i have only voted a few times since i moved here, and it has been liberal, with the explicit intent of trying to push him out.
the conservatives have never been competitive in this riding.
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
that said, brian masse was not a good mp and i will not miss him. in 20 years, the only thing he accomplished was a bill that legalized government run gambling, which is a terrible idea and which i'm staunchly opposed to. the government should not be basing healthcare or education revenues on profits from gambling, it creates a conflict of interest. i would support legislation to reverse the gambling legalization, or at least to privatize it and place a sin tax on private revenues, 100% of which go to help victims of the gambling industry recover.
the real reason that the three ridings in windsor swung to the conservatives is gerrymandering via redistribution. windsor is a small city with a very left wing, union-dominated population. the city itself take up a large space, and is surrounded by large amounts of more conservative exurban or suburban regions, bordering into remnant farmlands. those rural areas vote conservative.
previously, there were two small urban ridings and one big rural riding and the result was two left wing representatives (ndp or liberal) and one conservative, for the rural riding. what redistricting did was blur the rural/urban split, which folded the small urban zones into the larger rural zones. the urban zones are more densely populated but there are more people in the larger rural areas.
i would suspect that this is actually what also happened in hamilton, london and sudbury, but i don't know those areas well.
the ndp have been complaining for decades that the system does this on purpose. what actually happened to the ndp in saskatchewan was that the previous urban zones were folded into the rural zones, in a process that is quite similar to what happened in windsor.
this could create some problems here, as if the population has no legitimate representation, it will begin to act like it's unrepresented, which it now is. however, it might be difficult to undo. i mean, look at the long term result of redistricting in saskatchewan - the ndp have been wiped out of saskatchewan for decades.
this election outcome is essentially a mistake.
i mused previously if it seemed like the result of dumb kids not understanding what they were voting for, or fundamental shifts in canadian demographics that realign the country's future with a conservative identity, as a result of increasing immigration from conservative societies.
however, i don't think either of those are correct. or not quite so.
for right now, this is a fluke brought on by skewed turnout and weird events.
the government won't last long, and the result of the next election will undo this one. for right now, i'm not enjoying waking up in a conservative riding and a conservative region and i'm setting hard to work on fighting them as hard as i can.
i need to put a call out to frank at ekos or nik nanos or somebody else to get this analysis out.
the ndp did not fold into the liberals tonight. i can see enough of an analysis in specific ridings like windsor and hamilton to realize that's false.
the ndp vote bolted hard to the conservative party, and you can see that in the age demographics.
the reason the conservative lost is that carney then showed up and swung conservatives to the liberals.
this was a complex tango, a two way shift, and not just the destruction of the ndp. we will wake up to a completely altered political spectrum, where the liberals represent older and more conservative voters and the conservatives are the party of youth, hope and future. it's a complete spectrum reversal.
i usually beat the models and i did again. we'll see how close i get in the end.
what is going to happen is that ndp voters are going to swing to the conservatives in urban areas, and the result is that the liberals will win those seats more easily, because the seats were two-way races between the liberals and ndp (these are seats the conservatives are not competitive in).
liberals: around 160
conservatives: around 140
bloc: around 30
ndp: around 10
green: exactly 2
i also suggested the following:
what is going to happen is that ndp voters are going to swing to the conservatives in urban areas, and the result is that the liberals will win those seats more easily, because the seats were two-way races between the liberals and ndp (these are seats the conservatives are not competitive in).
i undershot this, and i want to correct something i'm hearing on the news. the news is suggesting that ndp voters are swinging to the liberals, and the conservatives ended up winning. that is an intuitive analysis and the numbers don't add up because the conservatives were in third place in all of these ridings - windsor, london, hamilton. if the liberals are in second, and the ndp vote shifts downwards to the liberals, the conservatives would not win. that's wrong.
what is happening is that ndp voters shifted to the conservatives in these ridings in such large numbers that the conservatives actually leapfrogged the liberals into first place. the ndp collapse is not from 40% to 20% in these ridings, it's from 40% to 5% and the movement is dramatically to the conservatives, who are jumping in these ridings from 15% to 55%.
the numbers are still coming in and my initial analysis could still be correct in the end, but if these numbers hold they're stark and startling. actually look at them. it's a giant swing from the ndp to the conservatives, and it's young people driving it.
conservative youth movements like this are scary stuff.
Sunday, April 27, 2025
looking for an apartment right now isn't the struggle i thought it would be; it's something different altogether.
i was expecting that the problem would be the 1% vacancy rate, and supply is certainly a problem, but not in the sense i imagined. there are apartments available in windsor, but they are either (1) in big corporate buildings, which are overpriced and mostly going to require a guarantor, or (2) too renovated.
too renovated?
so, take an apartment i would want to rent in windsor c. 10 years ago. it probably has older appliances, ratty floors. drafty windows...it's fine. it's big. it's cheap. sign me up. the units coming on the market have new appliances, new floorings, new windows and cost twice as much as they would have, which is either pricing me out or pulling it up to the very top of my price range. i don't care if the fridge is new, i care that the fridge works. i'd rather have a 30 year old stove than a fancy new burner top. etc. i want cheap and run down and spacious, and what the market is throwing at me is expensive and shiny and fancy and new...and cramped. the units have been cut in half. it's the torontoization of windsor, and it's staunchly unwelcome. these property management companies should go back to fucking toronto, and give me back my big, run down spaces for cheap. i don't want your stainless steel fridge.
worse, though, is this issue of credit scores.
on it's face, it seems reasonable enough to demand some entrance requirement around credit scores, but not if it's a rigid rule and there's no independent thought around it. the credit score is being interpreted by almost everybody as a magic number, rather than what it actually is, which in context is a rating of how well an individual pays off credit card debt.
nobody applying for bottom-of-market housing in windsor has ever had a mortgage, unless they've recently defaulted on it as a part of a divorce and few applicants have ever even owned cars in their lives. the exceptions would be the retirees. 90% of applicants have never had or ever will have mortgages and have never had or ever will have cars. so, what informs their credit score? credit card debt.
what is this number, in the context of somebody that only has credit card debt? it's a measurement of how frequently you pay down credit card debt. but, in order to have this score actually function, you'd have to frequently take out debt, and frequently pay it back down.
it follows that a low income person with a high credit score is somebody that constantly borrows large amounts of money via credit card debt and always pays it down, which could only make sense in context if they are extremely risky with their money. the riskier you are, the higher your credit score; the more risk adverse you are, the lower your credit score.
what having a good credit score means, then, for low income people, is that you have a gambling problem, or you're a drug addict, and also that you have some alternate source of income to pay your debts down, like selling drugs or prostitution. you couldn't get a good credit score unless you were constantly pushing yourself into debt, and you couldn't be constantly pulling yourself out of debt unless you were pulling in money under the table. therefore, you're really not low income at all, you're just a middle to high income criminal.
that is what having a high credit score would almost necessarily imply in the socio-economic class that is applying for these apartments - the applicant is a drug dealer or prostitute. insisting on a high credit score as an entry requirement weeds out the honest applicants and elevates the dishonest ones. then they wonder why their applicant pool sucks.
most people in my socio-economic class will have a credit score that looks something more like this:
i have never had a mortgage.
i have never owned a car.
i have never had a credit card and could not get one because my income is too low.
i have never missed a payment, but i've never made a payment on time, either; i've never had a payment to miss or make. therefore, equifax cannot assign me a rating. that should be the norm amongst the type of people applying for the type of housing i'm applying for - no credit history, because they're poor. credit histories are a middle class entity. poor people don't have credit histories because they don't have access to credit because they're poor.
now, why should property managers ask for credit reports? they should attempt to determine if the applicant has a large amount of debt from a previous tenancy, owes money in court or has a history of missed payments. it's reasonable on it's face. but when somebody does the check and it comes back as "this person has never borrowed money, has no liabilities and no assets", that should be seen as the best possible result, at least in this income demographic. i have no debt! no liabilities! that should be ideal.
they don't - they look at a score, analyze it binary and pass or fail. that's what the guidelines written by somebody in toronto say, and they expend no thought on it, they just do it.
as a result, i've actually seen an increasing number of properties just sit on the market, because the property managers refuse to rent to anybody that applies for them. 100% of the applicants get rejected, and told to sleep in a shelter, while these units sit empty, because they don't have a credit history. this is housing that should be low income housing and that can't attract middle income applicants. like me, many of these people can show years and years of rent receipts. i have 6.5 years of rent receipts, but they won't look at my application because i've never qualified for a credit card because i've spent my life poor. these are run down 300 square foot basements in windsor that only a poor person would ever apply for. it is absurd.
the way out is to find somebody that isn't a retard and actually knows what a credit score is and how to apply it, rather than just mindlessly follow instructions sent from head office, without understanding what they are.
i found a great spot out in amherstburg but the guy insisted on a verbal lease, and i wasn't interested in taking the risk. i tried to write a basic lease, and he...he didn't get it. he thought that not having a lease would give him the right to terminate a tenancy without a court, and that's wrong. i've found a few things that are overpriced and too small and thought about but pulled back from. i've found apartments that i've been apprehensive about moving into because they smell like ashtrays, and appear to mostly have drug dealers and prostitutes with good credit scores living in them. i've also found a couple of big wood apartments that are exactly what i want, but have owners that don't want musicians, or don't want odsp recipients, and that are still sitting on the market, weeks later - these picky owners want to wait and take their time to find their perfect imagined candidate, which is likely an astronaut that speaks ten languages and works part time as an ambassador to the united nations. i've been very frustrated by all of this, as it's a consistent lack of reasonableness that i'm encountering, mostly at the managerial stage. these useless capitalist bourgeois middle men are just sitting in between the tenant and the landlord and causing unnecessary problems. get out of here; go back to toronto. let me talk to the owner, dammit. i don't want to talk to you, and i don't want to pay your salary in my rent, either.
that said, i think i might have something lined up for monday, and it's actually exactly what i want, albeit a little out of the part of town i'd like. it's in a trendy or hip part of town, whereas i've been focusing on the region near the new bridge, which is close to the student district. the distance on a bicycle in the summer is not very substantive. the place is fairly central, really. i've been reminded of how bad that part of windsor smells this week, as the sewers finish their spring melt and clear out. the place i'd like to move into this week should smell a little less bad and a little more like fermented yeast, as i'm back in the range of the whiskey factory (where i was when i first moved here).
if it works out, i should be out of this hotel in a day or two. if it doesn't, may is going to be a long month for me. i tentatively have a temporary room lined up in a basement, if it flips over into may.
property managers need to be more realistic about what a credit score actually is and how useful it is for low rent applicants. there's a price point below which the concept of a credit score becomes extremely unhelpful, and everything i'm applying for is well below it. if somebody has a very bad credit score, that's one thing. but, if somebody just doesn't borrow money at all, they shouldn't be penalized for it they way i am being. ask for rent receipts instead - they're more useful than a credit score for this socio-economic class, which never has and never will borrow money, except to pay for drugs.
it's hard to really tell if the weird demographic flip in the canadian election and electorate is a fleeting mistake made by stupid children that don't understand what they're voting for or something more nefarious, as a longterm consequence of choices the canadian government has made about immigration. it seems to be that these young men voting conservative are also overwhelmingly from conservative cultures, like cultures in the middle east or africa that are fundamentalist muslim or christian. this is kind of exactly what jason kenney wanted to happen when he resdesigned the immigration system in the 00s.
so, there's two competing hypotheses that will have to work out:
- it could be that the young people are being tricked by social media and have no idea what they're supporting but are rather just trying to be "cool". if that's the case, polievre will go out of fashion soon enough. you have to win on the first try when you do this, or it backfires.
- or it could be that this is indicative of demographic changes in canada brought on by large amounts of immigration from conservative societies - they brought their kids here and raised them as conservatives, and they grew up to become conservatives.
i think it's a little of both and we'll have to let it work itself out to see which is the more dominant truth.
what i will say for right now is that the examples of societies that flip like this are minimal, but alarming. for example, this is a similar political coalition to the one we saw in iran in 1979 or in chile before the rise of pinochet. when the kids swing to the right like this, fascism tends to follow fairly quickly.
canadians should hope option a is more real and be extremely vigilant about the consequences of option b, as it could challenge the liberal foundations of our secular society.
i am a free speech advocate and am in full support of the inalienable right to give people the finger and to verbally tell them in no uncertain terms to fuck the fuck off and i'm actually happy to see the spectrum realign itself correctly around this. i find it extremely frustrating and annoying that conservatives have become the free speech party (it's mostly bullshit) while fake liberals, who are often the real conservatives in disguise, go after people for speaking openly and freely, in an attempt to silence or distort.
conservative people that want to restrict the right of people to tell other people to fuck off can go fuck the fuck off.
i stand in full solidarity with the old man and his rights to free expression.
canada was not given a free ride by anybody.
what canada earned was respect. it earned respect by dying in huge numbers for what was right and then refusing to be bellicose about it, and by trying to chart a direction in life that had some twinge of real decency. we were the real good guys. the world noticed.
it only really changed in the 00s due to some realpolitik decisions that, in hindsight, were clearly mistakes.
we can undo this and should, but we can't turn the clocks back and we need to work hard to rebuild the respect that we lost under stephen harper and justin trudeau.
Saturday, April 26, 2025
i don't have time to do the kind of in depth analysis i've done previously. i'm going to do this point form.
1) the polling is picking up a big liberal uptick in bc, alberta and saskatchewan. this is probably real, and probably driven half by the fact that mark carney is running to the right of the conservatives and half by immigration to the region, which has been substantive. albertans, particularly, may be waking up to a new demographic reality in front of them. however, doubling or tripling liberal support in the region from the rockies to lake winnipeg won't necessarily result in a single new liberal seat. the primary reason that the models are projecting a liberal majority is due to projections of them winning a dozen or more seats in the west. i would be surprised if the liberals win even two new seats west of winnipeg, but it does look like their vote totals are legitimately going to double in a lot of places, with no actual electoral effect.
2) the liberals might win ndp-liberal races in bc by swinging conservative voters. i think that the idea that ndp voters are swinging to the liberals is an oversimplification, and that a deeper analysis is going to show that potential ndp voters (young voters) are actually voting conservative in large numbers, but the conservatives have had the rug pulled out from under them by carney, who is destroying and dominating polievre amongst conservatives like a tiger eating a goat. carney is just slitting polievre's throat in front of his wife, and eating into the conservative base like a migratory despot. however, this is only going to actually pull itself off if the liberals have an extremely good day. more likely is that the ndp mostly keep all of their seats in bc, but get wiped out elsewhere.
3) this leaves polievre in control of a weird and unstable coalition that will collapse within weeks and carney dominating the centre-right of the spectrum. when the ndp rebound, and they will quickly, unfortunately, it will expose that it's the conservatives that are stealing their base, not the liberals. it's the conservatives that will immediately crash, not the liberals.
4) polievre's projected voters are young and being engaged by their phones. these voters are not high turnout and few will actually vote. polievre may actually have difficulty getting the vote out in ontario, particularly. conversely, the liberals' newfound dominance amongst older voters will result in a strong ground game in ontario and quebec and liberal turnout in these regions will exceed expectations.
6) while the liberals consequently probably won't win more than a couple of seats west of winnipeg, they could wipe out the ndp in ontario and push the conservatives further out of the cities, and deeper into the farms and forests. but, this is only around ten seats, when you add them up.
7) it looks like the liberals are going to completely dominate montreal. conversely, it also looks like the bloc are set to sweep outside of montreal. i would expect the bloc to exceed expectations in rural quebec and probably get over 30 seats. this is going to give them the balance of power.
8) the polling in atlantic canada is frustrating, but i would not expect the liberals to sweep. the ndp are no longer competitive federally in the east. it's not clear if the liberals or conservatives are the main beneficiary, but eastern conservatives are also the type most likely to embrace carney over polievre. the east has old and young demographics. i actually wouldn't expect the existing map to change much, but the coalitions support the differing candidates are in flux.
i would suggest the outcome then is that the liberals win seats in ontario at the expense of the ndp and conservatives and everything else stays more or less the same. what is going to happen is that ndp voters are going to swing to the conservatives in urban areas, and the result is that the liberals will win those seats more easily, because the seats were two-way races between the liberals and ndp (these are seats the conservatives are not competitive in). however, the accompanying shift from the conservatives to the liberals in rural areas mostly won't have any substantive effect, except in the boundary point between suburban and rural (sometimes called exurban), where the liberals could steal a few ridings.
liberals will win seats in places like carleton, bay of quinte, barrie, peterborough, durham, vaughan, oshawa, hamilton, niagara, brantford, london and windsor, but it won't be enough. the conservatives will be having a very bad day if they lose thornhill.
result:
liberals: around 160 (gains almost solely in ontario, at the expense of the ndp and conservatives in urban and suburban seats)
conservatives: around 140 (gains mostly due to redistribution in rural regions)
bloc: around 30 - hold steadyish
ndp: around 10, almost entirely in bc. they may be shut out east of calgary.
green: exactly 2
there was a speech in the 90s where bill clinton explained that actual quebecois sovereignty, whatever the arguments in favour of it, would be economically moronic and result in a catastrophic outcome.
that's basically my opinion on quebecois nationalism - it's an utterly idiotic idea. it would destroy quebec in a week. in fact, the americans would probably invade quebec, rather than allow it to become a rogue state. there are clear contingency plans.
clinton had the marines and the air force on red alert in 1995. they were on the brink of going in. they would have.
what happened after in the succession case and the clarity act is that existing canadian law says quebec has the right to declare independence if they can actually do it. this case is poorly understood in media. forget about ottawa - the americans won't let them do it.
it's not a serious issue at the moment. it was previously, and it might be again, but it probably won't be due to attempts by the federal government to reduce the relative number of quebecers in the province by overwhelming them with immigration from french-speaking countries in africa, the carribbean and asia. ottawa doesn't actually deny doing this.
as it is, the bloc are going to be the only social democratic and left leaning party left standing with a substantive number of seats, at least for the next couple of years. whether they like it or not, they're going to be the real opposition and the real left.
carney may find himself more ideologically aligned with polievre than with blanchet, but right-wing parties do not behave reasonably when placed in opposition, they just vote everything down. this is going to give the bloc a tremendous amount of power not just to advance the interests of quebec but to advance the interests of the left, and i'm going to be on their ass from here in windsor to make sure they do this right.
canada is not a nation-state, the way quebec might purportedly be. that is what he meant to say, and he's right - canada is an artificial colonial construction to organize territory conquered by an empire that no longer exists. it's also a failed state waiting to collapse.
but these two guys had better learn to get along, because the ndp is not going to have enough seats to help the liberals pass legislation any more.
what's unclear right now is if the liberals need one, two or three of the opposition parties onside to help them pass legislation, and if the conservatives do get over 140 seats, the answer could be all three. at the least, there doesn't appear to be any other outcome in front of us besides the necessity of a liberal-bloc agreement to pass a budget.
in fact, the bloc would appear to be the most left-wing party in the spectrum at the moment and the party i'd be most willing to vote for, if i could.
i don't plan to vote on monday, but my endorsement is for the green party.
Friday, April 25, 2025
israel should fight and win this in court.
there's certainly plenty of space to criticize israel's recent actions in gaza. i would agree they're distasteful actions, but the general crux of what israel is doing right now is required. others may disagree may forcefully, and there is plenty of room for subtlety.
however, the jurisdictional question is pretty clearly in israel's favour (you can't get out of the circular logic applied by the court and some western states) and the idea that israel has been intentionally starving the population has - at least until perhaps very recently - been entirely without merit. israel should defeat these specific charges, the way they are written, and that is what they should do, rather than something else.
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
what happened to the ndp this election?
this is the cause. this is not an effect.
it's been clear for months - years - that singh was not going to be able to capitalize on the unpopularity of trudeau, which is a catastrophic failure. the ndp should have been the go-to after trudeau's collapse.
but that is like playing around of the children's game, who made god. god. but who who made god?
god.
so, why are the ndp dying? and, round and round you go, until you get to this:
this is the cause. this is not an effect.
what is happening to the ndp is that the ndp are sucking terribly at social media and it's utterly destroying them in the polls. this may be the first canadian election where social media truly overt takes television, and just look at that. ouch.
well, look at their leader, spokesperson and mascot.
listen, i've been saying this for years, and i'm not just being mean. i have a vested interest in a strong ndp. they need to exist. and this guy is a pr nightmare.
however, if you're paying attention, you really it's not just jagmeet singh that's tilting the party in this dead end direction. that graph is a cause, and mr. singh is the root cause of the graph. but mr. singh is a symptom of his party, and not the root cause within it.
if the ndp lose party status, they will have to make some hard choices on what they want to be in the future. they may double down, or they may try to refocus, but they'll never be what they were a mere few years ago. do upper middle class canadian migrants need a party of their own? maybe there's enough of them that they do.
the canadian left should focus strictly on the greens.
unfortunately, if the pa tried to take control of gaza, it would just restart the stalled civil war. the palestinian authority has absolutely no democratic legitimacy in gaza, and should have called an election in the west bank decades ago at this point. israel cannot allow a civil war to erupt in gaza, so an attempt by fatah to take control of gaza will just lead to more bombing in the west bank.
gaza needs to be placed under a foreign occupying force - and that force could include egyptians and turks. sure. - until some very serious de-radicalization can be enforced, and fresh elections can be held.
fatah must be told in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome in gaza and violently kept out of it, if required.
my brain does this on me every single time, and it's true. do an a/b.
the term "highway to hell" is common enough in english that you see it relatively frequently. it was also a mega hit by the australian shit-rock or doofus-metal band, ac/dc in...i'm on the internet. i wasn't sure if it was late 70s or early 80s. it was 1979.
this is what my brain does on me:
"i'm on the highway to hell" comes in as the familiar, horrid unison full band screetch and then...
"...and i've been workin' like a dawwwg!"
because it's true.
they're actually the same song.
as far as i can tell, what this report is talking about already happened and it's called thatcher-reaganism, or neo-liberalism.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Sunday, April 20, 2025
what's my analysis of the election polls?
i think you're going to find it's a mirage. when polievre was running at 40%+ it was mirage, and carney running at 40%+ is also a mirage.
the question that you need to ask when looking at the numbers is if they're going to translate into seats, and it's unclear where. the liberals are actually up a lot in conservative areas, for the obvious reason that carney is a more convincing and appealing conservative than polievre. is that going to get them seats? where?
at most, a 10% bump in alberta might win them one seat. where's ralph? a 15% bump in saskatchewan might get his seat back.
the liberals are also up 5% in ontario, which is a lot of voters, but where are those voters? are they in safe liberal ridings? or is carney going to swing rural ontario?
if the liberals are going to win seats, it will probably be in quebec, but the three or four way split is tricky, and it may be the case that carney is just going to sweep montreal by huge margins.
i have a habit of making non-standard projections based on my reading of the polls, and i have flubbed it a few times, but i usually get it right when the mainstream media analysis doesn't.
right now, carney has nowhere to go but down, he peaked too early.
my projection: liberal minority. it might be a stronger liberal minority, but it will still be a liberal minority.
unfortunately, the ndp appears set to lose the balance of power, leaving it with the bloc, or resulting in an unworkable parliament.
Saturday, April 19, 2025
it took them way too long to admit that this is not the time for austerity, and they can't cut their way to prosperity.
you have to invest to build.
this is relieving in some sense, in that they sound more like liberals, but i'm still wary and apprehensive. it is still too much of a focus on the military and not enough of a focus on social spending.
Friday, April 18, 2025
there is no autism epidemic. it's overdiagnosed.
autism is real, but it's not a single disease. rather, it's a description of the process of specific genetic mutations that decrease the fitness of the individual. these should not be seen as mistakes, and are not genetic replication gone wrong, but are how evolution works, by trial and error. autistic people are nature's experiments; this is how our dna does experiments to see what works and what fails. sometimes mutations are good; that's called natural selection. sometimes they aren't and lead to genetic unfitness, and those genes don't replicate. there's thousands of bad genetic mutations that create unhelpful phenotypes and we collectively call that autism. some of the most common mutations, like down's syndrome, have names. they're all fundamentally, mechanistically, the same thing.
this is the necessary side effect of the process in which our genome uses trial and error in order to guess mutations that make us stronger. it's necessary that some must be born unfit in order to have some that are born with higher fitness. this is only upsetting in the sense that it upends the calvinist basis of american christian charitable dogooding. most cultures, historically, would think this is obvious and normal and not be bothered by it at all.
humans are unique. the unfit should be treated with dignity, but they are what they are, and they cannot be cured, nor can they be eliminated. to eliminate autism would be to end evolution. we should not desire genetic stagnation. our genome must continue to experiment, which will produce both failures and successes.
however, 95% of the kids being diagnosed with autism don't have genetic mutations and don't have anything physically wrong with them, they just have shitty parents that abuse and neglect them and are suffering from a deficit of attention and love. what they need is a hug.
this is the cure for "autism" that rfk really seeks - better parenting. more love. more hugs for abused kids.
what america has is a child abuse and child neglect epidemic brought on by lack of access to contraception and abortion and subsequent overworked two income families, not an autism epidemic.
Sunday, April 13, 2025
the economic theory being developed by trump is actually sarcastically called "fully automated luxury communism" by cynical post-leftists trying to grapple with the real-world consequences of superproduction within a capitalist mode of production, which isn't how it was supposed to happen. the capitalists were supposed to insist on artificial scarcity and empower us via employment, which would be their downfall. oops.
i'm in favour of reshoring superproduction, but we're supposed to get a guaranteed income out of it, not be told to go starve in the ditch. the proletariat of the future is supposed to be like me - overeducated due to emancipation from labour, and able to focus on esoteric art and literature, instead.
see, this is where you have to bring in some concept of eugenics. like, actually. not dumb racism, but some way to better the human race. so that communism doesn't become idiocracy.
let the robots do the work. great. but we have to have distributive justice. maybe it's not quite as rigorously held to marx as some would like, but we need some way for the masses to take advantage of this rather than be bludgeoned by it.
Saturday, April 12, 2025
i didn't think it would happen until it did.
i've slept in a hotel the last three nights. that's it. i'm evicted.
i talked to the new case management judge on friday and he seemed perplexed. he didn't like what he was learning about the case and seemed to want to undo it but there's no precedent for this. if the court in the end rules a mistake was made, as one clearly was, i am not going to get the apartment back. rather, i'm going to get a giant payout for damages, which are now substantive.
there is some tentative preliminary evidence that the gross freaks followed me here, but i need to be careful before i start accusing anybody of anything, in context. i don't have a lease here.
i've seen a few apartments over the last few days and will see a few more this week. i need to get in some where immediately.
i've also finally converted my agptek mp4 player (running android 8) into a wifi phone using voip. it's basically a cell phone without a sim card so i have no network access but i'm able to make voip calls over wifi, if i'm in coverage. chances are pretty high nowadays that you're going to be close enough to a bank or fast food restaurant at almost all times, but i actually bought it because i wanted to be able to do things like scan qr codes. i am going to, for the first time, find myself carrying a cell-like device, even if it's actually a mp4 player running voip over wifi and not actually a cell phone.
i've been busy and i'm going to remain busy but the first order of business when i get this lease signed is redesigning computer setups and network paths.
this is all the more frustrating because i was and am still right and the court has to this point been wrong. it will work itself out in the end, but i've already suffered an extreme injustice, and the only solution at this point is monetary. it's something to look forward to, but the situation right now is pretty awful.
i don't know right now, in the end, if i'd rather go through the bullshit for a bigger payout or if i would have preferred to avoid all of this and not get compensated for the subsequent hardship. if i do end up with 20-30K in total damages, that is going to buy me a house and that will solve this problem of housing once and for all. i'll certainly be better off, at the cost of 2-3 years of torment and hell. it sort of doesn't matter; there's no longer a choice. this can't be undone, all they can do is pay me for it.
the liberals are massively ahead in the polls, but dilbert has repeatedly refused to work them, anyways. this is legitimately not acceptable in canadian politics, but it sort of doesn't matter because the damage is so far gone. unfortunately, dilbert has actually run in the centre to centre left of the windsor mayoral field, which has tended to be pro-business. there hasn't been a good replacement option.
if people were naive, they shouldn't be, and any lingering confusion about the mayor's politics should no longer exist.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Monday, April 7, 2025
this isn't quite what i'm imagining.
these bombs are like giant icepicks that use gravity to cut through a structure before detonating.
i actually think we should be able to put a robot on the tip of the bomb that excavates through the structure, so that it's less a question of using the physics of mass to smash your way through in a collision and more like throwing a dart at a mountain that can burrow it's way through it when it gets there like a giant metallic groundhog before letting it rip mid mountain.
i wonder if you could actually trigger an inactive volcano using the same mechanism. that would be pretty brutal.
empires are sometimes conquered, and sometimes collapse.
more often, the empires that are the most stable and last the longest are eventually overrun by illegal immigration and taken over by barbarians. trump is a dolt, but he's basically right about this - the barbarians are our greatest real threat.
the ongoing barbarian houthi pestilence may justify r&d spending on new weapons designed to direct payloads underground. these weapons could also be used against hezbollah and eventually against iran. i'm imagining something launched by ship that lands at pinpoint precision and burrows into the ground before it detonates remotely. this would be well within our engineering capabilities to get a prototype for almost immediately.
if you are a member of the trump administration (and somebody is reading this), and you do care about eradicating child labour, you have an opportunity here. this is in alignment with the administration's goals. the reordering of global trade could very well occur with global standards on child labour, if it is guided that way. it is your responsibility and opportunity to get that done.
Sunday, April 6, 2025
the 50% import tax on goods from vietnam and india might be frightening to people that base their profits on child labour, but there's an upside to that. these are not countries that even import raw materials to north america, their export economy is almost solely designed around the exploitation of child labour.
i would rather see punishing taxes levied on an economy that relies on child labour than free trade with them.
that's not what anybody in trump's administration is thinking, except maybe tulsi gabbard. sometimes you can see unintended upsides in the policies of opponents.
inflation aside, if the us dollar survives that, this might not land badly, after it explodes.
from what i can tell, trump isn't fundamentally altering anything in the relative trade balances. he put steep tariffs on almost all of east asia, and also put steep tariffs on europe. he put lower tariffs on canada, mexico and most of latin america. that would means that north and south america remain preferred trading partners, relatively speaking.
it's really just a giant, huge consumption tax hike.
and it should result in subsequent giant, huge inflationary effects, although it remains to be seen if it can remain localized in america or not. canada is inevitably going to get hit with the inflation.
there is some possibility of this going zimbabwe-like, but i don't think it's that high. the fear is if the inflation starts feeding back. if that happens, it gets out of control.
these consumption sites reduce the spread of aids and other communicable diseases from needle sharing, which is a net public health benefit and saves the taxpayer untold millions of dollars on unnecessary treatments. to some extent, they also speed the inevitable process of overdose up.
the focus should be spent on prevention. i can't imagine why anybody would choose to take any kind of opiate, given the media around it, but they do.
that said, i would also like to see a national investigation into the conditions in which people become addicted to opiates in hospitals. i've had to push my way out of emergency rooms out of fear of being injected. they are aggressive enough that it opens up a lot of questions about kickbacks. drug companies should not be permitted to pay doctors to prescribe anything, but there needs to be a strong prohibition and crackdown on doctors getting paid to prescribe opiates, and there needs to be much more stringent consent clauses worked into people getting injected with opiates when they're unconscious. apparently, well over half of opiate addicts first got injected when they were unconscious and wake up addicted.
life saving healthcare should not come attached to a life ending addiction.
it's quite the swing in the canadian election polls. why is mark carney polling so well?
canada needed to get past justin trudeau. the country was sick of him. polievre was the guy running, but he was clearly unelectable. a lot of people opined when he was running at 40% that it was a mirage and that would never happen. carney is the escape mechanism people needed.
however, he's also going through his honeymoon phase in the course of an election and that is dangerous. i don't quite understand the movement from the bloc and ndp to carney, other than that..
mark carney is not a politician, so he made the most obvious mistake a rookie politician can make in canada, which is running on hockey. he's not running on his record as a banker or on his ability to fight trump or on what he would do to fix the housing crisis, he's running on hockey. the rookie mistake is actually working.
for now.
it's going to blow up. so, the liberals better hope they do get a majority.
Saturday, April 5, 2025
can we get a nice spot in siberia for the gazans?
listen, i actually support this. it's required. what else do you do with these barbarians that won't give up? they think they're going to win, eventually. you have to pack them up and move them out.
as marco rubio would say, and perhaps he ought to, let us dispel once and for all with the fiction that there will ever be a palestinian state in the levant.
the world needs to move on. i want a less insane way, but we've got what we've got.
gaza delenda est.
somebody is going to stand up and say,
i think america should make the stuff and buy the stuff. it even kind of makes sense, because you buy the stuff with the money you make selling the stuff. we don't need to do one or the other.
it sounds reasonable. but, it is unfortunately very naive.
in practice, albeit not in theory, that is the system we labeled communism in the 20th century. that was "really existing communism" when it really existed. oversimplified. nobody's expecting that, but it does seem to be what's in the back of don the coyote's sneaky head, and i don't think he fully realizes it.
reciprocal tariffs aren't about reciprocity or even about tariffs, they're about trade deficits. trump is irritated by countries that sell americans more than america sells them, but that's how the system was designed - everything comes to the centre of the empire. trump fundamentally, foundationally doesn't get it, or is at least pretending not to.
if you want to evade the wrath, then, you should sell less items to the united states, and that's what the policy will result in if it suceeds, the united states being removed from the centre of global commerce. i suppose that would most likely return europe to the centre of the global economy, as china's middle class is still far too small to adopt that purpose. trump's attempt to punish europe will re-establish the pre-nixonian status quo. our neo-nixon is going to undo the old one.
this isn't so complicated, really. somebody needs to make the stuff and somebody needs to buy the stuff. for the last 50 years, since the nixon shock, america has bought the stuff and china has made the stuff. before that, america used to make the stuff, and europe bought the stuff (china was cut out). this was supposed to be the postwar order - europe buying the stuff america makes. it did work well for america, but nixon blew it up and there's a narrative in the investor class that americans had become lazy and entitled, which there is some truth to. there was a particular push back on white people, who won reforms in the union era, pushing for civil rights for black people to mirror those reforms; rather than help pull the blacks up, the bankers reacted by pushing the whites back down off the ladder to whence they came. progress was over. go back to the fields, okie; it's feudalism all over again.
we can pinpoint where this whole progress thing broke to a few months in 1971 and it's been falling apart into smaller pieces ever since.
does trump want to bring that back? i don't think his intent is to go back to 1970, but he seems to want to immediately undo nixon first and foremost, and, i mean, that's what american workers would indeed want. this being in the centre of the empire thing benefits the banks, not the workers. the workers want to make the stuff and sell it.
what's unclear is whether this is a quixotic journey by an individual named donald trump to save the world economy or if the system is desiring this outcome, potentially as it gears up for a world war. if it has already been decided that there will be a war, america needs to reshore. this seems feeble and wrongheaded, but is it a function of incompetence or irrelevance?
we're not used to seeing america or americans act like this. they're supposed to know what they're doing, or convincingly bullshit it. anybody can see that trump has no clue and that nobody around trump has a clue, either. i don't think there's a precedent for this outside of the worst roman emperors.
if america seriously wants to make the stuff again and re-establish other countries - canada, europe south america, the midde east - as export markets rather than suppliers of raw goods and finished products, it is going to need to do more than this to get to that end point. massive government investment to rebuild industry would be a start. they will need to make some kind of deal with east asia to get wages up or get cut out again. if they had an excuse 50 years ago, they don't anymore.
if it is merely trying to create a revenue generating import tax to offset other revenue streams (like income taxes), that, however, might work quite well. after all, americans are reliant on imports.
Friday, April 4, 2025
what i'm saying is that i've trekked through endless skyscrapers for hours in vancouver and toronto and montreal, but detroit's not a concrete jungle like that.
you get over a few highways surrounding the core and it's just sprawls of residential houses for miles in every direction. there's no sea of concrete in detroit. it's actually relatively lush.
this didn't take long and there's more coming. they're building a giant battery plant on the edge of town that might never open.
this factory wasn't created by nafta; it opened in 1928. a lot of the history of the ford era, including the original home of the detroit red wings, was actually in windsor, not detroit.
detroit is a sprawling mess, but it's actually a pretty small city. so is windsor. in recent decades they've been pointed right across from each other.
i think they should convert the ambassador bridge into a pedestrian walkway. this isn't helping.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
this is what pierre polievre is trying to say when he talks about "biological clocks".
and while he seems to have assigned intellect to the parties in backwards order, he is correct in his thinking.
i don't care about this stupid planet and hope it crashes into the sun. i've got a few years to live and want to spend it having fun. i don't care about children and family and houses and wealth.
if i did, i would have waited to breed and would have bred selectively and with minimal offspring.
how do we react to these stupid import taxes the american president is putting on his own people?
i've been clear that we shouldn't tax our own people but should focus more on export taxes, instead. however, i'm really suggesting we wait it out, and it might not take too long. republicans have voters to face in a year and a half.
out of all of the taxes, the ones that make sense are the ones that are about protecting american industry that does or could exist, probably for national security reasons. that's why we have import taxes. that would actually arguably apply to both steel and aluminum, in the united states.
is it a problem that the americans import so much aluminum? it could become one. fair enough. but, these tactics are usually reserved for developed industries and not raw industries. either the united states has aluminum or it doesn't; if it does, it will find it where it needs it.
like through recycling?
are they on the brink of starting a war? they're acting like it.
so, what industries does canada need to protect? fish. water. lumber. you put tariffs on that to protect your own.
however, i think that the insistence on holding to these metals tariff also requires a direct response in the form of an export tax on two specific metallic exports that america is reliant on canada for and cannot replace. it's become necessary.
the other thing is the auto tax. we had an auto pact going back to the 60s - this is before free trade. it kickstarted free trade. i think that if they're doing this, you mirror it, just to undo it. you want to relevel the playing field so that costs go up on both sides and not just entering the united states. you have to do that. and what else can you do?
is there some equivalent industry on the border that canada wants to protect?
let the senate pass the bill first, and see what the house does. export taxes are unilateral - easy to generate and remove.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
i have been repeatedly drugged recently and it has at times been difficult to tell if i'm having a migraine or need to pass something through.
this is complete migraine, going on 23 hours. i've got these tylenol+caffeine tablets and they just knock me out anyways.
i'll stick with the caffeine. i would never take any sort of opiate, including codeine, on purpose.
i don't think there's a headache scale, like the richter scale, but these are the worst of the worst, and they make me sometime feel like the guy from pi, but i don't take drugs when the headaches get bad, they don't even really work, i just sleep it off.
well, it's april 2nd.
if you're a poor american that was dumb enough to vote for donald trump, here's your reward: a massive consumption tax hike on imported goods.
yes, he's laughing at you.
because you're stupid.
next step: once the import taxes are in place, they can pass giant tax cuts for elon musk.
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
canada needs a three party system to keep the liberals somewhere close to the centre and stop them from veering off to the far right like the democrats, but singh's consistent policy failures, which include things like trying to force the federal government to adopt provincial responsibilities, abolishing carbon rebates, removing consumption taxes on unhealthy food and taking away tax credits for low income housing corporations, cannot be singularly assigned to him. the ndp have always been a weird party. they don't come from industrial era workers movements, but from a western canadian conservative christian uprising against the amoral godlessness of the liberal banking elite. the ndp is a conservative party - more conservative than the conservatives - and it always has been.
let the ndp die.
the new left should be the green party, as the greens are what the new left actually is.
as carney is a conservative anyways, and polievre is obviously not one, it's increasingly irrelevant which party wins. the truth is that trudeau and harper were identical, policy wise, as reagan and clinton were in the united states. historians will talk about the mulroney-chretien-martin years, and then the harper-trudeau years. it doesn't matter anymore.
carney is winning because people prefer his personality. it's not about policy; the policies are indistinguishable. right now, people like the less flamboyant hair and the more tightly knotted tie of the liberal over the goofy fruitiness of the conservative. they think carney looks like he has a harder ass to fight off trump.
it's bullshit. nonsense.
the ndp offer nothing in response, but the same neo-liberal policies under a phony veneer of populism misbranded as vulgar socialism.
vote green, instead.
pro-tip: if you ever accidentally dump your entire pepper shaker on your eggs, don't just shrug it off and eat it anyways.
i slept all day and woke up with a fever and a migraine. my subsequent shit looked like it got basted in a turkey.
i didn't even got covid at all (unless i got it in 2019). i haven't been this sick in years.
Monday, March 31, 2025
i did my taxes this morning.
we're mid election and not a single one of the parties has explained how it's going to replace the carbon tax rebate for people that don't pay income taxes.
they gave me $560 last year in carbon tax rebates. as i use no carbon at all, i spent $0 on carbon taxes, and i know that the carbon tax had no discernible impact on the cost of food (especially the cost of imported food, which is 90% of the food i buy, because i buy actual food, produce, and not processed garbage).
my total net income from odsp last year was $16056. that means that the carbon rebate was 560/(16056+560) = 3.4% of my income.
cutting the carbon rebate checks will result in a 3.5% decrease in my total income. that's supposed to help me, in some way?
how do i replace that lost income?
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Friday, March 28, 2025
the liberals generally don't pretend that they don't represent the banks first and foremost, but they're also generally relatively enlightened about. it's noblesse oblige; it's charity. sure.
but, as a poor person, i almost always end up voting liberal (if i vote at all) because the ndp are just fucking clueless. their policies are often even worse for poor people than the conservatives, but they market themselves otherwise. it's worse than a charade, it's a scam.
yes, it's true that your average bourgeois middle class landlord is just trying to feed their kids, too. ok. fine.
the point is that they shouldn't be allowed to prey on the poor to do it. there should be laws that protect the poor from being feasted upon by the middle class, who are just being middle class. it's like criticizing a lion for being a lion; you don't tell a lion to behave, you lock it up to stop it from being a murderer.
i know better than to get frustrated with the ndp, it's just....
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.
The NDP also said that it wants to cut off low-interest federal loans, along with what it calls preferential tax treatment and mortgage loan insurance for large corporate landlords.
AAAAAAAAGGGHHHHHH!
fuck.
fuck.
FUCK.
so, let's instead have high interest bank mortgages for "small business owners", which will be passed on to working class and disabled renters in the form of higher rents.
winner: banks. loser: poor people.
what a bunch of fucking idiots.
*sigh*.
this is utterly stupid. again.
the problem right now is bourgeois professionals in the middle class buying cheap houses with small downpayments and having to hike the rent to pay off interest rates. that's what is happening to me. the people that bought my home are not corporate landlords, they're a middle class family trying to find a way to pay their own bills by offloading them to renters. this is called rentier capitalism and it is not about faceless corporations, it is about regular people in the middle class acting like parasites by using rent as a side hustle instead of working a second job to raise extra money. it's the latter that needs to stop, not the former.
in fact, if a large corporation bought this house (it wouldn't, but go with me) outright with cash instead of with a minimal downpayment and a huge loan with a high interest rate, it could charge less rent because it would have lower margins. that's actually what low income people, need - more upper class owners buying property that aren't paying interest rates and can operate at lower margins. i'm probably going to end up in a corporate apartment building with a higher margin because i can't afford the offloaded hike on interest rates that smaller landlords are paying right now, which is blocking me from renting another basement apartment.
a far more informed, intelligent and helpful policy would be to ban people from renting property until they have paid off more than 75% (or more) of the mortgage on the property, first. the middle class should not be allowed to offload their bills on the poor by buying up cheap property that they'd never live in themselves and then inflating the rent to levels that drive the poor further into poverty, and which they have no choice but to pay. this is predatory and parasitic; it's "rentier capitalism" at it's worst. this cuts the banks and the middle class bourgeoisie (who are the problem) and not the corporate sector out of the process. it would discourage bourgeois middle class people from becoming rentiers and shift the process of renting properties back to the wealthy (and to the corporate sector), which would lower rent costs because it would require less borrowing from the bank and because it would assert an economy of scale, rather than five million "small business" independent mom and pop entrepreneurs that need to raise money to pay for their kids and fund their cocaine habit somehow.
but this is the ndp, canada's protest party for rebellious 12 year-olds, and they're instead going to blame it all "on corporations", without any sort of analysis, which they simply don't have. the ndp should have a deeper class consciousness and a coherent class analysis. they don't. they want to appeal to the alienated children of the bourgeoisie to send them funding and donations, instead.
google recently announced it has developed a new quantum chip that is not always wrong, but merely usually wrong. it may get a correct answer, occasionally.
this is being hailed as a giant breakthrough.
this is the device they need to put the chip in to lower it's temperature to close to absolute zero:
absolute zero is colder than outer space.
it's colder than the end of the universe.
colder than margaret thatcher's dead remains, and this is very much a race to the bottom, the bottom of existence, itself.
it's so cold that matter halts to vibrate, although it's important to be careful in understanding the difference between what we call absolute zero in existing models and an actual bottoming out of existence, which is something lower than it.
you are never going to have an absolute zero enclosure in your pocket calculator walkie talkie, but you maybe you can pay mit to log into their computer, if you need to solve some np problem for work before the end of the universe.
if you want a serious way to address solving np-complete problems in polynomial time with reasonable amounts of energy and using reasonable amounts of memory, quantum computing is an extremely poor approach. if quantum computing ever works, it's going to be for mainframe computing, strictly. your phone will never be a quantum computer.
using bacteria is a far more serious idea that could very seriously be mass manufactured.
it's the hindus that are leading the way on this, right now.
i'm giving elon musk an ultimatum to immediately cease and desist copying conan obrien's appearance or to let conan run the world instead. if elon musk does choose to continue running the world, he needs to make his appearance more conducive to the purpose. for example, he might base his appearance on michael jackson, instead.
your choice, e-lo.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Municipal data confirm the negative effects of federal discrimination against the child care sector.
corporate daycares want a dei program?
of all the oppressed and marginalized groups in society, for profit childcare providers are the least of my concerns. the subsidy system that harper brought in was the most inefficient, market-breaking thing imaginable, making daycare providers wards of the state with federal contracts that looked like lockheed martin deals. it was crazy. i'm not a fiscal conservative, but childcare is a basic service, and it can't have this unsustainable model attached to it.
the simple reality is that if people actually wanted to pay for expensive childcare spots then the providers that skipped out of the subsidy system wouldn't be going bankrupt. they are failing due to lack of demand; they say so themselves. the market is speaking, and it's choosing the cheapest spaces possible and driving the expensive ones out of the market. in response, big daycare wants government to step in and hand out higher corporate subsidies to stop their business model from failing.
it looks like hypocrisy, but it's actually normal. this is how markets actually function in real life - they fail without government regulation.
the system that the liberals brought in was less inefficient than the system it is trying to replace, but it's still extremely wasteful. as people clearly want the cheapest daycare options possble, the government should listen to them and start looking at bringing back the dryden plan.
in the longrun, what we want is government run ece centres at cost, not expensive private nannies, subsidized by taxpayer dollars.
mulcair is wrong on it's face.
however, canadians are not going to vote for jagmeet singh because he looks like a clown, and they're entirely correct to reject him strictly on the basis of his absurd appearance and his goofy religious views. the ndp made a severe error electing him leader of the party.
canada will never have a sikh pm, and that's a good thing. it would be a tremendous step backwards to elect this guy or anybody that looks like him or believes the things he believes pm. there is nothing progressive or forward thinking about making space for silly belief systems and unsanitary cultural practices.
he has no chance.
he should resign tomorrow and endorse the liberals.
what it's demonstrating is that youngish canadians (this applies more to gen x than millenials, from what i can see and isn't that new) have a very poor understanding of economics due to an insufficient level of education in the topic.
young canadians are correct to identify problems in distributive justice with the neo-liberal status quo, but they are demonstrating incredible ignorance in voting for more of that status quo in order to solve the problem.
polievre's policies will make every problem he identifies, most of which are real, a thousand times worse.
only canada would be stupid enough to try to align with the french on the brink of a global conflict. we know what will happen to france in five minutes, right?
but, smart americans have always known that the germans are no ally. there's no surprise in seeing europe bolt for china on the earliest opportunity.
canada's cold war policy was to stay out of the dirty fighting. we need to retreat back to the pearson-trudeau-chretien position that was consciously and very foolishly (as we see now) aggressively reversed by the previous government.
canada should not be given the opportunity to choose between a europe-china alliance and us-russia alliance.
the american occupation of europe must be enforced, with violence if required, to prevent them from revolting against washington.
european insolence will need to have a price, if it comes to it.
canada cannot make the mistake of expecting otherwise.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
a 25% tariff on assembling cars in canada and shipping them into michigan pretty much kills ontario's automotive sector.
the government is responding by planning to ship oil from alberta to quebec (the national energy program) and generate an industrial policy around made-in-canada cars. but, this is dumb. it's backwards - it's bringing back the 50s. it's responding to trump with trump.
if we're going to build our own cars just for us and are no longer going to be able to export, the most obvious thing to do is to completely phase out fossil fuels entirely, which makes the nep strictly obsolete thinking. if all new cars are to be electric, and only electric vehicles are allowed by some upcoming date like 2035, canadians will need to buy electric vehicles to replace their old economy ones. this will drive the sector for a while.
we may need to nationalize some of the plants.
then, you reroute the electricity we're exporting back to canada to get the grid up by hiking up export taxes, which drives up the cost of manufacturing in the us rust belt at our benefit.
in all of this is an opportunity to retrain workers to build more houses in a massive make work plan, which we clearly need.
the canadian political spectrum is once again asleep at the wheel. this could be an opportunity to transition off carbon, at least in our populated great lakes and st lawrence region. let alberta export it to texas all it wants, until it starts to see the value of export taxes, itself.
your brain is a quantum computer, it's not a turing machine. all chemical reactions in real life are quantum reactions. classical computers are also quantum reactions, but those quantum reactions are obscured, as they exist at a lower layer.
your brain error corrects, but the amount of data it requires to do so is immense and the way we're approaching quantum computing has no resemblance to the way our brains work, at present.
there's likely better possibilities in building supercomputers out of bacteria bioengineered into behaving like synapses, but we need to get something like wave packets happening in the quantum computer, not pretend we can rely on this concept of superposition, which we don't even have a viable theory of. we don't know what superposition even is, yet we're trying to design computers around it, then getting frustrated when they don't work.
it's a dead end.
ai as it exists is just a computer program that does a google search for you.
i can already look up facts on google without asking ai and that does 90% of what a doctor or teacher does. they're already obsolete. the other 10% is never going to be replaced by any computer searching decision trees, ever.
but i learned something when i went through my cancer scare a few years ago - doctors are trained to use the same algorithm an ai would. i actually took graduate level courses on ai at carleton about ten years ago, and it's really not any sort of magic. it's a decision tree, a database search.
we have no idea at all how to make computers actually think and won't until we understand how we ourselves think. quantum computing may never happen, but real ai is likely outside of the possibilities of binary logic.
if trump wanted to break the canadian political system, he's already done it.
i have absolutely no interest in this election at all. the issues being discussed are idiotic, and the proposals on the table are moronic, across the board.
the canadian political establishment is using trump as an excuse to push policies they otherwise couldn't get away with, like hikes in military spending. nobody wants to waste money on the military, and i'm not falling for the bullshit.
trump's stated goals of the tariffs are to generate a revenue stream he can use to offset cuts in income taxes. he's trying to oversee a giant tax shift from progressive income taxes to regressive consumption taxes. in response, both of the parties in canada are proposing the same copycat tax shift. then, they're arguing that they have to do it to fight trump, when they're actually both adjusting tax policy in alliance with trump.
this whole thing is a facade. a charade. theatre.
nobody wins in the end, but the big losers will be the canadian people.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
i strongly support annihilating the barbarians in yemen and hope that canada participates in a global mission to erase them from the planet.
anybody standing up for the yemeni terrorists - anybody - should be seen as a national security threat by both the united states and canada. there is no acceptable argument for aligning with this particular group, which has absolutely no redeemable qualities, whatsoever.
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