This guy probably was smart at one point; idiots don’t tend to become university professors. Of course that was years ago and he’s since gone completely off the rails. My guess is what started out as a calculated grift slowly became his actual worldview. Kinda like the “fake it 'till you make it” principle, but pointing in the wrong direction.

What does the validity of the circadian rhythm concept have to do with creationism? Being wrong about one thing doesn’t suddenly mean you believe in ghost stories.

What I meant is that wielding new science and technology against people is in no way unique to capitalism. Every system we’ve ever tried has done that at one point.

No. That evil has nothing to do with whichever socio-economic system is your particular choice of boogie man.

“Assuming a spherical child and no air resistance, how far will the child travel?”

How it possibly be “bog standard” when it’s the only developed nation on the planet where it’s true?

assuming she has one

Aaaand there’s the rub. Poor and pregnant? You can just go fuck yourself.

More likely it’s DDoS mitigation pumping those numbers. Government websites are big juicy targets for DDoS attacks.

thinking of the letter delivery portion here. Parcel delivery is obviously hugely relevant

Going to just pretend I didn’t already say that parcel delivery is obviously still a very important component of what Canada Post does?

What service? Junk mail and bill delivery?

While all that is true, if the service is losing half a billion dollars a year, to provide a service that is becoming less and less relevant (thinking of the letter delivery portion here. Parcel delivery is obviously hugely relevant), it comes to a point where you need to re-evaluate what you are doing. The pool of money the government has to work with isn’t infinite.

Slightly better for the teeth maybe? And maybe a slight benefit if heartburn is an issue.

Yeah, but with lemon flavour. I think the idea is if you started with plain water, then added lemon, you’d now have lemon flavoured acidic water. If you start with alkaline water, you’d end up with lemon flavoured neutral water.

If you are a company the size of Microsoft, you have more than enough resources to test absolutely everything.

Well, I’m pretty sure my employer would have some questions for me if I were sitting there watching CBC Kids all day.

Sovereign AI for what use case? If we are going to be spending all this money on it, what is the return, other than one more shitty chat bot?

The problem I had is that taking one assortment of numbers that had no meaning, doing a bunch of operations on them (never actually finishing the operations though, because the last steps were “obvious”) leading to a different arrangement of numbers that also meant nothing, was not a good method of teaching. The pass/fail rate of that course relative to all the others reflected that. Every other teacher/professor I had before or since would include context when introducing an entirely new concept.

I had a linear algebra professor who did that all the time. Never did figure out what an eigenvector is not why I would want 14 ways of finding one. Brilliant man, terrible teacher.

The chances of me living long enough to actually be effected by it are so slim that I’m completely unconcerned about it.

The last stars will burn out in 120 trillion years

We think. We still haven’t solved things like the dark matter/energy problem. The answer to that alone could drastically change what we estimate will happen in the distant future.