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If I Had $55 Million

Who remembers the hit song “If I Had A Million Dollars” by the Barenaked Ladies? When that song was released back in 1988, a million bucks was a lot of dough. One line says “If I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a house.”

Yep, not these days. You’d be lucky to get a 5th wheel for that now.

I seriously think the only way my children will ever be able to buy a house is if I win the lottery. Or if I die soon so they can have MY house. I do play the B.C. Lottery every now and then just for fun, but my pension will only stretch so far.

A lot of us dream of winning the lottery, like local Scott Gurney did recently. We think about what we’d buy, where we’d travel, who else we’d share it with. But I think reality might not quite live up to the dream. (Although I wouldn’t be adverse to testing that theory…just to be sure.)

I did win $90 once. And my husband won $900. But when you add up what we must have spent on tickets up to that point…well, I think the lottery corporation came out ahead.

I knew someone many years ago who won the lottery at the tender age of 19. $100,000 was a lot of money back then and he was pretty excited. Needless to say, he learned a lot from that experience.

All kinds of new “friends” came out of the word work. He was buying everyone dinner and drinks all the time, blowing all kinds of money on whatever came to mind. And he eventually ended up bankrupt.

Nineteen is too young an age to really understand what money is or does. It’s one thing to grow up financially privileged, another to suddenly become the richest kid on the block.

But age doesn’t even matter.

The fact is that a LOT of people who win the lottery end up in dire straits. In the U.S., for instance, one third of people who win lotteries end up bankrupt after 3 to 5 years. And many lottery winners struggle with depression and suicide, or end up divorced.

We just don’t know how to deal with a big stack of cash.

I’m convinced that coming into a lot of money all of a sudden does something to the brain. Not just yours, but everyone else you know too. Some of the people around you become needy or greedy. You have to learn to say “no”, and that’s not easy.

Not only that, but when you win the lottery, your face gets splashed all over the place, complete with the giant cheque and the confetti. Everyone finds out who you are, so there’s no way you can just take your winnings and quietly slip away somewhere.

So, out come the scammers. There have already been a number of fake Facebook accounts set up pretending to be Scott Gurney, trying to swindle people out of their money one way or another. It’s disgusting.

I do wish him well and hope that, for the most part, he’s able to enjoy his winnings.

I’ve decided that I don’t really need to win the lottery. It seems like a lot more trouble than it’s worth, and I’m doing just fine, thank you very much.

What’s money anyway? There are some things you really can’t put a price on, like family, good health, great friends. A sunny day. What more could a person possibly need?

I’m already a winner!

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De-Influencing: The New Trend!

Well, I don’t usually pay too much attention to new trends, but my curiosity was piqued the other day when I heard about something called “de-influencing”. Apparently “influencers”, those people you see pimping products on TikTok and the like, are becoming passé.

De-influencing is becoming a thing, and as of a couple of weeks ago, there were 160 million videos with the hashtag #deinfluencing on Tik Tok alone.

It’s going crazy out there!

If you don’t know what an “influencer” is, your gen is showing. Generation, that is.

Where it used to be Anne Murray promoting the bank or Mickey Mantle pushing smokes (okay, now MY gen is showing), lately it’s been celebrity wannabes looking for fame by creating videos of themselves trying all kinds of things.

But let’s get real. “Influencer” is really just a fancy word for advertiser. Everybody knows that the successful ones get paid very, very well for promoting stuff: trips, make-up, clothes, power tools, you name it.

The difference is that lots of people don’t realize they are being advertised TO. They just think they’ve seen the latest, greatest thing, and they’ve got to have it.

It’s Slinky! It’s Slinky! Who remembers that?

And there are plenty of companies and businesses willing to pay the big bucks to have these influencers, well, influence. Money, money, money. And lately, that’s what’s changing the game.

Right now, a lot of people, especially the younger ones, don’t have much money. Inflation has become a nightmare.

So in come the de-influencers. They’ve started creating videos telling you what NOT to waste your money on, what NOT to do. I don’t know, this all sounds really familiar to me…

Wait a minute! Now that I think of it, I am the original de-influencer! I must have told my kids a thousand times what not to do. And I definitely said “No!” to all the things they wanted me to buy them. I can confirm that I have been de-influencing since the 80’s!

I’m honestly thinking this new de-influencing thing might just be a scam. Maybe the de-influencers just want you to start trusting them before they end up selling you stuff just like the influencers do. More like a “don’t buy THAT, buy THIS” sort of thing.

Whatever.

I’ve never had Tik Tok on any of my devices, but whoever still does is asking for trouble. There are national security concerns, ongoing investigations and bans everywhere. You never know who might be able to access your personal information, so I would suggest you just get rid of it.

There, did I de-influence you? Yep. See how good I am?

With AI, Who Needs Creators?

I was a Computer Operator back in 1982 when the Vancouver Public Library decided to automate their entire library system. Some library patrons were quite worried at the time about having their personal information stored somewhere where anybody could see it.

What a difference a few decades makes. Today, just having a Google account means you can literally be followed, and advertised to with “relevant” ads. And who-knows-who can get access to all kinds of information about you.

I don’t have anything against technology, obviously, having been witness to “Gutenberg Two”. That was what the computer was characterized as back then, in the book by David Godfrey. Gutenberg One was the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg.

The printing press was a revolution in terms of information and the ability to access and spread it to whoever could read. The computer was another evolution in that sequence.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, appears to be a revolution of another kind. And now it’s getting weird.

One of the latest apps, ChatGPT, is a chatbot that can “converse, create readable text on demand and create novel images and video”. It’s also stirring up trouble.

The creators of ChatGPT basically used material that was already out there to teach the bot how to create its own content.

Kids are have started using it to “write” essays in school. A new level of cheating. Those darn kids.

There’s a children’s book being marketed on Amazon that was created using ChatGPT. Even the illustrations are created by a text-to-image AI tool. It took the “creator” a weekend to put it together and start selling it.

Now my mind is racing. Maybe I won’t have to spend hours and hours on my writing ever again because ChatGPT can do it for me!

But what’s the point? When it comes to art, a text-to-image AI tool could never be a modern day Da Vinci. Or could it? And even worse, what if nobody cares?

Well, artists do.

In fact, there are two lawsuits against an AI company happening right now in the U.K. and in the U.S. Part of the argument in the U.K. suit initiated by Getty Images is that this AI company “illegally scraped” content from their website in order to train the tools to create images.

Lawyers for the artists in the suit say that this is breaking copyright and other laws, and they are suing for billions. They argue that “because the AI system only ingests images from others, nothing it creates can be original.”

Copying the great artists has been going on for centuries, but this takes it to a whole new level.

So, should writers be worried about chatbots?

Some writers may be concerned about the potential for chatbots to replace human writers in certain roles, such as news or content generation. However, it is also possible that chatbots could be used to enhance the work of human writers, by providing assistance with research, editing, or other tasks.

Well, that’s what ChatGPT told me anyway. Yes, that last paragraph was bot-generated after I posed the question on the ChatGPT website.

So I decided to ask the bot the age old question.

Was it “what is the meaning of life?” No.

Instead I asked “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

There was a long pause. Did ChatGPT recognize a tongue-twister?

Then came the answer: “According to a study by wildlife biologist Richard Thomas, a woodchuck, also known as a groundhog, would chuck approximately 700 pounds of wood if a woodchuck could chuck wood. However, in reality, woodchucks do not chuck wood as they primarily burrow in soil and do not have the physical ability to chuck wood.”

Smart a$$.