You Can’t Win Newsletter: Don’s Note 1: Early May

Welcome my new content vector. Tom and I are happy with how many people are checking out the ol’ pod. Dozens of people have sent us nice encouraging messages. The first episodes have been a bit of a journey of working through some basic ideas through pleasant chats, and now we’re getting into some nice discussions with friends from online. I expect things will get a bit more punchy and hot-takey over time but the chill conversations have been a lot of fun for us. Thank you for proving that we have an audience for all this. And a special thank you to the Patreon “moral supporters” who covered our hosting expenses and other start-up costs.

We launched the new Patreon tier for bonus content. This includes weekly bonus episodes, including ones about Tom growing up overseas in places like the Soviet Union and India. It will also include a newsletter written by me reflecting on the show and offering a few hot takes and jokes. There is also a discord server which I promise I will learn to use. We will prioritize a few questions from the Discord over of the near-malware website curiouscat. The money will also support our posting lifestyles - eventually I will become like John Dolan and call in from rural Mozambique or whatever.

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Upcoming Episodes

Our next Monday episode is a chat with our brilliant friend Mike about climate change. After that we have episodes planned on personal finance and health/fitness. Both money and health have been catastrophes for most of my adult life but I’m starting to get a grip on things. We also have a guest episode with our funny friend Big Keven (Brian) about life in Alaska and improv comedy. Plus even more episodes than all that. Almost a professional operation over here!

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Politics Takery

The Doug Ford Conservative government here in Ontario is doing a bunch of dumb stuff to cut social programs and restructure them along business management concept lines. It would be hard to list all of the bad ideas. A symbolic one is that Ford wants gas pumps to have a sticker telling people how much the federal carbon tax will cost them. Just aggressive nonsense.

I watch disability policy fairly closely because it affects me personally. The Ontario government made a bunch of positive promises under the Liberals before they were dumped by voters last year. One was to increase the earning threshold before they claw back benefits. Under Ford, the threshold will increase but they are increasing the claw back rate from 50% to 75%. What a bad idea. If you earn millions of dollars your effective marginal tax rate in Ontario is about 50% or something. A 75% rate is obviously designed by some political hack. That’s the most annoying part. These staffers pretend to be wonks but they aren’t even wonks.

Alberta is headed in the same direction as voters picked the United Conservatives there to run the province into the ground. The social-democratic NDP government went all-in on building oil pipelines to try to feed blood to the blood god but it wasn’t enough. It was sad seeing the unions and NDP premier travelling the country in support of the oil industry. It’s easy and correct to blame the NDP here but there are a few things to add in. First, turnout was higher and the Conservatives won 54.88% of the vote. So any theory that an ecosocialist would have done better seems unlikely. Second, there is a Green Party in Alberta and they got 0.41% of the vote, which seems like it says something. So there is a deep problem on the electoral side of the left there that needs to be addressed.

The Democratic primary in Amerika seems like a bonanza for consultants and techbro startups as huge amounts of money get raised by everyone. Not sure who else has benefited so far. Sanders is doing pretty well but you sort of have to add most of his opponents together to get a better relative picture. I think he has a shot but most of the other candidates are a blob of liquid metal that will take whatever shape they need to defeat him. Warren and Buttigieg have shown how valuable paying public relations staff can be. You rope in the rubes (journalists) with well-timed releases or whatever. Who cares. Don’t trust any of these people, really.

Still I can’t help but think that five years ago the left that I saw online was pretty small. Only a handful of people understood what Hoxhaism meant. Communist Internet memes were in their infancy. Now it’s all become wildly annoying, which is good, I guess. It’s becoming a normie thing. Like you might see a guy at work (if I worked) with an Antifa Gritty mug or something. That’s better than seeing everyone with Build the Wall mugs. Let a hundred schools of thought contend, I always say.

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Life as a Content Generator

I’m happy with how forgiving people have been about the first steps of the podcast. I have a pleasant enough voice for radio but I have layers upon layers of verbal tics that I need to work on. That’s one of the benefits of small time pod production - you can sort of throw the basic ideas together and then start to see what works, whereas I’m not exactly the sort of person that would be put on TV right away. So there is a little community there willing to see past some of the rough stuff. I should say I notice all this more than the average person, too, because my family has always been involved in radio one way or another. If the radio went quiet for a second we would all turn to each other and say “dead air” because it meant someone wasn’t doing their job. So I see our pod as a sort of late-night college radio show compared to the prime time pods that focus on horrific crimes or daily takery.

Writing a bit has also been a bit of a process. I have been blessed with helpful/forgiving editors but I am not good at getting out there and pitching articles. There is this picture of writers trying to struggle to get their ideas into the bloodstream but I tend to be impressed with what other left writers are offering a lot of the time. The trick to writing for money seems to be to worry less about that and just try to get your opinion out there too. I’ve never had that drive to turn everything into a full article so I haven’t really published much. I am going to try to work on some longer things though, including a book, although not sure where that will take me. Part of it is building a thicker skin, I think, so that I can bombard poor editors with ideas until one sticks. I don’t like that, though. I guess I still have a romantic idea of how it should all go. The big American cities seem strange - everyone in fierce competition for these few media jobs. Not really interested in getting involved in all that.

The sort of articles I’ve been writing are not big money makers, like they aren’t 5,000 word investigative articles for the Wall Street Journal. Still, it’s more money than I would probably make at a temp job working a few days here and there. Which is just another weird thing about being a compulsive poster. I (deliberately) avoided monetizing when I was making the memes and all that and I don’t have much capacity or interest for most kinds of work, but it’d be nice to figure out a good racket. Write opinion editorials for Bloomberg or something and be able to buy a microcondo by the time I turn 45. I guess I just gotta put one foot in front of the other.

If I could scrape together a few thousand a month from content generation then I’d probably move back to Montreal. Get some houseplants… Take another French immersion course....

Anyway, I hope you all have a great May.

Love Don