Avid Amoeba

@ avidamoeba @lemmy.ca

Posts

391
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9532
Joined

3 yr. ago

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4h ago

Carney announces creation of Canada's first sovereign wealth fund
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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 4h ago
Oh I see what you mean. Not status quo situation but other possible schemes for perhaps more fine grained democratic control. Yeah I dig that.

5h ago

China's global crackdown shadows Uyghur activism as Beijing's expanding repression beyond its borders are raised in Canada

Or that. And then every time Scotty says something abt Canada's relation with slave labour in China we'd point to having a law on the books against it. 🫠

5h ago

Carney announces creation of Canada's first sovereign wealth fund

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 5h ago

Right, that's the worst case scenario result. But I think we (they) might have gotten to it by having decades of unrepresentative government where the gov't represented business at the expense of the majority. And if that's valid, then I think there's an argument to be made about getting the gov't to do what's elected to do by giving it more power to do stuff, as well as experience the consequences of bad gov't earlier, before we get to a DOGE moment. That doesn't really change how capital captures and drives gov't to make decisions in its interest instead of workers, but we'd still be able to course correct faster and more effectively I think. I don't have a settled opinion on this but I've been warming up to the idea that voters should in fact be able to change gov't institution directions via elections in major ways. Also I don't think isolating gov't institutions from elected governments does prevent capital from taking them over. And we might be curbing just our own ability to exercise control.

7h ago

The West Forgot How to Build. Now It's Forgetting Code

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 7h ago

What you correctly observe as shortsightedness and unwilligness to make compromise are side effects created by our economic system. Competition for profit and capital literally creates the short horizons. If you don't make the money for me this quarter, I'll move my capital to your competitor who would. Your stock price falls and with it further falls the ability to raise capital to fund profit generating ventures and products. As a board and CEO you know that so you set appropriate quarterly profit targets and your exec layer cascades those down to concrete measures down to the junior devs. If your competitor introduces monthly profit targets and executes them consistently, you'd have to match as capital us going to start moving towards your competitor because your quartetly plans would look risky in comparison. Worse, when I say competitor, that's any firm producing profit, not a firm in your product market. Basically any firm that takes capital from capital markets is in competition with you for capital.

My point being it's not a culture or individual (group) behaviour thing, it's structural systemic drive that can only be solved by structural systemic changes. It's not a new occurrence either. It's been moving in this direction for decades, it's just gotten painfully obvious for most lately.

7h ago

China's global crackdown shadows Uyghur activism as Beijing's expanding repression beyond its borders are raised in Canada

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 7h ago

In other words it can't possibly work to sifnificantly decrease slave labour. At best it would function as a PR or idpol shield for Canada and Canadian corporations that they follow this law and therefore are clean, all the while it's not enforced because it's unenforceable. It'll be allow some lib idpol aficionado to say "Canada has robust anti-slavery in supply chains law. Look over there instead." and feel very good abt it. All the while our economy be still dependent on TFWs, American and Chinese slave labour. Also African and many other places' slave labour. And if we try to actually enforce it by blocking some major import from a large economy like US or China, we'd get slapped with counterslap on our exports to them, because our enforcement not only hurts the firm bosses that uses slave labour but everyone else involved. Therefore the gov't that represents it will take action to protect its interest.

And so given that we're materially dependent on slave labour, the material conditions dictate this ain't gonna pass and that's my bet.

10h ago

Carney announces creation of Canada's first sovereign wealth fund

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 10h ago

What kind of finance pros are gonna run it? If Carney doesn't handpick Keynsian ideologues for the job, it's gonna be neolibs all the way down, cause that's the predominant culture today.

10h ago

Carney announces creation of Canada's first sovereign wealth fund

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 10h ago

Do you prefer it being under less democratic control than more? Cause that's flip side of independent gov't institutions.

Personally I think isolating public infrastructure/institutions from the gov't has not worked incredibly well. I used to think the opposite. It "protects" them somewhat from bad actors but it also limits the ability of other gov'ts to leverage them to fulfill what Canadians voted for. Essentially limits the scope of electoral democracy to affect change further than it already is.

20h ago

Ontario hospitals announce job cuts as nearly three-quarters try to climb out of financial holes

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 20h ago

Just when you thought hospital working conditions and therefore service was bad enough.

21h ago

Quickly Announcing that the Young New Democrats have launched an official Discord server! If you're a member of the party under the age of 30, feel free to join at the attached link!

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 21h ago

I think organizing via whatever means available is higher priority. Perhaps many who join up via this channel haven't gone through the consciousness development needed to understand why they should do the effort to avoid Discord. It's prolly a bit of meet people where they are situation. Once an organization is formed, on principles that don't have anything to do with the comm platform, it's not difficult change the platform. I hate Discord and even I would have joined up if I was under 30. 😊

Some leftists probably think using a party in electoral democracy is not the ideal vehicle for organizing either. 🤷🏻

24h ago

Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 24h ago

you would simply enjoy the increase output of your existing workforce or maybe even hire more people for even more potential growth.

This assumes there's the aggregate demand needed to absorb your increased product output. If there are no more sales or higher prices, it means workers would be sitting doing nothing for longer due to the increased productivity. The moment that becomes apparent, the exec layer would cut the workforce so that fewer people produce the needed output for 40+ hours a week.

1d ago

Europe—not US—first to authorize Moderna's combo mRNA flu-COVID vaccine

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 1d ago

I thought there was an effort to target a not-so-easy to change part of the virus. Maybe I've been dreaming. Either way the yearly shot, mRNA or otherwise is much more profitable so a one-and-done vaccine won't appear out of Moderna of Pfizer, that's for sure.

1d ago

Microsoft and Meta announce large staff reductions as they spend big on AI

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 1d ago

Zuckerberg, in contrast to Gale, has said outright that AI is making some hiring unnecessary. “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person,” he said in the January earnings call.

"AI won't replace us, we're just going to be working more productively with AI" said the useful software engineer, naively parroting Big Tech's corporate PR.

Everyone should be reading Marx.

1d ago

Europe—not US—first to authorize Moderna's combo mRNA flu-COVID vaccine

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 1d ago

Anyone know much about the efficacy of the flu part of it? Says it's more effective than existing ones but is this the revolutionary flu shot that takes us out of the yearly flu vaccine rat race or not that far yet?

1d ago

DeepSeek ditches Nvidia for Huawei chips in V4 launch

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 1d ago

Yeah. The 80b Coder-Next runs at about the same speed on my hw too. I don't know if it's any better than 3.6 27b.

1d ago

DeepSeek ditches Nvidia for Huawei chips in V4 launch

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 1d ago

Take good care of your hw! It's not like 2 years ago when you could buy stuff off the shelf for reasonable prices. :D

1d ago

Question for Canadians - do you say "zi" or "zed"?

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 1d ago

Gen Zed

2d ago

China surpasses US in research spending – the consequences extend far beyond scientific ranking and clout

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 2d ago

while the business sector performed roughly 78% of U.S. R&D

The private sector has already begun pivoting R&D to China too.

2d ago

The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend

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Avid Amoeba @lemmy.ca 2d ago

Am doing something related at work as we got the directive to actively use AI, so I might as well use the best model available, which happens to be very expensive. It's also not so smart for our work so I have to kick it multiple times... What can I do, it's part of my performance objectives now.