Well, it’s that time of year again. Time to reflect on the things I thought were important last year, and see what I got right, and what I got wrong. If you want to see my new year’s post from 2023, you can click here. After reading and reflecting on my resolutions for 2023, I noticed a trend. Things that required positive changes in my habits, such as doing those things to maintain good physical and mental health, or taking fewer pictures with more care, were doable.
In this the end of the year of 2023, I bought a brand new DVD box set from Wal-Mart of a new television series. This was Star Trek: Picard, which exists because of Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that first aired on September 28, 1987. Star Trek: Picard ended on April 20, 2023, and on November 25, 2023, I was able to buy all three seasons of this show on DVD mere months after this series ended, and there are some interesting coincidences which help to underscore some of the reasons why I decided to buy this series on DVD and waited to binge watch it until Christmas of 2023.
Spend enough time watching Youtube videos, and you will inevitably come across one that tells you all of the problems in our world today are due to capitalism. They tell us how capitalism is unnatural, and how a “Gift” economy came before capitalist economies. This I do not doubt, given that capitalism is estimated to have started around 500 years ago. Another thing that existed before capitalism is slavery, which dates back to ancient times, because one of the inherent problems of a gift economy is slavery; which, I would argue, is a problem that capitalism solves.
Welcome to my new domain, paulquirk.ca. I decided to change to this domain name for a number of reasons. My old domain name, pquirk.com, got its top level domain name from the word commercial, which I felt was misleading as there is often nothing commercial about the content I normally create and post here. As a Canadian citizen, the top level .ca domain name is more representative of me and my perspective as a person living in the western democracy of Canada.
So the unexpected just happened. I was involved in an automobile accident this morning. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. I was driving in the left lane on a four lane road following another vehicle, when another driver decided to move from the right lane into my lane, but apparently misjudged as the rear wheel of their car clipped my front bumper, sending them into what I can only describe as a self-inflicted pit maneuver .
