I think what's happening is that the old political boundaries are being rewritten. The MAGA crowd don't hold all the same views as old school conservatives, and so some of them are now swing voters. But also Trump is pulling some votes from the democrats, most obviously the unions

The person who wants Biden to be the nominee the most is Trump. Notice he's gone completely quiet on him, not blasting him for his age like some democrats are, because he knows he can win against an 81yo Biden. As soon as he's confirmed as the nominee, Team Trump will turn around and try to make him look as old as dirt

I was ready for this to be a case of the students being too easily triggered, but boy was I wrong!

That information doesn't change anything I've said. He can be "trailing trump" and still not be the best candidate the dems could have

I think there are people on the fence (who generally decide the election) who would be swayed by Biden's apparent dementia

The Polymarket prediction markets gives odds for who will win the presidential election and who will win the democratic nominee. We can compare the odds of each candidate and use Bayes Theorem to determine their chances of winning the presidency if they secure the DNC nomination.

Here's the results as of posting this comment:

Joe Biden: 27% Kamala Harris: 50% Michelle Obama: 100% Gavin Newsom: 66% Other: 50%

Obviously this doesn't work perfectly (the Michelle Obama example especially is bizarre), but there is over $300M behind these numbers so people seem to think they're at least somewhat accurate.

TLDR: there is a lot of money that thinks Joe Biden is one of the worst options

You don't think if Biden stepped down and it was an open primary there wouldn't be some good options?

Pete Buttigeig, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, anyone under 60 would make Trump look like a dottering old man in comparison

I don't think the opinion "the man who has control of the nuclear arsenal is showing signs of senility and should not serve another 4 years regardless of who replaces him" is not an unreasonable one

The real question is, how can we avoid the maple leaf being griefed?

Here's the girl's facebook post since it wasn't linked in the article: https://www.facebook.com/emma.maclean.376/posts/1624020878439140?ref=embed_post

The powers that be will likely push for cashless society because it gives them more surveillance & control

If credit/debit cards were the norm and cash was invented today, it would likely be outlawed down because criminals/terrorists/child kidnappers will use if for nefarious purposes

You're still not answering my question.

But it's now clear that communism for you is a religion. Upper stage communism is the paradise that is promised to those who follow the tenets of the faith fully, and I am a heretic non-believer

I will not be continuing this discussion any further

How about instead of just saying that I am wrong, describe to me how an individual in a higher stage communist state would be prevented from slacking in his duties (and still gaining "according to his need") without state induced violence

What I described is exactly how it played out in about a dozen instances where a transition to communism was tried

There are different kinds of work which needs to be done for our society to function. These tasks have costs for those who perform them (lost time, spent energy, danger, boredom, etc).

In pure communism, everyone works hard and everyone is given the spoils of the work we collectively provide. But it is rational for any individual to not work as hard, because he will bear less of the cost of that work, but still realize the same gain

Therefore most people tend to shirk their duties, and the output of the entire collective drops. In order to maintain the system, the threat of violence is introduced, and we quickly get to Stalinist purges

It is not game theoretically aligned. It's not his fault, Game Theory didn't really get going until after his death

Marx's critique of capitalism is spot on. It's his proposed solution that is problematic

It's crazy that they change the weights on these indexes. How are you supposed to get an accurate inflation number if you keep moving the goal posts

I don't like it

I have to give credit where it's due, I actually like this change. Likes used to be private, and then they became public and subject to the toxic performativity of social media

Online market places to be jointly and severally liable for anything on their sites

This should be something AI can do now. Give it a list of what kinds of ads are not allowed, and ask it if the contents of this ad are acceptable

Does this work for the F21 Pro as well?

I would love for lightning to scale the network, but I'm worried that it won't. I don't have much experience with it myself (I've set up a small channel to try it out) but I know many people have been disappointed by it.

I hope that something like the OP_CAT soft fork can be initialized, so that ZK-Rollups can be implemented on Bitcoin. IMO that would open up so many more scaling options for the network

Everyone is the just the product of luck

Totally agree! Isn't an argument against the carbon tax though, but an argument for more transit development

There's been a slight downtick in recent years, but it's still up +10 years from 1970

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/life-expectancy

While I think the student protest are misguided, this seems like a good development. People have a right to (peacefully) protest, and universities shouldn't forcibly remove people that aren't hurting others or damaging property

It's not the simple unfortunately, because of 2 factors:

1. Our boomers are a very large generation, larger than the millenials

2. Life expectancy has increased so people live much longer (with high medical costs)

In the 70s - 2000s we had a large generation of in their working years paying for a small generation's 5-10 year retirement

Now, we have a small generation in their working years paying for a large generation 15-25 year retirement

And this is not something we can solve by just "taxing the rich". The numbers are so huge that taxing Canada's richest people is a drop in the bucket

I can't believe the carbon tax is getting such bad press lately. IMO it's one of the best policies to come out of the current government. Everyone is upset about high gas prices, but the forget that they get a big rebate at the end of the year. This means for people with fuel efficient cars, the tax is minimal, and the gas guzzlers pay a lot. Encourages better use of limited resources.

It's anti-tech propaganda. The same is happening with crypto. Certain groups don't like it, so they try to convince the public that it is bad for the environment so it will be banned

This isn't a good situation, but I also don't like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not "valuable" uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.

This is a bit of a fallacy. In a normal market, the rent for a home is less than the costs of home ownership (mortgage + maintenance + taxes) and that saved money can be used to purchase other assets.

Until the real estate mania of the last few years, if you followed this strategy, you would not be any worse off than the person who bought their home.

I personally would much rather have equity in more fungible assets than a home. Owning a home ties you to a specific location, and can't easily be sold in an emergency. Plus it's not a very diverse portfolio if most of you wealth is in a single property

Humanity:

It would be very stupid to set up a system where you have to give the porn site your ID. Better to just have an attestation that this user is over 18 years old.

There even ways to do this without the government knowing which site you visited with zero knowledge cryptography. But that would probably require everyone to get a Yubi key or equivalent, which might be hard to swallow

Governments already have systems to handle citizen IDs. They're not perfect, and fake ones do get created, but they're good enough. All that is needed is to connect that system to a UBI key or other device. Then websites could use cryptographic tools (signatures, ZK-SNARKS, etc) to verify that someone is over 18 without revealing their identity

I fear internet ID is coming whether we like it or not. AI powered bots will pass all captchas and be indistinguishable from humans. The open, pseudonymous internet cannot survive under those conditions. You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.

I suspect some of the negativity comes from porn users who are in denial

It seems to me much more likely that the porn industry is financing studies that say there is nothing wrong with porn use. The means and motive make a lot more sense going in that direction, as they don't want to be seen as the new cigarettes

I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it

The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.

There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.

Porn linked to decreased grey matter

Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning

Porn linked to negative social behaviour

Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement

I'm not really sure this law will "solve" the problem, or if it's a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn

The only developed country that doesn't seem to have a housing crisis right now is Japan. After their real estate market collapsed in the 90s, they instituted a number of reforms to make housing less attractive as an investment vehicle. Now housing there tends to depreciate over time, not appreciate. Consequently, it's viewed not as an investment but as a consumer product, much like buying a car, and there is competition that brings costs down.

I think this is the sensible approach we need to follow in the rest of the developed world, but I don't think it's not going to be politically feasible until a lot of homeowners feel a lot of pain and give up on the idea of housing as an investment