by Alan Langford | 2026-07-29 | Observations on Everything
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, thinks “weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay,” is a good system. Drop “income” out of that and he’s right!
The problem is, like many others who have reached a level of wealth in the billions, he sees everything as a business venture. But government is not a business, it’s a mechanism for providing services.
I’d like to suggest that proportional voting is a good idea, but the basis for weighting votes should be the amount of burden a taxpayer absorbs in running it. The “all taxes suck” right wing propaganda think tanks love to point out that for the average Canadian “tax freedom day” falls somewhere near the middle of the year, so let’s use that as a baseline.
While people who earn less than the average pay less income taxes, they pay a disproportionately large amount of tax when you consider that “all taxes combined, hidden or otherwise” version that the anti-tax people tout. For an example, let’s take someone who buys 2,000 litres of gas over the course of a year at an average $1.50/l. That’s $3,000 spent on gas. The anti-tax people happily point out that half or more of that is hidden taxes, so we’ll call that $1,500 in taxes for the year. For someone who makes $150,000 a year, that’s 1% of gross income. For someone making just $50,000 it’s 3%. Even at higher marginal income tax rates, “tax freedom day” can come a lot earlier in the year if you’re a high income earner. The propaganda pushers try to convince average people that they’re being hosed, but their agenda is more money for the wealthy, fewer services for those who need them.
Let’s look at that “level of tax you pay” not in absolute dollars, but rather in the percentage of your total tax load compared to income. Let’s give that “average” Canadian 50 votes to work with, then more to the people who pay more, less to those who pay less. In this scenario, we’ll use Tobias’ salary from 2024: 205.5 million. If he can demonstrate that his total tax load for the year was in the range of $155 million, he can have his 50 votes too, but I’m willing to wager that all he’d get is a few votes—at best. Maybe we round up so he gets at least one.
Your say in how the government is formed should be proportional to how much you have to bear on a percentage basis, not an absolute dollar value. Letting the people who depend on the services the government provide have a bigger say in who runs it sounds like a darn fine idea to me. I’m willing to bet most people would be a lot happier with the results. Not Tobias though. He can go cry on a super yacht or something.
by Alan Langford | 2026-05-29 | Observations on Everything
Yep, some fool bought a scam package and instead of following the instructions, they just pushed them out. Unbelievable, but then again, nobody said these fools were smart!
I’ve seen a wave of these phishing for credentials from a number of stores, and the best part of this is where they tell the scammer to use one of a set of random headers. In theory, this means you can set your spam filters to look for exact matches to these segments, and if you see to many of them, tag the message as trash.
Now I present for your edification and development of spam filers, the full text!
by Alan Langford | 2026-02-16 | Observations on Everything
Scammers love to prey on authors, taking advantage of their desperation to get their book published and/or promoted.There are tons of angles: interest from fake publishers, fake interest from real publishers, fake editors, fake agents, fake book clubs, and fake reviewers.
There’s two easy tells for these things. One is heaping over-the-top praise upon the work, and the other is the free-mail address (GMail, AOL, Hotmail, etc.). I saw another one recently where the scammer-idiot claimed to be an editor from one of the big five publishers, but was using a GMail address. Belly laugh. Please don’t fall for that.
This scam-ass is in the fake review category, but when the author failed to respond to the first message, the scammer got threatening:
![Email from a scammer. Subject: Re: [book title] From Christopher Joseph if you continue to ignore my messages, | might do something you would regret for the rest of your life. | already have access to your book, and instead of giving it a positive review, | will leave a negative one and damage its reputation. It seems you have forgotten that | have a community of readers, and | can easily influence them to bring your book down. You can try me though. On Wed, 24 Dec 2025 at 2:55PM, Christopher Joseph wrote: Hello [redacted], | came across [book Title], and it immediately struck me as the kind of transformative, deeply personal guide that seekers of self-discovery actively search for but often struggle to find.](https://ambitonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/scam-2026-02-16.jpg)
I have to say if this showed up in my inbox, they would get an obscenity-laced response (from a no-reply email address) inviting them to do their worst. And if they actually did post a negative review, I’d use that in my promotional materials under the heading “Review Scammers Hated This Book!”
by Alan Langford | 2025-08-30 | Observations on Everything
For most of my life, the rest of the world has viewed the US Democratic Party as centre-right on the global political scale, “Left” only in that they’re left of the Republican Party. From here, the Democrats seem pretty much unchanged (and thus less relevant). Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have devolved from hard right globalists to proto-fascist nationalists. It is hard to see how anything good can come from this.
It also seems that a good number of Republican voters aren’t particularly comfortable with this shift. Unfortunately for the majority of American voters, party affiliation ranks up there with religious affiliation. A disturbing number of folks seem to vote not on the policy platform of their candidates, but instead on who their daddy’s daddy’s daddy voted for. A generational Republican voting for a Democrat is so radical that it’s on par with announcing they’d converted to Islam. This despite the obvious fact that the Republican party of more than a century ago has virtually nothing in common with the current incarnation.
For all it’s innumerable and increasingly obvious flaws1 there is still one mechanism for Republican voters to correct course and save the country from collapse: oust the Trump sycophants in the primaries! That’s it. Show up for the primaries, make sure the candidate that goes into an election under the Republican banner has the gumption to stand up to the wannabe fascist. Then you can vote for your daddy’s party and be true to your politico-religious traditions. Congress regains the ability to stop a President who thinks he’s a King from running roughshod over democracy, and irrational policies that harm your community while benefiting his buddies get stopped in their tracks. This is how the American system was designed but it is up to voters to ensure that the checks and balances inherent in the system actually work. Y’all might even stand a chance of returning the party to a place where calling it the Grand Old Party or the Party of Law and Order isn’t a sad, pathetic joke.
As an extra bonus, you can prevent (or at least delay) the collapse of the American Empire. So get out there and ensure that the Republican candidate is someone who says they’ll work for you, and not subjugate your interest to the whims of some deranged old fool in the Oval Office!
1. Party-affiliated judges for one. Give me a frigging break, that’s just so obviously dumb. And Sheriffs too? WHAT??
by Alan Langford | 2025-08-15 | Observations on Everything
“Join our community on Discord”
Nah, sorry. That’s not what a “community” looks like to me. Not only is Discord more like a vertical news feed, constantly scrolling with information I might care about mixed with lots more information I don’t care about, but it’s a single sign-on way of accumulating highly detailed information on what I might be interested in. It’s a data profiler’s dream, and I much prefer to be a data profiler’s nightmare.
It’s also like trying to follow all the conversations in some mega-mall’s food court. No. Just no.
So yeah, ask me again when you find something that will actually foster a community, or when after IPOs and the subsequent and inevitable enshittification process makes it too irritating to bother with. I’ll take an ugly, clunky bulletin board system over this, ten times out of ten.
by Alan Langford | 2025-08-14 | Observations on Everything
I’ll say this up front: this is a self-serving plug for Celtic Brews. That said, it’s genuine.
Celtic Brews is a fantastic place to make great beer, and it’s right here in Trent Hills, in Campbellford, Ontario. It’s what regulators call a “brew-on-premise” operation. In practice this means you go in, select from more than fifty beers to suit your taste. A few weeks later, you drop in, bottle your beer, take it home, fill up a fridge (or cart away a keg, should you be lucky enough to have a keg fridge), and then happily consume it. When it’s time for more, repeat. You also need to sign an agreement that you won’t resell the beer, because regulations.
Like anything else, there are advantages and disadvantages.
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|
Great beer made to your taste
No preservatives, additives, etc.
You re-use your bottles, saves waste
Bottle in 500ml or 1l bottles
Premium beer for about half the cost of domestic swill | Takes about three weeks
Bottling takes 45 minutes to an hour
You need a beer/keg fridge (no preservatives)
Friends drop in more often |
Now, why am I writing a post singing the merits of Celtic Brews? The self-serving part is that it’s really convenient to have them in town! They say they’re the only one in Eastern Ontario, and that means that if they ever go away, it’s going to be a long haul to the nearest alternative. That would suck.
But at the same time, they’re very good at making beer. Shawn, who took over as brewmaster a few years ago, has really worked to improve the quality and consistency of their beers. They were great before, and now they’re even better! He has also been working on some new recipes that are just as good as any craft beer I’ve had. I’ve even gotten them to tweak one of their stock selections to suit my tastes.
Now maybe the biggest drawback is the volume of beer you get. 100 500ml bottles take up most of a fridge, and that can be a problem. When I first started making my own beer, I got together with a couple of friends. This meant we could split a batch, which also means we didn’t need a dedicated fridge. Spit a batch with three friends and you have something most people can manage. Fortunately now I have a spare fridge dedicated to beverages.
And last but not least there’s the value proposition. These days, a 500ml can of premium beer is clocking in the range of $2.50 a pop, and craft beer comes in even higher. Meanwhile the same amount of bespoke beer from Celtic Brews comes in at just $1.70. Not to mention that most of the profit on that premium beer winds up in the hands of some multinational, but when you buy from Celtic Brews, most of the money stays right here.
I think you just can’t beat that. If you agree, drop in to see them at 31 Kent St., here in Campbellford. Or give them a call at 705-661-2337.
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