Tags: AI

PASSPORT, PLEASE.

Trump Tower, Trump Hotel, Trump (and Kennedy) Center, Trump Institute, Trump Park, Trump Highway, Trump Boulevard and, as of last week, Trump Station (replacing Penn Station in New York), and Trump International Airport (replacing Dulles International in Virginia).

These last two are just possibilities for now. They’re the quo in the quid pro quo of Trump unfreezing billions of dollars in funding for a major New York infrastructure project. If Senate Democrats say yes to Trump’s offer, the taps will open. They’ve said no so far, though this is only the opening round of negotiations.

Read on…

ANNALS OF FRIENDSHIP.

I was meeting someone new for coffee. He’d come via a mutual friend and was starting a new career in his mid-50s that overlapped with mine. For 50-plus years, I’ve been more willing than most to meet with job-seekers because…you just never know where the conversation will go. So we met at a Starbucks on Bloor.

He’d e-mailed me his resume and I’d dutifully looked him up on LinkedIn so I wouldn’t have to waste time during our meeting by asking basic questions. I noticed he’d held a senior job at a company where one of my best friends had been the CEO before moving on.

After our usual unpleasantries about the Toronto weather, I said all bright-eyed that I was great friends with this other man who he must know as well because they must have worked together.

Read on…

HOW AI CAN DO YOUR BRAIN’S HEAVY LIFTING.

Back in June, I wrote a blog titled “How to use AI.”

Like many of us who earn our keep by our wits, I’d used ChatGTP and Perplexity as search engines on steroids. “What is Elon Musk’s e-mail ? “How will the new CFL rules make Canadian football more like American?” “Will we have rainbows day after day?”

Then I decided to use AI to plan. It did this shockingly well and lightning fast for a very specific trip to Japan.

I quickly learned AI’s uses are advancing so fast that what was earth-shaking last year is ho-hum today. For example, back in June, only a tiny fraction of Ontario physicians used AI to write up your visit, schedule referrals and prescribe medications. By next June, most of Ontario’s 18,000 family physicians will be using AI for that. So your doctor will actuallysee you and hear you when you come in for your physical. Game changer!

Read on…

AT 25, YOU WERE BARELY YOU.

Ask anyone to write a letter to their 25-year-old self and they won’t be kind.

Indeed, given the responses to our writing contest last month – we asked you to write a 100-word letter to your 25-year-old self — being 25 is one of the most arrogant, unknowing, unseeing and cringeworthy times of our lives. Did I really spend all that money on a watch? Hook up with a known psychopath? Treat my best friend like dirt? And don’t even talk to me about drinking and drugging. We’re lucky to be alive.

I remember back in the 80s my film festival friend, Helga Stephenson, asked if I would help her ‘chaperone’ a party for TIFF’s young financial supporters. They were all under 30. They were smart, attractive, fit and cocksure. They beamed with certainty. Helga said as we left: “Life hasn’t happened to them yet.”

True that.

Clearly, the older you drift from 25, the younger 25 looks. By the time you’re twice that age, life is often a muddle, or a slow-motion leap off the cliff. Get to threescore years and ten and it can be a tragedy in the making. Get to 80, and more tires are coming off the car than staying on.

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WEAPONS OF SELF-DESTRUCTION.

Last weekend our family went for its annual Thanksgiving Walk, a two-hour hike through Awenda Provincial Park above Georgian Bay. Behind me were my stepson and his 11-year-old daughter. Their conversation twisted and turned through as many subjects as they did navigating the fallen trees and winding forest paths. I was listening idly to their back-and-forth when I heard: “But when can I have a phone?”

I won’t say the skies clouded, but the mood changed at this, the most insistent question of our age. Because asking mom and dad when you can have your first phone has turned into asking them when you can have your first shot of heroin.

Clearly, this was not the first time she’d asked, and I was impressed by her father’s patience as he calmly listed all the reasons an 11-year-old shouldn’t have a mobile phone. “But Mary has one, and she’s 12!”

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STILL WAITING FOR THE CAVALRY TO COME.

The idea that there is no cavalry first hit me in 2005 when I saw the news reports fromHurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

Tens of thousands of people took shelter in the Superdome, and waited…and waited…for help to come. It never did. What came was looting and violence and other trappings ofLord of the Flies. How could this happen? This was America, for heaven’s sake.

It turns out I was right about the country, and wrong about the direction it was headed.

But this social collapse is also happening in Britain where not only is the National Health Service breaking down, but so is garbage pickup and public transit and immigration, and the police. Of course it’s worse in the US where being a white, Christian male can be the only defence against the predations of its government.

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OZEMPIC FOR ALL.

The word “Ozempic” first entered the language in 2018 when it was approved as a diabetes inhibitor. That same year, in what has to be the world’s biggest ‘off-label’ transference since the heart-disease drug Viagra became a multi-billion-dollar erectile dysfunction drug, Novo Nordisk started selling Ozempic as a weight-loss drug for very obese people.

Then in 2023, Ozempic and its fellow “GLP-1” drugs were shown to prevent strokes and heart attacks.

The next year, it made a claim to reduce kidney disease.

This year, it showed promising results in reducing the effects of Parkinson’s, as well as alcoholism and addiction, and to reduce obesity-related cancers as well.

My physician wife often says that the more unrelated diseases a drug claims to cure, the more it looks like snake oil. In the case of Ozempic, she’d be happy to be wrong. It really does look to be a universal solvent, curing most everything it touches. True, it’s so new that there hasn’t been time to understand its long-term effects. Maybe it will be the next thalidomide whose crippling effects revealed themselves not in its patients, but in their children.

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DON’T SKATE TO WHERE THE PUCK IS.

A quarter of a century back, my wife Jean and I formed a mid-life women’s running group to run the Marine Corps Marathon. Over its 7 years, JeansMarines took hundreds of women off the couch in February and trained them to cross the finish line in October at the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington DC, into the arms of a waiting US Marine.

JeansMarines needed financial sponsors to be viable, so we approached Nike, Adidas, New Balance and other usual suspects. They all turned us down. Wouldn’t even meet with us. This made no sense. These were professional women. They had Gold Cards. They spent without limit on their running gear.

Nope. Not interested. Then a friend who used to work for Nike told me why: JeansMarines were too old. At age 40 to 60, we were ‘off-brand.’ Nike’s brand was 20-to-40 year olds. “But the people who actually buy Nikes are 40 to 60,” I countered. “Doesn’t matter,” said my friend. “20 to 40 year olds are who they want to buy their shoes.”

Read on…

HOW TO USE AI.

If you read about AI and turn the page, thinking it’s not for you, or you’re too old to learn now, or technology and you never got along, or you use AI to do research or write papers, and stop there, you need to keep going. You must.

Because last week I used AI to plan a trip to Japan next year.

What I got back will not only change how Jean and I travel, but change how most everyone will travel. And travel itself, which is one of the world’s largest economic sectors, is a teensy thimbleful of what AI is already changing.

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YET ANOTHER EXISTENTIAL THREAT.

When I was a kid, the big fear, aside from a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, was too many people. The world’s population in 1960 was 3 billion, with predictions it would grow exponentially, until the earth collapsed from too many people living on its surface. Billions would starve or die of thirst.

That isn’t happening. In fact, the opposite is happening: the world is facing a catastrophic decline in population.

There may be more than 8 billion people alive today, but within just two generations, it’s predicted that the population will start to decline.

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UNDERTOURISM.

This week thousands of Canary Islanders marched against the 18 million tourists who visit the tiny Spanish island chain each year.

One marcher said, “We’re not against tourism. But the current model is predatory.” The Spanish government also removed 60,000 Airbnb listings across the country and by 2028 Barcelona will ban Airbnb completely.

Oh…and Amsterdam has banned the construction of new hotels, except to replace closed ones, and Florence has banned key boxes and guides with loudspeakers. Athens has limited visits to the Acropolis to 20,000 a day.

Read on…

GOING OUT AT THE TOP OF YOUR GAME.

Last year, the world’s authority on decision-making ended his life in a clinic in Zurich.

How Daniel Kahneman decided to do that is instructive. True, the Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking Fast and Slow was 90, but he wasn’t actively dying. He didn’t have cancer, or heart disease or Alzheimer’s. But as he wrote in an email to his close friends: “I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. Most people hate changing their minds, but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something.”

Read on…

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