I'm in Canada and we've had a very gradual digitization of taxes. It's not as complete as some other countries, but I was really impressed at how it progressed.

It started many years ago where your work would 'upload' your tax slips to the government website. It was very basic. But functional.

Then tax software, like TurboTax gained the ability to connect to the government website and download all your tax forms. More and more stuff started to be upload to the government site. Today, even my stock trades are uploaded to the government as I use a major brokerage.

Today my taxes are literally sign in to turbo tax, authorize so it can download the tax info from the government website, and I basically submit. Only thing I need to do is add donations and other stuff. There are 'free options' to file.

It's not a huge deal for the IRS to have built it's own software. I personally don't think that's a good model and prefer the model Canada did. The government defined the protocol to file taxes and receive tax slips. Then the actual programs to do taxes is left to the market. Most of the market players offer a free filing option for low-income people anyways.

You joke, but it's true. I was a teacher for a few years and Canada and went though all the teacher education and training. There's a lot of theory out there, but in practice, I genuinely don't think there is any better than exams.

A lot of people will say things like exams are too much pressure. Some learners don't perform well on exams...

Exams do one thing really well. They give you a closed environment on the course material. Sure, you can cheat on any assignment or essay during the regular school year. Yet, come exam time where all you have on your desk is a pencil and a piece of paper, you had better be able to perform.

Then if you get a student who wrote amazing essays during school projects, but could barely come up with a sentence during the exam, you would know something is up.

Catching cheaters should not be the biggest deal for regular school work and assignments. Just catch the big and obvious cheaters. For everyone else, leave it to the exam and weight it highly.

I think this is it right here.The strength of the chat bot lies in it's language processing.

However, the actions/results the chat bot actually takes are going to generally be limited by existing systems. If all the chatbot is doing is parsing your query then doing a 'google' or 'bing' or 'site search', then you might as well just do the search on your own. The technical competence of people to 'search' is also pretty ingrained in the culture that it is no big deal.

Similarly if the chatbot is accessing some feature of your website/app, a well designed app/website is going to make that functionality relatively easy for you to find and use. So again, you're likely to just go straight to that functionality. Alternatively, if it is hard to find that function, the chatbot might act as a glorified application/website search.

Laws that are vague and highly punishable are always dangerous.

It's more the stifling effect you have on the average person. As a kind of general rule, I do not believe such laws can exist in any area. Unfortunately this does mean that some 'small harms' might continue to exist. But I do think it is a worthy trade off for people to learn how to deal with small harms themselves, to preserve the rest of society.

We can and should count on 'social' rules to deal with the 'small harms'

Whether it is a small fist fight, small parental spanking, small sexual assault (not rape, but say verbal or vague touching...), small hate speech... the risk of criminalizing it is too great.

You risk stifling people's regular behavior. Young people may not be as willing to risk courting each other knowing it could actually land them in trouble. People may not be as willing to engage is civic discourse.

You risk exploitation by manipulative people. For example, I work in a corporate environment where people are always fighting each other for top position. Do you think someone might accuse someone else of some small hate speech to take their position, even if they weren't really offended?

As a kind of general rule, I am very wary of any law that is 'vague' and highly punishable. It doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you are in, they're just dangerous laws.

It's not pointless. Generally speaking flatpak or SNAPs are great for applications; especially those that update frequently.

I don't know why any vendor would release a binary outside of these formats or doing it straight into the distro. Yes, things that might be more system level could have issues, but for applcations, I don't know why Microsoft wouldn't just pick flatpak or SNAP and release it like that.

There's a lot to it, but yes in North America far far far too much is placed on enforcement. I'm in Canada and here, people are blind to anything except more enforcement.

I'd say Number 1 is actually road design. Just a quick example, I really dislike busy road that allow left turns into plazas outside of signals. Ban those and you get rid of a lot of potential points of conflict. Let people turn at a light or a round-about or whatever. You can do so much in terms of just designing the street better, so points of conflict are less.

Other examples I've seen anecdotally in Canada is really bad interchange design. We have 'collector' and 'express' highway lanes in a few of our highways. Express having less stops, so theoretically better. Ideally, you get on the highway via the collector, then go to the express. There are some really bad interchanges were people get straight onto the highway then try and cross 4 lanes to get to the express on-ramp. Just don't allow that.

Then of course you have driver education, which is a big thing.

Then you have street racing, which is a really big thing too. On this, I really believe we need to provide legal avenues. Have a local racetrack that people can race on. Some countries have done this as well. Government isn't too keen to do it here, probably due to fear of endorsing it or legal issues. But they really should. You want to have a car meet and race around, do it HERE... away from regular streets. Charge/toll entrance to it and away you go.

This is really it.
I've had Netflix for years. I don't even know if I watch it enough to justify it, but it's 'low-enough' that I just keep paying it.

Ditto for spotify.

What I simply don't want to do is pay for more than 1 service. I have kids and while Disney might be nice, I just don't want to pay for more services and have another account... It's just too much.

Years back, I wished more companies (Disney) would put their content on Netflix. Of course they eventually chose the opposite route and trying to build their own Netflix. At another point, I wondered if Netflix could offer an 'upcharge' for specific hosting. Like say $5/month gets you everything Disney. It's not ideal, but at least it's all on one platform with one account.

The way they've pursued it has been the most inconvenient option at the worst price.

It is obvious, and it's also happening.

Solid State batteries are saying something like 80% charge in 10-15 minutes. Filling up gas is still quicker, but you can easily imagine something like a gas station, but for EV chargers. It's in that time range of 'reasonable'. Heck, Gas stations themselves might even like this. 15 minutes is 10-15 mins is short enough to keep queues down, but long enough for you to be bored and buy a coffee or a quick snack.

Most creatives are less than worthwhile.

I think it is very few 'creatives' who actually get to make money on their creativity. A lot of creatives make their bread and butter on things that are more routine, and then use their creativity in small slices or other projects.

An artist might get a job make boring corporate diagrams or generic game/movie imagery. I think in a lot of those cases 'AI' could produce something 'good enough' for most uses. I'd still find it a sad an artist would not be able to make a living just because. That only the top artist gets to use their creativity making new and ground breaking character designs for a game/movie.

It's a complex issue, but at the core, you are right that they want to be a part of the new flow. I'm not actually opposed to it.

I think it was Toyota that has a small group of trades people who know how to do things manually and build things by hand. They employ them so the knowledge is not lost by simply automating everything.

It's extremely complicated and in no way is it easy to figure out how to pay humans who technically might not be 'needed' for the job anymore. However, I think it conceptually a good idea. It keeps people employed. It makes sure that human knowledge/skills are not lost.

Even say software. How much software is not maintained. In theory, you can just write software and once it is written, you don't need developers anymore. Of course in practice, things need changing, updating... but conceptually, I don't think it's a problem if say we had a requirement that you need at least 1 developer maintaining every 200,000 lines of code or whatever it is. Keeps people employed and makes sure the knowledge and skills are maintained.

This should even be the case for farm workers, manufacturing workers...

things like AI which scrape the internet or datasets and what not are way more complex. But conceptually, I think artists should find a way to be involved in the process. It will just be really hard to actually find a way to get them to be paid. I'd hate for the skills of artists to be lost in our society the same way as I'd hate trades people's skills to be lost.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but this only appears to impact physical retail locations. That makes sense to the extent those are the main location people can actually drop off electronics.

However, I can't help but wonder how this impacts online retailers. Seems like they might be getting a free ride here. I buy most of my electronic online. Then to dispose of it, I go to a physical location and drop it off.

Maybe there's a provision in the bill to add a fee to online retailers, which would then go to retailers with physical locations for dropping off electronics or something like that.

I don't know about you, but that sounds absolutely affordable. This would be for the whole world here.

Just to put it in perspective. The US defense budget for this year is 1.8 Trillion. If they cut it to 1.6 trillion and used the 200 billion remove carbon, that's pretty affordable.

Again, this is just the US budget. I'm just going by your numbers here. That would be mean the US could probably solve climate change on its own for the whole world. Realistically, that 200 billion spread over many countries would be just cheap.

To be honest competition is not the answer to 'natural monopolies'
You're just not going to get 20 companies each running their own cable to a person's home...

ISPs are one of those. What you need is effective regulations to manage the natural monopoly. While this can help. It also can result in this kind of action by Bell. Bell makes the investment in anticipation of making profit.

As far as Canada goes, I think a crown corporation should be in charge of the lines themselves; along the lines of Canada Post and Via Rail. It is infrastructure in the national interest. Then private firms could hook onto that in terms of TV, VOIP, internet packages with the crown corporation maybe only offering internet. You do risk the government ignoring the crown corporation or not investing properly. That's a risk though. However, I've been pretty happy with Canada Post as far as things go.

I don't know. I'm not wise enough to know the future. Maybe there will be futuristic jobs. I have no idea.

I'm a pragmatic person in the sense that if we see this could be a major problem in the near future, we can do something to help smooth the transition; wherever that transition goes.

'small' increases in price are not the end of the world. For example, Oregon had that law that outlawed self-serve gas. You gas had to be filled by a station attendant. I believe it's been rescinded now, but the point is historically it didn't drive gas prices through the roof. Sure, you could probably save a little money, but it wasn't crazy (if at all). If the benefit of that is some increased safety, a job for someone, convenience... I'm all for it.

I think tech will probably benefit more from this as well. I don't 'like' the prospect of huge swaths of technology taking over human function and us not having a good grip on how the technology actually works. How often is software written and then just not maintained. It happens way too often. I'd be all for certain 'job creation and knowledge retention' type regulations. All software in use must be actively maintained with a maximum of 500k LOC / developer. Or something along those lines.

Ditto for lawn mowers, machinists, iron workers, truckers... whatever

I'd much rather pay someone to at least be skilled, retain knowledge, and oversee things than just give people money for example. At least they're contributing to society.

I actually this model.

I think PTO you just use is very reasonable. No questions asked.

Then if you are actually sick for any reasonable amount of time, they have Short and Long term disability.

It's way simpler.