the ndp's position is that it supports ukraine in it's "struggle for freedom".

because it's not a socialist party. at all.

but the important issue in canada right now is reducing carney's power to attack workers, not theoretical political debates. if carney wants to be robert borden in a phony war against the americans, the left side of his caucus should get up and walk out.

due to the importance of the conscription crisis as a central event in canadian history and the development of canadian identity, canadians should be particularly vocal in opposing the behaviour of the now unelected government in kiev.

something like this is nice to see.

canada should be at the front of the line in supporting the rights of ukrainians against conscription and should be ensuring canadian weapons are kept out of the hands of the ukrainian military.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1vg0hll/civilians_save_a_man_from_military_recruitment/

drawing on my family history as a french canadian, i stand in strong solidarity with the ukrainian people in their struggle against the forcible conscription being enforced on them by their own government, which has exceeded it's mandate and refuses to call elections. many conscripted canadians in world war one were also unable to vote at the time they were murdered by their own government.

canadians rose up and threw borden out of office. ukrainians have no democratic process in place to allow them to do that.

canadian arms should not be exported - at all - to a country with rampant corruption that is using martial law to enforce conscription using violence, and that has no existing democratic process in force to challenge it.

https://www.courthousenews.com/ukraine-opens-probe-after-crowds-attack-army-conscription-vehicle/

this should not be permitted under canadian law.

https://militarnyi.com/en/news/canada-to-provide-ukraine-with-11-000-rifles-and-9-million-rounds-of-ammunition/

the government has made it clear that these mps have no future in the liberal party except as backbenchers.

there's enough of them that, if they crossed to the ndp (or the greens), they could undo the liberals' majority. this would have substantive consequences in terms of limiting what carney can do regarding issues like his attack on labour rights. it would force him to rely on conservative support, which is bad optics.

i would encourage liberal mps that oppose carney's attack on labour rights to leave the party and put an end to this very false majority government. carney is taking advantage of the situation to seize power and ram through legislation he has no mandate to try to ram through. backbench liberal mps that have been rejected by the government for being too left-wing have the power to stop him by joining one of the other parties instead.

as for the bill, i would probably have supported the idea, but likely have had issues with how it was worded. i would be more interested in preventing arms exports to more active conflicts in sudan and especially, particularly blocking canadian arms exports to ukraine, which we know are being used to enforce conscription laws at gunpoint, than i would be concerned about canadian arms exports to israel (which are minimal to nonexistent) and would have argued for broad language in the bill for that reason.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/casey-removed-israel-arms-bill-9.7359007

what do i think about the arch in dc?

the us capital already has a giant penis. they should really leave it up to the first female president to build a giant vagina, and cancel the plan for the arch.

trump should focus on updating the washington monument, instead, perhaps by installing a statue of arnold palmer next to it.

polling for the us congress has small sample sizes, poor methodology and large margins of error. results are highly inconsistent and poorly predictive. averaging it out into aggregate is not a good methodological approach.

the way to read these polls is like this:

1. if the polls all say the same thing, the outcome is clear.

2. if the polls are variable, it's a toss up.

the polling in texas, alaska, iowa, maine and ohio is fluctuating but the republicans are always ahead. there is little to no reason to expect the democrats to be competitive in these states.

rather, it is michigan, new hampshire, north carolina and georgia that are producing variable results, in wide swings, with huge margins, which makes the result less certain.

i think this is a more realistic map and i don't think control of the senate is likely to shift.

the house is harder to predict because the ridings are all cut up like swiss cheese but the trend has been for the media to predict a democratic win and for that not to happen.

i see little reason to think the house is about to swing but i'll stop short of predicting a republican hold. i'm going to state with confidence that the senate is extremely unlikely to swing to the democrats.

can somebody run that through ai for me?

you know who sets the price for bananas, right?

bob dole says the price of bananas is just right.

the saudis have a problem on their hands with the houthis, huh?

pity.

that's a shame.

i would encourage a regional coalition to wipe the barbarians out. i've said that.

....but maybe everybody should wait until riyadh falls, first, and takes the saudi monarchy out with it.

the saudis are the biggest problem in the area and create the most amount of instability. everything from 9/11 to isis to the failed state in lebanon to the dictatorship in egypt traces back to saudi arabia as a regional decision maker. getting rid of the saudi state would be a massive benefit to the region and the world. they're also a huge liability to the us central command, which is being clearly demonstrated.

if saudi arabia loses to the barbarian houthis, the americans will necessarily have to go in to protect the weapons in the desert from being taken by the iranians or the chinese, which would be very bad.

maybe the region should let the iranians overthrow the government in the uae, too.

this is not a change in positions on my behalf and is in no way a show of support for the iranian state, which is still a terrorist death cult and should still be wiped out. i have been in favour of regime change in saudi arabia for years.

do not google evariste galois, who you've never heard of.

At the time of writing, details have not been made public regarding exactly how Alpöge prompted the AI model to produce the Jacobian conjecture counterexample and what its output looked like.

my second year calculus teacher would be heartbroken, if he didn't already die of a heart attack. i mean no disrespect to dr bose or his family and that was a long time ago. it's a good line. admit it.

like navier-stokes, this is again the kind of thing that you can solve with brute force with enough computing power and getting a counter-example is probably more accurately described as a reflection of the parallel computing power of the ai systems as functional mainframe super computers (something that is perhaps being downplayed) than it is described as advanced intelligence. 

they really could have just written a simple program in basic with a few counting loops, fed it into the mainframe and waited for it to halt. doesn't halt? conjecture is true. halts? conjecture is false, print n1, n2...nk. the only reason you could do this now and couldn't do it 50 years ago is the difference in raw computing power. it's no advancement in the algorithm.

they'll have to rewrite a lot of calculus textbooks.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260804034634.htm

this is interesting (it looks similar to galois theory and could potentially be formulated as a branch of galois theory) and i'll give the method credit for drawing connections humans missed but it's still not doing anything novel and the suggestions that it is should be retracted by the people claiming as much. what the machine was able to do was tell us that the answer was right in front of us, but we just couldn't see it.

the square root of negative one, i, has turned out to be an amazingly powerful abstraction that has helped us solve a myriad of problems.

the computer didn't solve the conjecture, it pointed out that we had already solved it, and the answer was in it's database, we just didn't realize it.

great. that's useful. but it's advanced pattern recognition. it's not a creative, ingenious solution.

https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/

i just want to clarify that this isn't reflective of advanced intelligence, it's a reflection of extreme computational ability. the ai didn't find an ingenious trick to get an elegant solution, it ran zillions (a zillion is defined as a big number) of mundane, simple computations and came up with the answer via brute force by just doing the calculation over and over. this is how humans have been dealing with solving differential equations (which is what this is) for a long time. the tactic is called numerical methods. again, if you had a million calculus doing monkeys on a million typewriters, you could solve navier-stokes, but you'd have to enslave millions of humans for millions of years to get an outcome. this is a valid use of super computers, and it's a great result, but it's a function of the power of the machine to do rote math and not of any deep intelligence.

and i want to propose some caution. in fact, computers are very bad at rote math and need to do tremendous amounts of error correction. the results need to be double checked by humans. people that work with this kind of thing will tell you that normal logic gate binary computers - not quantum computers - make an uncomfortable number of mistakes that are essentially reduced to round off errors arising from the need to convert from binary to base 10 and the fact that the computers do all of their math in base 2, which is necessary but crazy.

in fact, there's some circular logic here that i might be cautious about. i haven't looked at this and i'm not going to look at it but computers use euler's method to do almost everything because they need to constantly approximate solutions and are constantly cutting off rounding errors. this is called floating point error.

i would strenuously recommend that the math be doublechecked by hand for errors in arithmetic resulting from floating point errors. if it holds up, i might even suggest it's dumb luck. if it doesn't, it demonstrates the limitations of computers in solving math problems.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2588063-openai-has-solved-the-navier-stokes-millennium-problem-using-15m-of-ai-effort/

the simple english tl;dr on ai is this:

there's going to be some subset of ai alarmists that are trying to profit from this and some subset that is legitimately concerned. the legitimately concerned should understand that by focusing on the threat that an out of control ai may cause, which is science fiction, they are distracting from the much more real threat that an ai directed by malicious, nefarious or otherwise bad faith human actors, or just basic human incompetence, may pose. activism should be focused on regulating human behaviour and on ensuring that governments aggressively mandate that systems are thoroughly tested before they go into production.

this is a different question than i looked into, but the google algorithm threw it at me (after i blocked a million young turks network videos trying to tell me how trump was DESTROYED by natalie harp scandal, or whatnot. this is a better suggestion, google. thank you for improving under human direction.) and i think it's worth posting here. the issue i was looking into was the question of misalignment and i determined the potential threat comes from poor programming and insufficient testing. it was much like the nuclear threat in the cold war. of course nuclear war was a serious threat, but there were efficient systems in place (including the mutual use of game theory, which is something the americans abandoned under reagan) to minimize it. the biggest threat was always that somebody would make a mistake, make a bad decision, and then we're all dead. 

once again, the issue being exposed is that ai is a legitimate threat due to the potential of human error, rather than the machines evolving beyond us. the latter is not something grounded in science. the former requires some careful regulation to ensure that ai systems are rigorously tested and have sufficient error correction before they are put into use and the evidence i've seen suggests that the private sector is failing at that task (where is the profit in that?) and needs governments to do the regulatory work for them.

i suppose you need to be in a specific age range to get the joke.

it's the kind of elementary mistake in basic economic theory that is rampant amongst stupid conservatives but that liberals just have not made in this country for decades. 

in fact, the grocery store collusion was the exact example that we used to talk about oligopoly in first year economics. we went through this exact issue. no, the stores aren't going to compete. are you nuts? they know better than that. they will instead fix prices, and there's a mechanism in which they do this.

what the fuck are you talking about? oligowhatchamasay? i'm talking about competition!

right.

what is an oligopoly?

“A rule of thumb is that an oligopoly exists when the top five firms in the market account for more than 60% of total market sales,”

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2023/may/what-makes-a-market-an-oligopoly

Characteristics of oligopolies

edit

Some characteristics of oligopolies include:

• Profit maximisation
• Price setting: Firms in an oligopoly market structure tend to set prices rather than adopt them.^[22]
• High barriers to entry and exit:^[23] Important barriers include government licenses, economies of scale, patents, access to expensive and complex technology, and strategic actions by incumbent firms designed to discourage or destroy nascent firms. Additional sources of barriers to entry often result from government regulation favouring existing firms.^[24]
• Few firms in the market: When there are few firms in the market, the actions of one firm can influence the actions of the others.^[25]
• Abnormal long-run profits: High barriers of entry prevent sideline firms from entering the market to capture excess profits. If the firms are colluding in the oligopoly, they can set the price at a high profit-maximising level.
• Perfect and imperfect knowledge: Oligopolies have perfect knowledge of their own cost and demand functions, but their inter-firm information may be incomplete. If firms in an oligopoly collude, information between firms then may become perfect. Buyers, however, only have imperfect knowledge as to price,^[23] cost, and product quality.
• Interdependence: A distinctive feature of oligopolies is interdependence.^[26] Oligopolistic firms must take into consideration the possible reactions of all competing firms and the firms' countermoves.^[27] Every oligopolistic company with strong commodity homogeneity in its industry is reluctant to raise or lower prices, as competing firms will be aware of a firm's market actions and will respond appropriately. Anticipation among firms about potential counteractions leads to price rigidity, with firms usually only willing to adjust prices and quantities of output in accordance with a price leader.^[28][29] This high degree of interdependence stands in contrast with the lack of interdependence in other market structures. In a perfectly competitive market, there is zero interdependence because no firm is large enough to affect market prices. In a monopoly, there are no competitors to be concerned about. In a monopolistically-competitive market, each firm's effects on market conditions are so negligible that they can be safely ignored by competitors.
• Non-price competition: Generally, the oligopolistic enterprise with the largest scale and lowest cost will become the price setter in this market. The price set by it will maximise its own interests, such that other small-scale enterprises may also benefit.^[30] Oligopolies tend to compete on terms other than price, as non-price competition, such as promotional efforts, is less risky. Along non-price dimensions, collusion is harder to sustain.^[31]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

that's what i learned in school. i don't know what they taught you at the ayn rand school for homo economicus tots.

so how do you get grocery prices down via competition, then?

you don't. you're stupid.

you need to reduce input costs, which in most cases, in canada, has to do with high transportation costs. further, the cost of fertilizer has been spiraling out of control for years.

you overcharge for bananas, you might wake up wearing some cement shoes, and sleeping with some fishes.

in theory, if you set up a freshco across the street from a food basics  they might compete with each other, but i can point you to several intersections where there's a freshco on one side of the street and a food basics on the other and they tend to engage in price setting rather than competition. the difference is that they don't buy food from each other, they both order it from their own suppliers, so they in theory might compete. but it's the same suppliers, the same labour costs and, therefore, the same price. they're not going to compete - that would harm both of them and they both know it. things like condiments move in lock step. i've basically never seen them compete, but have noticed prices are usually the same for most things on both sides of the street (and i'm picky so i'll go to both stores and actually shop).

then there's the cartels, like bananas. bananas are always exactly the same price everywhere. no exceptions. ever noticed that?

you could say "but the store will stop them". they might. they probably won't. what does the cashier care? what difference does it make to the produce manager?

that's what the fucking clause was for, you dumb fucks.

where do you imagine that the convenience store gets it's food from?

it buys it at the grocery store and then charges you for gas and labour to go get it. that's why it's twice as much; it's the unwritten relationship. it's cheaper to just use instacart; it's the same thing, and fresher produce.

if you get rid of these clauses, you're allowing third parties to step in as middlemen and hike the price. it will create inflation, not lower costs.

this is utterly irrelevant and has nothing to do with prices. small grocers source from large ones. i walk by people selling fruit outside the stores all of the time and the prices are generally higher because they just bought it at the store. what this is actually going to do is lead to more resellers and may create problems with people buying up stock in bulk, clearing the stores out and marking it up down the street. there's now nothing stopping them from doing that, so why wouldn't they? those clauses are broadly reasonable and something i'd mostly support as they ensure price stability, which tends to keep prices lower. this policy is utterly wrong, economically, and will likely completely backfire.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-empire-property-controls-deal-9.7356543

a smart analyst should have looked at the vulnerability nafta has inflicted on canada and decided we're too reliant on foreign investment. it's not the americans that are the problem, exactly. it's the amount of foreign control over the economy.

to react to the tariffs with more foreign investment is to suggest an inability to understand, to analyze and to learn. it is to completely miss the point.

something that we've heard frequently recently from mark carney and his cronies is the idea that they can only plan around and focus on what they can control. it sounds reasonable on it's face.

then he calls a conference trying to get a trillion dollars of foreign investment, which is basically selling the country off to the highest bidder.

this week, canada has seen two foreign investors in the auto sector, both european, completely bail on their commitments. auto companies from korea have likewise been sketchy. it would seem as though foreign investment is unreliable and unpredictable, wouldn't it?

if the government truly wanted to focus on what it could control, it would be building crown corporations, funding r&d and engaging in massive keynesian spending to get the economy working. instead, it's trying to balance the budget.

that's not adding up, is it?