I agree, but HN doesn't like metacomments that just complain on how an article/comment is being upvoted, hence you being downvoted. See guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As Canada is separating from the US, it is growing closer with China. This makes Canada a threat to the US. This makes the US a threat to Canada. This makes the US more likely to grab Canada's arm and pull it back in its circle by force. Canada just did a model of how long it could last against a US invasion and the answer was that its defenses would last 2-5 days.
It's all unnecessary and will just cause pain to end up where it started.
I don't know if it's intentional, isn't this the ultimate form of liberalism? To give the individual full autonomy, unshackled from the dependencies of family, neighbors, community, and any other local associations individuals are "born in". Seems like we are exactly where we've been aiming at for a couple hundred years.
yes, because he forgot about the car. The reason we don’t befriend our neighbors is because as soon as we leave our home, we put ourselves in a metal cage, ensuring no one will talk to us if we don’t want them to.
Befriending your neighbors kind of works in a city but only REALLY works in Amish communities.
> they're not strictly necessary. We know this because humans can drive without a LIDAR
and propellers on a plane are not strictly necessary because birds can fly without them? The history of machines show that while nature can sometimes inspire the _what_ of the machine, it is a very bad source of inspiration for the _how_.
This is a distinction without a difference. Even if you take a rudimentary raw cloth comparison like cotton vs heavy wool (the latter being fire resistant and used historically used by firemen, ie. “Safety critical”), the machines’ output quality was significantly lower than manual output for the latter.
This phenomenon is a general one… chainsaws vs hand saws, bread slicers vs hand slicing, mechanical harvesters vs manual harvesting, etc.
“ …by the mid‑19th century machine‑woven cloth still could not equal the quality of hand‑woven Indian cloth. However, the high productivity of British textile manufacturing allowed coarser grades of British cloth to undersell hand‑spun and woven fabric in low‑wage India” [0]
“…the output of power looms was certainly greater than that of the handlooms, but the handloom weavers produced higher quality cloths with greater profit margins.” [1]
The same can be said about machines like the water frame. It was great at spinning coarse thread, but for high quality/luxury textile (ie. fine fabric), skilled (human) spinners did a much better job. You can read the book Blood in the Machine for even more context.
What caused textile machines to replace the manual labor wasn’t the quality of their output, it was quantity. In fact, manually made clothing was of higher quality than what was machine-produced.
The environmental problem is enough for us to pump the brakes. By the end of this year, AI systems will be responsible for half of global data center power demand… 23 gigawatts. For what? A more useful search engine, a better autocomplete, and a shit code generator. Is it worth it? Are we even asking that question? When does it become not worth it? Who’s even running the calculus? The free market certainly isn’t.
I interpreted his post as saying it's not binary safe/unsafe, but rather a spectrum, with Java safer than C because of particular features that have pros and cons, not because of a magic free safe/unsafe switch. He's advocating for more nuance, not less.
Just downvote and move on.