Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (and the story of an economic paradigm shift that was catalyst for a move to California)

Mostly, I'm thankful for the Canadian who left her beautiful country to live with me. Thank you Sandi. Sandi is a classic Canadian. Her four grandparents came from four different European countries to meet and marry in Canada.

In the mid-1700s, my ancestors moved from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia, which had just become a British colony. By the late 1800s, Hantsport, Nova Scotia had 32 sea captains with the last name of Davison and John Fox Davison was the Master Shipbuilder in Hantsport. In the last half of the 1800s, a "business trip" lasted a month or even years, depending on whether a ship was simply heading down the coast, across the Atlantic or around the world.

It was a monumental shift in technology that was catalyst for a Davison ancestor leaving Canada for California.

In September 1886, the maritime town of Hantsport, Nova Scotia, ground to a halt. Flags lined the Avon River, brass bands played, and crowds gathered at the foot of Prince Street to witness a historic triumph. Slipping into the waters of the Bay of Fundy was the barque Hamburg, designed and constructed under the management of its Master Shipbuilder, John Fox Davison. Registering at nearly 1,700 tons, the Hamburg was a leviathan—the largest three-masted wooden merchant vessel ever constructed in Canada.

The launch of the Hamburg represented the end of a four-hundred-year-old economic paradigm, though. John Fox had brought the ancient art of wooden shipbuilding to its mathematical and physical limits. Beyond a hull length of roughly 300 feet, organic timber naturally flexes and warps under its own weight; biology had hit a ceiling.

As the Hamburg slipped into the ocean, across the Atlantic, European yards were churning out massive vessels forged from industrial Bessemer steel and powered by coal-fired steam engines. These new steel-hulled ships did not care about wind patterns, could hold twice the cargo, and operated on strict, unyielding calendar schedules. The crossing of the "Sail-Steam Divide" was swift and merciless. A paradigm shift. Within a decade, the macroeconomic reality of steel made a lifetime of elite wooden craftsmanship obsolete. The great shipyard went quiet, and the fortunes anchored to them dissolved. John Fox Davison had built the ultimate monument to a world that history left behind.

John Fox's son Arthur was my great grandpa who left Nova Scotia for California, sailing around the tip of South America in 1881. After 25 years in Nova Scotia, he spent his next 72 in the California redwoods.

Drive

What was admirable: he had a lot of drive.

What was not admirable: he didn't really care who he ran over.

How Did He Die?

Travel is deadly.

That's extreme.
No. Time travel eventually kills us all.

Totemic Energy for Different Times

Traditionally, a lot of college mascots were named after the animals or occupations that defined their regions. Grizzlies. Lumberjacks. Miners.

Still, it was a tad disorienting to watch the San Jose Programmers play the Santa Monica Lapdogs.

The Rise and Fall of Populations

Just as the birthrates of humans is falling, the birthrate of artificial intelligences is exploding.

Tired of waiting for an alien species to arrive by spacecraft, we're downloading them just like we do e-books or songs. By one count, the population of AIs is 3 million. (Specifically, that is the number of publicly available AI models on Hugging Face.) And growing daily.

*no AIs were harmed in the creation of this post.

US Created Half the World's New Millionaires Last Year

From Harper's ....

Estimated number of millionaires created in the United States last year : 441,078
Estimated portion of the world’s new millionaires that this figure represents : 1/2

September 2026 • Source: UBS (Zurich)

Live Streaming Executions

For a time, I would occasionally find myself in a restaurant showing MMA on a big screen. And I remember wondering how it was I landed in the crasser parallel universe that put violence on the big screen rather than nudity. 

Meanwhile, the guy who lives in the White Trash House is going to live stream an execution because cage matches don't feed his appetite for violence quite enough.

One Way We Look Into the Future

We use telescopes to see into the past.

We use financial markets to see into the future.

What People Are Paying to Live in the World's Most Entrepreneurial City

From Harper's Magazine

Minimum number of homes in San Francisco that sold for at least $1 million over the asking price in 2025 : 25

In the first seven months of 2026 : 160

Our Fascination with Sports

We're fascinated with sports in part because they offer a little oasis of clarity.

Decades into your own life, you may still have doubts about whether you're winning or losing.

But you can turn on a game three quarters of the way through and know—in an instant—who's winning.

First Computer

 How old am I?

My first computer had a carriage return lever.

Would You Go for High Score or ...?

Suppose you suddenly learned that you were simply a dollop of consciousness in the midst of a virtual reality game that had, until this moment, seemed entirely real.

Would you suddenly care less - or even more deeply - about who you were, what you felt, what you inspired in others (for better or worse), and the consequences of your life? Er, game.

Would you try for a high score in joy? For yourself and your fellow players?

Or would it suddenly be game over, so to speak?

The Current Gap Between US and Chinese AI

Martin Chorzempa - in a Peterson Institute presentation - reports on the current gap between American and Chinese chips. It is substantial.

Chorzempa reports that Chinese chip production is improving but remains far behind US quantity and quality. Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng reportedly said that the chip gap between US and China is currently "fourfold plus two years." What that means is that it takes four Huawei chips to match one Nvidia chip from two years earlier. (These are leaked remarks reported in July of 2026.)

Further, the US AI global revenue is greater than Chinas. In May of 2026, Anthropic reported $47 billion. In July of 2026, Zhipu reported $1 billion and DeepSeek about half that.

With a MU MU Here, and a GPU There

By far his most sweeping idea was AI-EI-O: artificial intelligence applied to agriculture and farming.

Well Read or Just, Well ...

He claimed to be well read, but occasionally undermined the claim by doing something like quoting Moby Dick. The whale, not the novel.

Cowboys and Cattle from 2100

 Cowboys in the future will use very different technology to move cattle.

The Reminder in Each Nobel Prize

 Nobel Prizes will be announced over the next week. They are such a wonderful reminder that we are so far from exhausting the possibilities of new knowledge. The best chapters of the human story still lie before us.

A Package Deal

“I put the Trump in triumph,” he said proudly.

“And, of course, the I and h.”

“I! Ha! Yes. But h? What’s the h for?”

“Hubris, apparently.”

An Odd Bit of Pandemic Nostalgia

She didn't miss COVID but she did miss some of the norms. Shy, she liked avoiding people as the default. And she always thought she had great eyes but a weak chin; a mask seemed like the perfect aesthetic for such a face, curiously giving her more confidence as she was out and about.

Haphazard

"Random? That makes me sound undisciplined. I prefer haphazard. That makes me sound dashing."

His boss continued to stare at him blankly, finally adding, "I hardly think that change in your annual review is going to make a promotion any more likely."
"It's all just a roll of the dice, isn't it Clive?"
"Well, the way you approach it, yes. Yes it is. And again, my name is not Clive."

Investigations of a Metaphysical Detective

Idea for a metaphysical detective show.

Guy investigates various religions to explore how they answer the big questions, the biggest being "How does this change my life?"

Each episode he dives into another faith tradition, embracing their beliefs and practices, congregation and clergy.

One drawback, of course, is that given it takes so long to properly immerse into a particular religion, the show may take a few years to release each episode.

Silicon Valley Isn't Just Further West - It is Further into the Future

In 1849, at the height of the California Gold Rush, eggs that cost pennies elsewhere sold for $1 to $3 apiece in California.

Silicon Valley has always meant higher prices. Years ago, when I traveled to work with clients in the heart of the Valley, I paid at least three times, and sometimes five or six times, what a nearly identical hotel room cost anywhere else in the country. This was during the internet buildout. I remember business trips in those early days spent scrolling through page after page of search results just trying to find a hotel with a vacancy, at any price.

The AI boom is, curiously, yet another California gold rush. About three-quarters of Nvidia employees are reportedly millionaires, and a huge share are worth tens of millions.

Why do Valley prices stay so far above everyone else's? Some are just spikes. Gold Rush eggs didn't stay at $3, and Valley hotel rates fell when the dot-com bubble burst. But I have an odd theory about the rest: Silicon Valley sits closer to the future.

If you had told someone in 1970 that a typical home would someday cost over a million dollars, they'd have dismissed you as speaking nonsense. In Silicon Valley, that day has already come. Time has a way of making outrageous prices seem normal.

Silicon Valley isn't just a place out West. It's a place further into the future, where people are already paying prices that will seem normal nearly everywhere in a decade or three.