That is exactly what normal human beings want our computers to do, and it's why the vast majority of AI safety initiatives are [correctly] seen as such a self-serving joke (because of the purposeful conflation of X-risk with "our political opponent could use this tool to destroy our politics") and ignored.

It didn't have to be this way- they could conceivably have gone for an objective, classically liberal, even-handed approach (rather than the progressive approach they settled on). But they didn't, and the social trust required to cry wolf is now spent... even though maybe it shouldn't have been.

This is why the highest standard of living on the planet, with the highest GDP over the largest population... is in Texas.

The fact the people there aren't pathologically conservative/authoritarian in the "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything" sense is the precise reason why that is.

A degraded battery in these devices leads to things like random power-offs or dropping to 1% randomly (the display does not correct itself as it assumes it's safer to round down), particularly when it's cold. When it shuts itself down, it clearly displays that it has power remaining, but the device communicates that it thinks it knows better than you.

It is this bad software (and bad hardware) in these computing devices that ultimately what has led to EVs- new and especially used- being a tough sell far before the first one was ever released. The technology has proven fundamentally untrustworthy in low-stakes applications; why should it now be trusted in high-stakes applications?

(The answer so far has been "give them an utterly ridiculous horsepower figure", which did work, but it turns out normal cars can do that pretty easily too, and they're cheaper.)

That's why they don't go outside. You can teach them to run from the panel vans; teaching them to run from the police (who were called by some Karen) is much more difficult.

Much like panda bears in captivity, it is unusually difficult to give a human being a life that resembles what it evolved for, which mostly involves convincing other humans to back off the safetyism a little.

What dignity can be found in the life of the modern child?

So can old shirts, those are bigger and harder to bury straight up and down, and have no identifying marks (underwear does have the rubber, which acts as a skeleton and frame of reference for what you're actually looking at; cotton squares don't).

Sure, the data might be slightly noisier, but right now they have no data. And that's even worse.

"Buy this item made out of this material, bury two of them in the ground" requires no further cutting or measuring, and most people would have to go to the store to buy a cut of cotton fabric anyway.

This particular clothing item also contains a more resistant skeleton of fibers against which to compare when the test material is heavily decomposed. This is how the "10 point decomposition scale" functions, and a single cotton square would not facilitate that.

Finally, it's novel, which entices potential participants to complete the survey.

Not really, though. Despite what even a good chunk of Canadians (or yourself) might think, the country doesn't end at Toronto.

If the government wasn't worried about the effects, they wouldn't be in any hurry to approve the infrastructure projects; they've been in the works for a very long time, stalled out. Urban Easterners claim to believe the planet will explode if they're built, and the governments they elect act accordingly, but it's really just a power thing.

Additionally, I'd advise you to not think you know better than the people that actually live here.

I don't think so. Time really isn't on Carney's side either.

Carney's new tariffs fall on those who, in aggregate, did not vote for him. The average Carney voter has been very vocal about wanting to pursue this tactic- that's why they elected him. (That average voter is an Eastern retiree whose holdings are generally in real estate, so they don't care about any other economic sector beyond that which keeps their property values high, especially compared to the feel-good Elbows Up stuff.)

But Carney's currently having trouble just keeping the country together at this point. That's why he's approving projects he really doesn't want to approve out West, like those oil pipelines, because the West has credibly signaled that that they might just ban Carney and his Eastern voting block from making law and collecting tax from them if development of their part of the country is hindered any further. But if it's not hindered, they'll grow in political power, which is also an inherent threat to Ottawa's power (just not immediately).

And yet here Carney is- for the second time now- imposing more economic roadblocks that drive up consumer prices and put more people out of work for no reason other than his voting block wanting it that way. "Just retaliate" might be the least bad option for Carney to pander to that voting block, but every concession to them drives the country closer to separation, and that has time pressure too.

Cutting edge development practice in 2025 was using a big JavaScript framework (not quite VMs, but they inherently strain the environments they run in).

That code is run by the JavaScript interpreter VM, which is running in the browser (another VM), which was (in whole or part) written in a managed language (another VM).

That program runs on top of the OS (another VM), which runs on another VM (the default hypervisor for Windows 10/11, or the desktop environment for Linux/macOS).

Each VM lets you have an entirely new managed programming environment- you have a new program that lets you write software even quicker than before- but that comes at the expense of memory usage and (most importantly) latency. Which is why it takes modern systems a few seconds to figure out you pressed a button in your React application that's running in an isolated browser instance consuming 1GB of RAM, where systems in the 90s were instant by comparison even though they had a fraction of the processing power.

It's conceivable that in 10-20 years, LLMs could be used as VMs in and of themselves, which will still likely be using 2020s development languages. So your software is going to require at least 128GB of RAM to compile, use another 32GB to run, and it'll take twice as long to respond to clicking a button.

Yes, that's called a "tax".

That was the means by which relief funding was appropriated from the public in 2020, and it was a huge success. Most people don't even know that happened (or the scale at which it occurred) beyond some vague notion of "deficit".

You'll pay for it with inflation and lower purchasing power relative to other nations for a time, but your body politic have demonstrated that is the only type of tax increase they'll ever consent to. But if you don't do it, you won't even have an economy with which to pay the bills.

Oh, you have the money.

You just don't want to spend it, for that would shift the balance of political power in the country towards labor and away from capital, and away from the old and towards the young, for the wages of labor and the young would have to rise.

That's anathema to an upper class and a body politic whose primary objective is controlling the cost of labor, and even the political party that's named after labor has no plan to change that.

This is going to continue until the current body politic is more afraid of dying from heatstroke than they are of anyone else being in charge.

Yes, and not only is it wrong (they are protected sufficiently), but giving an inch to the same moral impulses and people that resulted in them being overprotected in the real world will naturally result in them taking a mile.

The ideal number of human beings that do stupid shit and pay for it is not zero, nor can it be in any functioning society.

Yeah, I wonder what caused that?

The most freedom they actually get is on the Internet, that's why they all hang out there.

Because that is how we are redistributing from successful people to not-successful ones right now.

Claimed identity isn't a suicide pact and consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed.

AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development. The justifications for those policies (whether you agree with them or not) matter less than the fact they're being imposed from a condition of moral hazard.

Hence, the people of AB might vote to ban the people of ON/QC from imposing their laws; that's what separation is and why it happens.

Sorry, but that's just bullshit. This is nothing more than your standard pseudogovernmental meddling in the "just build your own financial infrastructure" vein, and it's coming from foreign countries this time rather than the US itself (it currently has an administration less hostile to business).

That is already true of Canada, as it is no longer possible to live like a Canadian [in the way they were hoping for] on immigrant wages.

>and still trying to figure out how they will avoid turning many of their citizens into criminals

The entire point of the gun bill is to do this. The purpose of a system is what it does.