GLOBAL WARMING
You know, developed countries like Canada could have led the way. We have the ability to provide decent housing and nutrition to everyone in the country. We have a fairly educated population. And we had the productive capability and the financial wealth to design a society, a steady-state society, that requires far fewer resources and labour, to maintain our infrastructure and a more leisurely lifestyle for everyone.
The problem of course is capitalism and Leftists' pathological adherence to compromised electoral politics and performative-only protest.
We needed to shut-down the oil industry. This could have been done in a gradual fashion while the national government financed investment in 21st-Century industries (pharmaceuticals? green energy?) to replace the jobs displaced in the petro-provinces.
GENOCIDE
The fact that, for three goddamned years, Israel has been free to conduct a live-streamed genocide in Gaza (and to a lesser extent in the West Bank) and that Canada's government continues to aid and abet it, ought to be cause for reflection on the part of the Left on the worthlessness of our strategy and tactics.
Other groups and individuals obviously have the time and the resources to devote to this issue. And for three years there's been nothing but disorganized, desultory, campaigns against various individuals and meaningless street marches. These groups should have, and could have, come together to come up with more sustained, meaningful actions. Campaigns against specific, particularly egregious nazi scumbags, like the crew at the wingnut-welfare National Pest, or the nauseating Atrocity Hausfuhrer, or some death-industry manufacturer exporting the tools of mass-murder.
AI
Aside from war, so-called "Artificial Intelligence" might be the single greatest misallocation of human resources in the history of the human race. It's certainly demonstrates that we do not have, but that we DO need, democracy.
Below is a video from a guy calling himself "Adam Somebody" wherein he refers to "smooth-brained dictators" [building ridiculous megaprojects].
This whole "AI" fiasco is the product of a society that allows individuals (so far all male) become multi-billionaires. Such undeserved levels of extreme wealth also mean undeserved levels of extreme power. Power over people and resources. For people who really aren't all that amazing to begin with. It allows Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to blow over $80 BILLION on his moronic "Metaverse" project.
"Artificial Intelligence" makes the "Metaverse" look tiny by comparison. Our capitalist system, oligarchs, financial institutions, "investors," corporate clients, etc., ... our "elites" had the wherewithal to put TRILLIONS into something which (if it works) will deliberately displace 20% of the OECD labour force, while simultaneously draining gigantic levels of resources, convincing people to kill themselves or others, and weaken human being's thinking abilities. (Trying to find a link for the current amount of financial wealth put into AI so far didn't get me a total figure. But I did see two headlines, one saying that $1.5 trillion for 2025 and $2.5 trillion in 2026. So THREE TRILLION DOLLARS in the last two years.)
And it doesn't "work." Which is to say, it isn't profitable. The whole thing is a Ponzi-scheme. The only sector actually profiting is the chip manufacturers. And they're getting money from selling to people who have been losing money year after year. And the whole thing requires hideous "data centres" that drive up local utility bills (sometimes by 25%) while providing few jobs.
If we lived in a democracy, "AI" wouldn't even be a possibility. LLM's that hallucinate, designed to destroy the livelihoods of a quarter of the workforce, being used now to displace 5-10% of the workforce, only for asshole employers to discover that they don't work and they are increasingly unaffordable.
I daresay a democratic society would have made better use of $8 billion dollars over ten years.
2 comments:
On the AI Ponzi scheme--it's worse than that. The chipmakers are lending the AI companies the money to buy the chips from them with. So when the AI companies don't get no revenue and can't pay it back . . .
Unless the US govt. bails them out because they're "strategic" (if they're so strategic maybe don't let them do something that stupid in the first place), the only solvent chipmakers left will be in China. I suppose the embargo on chip sales to China will have had a silver lining--if China hadn't decided it needed its own high-end chips, this fiasco might have left us with no non-bankrupt high end chipmakers in the world at all!
Purple library guy,
I suppose these chips are capable of doing wonderful things in better industries. So it'll be good if the Chinese figure out how to make them and allow their export for sensible purposes.
The whole circular financing thing I'm not too up to speed on.
I think there's some other people also loaning money to the AI companies and/or the chip makers. That Ed Nitron guy sometimes says that Meta, Google and Amazon [?] are spending 30% of their revenues on chips and data centres as well as going to the bond markets.
Whatever the case, it's a bubble that other people have said won't be like the 19th Century railroad speculation or the 2000's dot-com bubble, which both left behind valuable infrastructure.
The whole thing is an abomination.
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