The summary is confusing, because it is conflating two different events that are separated by an entire year. The first event was the bill in its committee, and that is where the "20,000 amendments" figure comes from. Of those, only 200 actually made it out of committee. What is now happening a year later are the votes to consider the 200 amendments. As each vote takes tens of minutes to conduct, that is where the "15 hours of voting" figure comes from.

The bill itself is highly controversial. It requires five-year action plans, regular reporting and the inclusion of labour and Indigenous leaders in discussions, to create what the Liberal party calls "just" energy transition. Conservative critics consider this a blueprint for economic restructuring that they say will put thousands of oil and gas workers out of work.

I would love to read the rejected 19,800 amendments if I could find them anywhere. Using AI to do a DOS attack on a process is a very interesting idea, even though of course it would be done in bad faith.

The defendant in this case isn't a social media company that makes money by placing advertisements on content written by its subscribers. Cox is a national ISP that provides connectivity. [Disclaimer: I am a long-time Cox customer]. Several major record labels sued Cox because it didn't take strong enough measures to remove copyright repeat offenders, in their opinion. Cox lost that case in a jury trial, but the damage award of $1 billion (!) was later overturned on appeal. Cox remains on the hook for "contributory" copyright infringement, because they arguably knew some accounts were pirating, and didn't take steps to stop them.

I think even contributory copyright infringement is too much. Are we going to charge cloud storage providers with contributory copyright infringement? Hard drive manufacturers? Heck, the entire IT ecosystem could be said to be "contributory".

No, if there was no intent of the ISP to hide anything, they didn't profit from it, but they didn't respond as quickly as the record labels wanted, then they can just get in line like everybody else and ask politely.

There are three problems with your small-words explanation. First, CO2 formation most definitely follows temperature rise in core samples, it doesn't precede it. Second, a rise in temperature induces cloud formation because water is the main component of our atmosphere, and clouds reduce temperature, they don't increase it. And third, a rise in CO2 induces a greening of the planet, because plants are made of CO2.

Because of these issues, I personally don't think it is ever correct to apply a simplistic model to something as dynamic and adaptive as the climate of a water world.

See, this is the problem. You have been led to believe that global warming is so absolute, so immediate, and so rapid, that you'll literally be able to observe its changes from farm land to crusted desert. That is just not so. Were you aware, for example, that what is now the Sahara Desert was once filled with lakes, rivers, and rich vegetation? The reason you aren't aware is because there is a cycle of dry/wet in that part of the world that has a period length of 15,000 years. You can drill core samples from the Atlantic Ocean and see direct evidence. But you won't see them with your own eyes. Human civilization has only even been a thing for just a fraction of that period length.

"Regardless, the issue isn't what the past was like (except as a method for predicting what nature had in store for us), the issue is not making things any more uncomfortable for us than we can avoid. I don't care if some dinosaurs had it worse, I care about maintaining the nice climate I was born into."

You can't figure out how to maintain your nice climate unless you can isolate human-induced climate change from naturally occurring climate change. And to do that, you must understand the geologic record. That's why it's pertinent.

A question that cannot be answered without being able to compare it to the past, because you need to isolate human-induced changes from naturally occurring ones. So far, I have not seen any study which has been able to do that. Natural variation is so large, that the human component is too small to isolate with what we know so far.

The geologists in the room are laughing at you, not with you. Deservedly so.

Bah. Hardly a right vs. left effect. Spend 10 minutes on MSNBC on 5 consecutive days and you'll see what I mean. It's all FUD.

These days you can't get very far trying to convince people to vote for your team. The sides are already locked in. You can get somewhere by asking people for specifics, such as when they say, "Candidate X is [some generally negative thing here]", you can just ask them to name one specific example of it, and they typically won't be able to. That's enough to make them stop and at least think.

But flooding social media with AI generated crap? Yeah, good luck with that.

Some very good ideas in there, with just one exception.

- "Watermarked ballots": Already being done if using scantron ballots. In fact, scanner can be physically set to accept only special ballot paper.
- "All ballots hand-counted": Terrible idea. Humans are lousy at counting repetitively. Scantron is thousands of times more accurate.
- "Mail-in by exception only": Excellent idea. Even further, mail-in only if voter will not be physically present.
- "Mail-in received and counted before election day": Yes, very good.
- "Mail-in must be witnessed, both provide image of ID": Yes, very good.

I am willing to pay a fair price for the content I consume, just as I do for everything else I purchase. What I am not willing to do is trade my time. They say time is money, but that's not correct; time is much more valuable than money. You can always make more money. You can never make more time.

What I now require is the ability to purchase access to your content without advertisements. No ad-free option, no subscription.

We have licensing firms that already provide blanket global licenses for specific reproductions of content such as lyrics and music. If there were an ad-free licensing agency where I could pay a fee that would be distributed to content creators globally, I would buy into that. There's no reason we have to rely on Alphabet or Meta to handle such licensing tracking. In the music world, this is handled by third parties, which provides some independence and audibility.

But in the meantime, each content platform will have to provide consumers like me an ad-free route if they wish to remain profitable.