Yes, heaven forbid governments impose any constraints on Microsoft, Apple, Google, or Facebook, because they've been handling things so well on their own.
Makes far more sense than the “population must increase forever” pyramid scheme the rest of the West is running. Check out Canada for a look at what happens when you try to juice GDP via population growth at the expense of literally everything else.
The data/facts disagree with you. In a low birth rate society a constant influx of new tax payers is required. Without it you end up with decades of stagnation like Japan.
1) Populations are their most expensive at their oldest age and each subsequent generation is smaller and needs to pay for an old generation larger than their own
2) infrastructure and many of the things a government provides is not scalable down and up. A road is not (much) cheaper to maintain because less people drive on it
This sounds like a strong argument for having a stable cap. It's not a total immigration ban and would freeze population at a steady state. This makes all of the boom and bust problems easier, not worse
But either way, European nations are nearly all screwed - their expenditure on pensions and healthcare will quadruple in the coming decades as the demographics change heavily towards elderly peple.
Pop increase faster than housing / good jobs. The usual. Tried to juice economy post covid with MASS Indian immigration, for reference peak "Chinese" immigration was post HK handover was 60k, settled at 40k per year, lots of Chinese wealth transfer to Canada. Indian immigration went from 60k per year to over 140k, outrageous amount. Bluntly, most of west including Canada gets second tier immigrants, all the good opportunities in US, Canada doesn't get to retain tier1 talent, and Indian immigrants are in aggregate less wealthy. The entire point of brain drain is to get best brains, or in lieu get wealth. Canada got neither. This not knock on Indian immigrants, who work just as hard as every other, just acknowledging value proposition is not the same.
The broader context is Canada is on paper a small pop country with sufficiently alright governance to get per capita rich selling shit from ground. The more people you have have, the less that model works, and frankly Canada at 25m in the 00s already passed that point (vs 6m Norway). It doesn't help that... foreign influence have stagnated Canadian fossil/extractive industries development. Trudeau thought it was good idea to aim for 100m Canadians by 2100 (century initiative)... which on paper makes sense - only way for Canada to compete/influence vs US is heft, but of course that means a lot of brown and eventually black people fighting for housing and opportunities in the interregnum.
Unsurprisingly, broken housing market = no one likes that interregnum.
Canada is really bad with housing and inftrastructure. Blame immigrants not crack head white politicans who see bike lanes as the devil take car and oil money whole worshiping Trump and far right parties all over the world.
Immigrants not worth their economic value are the problem. That's not blaming "immigrants" but "immigration policy", which like housing policy - failure of politicians. But ultimately immigrants, who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat. And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
The overwhelming majority of immigrants are worth it and long term they all are because they have more kids. Every immigrant who comes grown up with minimal education is a huge benefit.
Also its acceptable to have some immigrants who are not 'worth it', because it is something that is literally good to do, you are improving peoples lives.
> who are not citizens are the going to be the scape goat
Mostly because of far right misinformation.
> And reducing/denying/removing immigrants is short term more feasible than solving political sclerosis that require longer timelines, if can be fixed by system at all.
Its a falls believe that removing immigrants is somehow easy. Its not, its politically as hard as building new transit.
The difference is that building new transit is going to be great for everybody, specially Canadians who already own property or just live in the region, while focusing on removing immigrants will hurt everybody on net.
So the right solution is to focus on solving the fundamental problems you have no matter if immigrants or not.
Unlikely with Canadian exploding diploma mill immigration patterns post covid i.e. the 100k increase in Indians. That's not some, i.e. a few 1000 refugee/asylum charity to make feel good headlines. That's structurally unsustainable. Hence new cap reduction and strict field of study rules. Reality is Canada was importing fuckload of low skill hoping to juice economy short term with international tuition injections, but having students fill service and gig jobs driving up rent / suppressing wages / straining infra / services is bad short term politics and bad long term ROI. These generally aren't turnkey high skilled immigrants that boost economy long term. These aren't even wealthy economic immigrants dump $$$ into economy, these are bluntly marginal immigrants from poor households that goes into debt/leverage and have to take low end jobs with high remittance culture to payback - the give/take ratio is not great. They are no where nearly as "worth it" as a rich PRC international students dropping $$$ into economy and trying to capital flight $$$ into Canadian economy. And removing them is easy... a few signatures to cap study permits, change crs and pgwp requirements, already down ~70% from peak, much easier to building. Of course building is great for everybody, but Canada ain't building.
The right solution is move back to sustainable high-value immigration patterns. 60k to 160k Indians is unprecedented. Like 2nd/3rd largest cohort is PRC and PH at ~40k. 160k per year from any country is stupid policy, only justifiable if the plan is basically to steal their tuition and kick them out of the country after making PR/citizenship harder, i.e. Canada bait-switch (scammed) a bunch of Indian villagers pooling their limited resources together, and it's looking likely that's how this saga will end. Again, it's not Indian immigrants fault, but they don't vote so they're the one's whose going to get screwed because bad policy screwed Canadians who vote.
A lot of people on the internet blame Canada's malaise on their historically lax immigration stance.
While to a certain extent it has caused some social issues (eg. Indian, Chinese, Viet organized crime took advantage of it to leave crackdowns during the 2010s and 2020s and degree mills abounded), it's impact on the economy is overstated.
Canada's economy was always a resource extraction and construction driven economy, and
1. the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline project (thus making Canadian ONG less competitive than American sourced ONG for refineries)
2. the rise of America as a net energy producer and exporter especially in ONG (thanks Obama/Biden, Trump/Pence/Tillerson, and former Govs Burgum and Perry)
3. the blocking of the GasLink LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
4. the blocking of the Northern Gateway pipeline project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Asia)
5. the blocking of the Energie Saguenay LNG project (blocked the ability for Canada to build marketshare in Europe)
6. Bipartisan support in America for trade barriers against Canada even before the Trump tarriffs (eg. Biden and Trump's softwood lumber tariff policy)
7. (becuase this failure is bipartisan) Blue provinces halting renewables projects in Alberta and Saskatchewan while American governors on both sides took full advantage of CHIPS and the IRA, thus preventing Canada from building domestic dealflow in GreenTech
all played a much larger role than immigration in causing economic malaise for Canada.
At the end of the day, Canada's economy in the 2010s was structurally unprepared for America becoming a major energy producer and exporter by the 2020s, and was unable to successfully build infra to make Canadian ONG cost competitive against American ONG nor the ability to sell outside of North America.
THIS is the legacy of the Trudeau administration - if your economy is based on resource extraction, fighting against it for political reasons is self-harming.
Canada's GDP has essentially been stagnant for almost 15 years, and all kinds of infrastructure projects that would have helped the Canadian economy grow were blocked. Additionally, Canada has the same economic complexity [0] as Bulgaria [1] and Serbia [2] and is even less complex than Mexico [3], which makes Canada the least competitive choice for FDI within NAFTA.
Australia is in the exact same boat as Canada, but unlike Canada, their political class fully backed their resource extraction industries.
Serious question: what is ONG? I assume it's like LNG (liquefied natural gas), but after multiple searches, all I can come up with is Oklahoma Natural Gas, NGO in French, and On God.
Here in Nova Scotia, Canada, mass imigration is driving the most intense building of everything boom, ever. And it just went up a notch.
Plenty of Swiss imigrants as well.
No country is running a "population must increase forever". You only hear that when the public pensions are discussed because they are unsustainable. The argument is not " population must increase", it's more "human labor is the most critical resource and we must get as much as we can".
You can fear the results of runaway immigration in the short term, like cultural clashes, organized crime and brown people in your neighborhood. But you can't deny the results on the long term when you allow talent to go to your country and end up with more nobel laureates of New Zealand origin than New Zealand.
Yes but someone will be along shortly to defuse what sounds like giving the bad mars man credit where it’s due. Like everything else he does that works out, it was just luck, timing, actually a mistake that worked out, or someone else behind the scenes that he got lucky in hiring at the right time (by accident).
Short memory. When musk was buying all of this capacity it was billed as xai is going to take over the world. Instead grok is a flop and now he has extra capacity. If xai was a data center he’d be smart. But it is a failed Ai venture.
It’s like training your dog not to jump on the sofa. But then you fail to train to stay off and then brag about how you trained it to stay ON the sofa.
Huh? That's just basic history of xAI. At no point was xAI being sold as a Coreweave-like middleman leasing out data centers to hyperscalars. That's a boring, regular business. The pitch was that xAI would develop groundbreaking AI models for Grok which would attract actual users and generate revenue.
That evidently did not work out, otherwise these deals wouldn't be happening. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't leasing out their datacenters, if they did it would be obvious something was grossly wrong with their projected growth.
If your dad had owned an emerald mine I am sure you could also have been that dumb.
But to be more serious: It is impossible to say if this is good or bad for XAI without more numbers. What if they bought their compute way over market price and sell it at a loss?
Instead they have a reputation for telling researchers that their disclosure isn’t actually a vulnerability and doesn’t qualify for a bounty or recognition, then quietly patching said non-vulnerability with a suspicious degree of urgency.
Every time I get excited about one of these techs I end up finding it has approx the same range as a late 90s cordless phone unless you live on the Nevada salt flats, and a data rate that could probably be beat out by Morse code on a GMRS radio. Sadly I live in the opposite of that terrain with approx the same population density.
Regardless I have a few LILYGO Meshtastic Esp32 boards that are neat to play around with!
I have a very different experience - here in Europe with 868 MHz MeshCore you get good singnal from a repeater through one or two city blocks with non ideal antenna placement.
With reasonable line of sight tens of kilometers & much more is doable. There are some repeaters on mountains that connect bigger regional meshes with packets going >100 km regularly.
Uhhhh ... No. You must have read that it uses the same frequency 900mhz, but did you actually try using it? When I first got on meshcore here NJ i immediately connected with my closest neighbor repeater 20 miles away which then in turn connected me to the local NJ/PA mesh which spans almost 200 miles wide. I don't recall any cordless telephone ever doing that...
WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
I mean morse code on GMRS is actually an amazingly strong physics solution. Take the benefits of VHF propagation and combine it with high power limits and a coding scheme that is on par with FT8 for noisy channel resilience. No way a potato powered microwave is going to compete.
915 MHz mesh isn't a fair comparison. APRS is, but that requires licensing and unencrypted communication, so it gets less traffic. Quite good and fun though. I get point to point pings dozens of miles away daily.
> AB sees, correctly, an inordinate amount of tax per capita go out for the privilege of policies intended to kneecap that region's development.
Not only that, but the Feds typically use their outsized tax revenue from Alberta to “invest” in Quebec to buy votes via propping up unviable businesses, subsidies, outsized proportion of public sector jobs, and federal spending in general.
Hey, the little old lie that Québec, which does get an outsized proportion of the political attention, gets an outsized proportion of the federal money, which it doesn’t.
You can find many examples of specific programs where Québec gets the federal government’s money in incredible amounts. But you add all these programs together and you still come up short per person compared to Ontario. Why?
The only possible way to come to a conclusion as wrong as yours is by looking at gross instead of net federal spending by province.
When you consider the tiny detail of actually contributing to federal finances, in the past 20 years alone Quebec has received ~360 billion more than it contributed, whereas Ontario has received ~232 billion LESS than it contributed.
Nearly half a trillion difference between the two, and nothing to do with the auto industry whatsoever.
They’re also the ones constantly hiring and recruiting because internally nearly everyone benefits to having more people “under them”, and there’s a massive HR/Talent team that doesn’t go into hibernation after a 20% workforce reduction. Organizations want to grow, not because they need to but because it’s in the best interest of nearly all individuals still on the inside.
That's why it's so important that people get some stock compensation, so that when the stock goes up when they finally fire people the incentives are aligned.
>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win
Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?
They didn’t win because of DRM. They won because of the regulations that grant a monopoly for a specific term in the form of a copyright. Society has recognized that incentivizing creative acts requires a temporary grant of monopoly to ensure the necessary scarcity to make money and recover the costs of creation. The real problem is Disney keeps expanding that time period so things never enter the public domain
This is again conflating at least two things and this is so prevalent in this context. Let us not conflate how annoying DRM:s are to us users that buy the things, with pirates thinking they somehow have a right to use any software without paying fairly for it. I would even go as far as to say that you pirates are the reason I have to have a DRM in the shit I bought and paid for.
> I would even go as far as to say that you pirates are the reason I have to have a DRM
I think this is largely an incorrect take. DRM is anti consumer, not anti piracy. In fact, it has done very little to deter actual piracy (and remember it only takes ONE person to break the DRM), while affecting some casual pirates and all legitimate users. In the process, they got rid of reselling stuff you own.
It's anticonsumer, not antipiracy, never forget that. It means something like this would have happened regardless of pirates.
They succesfully did away with 2nd hand markets and the concept of "owning" anything. So yes, I would imagine DRM would continue to exist without piracy.
I think so, because their main goal is to prevent unwanted use of the digital product -- to the detriment of end users -- in more ways than just piracy. In fact, they don't solve the piracy issue.
I am not sure how I am conflating two things, it would be helpful if you could expand or connect to my argument. Perhaps I am misunderstanding.
My argument is that the grant of monopoly is a regulatory decision and the real cause of "winning". No amount of DRM would confer the same benefit because the ability to bypass it through piracy would be totally legal with no economic or other consequences and so a robust cracking and distribution ecosystem would emerge. Thats a drastically different story than when napster gets shut down, and limewire gets shut down and pirate bay gets shut down every time it relaunches. Imagine a world where there is are 1000 pirate bays
Piracy is as easy now as it was pre-DRM. DRM is the digital equivalent to security screws on electronics, in that they’re a mechanism for lawyers to argue their client made an attempt despite being easily bypassed with a trivial amount of effort.
Exactly this. The real power is in the regulatory grant of a monopoly that comes with rights like the ability to sue for damages, issue take down notices etc. the DRM does allow restrictions on distribution because many people can’t be bothered to remove them, but more importantly the act of removing them is evidence of the intent to knowingly violate the copyright which might be harder to prove otherwise
And now that they're trying to push up the margins and the streaming ecosystem is fragmenting making everything into a series of bundles again, piracy is on the rise again.
They did win for a while because they stamped out 99% of piracy. In the early days of streaming it was legitimately difficult to argue for piracy. Streaming was just too convenient and too cheap.
But, they are greedy above all else. And so, we are once again seeing a resurgence of piracy. Large corporations seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
By the time you're building (or buying) the necessary highly esoteric and expensive ultracentrifuge setup I think you would be well outside the realm of "hobbyist" unless someone insists on the most unreasonably pedantic definition for the term.
Unless we're only considering final assembly. Just gotta get that weapons grade fissile material supplier lined up. That might or might not qualify as rich hobbyist territory depending on how high a price tag is permissible.
In theory, there's also direct laser-based isotope separation. It's a technology that is being actively suppressed, and that's one case where I very much in favor of that.
This subthread starts off with the argument that the big corps will never beat the little determined hackers, one of the founding myths of the early internet. And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.
I mean reading it all certainly sounds like the people on the little guy's side are overestimating the value of pluck, an observation Hollywood generally makes just before the heroes with pluck win for ever!
> And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.
It's almost never about the level of resources the organization puts in. The usual reason is that there isn't enough incentive to do it. What is a hobbyist going to do with a nuclear weapon? Why spend your time creating one if you, like the overwhelming majority of people, have no desire to blow up a city?
Preventing something that hardly anybody would be trying to do even if it wasn't being suppressed is a lot more practical than preventing something millions of people would do given the chance.
Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
> It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
By which definition they utterly failed.
> Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.
As long as enough people keep the pirate bays open, it will be there as an alternative when the services start their inevitable enshittification.
I for one do not enjoy the “Which service has the classic film I wanted to watch this week?” Nor having to switch services every time I want to see a new TV series.
We need (and have!) similar “free” alternatives to the watermarked generative services. Just like I hate the yellow dots on my printed images, I am not happy to have my creative assets (I do nothing nefarious) stained with SynthID.
> Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy.
But this is moving the goalposts. You can win against piracy either by making piracy less attractive or by making the paid offering more attractive. The first has utterly failed, piracy remains easy as a rule, and to the extent that they've succeeded it's not only disproportionately by doing the second thing, the DRM itself is a net negative because it has such a small effect on the ease of piracy while making the paid offering worse.
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