Does anyone remember "learn to code"[1] being offered as a solution to blue collar workers displaced by outsourcing and free trade? Funny how the worm turns.
Property is a social construct in the sense that anything is a social construct. Like, sure, the fact that I "own" this spoon is societally constructed, but it's so foundational that almost every other aspect of human society is more abstract. Even animals have some sense of "property" - whether that's territory they defend or their stash of food. The social construct part is that we respect each other's property rights (mostly) without resorting violence, where animals resort to individual violence or threat displays.
Well, no, the physical laws aren't social. An apple falls whether there is a social group to see it or not.
And yes! Animals are a perfect example. Mother Nature came up with a nice strategy for maximal benefit in a social group, and she encoded it in our instincts and intuitions.
But that doesn't mean it's perfect. I have an instinctual fear of fire - but it's still better to cook my own food.
IP is obviously not "real" like physical property is real. Moreso, IP is a restriction on free speech as it walls off some expression as "Copyrighted" so you can't legally express it yourself without paying someone for the privilege.
That's not to say that IP is useless, but treating IP infringement as "stealing" was always a problematic shorthand. Previously, calling IP infingement "stealing" was the domain of corporate interest groups like the RIAA or MPAA, but with AI the winds have turned and supposed anti-corporate lefties are keen to treat IP infringement as theft to attack AI companies. There's very little intellectual consistency on either side of aisle here.
It's actually worse than that. IP laws trump property laws because they prevent you from using your property in ways you would otherwise be able to. It's nothing more than base rent seeking.
What's the straight line? I foresee catastrophe of the social media kind, where even more folks get brain worms from consuming AI information, but I don't foresee a physical catastrophe. How AI goes from "hallucinates all the time" to "self-improving superhuman thinker" to "being able to destroy the world" involves a bunch of logical leaps that are not exactly sound. At a bare minimum, how does a hostile AI secure the data centers it needs to operate from physical attacks like bombings? How does it defend undersea cables from being cut?
The real short term catastrophe is probably going to be economic and not in the sense of AI taking everyone's jobs, but rather in the sense of an economic crash due to AI overinvestment.
Your mistake is framing this as "skynet vs unified human resistance led by john connor". In reality it's "human players in the existing class war suddenly curb stomped by software".
Think less "skynet" and more "a corporation without any humans in it". What defends it from physical attack? Same things that defend Google from physical attack now. Everything that AI will make worse, we already have. AI just supercharges it, lets it scale, lets it run without even the inconvenience of suppressed empathy (if it doesn't seem like that's constrained corporations much so far, let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes without any humans in the loop).
There won't be a human resistance. There may be people who resist, but the police will arrest them. Existing power structures will continue to be neatly and elegantly coopted. Extinction doesn't look like HKs roaming the landscape, it looks like human survivability simply being economically untenable in the economy of tomorrow.
They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.
There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.
I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
It's mostly the emissions from diesel generators which many DCs use as it's far too expensive to ever shut them down. Often diesel generators are used to lighten the load on a power grid as well, so many DCs will run generators 24/7.
That source of power, since our grid is so outdated and struggles with the weight of these power-hogs, EVs as well as increased usage of AC during the summers create some dangerous conditions.
There is the risk of heavy metals getting into the water supply as the copper degrades but that will only be a problem down the line, that's prescient but not yet realized.
> I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
I agree; however I would not want a DC or a refinery, smelter or steel mill anywhere near my town. We have industrial districting for that reason, and because a lot of DC projects want to be put next to lakes and water sources, this causes issues for the residents.
In the case of one amazon data center, they were pulling in water that already had nitrates in it due to agricultural run off, but it wasn't enough nitrates to cause a problem for anyone until the data center came. It pulled in a massive amount of water, a lot of which was evaporated and that left behind water with very high concentrations of nitrates.
Normally, the nitrates would be filtered naturally and would mostly remain in the top layers of soil. Amazon pumped out 10s of millions of gallons of the vastly more contaminated water. It was so much water that it was forced much deeper into the ground. It was pushed deep enough to reach the aquifer which contaminated the water source for an entire community of 45,000 people.
Suddenly the water coming out of people's taps was polluted at 10x the federal level for safe drinking water. People got sick. Cancer rates spiked. Babies died. Amazon was forced to settle and pay out 20 million for water treatment and to dig new deeper wells for the community.
> I'm willing to bet that a data center creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
This is whataboutism. The existence of other bad things, or even worse things, doesn't make data centers good. They are a problem for the environment regardless of whatever else is also a problem and that's something that needs to be considered every time someone wants to build one. The companies who build and operate data centers should be held 100% accountable for the harm they cause.
Giving Alberta a market where they can sell LNG might get them on board, but this would also require a bunch of new infrastructure (pipelines? ports?) that I suspect the Canadian government will not want built.
It would be lovely to get Europe off of Russian energy imports.
One of the major problems of Canada is it's essentially a line of provinces east-west. It means you cannot simply route around a province with unreasonable demands, everyone must be placated, and the resource region of Alberta is seriously landlocked.
This has bred an economy of rent seekers and real estate at the expense of almost everything else. There are reasons that the best and brightest of Canada enthusiastically leave en masse to the place that Canadians claim to detest most of all, which leads to a sort of self loathing complex with the ones that stay; they are utterly mystified by the idea that anyone with any skills/talent whatsoever would want to move to Canada, it's truly mind boggling. (This is why I prefer Quebec - it's got enough people in it that really like Quebec a lot).
> you cannot simply route around a province with unreasonable demands, everyone must be placated, and the resource region of Alberta is seriously landlocked.
Retconned horseshit that emanates from idiot chambers.
The US is a big country next door, and historically the two economies and trade have been very tightly integrated. So Alberta hooks into the US pipeline system, as cooperative players in a continental energy system, and so does Ontario. There was never a critical reason to make significant East/West pipelines, in the same way that the US has loads of LNG export terminals (they were actually converted import terminals), and being connected to their LNG system meant it made little sense to spend billions of new terminals.
Not to mention some geographic issues. Running a pipeline through the Canadian shield is not a trivial matter. Possible, but it's much easier though the flyover US states.
And most hilarious of all about this, the reviled national energy program (NEP) -- you know, the one that 0% of Albertans understand but they're sure it was to screw them -- was the federal government proposing a national pipeline system. Alberta had a massive tantrum about it. Instead Alberta was constrained to selling oil at a massive discount to the US for decades.
>There are reasons that the best and brightest of Canada enthusiastically leave en masse to the place that Canadians claim to detest most of all
ROFL. Good god. The fact that you're in Quebec, and you celebrate Quebec (by far the most dysfunctional part of the country, largely a welfare state propped up by the rest of Canada, primarily Ontario), has to be the most hilarious part of this comical fan-fiction nonsense.
Now you seem to have a hilarious take on Canada, but in the real world the "West" anointed the US as the centre of power (the largest population base, unharmed by two world wars in a row). This means that people from everywhere generally centralized there, for media, for technology, and so on. Thanks to the current idiocracy and the accelerating decline of that country, the whole thing has reversed.
> And most hilarious of all about this, the reviled national energy program (NEP) -- you know, the one that 0% of Albertans understand but they're sure it was to screw them -- was the federal government proposing a national pipeline system. Alberta had a massive tantrum about it.
Yes, the NEP proposed extending some natural gas pipelines. You neglected to mention that it also imposed price controls and new taxes on oil and gas revenues.
Marc Lalonde, the minister responsible, literally said after the fact that the goal of the program was to shift oil and gas revenue from the provinces and industry to Ottawa:
"The major factor behind the NEP wasn't Canadianization or getting more from the industry or even self sufficiency," [...] "The determinant factor was the fiscal imbalance between the provinces and the federal government [...] "Our proposal was to increase Ottawa's share appreciably, so that the share of the producing provinces would decline significantly and the industry's share would decline somewhat."
> largely a welfare state propped up by the rest of Canada, primarily Ontario
Aside from the wrongness of the rest of your comment, you're hilariously out of date here. Ontario has become the defining political and economic disaster area in Canada.
> Aside from the wrongness of the rest of your comment
I see you've, uh, comprehensively detailed what was wrong.
Nothing in my comment was wrong.
> Ontario has become the defining political and economic disaster area in Canada
ROFL. Christ.
Ontario's "economic disaster" contributes 2x the amount to federal coffers than Quebec does, despite only being 60% larger in population. It contributes almost 3x more than Alberta, which about tracks with the population difference. In every economic metric, Ontario obliterates Quebec.
Seeing Maple MAGA nonsense from someone living in Quebec is hilarious stuff. Quebec has always been our special little welfare state, that has a government massively funded out of proportion, largely on the backs of Ontario and BC. Having you slinging stones and talking about the greatness of Quebec is...well, it's amazing stuff.
I mean...mention it? What? What a hilarious comment, that clearly derives from whatever right wing echo chamber idiot chamber you emerged from.
Aside from the fact that it's...fine... (protip - the automakers have largely ignored Trump and know he's going to die in a pile of his own feces and they'll move on). A gigantic new multi-billion dollar battery plant (still going ahead...hey, didn't multiple in Quebec get abandoned?). A new armoured vehicle plant. Two new heavy duty truck plants.
I mean, Chrysler is collapsing, but eh. They're collapsing everywhere. BYD will likely buy one of their plants.
And it's hilarious when Maple MAGA mouth-breathers always bring up the auto industry. It could disappear and we'd move on. This delusion that we're all auto workers here is comedy. I don't know a single person even peripherally related to that industry.
> or the state of your public finances.
Which makes it extra funny that Ontario bankrolls Quebec largess. I agree that should be stopped. Quebec needs to stop being the welfare project dragging the country down, which is something that would make Alberta happy as well.
Ontario contributes 3x more to federal coffers than Alberta. Now extremely simple sorts look at "equalization payments" (you know, the welfare program for Quebec), and think it's somehow paid for by the "haves", but that isn't remotely how it works. Ontario and BC contribute almost all of the money that is then handed out to welfare provinces like Quebec.
> We all suffer the weakened CAD simply to secure votes in Ontario.
LOL, wtf. You really need to disengage from whatever bullshit chamber you clearly get your "knowledge" from, because this is just embarrassing nonsense. Again, having someone from Quebec trying to claim that another part of Canada is holding them down is....good god, it is deliciously tasty idiocy.
It's funny how you cite "reality" and tell me I'm wrong, yet you haven't corrected a single thing. And FWIW, I'm firmly convinced you are an American spinning a hilarious fan-fiction, because for a Quebecer to actually say these things would be so ironic the universe would collapse on itself.
It doesn't seem like anyone knows what it is yet since it's a new thing. But free movement of people for work is mentioned in almost every article about it.
It would need to be actually negotiated and stuff, but the opposition quote is just agreeing with all the public statements I have seen from the EU and Canadian leadership.
So, I guess the opposition supports associate membership in everything but name.
Hang on you're saying people granted legal permission to fly to a country, specifically to immigrate to that country, also have the money to fly there? Crazy coincidence, that.
Canada doesn't have "open borders" or "free mobility" with "east asia" in the way that people are boogeymanning.
The closest approximation is the united states under NAFTA.
There is lots of poverty in America, but the border doesn't appear to have an issue. I fail to see how this would be much different (except more difficult due to an ocean and better security/screening checks on airport arrivals).
He's not wrong. I have a suspicion this EU idea is a way to backdoor immigration increases - something the Trudeau government was very keen on but was scaled back by Carney. Largely because immigration has become a hot-button issue in Canada and was partly responsible for Polilievre's popularity last election. Joining a treaty where another governing body would set the criteria for immigration and Canada just has to accept it due to freedom of movement within the EU is one way to route around the whole thing politically and make it much harder to change in the future.
If this is the motivation, it's a grossly undemocratic move.
I don't get how folks who hyperventilate about Trump being a threat to democracy can look at stuff like this and cheer.
IMHO, it would be a win even if it allowed movement between Canada and the EU as freely as Canadians and Americans can currently move between Canada and the US. That would give Canadian snowbirds easier (longer) access to warm EU destinations, while those destinations would benefit from the additional revenue.
In winter even the warm bits of the EU aren't all that warm either, and no one complains about the cold like a (non B.C.) Canadian encountering European winter humid cold for the first time.
Europeans go to Thailand, even Latam etc. It's why so many were killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami.
> I don't get how folks who hyperventilate about Trump being a threat to democracy can look at stuff like this and cheer.
It really stretches my imagination to the limit to see how your suspicion carries this move all the way to being comparable to what Trump has been doing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learn_to_Code
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