Twenty-four years ago

today (writing this column started very late this month...on 09 11...due to school startup pressures, and can be expected to be short) the worst terrorist attack in history killed just under 3000 people, dramatically and permanently altering the way airports are run, planes are flown, security is done, and travel is even thought about. Passengers today who haven't flown before that time would be shocked at the old practice of letting children (and interested adults afterwards) sit up front and chat with the pilots for a spell, especially on long international flights, or to see the cockpit door left wide open except during takeoff and landing, or people boarding planes sans baggage or body inspection scans. But, alas, it's not the same world any more.

Or is it? After all, in 2023 (the most recent year for which the Spy has data) and for the fourth consecutive year, more than fifteen times that many people died of gun violence in the disUnited States alone. It's been over 30 000 a year since 2014 and was in the 20K range for many years before that. Yes, the majority of those are gun suicides, but shouldn't the average Josephine dUS citizen be demanding dramatic changes to gun laws? Oh, every atrocity (say, the latest school shooting or assassination) generates calls to action from a few, but these voices never become widespread, never affect elections or legislation, and quickly fade from hearing and sight, with even news of the most horrific such crimes vanishing from the news feeds within a week or so. The noise is a tad longer and louder than a whisper when the targets are "influencers", captains of some industry, or politicians, but beyond the obligatory "thoughts and prayers" speech no one down there in a position to make changes in the interest of public safety seems to take the interminable wild West rolling massacre seriously.

The saddest thing of all is hearing the politicians of both major dU.S. parties full-throatedly excoriating each other as demented radicals, variously for supposedly causing, committing, or encouraging the violence, and/or for either promoting or wanting to restrict gun ownership. One wishes against all hope that the term "common sense" were not an oxymoron.

And, change!!?

As previously mentioned the Spy is changing his house, renovating what has for three decades been a junk storage room in the basement into a better office, and when done will turn the current one into a games and puzzles room tor the grandkids, simultaneously opening up much floor space in the family room. He's been rather pleasantly surprised to find he can still install eight foot sheets of gyprock (we still have some of those feet thingies in Canada) high up on the walls, and is confidant he could do the same on the ceiling if he wanted. But that will be T-bar--more expensive but more versatile, as the lighting will become drop-in LED panels. Install and forget. Those will last far longer than he will.

Yet another tech adventure

played out over the last few days, when the Spy failed to foresee the consequences of a series of bad decisions, and had to spend far more time fixing the problem than he did causing it. His Church uses Sync.com's eponymous program to share key files among both church leaders and the finance team, the latter of which he is a part. Working on a new system for money counting, he was setting up a donated MacMini in the tellers' room, and wanted to share one folder to it for tellers. So, he created another user and proceeded to do the usual administrator tasks to share that folder to the "counting" user. During that, he tested it by logging in with his own computer to the new account. Giant mistake, as it messed up the shares to that computer, interestingly by deleting, not everything else, but all files created in the current fiscal year.

He tried quitting the program, deleting the shared files altogether, then reinstalling and restarting Sync, but no luck. Here's what eventually worked: (1) Quit Sync. (2) Go to Applications:Utilities, and fire up the Activity Monitor. (3) Kill app processes with the word "Sync" in the name. (4) Go to Sync.com and fetch their uninstall program. (5) Run this to wipe from the computer all its traces, including the entire shared Sync folder. Ignore warnings about some failures. Only the ending message matters. (6) Fetch a fresh copy of the installer program from Sync.com, and reinstall using, of course, the correct email address and password user for that account. (7) Follow the instructions, then wait as all the folders and files are loaded (it can take a while when there are more than a Gig. (8) Do a happy happy when it works. Not sure what the py could have done if it didn't.

Last month,

the Spy commented on the false claims of their supporters that tariffs tax the exporting country, when they are obviously taxes charged by and remitted to the government at the receiving end of the supply chain and therefore paid by the importing party, then ultimately charged to purchasers in the importing country. True, the exporting country is impacted, for higher retail customer prices reduce demand and therefore the flow of goods, penalizing exporters as well as consumers. Because these transactions have considerable friction due to inventories in the hold of ships, by importers, wholesalers, and retailers, the full impact takes some time to manifest, but ultimately inflation and reduced sales cause customer hardship OTOH, lost jobs OTOH, and both shrink the economy. When coupled with targeting and deporting low-paid immigrant workers in agriculture and retail sales, businesses and farms that have functioned at the margins fail, and a domino effect begins that if sufficiently strong and long, inevitably becomes at least a recession.

Tariffs and the unsettled geopolitical business from WW1 caused the great depression, and there is no reason to suppose that another can now be averted, given current conditions and trends. In answer to those who point to trade deficits with specific countries and cry justification for such a trade war, The Spy points out that it 's more tangled than that. Obviously on a word scale net imports balance net exports. After all every one item in either category is also in the other. Therefore traded surpluses and deficits also of necessity balance. Any given country may have more of one than another with a specific country, but any nation that has a net imbalance will see its currency trade higher or lower to balance things out. So in theory, and as it has been in practice for nearly a century, a wide-open, tariff (and therefore also friction) free world economy allows all nations to prosper. Trade wars damage everyone.

But, the dreary repetition of these economic errors made by our governments are just the symptoms of a wider problem among we the people who plant the bums of others much like us in high offices where they repeat the same mistakes in the public sphere for the same reasons as most of the electorate do privately. The real problem: most people do not understand what money is, and inevitably by default mishandle it. We can therefore scarcely expect those from among us whom we send to the Capitol to make better money decisions for the collective than people generally do individually.

Too strong a statement? Then why are the media ads full of OTOH, ads for loan shark companies offering inherently risky and therefore very high interest loans on second, third, or fourth mortgages (or credit cards), so their victims can match money not their own to their wants, however necessary for survival, just unwise or even frivolous the latter may be?

Not convinced yet? Listen and watch OTOH more carefully. What other ads increasingly saturate the advertising media? Those for consumer proposal and bankruptcy advisors, who offer to help you write off vast debts so accumulated, thus putting even more pressure on the broader economy. After all, when debt vanishes from a debtor's books, it also does from those of the now former creditor's, accentuating higher business risk and jacking up prices (to offset losses) thus feeding additional negative pressure to the economy, so deepening the slope of its downward spiral.

Why is it so many people need help to keep their books and do their taxes, and should they have a good income, to manage their investments? Why is it so hard for a church to find a treasurer? Yup. Few people understand money.

In the slow moving train wreck of a failing economy, many more people become desperate to keep a roof over their heads, a little bread in the cupboard, and some milk in the refrigerator. The Spy well recalls when a University Professor from the old Soviet Empire attended a standards meeting (sponsored and financed by other attendees; he had no money) and boasted how wealthy he was. After all, he currently had a pound of meat in his fridge. Will it soon be that way world wide, as it was a century ago--a time when rural school teachers were doing well to be paid by room and board at a different farm every week (all anyone could afford; there was no money), and health care was nearly nonexistent, so once polio got going it easily wiped out whole towns in short order? And there were mumps, whooping cough, measles, and...but wait, we have vaccines now to effectively prevent them all...but wait, the anti-vaxxers (some in high places) falsely claim they not only don't work, but do more harm than good, so….

And, why are record numbers of people relying on food banks, or eking out a bare living on welfare. Why are there so many homeless camps? For economic, social, and political reasons the world's social fabric is tearing in exactly the same way it did in the run up to and during said great depression.

In what spheres do governments make decisions? Law, money, infrastructure, health, education, and increasingly for the future, science and technology. Who do we elect? Mostly lawyers, business people, and a few people with long-standing records as community-minded. Doctors, dentists, nurses, educators, scientists, engineers, and accountants? Occasionally, but unlikely. So, laws get crafted to the general satisfaction of elected lawyers (though whether in the public interest is often debatable) but in most professional realms, particularly science and technology, few in office have a clue, and this gets accentuated when it come to handling public money. Exhibit 1: the ever-spiraling public debt that handcuffs future government decisions, and inevitably (by effectively printing money) exacerbates inflation and recession pressures. Exhibit 2: giving billionaires tax cuts at the expense of reduced medical care and underfunded education for everyone else. Exhibit 3: threatening or cutting research expenditures at a time when major technological and societal change requires much more and better fact-based understanding of how to navigate both.

Yet, how many people in government understand even one of physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, computing, AI in particular, or again, money and basic economics? Few and poorly indeed. Q.E.D.

The government of Canada initially responded vengefully, imposing some counter tariffs. But for all his other political faults, Prime Minister Carney ought to know something of economics. After all, he is a former (some say failed, but the Spy will let that one pass to the historians) governor of the Bank of Canada and later of the Bank of England, so just might have some economic savvy. He later cancelled the retaliatory tariffs. Critics claim he caved to an overweening bully, but let us generously assume for a moment that he realized, as too many others do not, that taxing your own people to punish or pressure another country that has irrationally started doing same is a mug's, even a fool's game.

And, speaking of illogic,

and it is ill logic indeed, so much so that it leads to many deaths. One has to shake one's head to clear it when Tsar Vladimir of Russia tells Western European governments that if they send troops to Ukraine they become his legitimate targets. Ah, first, if he believes that, it follows by his illogic that his invading troops are already legitimate targets for Ukraine and any of its friends and neighbours, most notably Poland, which his drones have apparently already invaded. Second, is it not obvious that if he succeeds in his goal of exterminating Ukraine and Russifying what's left of the land, he will soon find new excuses to invade the Baltics and Eastern Europe? Third, does it also not follow that once he does either he will be at war with each of the contributing/allied countries? Fourth, he has already threatened to nuke London for Great Britain's support of Ukraine, an act that would likely end with wide swathes of Russia, and indeed of other parts of the world turned into nuclear waste. To riff on Churchill: History will not be kind to him, for he will not be around to write it. Will any of us?

TTFN; there is marking needing done.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fifth year as a high school and university teacher in 2025. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several commercial, nonprofit, and/or educational organizations and participated in developing industry computing and educational sstandards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named the best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He is a half century-long member of the IEEE, ACM, and MAA. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 when cancer happened, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth has been released; site redesigned.) : https://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

URLs for the newest edition of Issues Text:

Wipf&Stock site for his 4Civ textbook Volume One: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385226818/the-fourth-civilization-volume-one/

Wipf&Stock site for his 4Civ textbook Volume Two: https://wipfandstock.com/9798385232932/the-fourth-civilization-volume-two/