dpc050505

If you don't think the world is rife with criminal conspiracies you weren't paying attention in history class.

There's an enormous difference between outlandish claims about extraterrestrials or turning frog gays and believing there's a category of politicians trying to get wealthy off of their position. It's somewhat reasonable to hypothesize about criminal conspiracies in that 2nd scenario.

Per diems in the civil engineering union agreement in my Canadian province are 180$ a day to cover lodging and food when you're working away from home. Most people manage to spend less and save the leftover. That's tax free money unrelated to what you're actually getting paid for the work or transport time.

80$ might seem like a lot of money if you're making 60k a year as a biologist. If you're in a field where profit is the reason you work 80$ is peanuts.

When you take the eurozone as a block it puts it only second to the US in terms of GDP, with much better QOL indicators. I don't know how you can think this doesn't place it very much within the realm of economic superpowers.

Being a superpower doesn't mean much to the americans that live in a town that looks like Gummo. There's a lot of them.

The petrodollar system resolved the 70s inflation crisis after Nixon sent the head of the CIA to Saudi Arabia. The US military backed revolutionaries during the arab spring because the dead dictators wanted to start a pan-african currency with which to trade oil. Iran, Venezuela and Russia were under sanctions and treated as enemies in very big part because they were selling oil for other currencies than the USD.

The US dollar is propped up by constant US dollar liquidity related to the fact that you need it to trade significant quantities of oil with the vast majority of producers. That situation was held up by the US' military might. Starting shit with Iran and being unable to finish it means there's no reason for oil producing countries to keep financing american debt on the cheap. What are they going to do? Restrict their own access to crude?

There's more to it, but the USD for gas scheme is a big structural chunk of the financial house of card. You break that and the rest won't hold up very long. And it's not like other structural parts of what makes the USD the global reserve currency aren't getting eroded either. Fed independence stands there glaringly obvious.

Canada's geopolitical position might be a bit fucked but we're still a very rich country with highly educated and resilient people. An exceptionally poor hand would be trying to govern a place like Haiti.

Look up violet wands, you can shock humans with 0 training when it's a consensual hobby.

I'm pretty involved in my local regionals. I'm part of DPW at one and I've operated propane fueled flame effects a couple times. I'm throwing my quinceanera at a small unsanctioned regional close to my birthday.

That whole 'money-less' gifting thing makes for a very nice party. It has nothing to do with real economics. The vast majority of people at burns are able bodied, have above average practical skills and are right in the age group where you'd expect folks to be competent to work.

Gifting drinks, cordoning roads, making sure port-o-potties are functional and clean, making a silly art piece and shirtcocking among a few thousand people for a week or so has little to do with maintaining infrastructure, education, healthcare and the logistics to keep billions of people, including children, the disabled and the elderly, fed and housed all the time.

How do you do that without completely messing up the supply chains that keep us fed and alive for the next 6 months? The wealthiest people (who also happen to be ones that are a bit more sheltered from the climatic crisis) will still be able to afford food. Billions of poor people would just starve without petrochemical fertilizers and the diesel required for industrial farming and transportation of food. We could've had a smooth transition a few decades ago. Now it's super late and the choice is short term catastrophe vs long term catastrophe. Do you know how much fossil fuels it takes to build and maintain a wind farm or an electric truck? How much petroleum coke is burnt making the cement to build the towers that make walkable cities possible?

The alternative to fossil fuels and the climate crisis is basically an incredibly deadly and uncomfortable step out of the industrialized world. No one is making that decision. It's a fancy trolley problem where the amount of people on the tracks has 10 figures on both sides and blurry timelines.

Just the increase of gas prices due to the iran war is going to cause some fucked up harvests in africa, south america and asia. The poorest farmers aren't able to afford fertilizers. I have a coworker who has ties in Guinea-bissau. The farmers there are basically getting spitroasted by the combination of climate changed caused droughts messing up their cash crops followed by increased oil prices due to wars they have nothing to do with increasing the price of their agricultural inputs. Your simplistic view on fossil fuels will not keep them alive long enough to see the even worst effects of climate change that are coming. If it was easy to stop emitting greenhouse gases we would've managed to do it 25+ years ago.

Monero is delisted from exchanges in Canada because the anonymity makes it impossible to comply with anti-money laundering regulations. It makes it a lot harder to acquire the coins or to turn them into liquidity. The government is also going hard against encryption with law c-22, which will make Signal stop providing service in the country.

You don't need to go back to prehistory, you can just go back a few hundred years before the urbanization brought forth by the industrial revolution. We had millennia of written record by then.

Several influential people are deluded into thinking that LLMs will bring forth AGI. A lot of people don't really understand that LLMs are just one type of AI. This creates a paradigm where we're nearly all-in on LLMs and very few people are thinking of the other ways to engineer task-specific artificial intelligence. Stockfish is a great example of a non-LLM AI that is the best at it's task.

Having guardrails against diarrhea lettuce is just reasonable policy.

I'd have a very hard time spending other currencies than CAD to pay my bills.

When the material conditions and the people at the top of all of the corporate world lead to decisions with awful ethical implications there's conclusions that should be reached.

The small regionals don't attract billionaires, some even unaffiliated from the BMorg over certain billionaires being involved with it.

You call it greed but in a lot of these places it's necessity. Now that necessity might partially be the result of other people's greed but that's a whole other conversation about poverty.

Everyone has clients and if your employees aren't incompetent sycophants they can give you actionable feedback.

I jailbreaked my Canadarm to prune my weed plants using a LLM.

Ocean currents, elevation and distance from the equator also have a big impact on what the season is going to feel like.

There's no need to change the dates. They're already arbitrary based on the position of the sun and the earth and people have the experience to take them with the grain of salt necessary to the region they live in. People who live near the equator probably don't have much care for the notion of the winter at all. Folks who live far up north know that spring actually comes in much later than march 21st. People who climb glaciated mountains in the canadian rockies know they won't get summer conditions until late june.

Do you realize that humans are currently triggering a mass extinction event that may very well threaten the very existence of our species within a couple generations?

Jews aren't all zionists and it's perpetuating jewish hatred to pretend so.

That cash keeps circulating among global black markets after any given invasion.

Contemporary bandsaws used by people who take workplace safety seriously have emergency brakes for just that reason (countless trained operators also lost fingers). Improving tools is something we've been doing since our ancestors first held a branch. If we satisfied ourselves with good enough we'd live much different lives.

My days of contraband in college taught me that the perspective of repeat business kept things quite amicable.

Your phone very likely runs on an OS created by Apple or Google.

It will pop just in time to put the blame on the liberal that wants to slightly tax the rich and improve the quality of life of working people.

> I'm not sure how fixing my own tractor leads to criminal acts

They're probably pre-criming the killdozer or something.

Apart from safety, the rhetoric of the US government regarding the invasion of former allies has led a lot of people to try really hard to boycott as many American products as they can.

Maybe there's a bunch of inflated profit margins and people getting filthy rich off a poorly regulated market.

Your mind will be blown once you discover rent seeking behaviour.