Quillipede

The Carney government wants to make telecoms and maybe other companies track everyone's info in databases they can access secretly and without a warrants.

Such databases will be perfect targets for foreign intelligence, US CLOUD Act demands, organized criminal hackers, etc. #cdnpoli #canada

Canada's attempt at a patriot act is coming back tomorrow, and you know they are gonna use Tumbler Ridge as the excuse for "lawful access". Don't fall for it, it's about counter-insurgency, not "making kids safe again"
www.canada.ca/en/public-sa...

rainy day tunes (2020)

The minister says it is irresponsible not to pass a bill like this, but to even *propose* it. She thinks it's irresponsible to make the suggestion.

What is the source of risk here, and how are we supposed to chart a course if putting forward suggestions is itself dangerous?

#cdnpoli #canada #C233

Alberta Won’t Budge on Charging Indigenous People for COVID Vaccines Though health advocates argue the province's $100 fee amounts to a treaty violation, the federal government rebuffed a request to step in, pointing out it's still free on reserves

Alberta has refused to exempt Indigenous people from the $100 fee for COVID vaccines.

And though health advocates contend that amounts to a treaty violation, the federal government won't step in.

pressprogress.ca/alberta-char...

And the broader issue is that we will never automated our way into the things that actually make life better, like shorter work days/weeks, universal healthcare, free community spaces, etc. We already have the productive capacity to do those things; the problem is political, not technological.

Yeah I don't know why you're bringing up family farms. The immediate issues here are who owns the patents and controls the repair and resupply chain, who owns the software and the data, who controls food pricing & distribution, who controls the mineral supply chain that makes the robots, etc.

??? I'm not arguing against the tech.

I'm arguing against the fantasy that the tech will make things better on its own.

If you actually read what I wrote, I want *more* change.

Which is my point: tech is cool and all, but we need to aggressively guard against the fiction that technology automatically makes things better, because that mistaken belief blinds us to the real solutions to widespread social problems, which are political.

There's so much potential for quality of life improvement that is already sitting right there, without technological change needed, but it's being blocked.

New tech's potential for social betterment goes unused unless we recognize that the tech itself won't make things better without social change.

The core point is correct though: technology doesn't automatically or necessarily translate to improved quality of life.

Improved quality of life comes from social and political change, and improvements can happen whether or not technology has changed.

Third, it's worth noting that if we've gone from 80% to 1.5% agricultural workforce, we're in a territory of diminishing returns. It's not obvious that any remaining social benefits outweigh the impacts of further concentration of ownership, wealth, and the supply chain fragility of this tech.

Second, if factory labour represents human freedom and flourishing to you, you should really update your definitions.

The agricultural revolution's benefits to human flourishing were locked away by labour practices and economic structures until political change unlocked it.

First, that's an oversimplification; technology and ownership changes also reduce demand for agricultural labour while boosting labour supply (population), so they couldn't have stayed if they wanted to; we can't infer they liked factory life better just because they chose it out of necessity.

We have the technology and resources for a far higher of standard of living than what we actually have; there's no reason to think piling on more technology alone will make things better when the real bottleneck is lack of political accountability and will.

Not saying that technology can't help, but technology alone provides zero guarantee of overall improvement unless it is accompanied by democratic governance and public accountability. Without those, it just helps power concentrate its own wealth further.

Long hours, terrible pay, and harsh conditions continued to characterize the industries labourers moved into as they transitioned away from agriculture. Changes to leisure time and working conditions came mostly from social and political activism to limit what owners could force workers to do.

Stephen Miller and Peter Thiel are the two most cartoonishly evil caricatures of the US ruling class. Couldn't ask for more obvious villains.

The companies and their employees are already reading and scanning these conversations. There is no privacy. The idea that a billionaire's global megacorp somehow doesn't count as an intruder into our privacy is a dangerous fiction.

A great point I saw recently is that the issue with the ultra-rich isn't just that they hoard money which could help the less fortunate.

It's also that their disproportionate wealth puts the power to direct society in the hands of people divorced from the risks and concerns regular people face.

They probably won't speak about it until they start getting a lot of pushback from constituents about it. I'd suggest writing to them, or better yet phoning them.

Family of Tumbler Ridge shooting victim suing OpenAI | CBC News The mother of Maya Gebala, a 12-year-old who remains in hospital after the shooting on Feb. 10, alleges the tech company failed to alert authorities to prompts from the shooter related to violence.

Family of Tumbler Ridge shooting victim suing OpenAI
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Rachel exposes dangerous, violent and unhinged people online so you and your family don’t have to deal with them in-person

She’s not just doing journalism, she’s providing a valuable community service – you can support her work here:

www.patreon.com/cw/RachelGil...

I enjoy being silly with vector art. This my illustration of a kelp pipefish, Syngnathus californiensis.

#vectorgraphic #vectorart #art #pipefish #syngnathus #fish

If banks and governments insist on checking devices for security they should define actual standards. It should be possible for any tiny project to be certified at no cost and the standards should be fairly enforced so a mainstream device without current patches is disallowed.

Today, voting opens for the next leader of the NDP. NDP members and organizers know things have to change in the party, and the collapse of old ways is a powerful force for change.

So if you're a member: check your emails, review the candidates, and rank your choices! #cdnpoli #NDP #Canada

❗On Friday evening, the CAJ learned that journalist Rachel Gilmore had recently been approached in public by individuals linked to, or implicated in, an investigation she had written, and was published by The Tyee that focused on white nationalists.
https://loom.ly/z22FRzg

I imagine what it does to them is what elite status has done for a long time; makes them uninterested in or hostile to engaging with the wider population and the material reality that population lives in, and makes them obsessed with status games and competitions among their rarefied peers.

While LLMs multiply some of the problems, I think this is a very old problem with social elites across history; they are alienated from baseline humanity by the twin forces of sycophancy (insulating them from social accountability) and wealth (insulating them from material accountability).