I hear you. I don’t want to get shafted either. I’m not a 1% elitist that can light $100k on fire and not care. I want people to get a break too, but we have to use our heads. We need to have a bare minimum level of domestic manufacturing. People still need jobs to eat, and we need to stop putting trust in people who don’t give a damn about us to do what’s best for us.

China, the US, the mega corps, they don’t care about any of us. If you die, if your children starve, if you are marching with pitchforks and torches in the public square, they don’t care. They are a million miles away and have zero skin in this game, they just show up and declare themselves the winner and demand your money.

We need ambition, we need to prove we can take care of ourselves because no one else will. That’s the only way we get a “break” from the relentless BS.

The people are the system. The prices are the product of systemic choices. Your Short Term break will end up costing you a fortune down the road when they’ve cornered the market and either Enshittification or price gouging ends up costing you your shirt in 10 years.

I don’t want to pay any more than you do, but “Screw tomorrow, today we feast” kind of mentality is how we got here in the first place. If we don’t think our way through this, we’re going to end up shooting ourselves in the face.

There are some justifiable reasons. Mostly responsibilities you can’t just walk away from. That said, anyone doing it recreationally should definitely be considered suspect.

Yes. Could be exciting in the near future. As the article points out, it’s a bit less power dense than lithium, and has a slightly worse power to weight ratio, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad, it’s just better suited for different market niches than lithium. I could see urban cab companies and other short range fleet uses preferring sodium-ion, as they’ll have a higher rate of cycling and wear, and the cheaper cost of a battery will represent a significant net benefit. I think consumer grade vehicles are going to prefer Lithium for the foreseeable future though.

Yes, I do think so. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

Seems a bit extreme. One can find the Trudeau era immigration program generally harmful, without putting the blame on immigrants or immigration in general. The reality is, it was a bad system. We had a relatively good thing going before he loosened the rules to let many times more new immigrants in than we had the infrastructure to support, for the sake of corporate lobbyists trying desperately to keep wages stagnant. The biggest villain there isn’t the people who arrived expecting a to work hard and earn their pay, it’s the greedy shills that straight up fabricated a labour crisis to get out of paying people a fair wage for their work.

Why are you defending the corporate ghouls who created this problem and lied to Canada and are engineering a conflict between us to hide their own crimes.

Granted, a bad move trusting the lobbyists screaming about a labour shortage, but it seems … counter productive… to jump from the idiots who trusted the corporate shills straight into the arms of the corporate shills themselves. That’s the definition of going from the frying pan into the fire.

Where are those “But the Blue collar vote…” geniuses.

She’s engineering a backlash against the justice system. By finding way to defund the justice system, she’s amplifying the already revolving door nature of the courts to justify brutal police crackdowns. By manufacturing a crisis she can engineer public consent for independence.

Harm reduction is good. What BC did though is deeply incomplete and caused more harm than it reduced.

Right now the Sodium-ion tech is still in its infancy. It’s higher priced than it will be as the market scales. I expect it will find more use in stationary storage capacity than mobile devices as it’s power density is a bit lower, but the material cost is much lower and therefore potentially useful for utility grade or home power banks. It’s theoretically able to benefit from a lot of the same technology that Lithium cell batteries use, so cross-chemistry innovation potential is high.

What is the endgame here? If you were dictator of the world, how would you even propose ‘fixing’ this? It’s one thing to be angry, but point that anger in the direction of something that is actually possible to change.

Ban all for-profit use of LLMs or generative AI products. The models are in people’s hands now, we can’t stop that, but we can end their monetization. Selling AI tools or products should be considered on the same level as human trafficking with similar penalties.

A lot of proposals, but not a lot of approvals. Time will tell if their commitment to decarbonize holds but the fact developers are making proposals does not imply they’ll actually get approved. China is nowhere near as dependent on private corporate interests approval to maintain power and their clean energy export strategy is dependent on demonstrating domestic capacity gains.

Steel and concrete are the only industries that are going to continue to be coal dependent in the foreseeable future. China is already investing heavily in new plasma drilling tech for tapping deep, closed loop geothermal to augment nuclear, solar, hydroelectric and wind capacity. If Chinese battery tech continues to improve sufficiently to increase build out of utility grade power storage facilities, they’ll have more than enough capacity to continue to wean off coal for power. Their power grid makes the North American grid look positively quaint and backward already.

An AI tool is not going to produce higher quality work than a professional human.

Yes it will, because there will cease to be professional humans. If there’s no development pipeline, no one is going to achieve the pinnacle of art, because there’s no return on that investment. The AI will become better than any human, not by raising the standard by by kneecapping our ability to reach higher.

It’s ironic you chose to compare it to computers because we’ve seen that the generational decline in mathematical ability has fallen off a cliff as people now don’t even have to think about how numbers work. We have college graduates with zero reading comprehension or writing ability because they’ve never had to independently develop those skills. We have vanishing competency in critical analysis and the ability to carry a dialogue at levels that were considered natural and intrinsic a handful of generations ago. Everywhere we see the constant erosion of the capability of achieving objectives that are less than a generation removed from us. We’re not talking about forgetting how to knap flint or the decline of the buggy whip maker. We’re talking about the intrinsic capacity of the human mind to engage with the world suddenly becoming an investment on which there is no chance of return in a single human lifetime, because there is no economically sustainable path from raw novice to professional.

AI will absolutely surpass us, not by raising the bar, but lowering it into hell under a firehose of garbage.

Sure, if you built an AI on your own machine, trained it entirely on public commons and voluntarily obtained data with the active consent, and powered it entirely on solar power and wind turbines, to do jobs without intrinsic value to human development, people would have a lot fewer objections to it. But you didn’t. And you won’t, because it would take resources that exceed anything you have available to do so. Much like genetic modification, there are motives and methods that potentially have real value, but they don’t tend to have significant return on investment and so are simply not done, and what is done ranges from suspect to objectively exploitative. You cannot create an ethical AI in the current environment, if such a thing is even possible.

Excellent plan. I think it’s more essential than ever for people to leverage every organizing tool in the toolbox. We absolutely need to have a coordinating system for focusing the power of the various organizations working to strengthen and protect the people. I can see arguments both ways in terms of whether The Party should be the main coordinating vehicle or whether there needs to be a separate arm for internal coordination, but at this point, any ambition regarding expanding the scope of the movement is welcome.

“Quickly” is relative. We can move more quickly than we are certainly, while maintaining the forethought to prevent unnecessary harm, but we have to take a balanced approach. We don’t want to let perfect become the enemy of the good, but we also don’t need to make mistakes that cost us more down the road than we ever benefit from the development in the first place.

Or, better idea, stop using AI for creative work people find genuine personal fulfillment in, and eliminating any pathway to excellence. If you can’t afford to pay real people to create genuinely human artistic works, you’re a terrible business person and deserve to fail. It doesn’t make you a “Genius Creative” finding shortcuts to success, it makes you a pathetic hack with no independent talent, a parasite, and a miserly cheapskate on top of that.

Technically, it’s sedition. In every way that matters, it’s treason.

I wish I could find something. I’m in IT out in Alberta, and there’s only one market; big oil. If I could leave, I would, but my wife is a teacher and that’s not a career that migrates easily. I’m no fan of the UCP mismanagement and shutting down any opportunity for diversifying our economy, but we just can’t seem to overcome the rural conservative base. It’s like being tied to a rock and watching an avalanche coming straight for you.