Aptenobytes

The Throne Speech

Colour me underwhelmed. Call me when the budget comes out.

No surprises good or bad, with the exception of a remarkable silence on the subject of the gun registry.

Yeah, I'm alive

Just a quick jot. I'm still in Edmonton. Been working on putting together a team of tradespeople to fix up the building, and getting all the paperwork and accounts in place. It's a ton of work; challenging and exciting.

The trades are the real challenge. We, and by 'we' I mean Canada, has spent the last thirty years teaching everyone that the trades were lesser than the professions, and that anyone important went to university. We've ignored and belittled the trades. Took apart the apprenticeship programs.

In my industry we've felt it most heavily. Trades like watchmaking, hand engraving, even gold-smithing are dying. Nobody is taking them up.

The irony is that my friends who took up a trade are almost invariably better off than my friends who went to university and are carrying between 30,000$ and 80,000$ worth of student debt. Judging by where they stand, I don't see the professionals catching up in the next few years... compounding interest works both ways....