Problem is, we’ve never found a better system. They all suck, in various ways, many of them far worse than representative democracy. And that’s even if no one’s messing with the details of the setup to keep a certain group in power.

Personally, I favour Aqualung. But really, it’s all a matter of taste.

If we actually had superintelligent AI, I might be concerned. But what we have instead is stochastic parrots with no innate volition. In and of themselves, they aren’t dangerous at all—it’s the humans backing them that we have to be wary of.

It’s an American business (headquartered in California, which I’d bet is the jurisdiction where whatever law they’re citing is actually in force). A shame that can’t (yet) be used as a reason to prevent them from doing business in this country.

There are some circumstances where you’d be better off delivering pizzas. (As someone else already said, though, this guy is probably management and being very well-compensated for his on-call time.)

We haven’t had an entirely Canadian company, headquartered here and without significant cross-border supply chains, building consumer-grade vehicles in my lifetime (some commercial/industrial/military vehicles, yes, but not the kind of car you’d find parked in someone’s driveway). Vehicle design, one of the more important skillsets involved, isn’t done here for that segment. I don’t expect this to change in the near future. Basically, we have little chance of doing anything but importing this type of vehicle, either in complete form or as most of the parts. Doing the final assembly here uses similar skillsets to other manufacturing industries, so the workers could, in theory, be trained elsewhere.

That doesn’t mean we will lose the knowledge and skills needed to build transport. Those small actually Canadian producers of commercial, etc. vehicles can help us keep the important technologies in the country. Preferring them for government purchases and (if necessary) subsidizing them for corporate ones, even if they’re a bit more expensive, can help. And it doesn’t require us to compete in the consumer car market, where economies of scale are much more important. Given that, we should be importing consumer cars from as many places as can meet our safety and roadworthiness standards, to keep ourselves from becoming too dependent on any one source.

Yeah, where I am we’re getting what would have been typical January weather in the town where I grew up . . . which is ~400km north of here. And we’d had ~40 less years of global warming back then. This weather isn’t unprecedented or anything, but it’s still pretty damned cold.

Because AIs don’t understand physics. Or anatomy, given that Tux has three flippers here. (Nor do the upper swooshes make visual sense.)

Indeed. I would say that the Epstein Files were a distraction from this, except that I don’t think the people in power in the US understand quite what magnitude of blowback their actions are going to result in, even now.

I’ve often thought we should have continued burning the White House down every thirty years or so, just to keep 'em humble.

So what percentage of them would like Canada to annex the US?

Someone too lazy to update their listings to reflect a rising sticker price (or not wishing to do so for other reasons) isn’t too good to be true. If they’re an established business selling new-in-box items at more than the wholesale price they would have paid (around 50% of the lowest sticker price the good’s ever been sold at isn’t a bad estimate), then you may have found a genuinely good deal.

It’s when someone starts selling at below their cost (unless it’s obviously to clear out old inventory or the like) that things get suspicious.

You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.

Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.

Beyond weird. Dude tries to push this off on workmen who had scaffolding up against the building exterior, but what reason would they have had to make a tunnel between the units? This is just insane.

The document which governs this in Canada is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of the Constitution Act. The relevant portion is right at the beginning: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In other words, rights are not absolute, which allows things like laws against hate speech to be passed. Among the rights guaranteed by the Charter is “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”. Freedom of speech is a subset of that.

( Full text of the Charter )

(In fact, even in the US, the right to freedom of speech is not quite absolute, as there are laws against libel and slander.)

Ontario’s economy is heavily reliant on their auto industry that’s pretty tightly coupled to the US.

Looking over statistics in Wikipedia, it’s about 10% of the provincial economy, and not all automobile manufacturing in Canada is twinned to US companies (Honda and Toyota both operate plants as well, and probably have a better chance of competing with the Chinese companies). It’s nearly all concentrated in a handful of cities in Southern Ontario. Their local economies would be in trouble if the US automakers pulled out, but I think the province as a whole would weather it, although some of Ford’s more ambitious and useless projects would have to be put on hold due to the drop in tax revenue. Some of the factories and resource streams could probably be offered to non-US automakers or moved to manufacturing armoured vehicles, which (unfortunately) it looks like we may need more of anyway.

So, Ford is kind of speaking up for the short-term interests of a small, vocal subset of his constituents. The rest of us, not so much.

I suspect they’re making an unwarranted assumption that the experimental patient ended up with high cholesterol due to excessive consumption of animal products (rather than, say, a genetic defect that would cause them to overproduce it regardless of diet) and applying some typical vegan arguments regarding livestock farming. No need to listen to them.

Remember, Windows will install updates without user intervention. If you remove things, it just puts them back.

Some people seem to need the psychological crutch religion provides them with in order to function, and I’d no more take it away from them than I’d take a physical crutch away from someone in a leg cast. I have no issue with people who want to pray or carry out ceremonies in private or in a public building clearly marked out for the purpose. If you voluntarily enter a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. then you should expect religion.

The problem is forcing religion on people who don’t need or want it, including children. In other words, the real issue is proselytization (trying to either encourage people to join your religion, or shame them into it) aimed at random members of the public. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it should be treated as much more impolite than it currently is.

Sounds like the soil failure taking place was natural under those conditions, but the conditions themselves were not entirely natural. Situations like that make weasel-wording easy.