GreenBeard

Canada would like to declare all sales final. America bought him, he’s your problem now.

Perhaps they should hold a rally outside SCOTUS. I’m sure _tourists would love to see the nation’s highest court.

Your vibrations in the ether seem distressed my friend. A nice warm cup of tea will help re-balance your humours.

Standard operating procedure. Every engineer knows the old rule: On time, On Budget, Done right; pick 2. No one ever picks option 3, public or private.

Well… some would go directly to next of kin, some would be claimed by banks to repay the loans they live on, and most would end up in the private “charitable” foundations they use to evade taxes (which are themselves usually operated by some blend of next of kin and their ideological proteges). There’s a complex web of ways they avoid that money falling into public hands, but the general answer “None” is correct.

Yeah, it’s a parachute, not a concrete floor. It’ll slow things down, it won’t stop the price spiral.

I will NEVER support the cutting of a sales tax.

I mean, I won’t speak for you, but a lot of sales taxes are regressive, hurting the average consumer a lot more than those who can and should be paying more (on account of their benefiting from the common infrastructure more, while also placing greater strain on it), but I will concede there are sales taxes that make sense, and fuel taxes are one of them.

Misdirection. You’re comparing the equivalent of small local retailers with a multinational mega-corps the scale of Amazon. Such projects are a rounding error in the wider market.

But how does being fed useful information, coding for us, providing interesting stories, a caring AI boyfriend or girlfriend lead us to enslavement?

The “Usefulness” of this information is questionable at best, and wildly incorrect all too often. “Coding for us” is a double edged sword in that it makes an appealing shortcut, while also leaving us at extreme risk when it makes what is all too often a critical mistake we don’t understand, a problem which will only get worse as we gradually forget how to code for ourselves. Also, it’s not a “Caring AI Boyfriend” its a simulacrum of human interaction that does not care about anyone or anything. It’s a Lovecraftian horror dressed up as a relationship. A perversion that treats humanity as a disease to be treated into remission.

I’m hopeful there may even be republican dissent for all the overstepping.

Ever the optimist. Republicans grumble about other Republicans, they don’t do anything about them. Republicans don’t have principles, they have talking points and disdain for their neighbours. They don’t have morals, they have self-righteousness.

Wistfully wishing we’d heeded good sense 50 years ago doesn’t change the present. Supporting Canadians is a very nice sentiment, but for the 5 million or so Albertans (or at least the 3.5 million who aren’t absolute lunatics) it’s as hollow as “thoughts and prayers.” What “just energy transition” options are there, when we already sold off our only state oil company 25 years ago? Where’s the copper and lithium projects, the domestic manufacturing jobs, the public works infrastructure to make living and working outside the St. Lawrence corridor viable in this country? Where are the geothermal plants that make use of our skills and tools for drilling to replace dirty oil, coal and gas plants? Why are all our investment dollars in foreign tax havens instead of building a Canada worth living in?

I am so sick and tired of the UCP and the CCP. I’m tired of this country bending over backward for foreign oil. At the same time, you can’t feed a family on sentiment.

It’s even more insane than that. We have a wealth of natural geothermal in some regions, yes. We also have a wealth of tools, expertise, and geography for deep-bore geothermal on the prairies. We’ve already had prototype geothermal plants set up near Kindersley Saskatchewan and a proposed site in southern Saskatchewan. If we had the investment and regulatory framework, we could conceivably never have to burn anything to power or heat our homes again between existing hydro and geothermal power, supplemented with solar and wind. We just don’t because our “leaders” both business and public have no vision or ambition.

Change is scary to people. Especially in an environment when every other sector is contracting in this province. We wouldn’t even be viable as a territory without our primary export. Alberta is not a self-sustaining economic zone, we exist because of exports and we can’t seem to attract investment of any kind outside of oil projects. Our agricultural product is a fraction of our oil revenue, and all our other mineral wealth is under-developed. Alberta doesn’t have the wealth internally to fund any of our own infrastructure. The vast majority of the wealth from our resources end up in foreign hands, and we’re only allowed enough of a share to maintain existing standards.

Now, would it make more sense to use part of that 30 billion to build up other industries? Sure. But then we’re gambling on unproven markets and supply chains, and at the end of the day, we (collectively as a province) are cowards. Yeah, you heard that right, Convoy Albertans are obnoxious barking dogs who are trying to look threatening while pissing themselves in sheer terror that we might end up losing everything. They’re not “aggressive”, they’re staring at an apocalypse as big to them as AI is to white collar workers. The rest of Canada won’t help us when we go down. It’s not useful to argue about whose fault that is, so lets leave it at “there’s blame to go around.” The corporate owners in the US aren’t going to lift a finger to help us either, in spite of what many of my fellow Albertans think.

So we bet on what we know used to work, and hope this is temporary despite all evidence our province is a “Dead Man Walking.” If we we had any kind of backstop at all we might shift our priorities instead of doubling down on an industry that’s slowly killing us, but Bay Street has always seen us as a resource colony with one resource and there’s nothing to suggest that is ever going to change. A lot of ink has been spilled pointing out Alberta without Canada is basically a dead end, and they’re right. No one is willing to confront the fact that Alberta WITH Canada is also a dead end. Desperate people make bad choices.

Edit: Grammar

It’s only as environmentally destructive as the environment in which it operates, if you train your AI in France using Nuclear power it is effectively carbon free training is it not? The biggest limitation on the carbon use of AI appears to be entirely limited to how fast or slow the USA transitions to renewable energy.

Distracting hypothetical - ie a red herring. The question is not is it conceivable to build AI in a way that isn’t inherently environmentally destructive. It isn’t being done. Not at scale, nor is there any plans to do so. There’s no intention to reduce reliance on fossil fuels powering datacenters. There isn’t even a suggestion of intention to give lip-service to the problem so fantasizing about it serves no purpose.

enrich themselves? I thought AI was a massive money losing adventure bubble that was about to pop?

These are not mutually exclusive. The golden parachute problem still exists.

enslave humanity? I thought AI was slop not worth of even being used because apparently all it does is hallucinate answers?

That it is worthless doesn’t make it not psychologically destructive. People want things that destroy their lives all the time. Drugs, gambling, AI sex bots, etc. We’ve known for a very long time there’s ways to hijack people’s behaviour and make them behave in ways that violate their values and good sense. The fact that AI slop directly engages in hacking our brains, and filling our heads with junk data and hallucinations is not internally inconsistent.

I think people should be very careful about how dependent they become on such things, because inevitably if adoption ever does creep up the spike in prices of accessing those models is going to be astronomically more than having some jingle writer slap something together. Right now they’re desperate for adoption but those servers aren’t free to run. If they’re ever going to turn a profit the fees for accessing these tools are going to be orders of magnitude more than any small business owner can afford, and by then, there won’t be any aspiring new artists to take a cash job; they’ll have either starved to death or moved on. You’re basically Wille E. Coyote-ing yourself off an advertising cliff using AI like that, and same for other similar uses.

If that’s the part you like, then you’d love the two battles of Mag Tuired. The absolute shenanigans the Tuatha De got up to fighting the Fomorians was legendary. Their analog of Tyr coming back with a silver hand that moves like flesh to replace his lost one and retake the throne of the gods was wild.

It’s as if they want to give everyone a reason to want to see them suffer. The greatest harm they do to these innocent families, but not far behind is the harm they do to the rest of the Jews worldwide. The state of Israel is the most anti-semitic organization since the end of Nazi Germany.

If you think Loki is fun, you should try the Fenian Cycle of Irish/Gaelic mythology. You’d probably get a kick out of the kid raised by his aunt the druidess and her warrior-woman “Roommate” who goes on to fight a giant boar, become a genius by sucking his thumb while cooking salmon, and to become leader of the high king’s own mercenary company after discovering his divine heritage.

It’s the fundamental problem of having no public housing construction. If the profits aren’t there, private developers just won’t build them. If we had something like a UK council-housing system, we could just build it and deal with recouping costs through other means or on longer time scales.

Has this ever actually been implemented? I see “windfall taxes” legislation floated every couple of years, when price gouging goes to 11. I never see anyone ballsy enough to implement it.

Rarely and never high enough to check price gouging.

It’s regressive in some ways, and not in others. If you’re completely unemployed, you might not drive but generally speaking low wage workers have to do the most commuting, often living furthest from their job, in places with poor transit access if any. They often are forced to use the least efficient older vehicles as well. The biggest savings however will be in commercial transport which would have been passed on through rising costs for groceries and essential goods, which again will hurt those already struggling more than the wealthy. Sudden unpredictable price shocks are always absorbed by the poor the most.