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GreenBeard

@ GreenBeard @lemmy.ca

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288
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1 yr. ago

  • Alberta fires latest salvos in ‘war’ on renewable energy

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  • Wistfully wishing we'd heeded good sense 50 years ago doesn't change the present. Supporting Canadians is a very nice sentiment, but for the 5 million or so Albertans (or at least the 3.5 million who aren't absolute lunatics) it's as hollow as "thoughts and prayers." What "just energy transition" options are there, when we already sold off our only state oil company 25 years ago? Where's the copper and lithium projects, the domestic manufacturing jobs, the public works infrastructure to make living and working outside the St. Lawrence corridor viable in this country? Where are the geothermal plants that make use of our skills and tools for drilling to replace dirty oil, coal and gas plants? Why are all our investment dollars in foreign tax havens instead of building a Canada worth living in?

    I am so sick and tired of the UCP and the CCP. I'm tired of this country bending over backward for foreign oil. At the same time, you can't feed a family on sentiment.

  • Canada Should Be Leading a Geothermal Power Boom | The Tyee

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  • It's even more insane than that. We have a wealth of natural geothermal in some regions, yes. We also have a wealth of tools, expertise, and geography for deep-bore geothermal on the prairies. We've already had prototype geothermal plants set up near Kindersley Saskatchewan and a proposed site in southern Saskatchewan. If we had the investment and regulatory framework, we could conceivably never have to burn anything to power or heat our homes again between existing hydro and geothermal power, supplemented with solar and wind. We just don't because our "leaders" both business and public have no vision or ambition.

  • Alberta fires latest salvos in ‘war’ on renewable energy

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  • Change is scary to people. Especially in an environment when every other sector is contracting in this province. We wouldn't even be viable as a territory without our primary export. Alberta is not a self-sustaining economic zone, we exist because of exports and we can't seem to attract investment of any kind outside of oil projects. Our agricultural product is a fraction of our oil revenue, and all our other mineral wealth is under-developed. Alberta doesn't have the wealth internally to fund any of our own infrastructure. The vast majority of the wealth from our resources end up in foreign hands, and we're only allowed enough of a share to maintain existing standards.

    Now, would it make more sense to use part of that 30 billion to build up other industries? Sure. But then we're gambling on unproven markets and supply chains, and at the end of the day, we (collectively as a province) are cowards. Yeah, you heard that right, Convoy Albertans are obnoxious barking dogs who are trying to look threatening while pissing themselves in sheer terror that we might end up losing everything. They're not "aggressive", they're staring at an apocalypse as big to them as AI is to white collar workers. The rest of Canada won't help us when we go down. It's not useful to argue about whose fault that is, so lets leave it at "there's blame to go around." The corporate owners in the US aren't going to lift a finger to help us either, in spite of what many of my fellow Albertans think.

    So we bet on what we know used to work, and hope this is temporary despite all evidence our province is a "Dead Man Walking." If we we had any kind of backstop at all we might shift our priorities instead of doubling down on an industry that's slowly killing us, but Bay Street has always seen us as a resource colony with one resource and there's nothing to suggest that is ever going to change. A lot of ink has been spilled pointing out Alberta without Canada is basically a dead end, and they're right. No one is willing to confront the fact that Alberta WITH Canada is also a dead end. Desperate people make bad choices.

    Edit: Grammar

  • Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated | TechCrunch

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  • I think people should be very careful about how dependent they become on such things, because inevitably if adoption ever does creep up the spike in prices of accessing those models is going to be astronomically more than having some jingle writer slap something together. Right now they're desperate for adoption but those servers aren't free to run. If they're ever going to turn a profit the fees for accessing these tools are going to be orders of magnitude more than any small business owner can afford, and by then, there won't be any aspiring new artists to take a cash job; they'll have either starved to death or moved on. You're basically Wille E. Coyote-ing yourself off an advertising cliff using AI like that, and same for other similar uses.

  • Do Canadians actually consider joining the EU?

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  • While true EU membership would likely be impossible to achieve in any meaningful way, I think the idea of a much more tightly integrated relationship with Europe is very much something most Canadians do support, even with some logistical challenges. People underestimate how much we share in common with our European cousins. A lot of us still keep in touch with family back in Europe, still follow the news of the day, and indulge in entertainment from the old country, to a much higher degree than Americans ever did. I think our values align much better with Europe than with the US in recent memory and I think we'd be willing to adapt a lot more for Europe than the Yanks.

  • If you were in Jail would you stick withe bible or be interest in other religions?

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  • If that's the part you like, then you'd love the two battles of Mag Tuired. The absolute shenanigans the Tuatha De got up to fighting the Fomorians was legendary. Their analog of Tyr coming back with a silver hand that moves like flesh to replace his lost one and retake the throne of the gods was wild.

  • Children killed in Lebanon as Israeli strikes hit homes far from the war's front lines

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  • It's as if they want to give everyone a reason to want to see them suffer. The greatest harm they do to these innocent families, but not far behind is the harm they do to the rest of the Jews worldwide. The state of Israel is the most anti-semitic organization since the end of Nazi Germany.

  • If you were in Jail would you stick withe bible or be interest in other religions?

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  • If you think Loki is fun, you should try the Fenian Cycle of Irish/Gaelic mythology. You'd probably get a kick out of the kid raised by his aunt the druidess and her warrior-woman "Roommate" who goes on to fight a giant boar, become a genius by sucking his thumb while cooking salmon, and to become leader of the high king's own mercenary company after discovering his divine heritage.

  • Halifax drops plan to require affordable housing units in new buildings

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  • It's the fundamental problem of having no public housing construction. If the profits aren't there, private developers just won't build them. If we had something like a UK council-housing system, we could just build it and deal with recouping costs through other means or on longer time scales.

  • $30m an hour: big oil reaping huge war windfall from consumers, analysis finds

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  • Has this ever actually been implemented? I see “windfall taxes” legislation floated every couple of years, when price gouging goes to 11. I never see anyone ballsy enough to implement it.

    Rarely and never high enough to check price gouging.

  • What would be better than reducing the gas tax?

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  • It's regressive in some ways, and not in others. If you're completely unemployed, you might not drive but generally speaking low wage workers have to do the most commuting, often living furthest from their job, in places with poor transit access if any. They often are forced to use the least efficient older vehicles as well. The biggest savings however will be in commercial transport which would have been passed on through rising costs for groceries and essential goods, which again will hurt those already struggling more than the wealthy. Sudden unpredictable price shocks are always absorbed by the poor the most.

  • Ontario man charged after foreigners found illegally working in Banff, Jasper

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  • On a second offence I have to agree. He's made himself an ongoing risk to the community at large at this point.

  • America Used to Own the Internet. Now It’s Running Scared.

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  • Hey there bud, we'd totally be down to help you out there but whatever you caught seems to already be making Alberta sick and we don't want it catching on any worse up here, eh. We're not really big on the whole conquering thing these days either (turns out there's consequences to that). We'll bring some matches and have a good 'ole pork roast at the White House when you're ready though, eh.

    ~Sincerely, Canada

  • Alberta @lemmy.ca
    GreenBeard @lemmy.ca

    Edmonton police emails, documents provide new information on Canada-first AI facial recognition bodycam pilot

    www.cbc.ca /news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-police-emails-documents-provide-new-information-on-canada-first-ai-facial-recognition-bodycam-pilot-9.7157991

  • Demonstrators march through Ottawa opposing Iranian regime

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  • No, they can't. They can't see that their family, their friends, their communities are as good as dead, regardless of which set of monsters are butchering them. They want to believe that there's a world this ends in freedom for their kin, often because it would cost them too much to give up hope.

  • AIPAC may be a new litmus test for Democratic candidates. Leaders say voters' heads are elsewhere.

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  • I didn't say more money always wins, there's plenty of evidence of that, but money is fundamental in the US to building the communications apparatus to be heard over the unhinged rants being amplified by the corporate class. You want to be heard over the fire hose of bullshit, you need full-time dedicated staff and they need to eat. The game is rigged in favour of the corrupt, even you can't deny that one, and with the wild imbalance of current wealth inequality in the US the progressive left is not well positioned to break the siege. There are regional bastions that can hold the line like Minnesota, New York, and Seattle but it's not enough to actually win given the way the US electoral system is structured to favour dollars over people.

    You want my honest take? It's going to take a decade of community organizing, union organizing, and a whole lot more blood, sweat and tears to break through the point where the progressive left is able to drop the center-right DNC and stand on their own against the plutocrats trying to break people's spirits. Can it be done? Yes. Are we there yet? I don't think we are, not in most of the country. It's a much longer road than I think a lot of people appreciate. That doesn't mean it isn't worth walking, but it's going to take a lot longer to right this ship than a few years, and we need people with the commitment to do the ground work, to build community groups, to organize in places that no progressive has ever stood a chance before.

    I'm not going to carry water for the pathetic old guard that are failing to effectively fight the fascist right. Call their bullshit out. But at the end of the day, the left by itself isn't big enough or strong enough to overcome the oligarch's propaganda machine. Not yet. Not where they need to be.

  • AIPAC may be a new litmus test for Democratic candidates. Leaders say voters' heads are elsewhere.

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  • You kiss your mother with that mouth? I said national scale You can do it on a mayoral scale, even a city the size of New York but the closest anyone ever came to pulling it off at a national scale was Bernie and he still couldn't fund a full war chest at a time with much better financial conditions for small donors.

  • Prolly won;t word this correctly. But when did the idea of a woman subservient to a man begin? And how come it seems its lasted longer that most relgions?

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  • There does seem to have been a pretty widespread shift around 5000-3000 BCE (7000-5000 years ago) where a number of different populations across Europe, Asia, and North and East Africa all shifted in a relatively small time window to a patriarchal (literally "father-lead" for people who aren't familiar with what the term actually means) social structure. Interestingly this also coincides with a rapid loss of genetic diversity in the y-chromosome suggesting it was highly hazardous to the health of most men when this shift happened. Some have speculated that this is the point at which we went from minor territorial disputes and some mild raiding to the emergence of organized "warfare", though the evidence is circumstantial. While cultures still often went back and forth between being more egalitarian and more patriarchal, that seems to be a major historical turning point. In the (roughly) 300,000 year history of Homo sapiens, and the several million year history of the Homo genus, that's a relatively recent.

  • AIPAC may be a new litmus test for Democratic candidates. Leaders say voters' heads are elsewhere.

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  • I think it's important to remember that the Democrats are not a single unified party, it's a coalition of two. One that has strong convictions, and well reasoned and popular plans for correcting the course of country, but an inability to raise the funds to support a coherent organization or run a campaign, and a second party that has no coherent values or convictions and importantly, no functional plan to govern, but significant funding from corporate owners and the resources to manage a large, national scale organization. This is how you end up with a party with AOC and Bernie at one end and John Fetterman and Andrew Cuomo at the other end. A tent that big doesn't have an ideology, a consistent platform, or any positive mandate. But also neither party is viable on its own because of the structure of the US electoral system.

    From one angle it is certainly true that the DNC is parasitic on the popular movements of the day. From another angle, it can look like the progressive movements are parasitic on the structural and financial machine of the democratic party. In both cases though if you zoom out far enough, it becomes apparant that both of those are true, and more, but also that it's ultimately a dysfunctional symbiosis of convenience to survive in a system that is structurally incapable of producing a result that disadvantages the capital owner class. You can't actually use the US political system as it stands to correct its current failures. It's designed to fall apart if you try.

  • Trump says a 'whole civilization will die tonight' as deadline for Iran to reopen Strait of Hormuz looms | CBC

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  • This is an explicit statement of intent to commit genocide. His entire administration is now party to war crimes. He's crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.

  • Alberta @lemmy.ca
    GreenBeard @lemmy.ca

    Alberta bill would limit medically assisted dying to patients facing 'reasonably foreseeable' death

    www.cbc.ca /news/canada/edmonton/alberta-medical-assistance-in-dying-limits-legislation-9.7133788
  • Alberta @lemmy.ca
    GreenBeard @lemmy.ca

    Canada’s largest AI data centre proposed in rural Alberta | The Narwhal

    thenarwhal.ca /olds-alberta-ai-data-centre/
  • Alberta @lemmy.ca
    GreenBeard @lemmy.ca

    Alberta’s Smith owes answers before separation vote: former federal minister Dion

    www.ctvnews.ca /edmonton/article/albertas-smith-owes-answers-before-separation-vote-former-federal-minister-dion/
  • Alberta @lemmy.ca
    GreenBeard @lemmy.ca

    How a new, more sustainable lithium mining process could kick off the industry in Western Canada

    www.cbc.ca /news/science/lithium-alberta-mining-brines-9.7068876