Counterpoint:

Carney effectively enacting a conservative agenda would get lefties to uncompromisingly vote NDP and probably shift a part of the centre-left in the same direction. An effect similar to what's happening to the UK Labour vote going to the UK Greens.

Is this Gen Z humor?

I'm half-serious.

I understand that and I agree the approach under these assumptions must be needs-based. I'm saying, that it's worth examining how much of this new phenomena is needs-not-met vs falling prey to a new kind of profit-driven entertainment. I have no idea what the numbers are. Could be mostly unmet need. It's not necessarily following the same dybamics as drug use.

While that's often true, there's also cases where for-profit corporations create predatory products that create their own demand and social problems with it. Like the online gambling explosion in North America.

Our choices always affect the ones around us.

Oh yeah, I get all that. A CCP Taiwan would have been treated like Cuba and probably had similar if not worse fate given what happened with other left revolutions in the region.

That said, the history since then has created facts on the ground that Taiwan is independent at present and has had some form of democracy for 30 odd years. I personally would prefer for people in Taiwan to decide on whether to go independent, stay status quo or move towards unification. If China keeps developing as it has in the past, I think there's a good chance that in a couple of decades Taiwanese people could decide to unify. There's always gonna be unhappy people either way. Such is democracy. And any other system for that matter.

That's not to say there aren't plenty problems but I think they got decent chances to solve or navigate many of them. For example managing their hard-on for Taiwan without resorting to war. Managing the decline of the US without war is another big challenge.

At this point this isn't even a matter of speculation. Harvard's been tracking domestic opinions through independent polling since the early 2000s. The tables in the report span to 2016:

Sadly no newer data but as you can see there's a positive trend across levels of gov't with pretty high satisfaction across the board. Would be nice to see where these numbers are today, after COVID, the real estate bubble and the Trump trade war.

This is to say that we’re facing a coordination problem around executives being honest around the AI gains they’ve witnessed – if they co-operate, they keep their jobs. If they defect, they will possibly be fired by their embarrassed peers (who have now been implicitly called liars, cowards, or incompetents) and then replaced with someone that will toe the line anyway. If they could all admit the truth at once there might be some hope, but there is no way to coordinate that event.

I think it's interesting to notice that this is not AI-specific. He kinda alludes to that in a different context but I think it's important for people in the industry (and any industry really) to understand. This is driven by the incentives built into the system. Specifically the competition for profit. Whenever there's a thing (technology, process, method) that promises significant profit, everyone and their mother jumps on it. For the simple reason that if they don't, they're getting replaced by someone who would. For the simple reason that if they don't jump in, capital is going to leave their company and enter another one that promises to jump in, and therefore has higher expected profit. This can look as simple as large investors dumping your shares for the shares of a different company, sending your stock price in steep decline. Everyone competes for capital which requires competition for growing profits. Capital goes where the expected profits are higher. Without capital, firms can't hire people and buy what they need to conduct business and create new products. This incentive makes it very difficult to avoid a situation like the one above. We've seen this in corporations with the move to the cloud, with outsourcing development to CHWTIA and so on.

Little Marco abt to designate them as anti-tech extremist terrorists. This is gonna get interesting given how many people are aligned on this.

In case you think I'm joking.

Streaming from your gaming PC.