> Does my uncle having an argument with his doctor over needing more painkillers, combine with an anecdote about my sister disagreeing with a midwife over how big her baby would be, combined with my friend outliving their stage 4 cancer prognosis all add up to "therefore I'm going to disregard nutrition recommendations"?
Not sure about your sister and uncle, but from my observations the anecdotes combine into “doctor does not have time and/or doesn’t care”. People rightfully give exactly zero fucks about Bayes theorem, national health policy, insurance companies, social dynamics or whatever when the doctor prescribes Alvedon after 5 minutes of listening to indistinct story of a patient with a complicated condition which would likely be solved with additional tests and dedicated time. ChatGPT is at least not in a hurry.
To compete with China in the ”open market” now, Canada will need:
- 25 years of investments in infrastructure and education in STEM and manufacturing
- Targeted state subsidies of chosen branches, which will require
- transition to at least partially planned economy, which will require
- at least partially transitioning to some form of dictatorial governance
- increase population at least twofold (you need multiple multi-million metro areas to support large high-tech clusters)
- devaluate CAD about 2x and accept about the same drop in local purchasing power (which likely will happen anyway, but could be not that harsh and fast).
China at the moment has like 10x advantage in industry ober Canada, it’s impossible to compete. It’s like saying that your immune system must be able to handle bubonic plague, so let’s just inject the body with the pathogen and let it adapt without any external support. A noble idea, but you’ll likely die in the process.
- Also a much larger population to create the labor pool necessary.
I was speaking mostly about the Western bloc of countries (EU + USA & Canada) that have their heads in the sand. As a semi-unit, they already have most of the pieces necessary to be competitive.
> But politicians are - in general - neither evil, nor do they have any real incentive to ”control citizens’ thoughts”.
As someone coming from authoritarian state, this is such an alien line of reasoning to me. By definition, those in power want more power. The more control over the people you have, the more power you get. Ergo, you always want more control.
It's easy to overlook this if you've spent your entire life in a democratic country, as democracies have power dynamics that obscure this goal, making it less of a priority for politicians. For instance, attempting to seize too much power can backfire, giving political opponents leverage against you. However, the closer a system drifts toward autocracy and the fewer constraints on power there are, the more achievable this goal becomes and the more likely politicians are to pursue it.
Oh, and also politics selects for psychopaths who are known for their desire for control.
What exactly did those people taste that it got them upset so much and who exactly those "people" are? Last time I checked these laws are pushed through as covertly and sneaky as possible and no "people" asked for them. I can't recall any demonstrations with protesters asking to violate their privacy to keep them safe for those evil internet trolls that want to have a sexual intercourse with their relatives.
You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab and desire to fully control the plebs as push from the society. This doesn't sound convincing.
> You're trying to frame the classic authoritarian power grab
Half of US states now have age verification for pornography; three will be requiring age verification to even download apps soon. There is indeed a push from society to get the internet under control, even if the EU is not necessarily connected the same way.
This is a huge, unprecedented reversal of opinion over the last decade that has almost completely gone over HN's head. The EFF, TechDirt, HN, Reddit view of the world has been tried, found wanting, and is being rejected. The EFF which once rallied the internet against SOPA/PIPA... currently is yelling into a void. Nobody believes in a free internet anymore.
Public opinion means nothing in an age of mass manipulation and media control. People believe what the news, the government and the powerful tell them to believe. The first step to passing unpopular legislation is making a media campaign so it becomes popular, or simply just do it and distract us with nonsense for a couple of weeks until we forget.
The worst thing one can do nowadays is blame the masses for their ignorance, thus turning us against each other, while the powerful do whatever they want. Divide and conquer.
Civil liberties, like elections and liberal principles in general, are unfortunately only popular when the right side (coincidentally one's own) is winning
Don't worry; HN makes such statements all the time, you can't accuse me of not grasping the format. On that note, not once did I use the words "complete failure" or "all people" despite your quotation in this thread, so please don't argue dishonestly yourself.
I cited a reality: We went from SOPA/PIPA over copyright, to no question about age verification on morality grounds. It shows a trend towards zero interest in free and open internet activism. Such a trend indicates something is severely wrong, and the idea of an open internet has become disconnected from popular belief, internationally, as something to strive for. Prove me wrong.
Can someone explain me this: the article is basically about the dedicated employees who now feel betrayed by the company. But why would anyone be emotionally involved with a for-profit private company that appropriates user-generated data? Outside of specific cases and normal employer-employee relationship, I can understand being dedicated to something if it contributes to a "greater good" in some form. Condition for this in this case is that user data is open (at least for private use) or the app is open.
This is not "hot" take, this is correct take in itself. The problem is the execution: how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency? How do you ensure that the funds are not stolen? How do you make sure that the product is actually used and you don't fund a thing that no one uses? And so on.
Those are the problems that every govt funded project faces, but they are particularly tough in software. We have many examples where it went very wrong so not many governments acting in good faith are eager to step into it. And you can't allow the government to intervene in development or management here, because this how you'll end up with government-mandated preinstalled browser on smart phones or with added backdoors.
One solution could be participatory budgeting where the end users will directly decide where to invest part of their govt-collected taxes. E.g., on your declaration you'd have a field where you'd like to invest X% of your paid taxes into project Y. This comes with its own set of challenges and admin overhead, but I don't see any other good solution for cases like this, because they are impossible to run under direct government control.
> how do you ensure that development is of enough quality and efficiency?
You don't. The state doesn't know what a project needs at a given time, and will try to apply cookie cutter solutions when they don't need it. What you actually do is two parts:
- Give a budget for each institution to spend on open source projects (defined by some industry criteria, or something)
- Force institutions to consider open source projects for free (as in no cost) digital goods, and a report as to why open source solutions when paying for a digital good or service. The later should be evaluated by a central organization that promotes the rational use of digital products, like the U.S. Digital Service, EU Digital Services Directorate, Digital Transformation Agency, European Data Innovation Board, Secretaria de Governo Digital, etc.
These two policies in conjunction would supply projects with the cash needed and foment projects to do useful things.
Honestly it'd depend a ton of the particular industry/company/programmer. Some are definitely creating capital assets and should be amortized, others are "repairs and maintenance" which can be expenses. I'd probably defer to treating them as expenses, but allow for amortization if the company desires, and maybe have some audit possibility on that if it looks like the big players are gaming that somehow.
Part of the complication here is companies generally really like amortizing stuff. It lets you smooth your profit across years which is usually better both for tax purposes and for your financial reporting for the market. So this kind of change is fine or even good for a company like Google, but can really suck for a small bootstrapped SAAS. This is why I'd allow companies to pick, with some degree of latitude.
Aesthetics is objective as long as we’re talking from casual perspective, which is always the case for infrastructure and buildings unless we’re at architecture summit. 90% of people would agree that Amsterdam or Paris city center is more beautiful and pleasant to be in than modernist hellscape at outskirts of Soviet cities. And therefore 90% of the buildings should be built with this in mind, when feasible, because it directly affects wellbeing of humans. Weathered concrete finish is nice in art house movies and in hipster bars, in everyday life it’s ugly and depressing on large scale objects for most people. The rest 10% would be perfect for modernism/functionalism/brutalism, but unfortunately proportions are reversed today. This is of course more subtle for pure infrastructure like bridges or highway interchanges, but the general principle still applies.
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