for decades could actually make significant progress so quickly, once we got motivated.
- While we’re eliminating inter-provincial trade barriers, why not really embrace free trade, including the elimination of supply management?
- Actually prioritizing our sovereignty in the Arctic. Our most recent defence policy statement hints at this, but we continue to expect our armed forces to do too much with too little. The recent announcement of working with Australia to upgrade our Arctic radar equipment is a good example of something we need more of. Underpinning all of this is figuring out how to actually procure equipment. Plus anything we do in the Arctic must properly engage with First Nations.
- The US is inexplicably destroying its preeminence in health science research. We should be actively courting American scientists to relocate to Canada. Our focus should be on epidemiology and public health.
- Raise the HST by 1%, offset by income tax reductions, and dedicate the funds to cities. This one would get me booted out of government quickly. That said, Canadian cities remain under-resourced, relative to the services they need to provide. They need a source of revenue that grows with the economy.
- The CRA should prepopulate our tax returns. They already have most of the information. Just fill them in and allow us to adjust if necessary. Of course, this would require simplifying our tax system, which is the real point.
- Switch to proportional representation already
Finished reading: Matthew Scace tells the harrowing tale of a major forest fire in Jasper on Fire 📚
📚 Finished reading: The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger is a fascinating book about how sophisticated and under appreciated plants are: they can detect relatives, “see” their surroundings, manipulate their environment, and make complex decisions.
Near the end, Schlanger writes:
Now when I spot a tendril that is making its way through a crack in the sidewalk, I internally commend it for its resourcefulness. I feel I know about some of what it took for the plant to do that-the small miracle of its germination, the craning of its elongation, the articulation of the hundreds, maybe thousands of fine root hairs, right now probing its belowground world for sustenance. I think about the stem cells in each of its growing tips, poised and ready to become whatever sort of flesh the plant needs them to be. The whole being a sensitive, decisioning network spread throughout hundreds of limbs, thousands of roots. A body in motion, adapting in real time to every subtle shift, flowing like water through its surroundings and taking note of the shape and smell and texture of it all.