Damnit. WFH.

I knew what I meant!

I provide IT support to insurance brokerages - you may or not be surprised to find that since COVID, they're continuing to convert to WFO.

Especially for the boutique shops, I doubt an RTO office can compete financially with one structured under a WFH model.

For most roles in the process, WFH should be very desirable to an employer, so long as the employee signs an appropriate contract indicating that they're obligated to come to the office should their home setup be inadequate for supporting WFH, including mandatory local installations of whatever communications and collaboration tool you decide to employ.

Maybe you require them to attend a certain number of in-person meetings or team building exercises (but not 3/week, I'm talking monthly or less).

It saves on office space and related expenses. Throw up a suitable server farm and have employees remote in - all the horsepower, storage, and data security of a data center, it's potentially more secure than a cubicle farm.

Forcing RTO is just a way to fire people without having to admit you replaced them with a lower quality but much less expensive AI.

Company scrip. You'll swear fealty to a Tech Bro, and in return you'll get scrip you can spend on whatever their empire produces. They will control what is available and how much of it you can have.

They want to be gods on Earth.

Eventually, they're going to realize they don't need 8 billion people consuming energy and resources when they can sustain their lifestyle with a few thousand people and a few billion robots, and then things get very sad for a while.

We are in an economic system based on ownership, with an ever-shrinking group of people owning an ever-growing percentage of things and making everyone else rent from them.

As labor is replaced by AI and robots, more and more people will exist who are not needed in this economic model, and while there's no need for a few people to own everything... they're not going to give it up.

UBI is a stop-gap. It still leaves a small hereditary capital class in control, because they will be the ones in charge of who gets UBI and how much. Because it will not be 'universal' in distribution.

We can't dial back human labor, because we're heading for a time when so little human labor is required that an individual share wouldn't be practical.

We're still going to have scarcity - you're going to want a place to live, you're going to need energy to power things, you're going to need a share of resources to have those things produced for you. There is no 'post-scarcity' on these fronts.

I look to the south, and if a bit of Canadian cultural propaganda is required to counter the stuff that's been coming out of Hollywood for the last century... OK.

We value education more, guns less. We value cooperation more, greed less. We're OK with single-payer healthcare instead of letting the rich at the top get richer bleeding us to death, and you're not going to convince us that's wrong because somebody else is getting healthcare 'for free'.

There's a reason so many Americans have recently discovered their Canadian roots and want our passport, and it's not because things are going well in the US.

> No different than AI/LLM.

One involves sentient minds, the other doesn't. Come back with that argument when it's reasonable to believe an AI could actually be self-aware.

It's problematic. In terms of prompting your own process, your final work is no less genuine, but it's the lit version of the legal "fruit of the poisonous tree".

That AI is not only replacing human art, devaluing it, it's doing so based on theft of work humans trying to make a living already created.

If you're a writer caught using AI, you're betraying your peers.

Instead, sell a lifetime license to a particular major version with a specified support period. If I want to run an old version that's been compromised... that's my problem. If I am happy with not having the latest codecs and plug-ins... that's my problem.

And if I'm not happy, I can buy a new license for the latest major version to fix that.

I think of it like this: life is dangerous. You can surrender freedom for safety, but there's a balance point beyond which you're losing more than you gain.

I don't want to live in a world where I'm watched everywhere I go and there's a constant risk that someone will access data on me to cause me some kind of harm. And the risk will always be there with an omnipresent surveillance state.

I'm OK if the cops have to work harder to catch criminals and a few more people are hurt by criminals if it means we all get to be freer - and a certain minimum level of safety is achieved. Freedom costs, you must be willing to risk something to maintain it.

I will refer you all to the movie Real Genius.

You don't monitor all the ALPR in the nation live - you set up a system where every ALPR installation has a 'wanted' database and reports hits. Typically the list would be updated daily and be built from a mix of local, state/province, and federal records. The systems have a mandatory retention policy to only keep hits against the wanted list.

But then you get somebody who catches on to the great idea that it should be retroactive. Force all those endpoints to hold their plate data for as long as the storage holds out - so you can search for where a plate has gone over the course of the last few weeks, or months... hell, maybe years. And you don't just watch for hits against the wanted list, you want to be able to send out queries like, "select all plates in common between these sites and dates" so you can find what vehicle was at every similar crime you've just figured out is probably the work of the same person or crew.

Then they want to throw the retention idea out the window and put cameras at every intersection and highway on or off ramp, and nobody involved worries about how that's absolutely going to be abused by everyone who has access to it.

Phonics-based teaching was coming into vogue when I was learning to read. My parents objected because that's not really how English works, and they weren't wrong; my cohort generally has shitty spelling abilities.

Rote memorization of the basics is about the best you can do, because English is too recently cobbled together from too many different languages to have a consistent spelling system. You need to learn Latin, Greek, French, and German at a minimum if you want to be able to reliably deduce spelling from sounds once you're past the elementary level.

Europeans are probably in better shape on that front than Americans or Canadians.

This is not how things work under kleptocracies. The US was never particularly strong on communal resources anyway, now it's just not even pretending.

Bond died and I've never liked the fan theory that the name comes with the number - for me it's always been the same guy portrayed by different actors and slightly adjusted for the times in which the movie was made.

Between Austin Powers and Jason Bourne, both ends of the Bond spectrum have been done, and done better.

The right holders may not want to hear it, but the Bond franchise needs a longer rest than it's had so far.