Remember that the Fediverse could survive instances having legal liability for user-posted content because each user could run his own instance.
And this would require each user to run their own instance. The Fediverse is already hard enough to get average folks to join, this would make it nigh impossible for most.
If you watch the video you'll see that there's an ongoing process that gradually eliminates parties until there's only two remaining. Canada has been progressing along this path. There's only one national conservative party of any note now, and on the left only the Liberals have any chance at forming a government. The NDP can only act as a spoiler for the left. Give it some time and the NDP will wither away, leaving only the Liberals and Conservatives.
I consider Trudeau's betrayal of his electoral reform promise to be one of the worst political stabs in the back that has happened to the Canadian electorate in recent history.
And yet, in the upcoming election I'm going to vote Liberal. Hell, I'm probably going to do volunteer work for their campaign. Because in my particular riding the projections are currently a tossup between Liberal and Conservative, with the NDP having only a 1% chance of winning and no other party having any meaningful chance of winning. So in my riding Liberal and Conservative are the only choices that matter. The two party system has already arrived in the spot where I live.
I hate this. But I recognize the reality of the system I live in. This is basic game theory, voting third party would only harm my own interests.
It causes the insurance companies to crank up the fees for insuring Teslas, which makes people think twice about buying a Tesla, which results in way more than 80 lost sales.
Tesla's valuation is already overinflated based on expectations of future growth rather than current market, so those lost sales end up translating into way more of a loss in value for the stock price than those lost sales' literal dollar value.
Billionaires often leverage their stocks as collateral for loans, so those stocks losing value can end up costing the billionaire more than the dollar value loss alone.
Economics involves understanding and predicting the behaviour of large groups of people, doesn't seem all that far off topic here. And of course the way that people react to AI-generated content in products will be quite relevant to lots of people trying to market such products.
I think we'd only see that as a serious possibility after a conventional military invasion had turned into a quagmire, and we'd only see a conventional military invasion after a lot more provocations and failed "economic" annexation attempts.
I think Trump believes that Canada really is just some piece of real estate he can "acquire", but that very fact means that he's not going to go straight to the biggest guns because he assumes the Americans will be welcomed as liberators after just a little effort. It's only when those little efforts keep on failing that there'll be ramp-up.
This will take years. We're in for a long haul, and victory for Canada is possible at each step along the way, so I'm not too worried yet. Angry, but not worried.
Ideally, we'll help Ukraine finish off Russia in the near future and then we'll be able to purchase a ton of really spiffy gear from Ukraine that'll take an invasion off the table. Ironically, all that military hardware the Americans gave Ukraine under Biden can now be reverse-engineered to make good anti-American-forces drones if needed.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
-- James Nicoll.
That Arabic word, "Jihad," sure looks handy for situations like this. Yoink! It's an English word now!
Obviously I'm not saying the FLQ will be the ones to "stand up," the FLQ are long gone at this point. They're just an example showing that Canada's had brutal terrorist insurgencies acting within it before. We're not the easy-going doofuses that American popular culture portrays us as.
Well, that's fine if you prefer it that way. I prefer relative anonymity and subject-focused discussion myself. It's a preference, not an objective "I'm right and you're wrong" sort of thing.
My main concern would be that Trump et al are drinking their own kool-aid and genuinely think they'd be "welcomed as liberators" if they invaded Canada. They've certainly made it sound that way, talking about how awesome it'd be for us as their "cherished" 51st state, with all that great American healthcare and whatnot.
The invasion would turn brutally bloody instantly, but some of that blood would be Canadian so I'd rather not get to that point.
Canadians, take a shovel and start digging trenches along the entire border. 3 trenches deep, with extra circular ones around cities and logistic hubs. [...] All of this can be done without conscription
I think you may be somewhat unfamiliar with just how vast that border is. It's the longest international border in the world, 8,891 kilometers (5,525 miles) long.
If the Americans really do invade we'll be defending via means other than World War I era trenchworks.
Yeah, all this speculation about senators and electoral balance and whatnot skips lightly over the more immediate effects that would come from an American attempt at annexation. If the Americans thought trying to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan was bad, well, this would be like that, except that Canadians can pass for American and can access America's home soil quite easily.
How would rampant assassinations and terrorist attacks against Republicans (and the particularly spineless Democrats that enabled them) affect the electoral balance, Forbes? Ever hear of the FLQ, by any chance?
Americans still have this basic delusion of being "welcomed as liberators" when their Freedom and Democracy rolls in to town, even after all the times they've stuck their hands into ovens and been burned.
But I must say, I think it's probably for the best that he dialed down his Fediverse engagement. Both for his own sake (nobody should spend that much time on social media) and for the Fediverse as a whole - he seemed to be everywhere that I went and it made the place feel small and monocultural.
I've always liked the way on Reddit I barely ever recognized anyone's name. I prefer engaging with the conversation, not with the people.
This guy's court cases are widely misunderstood by the general public.
In a nutshell: he's a crank who is trying to tell the court "I don't hold a copyright to the thing my AI produced, my AI holds the copyright."
And the court tells him: "Only people (or legal persons, like corporations) can hold a copyright. Your AI cannot. If you say that you yourself don't either, we can't force you to have a copyright on it. So I guess that thing has no copyright and is therefore in the public domain."
And then everyone gasps and exclaims "the court just ruled that AI-generated things are in the public domain!"
Got a lot of people to click on it while raging, though, so it served its purpose.
In case anyone's interested in the source material, here's the press release it's going on about. The AI is about searching and analyzing evidence, it isn't fabricating anything that'll actually be used in court.
This just in: people who are used to earning millions of dollars and being the center of public adoration warn against anything that might change that.
It might happen once, at which point there'll be a colossal uproar. Even compared to the various other uproars we've been hearing. I'm sure you'll notice if it happens.
And this would require each user to run their own instance. The Fediverse is already hard enough to get average folks to join, this would make it nigh impossible for most.