it's starting to look like we're going to need to call a general sit down strike in canada to address the government's vicious attacks on labour rights.

these proposals are blatantly unconstitutional and should be ignored by all. they are illegal proposals; they have no legal force.

when a government abandons the rule of law, it's citizens must abandon the pretense of civility and shut the economy down until it relents. 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/section-107-labour-code-hajdu-right-to-strike-9.7350619

i think it looks better the way it is than it would if somebody went in there and made it look mowed over and chopped down and fake, like some bourgeois golf course or something.

landscaping is almost always hideously ugly. things tend to look better when you let the weeds grow in and the ecosystem thrive.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/town-residents-demand-action-over-060605130.html

ok, i got the front door waterproofed. i'll need to do a second concrete run a little later tonight, but that's the last time i should have to go outside for the foreseeable future, meaning i should be able to completely lock this place down and lock these losers out.

the next thing to do is spend some time in the shower - a lot of time in the shower.

during the 00s, i had to either go to very small venues or to house shows to get interesting music (in ottawa) because the standard venues would only book garbage. there were better concerts happening at the legion than there were at the local club. the city hired better djs to spin at the beach than the nightclubs did to spin at the bars.

why don't i do it myself?

because i'm a contradiction. i'm complaining that the music scene sucks (which is not the same thing as arguing that there are't any good albums being released), but i have a large, sprawling discography that i couldn't possibly perform live in any way other than pressing play on a playlist. in theory, i should benefit from the shift to personalized streaming, except that i'm violently opposed to reducing my art to content to act as a medium for ads. 

i've been trying to find a drummer that i can work with for years and have mostly given up, but i don't want to show up with a drum machine, because i think that's lame. i understand how to adjust, but i don't want to adjust, i want to go do something else.

you can stream my recorded music on the links on the side. i have some live music written that i'd like to perform for you (it's not the same as the music on the side), but i have to find some like-minded musicians that are willing to shut up and do what i tell them, first, and i haven't been able to do that. i can't do this alone; i'm not very good at meeting friends. i don't play well with others. i can be extremely mean and not very nice.

i want to post some suggestions as to what the young people can do to save their music scene, if they want to. i'm not convinced they want to, but here's how to do it if they do.

1. bring back house shows. by house shows, i don't mean house parties. i don't mean "block parties". i mean concerts in basements or backyards, where bands perform live music (they can be electronic bands) and guests pay a reasonable amount to get in, of which most goes to the band and some goes to the house. this is necessary to blunt the profit motive to rebuild the scene. the venues are either owned by large promoters (this is a big problem) or have huge rent bills to pay and can't gamble on art over profit. the only economically feasible starting point is the house show. prioritize creativity over marketability. don't overcharge. pay the artists. take a minimal cut and operate at cost. you're in this to save the scene, not to put your kids through college. if the venues start to realize that the house shows are cutting into their audiences because there's a market for better music, they'll adjust to it. further, it's ok to book multiple genres on the same bill and is even recommended. some of the best nights i've had start with a punk show in the evening and turn into in all night rave. a 12 hour party that starts with a good rock set and turns into a bumping techno party before shutting down with an ambient set when the sun comes up would be an awesome house show.

2. reclaim college radio and step away from internet streaming. your spotify playlist doesn't have an audience and isn't going to get one. it's not somewhere that a community of people can go to and listen to the same thing. you have to realize the value in people listening to the same stream and try to get control of the means of production in a way that can actually broadcast. you could in theory hook your spotify playlist up to an fm signal, and maybe that's how you do it, but you need a physical place on the dial. the internet isn't good enough and the whole industry is going to collapse if you don't realize that and take a step back from it.

3. stop selling commodities and start selling art. you're not a fashion designer. you're not doing marketing for the paperclip factory. this isn't a hustle to profit off a third party product. it's about the music, so make it about the music.

4. get rid of the moderators. let the shows be open spaces and stop trying to control the behaviour of concert goers (within legal bounds). if people are assholes, confront them on it, but don't police them over it. you will lose more concertgoers by moderating the space than you will attract by creating "safe spaces".

5. no open mic nights. they promote mediocrity and destroy the venue, turning it into a place where people go to get drunk, rather than a place where people go to interact with artists. they build the wrong kind of community space. 99% of people that show up to an open night could not get booked and should not get booked and should not be on a stage, anywhere. adopt filters. it's ok to tell somebody they're talentless and suck and should get a job at mcdonalds instead of pretending to be an artist.

6. no drugs in the house. at all. no smoking. no marijuana. some social drinking, maybe, not too much. and you have to be willing to enforce it - especially the pot. throw the potheads out and tell them why. tell them to go to the bar to get stoned, or to go smoke in the park and come back. the drugs make people stupid, dimwitted and uncreative. you're not hosting an opium den, you're hosting a venue. it's not about the drugs, it's about the music.

i think you'll find that if you build it then they will come, so long as you make it about the music, and make sure the music is good.

so, i mean, i'll keep an eye on it.

if it does flip back, maybe i'll start going out more again.

right now, i'm planning a future around staying in and focusing on my own reading and writing projects, by myself.

the culture might come back. i'm just pessimistic right now because it's not like it was before.

i went almost nowhere through most of the 00s, because i didn't like the kind of rock music that was popular at the time. that shifted around 2008 or so and all of a sudden there was more music that i liked showing up in more venues so i went out more. venues seemed more interested in booking more artistically interesting acts. i'm not going to pretend i fully understand why that shifted in the late 00s.

a part of it is no doubt just cyclical. i've posted before that i didn't like the music that was popular in the 80s or the 00s but did in the 90s and 10s. the 20s seem to be a rehash of the 00s, which i didn't like very much and thought of as a cultural lowpoint. on that level, it's not surprising that i'm bored with the events lists i'm seeing, and would rather stay in than go see some shitty 00s indie band or some boring folk music. i tend to like rock music that is more dissonant and dirty and experimental and abstract. that's not in style right now; what's in style is boring rolling stones style three chord rock bands with stupid vocals, which sucked in the 60s, and has sucked every time it has come back, since.....or pretentious twee-folk that is so goddamned boring that your grade 12 english teacher would like it (or might even be in the band). just like the 00s.

but it just seems different this time. it seems like something's broken and that there doesn't seem to be an appetite to fix it. it seems like people are happy with and want the status quo of low quality live music. that wasn't the case in the 80s or the 00s - people then were cognizant that the status quo sucked, whereas people today seem to have nostalgia for exactly the eras that i'm so heavily criticizing as low points.

i acknowledge i could sit down and sort through bandcamp links, and my own email lists, and it wouldn't take me long to find some records i like. further, i acknowledge that most of what i'd pull out would be pretty obscure. that's not the point i'm making.

the point i'm making is that from 2014-2020, it was relatively easy to find a show to go see on a friday night in detroit. now, half the venues i would have gone to are closed and the other half are booking things i have no interest in at all and that are broadly speaking largely aristically dead.

the algorithms have made it hard for creative or interesting music to get enough of an audience to get a venue to book them, and the shift in culture has made a lot of the venues disinterested in holding events. i would be less concerned if i saw new venues popping up, as the issue is easily resolvable, but i'm not. what it suggests is that there's a lack of interest amongst young people in underground culture as a gathering point, that young people would rather chat online than go to an underground concert, which is going to kill the industry. bands can't survive selling music. they need to perform to exist and if there's nowhere to perform they don't exist. it doesn't push things to the margins (what i'm pointing out is that there are no margins, that the margins are disappearing), it pushes them into the centre. it doesn't create heterogeneous, idiosyncratic art, it produces homogenization and commodification, because you can't exist at all unless you reflect a cliche, because nobody wants to organize anything anymore.

and what i'm ultimately pointing out is that what it means, for me, is that there's nowhere to go anymore, so i'd rather just stay in and read a book.

when even resident advisor thinks techno is dead, it indicates a crisis point.

this is like rolling stone writing a eulogy for rock music, which has already happened (correctly) more than once.

i think the future is in bands like son lux, who released a new album today. but they aren't young, they're my age. in fact, i hope i'm still able to be creative, myself. there aren't many innovative actors in today's music scene and it's because the media landscape discourages it. the video doesn't talk about the way that streaming sites like spotify place everything into extremely narrow demographics and then nail the listener to those demographics via aggressive personalization. once the marketing algorithm decides you listen to a specific subgenre, it will flood you with music that sounds exactly the same.

if we want to talk solutions, it should be in pushing back against the personalization. ai is going to intensify personalization, not break it. because you're just a money machine, in the end.

it's up to listeners to break this in the end. what's worrying me is that i don't see a lot of evidence that the market is unhappy with the status quo. that wasn't the case in the late 80s, when there was a real revolt against corporate radio and mtv.

the irony is that it's easier to revolt now than it was then. but i just don't think these kids want to revolt, i think these kids like the corporate commodification. i consequently think we're looking at a lengthy period of stagnation.

i've had a really boring, tedious week. i have a lot of work i have to get done in here before it gets cold, but i've been forced to spend the time scraping off acne and dead skin instead.

i do at least feel better now than i did last week, but it's been a lot of wasted time cleaning up the mess. if i get the chance to smash these idiots' brains in, they'd better fucking run, because it's going to be a brutally violent outcome if i catch them.

i just want to write this down while i'm thinking of it.

something that's different about this place and every other place i've lived in since bronson - which was from 2007-2011 - is that i have my books unpacked and on a shelf, here. i had a handful of the books out and on a shelf in the last basement i was in, and i had a part of the apartment put aside for building shelves in, but the basement turned out to have some weird water issues and i never got around to setting anything up in there. i intended to build shelves in the basement i was in from 2013-2018 but my focus was almost 100% on my discography at the time and i never got around to it.

the reality is that the culture on this continent has changed enough for the worse over the last 5 years that i'm not confident i'm going to find myself very interested in the nightlife in detroit or windsor. i've scanned. it's truly gone to shit. i've complained before about the ubiquity of folk music displacing more interesting genres that require higher levels of musicality, but the techno scene has also gotten horribly boring. something i'm learning about the young people via proxy is that they're incredibly shallow, because they live in a world where nothing exists except marketing demographics. the idea of creating something new or creative is just beyond them and from what i can see from sorting through shows, they even seem to inherently resist the idea of novelty on it's face. to the younger generation, everything is a cliche, because all they've ever known is a cliche. you can do rock music, but only if you're a novelty act. rock music was heading in that direction anyways, but the cliche-ification and memification of everything means electronic music also only exists as cliches, which means the concept of music is running up against a brick wall of commodification. i'm not even sure much of this is being grasped. i think sitting down and trying to explain this might result more in blank stares than any sort of creative spark. i see a kind of dead end of ultra-commodificaton in the near future (commodities are not art), which was about where we were in the late 80s, but the difference between gen z and gen x is that gen x realized this was bad and resisted it and gen z doesn't seem to understand why that would even be considered something to criticize. the fucking fuckers seem to have finally succeeded in completely brainwashing the kids. 

there's no underground left, post-pandemic. it's ok if things shut down. but nothing's replaced them except social media, which is not an underground in the same sense, it's just hyperlocalized cliques. all of this networking should be making it easier for people to find each other, but it's instead made it harder.

and, from what i can see, the venues are just confused that their marketing isn't working when they pump out cliches over tiktok and nobody reacts.

what we're going to need is raw unfiltered venues and it may require a generational shift, as young people seem to be afraid of the idea of this on it's face. who will protect them from getting offended? it's common sense to them that a venue should have a moderator and somebody to kick-ban anybody that doesn't fit in. you can't have a counter-culture, then. it's a contradiction.

so, we're going to have to endure a period of 50s style conservatism by a younger generation that just doesn't know how to think and just doesn't want to learn how, and i'm going to be too old (if i'm not already too old) to rebel in solidarity with whatever comes next. if the next generation rebels against their parents by ditching tiktok and twitter and reading books and essays and blogs, maybe they'll find me and enjoy what i have to say. if not, the future is probably quite bleak.

the art scene is always the first thing to fail in a culture that is embracing anti-intellectualism and entering a dark age. ai provides a glimmer of hope in clawing out of this, but it won't save us unless it breaks the ongoing commodification and marketization of everything through the social mediafication of everything by giving us more free time to think for ourselves.

what i'm getting at is that i'm less and less interested in going out to party and more and more interested in staying in to read and create, instead. that's ok. i was maybe partying a little too much in the late 10s, before the pandemic shut me down.

i have yet to recover from the pandemic. that's where i am in life. the restrictions and changes were so devastatingly harsh that i'm still struggling to climb out of the hole i was thrown into, to die.

the first couple of years of the 2020s weren't so bad for me in terms of productivity; i changed directions, certainly, but i got a lot of writing done from 2018-2022, even if not much of it has been pulled together, yet. the data is waiting to be compiled and will be in the end. since then, it's just grown in volume and complexity, but i still have time to finish it.

the last four years, since the house i was renting got bought by investors in early 2023, have been horribly unproductive because i've been struggling to exist rather than able to focus on working on anything of value. it's been utterly catastrophic, in sum - years of constantly wasting all of my time on boring and tedious shit. i think the place i'm in is stable, so long as i can block the smokers here, and so long as i can ultimately get the stalkers thrown in jail, and i don't want to move again. so i'm intending on returning to productivity as soon as i can finish installing the place, and hoping i can turn the installation process into something productive, itself.

the fact that i have my books out and accessible and cataloged again means i want to get back to the book project in addition to the journal project, which i got a start on when i was healing from my orchiectomy in 2021, but put on hold when i was concerned about my site getting hacked by what was almost certainly the same entity that ended up stalking me, and is still trying to take control of and take credit for my writing. i haven't touched the main book report project since i put it down to focus on the discography, in 2013.

what i've learned about myself and the way i work since is that i'm not a good multitasker because i'm very much a workaholic. i find that multitaskers tend to do many things poorly all at once, and that single tasking results in lower outputs but higher quality. it's consequently better for me to do revolving tasks than multitasks, or to restrict my multitasking to one major project at a time, and a series of minor things on the go.

i've tried to build schedules in the past, but i never stick to them because i constantly run over. i tend not to want to put something down.

i'm also anxious to return to musical productivity and am struggling with finding the pathway to it. i have worked on some music since, and have further incomplete projects, but i haven't released very much since 2018 because i've been focused on other things and unable to get anything done. 

the journal has to be the main focus because it has to be a linear movement. that's not negotiable. i can't pick up in 1996 or 2004 or 2013 or 2022. i've tried and it fails. i have to start in 1989 and move through sequentially, completing projects as they finish. it's the only way to get anything done.

but, that doesn't mean it has to be the only thing i'm doing.

the seven workstations i need to set up - and i had this idea previously, but there's more space for it in here - are as follows:

- the offline web interface, connecting everything together, in my bedroom

- the journal, which reads through the fiction shelf, and connects to the book web, in my bedroom

- the book web, where i read through the reference books on my shelf, and continue to build it out, in my bedroom

- the music web, where i'm doing reviews (starting with davis), in the listening room

- the recording studio, where i'm going to need to start again with inri000, recompile and then get back to rereleasing music, in the studio room

- the eating station, connected to the oversight committee, some blogging analysis of that, and the diet vlog, in the kitchen

- the video station, in the side entrance

the book web will work the same way as the music web. this isn't a new idea for me and i've already started on it.

so, for example, i started reading the rights of man, which was in response to edmund burke's attack on the french revolution, which sent me to richard price, which sent me to thomas hobbes. i stopped there. i was also reading malaterra because of the genealogy project.

the genealogy project is not something i'm actively interested in but it will come up when i get to 2000/2001 in the journal project. i will eventually re-read everything i studied in school (that i remember) for the journal project, and will try to redo as much of the genealogy as i can using better methods. i wasn't that concerned about sourcing and eventually realized that a lot of what i was doing wasn't grounded in fact. i wasn't aware of the genealogy industry when i started (i didn't understand why somebody would fake their ancestry, so i didn't see an incentive to bullshit, and it didn't cross my mind until i began to understand that people were selling dubious books to a middle class from peasantry backgrounds that wanted to climb ladders into the aristocracy. i also underestimated the reality of female promiscuity and had to deal with that firsthand before i understood it better. an official genealogy might not be real. the necessity to find clear sources is more apparent to me now than it was then, when i just pulled data down off websites without checking it or looking into it.)

i will not start again with hobbes, but with adam smith, because the theory of moral sentiments (lcc: AC7) is the first item on my shelf. i will read through each item on the shelf sequentially, and every text cited by that item, only returning back to the shelf when i've snaked my way through everything cited. it is likely that smith will cite locke, so i will likely put the smith down at some point to read some locke, and order it when i do. i may need to put the locke down to read some bacon. etc. i will eventually get back to the next item on the shelf when i finish reading through the smith. if i read through items already on the reference shelf, i can skip them when i get there. this work, along with everything else, will eventually get subsumed into the journal project (i didn't read smith for school, i got that book for $1 at a garage sale, but there's a big psychology text at bf and kant and hegel, which were read in a course on german idealism, near the top of the shelf, in the bs)

the revolving tasks will need to be:

- one journal author (starting with asimov)

- one discography project (starting with second class citizens)

- one book on the reference shelf (starting with adam smith)

- one artist in the music web (starting with miles davis)

i will be listening as i'm reading and updating the music web throughout.

the other stations will be mote sporadic, with each new project transferred to the offline station when it's finished.

the journal project, moving forward, is now the main project, not the discography project. that is to say that the discography, while the major end result, is now actually a subset of the journal, and will be formatted and presented in the end as a component of the journal. components in the discography cannot close until i get to them in the journal. in the case of music re-recorded in the 2010s (or upcoming projects yet to be finished in the 2020s or 2030s), it could be many years before the projects close.

this will let me work through my recording, my reviews, my reading and my writing without losing track of any one thing, which i have not been able to do since i rebooted the first time in 2013/2014.

in fact, i'm currently in the process of a second reboot and what's about to come up is going to be the start of a new narrative in 2027, meaning my narratives are not going to be in the following collections:

alter-reality segment:

1989-1996 - period 0 (journal period)

1996-2000 - period 1 (inri period) <--- i initially started here but want to start in 1989 now instead. basically done.

2000-2003 - period 2 (post-inri to bc trip) <---basically done

2003-2007 - period 3 (return to ottawa, the sarah period) <---i left off here. about 30% done. 

2007-2011 - period 4 (bronson) <---not done. many demos to complete. 10% done.

2011-2013 - period 5 (occupy period) <--- many ideas, not even demos. no studio. 0% done.

first reboot:

2013-2018 - period 6 (reconstruction period) <----highly productive, but mostly remastering and rebuilding. some demos. 0% done.

2018-2023 - period 7 (reorganizing period) <----mostly writing and compiling. i will need to address this the way i addressed period 1-3 in period 6, with a later reconstruction period. 

2023-2027 - period 8 (deadzone) <---completely unproductive, totally dead period. almost a total wash. will largely skip over in the end, except to compile a linear narrative through blog posts and vlog videos. no major products started that need to be finished.

current reality:

2027-2033? - period 9 (second reconstruction period) <----hope to completely finish and close periods 0-6 at least, with further ideas put aside for future completion.

it would be a grave error to sell f-35s to the saudis and i hope it gets blocked by congress.

if the saudis cannot beat a pitiful, barbarian force of houthis with less advanced weapons, more advanced technology will not do them any good. they need proper training, not more technology. giving them more advanced weapons just increases the level of liability that propping up this fake country generates.

it may be in the interests of the west to let riyadh fall and focus on cleaning up the mess afterwards, instead. that would eliminate a dangerous and unstable state from the region, and negate the potential consequences of a saudi collapse, which are substantial.

stated differently, a saudi collapse should be seen as inevitable. you can only rule with fear, oppression, slavery and violence for so long; it's a matter of if and not when. the direction of policy should be to generate an orderly collapse that can be reorganized into a modern society, not continue to prop up a despotic theocracy that wants to bring back the dark ages as it's founding, guiding principle.

so long as the anachronistic saudi hierarchy remains in place, it will continue to pose a grave threat of destabilizing the region.

i'll reiterate that ratifying ceta would largely require making the same concessions to france that we don't want to make to the united states, and the united states would be correct to raise eyebrows over that. however, the reality is that there's next to no chance that's going to happen. ceta is dead.

nor does it matter much. there's no possibility that the eu will replace the united states as a trading partner for canada. as such, poking fingers in the eyes of the americans on this just isn't very smart, which is the general conclusion i'm drawing about mr. carney - he seems to, in truth, be quite the fucking dunce. there are ways to replace the united states that make sense. the eu would play almost no role in this.

so, i'm feeling a little bit turned off and outwardly irritated by watching the prime minister engage in these outward displays of affection with european leaders that i don't agree with on much of anything and would rather keep at an arm's length, but i'm realizing this is mostly for show. it's certainly not going to make me more likely to vote for these guys, that's for sure. but it's not likely to have much of a substantive impact.

it's political theatre, and the demographic that carney is targeting in canada is mostly older white people that lean to the right of the political spectrum. if most young canadians find the display to be somewhere between disturbing and sickening, they should take solace in realizing that he's speaking to his base, which is dying white boomers, and that it won't really mean much at the end of the day.

i would just like to express my opinion that i hope this is over now and that i'm not required to stomach it again any time soon.

if the pmo could stop wasting so much time on this and start focusing on some more serious trade negotiations, that would be encouraging.

there's ultimately 7 new videos here at the end of the playlist.

   

there's going to be yet another sub-blog coming up on the side soon, and i'll reiterate that a part of installing the apartment is going to be rebooting all of these websites and connecting a large percentage of them to their own terminals or devices in their own physical spaces in this apartment. the kitchen chromebook will need to come up first. these will update on the side, soon, i just keep getting knocked off direction by these loser stalkers that won't go fucking die in a ditch already.

i'm not running for any office, or at least not officially. i would not be likely to show up to work if i won an election. i have better things to do.

however, i'm becoming annoyed by the nature of the debates in the society, which are devolving into soundbites for tiktok. these are completely useless. i'm not even interested in making fun of tiktok. it's just a complete waste of bandwidth.

what i'm going to do is set up a sub-blog where i answer debate questions in full form essay responses and invite people to write me in as a write-in candidate, as a means of protest, for not getting clear or sufficient answers from politicians running for office, largely due to the media failing to do it's job.

the races i pick could be anywhere in the english or french speaking worlds (i don't speak any other languages). they could be in canada, quebec, the united states, the uk, ireland, france, australia or any other place where i understand the language and can react to the debates. i may pick the quebec premier debate as my first option if i can get it done in time. i will be more interested in issues in detroit-windsor, ottawa-gatineau, michigan, ontario, quebec and new york than issues anywhere else.

it will come up as a series of page posts with an index on the front of the blog.

if you want to write me in because you're sick of liberals and democrats and conservatives and republicans, and want a realer response that's based on data and science rather than ideology, and want to vote for an outspoken atheist rather than a religionist, then write me in as jessica murray. i won't go to your district if i win. however, maybe i might influence the direction of politics in your district if i do well.

think of me like a rhino party candidate that isn't a joke.

the one seat i might consider accepting is a seat in the canadian senate. i am not officially applying, but if these responses are to be used for anything other than as agit-prop and a means of protest, the thing i'm maybe sort of kind of abstractly running for is the canadian senate.

i've been accused recently of being ai. it's probably because i don't type in retardo twitterspeak like all of the other idiot humans.

but i'm not ai. i was born of human parents, and am therefore nominally human myself, in the year 1981 CE. i lived in ottawa, canada until 2013 and moved south to windsor in mid 2013, where i've been living since.

saudi arabia really isn't a real country, it's a crime family with a large fief. it would likely split into 3 or 4 smaller countries that are more similar to nation states if it were to collapse.

the strength of the saudis is on paper. the reason they don't use their army is that the aristocracy doesn't trust it. it has no loyalty to the state. a situation like we saw in iraq with isis or afghanistan with the taliban - where the superior security forces gave up without fighting - is not just plausible but likely. it would force the country to splinter quickly.

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/could-saudi-arabia-collapse-and-would-islamists-fill-the-vacuum/

i have some cameras to set up in here. as i'm confident they can't get in, i should be able to set up a fair number of them in an assortment of access points.

i had a big meal this morning and i'm not feeling the effects of being drugged at all. i would be if it was in the food. but i don't think they can get in here.

conversely, somebody smashed a hole in my fence this morning at exactly the spot that i was worried about, as if to confirm my suspicions. i'm going to have to talk to the neighbour when i get the chance, but i'm again in the situation where i'm afraid to leave the house out of fear of somebody getting in here.

my landlord doesn't own the fence. the neighbour owns the fence. she's complained about the vines in the yard damaging her fence.

this time, i don't think it's the current landlord; i think it's the previous landlord. i think that her and her two male friends followed me here because they didn't get what they wanted the last time and they want to finish the job, whatever the job is.

i don't understand. i don't want to pretend that i do.

does that mean that we should abolish central banks?

no.

but i think that the idea of taking monetary policy out of the hands of elected decision makers is undemocratic. the central bank has other things to do and should continue to exist, but interest rates should be set by elected representatives and not be made by independent bodies acting out of the control of the executive or legislative branch.

in canada, there should be an elected minister responsible for setting rates and a ministry responsible for overseeing it.

one of the biggest drivers of inflation in the united states right now is the tariffs. trump might complain that he wants lower interest rates, but the fed is designed to hike interest rates when inflation comes up. oops. in fact, this is an algorithm for out of control rate hikes because the rate hikes will probably contribute to creating inflation by increasing borrowing costs, rather than contribute to decreasing it. 

it would follow that if trump wants to lower interest rates, he should start by cutting the tariffs.

but he wants his capybara.

right now.

all evidence is that trump actually supports the obama era policy of quantitative easing + low interest rates but that he put people into the fed - twice - that don't, that hold to the debunked monetary theory of inflation. he's being blocked by his own laziness.

a return to obama period monetary policy would not reverse inflation on it's own, but there's little evidence that it would hike it, either.

why was there such minimal inflation during the obama years?

well, look at that oil chart again:

oil was maxxed out. but it was pretty flat overall. then, a sharp decrease in energy costs (caused by an increase in production) slashed transportation and production costs.

obama also oversaw a historic widening in inequality that was an effect of the policies of the reagan-bush years, which congress blocked clinton from messing with.

The distribution of income in the United States has been more unequal under Obama’s presidency than any time since the 1930s, according to the Gini Index, a conventional measure of the inequality. 

the result is that demand for a lot of the cpi goods was very low because people were so fucking poor. stores couldn't sell anything because people had no spending money; a lot of big stores went out of business.

it is true that handing out free money during the pandemic probably did influence inflation, even if the primary cause was the steep spike in oil. however, this wasn't a monetary phenomenon. it was due to an increase in demand caused by giving money to poor people, and the fact that american capital is brutally exploitative and viciously parasitic. read the grapes of wrath, especially the part where joad realizes the money he's getting in wages is just going back to the employer, who hiked the prices after the harvest, in order to eat. that's how the system works, and why it's often not the best strategy to hand out checks to the poor in the united states. it just ends up subsidizing rentiers or agrifood.

during the obama years, the fed completely spit on the face of monetary policy - it cut interest rates to 0% (there were negative interest rates at one point) and it printed trillions of dollars. the debunked, completely wrong theory that dumb conservatives won't let go of would argue that inflation should have hit 30% after so much printing, and with access to basically free money. it almost looked like obama was trying to create hyperinflation.

but there was no substantive inflation over this period. in fact, there was some mild deflation.

the theory doesn't need to be tweaked in order to save it. it's not rough around the edges. it's not off by  factor. it can't be fudged with a constant. it's not even close. it's completely, flat out wrong.

the empirical data is extremely clear that high interest rates do nothing to stop inflation, because inflation is neither created by nor is solved by monetary policy.

that theory was debunked decades ago. inflation is caused by increases in capital inputs.

i would support lower interest rates in canada and the united states. but i guess i'll take advantage of higher interest rates if i can.

the bank just sent out a lengthy investor pamphlet encouraging account holders to invest in weapons. they use the orwellian term of "national defense", but they mean buying stocks in weapons manufacturers. there is a 0% chance i'm going to invest in any kind of guns or war spending. there is a 0% chance i'm going to invest in oil. but i need a medium term return and it doesn't look like i'm going to get it on renewables. i may put a little in hydro energy if i can find a good deal.

the most ethical and pragmatic investment decision in canada right now is probably bonds, unfortunately.

https://financialpost.com/news/economy/fed-seen-hiking-rates-in-defiance-of-trump-decision-day-guide

i think this is the rare article that is getting this right:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-danger-isnt-that-ai-is-too-smart-its-that-its-stupid/

yeah, i just ran through a string of more scare mongering videos about ai going rogue (i'm not going to cite anything but i want to understand the argument as clearly as i can) and the commonality is that:

1. the people making the arguments don't understand the necessity of using proper syntax

2. the models don't have sufficient error correction and don't foresee the need to correct the user error of bad syntax

the result is that the systems are never going rogue, and are never transcending their programming, but are often being trained poorly and seem to be full of bugs and errors that aren't sufficient to catch the poor training. the actual problems are user error and bad programming. the results might indeed be dangerous to catastrophic, if you employ a badly programmed ai model full of bugs and logic errors in an environment where people don't know how to use it, and that does require careful oversight, but that's not the model's fault. 

stated differently, a frequent outcome is that the program crashes because it's too stupid to work through the situation, not because it's scheming it's way to dominance or control.

an example i found was a guy that programmed a couple of a models to destroy all threats and then disengage and claimed the model went rogue when it went after him instead of disengaging. it sounds simple. that's exactly the mistake. a threat is a very complex concept that requires a lot of logic programming to define. if you loosely define a threat, if you miss a clause, if you skip an else if, you could end up with the thing defining something as a threat that you didn't intend it to define as a threat. but, from what i can see, this model was following the logic that it was programmed with flawlessly. the video actually included the model's thinking and you can hear it go through the lines of code and come to the correct conclusion that the guy with the off button is a threat. that's not a mistake. that's not a model going rogue. that's logically correct! that's a program correctly completing the way it was written; it's also the program not being written correctly, and that's the actual problem. that's a very basic programming error that should have been caught very early. what it exposes is that the ai companies aren't doing sufficient error testing.

you could argue that the model wasn't told to consider being shut off a threat so therefore it's gone rogue. ok. but that's wrong, if you defined a threat in such a way that being shut off fits the definition of a threat. 

the solution is to more carefully define what a threat is so that being shut off doesn't fit the definition of a threat, and that might require including a specific clause. it's not convincing to argue that that's too complicated, either. a lawyer or a parliamentarian would have caught that. but the programmer was probably not that bright a person, himself - they tend not to be.

the models also seem to need more complex c++ programming in how they convert conversational or colloquial language into logic. these must be complex, dense blocks of code that are hard to get through. but you have to get that shit right and you have to thoroughly test for it before you let these things out into the market.

i'll keep an eye on this. but, right now, i see a lot of evidence of an industry defined by a lot of incompetence, a lot of evidence of badly programmed models and a lot of evidence that the models are at times having difficult understanding inexact commands with imprecise syntax because they haven't been coded specifically enough. the more code in the gui, the slower the model.

i also see a lot of evidence that the main threat from ai is that it is too stupid to work through contradictions or predict outcomes (it's not able to understand consequence) and not very much evidence that the ai is going to outsmart us any time soon. you're getting this backwards. the real threat is actually in how dumb ai is.

i just watched something on youtube where the ai spits out that

true intelligence is not problem solving but the ruthless application of power.

sounds scary.

but the computer is just repeating something it downloaded. it doesn't understand what those words mean.

watch this, again:

i'm a hemingway fan, but it was something i did almost entirely in high school - for whom the bell tolls in grade 10 and old man and the sea in grade 12. they're both great books and i enjoyed them both quite a bit, while i found myself bored with the cancan, with much of the nineteenth century literature (i would have been very bored during the 1800s. i'd have probably completely rejected the society and instead sought out an old raft and tried to live on a river with a guitar with five strings, and called anybody demanding i restring bourgeois.) and also with some of the shakespeare.

my opinion was not popular in my classes, which were enriched/gifted grade 10 english and advanced grade 12 english. almost everybody hated the old man and the sea, including the teacher. nobody understood it at all.

the iq results i posted yesterday are in truth actually probably spot-on. it is the truth that the ai wouldn't understand hemingway. at all. but most people don't either and that just makes it of average intelligence.

i transfer $25 to my voip account every 3 to 5 months, which means i'm paying $5-$10 a month, depending on usage. with that, i get:

$1.10/number (i have two numbers, so it's $2.20/month,  base rate)

 +

$0.005/minute out-calls anywhere into canada

$0.01/minute out-calls anywhere to the us

$0.01/minute in-calling from anywhere in north america.

(toll free numbers are free to make calls to or receive calls from)

$0.0075/txt (in or out)

- voip works on cisco office phones with modifications and on cell phones running specific apps

- txts are forwarded to email and can be responded to from email as email

- voicemails are forwarded to email in the form of mp3 files.

i don't fly very much. apparently, plane tickets are expensive in canada. that's news to me. apparently, they're looking for ways to reduce ticket costs. 

this isn't the first time that this debunked argument about competition reducing prices has shown up in canada.

canada has very expensive cell phone fees. this was blamed by the right on overregulation and not enough competition, so they tried to break up some large companies, and the prices actually went up. very few people want to admit it, but the reality is that canada is a very big country with a very small population scattered over a large distance and with challenging terrain in between. building anything here is hard, and expensive. canadians need to pay for the cost of living in the wilderness, on the edge of civilization, in an environment where maintaining a network is very challenging.

likewise, carney has wanted to reduce food prices through increasing competition. but the reality is that we have a short growing season and swaths of badlands (you can't grow a damned thing in the canadian shield), and we don't tend to eat the kind of food you could grow here anyways. we import most of our food. we're paying for the cost of oil two or three times through transportation, refrigeration and fertilizers. it has nothing to do with a lack of competition, although i'd welcome steps to grow more food locally, to cut down on two or all three of those costs inputs.

it's a great general solution if you have a specific ideology. you can trot out competition to solve problem after problem.

....except that it doesn't work.

like most cure-alls, it's a kind of snake oil and if you take it too seriously it can cause substantive harm.

as with the other examples, and i'll admit i haven't looked into this too closely, it is highly likely that the higher costs for air travel in canada have to do with canada's isolated geography full of distant communities and endless forests. there probably isn't a way to reduce costs; outsourcing hr has a very bad track record and will predictably lead to 2-3x the labour costs, we have enough data to say that with confidence. 

it's the price you pay for living in the sticks.

canadians will tell you there's upsides to the landscape. it's up to us in the end to decide if the cost of living is worth it or not.

i'm not exactly sure what carney wants or expects the private sector to do in publicly owned airports. i suppose he may want them to take over hiring, or may operate a tim hortons. the argument is that this is good for canada because you can tax it. but you're taxing profits, so it would inevitably be better if you owned it, given you already own it.

it's going to cost a lot of money to sell it, to start. you have to pay lawyers, for example, and they charge a lot. then, you're going to take a percentage of the revenue you would have had 100% of if you had kept it. so, you're going to throw away 95% of revenue, or might even lose money. on it's face, it doesn't seem to be very smart.

what it is is a reflection of the tired old argument that the private sector is "more efficient". this was at best an assumption in like 1975. since then, it's been repeatedly proven wrong by dataset after dataset. but homo economicus is continental and theoretical, it's not analytical or empirical. it relies on theory, not data.

one example is outsourcing hiring, which is probably almost the only thing that a private sector could do in an airport while retaining public ownership. there was a time in the 80s when outsourcing hiring was supposed to save money because the private firm was supposed to be more efficient. then they actually tried it and learned that the opposite was true - the bureaucracy in the private sector infrastructure was brutal, the corruption was rampant and you had to pay the ceo and this whole other layer of management, while you really didn't replace any government workers. the result was that the frontline workers saw a paycut, which was recessionary, overall and the costs still doubled or tripled. it turned out to be the most inefficient, trickle-up policy proposal you could imagine, if you tried. it was a massive transfer of wealth from government workers to private sector ceos and bourgeois service workers like accountants and lawyers.

i don't imagine there's actually much that a private sector investment could really add to an airport that the public sector couldn't do for a fraction of the price. 

the messaging is that carney may have been blocked by the ministry. if that's the case, i hope that data wins out over ideology, after they have their debates, which are healthy and encouraged.

“All [young people in America] know that a lot more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. And I tell them what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it,” said the former commander-in-chief.

in fact, they've been conditioned to accept that outcome as the eventual terms of peace.

when young people say they're in solidarity with palestine, what they mean is they support oslo, they support camp david. they think that's what "palestine" wants.

....because they get information from tv shows, or from social media. they don't read books.

it's an early sign of idiocracy.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/bill-clinton-young-americans-shocked-to-learn-arafat-turned-down-palestinian-state/

was clinton's proposal reasonable?

sure.

would clinton's proposal have been in the self-interest of most "palestinians"?

yes.

but they didn't support it. and by standing in front of an audience and repeating support for clintonian proposals in historical israel in 2026, you are not standing in solidarity with any muslim group in the region, you are articulating a now very dated american policy proposal that they have firmly and repeatedly rejected.

conversely, if you are standing in front of an audience and legitimately standing in solidarity with the muslim political entities in historical israel, you are necessarily calling for the end of israel. that's what they are fighting for. that's what solidarity means. 

which is it?

it's the former, in 99% of situations, and the actual issue is that the performer doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about, not that they're politically aligned with hamas. they're not politically aligned or in solidarity with anybody except themselves, and the irony would be that they'd be enforcing a colonial model on a muslim population that is resistant to it, and is only really supported by liberal jews.

they're in solidarity with noam chomsky and norman finkelstein and naomi klein (abstractly if not actually), not with any contemporary muslim entity in historical israel.

there has never been any organized "palestinian" political movement that has ever accepted the existence of israel. every single muslim political entity in historical israel since 1948 has firmly rejected the existence of an israeli state and argued for a single muslim state in historical israel, to be populated almost entirely by indigenous hebrews who have been converted to islam in the last 300 years, and mostly in the last 150 years.

it's ok if you support that. i would disagree with you, but you have the right to reject the existence of israel, if you were honest about it and fully understood what you were claiming to be in solidarity with.

but, unfortunately, almost nobody in the west understands what they are saying when they repeat these slogans and when challenged on the point they universally expose that they are supporting the clintonian model that had absolutely zero support from muslims in the 90s and has absolutely zero support from muslims today.

white people need to drop the support for clintonian solutions. he was a well educated, smooth talking failure, and all he's taught us since is that he was a bigger creep than we thought he was. let's move on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IsraelPalestine/comments/1nlbqvx/why_was_the_2000_statehood_offer_unacceptable_to/

it would seem as though the individual really means to talk about a free irelend rather than a "free palestine".

as is the case, generally, when entitled, rich white people talk about this issue, they don't represent the viewpoints of actual people living in historical israel - not the converted hebrews, certainly, who overwhelmingly support driving israel into the ocean. there is essentially nobody in the region, which is roughly the size of new jersey, that wants two states.

new jersey is pretty small. a lot of people in new jersey would rather join new york. could you imagine splitting new jersey not just into two states but into two countries? ignoring the logistical problems on the ground - there is no infrastructure in which to build a state with - the amount of space being talked about doesn't seem to really be well understood when rich white people run their mouths off about it. for that reason, there is some logic in the reality that nobody supports two states. the area is arguably too small for one state, whatever the religion.

the clintonian solution worked in ireland, but ireland isn't israel. the indigenous hebrew population in historical israel is not very similar to the indigenous celtic population in ireland. clinton's solution to the problem in the area has proved resilient amongst entitled white people, and remains popular in the west thirty years on, but it was rejected by the "palestinians" at the time and it remains rejected by the "palestinians" today.

if macklemore speaks for anybody, he speaks for a disappearing and aging class of liberal american jews, not for "palestinians" (hebrews converted to islam by arabic colonialism, and mostly only actually over the last 150 years) living in historical israel.

that said, i don't think it's helpful to ban musicians and i would not ban the person from performing at my venue, if i owned one. i might seek an audience and try to talk some sense into him and correct him on points he's wrong about, instead. the united states once was a historical bright point of debate and free discourse. problems are not resolved via censorship.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/sheeran-macklemore-tour-9.7345034

i don't think that an elite female athlete, if hired as a spokesperson for the gambling company, would succeed in selling a lot of product to the demographic being targeted to buy it.

there would really seem to be some entitlement issues at play.

and ms. sweeney has no responsibility to give the slightest fuck about them.

ms. sweeney is a model. maybe she's also a bad actress, but she's not an athlete. 

she's selling a gambling product to the kind of older men that also buy pornography and/or go to strip clubs. the demographic that is being targeted tends to like thin blonde women with large breasts, and tends to have little to no interest in women's sports.

the typical target audience for the ad would be perfectly represented by the now historical television character of al bundy.

she doesn't have a responsibility to represent female athletes and the suggestion that she does isn't fair to her or what her job is, here. the criticism from female athletes has no relevance whatsoever to her job as a model in the ad and is in truth outright absurd.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/sydney-sweeney-sports-ad-9.7342823

this is from june.

i finished in the bedroom in early july and sealed up most of the laundry a little after that, with a blog post on july 31st, but i didn't do a second update video in late july. i had issues with my vacuum and did some work in the front instead. there are videos made that were intended for my landlord but they won't be uploaded to this playlist.

i think i should have done a video at that time, but i've also been mostly naked inside for months and i was waiting to finish things that took longer than intended. i ultimately think i forgot or otherwise put it off and never got back to it.

what i describe in the update vid is pretty different from what i did.

i'm going to do another steam mop run in the very front of the bathroom tonight or tomorrow morning (i'm not paying electrical but it's cheaper over night) and will make a combined update video, split into two, once i decide how to best clothes myself in the short run.

it's going to be quite the long term project but i have the shelf and floor space dedicated to it in this apartment. 

there are two lists of books that i'm going to be filling in, slowly:

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/dgdgkdhldfjlfdhla/readbutunowned

https://www.librarything.com/catalog/dgdgkdhldfjlfdhla/booksthatdisappeared

both of those lists are partial right now and will continue to get filled out as i sort through essays i wrote and course syllabi over many years. another source of texts will be this blog which, if printed, would come in several thousand page volumes and is going to take a while to organize into a linear order. i've posted several lengthy research projects to this site that have involved reading quite a few online texts.

i was not able to get a list of books checked out at carleton because the server for the library crashed between 2013 and the time i asked, which i think was 2019ish. they lost all of the data before the crash. my records are incomplete. i checked at least 1000 books out of the library, and that doesn't include the ones i read in the library and never took home.

this will never be comprehensive but i'm aiming for 80% of a total read list.

i just bought the scarlet letter and the island of dr moreau, both for less than $10. at $20/month for now, and maybe $50/month when i'm done buying furniture, it will slowly rebuild, but i also need to direct it towards texts for the journal project, first.

the cds will fill in soon, too.

i'm currently scouring old drives for signs of a book list from 2002/2003 or from 2011, which are key maximal points. i currently only have two versions of one book list, from 2005/2006, and it's missing a huge amount of texts. i am sure these lists existed, but i'm having trouble locating one.

trump just appears to be annoyed by the suggestion that he has to act quickly in the middle east. he wants to demonstrate control by taking his time, but it's blown up in his face.

the lesson is that you need to act swiftly and decisively in this region. you cannot dither. you cannot meander. you cannot fuck around.

had they swiftly taken the iranian state out, a lot of these problems would have been resolved. had they been more aggressive with the houthis, it would have made a difference. and etc.

my body had a hard hiccup on thursday afternoon. i don't know exactly what happened yet, but i was drugged - hard - at some point, either via some ingredient of the pasta i ate on wednesday afternoon/thursday morning or via somebody getting in here and drugging me while asleep. 

there were unusual marks on my thigh and on my chin but i don't know if they're symptoms or causes. i'm leaning towards the former.

as was the case previously, it's not ambiguous. i resisted it at first, but it's clear i was drugged hard on thursday and may have been drugged with weaker doses a few times leading up to thursday, in amounts that were less clear and not very effective. but what happened on thursday was clear. activity picked up heavily after an extremely disappointing order by an extremely ignorant adjudicator at the ltb in early august, who was not able to read a graph. i'm certain it's the same people, who have followed me here.

if this ends in violence, the court will have to own up to it's series of blatantly ignorant mistakes. i give no credit to the opposing arguments. i'm dealing with overtly discriminatory judges that appear to have been put in place on purpose. the result is a court system with no credibility, and that deserves no respect and no deference.

i was sleeping with my windows open because it was nice out and i like sleeping with the windows open when it's nice out. i sealed all of the screens up early in the summer and actually put chain locks on the windows in the bedroom. somebody could get through these if they were insistent but i would be able to tell if they did. as there's no signs of entry, i don't think anybody actually got through the windows and inside the apartment. however, i've been noticing for a while that there's signs of somebody coming up towards the window in terms of garbage left outside it and other things of the sort. i do remember waking up with something on my cheek and not being convinced it was saliva, but not being sure quite what to do. 

i think they might have sprayed something through the window. it's not the first time i've thought that, either. yes, they are apparently that pitiful and that pathetic. and i don't fully understand what they want. 

this is partly why i sealed the laundry up on saturday, although i don't think that's the entrance point. there's no sign of entry through there. there was sign of entry through the side, previously, but hasn't been for a while.

when they manage to get something into my system, it will clear within 6-12 hours. it's a very short, intense, annoying feeling of being high on something i don't want to be on and don't enjoy being on, but my kidneys will clear it out almost immediately. this is the point they don't seem to understand. they think they're curing me of something and that they're going to clear a pathogen if they force me to take the right "medicine". they don't understand that i'm castrated and that my body removes injected testosterone as a foreign substance, because that is what it is. while the drugs clear fast, the side effects can linger for a variable period that depends on how intense the drugging was. as of monday morning, i felt the remaining side effects had lifted and cleared and i was feeling and looking relatively normal again. the intensity and briefness of the effect, combined with my medical history, makes it clear that i'm being drugged.

however, the drugging on thursday was heavy - heavier than it's been in over a year - and i subsequently had to spend the weekend in the bathroom washing off the side effects, which are best described as vicious acne. it's brutal zits. i don't get it. i don't understand what they're trying to do. my weight has fluctuated in confusing ways, as well. but the over-riding direction is that i'm losing weight and this is what will determine outcomes regardless of the drugs, which are frustrating and annoying but of minimal actual consequence. the acne will have an even more minimal effect once i get that extra little bit of weight off.

i've been hovering around 135 since i bought some fruit at the end of august. fruit clears so fast that i wasn't as interested in the algorithm and was eating through it quickly to stop it from rotting in the fridge. i didn't lose weight over the last two weeks, but didn't gain any either. i'm still at 135. that should start falling again this week as i shift to salsa and bring in the minimum meals.

for obvious reasons, i need to prevent them from getting in here again. the weather is cooling, so the windows should mostly be closed. i don't see how else they could get in, or how else they could spray me from outside. i don't see any other signs of entry.

after sealing it up on saturday, i spent sunday cleaning the laundry and doing a general monthly clean (a little late) in the laundry (including doing laundry), the bathroom and kitchen. i set up the new shop vac that came in on the 21st on saturday morning for the first time (because i was working outside for the last week of august and rebuilding the reference library shelf for the first week of september) and it's actually a lot more powerful than the one that exploded a few weeks ago and really picked up a lot of the dirt. i also ran my new combo spin  scrubber / steam mop for the first time this morning and it's certainly helping get the rest of the dirt off. 

it's truly hard to get your head around just how dirty this place was when i moved in. it's like 150 years old and it's been updated but it hasn't been cleaned well in probably 30 years and it had rodents, roaches, ants and anything else you could imagine. now it's totally gone.

the decrease in temperature outside has my high lumen led lights running at full power again. this, combined with the three prong attack of the new shop vac, the usb spin scrubber for tighter spaces and the spin scrubber / steam mop has the place feeling truly clean for the first time since i moved in last year.

this is tedious stuff, but it means that i'm back where i started when i made those rooms of the house videos, and that there will be a few more videos uploaded soon to explain the progress i've made in those two rooms, particularly. there's been progress in other rooms, too, but we're going through the space in order, and the kitchen is the next space to finish up, as i put aside cash over the next four months for the rdsp.

while it would not be very likely that ai is going to go rogue and kill us all (i'll state again that the issue being brought up is not an ai transcending it's programming, it's a programming error that nobody wants to admit. it's easily fixable. the ai did not disobey it's programming. the ai did what it was told.), it is in the realm of plausibility that a shift towards fascism/feudalism as a result of automation, if we fail to build the right political movement to direct the shift in the mode of production towards communism, might result in a capitalist overclass that wants to just wipe the excess proletariat out. that is, if the capitalists don't need the workers anymore, they might decide the world has too many useless eaters in it and just wipe the bulk of the proletariat out. the result may be a large reduction of the population, rather than extinction. i could make up numbers. 70%. 80%.

while that would result in a lot of dead people, everybody dies anyways, and it would not be a bad thing overall if it leads to a better life for the survivors. no, i'm not volunteering. but i'm not interested in religious ideologies like the sanctity of life. it may be a necessary step to maintain sustainability and stop producing so much pollution.

and it would, by definition, end capitalism, as there would be no more proletariat left to steal labour from.

because they're all dead.

the most serious concern to human life on this planet is carbon emissions, not ai or automation, and every second spent worrying about ai is a second that is wasted on not worrying about climate change.

but automation may lead to conditions that reduce emissions and i would ultimately support that, albeit in the most humane way it can be done. i'm not much interested in a dictatorship of the proletariat, either, i just want the abolition of coerced labour (wage/chattel slavery) and the abolition of inequality/class. the fascist approach of just shooting everybody is less desirable but is better than the status quo of runaway population growth, in the long run. that's not sustainable.

i would prefer something like mass sterilization. but wealth redistribution and education for women, together, seem to minimize growth rates on their own, without the need to carry out the procedures.

that being said...

the current population of the earth is far too high. the immense amount of global over-population on this planet is the primary cause of runaway carbon emissions, climate change, deforestation, food insecurity, pandemics and a spate of other interrelated problems. to maintain a sustainable population, and a free society where we have food security and enough resources for everybody to live freely, we need to cut our population at least in half and then severely curtail population growth. i am in favour of a global population between 1 and 2 billion people.

these luddite fake leftist idiots are not allies of communism, they are enemies of it, and they will unfortunately need to be fought against - perhaps violently - to institute the revolution in the mode of production brought on by the shift to automaton through ai.

the revolution is everywhere and always in the mode of production.

i don't want to call myself pro-ai. i'm neutral about ai. it's just a fancy gui over a search engine. you're being confused by the realistic presentation of the gui. it's not real - it's just a search engine.

i'm pro-technology, pro-automation and anti-capitalist because i'm a communist, and that's what being a communist means. but that also means understanding that it's capitalism that will build the infrastructure that will eventually automate labour, and allow humans to be free from slavery in the capitalist economy, and spend their time making art and living civilized existences instead.

i will reiterate that this is overblown. we're not there yet.

but leftists should actually be excited that the ai is putting us on a path to ending the barbarism of coerced labour that we call capitalism and finally creating an actual civilization, with actually civilized people in it, to replace the pathetic mass of pitiful slaves we've assembled in the capitalist economy as proletariat to generate profit for the capitalists with. this is a symptom of late capitalism. it means we're exiting the capitalist phase (which is defined by capitalists stealing surplus value from people they force to work for them, which is the definition of capitalism, either via physical chains or via imaginary economic chains. it is when you eliminate that relationship of capitalists enslaving the proletariat that you end capitalism, and the way you do it is via automation.), but we need to have the political infrastructure in place to guide us through the transition, or it will fail and fall backwards into feudalism, instead. leftists should be building that political infrastructure to help guide us towards a transition to an automated society that ends the capitalist relation and leave the backwards luddism and fear of change to the ignorant fools on the right. fake leftists arguing for the retention of the status quo because they fear the shifts in the mode of production should be spat upon, cast out and shouted down and treated with contempt. the word for that is reactionary; fake leftists opposing ai are in truth capitalist reactionaries and backwards conservatives. ai is the best and only hope we have to get out of the slavery of capitalism and truly revolutionize the economy. it has to be done right, and there are dangers, but outright opposing it is sentencing us to perpetual capitalism, which is itself delusional - some other society will transition from capitalism to communism and wipe us out, instead.

we don't have the choice to stagnate in perpetual capitalism. we can choose between transition to communism or suffering through a conquest by those that do so first.

the classical ancients only considered a few vocations to be fit for a free individual, and considered the vast majority of human labour to be unfit for the free, and merely forms of slavery. they considered mathematics, philosophy (which we would today call science) and art to be the vocations fit for the civilized, free individual. they would reject almost all labour in a capitalist economy as slavery, and call the people that did the labour slaves; whether they were wage slaves or chattel slaves was largely irrelevant. i agree with them and i align with the historical strain of thought from socrates through to marx and beyond that seeks to one day abolish labour. that's what a left is and, certainly, those that are aligning in opposition to that wonderful dream of a utopian future without coerced labour cannot be called a left.

what do i think is going on with this?

it's more than clickbait. this is clearly being organized. 

i suspect that the end result is that the "regulation" ends up written by the industry. i'm not entirely sure what that means yet, but in existing crony capitalist terminology we say that the regulators are captured. what that means is that the regulations are written by the industry to advance the aims of the industry and really aren't regulations but enabling legislation. the direction appears to be towards advertising.

a law that tries to prevent rogue ai from taking over canada is like a law that mandates tiger-banning rocks.

it's probably harmless because it's probably meaningless. it probably doesn't actually do anything at all.

but, i mean, i need to see it before i can deconstruct it. right now, i'm just guessing that the ai companies are seeking "regulation" because they're trying to capture the regulators, so they can regulate themselves.

there should be some regulation to prevent ai companies from warehousing personal data in data centres. you don't want a file with your name and your picture on it that's been scraped from the internet without your consent, and can be used to generate personalized ads. but that's what's coming unless some laws are written to stop it.

this nonsense about ai killing everybody would seem to be a distraction to allow them to capture the regulators without seeing laws passed that prevent them from warehousing personal data.

“Imagine a world where all companies are run by AI, where there are robots all over the place, where basically humans don’t have any work except for nominal work, and even politicians and everyone is deferring to AI because the AI just seems to have such good judgment,” he added. “That’s the kind of future that we’re headed towards.”

that's called communism.

i'm strongly in favour of that future. i support that. i will fight for that and fight against those that want to stop it.

but it won't develop simply by revolutonizing the mode of production, and the projection is not realistic. that is not going to happen any time soon, but i hope that it does happen one day, and i will fight for it to happen, not fight to stop it from happening.

i could understand conservatives opposing ai but it's ideologically incoherent for self-identifying leftists to oppose technology like this. if you're opposed to automation, and you call yourself left-wing, i'm sorry to tell you that you're not very left-wing at all. the whole point of the left is that automation eventually abolishes labour. that's what communism is. 

pay a one-time fee of $500 to prove you're a genius! this week only!

right.

i don't know what my iq actually is. i gather it's pretty high.

i don't think that paying membership fees to join a group like mensa is very smart.

i know that iq tests are not perfect, that they have cultural limitations, but it's the best standard of comparison we have.

i was identified as gifted as a child because i scored in the 99th percentile on the tests they did every second or third year. i also did an entrance level iq test for the government of canada as an adult in my 30s, and again scored in the 99.9th percentile. the interviewer actually thought it was a typo.

he literally told me my iq was impossible, that nobody scored that high. well, i was nobody, i guess. i was applying for the most entry level position at statscan and i guess the guy was a hierarchical douche because the best response he had was that it was higher than the entry level requirements for management positions, so therefore it must be a typo.

well, yeah. 99.9th percentile is nobody. i guess.

my dad, who was not well educated, used to surprise people with his gct II scores, which got him hired as a call center stooge for the tax office (it was a good job for a poorly educated guy from a very lower class background). he was sure he'd score higher than me. he wanted to compete and vanquish his smarty pants kid for good. he was sure he'd do better than me, because he did better than everybody he knew. but he was very quiet and never brought it up again when i showed him the score and it's relatively clear his score was not close to mine.

so i had to go find some stats (which actually took some effort) and when i found them i realized it really was a score that nobody gets. it was way off the charts.

but they didn't hire me because i couldn't pass the situational judgement test, and i actually tried three times.

how are these ai systems scoring on iq tests today, anyways?

you have to be careful. if the test exists on the internet, the ai system might have learned it. it could tell you the answers by finding it in it's database. that is what an ai is - an advanced gui on top of a search algorithm running on a database in the backend. and that's all it is.

so, somebody devised an offline test that no ai had ever seen before. 

this is where they were at in 2025, when the issue was fresh:

that's actually not very impressive, is it? but it's about what i expected. it's interesting that the ai systems show about the same level of variation as humans, but that's a function of the central limit theorem.

since this hit the internet, these numbers have started coming up, but i'm skeptical. if i was deepseek, i would consider this bad marketing and want to improve it. the nature of the technology makes this hard.

you could argue it's not fair to the system to ask it to think like a human. ok. the mirror test has been modified for some species to adjust to their perception of existence, and they tend to do better when it has. but if you're going to argue the ai is 100x more intelligent than the smartest human, you need a standard of comparison.

i would not have a lot of faith in the updated numbers, at least not until some kind of truly third party institution can be built that can truly ensure these tests are fully offline.

in 2025, this was random, with no prep. and the results were what you'd expect that autistic kid to score.

"How well do you fancy your chances at being able to deal with a system that is 100 times smarter than the smartest person on the planet?"

i strongly reject the premise. 

what is intelligence? is it the ability to regurgitate knowledge? that's not what they test for in iq tests. or is it the ability to think creatively, abstractly and to use novel information to problem solve?

the ai is just a database. if we have already solved a problem, it can tell us how to do it. but it can't solve new problems on it's own.

the ai will never score as high on an iq test as a moderately intelligent human.

you should look at the ai as that autistic kid you knew when you were younger that was impressively knowledgeable and able to run off scores of facts like nobody else, but couldn't write an essay to save his life. that kid wasn't smarter than you, and he didn't do well in life.

the ai is not going to be smarter than the smartest person. it will never transcend the point where it struggles to compete with humans of average intelligence on issues that define actual intelligence.

if you program a bot to be malicious, it can be malicious. there's no question about that. asimov's laws of robotics are not real, or at least not yet.

however, this issue floating around the media - of these bots going rogue on their own - is not real. i went over this once before. the issue at hand was actually a bug, a programming error, it wasn't the result of the bot transcending it's program. that's make-believe.

it follows that you should regulate humans, not regulate ai. and this is the same issue that democrats constantly get wrong - they blame human behaviour on inanimate objects, on make believe diseases and on everything you can possibly imagine, except on the humans ourselves.

an evil person could program one of these things to do evil things. sure. but the ai layer isn't the problem, and that evil person doesn't need the ai to use the computer to do something evil. but that isn't the concern that was being brought up, and you're missing the point, regardless.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cm70d91rg7l4t

the political class in this country doesn't work for canada or canadians, it works for foreign capital.

the country needs a revolution. it needs to roll a few heads through a few guillotines.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/article/pm-carney-to-kick-off-canadas-first-investment-summit-protests-planned/

the media is suggesting that the backwards, barbarian houthis have somehow managed to drag themselves out of the caves for long enough to launch some kind of substantive offensive in the south of yemen. there does appear to be something afoot but the narrative's not being accurately reported.

- the saudis shot down a plane with some houthi dignitaries on their way back from iran. this appears to have been an entirely unprovoked attack. it's something israel might do, but israel is capable. what's relly being exposed here is that the saudis are utterly useless as allies and more of a liability than an asset in terms of military partners.

- the houthis reacted.

- the saudis contacted the pentagon and said "we can handle this" and launched an offensive.

- to the great embarrassment of the saudi forces, they were defeated by a group of cave-dwelling barbarians, despite having modern us-built equipment. analysts have been saying for years that the saudis don't know how to use us weapons. exactly.

- so, the saudis contacted the americans and asked for backup, who said "well, you picked a fight with somebody a tenth of your size, and you couldn't finish it. why would we come to our rescue? next time don't pick a fight.". they also offered them intelligence....which is what they give the israelis and all the israelis need, because the israelis are competent.

so, what should the yankees do, here?

step one is acknowledging that the saudis are a major problem. trump is a stubborn old man and he's going to dig in, and it's probably not the right answer, but he's nonetheless basically right. trump will try to sell them more military hardware and tell them to deal with their own problems themselves. 

however, the saudis need to get trained in how to use this hardware or the hardware needs to be taken away from them. it's a major liability to have all of this expensive hardware sitting in the desert, with nobody that knows how to use it. if you thought losing bagram in afghanistan was a catastrophe, the fall of riyadh - which would be a good thing for the region in the long run - would be potentially far worse. worse, the days of the americans being at their beck and call are over, but the culture in the region is going to give the saudis difficulty in understanding that. the saudis are hierarchically superior. they pay people to do what they want. they don't work for things themselves. that might cause them to lose weight! trump may be an anomaly in the long run in terms of telling them to fuck off when they start barking orders, but there needs to be an exit strategy. the saudis are not good allies. that's the takeaway.

but somebody is going to have to step in. these half-evolved primates need to be obliterated. they can't sit there and keep lobbing missiles.

i'm going to call on the turks to deal with this, if the british and french won't. they have a history in the area as well as naval forces in it and they benefit from keeping the straight open.

yikes.

prepare the babooshka.