I wonder why you left out these parts of the article…

“Mark Carney is being elevated much the way Justin Trudeau was… What I am most shocked about is that everybody seems to think that this is some kind of radical departure and that Trump’s belligerents is driving Canada reluctantly into the arms of Beijing. Is there anyone who can explain to me, or tell me, that if Kamala Harris had been elected a year and a bit ago in the American election, do we really think that Mark Carney would have done anything different? This is bread in the bone with these people. It is what they do and what they have always done. Whatever you make of any of this, could you please leave off with this business that Trump is driving us into the arms of China. This is where the Trudeau Liberals unfortunately feel most comfortable. It goes back to Justin Trudeau’s dad. What is happening here is the revival and reconstitution of a lot of protocols and MOUs that were in place during the Justin Trudeau period, the Dominic Barton period, before the Chinese pushed the envelope a bit by kidnapping Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, and before the public revelations about the degree to which the Chinese were influencing and monkey-wrenching our federal election system.”

“Mélanie Joly musing about Canada and China building EVs together – this is just the same old story of the Liberal Party of Canada elites turning a blind eye to Trojan horses for Chinese intelligence infiltration, stealing of Canada’s world-leading technology like the Nortel case… Why is Mark Carney moving ahead with these absurd deals? My theory is… Scott Bessett at the White House is saying, ‘Who’s Carney working for?’ Look, he is trying to thread the needle between his patrons, the industrialists in Montreal that I’ve reported have been in bed with the Chinese communist elite, along with Jean Chrétien for decades. He is working with and for them. He is working for a majority. His elbows up rhetoric is still winning, anti-US, anti-Donald Trump. They’ve got a ticket to be a majority government for a long time unless Canadians smarten up. Here is the key: Mark Carney knows that if we don’t get an American trade deal, China doesn’t even care about us anymore – we matter because of our trade integration with the U.S. and the world.”

Gee, I wonder who’s viewpoint this article is trying to push.

Plus quoting The Epoch Times? Yikes.

Honestly, this could be a good thing. It may look like more misconduct is happening, but it also could be the same amount as always. Only now it’s coming to light and being dealt with.

ACAB, but maybe, just maybe, there’s a little bit of light on the horizon?

A number of issues stop that from being possible.

First, a flare is meant to be an emergency system. You send material to the flare because something has gone wrong, like a fire or a leak. There needs to be a clear path from the plant to the flare to make it as easy as possible to remove the material from the plant, so putting a turbine in the path could impede that.

Second, flares are typically used intermittently. Optimally, they would never need to be used at all, but the reality is they will be used. So that turbine would be sitting there on standby, producing nothing most of the time. And then it would suddenly be producing a lot, to the point where there could be too much gas for it to handle and the turbine would have to be shut down.

Third is cost. Gas turbines are expensive to maintain, and a gas turbine that’s sitting there giving you nothing most of the time is even more expensive cost/benefit wise.

I agree with you about the harms social media causes. It’s not helping matters at all, and actively harms people. But so does alcohol. Drinking can relax people, make them feel numb and happy for a short while. Doesn’t help them at all. But we don’t point the finger at alcohol, we say it’s a symptom of a larger problem. In this case I’m saying social media consumption is the same, just a symptom of a larger problem.

And like alcohol, it doesn’t actually help at all. It just takes a person’s mind off their problems for a while. It lets them unplug and just mindlessly scroll Tiktok or Instagram. Say stupid shit on Twitter.

Building community is an answer to this problem. Arguing on the internet is like yelling at the void, where speaking in person tends to make someone think more and be more mindful of what they say, since the repercussions are immediate and right on front of you. And it’s just better for the person too, getting to feel that connection to other people.

The problem though, is that it takes a lot more effort, time, and money to participate in community. The people I’m talking about, simply can’t. They don’t have that time, energy, or money. They can’t afford to meet friends for dinner, even at each other’s homes. They can’t go meet friends at a nearby park because they’re exhausted from work. They can’t go hang out at a friend’s place because of the time commitment. The couple of hours they might have at the end of the day is spent browsing simply because it’s low energy and doesn’t cost them anything more. It’s the only thing that lets them unwind, or unplug, or blow off some steam.

I think the answer is to have the community meet these people where they are. That’s a huge undertaking though, which is probably why we haven’t seen very much of it yet. But it’s going to be sorely needed.

You’re wrong about about what’s causing the apathy and disinterest. It’s not being caused by phones and tablets, social media addiction, or doomscrolling. Those are symptoms of the real problem.

That 22 year old cashier is zoning out because that’s their 2nd or 3rd job, and they’re exhausted. Those folks who refuse to watch the video? Some of them simply can’t, because they’re burnt out from just trying to survive. Those cynical kids with no hope for the future? After 2 recessions and a pandemic, that’s kept them out of the jobs market, I can’t blame them.

A lot of people are struggling to survive. Struggling to ensure they can keep a roof over their head, struggling to afford groceries, struggling to afford that car they need to get to the 2 or 3 jobs they work.

The cost of living is ridiculous now, and wages are stagnant. A large amount of people are simply surviving. All their energy is going to getting their basic needs met, and not all are able to meet those needs. They can’t spare the attention to care about the rest of the world, when they are worrying about which bill to pay and which can wait. Or how to keep that car running just a bit longer until they can get it fixed.

Trump and his goons are absolutely taking advantage of this too. Don’t fight back, or we’ll make things worse. Argue with us and we’ll take away that benefit you’re using to survive. So you’re absolutely right when you say something has to be done. And the sooner, the better. But understand that for those folks we are talking about, they won’t be able to help. Not yet. Unfortunately, things will have to get worse before they are forced to act. And not “ICE is killing more people” worse. It’ll be “I’m getting evicted, I can barely afford to eat, and a lot of people I know are the same.”

Time to warm up the popcorn machine.

Do you really think that there won’t be multiple models even if the bubble bursts? The “best” models are from China and are open source. “We” don’t control China at all! So I don’t see this as likely.

There likely will be a few models remaining when the dust settles, but considering the sheer cost, scale, and power requirements of the data centers the current ones need, I could see one company buying up the rest when the bubble crashes. I don’t want this to get political, but the models coming from China are incentivized to follow the government’s policies regarding information control. They already answer certain questions with government sanctioned answers, or outright refuse to answer. I don’t see them remaining open source for long, and their datasets even less so.

What I DO have an issue with is Mozilla turning its users into training fodder for the AI companies - instead of just building that private AI they keep jawboning about.

This is a fair concern. I don’t use the AI chat bots, and I try to not use the AI answers that pop up with searches. And I refuse to use the generative AIs. But I’m a minority it seems. Thousands of people use these AIs everyday, many of them by choice. So the real question becomes, do we want them using browsers like OpenAI’s new browser, that will likely mine everything they do for their datasets? Or do we want a browser that can limit what these AIs can scrape up, like Firefox?

We’re losing the battle against AI. The amount of people using it keeps growing. Just look at the people using Grok to argue with each other on Twitter. Or the students getting ChatGPT to write their essays. We need to build alternatives that aren’t controlled by billionaires, massive corporations, and venture capitalists. But that’s going to take time. And until we get there, we should be mitigating the damage as best we can, by giving privacy-focused alternatives when using AI.

These aren’t great choices. But if I have to choose between them, I’d rather back Mozilla.

Why not both? (I know lots of folks will hate this take, but please hear me out.)

Because let’s be real: AI is not going away. Yes, we’re all waiting for the AI bubble to bust. And I really want it to, these companies are getting so terrible. But when it bursts, AI isn’t going to disappear. It will condense down to a few companies, or even just one. Do you want one company controlling all the AI out there? Controlling all the answers AI gives? Saying how you or others can use it?

Mozilla claims they want to develop responsible AI. They say they want to make their AI private, and work on-device. I believe we should be encouraging this, so that we don’t end up with control of AI in the hands of Google, Meta, or Musk.

We need alternatives, badly. Because AI is here to stay, no matter how much we hate it. This Pandora’s Box has already been opened, and things aren’t going back.

While I subscribe to that same kind of thinking, others will not. They will see it as being forced to share the rewards of their hard work with others who, in their opinion, didn’t work as hard. Put another way, they see themselves as having taken on the responsibility of caring and providing for themselves, and policies like that would force them to also care for someone else who isn’t meeting that responsibility.

It’s a simple take, but not completely wrong. There will be people who will take advantage of others generosity, shirking the responsibility to care and provide for themselves, and keep demanding more. And there’s also the reality of government waste and corruption siphoning that “hard work” away.

It ignores the many realities out there, like how not everyone gets the same starting point in life and not everyone has the same abilities. But its simplicity is its strength. It explains things in a way that is easy to understand. I worked hard, they didn’t. I didn’t get handouts when I was struggling, so why should they.

This is why I think the way to convince these people to do the right thing is to reward those who do vaccinate with a tax credit or payout. It makes it fair across the board, and makes those who still choose not to vaccinate understand the cost of that choice. Or at least see that there is a cost to the choice.

A study, that could give a hard number of the average cost per patient, broken down by vaccinated and unvaccinated, could go a long way to proving the point. The recent measles outbreak would be a great place to start.

I wonder if the numbers could back that up? Like the cost of treatment of an unvaccinated child getting a preventable disease, versus a vaccinated child getting the same disease? Also, the number of children in each group? No vaccine is 100% after all.

There could be an actual cost to the healthcare system for choosing to not vaccinate. If that’s the case, creating an incentive like a tax credit for vaccinating could be an effective way of reducing cost overall.

I’d like to see someone study this, if they haven’t already.

That’s quite a click-baity title.

Drumpf and his tariffs are fucking up production, distribution and supply chains should be the actual title.

I wish they had kept everything here in Canada, or just stopped shipping to the US, but that’s just not realistic. I think we will see more companies doing this unless there’s a new trade deal soon. And if Drumpf starts fucking with CUSMA next year, it could start all over again.

I hate that I laughed at this.

Carry on, shitposters.

ROCK AND STONE!

WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH WE’RE RICH

Why are you trying to bypass a security feature of your bank? Because that’s obviously what this is, so that nothing shady can happen in the background without your knowledge. This post seems pretty suspicious to me.

Maybe your interests are completely innocent, but this kind of bypass can and likely has been used nefariously.

OP, please stop linking to your posts. Cross post the original. Doing this stops folks on other instances from interacting with the original post easily.

S

First of all, there’s no “one size fits all” approach to flirting with women in my experience. So if things aren’t going well when talking with a woman, understand it might not be something you’re doing wrong, you may not be compatible with them.

If I had to describe confidence, I’d say it’s a quiet thing. It’s not loud and brash, bragging about your accomplishments or your belongings. It’s not the clothes you wear or how much you go to the gym (while these things can help you to feel more confident, they don’t create confidence that’s not there). Confidence is feeling comfortable with yourself, comfortable in your own skin. And here’s the weird part: confidence is letting go of the desire to be with the woman, and just letting the conversation go where it goes. By not focusing on your goal, you free yourself to enjoy the moment and you will find it so much easier to have that conversation.

I was happy that you were back, Stamets.

Was.

Mostly just kidding!

I didn’t see it suggested yet, but you should check out Selaco. It’s a fairly new FPS with tight gunplay and retro graphics. The enemies AI is well made, they will work together to hunt you and try to flank you. The weapons are a mix of standard fare with some new stuff, and you can modify them with upgrade packs similar to how Doom 2016 does it. The upgrades give each weapon a good variety for different play styles.

The first chapter is released and playable, and there are 2 more chapters coming. The first chapter has a good amount of gameplay, I put 35 hours in it.

I’ll read the Consumer Reports reviews and see what the comments say. Their rankings can give you an idea of the models to avoid at least. Even in the same brand, one model can be wildly different from another model simply due to who the real manufacturer was, or just the parts used.

Sometimes the reviews are detailed and thorough, but sometimes they only list the basics. Usually for the appliances they go in depth in my experience.