Morrie the Toupee Salesman

Visiting Nova Scotia is refreshing - it’s far enough away from San Francisco/Silicon Valley so that any trend you observe is likely to be a real one, rather than a Silly Valley one. Some things I’ve noticed:

• Broadband is close to ubiquitous, even among late adopters like most of my friends.
• Ditto for wi-fi. It was pretty easy to find open access points around the city. A year ago it was not. A year from now I expect people to have discovered how to secure their open access points.
• Everybody, their grandparents, their grandkids, from 12-100, are on facebook. My niece, who is 13, says her entire middle school class is on (via lying about their age and/or grade level/school). On the other hand, it’s still very difficult to find people who have heard of digg.
• I predicted this year that the Canadian standard of living will soon surpass the US (I based this on my own version of Murphy’s Law - my family moved from Ireland to Canada right before the “Celtic Tiger” appeared). With a 20% appreciation of the loonie, and a flood of petro-dollars not just in Alberta, but also from offshore oil here on the east coast, I see that prediction rapidly becoming a no-brainer. Most of my friends have bought new houses, one made a couple of million from a dotcom deal (the prick), and another is making a quarter million a year (slightly less impressive when you consider that you can make that as a labourer in Alberta) doing a decidedly non-rockstar engineering job. And our neocons are slightly better than theirs - they don’t seem to show any indication of wanting to drown government in a bathtub — i.e. they haven’t put their ideology ahead of good fiscal management, or at least not yet. And Canada does not have the huge disparity in income that the US has, so any increase in wealth is likely to benefit the many, rather than the US way, where it all goes to the few. Oh, and the price of gas (admittedly already high) seems not to have changed significantly since last Christmas.