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Comment Re:What we need to be doing (Score 1) 134

You're still here after all these years?

Notably though if we actually run out of work to do we have a post-scarcity utopia, and that happens when people are so rich that there's basically not a single person who, given even more money, would even be able to think of something to spend it on. That's not going to happen any time soon, so we're basically dealing with a distribution problem, which requires distribution (e.g. minimum wage, set it to 1/3 national hourly GDP, the reason for this takes a while to explain) and redistribution (negative income tax, do it as a universal dividend) policies along with monetary policy to properly increase the money supply to not fall behind productivity growth.

Submission + - Writer turns down grad school acceptance due to AI misinformation (businessinsider.com)

bluefoxlucid writes: A promising young writer rejected her invitation into the University of Sidney's creative writing program on speculation that AI will make creative writers obsolete.

In late 2023, I began noticing changes in the media landscape. Publications were laying off most of their writers, and friends in the industry lost out on great gigs and started competing with AI-generated writing.

As for the book industry, I realized AI will not spend years crafting a thrilling romance novel; it will instead churn out a thousand ebooks a month. For the commercial side of the industry, that will always be enough.

The link used for an example of AI-generated writing consuming the industry discusses cover letters and resumés, and in a great fallacy of equivocation the author decides this means creative writers like Brandon Sanderson, David Webber, and herself will be replaced by ChatGPT.

Instead of AI taking her job, the AI narrative took her job, or at least convinced her to give up on her career as a writer.

Comment Nothing controversial about taxing services (Score 1) 51

If a Canadian engineering firm designs something to be built in America, nothing crosses the border but information. Specifications one way, blueprints flow the other. The work is taxed in the country of sale, where the customers are. It's always been that way, on both sides.

This is just a computer doing some work in America (and we all know the actual computer may be in Sweden), work that is sold as a service by Americans, to Canadians. It's no different than the specs and blueprints. A query is sent to America, services are performed, results are sent back to the customer in Canada.

And it's a friggin' THREE PERCENT TAX. God, quit whining. You got away with no-tax for years, and never should have.

Comment Dystopia (Score 1) 106

USA worships almost unfettered capitalism, which is why they are such a rich country but at the expense of their less capable citizens.
USA has insanely poor worker rights (termination, sick pay, mandatory paid holidays) and a completely broken health care system with outrageous expenses and second world public infrastructure. But.. in conversations I’ve had with Americans they kind of go meh, to any change.

Comment Re:What is this stupid writing (Score 1) 60

It was pretty evident to us EE’s within a few days that it was likely an AC inertia sync issue, primarily caused by green energy and lack of spinning mass. Ideologically driven left governments don’t particularly appreciate engineering and the risk and complexity of large power grids and just want more solar and wind, damn the risks.

Comment Re: I'm going to have to tell you (Score 1) 87

The best intel I got was from David Roberts "Volts" podcast, where he had on a genuine "China Expert" who has reported full-time on their business news for a long time. That guy pointed out that you can't get anything done in most provinces without appeasing the 'boss' of that province, generally the actual political head.

And a lot of those guys own coal mines, so you can't get your solar project approved without also putting in a coal plant. A lot of the power plants are solar with coal "backup", and a lot of those are barely turned on - just a few months of winter, say.

So, yes, they "build a coal plant every week" but at low capacity factors, so the coal usage can actually go down.

The metallurgical use is expected to decline sharply in the 2030s, even if no better process is found, simply because their building boom is over and a lot of it was for rebar.

Comment Excel is way better...but it doesn't matter (Score 1) 277

I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.

Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually tossing of Macros that do database hits or invert pivot tables is just easier in Excel.

Thing is: IT Dept. HATED ALL THAT.

IT totally hated user programs of any kind, even when they were far more stable and reliable than their solutions. Even small ones that did one thing.

My solutions were always up for being replaced by some more-difficult usage of their Big Solutions, like PeopleSoft or the Formark Document Management system. Only the fact that they were so slow to deliver - by the time they'd started the project in earnest, the business needs would have changed; I'd adapt my Excel macro solution in a few days, and they'd be back to square one on a year-long process - kept my solutions going for years.

So, the bad news is that you won't be able to do some of the cool power-user solutions with Calc that you could with Excel; the good news is that your IT department will be happy about that.

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