Four journalists had an opportunity to ask a question and follow-up of Carney. Only two were real journalists, and the difference was telling.

• Q1a: Missed original identification and question, but apparently what budget cut will be made to make room for promised investments?
• Q1b: where is the $500 billion coming from.
• Q2a: Juno news: Was Justin Trudeau a good Prime Minister?
• Q2b: How you reconcile (working with former LPC members who were part of Trudeau’s government)? The “odd” question.
• Q3a: Canadian Press: New immigration targets?
• Q3b: Pipelines take years, how does that protect Canadian sovereignty?
• Q4a: True North: “How many genders are there?”
• Q4b: Do biological women have a right to their own spaces?

As a fellow pedant, I have to point out that even a simple tic-tac-toe algorithm is “AI”.

The term AI was coined at the Dartmouth College Summer Workshop in 1956. Early AI focused on developing expert systems and things like heuristics.

Most people conflate AI, the technical term for computerized decision making in general with the SciFi concept of super intelligent computers, and there has been a revolution since about 2010, in that computationally intensive neutral networks that were theoretical became more conceivable and practical. But LLMs are just a single family of AI techniques.

This, even bad 90’s game computer AI is just as valid to call AI as the latest OpenAI model. It’s just more primitive. Orders of magnitude more primitive, and no neural networks or LLM.

Mythbusters did this with coffee whitener as I recall. Impressive.

This has also happened to sawmills and flour mills, under less controlled circumstances.

I’ll add that Canada is pretty big, and there’s lots of regional variation. Assuming OP is from New Zealand, I think we’re pretty on par.

Vancouver and Toronto are saving the most expensive cities in the world, but Fraser Lake isn’t.

Sharing lines isn’t that unusual, it’s been done since the dawn of the railroads. It’s just that freight would be waiting on sidings while passenger and mail moved. Via Rail is just bass-ackwards.

I suppose the problem is that CN or CP own the tracks, and Via is just the renter, so CN and CP give lower priority.

As I recall, all the side effects of the Covid vaccines are side effects present with other vaccines, and they are all auto-immune responses. You are at a much much greater risk of all of those if you actually caught Covid.

I suppose there is a bit of calculus involved. If you are 100 times more likely to suffer from Guillain–Barré syndrome or myocarditis if you catch a disease, but the disease is exceptionally rare, it might not make sense to get a vaccine. In Covid’s case though, a substantial amount of the general population caught Covid, meaning that the overall risk was substantially reduced by being vaccinated.

Some people just seem to have trouble with risks and percentages; shades of grey rather than black or white. Getting vaccinated isnt 100% the right call, it’s only 99.99+% the right call. Ironic that the same people were totally cool with a 0.5% of Covid killing them, never mind all the other severe side effects. You were asking them to make a choice between 99.99% fine vs. 90% fine or 99.9999+% non-lethal and 99.5% non-lethal. You look at the relative risks though and the vaccine was thousands of times more safe than catching Covid unvaccinated.

Perfect. Just what Lemmy needed!

Well put. She made her choice. I doubt she accepted the consequences of her choice though. All the noise about being “denied” an organ, the fundraiser, the noise she made.

A lot of people are going to die waiting for an organ transplant, there aren’t enough to go around. No one is entitled to an organ, someone has to die to donate one (other than kidneys). Her demanding an organ is condemning someone else waiting to death. It the fundamental ethical calculus of organ transplants and organ donation.

I just really get the impression that she felt entitled to an organ despite choosing not to follow all medical advice.

It’s not even really denying. They are just giving that organ to someone else. I’m sure if there were a glut of organs on the market somehow, then they could get less picky, but you don’t. For every successful organ donation there are probably a dozen people who die waiting.

That’s the other angle. Someone has to die to donate organs (other than kidneys and I think liver). There aren’t enough organs to go around. Who lives and who dies? It’s a classic philosophical conundrum.

Yep, not enough organs to go around. Some people are doomed to die waiting. It’s right out of a philosophy textbook.

You’re escaping from a burning building, the stairs are about to collapse. Do you assist the elderly smoker or the teenager? The pregnant woman or the father?

Classic. In this case do you save the entitled woman demanding an organ who refuses to follow medical advice, or the next person waiting?

Ugh. $125k to get an organ transplant in the US without the vaccine. Also, the stupid tweet speculating that vaccines aren’t required to donate organs. Nope, they absolutely aren’t. Idiots. Imbeciles. Morons. It’s absolutely infuriating that people can be so willingly ignorant.

Sure, hospitals willing and able to do organ transplants are rare, but that’s because organs to transplant are exceptionally rare. Other than kidney donations, and I think liver (IIRC), all organ transplants require someone to die, and to die under pretty controlled conditions so that their organs are still in a usable condition. For every organ transplant that occurs, there are a dozen others that die waiting.

To give this woman an organ transplant is to deny someone else an organ transplant. The question is not whether she should get an organ transplant despite not taking every reasonable measure to increase the odds of that organ contributing to a longer and healthier life; but rather who else dies if she doesn’t want to take every reasonable measure.

The fundamental calculus of organ donation is not everyone who needs one will get one. Who will benefit the most? This is absolutely the practical application of those philosophical paradoxes where you are asked to pick which life to save under various circumstances.

Her whole case reeks of the entitlement that oozes from the Convoy protesters. I shouldn’t be inconvenienced, I shouldn’t have to compromise to help others. I should get to live, screw everyone else.

I have a friend who got a lung transplant around 10 years ago. It’s a little unnerving how bloodthirsty I got whenever I saw an aggressive motorcycle driver. “I hope they are an organ donor” became my new curse. I wasn’t exactly wishing death upon people, but it was sobering to feel how mixed my feelings became knowing a friend was waiting for an organ donation.

The inverse of this story of this woman dying is the story of everyone who skipped past her in line. One of those organs could have been hers. I’d like to hear stories about people whose lives were saved.

Not too far from Talinn, Estonia to St. Petersburg, Russia. Curious.

I understood it as coal was phased in as nuclear was phased out. The thing that astounds me still though is how recent the last 3 were shut down.

If only there was some means of replacing all that coal with a non-carbon intensive source of energy that isn’t dependant on the weather…

Has anyone heard of such a technology?

Sarcasm aside, that Germany shut down their last two nuclear reactors so recently and carried through is astounding. The excuses are mind-boggling. They’re old? Refurbishing is cheaper and faster than new built. They need re-certification? Then do it.

Ah, for just one time

I would take the Northwest Passage

To find the hand of Franklin

Reaching for the Beaufort Sea

Tracing one warm line

Through a land so wild and savage

And make a Northwest Passage to the sea

This was my impression. This was a rushed propaganda mission for prestige using existing material.

Still, I’m sure there would have been some useful science done, but the main point of the mission was that Putin’s regime would have been able to crow about how great Russia is doing.

Of course, if it had succeeded, it might have spurred some competitive spirit in other space powers.

Or a renewal step. If it’s not worth renewing, let it into the public domain.

This is why It’s A Wonderful Life became a Christmas classic. Because it was in the pubic domain, it was used as late night filler.

The MPAA and RIAA miss the point. If It’s A Wonderful Life was still copyrighted, it wouldn’t have become a classic.

It’s like the concept of Abandonware. If video games had a large copyright clearing house like the MPAA or RIAA, Abandonware wouldn’t work, but abandoned media will disappear. Heck, non-abandoned media also disappears because profits don’t reward preservation.

Nominative determinism?

I get it. If you see this, what bin does it go in? It looks and feels like plastic-plastic, but it’s actually closer (is?) cellophane. I can see how this could cause confusion. Still, I think the solution is to move away from plastic-plastic to bio-plastics, such a sulfite pulp. If all plastic was bio-plastic, it wouldn’t be so confusing.

An aside. Celluloid (as in film), cellophane (as in the original cling wrap), and rayon are all made from the “Red Liquor” or sulphite pulping process. The Port Alice pulp mill on Vancouver Island used this process, but it closed permanently back in 2015. The sulfite process used to be common, but it’s been mostly phased out, although it apparently had a brief revival when oil prices were around $100/bbl from 2010 to 2014. Rayon and other dissolving pulp products were more cost effective than many oil based plastics. I don’t know how the economics have changed, but I expect that displacing petro-plastics with bio-plastics shouldn’t be that expensive, extrapolating from that $100/bbl price.