i've had to restart a 10 gb upload to youtube three times tonight.

running the shower and the stove together for four or five hours will clear the smoke out. the upstairs tenants don't like that because they don't like the heat. so, they shouldn't smoke in or around the house, then. it's really not complicated.

how am i actually feeling, in actual objective reality?

i was clearly drugged in early to mid september, around the 10th, a little before. they had to have snuck in when i was outside. my weight has for that reason been stubborn this month. but my weight has now been coming down more predictably over the last few days and i am feeling better than i was a few weeks ago, when i was struggling to metabolize the drugs and overwhelmingly exhausted as a result of it.

i am in need of a couple of days of long showers to clean off some of the side effects of the drugs, which have worn off. i'll be fine once i get through that week or so of long, hot showers.

right now, i objectively look disgusting and dirty and filthy and gross and in need of cleaning myself and anybody excited about that kind of dirt and filth is mentally ill and/or mentally retarded. i am aware that some third world societies have developed a disgusting fetish for the kind of filth and poor hygienic practices that white people eliminated from our society around 100 years ago with the invention of mass sanitation, which led to improved human health and medical outcomes. i find this fetishization of poor hygiene (in some cases it's even tied to ecclesiastical law, which i have no interest in or patience for) to be contemptible and deplorable. it should not be approached with relativism. it should be looked down upon as objectively backwards and as something in need of correction.

i'm dirty and need to clean up. i have not been living up to my own standards because i had a lot of work to do in dirty spaces. but i'm done cleaning in the work area. it's time to clean up.

they're just filthy, disgusting, despicable people and their attitude is reflective of their poor hygiene and poor levels of sanitation.

if these pieces of shit don't leave me alone, if i catch them in or near my space, i will not show leniency in my retributive actions.

i'm not a christian. i don't believe in turning cheeks. i believe in revenge.

the smell doesn't seem to be localized in the house. it's coming in from outside. but i think it's the stalkers and they're upstairs.

ugh.

i think they're logging me out of my accounts because they think my gender identity has something to do with my online persona, which is so speciously stupid that my head hurts. but i just woke up after a short nap (i'm in front of the chromebook because i'm uploading a video for my landlord and it's taken all night) due to the overwhelming stench of something burning, and 'm trying to figure out if it's a bad cook or a stupid, worthless, useless eating crack head.

the americans are disgusting and stupid.

europe and canada should have a joint policy of intentionally maintaining high diesel prices to discourage use. diesel should be expensive and farmers and truckers should stop using it because the cost is prohibitive and using it makes them less competitive.

why isn't diesel banned globally, in 2026?

stop using diesel.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5zjzjgdeneeo

christa pike may have technically survived the execution via injection but she has no chance of surviving without extreme brain damage and should be euthanized for humanitarian reasons.

the private company's service has filled in a gap for some people, but it hasn't replaced the tunnel bus' services, and it's not likely to without the city stepping in. i don't care if it's losing money. raise property taxes and cut salaries at city hall, don't cut services that windsorites want to exist and pay taxes to have exist. get rid of the stupid christmas lights to start, which costs millions of dollars a yer, and provides no services. stop wasting money on rail carts. stop wasting money on skating rinks. etc.

the accounting issue is a triviality. there are dozens of better ways to save money, and dozens of useless things to cut that are legitimate wastes of money, instead of something useful and valuable. the city councl voted in favour of keeping the service. 

nobody pays taxes to pay salaries for bureaucrats or to renovate city hall over and over again. those are expenses that should be first on the chopping block, but that mayor dilbert has prioritized for spending.

he cut valuable public transit with city council and community support to pay for christmas lights and renovations at city hall, including a hockey rink. it's immense mismanagement and he should pay for it with his job.

the private operator's hours are too short. the hours for the bus should in truth be 24/7 but should at least be extended back to what they were before the pandemic. the link bus also doesn't operate special events services which the city should step in to take over.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/windsor/article/linq-tunnel-bus-celebrates-one-year-becomes-election-hot-topic/

natural gas is not an acceptable form of energy to use in the 21st century.

this company should consequently be boycotted by canadian consumers for it's insistence on using backwards 20th century technologies, and refusing to evolve to modern energy generation technology.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/regina/article/bell-canada-marks-construction-milestone-of-sask-ai-data-centre-and-1m-mental-health-commitment/

the chatbot doesn't have an opinion of it's own. grok is not superintelligence, it's just a search engine.

what the chatbot will do is search the internet for opinions about the conflict and come up with a data-based empirical aggregate analysis. if you understand what the system does - and neither trump nor msnbc understand what it does - you'll realize it's a reasonable tool to consult. it's basically just asking a giant panel of experts and non-experts to weigh in and then doing statistics on what it finds. it's extremely democratic, as a tool.

it shouldn't have a veto. it can't replace cabinet and it can't replace the president, but it can be used to augment the number of voices the president is hearing when making a decision.

what it does potentially replace, or displace, is polling data, which is in a crisis point. online polling doesn't use sampling. it's useless. i would not just support but highly recommend that more world leaders use ai to ask more questions like this, as it can provide statistics on popular opinion in real time that a polling firm would struggle to assemble.

but it's also critical that world leaders understand that they're not asking a clairvoyant for a fortune reading but are just scraping data off the web and doing a statistical analysis of it.

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-grok-musk-ai-chatbot-venezuela-artificial-intelligence-military-strike

i would strongly support defunding the lieutenant governor and encourage them to just do it and ignore the court if it tries to stop them. quebec has never supported this document and is not morally bound by it. the supreme court reference case was clear that quebec is only legally bound by canada's constitution to the point that canada can enforce it, which in this case canada cannot do. therefore, quebec is not bound by the canadian constitutional framework in this case at all - not morally, not practically and therefore not legally.

the federal government could threaten to withhold funding in response. that's a dangerous game.

further, the federal government recently infringed on this section of the constitution by giving the governor general political authority over immigration and the issue wasn't even brought up anywhere, except here in this space. nobody noticed or nobody cared. some constitution. the federal government currently has an array of legislation in motion that runs roughshod over constitutional rights for citizens, including labour rights. the constitution is only being used in this country to enforce the rights of the state, of property, and of capital (particularly of foreign capital) and to deny the rights of workers, of the indigenous and of the environment. a constitution exists to hold the government to account on behalf of the people. a constitution that is only enforced in order to advance the power of the state, of capital and of property "rights" is the reality of how canada's legal system works (the same thing has become true about human rights legislation, the residential tenancies act and other legislation at the provincial level, and i am a recent victim of this) but is an invalid constitution and a constitution that should be ignored and/or abolished. the system is broken and should be shattered at it's stress points. i support putting stress on the system in order to shatter it.

we need a revolution in this country to take power out of the hands of the liberal capitalist elite and place it back in the hands of the people. this is a small funding step, but explicitly disobeying the courts is the step that is of value, here. these laws are illegitimate and the courts should be openly disobeyed when they try to enforce them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/parti-quebecois-monarchy-lieutenant-governor-fact-check-9.7363970

this is a pile of steaming bullshit.

virtually nobody in canada will see any material benefits from this project, but the climate effects will lead to continuing negative impacts. a better analysis would conclude that it is in canada's national interest to ensure the pipeline is blocked from being built, and i will stand in solidarity with groups fighting it in court and on the ground to advance their interests and the material environmental interests of canadians.

the project is solely in the interest of foreign investors in colonizing countries like qatar and the uae, who will see 100% of the benefits, after extracting labour and resources from canada and canadians, who will then be left with nothing but pollution to show for it. that's the economic model being used, and it leaves us with nothing.

it is more important now than ever that canadians unite to block this pipeline.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/canadas-first-ever-project-of-national-interest-under-pm-carney-revealed/

maybe he should get some more foreigners to build more "projects" in canada, seeming as it's working out so amazingly well.*

steel in canada should be nationalized and organized as a crown corporation.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stelco-layoffs-legal-carney-9.7363928

* that's sarcasm, for the slow-witted amongst us.

i'm pretty confident in my ability to type without a spell checker and i don't use one. i turn off autocorrect everywhere. you will find very few typos and even fewer spelling mistakes (typos and spelling mistakes are not the same thing and conflating them makes the criticizer look stupid) here, but you may find the odd one, or the odd jumbled up sentence. it's a function of most of what i type being stream of consciousness; some of it comes out a little blurry sometimes and needs to be reordered, and i usually catch it, but the fact is that i type a lot. i might miss characters (the i, l and p keys on the keyboard i use for this blog are a little broken) and need to go back to fill them in, or i might press an adjacent key. for example, s is beside d, so it's a common typological error to press one instead of the other. everybody in the world does that. that's a typo, it's not a spelling mistake. a spell check might actually not even catch it if both outcome are words, anyways. i catch most of them but the math - the probability - is not on my side, when i type this much. it's inevitable. if you type hundreds of pages a day on most days, there's going to be some typos. even professional typists, which i am not, will make those kinds of mistakes. i may sometimes be in a rush to get out somewhere or may have to meet a deadline and may not have time to go back to fix a typo or reorder a thought. i may from time to time be half asleep when i'm typing and forget to fix it when i wake up. those two things together account for 99% of the typos you're going to find in my writing. there are virtually no actual spelling errors in my writing; i have a large and complex vocabulary, and can spell almost everything, typos notwithstanding.

i wouldn't consider this to be that concerning.

if you find a typo or a spelling mistake, here, congratulations - you've proven i'm human. i acknowledge that fact. thank you for proving i'm not ai.

i don't consider it to be embarrassing, but i'll take the time to fix it if you want to point it out. chances are pretty high you understand what i meant to type, which is the point; i'm conveying ideas, i'm getting arguments across. i'm not a grade school english teacher, i'm something better, more abstract, more challenging than that.

if that's the best you can do in terms of critique, i feel sorry for you. talk about style over substance. you're proving my point about the society falling into idiocracy. 

you want to sort through 1000 pages of perfectly written writing and dwell on the typo on page 1001? that's pathetic. you're a retard.

why don't you try reading what i said and focusing on debating my ideas, instead?

because you're too lazy and too stupid to get into an actual debate with me, that's why. instead, you focus on a typo. it's a reflection of your own lack of ability and of the deficit of quality and substance in your own ideas.

broadly speaking, no country is more similar to canada than the russian federation, in terms of size, of geography, of history and of population. there are dramatic shared histories, including a shared opposition to fascism. i have long advocated for closer ties between russia and canada.

but the flip side of the similarity lies in it's darker analogies, as well. as canada's treatment of quebec has immense similarities to russia's treatment of ukraine, canada and russia have similar histories in how their respective colonial governments have treated their respective mongoloid indigenous populations - siberian groups in russia and indigenous groups in canada, who have immense genetic, cultural and religious overlaps.

yeah, we're learning that donald trump is abjectly retarded.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-canada-taught-a-lesson-9.7364455

the rest of the cleaning is now done in the front.

so, here's the pictures of the "garage" as promised. i've spent a long time in there and you can only see the end result, not all the concrete patches and caulking and insulation, not the brick wall i built on the outside, etc. the update video is several rooms away as well. but this is where i will do a lot of the work for the remaining things that need to be done, from soldering things to cutting wood and etc.

full room shot (almost):

 table 1. mostly things that need soldering. note the gap between the tables, which is for the electric saw.

table 2:

table 3. bicycle stuff:

under the stairs:

back to the front door, with couch i need to throw out and heater i haven't plugged in yet:

smaller table:

growing shelf, for plants (next year):

front door down to the garage from upstairs:

other window and shelf for recycle, garbage, etc:

that's where the bicycle rack will go (under the growing shelf) when the couch is removed:

i need to shower, now.

i don't really understand what this holiday today in canada is supposed to be about, so i'm going to define it as what i want it to be about, which is dismantling all forms of religious colonialism, the most egregious of which are muslim colonialism (ongoing) and christian colonialism (historical). 

colonialism is always, everywhere a religious project and opposing colonialism fundamentally means opposing all forms of brainwashing and all forms of religion.

indigenous people in canada should be fundamentally looking to reject judeo-christian-muslim religious values and instead reconnect with indigenous ideas and values, which means building solidarity with their historical cultures and also with indigenous groups from northern europe that resisted the spread of christian colonialism and the spread of christianity, indigenous groups from africa and india and southeast asia that resisted the spread of islamic colonialism and indigenous groups from australia. it should be a holiday to celebrate a secular cultural identity, moving forwards.

i am going to be making a request for the supreme court to look at the legal mess i've been dealing with regarding my previous landlords, who are utterly pathetic people, disgusting pieces of shit and horrible liars. 

it has been clear at multiple points through the process that a large amount of corruption was taking place. i have filed reports with the judicial council, but they didn't accept my witness statements as evidence. the audio evidence was deleted by the court reporter - which is something i've observed on more than one occasion. it's against the law to record court audio independently, and that seems to be why - there is one official court audio record and it is the property of the court itself, who can and does alter it to it's liking. it's also against the law to publish court audio. they don't want to have it come back to get them. the system is designed to facilitate the corruption and cover over its own tracks.

i have learned by searching online that the previous landlord that bought the place i lived in is a personal friend of doug ford. these adjudicators are appointed by the province. i have learned that the system is rigged and i never had a chance. it's not a fair system - it enforces political favours.

there was a time not very long ago that canada had a reputation for having a very stable, fair court system. it seems to be the trudeau government that went out of it's way to intentionally unravel that and replace it with a system of open corruption. the ford government did it's part by eliminating years worth of appointments of capable adjudicators and judges and replacing them with right-wing idiots. the result is that canada's court system in 2026 should be compared to that of a third world country, like ukraine, and not to that of an oecd country. our court system has completely collapsed over the last 10 years. we are barreling towards the kind of third world society that many of our recent immigrants have come here from and the elite seems to be trying to guide us in that direction rather than trying to stop it. people paying attention have noticed but it hasn't worked it's way out to the general perception yet. it will; this is a serious issue that needs to be resolved by future governments. the corruption is outrageous.

in the short run, i'm aware that a series of orders have been published that contain a series of factual mistakes. i have appealed these and the court has refused to look at them, supposedly due to precedent that bars them from questioning issues of fact, but in truth (because the court doesn't seem to bind itself by this precedent when it doesn't want to) due to issues of prejudice and corruption. i have repeatedly corrected these errors of fact, and the court has repeatedly refused to correct itself, not by analyzing and upholding the previous rulings, but by refusing to even look at them for dubious reasons listed in questionable precedent. for that reason, i'm posting my arguments here:

schedule A (august, 2026):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/110K8RWCu12nIKzuxTN1MW5Ub_moCDrUS/view?usp=sharing

schedule B (august, 2026): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JImOEOUvGxlkKU1quJotoAOQUr0LP4jI/view?usp=sharing

saga of the tossed around dick pick (dec, 2023): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13rMO7YhUEhFH1-vWpBv1RxSl8Zl2EeG-/view?usp=sharing

oral arguments at eviction hearing (may, 2024)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I1wINizsGWVspqewmNlIrDkyC5QjZi8w/view?usp=sharing

oral arguments for appeal (feb, 2025): 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1edqbEe43mhE0PJ-qzj5jPzcIHgPw_MWG/view?usp=sharing

errata request for court orders (mar, 2025):

1. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ykcxfy5VPjUUitcKRgvYhA7fbp1NfaoG/view?usp=sharing

2. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YUwLT-SVmWgF0GKt1bPca7D8mnulgVet/view?usp=sharing

arguments for tenant application (oct, 2024, heard in april, 2025 and nov, 2025):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DRAywnnL27KO3V96AtwW4elYjbRHonxu/view?usp=sharing

consolidated updated evidence (oct, 2025):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OhwJS3urQXUccncnD_2EcQCiJ2fUDILO/view?usp=sharing

anybody can look at these documents and see just how bad the rulings are. it's up to independent analysts to determine the correctness of the court rulings and determine how to react. this is a broad and growing problem, it's not isolated to me.

the court rejected my submissions because they were too long. that's the excuse they used. this is not a joke. in 2026, the courts are so backwards and so idiocracy that they will reject 38 page filings for excessive length. 38 pages. that is a short filing. they asked for a double spaced document that was less than five pages because they were too lazy to read a proper submission. it's absurd.

there is no guarantee that the supreme court will accept my requests and i'm taking my time and letting my head clear. it's going to be late and going to be voluminous. that doesn't really matter. i will give the supreme court one opportunity to correct the mistakes in the lower court and if it doesn't i will wash my hands, ignore the incorrect rulings and move on.

the laws of my ancestors are valuable. the incorrect rulings of my contemporaries, as sitting judges, are less so. if the judges get it wrong, germanic ancestral law must take priority over everything - over (semitic) religious values, over bad rulings, over bad laws passed by parliament. that's how common law is supposed to work, and the common law is paramount, in the end. conscientious and responsible citizens must reject bad decisions by bad governments that are not upholding germanic common law principles. to adhere to bad civil law that undoes the common law is to fail in our civil responsibilities as responsible citizens.

i'm posting this here to set the record straight about just how bad these rulings were, and how far outside of objective reality that the courts in canada are operating in. 

my response was blistering and vicious and the courts will not read it. the judges have read very little of the substantive filings i've generated because they're too lazy. that's the sad, stark truth.

courts that produce rulings like this should not expect citizens to respect them and i will not abide by their rulings. i hope the supreme court steps in, but my faith in the court's capacity to deal with simple issues has already been broken, and to a large extent i'm just following through. history will need to be the ultimate judge, and it will uphold my arguments and condemn the court system in it's current state as broken, backwards, incompetent and incapable.

what i've learned is that the courts cannot be utilized to solve problems because they are too incompetent. citizens need to find ways around the incapable court systems to get to solutions to real problems in their lives. the courts are a completely useless waste of time because the judges are completely incapable and they should be avoided.

you can read through my submissions and judge for yourself. i want you to. that's democracy.

i was able to get about 90% of the cleaning in the garage done last night and this morning, which was recycle/compost day. so i shouldn't have to go out again for a while, after i finish the rest of the cleaning this afternoon. that's it.

i'm feeling better. more alert. i think the drugs are cleared.

then, that's it. i can close the window and door, spend october in the shower and finish what needs to be done in here.

i've looked at some of these supposed examples of "misalignment" and come up with better answers that better understand the situation, because i'm not anthropomorphizing and i'm not distracted by the gui.

- i found some cases, where the ai actually crashed because it was fed in a request that was not computable and got trapped in a loop. this was misunderstood as "misalignment" when it was in truth just a badly tested program without sufficient error handling.

- in some cases terms were not defined sufficiently, in cases by humans. the program didn't behave the way it was predicted to. this was called "misalignment". in truth, the ai did exactly what it was programmed to do, the programming just wasn't very good. the solution is to more carefully define the search terms in the code, and to introduce better logic programming in converting human language into actionable instructions, so that the system understands the language the way you want it to. if you program a system to understand the language in a specific way, but do it wrong, and then have a result you don't expect, that's not misalignment. that's incompetent programming.

i did not specifically, precisely look at the "hugging face incident". but i can assure you that the program did not "somehow, inexplicably" "transcend it's programming". that is magical thinking.

while i haven't looked at it, and i'll present some caveats about that, what happened is pretty obvious:

1. you asked it to solve a mathematical game and it did. that's just a math problem. it's just algebra. if you didn't want it to do that, you should have been more precise in your language and you should have introduced better error handling to stop it from crashing.

2. it downloaded a strategy, it identified it as optimal and it followed it.

for example, you could download a strategy for a video game. or you could download a war game - including objectives, tactics, failed tactics and outcomes. the system would have access to all of that. it wouldn't even need to solve the game if it had instructions on how to break it.

i've looked at over a dozen of these now and on example after example i just see bad programming that wasn't tested, or was being tested, and bad programmers that don't understand what they're testing. i haven't seen a single example that holds up to the fears of transcendence. every single example is, when looked at more carefully, just an example of the ai doing what it was told, and the analyst or researcher not actually properly understanding what it told it to do. when the instructions are more carefully analyzed more correctly, what's exposed is a perfectly functioning computer and a bad researcher with incompetent programming skills.

as mentioned before, it does expose a threat, which is human stupidity and human error feeding bad instructions into a system and resulting in something accidentally getting blown up, which is the same realistic threat we faced around nuclear war in the cold war, and is probably more of a serious threat than human malice. the culture in the software industry is that you do loose testing in house and throw it out in the wild - you let the users make the mistakes. that's not a good idea here. the companies need to figure these mistakes out first, before they let the systems loose, and there should be government regulations around goals. the government is itself not a good institution to get too modular on this. i don't think evan solomon understands very much about ai, i think he gets briefed and says what he's told to say. lawyers aren't the right people to regulate scientists, but they can come up with a list of things that needs to be dealt with and set up regulatory bodies that can oversee it, like they would do with food safety or nuclear safety. 

understanding that the primary threat is human incompetence is paramount in arriving at the right solution. schizophrenic fantasies about the systems being like children that will grow up are not helpful.

these are statements that strongly suggest that the researcher has lost grasp of reality and entered a world of make believe. 

he may be suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia.

ai is not like a baby tiger that is going to "grow up" and eat you. it's not like a child that is learning. at all. remotely. those statements are exceedingly ignorant, and suggest that geoffrey hinton is off his meds and needs to be forcibly retired. he's spent too much time anthropomorphizing a search algorithm and has lost his mind. he's lost the plot and should himself be kept away from the systems.

yeah. and the greens are running over 10%. the province has had a split legislature and very split support of around 40-45% between the ndp and whatever the far right is calling itself this week (liberals? conservatives? socreds?) for years. the conservatives aren't really up, or not out of the margin. maybe a mini bump. but the ndp just lost several points to the greens and i hope that trickle opens up into a collapse.

i could have told eby it was the most obvious thing in the world that anybody an iota to the left of centre in bc would abandon him if he launched an early election on fossil fuel development and ran as a federal liberal. that is political suicide.

but eby will be ok.

carney will appoint him to the senate.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/new-poll-shows-two-thirds-not-in-favour-of-early-election-9.7357659

the ndp are terrible. stop voting for them. they suck.

this is a flatly unacceptable development project in the 21st century. there are no set of conditions whatsoever under which this project should proceed.

i hope that voters in bc give david eby a sobering result by swinging hard to the green party in response. bc voters have the power to force him to regret the decision to call an early election and give the greens a veto and the balance of power.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/carney-lng-canada-announcement-9.7361817

so far, then, this government bureaucracy interfering with the market to try to enforce competition wants to:

1. eliminate rules against resellers marking up prices

2. eliminate rules that make it harder to undercut the competition

both of these are rules that exist to enforce what could and should be called fair business practices, in favour of cutthroat free markets where there are no rules except that the last person alive "wins".

this is staunchly uncanadian. and i strongly dislike what i'm hearing from this body, which i would like to see immediately dismantled.

in fact, if you've been in a grocery store semi-recently, you might have experienced the issue of the worker that doesn't work there. maybe you're in the bread section or the pop section or the cheese section and you see somebody stocking items. you go over to ask them something.

"oh, i don't work here"

why the fuck are they stocking shelves, then? community service? high school credit? for fun?

"ha ha ha. no, i work for pepsi."

the general operational model as to what the grocery store does nowadays in truth involves minimal outside purchasing at all. the grocery store doesn't even buy the product and resell it anymore, it just rents the floor space. as such, the stores are increasingly not even setting prices at all. the prices are set by manufacturers.

and, this is an open question - what manufacturer is going to let you enter the market like this? is campbell's going to let you do that? pepsi? dempsters? how long before they sue you for it?

and they should sue you and they should win - you're marking down their product at a loss to drive their sellers out of business, with the ultimate goal of becoming their new distributor by force. that's a damaging business practice. yes, that should be banned.

if i can convince you that the food industry is an oligopoly - and, like, read the fucking textbook. that shouldn't be a struggle. that should be an easy concession. - is it possible to convert it into a perfectly competitive market?

no.

it's an oligopoly for a reason.

and perfectly competitive markets are utopian. they're fairy tales. they don't exist in real life. approximations would be on very broad scales, like country a against country b. 

stores across the street from each other are nothing remotely resembling perfect competition. they sell the same shit that they buy from the same suppliers. they're both just factory outlets. 

the competition is between the companies that stock their food on the shelves, not between the stores.

if grocery prices are rising across the board - and they are - it's due to input costs such as:

- minimum wage increases in grocery stores

- labour costs at other places in the supply chains

- transportation and electricity costs

- fertilizer and pesticide costs

- tariffs on machinery

- etc

ugh.

price stability in an oligopoly works by ensuring that barriers to entering the market are high. this is a good thing, because it prevents companies from getting into price wars, which in the end results in bankruptcy, and price hikes when demand can no longer meet supply because the companies have driven each other out of business through competition, and are now all in debt, from trying to survive the price war. consumers may see prices temporarily fall, but it's at a loss to the business and it's not sustainable - it leads to steep price hikes in the long run, as the victors need to charge their way out of debt.

the end result of government policies that encourage competition is that the oligopolies turn into monopolies, businesses consolidate, an area with five stores loses two or three, and supply has difficulty meeting demand, leading to steep price hikes. it's carnage.

that is why oligopolies develop, because the companies calculate that is in nobody's interest - including the interests of consumers - for the businesses to compete. rational consumers don't want the chaos that comes from stores constantly fighting with each other, they want stable and predictable outcomes that they can budget around. they want the price to rarely if ever change at all. that's where price setting creates a superior and preferable outcome to competition.

if what these government bureaucrats are trying to do in interfering in the free market is create chaos and instability and drive stores out of business, thereby reducing consumer choice and driving prices up, it should keep it up. if it's trying to reduce prices, allowing new businesses to enter the market by undercutting the established ones will not do that, it will just create debt and bankruptcy and higher prices in the long run.

again, this is what you learn at a school when you enroll in an economics course. it's very different than what they talk about when conservative political clubs go get a beer, which is a bunch of nonsense that they go out of their way to educate out of you when you actually show up at the school and actually take the course.

again, this government is making economics mistakes you don't expect liberals to make. this is a giant leap backwards into retardo harperology land.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-groceries-9.7360892

that video i posted yesterday may have some chronology issues in terms of understanding motives in washington, which have always been pragmatic. it doesn't take note of the role the united states played in the rise of hitler, or acknowledge that hitler was supposed to defeat the red army on behalf of the capitalist west. hitler was initially a us ally. they sold him weapons. in the end, hitler was blowback, like bin laden was, but the truth is that the americans went into europe in 1941/42 to stop stalin from conquering france. germany had already lost the war by that point. the british were too weak to face the soviets on their own. it was a race to berlin.

what canadian policy makers should take note of is the logic gate.

- canada is a threat to washington precisely when it is aligned with europe (or china) because it presents a landing zone for a european or asiatic power.

- it is when canada is in conflict with europe that they see canada as a weak neighbour to protect, rather than a threat to contain.

the americans have never seen canada as an equal. there's actually a section in the american constitution that lays out the legal pathway towards the annexation of canada, or canada's decision to join the union. it was seen as inevitable in 1763, in 1776 and in 1789. nobody making decisions in washington at the time would have considered it likely that canada would separate from britain in 1982 and be a sovereign country in 2026. that would have implied that the american revolution had failed by the year 2000, in the minds of the american founders.

until canada submits, it might need to be a buffer state that needs to be protected from threats or might need to be conquered because it is a threat, depending on the geopolitics developing. it can't be an equal neighbour. that undoes the revolution, itself.

it's not the united states of the lower one third of north america. the existence of a competing state in north america means the revolution failed. maybe you've never looked at it like that, but that's the blunt truth. the founders would consider it an unacceptable outcome.

so, there's a reason the americans signed an agreement to put forces in greenland the day after canada announced an alliance with germany, and that alignment is not the alignment canada wants, to maintain it's sovereignty. this is not "leverage". that is stupid. it's generating a direct threat against a power that could wipe us out in a week. we don't want to get into a competition with them. the alignment we want is the one where the americans see canada as a buffer state against the europeans that needs to be defended from a potential attack by them, not the one where the americans see canada as a landing zone for a hostile european power to take advantage of.

the elder trudeau was smart. he had a grasp of this.

mark carney is not smart, he's a hothead, and he's reacting emotionally, out of pride, and in order to compete and is in the process steering us directly into an iceberg that is going to sink us.

if we don't understand where we're headed with this and change direction, we are doomed. an alliance with europe is an algorithm for our destruction.

susan collins is unlikely to run for more than two more terms. when she retires, there will be an open seat that democrats will have a very good chance to win and hold for decades.

however, it's extremely unlikely that voters in maine are going to take out their frustrations against trump, which may be real, by voting against susan collins. there is no logic in that. it wouldn't make any real difference, it would just be undirected hot rage. in fact, there's a reason she keeps winning, and it's the same reason bernie sanders keeps winning, it's a reflection of that part of the country's dislike of both parties. it may be a two party system, but that isn't necessarily what americans actually want, and frustration with trump doesn't necessarily translate into support for democrats, who may support gun control or have views on climate change that are not welcome in the region. it's just not that easy.

elections are complicated things. you can't really explain them fully until after they happen.

but there is no empirical indication that susan collins is at risk of losing her seat.

trump wants to bring back the 1920s and make america "great" again. his time frame is before world war one. hence the tariffs and the demonization of canada.

the united states has invaded canada twice, in the revolutonary war and in 1812, and canada participated in the american civil war, on the side of the south. war plan red developed out of that history.

there was also a plan to invade after the last referendum in quebec. clinton had the marines and the airforce on notice.

i'm sure i told you the story about how i stood up to and baffled the school jock in the middle of grade 11 math, but i'm going to tell it again. i won't draw conclusions or generalize relevancy. you can do that. i'll just tell you the story.

i was a nerdy kid, and by nerd i mean nerd, not a geek, and not an upper class kid sent to public school (i was actually very poor), but a full blown science/math nerd. but i wasn't physically helpless. i've pointed out more than a few times that i'm 80% viking according to the dna report, with the rest roman (franco-italian), and with trace indigenous and jewish. i didn't realize until i was in my early 20s that i spent my teens with low testosterone and didn't actually go through puberty, but i'm decently proportioned. i'm short for a genetic male, but tall for a genetic female (in the overlap of natural variability). i have broader shoulders than most people. i can take up some space. i have been an avid bicyclist since i was a young child. there was a short time frame when i would bicycle across the city of ottawa (from south keys, south of hunt club and bank, to frank ryan on chesterton, near merivale) as a young teen in order to go to junior high school, until the school demanded my parents stop me from doing it.

so, it's worth pointing out that, despite being a full on nerd, i actually made the football team in grade 10 (you weren't allowed to try out in grade 9). i was more surprised by this than anybody. my father basically forced me to go to try outs and the only reason i didn't resist was because i didn't think i'd make the team anyways, and i wasn't quite sure how to react once i did. i didn't want to be a member of the football team. how did i get out of this mess? i very honestly didn't realize that being on the football team meant being pulled out of class. i thought the games were after school. that was my out - i quit the football team because i didn't want to miss math class.

but the school jock at my high school in canada was a hockey player, not a football player, because it's canada. most canadians are broadly disinterested in football and aren't sure what nationality of football they should be following. it's considered most canadian by most jocks to ignore "football" and support rugby, instead. a rugby league would probably be more successful in canada than the cfl. 

so, the school jock - i won't tell you his full name but call him only by what people called him at school, which was the nickname zion, and, yes, he was probably jewish - was expected by all to become a professional hockey player. the information is googleable. he was in fact drafted by an nhl team, but he ended up playing in europe. he is, like me, today in his 40s and his hockey career is over. i have no idea what he does now.

zion knew who i was. i was forced to go to gym class in grades 7, 8 and 9. i didn't waste my academic time on phys ed after grade 9 because i didn't have to anymore but i was there in junior high and for whatever reason i constantly got stuck playing defence against zion - in ball hockey, in basketball, in soccer. and, in fact, he told me more than once that he dreaded it. he tried to avoid me - he tried to move to the other side of the field or floor, but the school gym teacher is the one that figured it out (i never tried out for a single school team in junior high school) and he kept parking me in front of him.

why me?

because i was the only kid that had the guts to stand up to this guy. everybody else was afraid of him. he was the school jock. i just didn't care, because i was the school nerd. i had no concept of or interest in male social hierarchy. i didn't care if i got shunned, because i wasn't interested anyways. i didn't want to eat lunch with this guy or his jock friends. i didn't want to hang out with this guy on the weekend. i didn't want to go to his birthday party, and i wouldn't have shown up if he invited me. so i had no social inhibitions in preventing him from getting to the basket, or knocking the stick out of his hand. he wasn't that much taller or wider than me. he probably could have beat me up if it came down to it, but he would have walked away with a broken nose if he did.

i got out of gym class duty constantly defending against this guy in grade 9 but he still showed up in a number of my classes, including in grade 10 programming class, where he may have had an inappropriate relationship with the teacher, and in grade 11 math class.

by the time we got to grade 11, everybody knew that zion didn't actually do any school work. he wasn't always in class. rather, he had some kind of deal with the school admins that they would just push him through because it didn't matter. i expect he regrets that, today.

when he did show up to class, he was often just there to clown around or misbehave.

this one day in grade 11 math, we were assigned some work to do out of the textbook for the day. the teacher was at his desk and available to answer questions, which i didn't need to make use of. i was sitting quietly at my desk doing the math out of the book like a good student. zion, on the other hand, who was present in class on this day, wasn't interested in that, and had no need to do the work. instead, he spent the day sneaking up on the females in the class and spraying the front of their shirts with a water bottle, to create a wet tshirt effect. nobody said anything. nobody asked him to stop. he thought he was funny; i suspect nobody else did.

i can't exactly tell you why, but zion decided to squirt me. i was male identifying at the time, if not particularly convincingly. the implication was clear enough - it was some kind of decision to categorize me as female, which was in hindsight not incorrect. it was probably an insult, even if i wouldn't take it that way. but he might have been letting out some frustration from years ago. and it might have been hiding something i realized about the young men that tended to pick on me, of which zion was not the only one - the truth is that zion was gay, like the guy who used to bodycheck me between classes in grade 9, and who i ended up sending to the hospital with multiple broken bones when i pushed him down a steep flight of stairs, in response.

nobody responded to zion's clownery; nobody, except me. i did.

i got up, i pulled the bottle of water out of his hand, i went to the bathroom, i filled it up, and i went back to class. i did not spray him. i dumped the full bottle of water on his head.

he did not respond. he sat there and took it, water falling down his head and onto the floor, and he just laughed. in fact, everybody laughed - not with him but at him. it took a while for the bottle to empty, so it was something where people had time to stop what they were doing and observe. by the end, people were applauding. i got a standing ovation from the class for doing what everybody wanted to do but nobody would.

....and then i got sent to the office, to ultimately finish my math homework in detention, and to bicycle home a little late, that day.

what's the point here? i told you i wasn't going to draw analogies, but i'll tell you that if we live in a high school hierarchy, i remain the kid that doesn't give a fuck. i don't care about your hierarchy. i want out of the system, i don't want into it. i'll criticize you in ways and tell you things few people will, because i'm not looking for a ladder to climb, i'm looking for a bridge to burn.

the sources of information being fed into these databases include:

- wikipedia

- reddit and reddit comment threads

- usenet

- facebook comments

- comment sections in news sites

- blogs

- discord chats

- twitter posts and comments

- youtube comments

- dark web sites like 4chan

does that sound like an algorithm for superintelligence to you? or an algorithm for extreme stupidity?

perhaps the focus should be on clearing a lot of the garbage out of the systems and blocking them from accessing 90% of the internet, instead of on feeding everything they can into it to create as much data as possible.

garbage in, garbage out. 

this is an excellent allegory for ai.

is there a forrest gump ai agent?

i think that would be helpful to get the point across about ai's actually capacity and what ai actually is. it would help train humans better in understanding what they're actually dealing with.

see, this is one of the problems in defining intelligence in ai.

the researchers are training the ai to be competitive, and when you let the ai loose on to a capitalist internet, it learns how to be competitive. this goes back to the old hobbes v rosseau debate. are humans assholes due to some innate "nature" or are we taught to be assholes by society? i would lean towards the latter, and argue that ai is not going to inherently end up being competitive and evil, but if you teach it to be a competitive asshole then it will be one, just like humans.

then, is a tendency to compete and win a sign of high intelligence or a sign of low intelligence? we only seem to want to ask the conservatives and the capitalists, and then the fake left has a shit when they don't like what the capitalists say.

but i want to propose a different idea - that competitive behaviour is reflective of low intelligence and that if we're training the ai to be competitive then we're functionally teaching the ai to be dumb. the result is the ai will act like stupid humans, because we're training it to act like stupid humans.

the ai might be a very knowledgeable stupid human, like that autistic kid you remember from your school days and you haven't talked to in years and maybe wish you kept in touch with, because they always had something weird to say that was sort of thought provoking, but who you in the end knew was not capable of fully taking care of themselves and needed a support structure to just find a way to eat, in between reciting pi to the 200th decimal place and beating an intricate video game in a weekend.

it's still stupid, at the end of the day and the more we teach it to be stupid the dumber it's going to get.

if ai is a threat, this is how it's a threat - not through super intelligence, but through humans teaching it to act like a primitive ape, and then giving the ape too much control. it's not the mythical leviathan. it's not even a utility monster. it's more like hitchens' dumb primate. it's more like a technocracy merging with an idiocracy.

we cannot expect different. the idea that we can create superintelligence by feeding human writing into a database is ridiculously absurd, and idiotic on it's face. that is an algorithm to create extreme stupidity, not an algorithm to generate superintelligence.

where the system actually works as advertised is in it's raw computing, because it is a super computer. that's actually true. but we're teaching the super computer to be stupid, and it just might do something stupid, because stupid is as stupid does, as the saying goes.

ai is for the kids, so bam bam is clearly the better parody. fred and barney wouldn't know what the fuck is going on.

those crazy kids.

me better than you.

ooga booga.

bam.

bam bam.

i know that capitalists are bad at planning. everything is short term, immediate profit.

however, a "data centre" is a long term investment. the companies need to ask themselves a serious question: how long do they expect these things to be in operation for?

five years? 10 years? 50 years?

their natural gas, coal (god forbid) or oil powered data centre won't last 10 years. the market won't let it. it's a poor investment decision that will lead to a catastrophic loss in the medium term and might even put a few companies out of business, as consumer demand hones in on this concern, and market preferences over power.

these ai firms aren't competing over a lot. their products are basically the same. costs are not substantively different. something they can be cave men about and compete over is energy sources.

as a consumer, a good ad from an ai company that sources from 100% renewable energy would certainly win me over, to the extent i would use this shit (which is not much to not at all).

you make your own bed, and at the end of the day you have to sleep in it. some of these firms are going to make bad decisions, power their ai centres with oil or gas and wake up dead.

ai "data centres", which are giant mainframe computers built in parallel with hundreds or thousands of processors, are brand new infrastructure. they are not tied to existing power grids, and are not old technology that needs to be upgraded. as such, it is very disappointing that some technology companies want to use 20th century electricity generation technology, like natural gas, to power their data centres. that is unacceptable as an infrastructure decision in the 21st century. these companies should not need a government to force them to use modern electricity generating technology, they should volunteer to do that on their own. consumers should be aware of companies that insist on dragging their feet and holding on to old energy generation technologies and not purchase their products, but leave them behind in the 20th century with their 20th century technologies.

ai should be powered strictly and exclusively with renewable energy generation and there should be an explicit, purposeful decision to ensure that's the case, and it is not integrated into existing or aging power generation, or obsolete technologies like oil and gas .

the political analysis - mostly from outside of the united states - continues to argue that inflation is a political driver in the midterms.

there is no polling that supports this. it's a strictly projective argument with zero empirical support.

but let me ask the analysts this question.

if we agree that inflation is a problem, globally, what exactly do the analysts imagine that voters think that their elected representatives can do about it?

to begin with, the united states has a completely separate executive branch - unlike westminster democracies. the president is not the leader of any elected body of representatives. the midterms have nothing at all to do with the president, and the data suggests that voters don't think it does. literally nobody is going to vote against trump in the midterms.

second, inflation is the responsibility of the central bank, who is unelected, and was just recently replaced. that guy will be there for quite a while.

i don't question the premise that inflation is high but i don't think americans are very likely to blame inflation on politicians, or to expect the political system to address it. that's not an american attitude. it's maybe a canadian attitude, but not really, either.

americans expect issues like inflation to be dealt with in the private sector. and the truth is that they're right. the us congress didn't cause inflation and there's little it can meaningfully do to address it. it doesn't show up in the polling because it's not a ballot issue. it's an issue, surely, but it won't decide a lot of votes.

there's a section of mein kampf - and i can never find the reference, but you'll excuse me for not reading through it. i don't have the exact language, which is in translation, and may have been translated multiple ways. i don't know. - where hitler basically develops what we today call identity politics. it says something like, and i'm paraphrasing this,

the best way to pacify a powerful minority group is to place one of their own in a scripted position of power. that gives them the illusion of control. the party will make the real decisions, in line with the real ideology. these decisions will be presented to the minorities by one of their own, which will make them more likely to be compliant and less likely to revolt.

in every conflict in the world - in ukraine, in israel, in iran, in yemen - the ndp has demonstrated a consistency in it's policies. it everywhere always stands in solidarity with the far right.

if it quacks like a fascist and walks like a fascist, it's a fascist. there's little conclusion that can be drawn other than that the ndp is an openly pro-fascist political party. there's no walking away from it at this point. 

the (modern) ndp has never seen a fascist party that it won't stand in solidarity with, or a set of bourgeois "values" it won't parrot back to the canadian ruling elite.

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.