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.
The USA has a long history of bullying Canada, long before tRump. He's just more blatant and obvious about it.
There is such a concept of carrot and stick. If the USA wants Canada to be a "good" (in the eyes of America) neighbour then for the love of God why don't they start using a carrot instead of the stick?
Military action would be brutal, but you can only say that it's unnecessary if the alternatives are better. If not now, then how many years down the line? The claims Carney are making are not light in their own right.
It would be like Iraq, they would quickly have Trump fly onto an aircraft carrier with a “mission accomplished” banner, then the Canadians would commit to guerrilla warfare for a few decades.
Yes, yes I have. I've known a lot of Canadians over the decades. They would totally commit to guerilla warfare to defend their nation, same as most other people would. They'd be damned good at it, too.
If you think there's something about Canadians that would stop them from getting down, dirty, and vicious, then you don't know Canadians very well (and have never seen a Canadian hockey game).
Could they hold out alone over the long term? Probably not, but maybe. Smaller, less capable nations have pulled off such feats.
But also, they wouldn't be alone. They'd have quite a lot of support.
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.
Yeah, liberalism preaches selfishness under the false guise of pseudo-individualism. Everyone today is special, unique individual, but ironically, at the same time, almost identical to the next special, unique individual, with their identity constructed by fervent consumption of the same mass produced goods and images.
Final product of liberalism is Nietzsche's Last Man.
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_.
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.
Safety critical (will kill someone if not bug free) code makes up <1% of what's shipped, safety clothes which must be of high quality else risk harm to someone make up a similarly small percent
Both will stay manual / require high level of review they're not what's being disrupted (at-least in near term) - it's the rest.
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.
That’s just not the general case at all. Automated or “powered” processes generally lead to a more consistent final product. In many cases the quality is just better than what can be done by hand.
Have plenty of people, quite literally worth less than most material goods (evident from current social positions and continued trajectories) so why would companies care if it makes more money overall? Our lives have a value and in general its insultingly low.
The machines we’re talking about made raw cloth not clothing and it was actually higher quality in many respects because of accuracy and repeatability.
Almost all clothing is still made by hand one piece at a time with sewing machines still very manually operated.
“ …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.
The problem with those quotes is the lack of definition of “quality”. Machine woven cloth in many ways is better because of consistency and uniformity.
If your goal is to make 1000 of the exact same dress, having a completely consistent raw material is synonymous with high quality.
It’s not fair to say that machines produced some kind of inferior imitation of the handmade product, that only won through sheer speed and cost to manufacture.
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.
It's all unnecessary and will just cause pain to end up where it started.