Yup. It's pretty hard to do the right thing when the oil cartel that has invaded Alberta keeps threatening to shit itself and is actively trying to engineer a separatist movement entirely for its own benefit. Here's hoping Carney eventually finds a way to disembowel them.

The last game Sweeney did the artwork for was ZZT. As much as I love playing around with AI art generation for fun, he's really not an expert on this.

FYI, their statement about Iceland is wrong. BEV sales were:

2019: 1000
2020: 2723
2021: 3777
2022: 5850
2023: 9260
2024 (first year of the "kílómetragjald" and the loss of VAT-free purchases): 2913
2025: 5195

Does this look like the changes had no impact to anyone here? It's a simple equation: if you increase the cost advantage of EVs, you shift more people from ICEs to EVs, and if you decrease it, the opposite happens. If you add a new mileage tax, but don't add a new tax to ICE vehicles, then you're reducing the cost advantage. And Iceland's mileage tax was quite harsh.

The whole structure of it is nonsensical (they're working on improving it...), and the implementation was so damned buggy (it's among other things turned alerts on my inbox for government documents into spam, as they keep sending "kílómetragjald" notices, and you can't tell from the email (without taking the time to log in) whether it's kílómetragjald spam or something that actually matters). What I mean by the structure is that it's claimed to be about road maintenance, yet passenger cars on non-studded tyres do negligible road wear. Tax vehicles by axle weight to the fourth times mileage, make them pay for a sticker for the months they want to use studded tyres, and charge flat annual fees (scaled by vehicle cost) for non-maintenance costs. Otherwise, you're inserting severe distortion into the market - transferring money from those who aren't destroying the roads to subsidize those who are, and discouraging the people who aren't destroying the roads from driving to places they want to go (quality of life, economic stimulus, etc)

Road maintenance isn't the only cost. Automobiles have a lot of externalized costs that are bared by the government besides just building roads. You need to constantly be building out new cities with new infrastructure in order to make room for cars and a car centric society.

You could tax the car companies themselves to pay for it but good luck with that. Realistically if you have the political power to do something like that you probably wouldn't have a car centric society that shifts billions of dollars of cost on to consumers.

The examples I can find where someone actually got in trouble were explicit calls to violence. The famous one is a guy who wrote for a British sitcom called Father Ted. He explicitly said that if you see a trans girl in a woman's bathroom you should punch them in the balls. The two that got actual jail time were inciting an attack on a hotel full of immigrants during riots. Even in America that's not legal we just very seldom enforce those laws.

The example in the article you linked to the police admitted they were wrong and paid the people in question 20,000 British pounds as compensation. In America the 20K would not have been worth it because every time you interact with police there's a high probability they are going to kill you. When police get something wrong in America the payout should probably be at least half a million to account for that. But as far as I know the cops in the UK don't just randomly murder people for shits and giggles like they do in United States.

I'm not saying that there isn't some abuse going on though. 12,000 arrests is insane.

But at the same time they're probably needs to be a middle ground between arresting 12,000 people and the rampant stochastic terrorism we've got going on here in the United States where we've got idiots running around killing people trying to start a race war.

Isn't Uber still losing money?

Amazon had a plan for profitability, so much so they took on more debt in the early days to scale up. A gamble that paid off because they had a solid plan to begin with, not a "hope the magic beans drop into our laps before we run out of money" type of plan that AI companies have. Uber's business plan was "lets keep doing illegal shit that our competitors cant and just hope we become big enough not to fail".

Erm... that's the whole point of a T&C/EULA/et al. To limit legal liability and as a defence against being sued. Which is one of the reasons most countries do not treat them as binding contracts.

The wealthy prefer a dystopian hell hole for 99.9% of the population and extraordinarily god-like opulence for themselves. They want to be able to control who lives and who dies on such a fundamental level that they are like the Pharaohs of old literally exalted to godhood.

You cannot as a regular person comprehend the kind of greed that a man like Elon Musk or Bill Gates experiences as their normal state of being. It is way past just wanting money or yachts or any of that and into the point where they want to be transhuman.

And you need to understand that they do not think of you as a human being. You are not at the same level organically or as a species in their eyes. You aren't even at the level that you for example perceive a chimpanzee as in their eyes. To a guy like Elon Musk you're more like a slime mold. An utterly alien existence that might occasionally be useful.

I mean you could stop voting for right-wing politicians because you don't like queer people or brown people or whoever the fuck it is you don't like (in Japan it's certain job descriptions because the Japanese can't tell each other apart well enough to create racism).

You could also get over that stupid 12-year-old feeling of it's not fair when you see somebody having food and shelter without being miserable 40 hours or more per week.

But you're not going to do that. Or if you do your friends and family aren't. So like crabs in a bucket we are going to destroy ourselves.

I'm not acting like there's anything that can be done about it I'm just venting. Flaws in human reasoning and emotions mean our species is doomed and it is incredibly frustrating that we're all going to die for such a stupid and idiotic reason.

Who knows maybe one of the other species will take over after we kill ourselves. Smart money is on raccoons. A few more mutations and they'll have opposable thumbs. Beavers are also in the running.

The population decline from low birth rates isn't drastic enough. You can look up how the math works out but there is a long tail of increased population growth before you see the crash. It has to do with how you already have all these people of childbearing age going through their lives.

So long before our population could adjust we're going to get hit with huge amounts of layoffs that will cause massive amounts of social strife. There's no getting away from it.

There won't be much of an experiment per se. In practice it will quickly devolve into a few big players that control platforms people use so that they can continuously access new training material.

So microsoft, Apple maybe and Facebook and possibly but probably not Twitter (since we just learned 80% of the accounts on Twitter are Russians and bangladeshies pretending to be American conservatives) will continue to thrive because they will be able to tell the difference between a bot and a human being thanks to their control of the platform.

Everyone else was just accessing free training data goes tits up soon. Some of them will be bought out.

In addition to devastating the job market and devouring electricity and water AI is also going to result in huge monopolies because it's a technology that lends itself to monopolies inherently.

It's supposed to be the answer to the question "if nobody buys the wealthy's products how are they going to stay rich?"

The goal here is to replace as many workers as possible and eliminate the dependency on consumers.

The ultra wealthy want to go back to being like kings. Basically feudalism.

They will have a very tiny number of guildsman and scribes and a handful of knights to keep them in line.

Everyone else has a lifestyle below that of a medieval peasant because you're not even needed to tend the land anymore, they will have machines for that.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realize what's happening here. Even more so there are the people who realize it but just kind of put it out of their mind because the idea of the ultra wealthy dismantling capitalism is so far outside what people view as possible that they can't emotionally comprehend it even if they can understand it intellectually.

And of course there are the numb skulls who think that they are somehow going to profit from the collapse of modern civilization. It's a big club boys and you ain't in it.

Europe like America gives too much money to its 1%. The only way to maintain their economies is with cheap goods made by slave labor in China. That's the only way to offset increasingly large amounts of money being moved from the bottom to the top.

If you want to fix that you have to cut off the flow of money to the top and we're not going to do that. There's a variety of terrible reasons why that is the case but it just is.

I honestly do not know a solution to prevent human civilization from collapsing. I suspect that within 10 or 20 years we are going to hand nuclear launch codes over to religious lunatics and that's going to be gave over for humanity.

I definitely do not know how we avoid regressing back into feudalism even if we don't destroy our species. People just like worshiping rulers and kings and the ones that don't don't have the tendencies towards violence that the ones that do have. If it's one thing Afghanistan taught us it's that a very small number of idiots willing to use terrible violence can install a very very small number of people as absolute rulers.

We could counter this with education and critical thinking but even among people who should be well educated all I'm hearing is how we should all go into the trades and be plumbers or whatever. Anti-intellectualism and a hatred and disdain for experts dominates discourse now. That overpowering 12-year-old urge to not be told what to do has completely overwhelmed society and I do not know how you push back against that.

Basically don't tell me what to do.

Sure do :) I can provide more if you want, but start there, as it's a good read. Indeed, blind people are much better at understanding the consequences of colours than they are at knowing what colours things are..

Another massive round of layoffs.