The cognitive ability of AIs is 0. AIs do not think. They do not reason. They do not understand. They can probablistically predict output based on training data, and an input, and that's it. With programming, it can find bits of code on the internet that are related to the keywords you give it, but it can't actually code a damn thing on its own. Which makes it a slightly less useful version of stack overflow, and for it ever to become better it will need a quantum leap of new techniques that are not currently on the horizon.

If you want to save Warner Bros, et. al.

That idiot has done nothing but drive the company further into the ground, and profiting massively from it.

That sounds like something an AI would say.

Forgive me as I'm not very familiar with psychoactive substances. Psilocybin causes hallucinations, right? That seems like kind of a big side effect for someone who just wants to take a pill to stay healthy longer.

The right thing to do is cooperate on things that make a lot of sense for Canada anyway, such as building up NATO as a deterrent to Russia, building up arctic defenses, and cooperating on border security. None of those are "bad" for Canada, other than the fact that they cost money. And while Canada is never going to threaten the US militarily, it's not stupid to build up home-grown military capability that would at least make us capable of fighting a long protracted guerilla war against their population and infrastructure, if only to act as a deterrent. I'm thinking large investment in drone technology and "smart munitions". They'll be useful in the coming proxy wars with Russia anyway, and so much of the industrial heartland of the US is in range of such technologies from Canadian soil that it would actually give the US pause in just marching in with tanks, especially since they're easy to conceal and transport around the absolutely huge Canadian landmass. I hate to think this is even necessary, but here we are.

Well... it's projected to *peak* at 10.3 billion, and then start declining. Western nations have already started declining.

There's zero chance of the Canadian military being able to put up more than a speedbump between Washington and Ottawa even if you invested heavily for a few years. That's not really the point. The US feels like it has been underwriting the security of its allies (and in fact it has, though that was also a US strategy since WWII). At this point the Americans who are against the rules-based international order have prevailed. That means the relationship between the US and everyone else is becoming transactional. So if the US wants Canada to contribute more to the defense of North America, or to the NATO alliance, in order to continue trading with the US economy, that's what's going to happen. It's just reality. Yes, the loss of a rules-based international order is ultimately bad for the US, but in a democracy you do what the majority wants, and if your majority has become a populist mob, they'll want tariffs. The majority of people don't have degrees in economics. Proponents of the rules-based order have failed on two fronts: first, people throughout the western world have lost trust in experts and institutions due to a whole bunch of small but significant high profile screw-ups, and second, the wealth generated by globalization wasn't shared enough with the general population. Everyone's listening to WiiFM (What's in it For Me?) If your answer to that question is "nothing, for the majority of you" and you live in a democracy, that's not a winning strategy.

Yes, about PFAS... municipalities are rushing to install carbon filters in their systems, which have proven to be effective at filtering out PFAS, but in the interim you should really be looking at using an activated carbon filter like Brita, or an under-sink one, that's rated for PFAS removal. It's nasty stuff that will accumulate in your tissues and mess with (I believe) your liver. And I'm not sure what the standards are for bottled water either. Hopefully they're filtering that too.

Prime Day deals sucked this year. Most of the deals it showed me were the same prices the stuff sells for any other day. The best discounts were on Fire TVs and Kindles, both of which I bought on Prime Day in previous years. The only discount that was interesting was a jacket I had looked at the day before which got 40% off.

Most large-scale plastic you can actually see in the ocean and extract (e.g. in the big ocean cleanup project) is apparently from fishing gear. This is high grade plastic and valuable enough that they sell it to recyclers. It doesn't break down very quickly. Other forms of plastic that end up in the ocean don't stand up well to UV and saltwater and break down into microplastics and nanoplastics, and basically just stay in the environment and get ingested by organisms and eventually move up the food chain. You may worry about plastic cookware, but the food you're cooking is full of plastic too, and it's not really possible to filter it out.

There's no point in you trying to gaslight everyone. We were here and it was only three years ago. We remember all too well.

Canadian here. I do appreciate all the pro-Canada stuff at home now, which is a drastic change from a couple years ago where the media was literally telling us not to fly Canadian flags on Canada Day because it made some communities (obviously indigenous peoples) feel uncomfortable, and just because people in the trucker protests were flying it. We should *never* have given up the flag as a symbol of unity, and it's good to see it back.

But it's important to realize that Canadians are very much alone in the way we're handling the US and their off-the-rails ruler. The rest of the world is just more used to dealing with crazy leaders, and they don't give the US a fraction of the headspace that Canadians do.

I've spent years working all over the US as an automation professional, so I got to meet lots of Americans. What Canadians don't realize is that Americans think about Canada about as much as Canadians think about Mexico, which is to say, almost never. I've met people in Port Huron (a border town in Michigan) who've never been to Canada, and have never even considered going to Canada. But then again I've met people in Detroit who've never been to Chicago, or one man who'd never left Texas.

But the idea that Canadians' boycott of US products and travel is having any more than a tiny impact mostly on border communities and a couple vacation destinations is naive.

To an American, they have so much more occupying their headspace right now, that most Americans are completely unaware of anything related to Canada, and they just don't care. Their media is extremely polarized. Both media sides are telling their viewers that it's the end of the world.

The crazy thing is that the average American, and even the average Canadian, have pretty similar, centrist, and reasonable views about all of this. The majority favor stopping people from just walking over the border. They think that a person who overstays their visa should leave. They're ok with a managed level of immigration every year. They don't like the idea of breaking up a family that's been living here for 20 years either.

It's the political parties and media organizations who are out of touch with the silent majority. The sides have become so polarized that neither side represents the majority centrist opinion that I outlined above. That means people feel like they need to vote for open/permeable borders, or crazy crackdowns. Between the two, and after years of feeling like nobody did anything about the problem, I can see why they voted for someone who promised to take action. But that doesn't mean that *this* is what they wanted. They just really didn't want the *other* thing even more.

I feel sorry for them, honestly. At least I can say that in the last election in Canada, that the polarization seemed to fade away. The left wing party ran a guy who's literally a banker, and many on the left are accusing of being conservative. But this is just because all centrists are now viewed as far-right by the left, and far-left by the right. And that's what people are sick of.

Back to your point. Yes, Trump pissed off Canadians. It just doesn't matter. Since 1990 we've been living in an increasingly globalized world, where everyone drastically reduced military spending and should have meant more money to spend on making everyone's lives better, and for the developing world that was true, but for everyone living in western democracies all we got was more and more inequality as the increasing wealth only went to the top few percent. That world is now over. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shattered that reality. Military expenditures are doubling again, and Canada, after starving its military for the past many decades, is poorly situated to participate in this new world, and the US knows it. That's why, in the last Canadian election, both big political parties had the same military policy for Canada: drastic increase in spending, particularly in arctic infrastructure and defense. And this is exactly what the US wants... the allies have to spend more on defense, and that's exactly what they're getting. That's what'll have an impact. Boycotts won't move the needle.

We had a similar experience, but stuck to our guns and didn't let our kids have a smartphone until high school. It worked out. It just means some minor inconveniences. It's also worth pushing back on the sports organizers, and let them know that their assumptions about all kids having a cell phone is incorrect, and that they need to accommodate families like yours. Also, we've had a VoIP landline for almost 20 years. The VoIP services are pretty cheap, and it gives us the peace of mind that there's an extra way to dial 911 in the house, and we taught our kids how to use it. You can tie VoIP home phone lines to your address, so if you dial 911 the call center knows your address automatically, which isn't possible with a cell phone (yet).

First of all, my kids have an alarm clock, so they don't need the alarm on their phone. Alarm clocks are cheap. Secondly, our school requires us to provide a scientific calculator for math class, and you can't bring a phone into the exams, and a basic scientific calculator is really cheap (and the school has some loaners as well). Third, we're only talking about the age of 14, so they don't need a GPS. It's all walking or biking distance.

Need I remind everyone that just a few years ago kids were getting along just fine without smartphones and social media, and according to evidence and data they were actually doing better emotionally and physically. We had walkmans then, or MP3 players later. They still exist, and honestly they're not really needed.

The biggest gripe I have is that teachers themselves almost exclusively use Google Classroom to assign work, and a lot of kids just use their phones to do their assignments. If teachers want to avoid kids having devices, they need to stop making devices a requirement to hand in schoolwork, at least before high school.

This lines up with recommendations by Jonathan Haidt in the US, where he basically says don't give kids cell phones (or social media) until high school, and even then it's not great. I know that we followed this advice. Our kids said that many of their peers already had phones or devices at school in grades 7 and 8. They also, alarmingly, said many of their peers had already watched Deadpool at this age, which I found astounding. I think it's OK to let kids be kids.

We also have rules about keeping the phones at the charging area at night (so they don't have them in their bedrooms when it's time to sleep).

We definitely feel like we could easily be more strict, but our kids' friends seem to think we're some of the strictest parents. Though our kids generally tell us that's a good thing, and they think their peers are making a lot of bad decisions.

Honestly, as a parent, I feel like there's a lot of stuff being pushed on our kids that we don't really agree with, but has become a societal norm, and we just have to help them navigate.

I mentor a high school team, so I end up being around lots of high school students. It's very common for them to have a conversation where everyone tries to outdo each other with their mental health labels (ADHD, anxiety, OCD, ASD, neurodiverse, etc.). I asked another mentor, who graduated around 2014, if this was normal when he went to school, and he said "absolutely not", so this seems like a relatively recent phenomenon. I suspect it lines up with the social media and twitter or tiktok influencer videos. These ideas are clearly coming from somewhere. I'm pretty sure that cell phones are mental health petri dishes. In some ways it's good because mental health is no longer a stigma, but I don't think we should be basing our identities on our self-diagnoses.