Also, been there, done that:

A few years ago, I worked at a very small software vendor. We provided one software application for insurance claims. It was not complex and used nothing at all unusual. A web server and working DNS is all it took to get it going.

Nevertheless, I was often off the books tasked with fixing entire large company’s networking environments, DNS, Active Directory, virtualization environments and Citrix to make our small application work. And I know most of you who read this are not in IT, so this would be like having a plumber come around to fix a faucet and then have them do your interior decorating, tutor your kids on algebra, replace your alternator in your Buick, and also re-do your landscaping. It’s insane.

I did all this so our application could have an environment that worked well enough to allow it to function. Absolutely none of it should’ve been done by me, but many companies had such broke-ass environment that we had no choice (and my boss said to do whatever it took to get the application working, so I did).

One time my boss there asked me, “If they’d had to hire enough people to do what you did for them in their busted environment, how much would it have cost and how many people would it have been?”

I thought about it for a bit and told him — accurately — that it would’ve been 4-5 people and they’d have to pay those people total about $500,000 a year to do what I’d done.

There’s just so much incompetence in every field. It’s a shock anything gets done. But I truly do think a lot of it is ameliorated by people like me, working behind the scenes and off the books, fixing shit.

Rant: “I wasn’t trained on how to do that.”

In my field, other than a few bits of VMWare, I wasn’t trained on a single thing I do or have ever done. Taught myself and figured it all out myself. I’ve never even had a mentor. No one. 99.999% of the things I know in IT has been and will continue to be all my own self-teaching.

However, the younger gens seem to have little to no troubleshooting or self-teaching skills. Learned helplessness, I guess. I’m not totally blaming them — it’s the environment they’ve been stewing in. Autodidacticism or in any way coloring outside the lines is not rewarded for them at all. And everyone responds to the incentives present, so it’s not entirely their fault they can’t figure out a damn thing nor teach themselves how to do something.

But it does make it difficult to give anyone under 35 or so IT projects as they need handholding every tiny little wee baby step. And that gets very tiresome.

If Russia does manage to achieve victory in Ukraine, much of Europe will then be fighting it in Poland and the Baltic states 5-10 years after that. I hope this next point is obvious, but we should not allow that to occur. Mostly, it should be Europe doing that but they seem not to realize what’s about to happen if Ukraine loses.

But they gonna fuck around and find out I guess.

Many people are worried about Canada’s economy in recent months. The country’s real per capita GDP — the most common measure of living standards — has been falling for over a year now.

This is an inevitable consequence of the housing market being so out of whack there. It’s why we reconsidered and decided against emigration. Our standard of living would be in active freefall in Canada.

And it will only get worse unless Canada does something about how much a drag housing is on everything there. I predict they won’t, and it’ll lead to a 20-30% total from-peak decline in per capita GDP over the next decade or so.

The first ten on today’s playlist: