The 2026 Fibrations Festival in Fernwood, Victoria BC. Being tempted to buy more yarn is never dangerous!
It’s hard for people to know this until they get there, but money has such diminishing returns. Once you can buy dinner and not worry about it, everything beyond that is just marginal square footage in a second home or an extra-comfy seat on an airplane. However, wealth can be useful if you see money as a system. I have more “system points” than others, so if I want, I can donate money to my kids’ school or fund businesses that I think are interesting. Accumulating wealth for its own sake is creatively bankrupt. But deploying it to move needles you care about moving is a super-good use of time and energy.
Startup CEO Daniel Eberhard, interview with Macleans, 10 August 2026
Eberhard is newly rich and elsewhere in his interview sounds like he has been hanging out with bad company who tell him he is more productive than a homemaker who raises children and organizes or a bus driver who keeps the local makerspace going. I think he is smart enough to understand why the rest of us don’t like a few people who were lucky in their parents or lucky in business moving so many needles. But I don’t know he has seen where this kind of thinking leads as well as Agatha Christie saw in 1952.
This small business in downtown Victoria has diversified to selling pizza and wine. But that would not protect it if a tsunami washes away the city or the next government decides that anyone who owns an ethnic restaurant is un-Canadian and should have their business confiscated and sold at auction
(The following is outside my usual topics but its an area of my expertise that I have not found anyone else talking about).
Wise investors use diversification to reduce risk. Any one investment might fail for many different reasons, but many different investments are unlikely to fail together. Additionally, what causes one investment to do poorly often causes others to do well. Rising energy prices hurt manufacturing (which buys energy) but not energy companies (which sell it). Rising wages hurt employers with many low-wage employers, but benefit businesses who sell to consumers. Classically, bonds and stocks tend to move in opposite directions under a given type of pressure, so almost all long-term investors will benefit from holding some of both. For most of history opportunities for diversification were limited, and a prudent investor might buy several plots of land, invest in a ship’s cargo, and make some loans to neighbours. In the 20th century, mutual funds allowed small investors to own dozens of different assets for low but significant costs. Today anyone with a bank account in Canada can buy an index fund that holds thousands of different assets around the world for around 0.25% of their investments per year. However, most of these funds lack one important type of diversification.
Graphtreon is awesome! Patreon is awesome! But Patreon is also another giant institution which we are are asked to trust but don’t have a way to verify
Patreon is essential for funding many types of digital creations. Patreon is not the best at processing payments or building and running websites. So a lot of us are very interested in them as a business because they offer an alternative to surveillance advertising and creating merchandise or face-to-face services to sell, but they seem kind of flimsy. Because they are a private business, we have to guess a lot. One of the things we have to guess about is whether they are a $24 million / year business or a $120 million / year business. (All sums in this post are in US dollars).
