Better than a wealth tax is a land value tax. Key properties are that it doesn’t cause capital flight (you can’t move land), it’s almost impossible to evade (you can’t hide land), it’s economically efficient (it literally doesn’t even harm the economy in the slightest to implement it), it can’t be passed on to tenants (both in economic theory and in observed practice), and it’s progressive.

Plus, it incentives denser, transit-oriented city development and disincentivizes wastage of prime real estate (which contributes to the housing crisis). All in all, a terrific policy that people aren’t talking nearly enough about imo.

Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.

Imagine if someone defended nazis with “they were calmly denying the Holocaust”. I’ve seen far too many tankies denying the Uyghur genocide every chance they get. Like you say, it doesn’t matter the tone; genocide denial is itself a line you don’t cross.

They’ll ban you for acknowledging the existence of the Uyghur genocide, for one

Edit: wording

How do so few people in this comments section see the obvious satire?? It’s clearly making fun of both landlords and absurd tipping culture.

Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.

For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.

I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.

Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.

It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.

In Bibi’s eyes, every day that Hamas continues to exist is a good day. If Hamas ever ceases to exist, Israelis might go back to questioning his corruption charges.

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Exactly. We shouldn’t have to rely on our landlord being a decent person. We should live in a housing market where landlords have to take proper care of their properties or else face vacancy. It should be an actual competitive market, where landlords have to compete to attract tenants, rather than tenants compete to attract a landlord. The negotiating power imbalance is completely wack in so many cities.

Yeah, I remember doing a pretty standard software eng internship for a cloud services company one summer back in undergrad, and I just found it so dull and uninteresting. It wasn’t even the company’s fault, as the team was great, good work-life balance, and good pay. I just realized through that internship that I truly did not want to work in cloud services or as a bog standard software eng.

Much happier now working as a research engineer in embedded systems, as it’s a field I find genuinely interesting. When you’re young is exactly the time to try to figure out what actually interests you and try to go do that. Spending all day every day writing code to solve problems you find fundamentally uninteresting is a quick route to burnout.

It certainly doesn’t help that it’s literally illegal to build enough housing across the vast majority of urban land (at least in the US and Canada). Nothing like good ol’ fashioned manufactured scarcity to guarantee line keeps on going up.

It’s the mother of all regulatory capture, where our local governments (who are supposed to represent the needs of the people) have passed so many frickin laws to systematically manufacture and maintain the artificial scarcity of housing that keeps these ghouls’ investments so wildly profitable. Restrictive zoning that makes townhouses and duplexes literally illegal? Check. Arbitrary and pseudoscientific parking minimums? Check. Setback requirements so everyone is legally required to have a massive resource-consuming, space-wasting front lawn whether they want it or not? Check.

Utter insanity.

Yeah, I’m working in embedded ML, and it’s an insanely exciting time. We’re getting more and more microcontrollers and single-board computers with special AI accelerators, many of them RISC-V, by the day it seems. One of the next steps (in my opinion) is finding a good way to program them that doesn’t involve C/C++ (very fast but also so painful to do AI with) or Python (slow unless it’s wrapping underlying C code, and unsuitable for microcontrollers). In fact, that’s exactly what I’m working on right now as a side project.

What’s also cool is RISC-V promises to be the one instruction set architecture to rule them all. So instead of having PCs as x86, phones and microcontrollers as ARM, then all sorts of other custom architectures like DSPs (digital signal processors), NPUs, etc., we could just have RISC-V with a bunch of open standard extensions. Want vector instructions? Well, here’s a ratified open standard for vector instructions. Want SIMD instructions? Congrats, here’s another ratified open standard.

And all these standards mean it will make it so much easier for the compiler people to provide support for new chips. A day not too long from now, I imagine it will become almost trivial to compile programs that can accelerate tons of scientific, numerical, and AI workloads onto RISC-V vector instructions. Currently, we’re stuck using GPUs for everything that needs parallelization, even though they’re far from the easiest or most optimal devices for many of our computational needs.

As computing advances, we can just create and ratify new open standards. Tired of floating point numbers? You could create a proposal for a standard posit extension today if you wanted to, then fork LLVM or GCC or something to provide the software support as well. In fact, someone already has implemented an open-source RISC-V chip with posit arithmetic and made a fork of LLVM to support it. You could fire it up on an FPGA right now if you wanted.

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

In 2016, I said half-jokingly that I was moving to Canada if he won. Then he won and now here I am in Canada. Granted, I was a senior in high school when he won and I was already applying to a couple universities in Canada. But definitely was worth it. As many issues as Canada has (cough cough housing crisis), I at least trust it to not descend into fully-fledged fascism any time soon.

Yeah, this is a great example of why I make an effort to specify the government when criticizing countries. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? I call Putin and his government evil but never the Russian people at large. China’s genocide of the Uyghurs? I call Xi Jinping and the CCP evil but never the Chinese people at large. Israel’s apartheid state and ethno-religious cleansing? I call Netanyahu and his government evil but never the Israeli people at large (and certainly not Jews at large).

The allure of treating entire demographics or populaces as a monolith and blaming them for the crimes of their government is exactly why genocidal rhetoric is so dang pervasive, and I won’t abide by it.

(Yes, I will also criticize civilians who actively support these crimes, but I make sure to be clear in distinguishing between them and the rest of the civilian population.)

Ah, but that says not to kill people. It says nothing about killing rats! /s

Seriously, though, that’s exactly why we’re so capable of committing atrocities: we dehumanize each other until we consider it acceptable to kill. Portraying Jews as rats and subhuman is exactly how the Holocaust happened, and portraying Palestinians as subhuman is exactly how Israel is currently doing what they’re doing.

When you’re a thin-skinned fascist conducting ethno-religious cleansing, any criticism must be met with absolute resistance. Fascism requires extreme black-and-white thinking and complete rejection of nuance.

We see the same pattern in the US with the MAGA movement, where even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Liz Cheney get demonized for “betraying” their “side”. Facts and nuance are rejected, and the only thing that matters is team loyalty.