Saying fucking asshole things. They're tired of having to pay skilled labour what it's worth, and AI isn't going to actually take the jobs, so they have to make everyone scared by saying things like this and laying off hundreds of people at a time.

Funny how such easy to predict actions aren't being threatened with being replaced. As more than one other person has said here, CEOs are ripe for replacing; nobody would even notice the difference.

I mean, it sounds like you have bad neighbours. I live in a townhouse, and my neighbours (co-owners, really) are great. We help each other out. I can ride my bike for a few minutes in any direction and be out on a beautiful trail or out by the lake. Don't get me wrong, I've very deliberately selected a city to live in where access to nature is trivial. That was a priority. But I'd be happy enough to live in an apartment here if I needed to, the only thing that stopped me in the first place is the rules/laws surrounding pet ownership (I had 3 cats at the time, 4 now).

I'm much more in favour of being communally rich. Whole forests and lakes are available to me, not just a yard and a backyard pool or whatever. There are lots of ways to have peace and quiet and beauty, and only a few of them are living out in a field, isolated from everyone else. I'm a pretty introverted person, but when the park is big enough, you don't have to talk to anyone to enjoy it.

I think to be fair, it has both a problem with not enough taxes and bad priorities. Unless one of the priorities you're talking about is corporate welfare and low taxes on the rich. Certainly it is the case that they (and Canada) could raise enough money if they would actually just enforce their tax laws and implement wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.

If your microphone is active, it should at least show an indicator light and a top-row icon, I'm pretty sure.

I don't know about your food banks, but here in Canada, they're not run by the government. They're charities. I'm ALREADY paying taxes to try to make sure our government takes care of less fortunate people, and they've failed by foisting that off onto food banks, which are run on shoestring budgets, charity, and luck. What happens when people can't afford to give to the food bank, like when there's a recession?

If it were a government agency that was guaranteed to have affordable/free food so that anyone could at least cover their basic dietary requirements, I'd definitely be agreeing with you here. But it's not. We need to understand that the government is failing us at the most basic level.

This is, remarkably, one of the worst takes I have ever seen.

Everything is politics. Especially art. Narrative and storytelling is always going to be political. There are games about war between actual countries on this earth and you think games aren't political? Maybe candy crush isn't and that's all you play. But there are political choices made throughout the development of a game, and they can and should be scrutinized through that lens.

Some games are more political than others, definitely. That's fine. But any game with more than a facile narrative better be something we can talk politics about or it's a huge waste of time.

Even this discussion of whether politics belongs/is possible to remove from games is a political topic. Polygon was a good site that often had interesting takes. Iâ(TM)ll be sad to see it turned to AI slop.

Cuba would be in a much different and likely better position if the USA wasn't embargoing them and doing whatever they can to make sure the country never succeeds.

Local ordinances? Lack of subsidies? I live in the Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. Everyone here has a heat pump. It's getting less and less common to see furnaces of any kind. But the government has been working hard to switch people over where they can, providing subsidies and showing how much lower your bills tend to be.

I greatly suspect Norway has also done something like that, considering the penetration of EVs there as well.

My heating/cooling bills are slightly higher in the winter than in the summer, but not meaningfully so, and we get temperatures down to -20C here occasionally. The heat pump is much slower at heating the house below -20C, but it's not too bad. (In actual fact, the reason why the bills are higher in the winter is because the cats still want to go out onto the catio and that means the door is often left propped open for long stretches of time. They want to do that in the summer as well, but the delta between room temperature and the outside temperature is smaller in the summer than in the winter.)

IN PRACTICE, the reality is that a normal heat pump will be better for your heating and cooling and your bills almost all of the time. If you live even further north than me, like in my old home town of Edmonton, you might invest in a failover heating system. But if you're buying from a reputable local installer, they'll set you up properly.

This is actually happening to the Canadian government in Ottawa. Very similar scenario. Not enough desks, rat infested buildings, complete chaos.

And the government is doing it because downtown business owners are having a hard time. It's madness.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada...

Literally everything is worse under this system. For a government that pays lip-service to climate action, it's absolutely unwilling to do even small-scale things like let people work from home and not contribute to pollution and traffic.

As a Canadian, I actually don't see much difference.

A lot of Americans accept the book bans or INSTIGATE the book bans. They don't like diversity, they rail against DEI even when the policies in place are just to make sure that women and minorities get a fair shake. They LOOOOOVE bombing foreign countries, finding scapegoats, coming up with nonsense bathroom bans.

90% of what I see from American news--left OR right--is Americans kowtowing to authority while their quality of life goes down the toilet. They just try to decide which colour of authority they're going to submit to.

This tiktok ban was started under Trump 4 years ago, and weirdly, the Democrats pursued it for 4 years, and now Trump might stop it! When people complain both parties being the same, they're not that wrong. There are some outliers, but mostly it's the same love for the police state, for bombing Palestinians, for letting children get shot in school. Chinese people and Americans disagree on exactly what form of un-freedom they're willing to accept, but they're not that much different.

And in the case of China, there are plenty of more local politics that people ARE involved in, just like here in NA. Chinese people aren't voiceless, they just don't pretend that they actually have a say in Federal politics.

And, like, I'm not ignorant to how bad the Canadian system is about this stuff either. I vote in Federal elections and get no representation, and our electoral system guarantees that I basically never will.

Citation?

One of the FIRST posts I saw on there was a Chinese woman saying there were plenty of LGBTQ+ people on the app, so post all the thirst traps you want. The app is half amazing cooking videos and 25% muscle mommies.

I read a comment from one (Chinese) woman to an American creator that was like, "we find all the other feminists and tell them that we don't accept comments that denigrate women or focus on male sex acts, so we don't say "I'll F*** your Mom," we say, "I'll castrate your Dad!""

The problem the government has with the app is that people are learning that actually, as citizens, they have a lot more in common than they think. We all have similar struggles. We all want to be able to afford groceries and health care and find people to date that don't suck.

But without it, they're on the hook for billions in costs when climate change wrecks up the place.

Someone needs to pay for this, and oil and gas companies have KNOWN for years that climate change was happening and they didn't care. The predictions that exxon scientists made decades ago are remarkably accurate. Indeed, the science of climate change is, broadly speaking, very simple.

Companies that have lied to us for literal decades about how safe and clean their energy is, how nothing bad would ever happen, and now the executives will go off somewhere with all their money and hole up while the rest of us have to clean up literal wreckage from hurricanes and floods, cold snaps and heatwaves.

Global warming itself is regressive and impacts the poorest among us. Someone has to do something, and it sure as hell doesn't look like it's any of the federal governments in the world.

1. The repaid amount should never go over a certain reasonable threshold. Letting loans drag on for multiple times the original value is gross.

2. Governments should probably be paying for post secondary education anyway. Profits and education are a weird mix.

3. Not only should these people be forgiven their loans, they should be given back some money based on my first point.

I feel like these kinds of loans fundamentally misunderstand what is going on: these are people trying to get educated to make themselves and their communities better. Saddling them with huge loan debt is going to obviate at least some of the benefits of educating them; they have to pay their loans back rather than participate in the economy, at the very least.

ChatGPT is wrong just enough of the time that I can't trust anything it says.

If ChatGPT could return to me with a PRIMARY SOURCE of information--like a scan of a manual or something similar--then I might be willing to trust it, but otherwise, it's just relying on some stochastic mimicry and luck to return an answer that I can't have any confidence in.