@MarkOldGate
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Vancouver Island, BC
Joined November 2023
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Mark Gates retweeted
That Mitchell and Webb Look Offensive Banned Sketches Full Episode
Mark Gates retweeted
Eby is dressing a political calculation in constitutional clothing.
The Lieutenant Governor’s power to dissolve the Legislature is real –Trump does not make an early BC election necessary.
British Columbia is ground zero of this country's broken healthcare system, economic negligence and can't contain its real economic drivers –drugs, dirty money, gangs and the public service bloat.
He was elected to govern through these moments –not add chaos or lazy infactual campaign narratives–have the presumed experience, insight and vision to protect British Columbia not invoke an "existential" threat to escape accountability.
BREAKING - @Dave_Eby says LG has granted an election in BC. Says “existential” moment for BC with @realDonaldTrump attacks on Canada.
Mark Gates retweeted
This is one of the sketches that has been removed apparently. I'm just going to say it. If you can't see the anti-racist intent of this sketch, then you are too thick to be deciding what comedy gets seen or commissioned.
nitter.cf/darkcobbett/status/210…
Today in 'Orwell was right'.
BBC removes 11 Mitchell and Webb comedy sketches from iPlayer.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jd…
Mark Gates retweeted
I think it's at least a little bit the unions, guys
Mark Gates retweeted
Rousseau famously sent his five kids to die in an orphanage, where only 10-20% made it to adulthood, and to this day he is considered one of the main theorists in the field of raising kids.
It's insane how much people can get away with when they are in the good graces of the "intellectuals".
Mark Gates retweeted
In the 80s and 90s, we saw images like these and worried that the mall had replaced the church. The irony is that what once looked like the secularization of a common culture now looks in 2026 like evidence that a common culture still existed.
Decades ago, even that commercial Christmas depended on a remarkable degree of cultural cohesion. The mall could secularize Christmas because nearly everyone still understood it as the common season. So the decorations, music, crowds, school vacations, family rituals, and shopping calendar all rested on some broadly shared Christian inheritance. Most Americans were then, in some loose sense, Christian: practicing, lapsed, or simply cultural.
Whats changed since then is deeper than commercialization. The shared ethnocultural ground itself has changed. America is more ethnically and religiously plural, while the older Christian inheritance is less universal. Christmas is losing its place as an unquestioned common cultural language. Even the commercial version now exists in a society with less agreement about why late December should be set apart at all, even as something merely culturally sacred.
It’s actually criminal how many of these are gone. Amazon and private equity killed so much of American life.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
This video is AI generated. The Sears logo shown was intreoduced in 2004, not 1996. In 1996, Sears was spelled in all caps. The date overlay misspells the month DEC as DIC.
logos.fandom.com/wiki/Sears
Mark Gates retweeted
A bunch of Nobel Prize-winning economists have endorsed California's proposed billionaire wealth tax.
I can't oppose them on authority. But I know some academics who can.
With all the various takes on the Odyssey this summer, this has to be my favorite.
Nolan's Odyssey was a pretty great movie.
The widespread controversy was minor and superficial.
OTOH, Nolan's version 𝘸𝘢𝘴 attenuated and two-dimensional.
There were important changes: Odysseus was not wracked by guilt. His main characteristics were his wily wits, resourcefulness and indefatigable spirit.
The real Odyssey tells us of the man who is a man, who can not be tempted to be less than a man or more than a man.
Recommended podcast:
#1,127 (July 28) artofmanliness.com/character…
The book:
amazon.ca/American-Odyssey-A…
Here is the third most interesting Homer commentary I have heard this summer. It is about the Iliad, but is still relevant.
I found the Iliad boring and serious, compared to the fun adventure of the Odyssey. Hevroni does a good job of laying out a framework.
The topic of the book is the first word of the first sentence: rage.
Its focus is four days of the trojan war.
The Gods, the horse, Helen: that is all backstory for the four days that lead to Achilles's aristeia,
econtalk.org/econtalk-book-c…
🚨BREAKING: Jensen Huang just EXPOSED Dario and Altman’s "Rogue AI" grift to avoid getting sued into oblivion under EXISTING law
“Don't let this doomsday narrative cause somebody to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.
Go and read between the lines. They're actually not asking for more laws; they're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have.”
ABSOLUTE TRUTH NUKE
Mark Gates retweeted
Few people understand how fully degraded search became after 2020. In the before times, results were driven by user experience which fed algorithmic determination of credibility. Then Google flipped to prioritize "stakeholder" content. It was part of the general anti-populist revolution and clearly reflected a deep-state push.
At the same time, publicly available tools to examine the traffic of any site were made to vanish. This is all part of pushing messaging to the public and massively marginalizing creative and offbeat content. Today, the results of search reflects someone else's views of how you should think and not actually what the people are proven to want.
This gigantic change was never announced. Nor did the status quo ante return after lockdowns were over. The internet of today is completely unlike the internet of 2019. Now with AI driving most results, ruling class orthodoxies are ever more ascendent.
Mark Gates retweeted
If Canada had built Energy East and Keystone XL we would have been bringing in $277 million per day or about $99 billion annually in additional revenue at current oil prices.
How do we blame Trump for this staggering failure?
Mark Gates retweeted
OpenAI will have some liability for rogue agents it creates. It should have that liability. But the liability will be complicated by the fact that a) these programs are capable, much more than any other kind of software, of doing things that the creator does not intend
Mark Gates retweeted
“If there is a single most deplorable intellectual failing on the conservative side, it lies in reducing every question of law, constitution, culture and society to a question of economics.”
Sir Roger Scruton
So Keyenesian governments spend money in order to stimulate the economy to higher growth.
Then MMT governments tax the economy in order to stop inflation, because inflation is caused by high growth.
But in both cases, they are trading primary effects for secondary ones. The main cause of inflation is the money supply, not growth. And the main cause of growth is the allocation of resources to helpful innovation, not spending.
Ultimately, we get the inflation, but not the growth.
Modern Monetary Theory is a permission slip governments write for themselves.
The core claim MMT makes is that a sovereign currency issuer cannot go broke and therefore faces no real budget constraint, only an inflation constraint. Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler built careers on this. Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, and Weimar Germany ran the same experiment before they published a word.
Prices coordinate billions of decisions simultaneously. When governments print money to fund spending, they corrupt that signal. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without a corresponding increase in real output transfers purchasing power away from you to whoever spends the new money first, which is always the government and its contractors.
MMT advocates admit inflation is the constraint, then propose that Congress simply tax the excess money back. They trust the same institution that runs $1.8 trillion+ deficits in a fiscal year to accurately diagnose inflation and surgically remove purchasing power before it destroys your savings.
The calculation problem identified in 1920 is this: central planners lack the price information needed to allocate resources efficiently. MMT does not solve this, it hands a sledgehammer to the institution destroying price signals.
Capital formation requires real saving. You cannot print your way to a higher standard of living, and no journal article changes that constraint. Taking wealth away from productive people and handing it to bureaucrats always ends in more poverty, not less.
Mark Gates retweeted
"Among white men who grew up in middle and upper income families, who is most likely to be a successful entrepreneur by age 35? One of the strongest predictors was whether they as teenagers engaged in delinquent behavior." podcasts.apple.com/za/podcas…
You can just make multimillion dollar movies for a few thousand dollars now.
TALES OF GRIMWICKE — Chapter I is 22 minutes of AI fantasy animation inspired by the many anthropomorphic animal stories I read as a kid, with a dark twist:
The model: Seedance 2.5 (@ByteDanceSeed_ ) via @Segmind_ai. 847 takes generated, mostly 30-second multi-shot prompts, over 5 hours of footage. 127 clips made the cut. About $4.5k in generation, four weeks from first take to publish.
Characters and locations came out of @midjourney. Using MJ for the location plates was a revelation: the cinematography and art direction are a level above, and it renders far better as a plate than Nano Banana or GPT Image. Nano Banana (@GoogleDeepMind run on @fal) did the heavy lifting editing those plates, building anchor frames and turning MJ characters into turnaround sheets. Then I let Seedance do as much of the framing and camera operating as possible. That gave the best results.
A lot of what I do in my Unreal Engine films came with me: a handheld, imperfect camera operator instead of smooth moves, focus hunting, and above all weather and atmospherics. The model does water, snow, smoke and rain really well, and leaning into that is what keeps it from looking like a Temu Pixar film.
The tools I built: a portal (Node on @flydotio) that holds the bible, the refs, every prompt and every take, with a Claude agent (@claudeai) that writes the prompts to the house rules. A Premiere Pro (@AdobeVideo) panel that browses the archive, drops selects on the timeline, versions the project, strips music, and sends fixes back to Seedance. Everything is done in 720p with no upscaling, because it looks terrible. Narration is my own voice through @ElevenLabs speech-to-speech. Music from @Artlist_io.
None of this would exist without @PJaccetturo and @Kavanthekid. Their narrative work, Nexus and Chronicles of Bone, proved long-form AI film was possible, and their podcasts, newsletters and X posts, updated constantly as the workflow changes under everyone's feet, showed how to actually do it.
Chapter II is currently in the works and I will release it initially on my YouTube channel, The Darkest Age (@CharlieDriscollAI). Consider subscribing there to see it as soon as it drops!