If it wasn’t bizarre enough that media funded mostly by government are outraged at being labeled “government-funded media” (a simple statement of indisputable fact)
Now Canadian politicians are accusing the opposition of getting help from “American billionaires” to attack CBC.
For those who don’t know — Elon Musk is a Canadian citizen.
His mother was Canadian and he acquires Canadian citizenship as a youth and lived in Canada before deciding to immigrate again to the US for business opportunities.
Anyone who googled it would know.
Trudeau famously once said “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”
I guess that doesn’t apply to billionaires.
It think it will become a near-universal retirement savings account in the next couple decades — before other uses become universal.
It’s the killer app. Everything else is added value.
Sorry for your loss.
I’ve had friends and relatives murdered in the past and know how devastating it is.
Not sure what is worse: thinking it was a targeted crime, or that SF is so dangerous these days even very wealthy and security-aware people get randomly murdered.
Hope police can find out what happened, and the perpetrator be brought to justice, so it gives some closure to family and friends
Price?
I look forward to exchanging 1 BTC for vast tracts of productive land, castles, planes, jewellery, works of art..
As in a “billionaire’s” entire wealth.
Mere “money” will not be enough.
Like I say to people complaining about ageing.
There is an alternative but you ain’t gonna like it.
AI regulations are orders of magnitude more dangerous than AI.
And it in fact magnifies the main risk of AI — people trusting and delegating decisions to it.
I’m afraid of people who are gullible enough to think of AI as gods that can be trusted or even worshiped, and the people who will use that in their favour.
In a world of smart people who knew how to think critically AI wouldn’t be dangerous.
In our actual world it will allow for automated propaganda and gaslighting in a scale we can hardly begin to comprehend.
If you think social media censorship and MSM propaganda is bad, what’s coming is orders of magnitude worse.
I’m not your typical “libertarian”. I’m more pragmatic than that.
I think that until we have an example of a working society with zero taxes that can resist an attack by a major super power like the US or China, it’s reasonable to say taxation is necessary.
Mind you people in ancient times also claimed slavery was necessary (and some even that it was good), and part of that justification is that there wasn’t a functioning society that could defend itself that didn’t have slavery.
People tend to rationalize whatever they need to do — and I think it’s unfair to judge people thousands of years ago who *couldn’t* have known better by our own standards (19th century slavery was *very* different and worse).
Perhaps one day our descendants will think the same way about taxes and the people who imposed and supported them. Who knows?
Or maybe we’ll fall into a deeper darkness, and people will invent new horrors worse than 19th century slavery and 20th century labour camps and mass murder combined.
History is full of pain and suffering of all kinds.
Let’s enjoy and protect whatever little peace and prosperity we can find.
Most of the popular support for taxation comes from people falling for the ludicrous trick of believing taxes are mostly paid by “them” (which most people believe doesn’t include themselves) for the benefit of “us” (which people are convinced include themselves).
Of course that’s almost never the case.
Taxes are paid by most people to the benefit of few in high positions who then sometimes spend a tiny portion of it buying the support of the population while the rest is simply for the benefit of the powerful and their entourage.
In ancient times people at least didn’t pretend otherwise. Taxes were imposed on those either defeated in battle or who begged for protection.
It was something the strong imposed on the weak — and while many claimed it was justified, nobody pretended it was the other way around.
Taxes are always to benefit the strong — those who are literally strong or have more and bigger guns.
You might make arrangements that incentivize the gun-people to give a little of it back to the general population, but that’s it.
No voting or court can change the nature of things.
One of the things that pisses me most about taxes is all the talk about “paying the fair share”.
You might argue that taxes are necessary — but there’s nothing fair about taking by force someone’s property and work for the benefit of others.
The “fair share” of taxes for every single person on Earth is **exactly zero**.
I can’t afford to own a home where I live, but if I had never paid any taxes I could be comfortably retired by now.
That’s pretty typical of middle and upper classes in most of the world.
How is that fair exactly?
Anyone who finds legal ways to pay less in taxes is just behaving like a normal human being instead of a mindless zombie.
Being a serf and paying taxes is just yet another sad thing we endure in this vale of tears. I try not to think too much about it.
But pretending it’s a good thing is too much to ask.
I came. I saw. I conquered.
Not mine obv
Tons of Cantillon effect going on in developing economies as well
Weird article. Guy went from skeptics to advocate but in the last few paragraphs states he still believed Nostr will not be decentralized in the long term and will end up being just like today’s web.
So the title might be more correctly be “using nostr for some stuff: from complete skeptic to admitting it’s not completely useless”
BTW I agree with him about long term for Nostr (unless there’s a lot of change). But I disagree with him about the web in general.
Centralized dystopia and wev of trust aren’t the only possibilities.
Fuck that. Hope we never go back to that.
I’d rather have awful traffic jams and be packed with hundreds of strangers in trains than go back to that shit.
Maybe the future will be a global war between zombies that just do whatever ChatGPT tells them too — and the few remaining actual humans.
We have a good chance of winning bc the AI-zombies will be dumb af.
My “über normie” friend was “explaining” to me the other day how AI can’t be manipulated and asking ChatGPT about something is more reliable than googling it — bc top search results might be “fake news” while the AI generated answer will be based on the entire web.
He then justified his claims by pointing out he studied machine learning in college and oversaw machine learning projects as an exec.
A little education can a be a lot more dangerous than no education at all.
I expect this to be the narrative moving forward — AI is scientifically guaranteed to be correct.
Not trusting whatever (regulated) AI says will be called “AI denialism” and considered more dangerous than terrorism.
“Regulating AI” is an attempt at creating a fake god that can’t be questioned— and removing the need for messy non-compliant human thought and communication from the equation.
You think the “I believe in Science” crowd was bad, wait for the “I believe in AI” crowd.
If they get their way it will be a nightmare.
