Monthly Archives: April 2025

Shorter Work Weeks

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I loved having a 4 day weekend. It is long enough to make me question the 5 day work week. Who came up with that? And why do we still have them?

I don’t need regular 4 day weekends, but I’d love regular 3 day weekends, then add one more day on holidays.

Who else is ready to reexamine the work week? And while we are at it, I’m pretty sure student’s wouldn’t mind that schedule either. Maybe on average students wouldn’t miss as much school, and just as much work would get done.

It won’t happen before my career is over, but I hope that a 4 day maximum work week is something my kids get to enjoy.

Vote or Hush

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I wanted to title this, “Vote or Shut Up!” But since that seemed a bit crass, I thought I’d let my inner Bajan shine through with, “Hush your mouth,” but that would not translate as well as it does in my head… and is still not accurate in enunciation, so ‘Vote or Hush’ will have to do.

No matter how clear, crass, or complex I might say it, the message is simple:

If you don’t vote, you should lose the right to comment later.

You chose note to complete your civic duty. You didn’t participate in your democratic right. You decided not to be part of the decision of who represents you in a free and open society.

“But my one vote doesn’t matter.”

Wrong!

Over 10 million eligible voters did not vote in the last Canadian federal election… more than 1/3 of the eligible voters chose not to do their duty and cast a vote. Do you realize how influential it would be for ALL of those people to vote in the next election?

And so, if you are one of those people, I say, “Vote or hush-ya-mout”. You could have ‘had your say’ and chose not to… that negates your right to have a say later.

Vote or zip it.

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Ps. My bias this election: Unapologetically Political – It’s time to Smart Vote

Even the greatest waterfall

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Even the greatest waterfall begins with a single drop. I can see the droplets connecting, I can see the water beginning to build momentum. It may just be a few streams now, but they are all moving in the same direction. They are collecting into a powerful river, a powerful force. They are heading to a precipice, and they will lead to a great fall.

Go to any social media site and search the hashtag #protest. Or search 50501. Small protests of 30-300 in tiny towns, and larger rallies in the thousands and even tens of thousands in large metropolitan cities.

This isn’t a trickle anymore. This isn’t a small isolated stream of fed up people. This is a strong current going through a nation. People using their right to peaceful assembly to say they’ve had enough.

Let’s hope the peacefulness remains while the water keeps flowing, building in volume and momentum. I’m filled with optimism and hope, while simultaneously concerned about turbulence and dangerous undercurrents. Waterfalls can be beautiful, but they can also be forceful and dangerous. In a perfect world, this will be one of the most epic waterfalls, both powerful and beautiful.

In a perfect world…

Unapologetically Political – It’s time to Smart Vote

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I haven’t voted yet but my oldest daughter sent us a photo of her walk to her nearest polling station today. My youngest daughter lives at home and will either vote early or vote with my wife and I when we go. They have been going to the polls since they were in strollers. They checked boxes for us before they were old enough to vote themselves. And both of them have voted in every election since coming of age.

I don’t know who they have and will vote for, but I know who they won’t vote for. They did not, will not, vote for the Progressive Conservatives. Not because their parents told them not to, but because they agree with us that the principles of the party do not align with the free and open democracy we want to live in.

I am unapologetic for my influence on this.

The global conservative wave, literally at our doorstep, is not creating a political environment I’m comfortable with. Pierre Poilievre does not share social or political values that I have. I believe he will undermine Canada’s multicultural and socially progressive values and he will weaken our country.

I cannot stay silent. Decades of non-partisan promoting of voting as a civic duty are over. I’m not just saying ‘Go Vote’, I’m asking anyone who reads this to Smart Vote. Go to the polls, find your riding, and choose the party most likely to beat the Conservative Party in your riding.

The only party likely to beat the Conservatives in this election is the Liberal Party. I would love to see them win a majority because this is not the time for a weak minority government. However, if you are in a riding where the NDP is more likely than the Liberal candidate to beat the Conservative candidate, then vote NDP. Same for a Green Party candidate. Smart Voting.

I see some of the non-democratic decisions being made south of our border and they scare me. Pierre Poilievre is a populist, slogan peddling, empty-promises spouting lifetime politician who has done almost nothing to better Canada. He rode the right wing wave to the south and only started backpedaling when he realized that this was going to potentially cost him the election. Unprincipled, shallow, and weak. Not what our country needs right now.

I’m not planning on sitting silent and then wondering why our country voted the way they did. I can’t. I won’t.

Don’t just vote this election, Smart Vote.

Free will or no free will tug of war

Consciousness and Free Will

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I just finished listening Annaka Harris’ audio documentary, ‘Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe’. I’ve also listened to her and moreso her husband, Sam Harris, talk about Free Will – or rather that we lack free will. On these concepts I consider this couple two of the brightest minds. They have researched these topics far more than me and their depth of knowledge and understanding far surpasses mine. I look to them for anything they share on these subjects and admire the scope of what they know and understand on the topics. And yet I disagree a fair bit with their conclusions.

I’m not going to detail my thinking completely here. Rather I’m going to do a bit of a mind dump and hopefully expand on my thoughts later. I just feel that these two topics belong together and I often think of how they are connected. I’ll also share some links to the things I’ve already written on the topics. 

1. I don’t think consciousness is fundamental.

I think it is emergent. Consciousness is on a spectrum, but life is an essential necessity before consciousness. If life must come first, consciousness is not fundamental. So a rock does not have consciousness, but the simplest amoeba does. Every living thing has some level of consciousness. However, there is a minimal basic consciousness related to ‘the lights being turned on’. We can argue about where this point is, and while I favour the idea of self-awareness being the ‘lights on’ moment, I think even the idea of what it means to be self-aware is debatable and that a human definition automatically biases greater intelligence than I think is required for an organism to be self-aware. 

2. Consciousness comes from an excess of processing time.

“…life requires consciousness, and it starts with the desire to reproduce. From there, consciousness coincidentally builds with an organism’s complexity and boredom, or idle processing time, when brains do not have to worry about basic survival. Our consciousness is created by the number of connections in our brains, and the amount of freedom we have to think beyond our basic survival.” And from the link in #1, above, “It’s sort of like the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid must be met, (psychological and safety) AND there then needs to be extra, unnecessary processing time, idle time that the processor then uses for what I’m calling desires… interests beyond basic needs.”

3. In this way, free will starts early. The early decision-making might be as simple as moving towards more nutritious food, but somewhere in the development of brains choices move more towards desires… choosing to move towards something we like/desire, not just something better for the organism. The fact that we do not just operate in a way that best serves survival to me is one of the strongest arguments for free will. Free will is ubiquitous in nature. Animals show higher order consciousness and make choices that show value for other life and do not make sense in a universe without free will.  

4. Free will is on a bell curve.

Our hardware and software are imperfect, and our beliefs, our morals, our desires, our wants and wishes are all fed through imperfect systems influenced by outside sources. As a simple example, we know that being hungry can affect our disposition as well as our decision-making. These ‘outside’ influences can be very strong and can keep us low on the free will bell curve, while other choices we make might be a lot freer on the free will bell curve. Hardware issues like our gut biome or a tumour as examples can limit our free will, as can software issues like the brainwashing of beliefs or the societies we live in, which can and do reduce our free will. But as significant as these influences can be, they do not negate free will. 

5. We truly don’t understand consciousness and free will because of our inability to understand the unconscious mind. However, this hardware issue gives us hints. 

 I’ll start by saying we do ourselves a disservice when we separate our conscious and unconscious minds. This is a hardware issue that gets in our way and our software does not have a way around it. The argument that we can ask a person a question while they have sensors on their brain and we can figure out what their answer is before they consciously do is a poor argument that we don’t have choice or that we don’t have free will… Even if our conscious mind makes up after-the-fact reasons for the decision. The reality is that we are of one mind, and our conscious mind not knowing what our unconscious mind knows at the same time is not the separation we think it is. It’s simply that we have poor hardware that makes us think these are two separate minds.

Glimpses of the unconscious, for example with the use of psychedelic drugs, show us extremely metaphoric imagery and not a doorway to logical processes. This might not seem to be a good argument, but I think it’s better than thinking of us as having two minds, the unconscious with no free will and the conscious with just an illusion of free will. If consciousness is built from idle processing time, the idea that organisms start to make any choices at all that veer away from survival inherently suggests that there is choice and so there is free will. 

All this said, and despite thinking we have free will, I really don’t think it’s all that free. I think our basic survival needs, the desire for sustenance, the desire to procreate, the desire to protect our family, the desire for community and attention, these all limit the freeness of our free will. Then there is also the limits of our hardware and software, the influences of other organisms on our bodies… these all flatten the curve of free will to the point that we spend most of our lives not really having much choice… But limited choice and highly influenced choice is still not no choice, and so there is free will even if it’s not completely free. 

Fruits of labour

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I started my current health & fitness routines in January, 2019. Six plus years later I can really see and feel the results. But if I go back 2 or 3 years, I’d have said that progress felt slow. It was.

Slow, and steady, and other than when I herniated a disc and was in pain for several months (unrelated to my working out), always in the right direction. In other words for almost the full 6 years I’ve seen steady progress. Now at 57, I’m the strongest I’ve ever been. My cardio was better in my 20’s when I was training in the gruelling sport of water polo, but even now my cardio is quite good.

My point is that too often we look for the fast results and the quick fixes. Seldom do we accept that healthy progress is built on good habits over long periods of time. The quest for instant results is unrealistic, and often results in inconsistent outcomes or fluctuations between improvements and losses of gains.

Good habits, consistency, and a willingness to keep going even when the results aren’t immediately obvious are whet leads to long term progress. In the end the real progress, the real fruits of your labour, are the lifestyle changes that keep you feeling young and healthy. You are on a marathon not a sprint. Work on your habits and routines and the results will come over time.

New era

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What’s happening now might be the biggest change in global politics that has ever happened outside of weapons of war being used. The shift in finance, the collapse of friendly trade, the forming of new trade alliances, and the political and economic alliances that are currently in the works could not have happened in the last 100 years without missiles or guns being fired.

Yet here we are. Empires fall. New superpowers emerge.

The question now is, can this happen while remaining a political and economic battle, and not one that requires force, might, death, and destruction?

I hope so. I want to believe so.

Ever since I read ‘The World is Flat’ about 20 years ago, I could see that the path forward was going to be about economic strength being based on countries focussing on their competitive advantages. I could see that protectionist policies, tariffs, and isolation would be the demise of even the greatest economies. And that the future powerhouses would be those that have natural resources that the entire world would need.

We are approaching a new era, and the countries that will prosper are the ones who recognize their strengths and are ready to negotiate the way they share those strengths with the rest of the world. Let’s hope we can have peace to go along with our prosperity. The looming question is, can we enter this new era without violence? Can we be a civilized race? Or are we just warring monkeys who happen to wear clothing and buy expensive accessories?

Reflections of China

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Living in China for two years, from 2009-2011, I was surprised by how market-driven the economy was. I was surprised by the brightness of the cities at night. And I was surprised by the focus on growth and development.

The running joke was that the national bird of China was the building crane. I remember being downtown in Dalian, a ‘small city of 6 million’, (as the city was described to me), the first time I heard this national bird joke. From where I stood, looking to the sky I counted 11 building cranes. The construction of new buildings seemed to be everywhere. The Superintendent of schools that I worked with lived in a very nice neighbourhood near the ocean. Her high rise apartment building had less than 25% occupancy, and yet there were 6 or 7 other high rises being built near her building.

And everywhere you turned downtown, there were shops, underground markets, and in the narrow side streets pop-up markets with items on sale. Go to the fancy mall and buy a $3,000 original name brand bag, or go to the underground markets and get a similar in quality knockoff for $200, or go to the pop-up market and get a similar but much cheaper, lower quality bag for $25.

I should note that when I say ‘underground markets’ I am not speaking metaphorically. I’m talking about entire shopping malls under the city. Floors of sub-terrain buildings under the buildings. These underground markets are often the only place you can find grocery stores. First floor stores are too real estate rich for a grocery store, so these are always one floor down.

Public transit was cheap and efficient. Restaurants were affordable too. Starbucks cost as much or more than here in Canada, but in China you always have to pay well for Western comforts and amenities. The desire for status is as strong there as anywhere in the world.

When I was hired it was by the outgoing superintendent, who had the job for 17 years. I remember him sharing a story with me on my first visit the June before moving there. We were being driven from the city to the suburb of Jinshitan where the big high school was located. We were driving through Kaifaqu, and he told me, “When I started here 17 years ago the road here was a pothole filled dirt road through a tiny village, and now it’s a city of 1 million people.” Imagine moving from a village to a high rise filled city in 17 years. I would not have believed it was possible anywhere else, but having lived there I know it’s possible in China.

Until recently, most people didn’t have a sense of the scale and the development of China. But in recent weeks there has been a flood of information on social media that has made it possible for people to see what life in China is like. And the reality is that while there is poverty there, it’s probably much worse in North America. While the middle class is different, the economic reality for a middle class in China is probably better than the debt-ridden middle class in the west. And the infrastructure and cost of transportation is incredibly less in China than almost anywhere else in the world, with faster and more efficient travel.

Add to this the most sophisticated electronics and manufacturing industry anywhere in the world and China is an international powerhouse that will shock most people who have illusions of China being a developing country. I can say that even 15 years ago it was farther ahead than people imagined, and in China 15 years of advancement is equivalent to 50 in most other countries. It will be the dominant economic force in the world if it isn’t already.

Coaching brain

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I haven’t been a coach in a long time, but I still feel like my brain wants to go there.

Our hot water tank died this weekend and it’s being replaced tomorrow. But today I decided to go to the local community center for a workout, swim, hot tub, and then shower and shave so I didn’t have to have a freezing shower at home.

My gym workout was probably a total of 45 minutes. There were a couple really fit people in there doing hard workouts. There were also a lot of guys in their late teens or early 20’s working out. They weren’t doing anything wrong or dangerous, but I found myself wanting to coach them.

“You are swinging your body and cheating, using momentum rather than your muscle, lower the weight and go for better technique.”

“Your elbows are flaring out, keep them tucked in.”

“That weight is too light, you’re doing sets of 12 and it looks like you can do 20. Maybe try a bit heavier weight.”

This was my first time in this gym, and of course I didn’t say anything. And the reality is that I might have been doing something where someone else could have given me feedback to improve… I’m in no way an expert. But I really felt like helping out. I just didn’t know how it would be taken, and I’m the newbie that just showed up for the first time.

I guess once a coach, always a coach. Sometimes I just feel the urge to help out, and it’s hard not to.

How gullible are we?

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“… it is entirely possible that future generations will look back, from the vantage point of a more sophisticated theory, and wonder how we could have been so gullible.”

— Closing sentence of Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J. Griffiths.

I came across this quote today and it made me wonder just how gullible we are as a species? Not just because we don’t understand quantum mechanics, not just because we don’t understand the gap between Newtonian Physics and Special Relativity, but for so many more simple and less profound reasons.

We fight over imaginary lines we call borders. We spend a considerable amount of our existence working for money… pieces of paper that only have value because we believe it has value, while our governments (we also make up silly rules for) print that money in mass volumes to keep our economies afloat.

We break into tribes based on heritage, relative strength, socioeconomics, and even skin colour. And we spend a tremendous amount of the global economy to create weapons to protect ourselves and also threaten ‘those who are not like us’.

We fight over false Gods. Why do I say false Gods? Because there are literally thousands of them, and even the largest, Christianity, doesn’t agree with who gets into heaven. So the vast majority of believers are believers in the wrong religion or wrong sect. Yet hate, discrimination, and wars are all byproducts of people of faith fighting people of different faiths, very often ‘in the name of their God’.

Human beings are playing the game of life with imaginary boundaries, imaginary political structures, imaginary currencies, and imaginary Gods. We are gullible. We are blinded by unimportant things, and in 100 years humankind will look upon us like we were as backwards as we perceive cultures and societies that did barbaric and stupid things 100’s of years ago.