Didn’t they already try with Conrail?

Or, for your slowpokes, parts per million or billion of “c”.

cc, or centiC

Helium is rare on Earth and is not renewable.

The reason Germany had the “best” blimps? They used hydrogen which is a fraction of the cost while having even more lifting force than helium. It’s what allowed them to build airships as big as they did. It’s also why the Hindenburg exploded.

We haven’t solved the first problem, so the prospect of succeeding a second time is, while not inconceivable, very limited.

More importantly, most people probably wouldn’t want to spend several days crossing the Atlantic or Pacific when a plane gets you there in 12 hours or less. Even if the experience on a plane sucks, saving multiple days worth of your time is extremely hard to compete with. What really killed airships was airplanes, not the Hindenburg disaster. Airships had already been in decline when the Hindenburg blew up, and the decline was proportional to the advancement of passenger airliners.

Then they wouldn’t be homeless silly!

Remember: status quo only, no real solutions allowed.

That’s supposed to be the law here too. Or at least, you don’t have to provide seating but you need to also provide a bathroom if you do. But restaurants ignore it and no one enforces it so it doesn’t matter.

Here in BC, Canada, restaurants are supposed to be legally required to provide bathrooms to customers if they have sit down dining. But if you go to any restaurant within 100m of a transit station and ask to use the bathroom after buying something, they’ll either flat out say they don’t have a customer bathroom or it’s perpetually “out of service.” The vast majority are nice and even apologetic about it (this is Canada after all), but I’ve also had stink eyes and rude "NO"s from plenty of employees for having the audacity to ask for a bathroom like I’m some toilet junkie looking for my next fix.

I’ve read some comments on Reddit from restaurant staff along the lines of “I don’t give a shit what the law says, the workers deserve a private bathroom free from drug addicts more than the customers deserve one.” Which, I can see where they’re coming from and I’d probably feel the same way if I had to work 8+ hours in that restaurant every day, but it really highlights the individualistic nature of Western society. Everyone looks out for their own interests only, and have no qualms about screwing over others for it.

As someone with a Thinkpad, that weird thing Lenovo does where they switch the control and function keys gets me every time I switch between Thinkpad and non-Thinkpad laptops. Usually when I use a non-Thinkpad, it’s someone else’s laptop and I look like an idiot in front of them wondering why their copy and paste is broken.

I get that the function key isn’t technically a standard key on the keyboard (I’ve only seen them on laptops) and Thinkpads always had that layout dating back the IBM days, but it’s still annoying.

Warning Chinese Competition Is Closing In

You know everyone believes in capitalism when a new competitor in the free market is a dire warning and perceived as a threat.

Damn typesetting sounds like such a cool term. Makes me think you’re picking up each letter and putting them… actually wait is that literally what it used to mean? Putting letters in a printing press?

What province? I assume this is talking about Canada since you mentioned premier?

No, it’s MY supporting drug use. Get your own!

I was literally taught the term “drugs AND alcohol” in school. Imagine if science class taught you that it was “water AND ice” and that ice is merely adjacent to water.

I think they now teach that alcohol is also a drug, but still.

Honestly, I’ve been doing some recreational thinking about this whole thing, and I find myself agreeing with you. You brought up good points I hadn’t considered, thanks!

I live in Vancouver and there are literally no bathrooms, public or private, in the densest parts of the city for this exact reason. I’ve damn near pissed myself on long transit trips because all of the restaurants near transit stations won’t let you use the bathroom even if you buy something.

You used to be able to pay to use the bathroom by buying something, now you can’t relieve yourself even if you wanted to pay. Like build coin operated toilets like they have in Europe at this point because it’s better than literally not having access to any bathrooms at all.

IIRC all US government projects HAVE to be CC0 if released to the public. I think the idea is it was created with public money so there shouldn’t be any restrictions on how the public can use it.

You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The only question going forward is how AI will be developed and who will control it.

Fair enough, but even if the model is open source, you still have no control or knowledge of how it was developed or what biases it might have baked in. AI is by definition a black box, even to the people who made it, it can’t even be decompiled like a normal program.

It’s funny that you’d bring up the drug analogy because you’re advocating a war on drugs here.

I mean, China has the death penalty for drug distribution, which is supported by the majority of Chinese citizens. They do seem more tolerant of drug users compared to the US (I’ve never done drugs in China nor the US so I wouldn’t know), so clearly the decision to have zero tolerance for distributors is a very intentional action by the Communist party. As far as I know, no socialist country has ever been tolerant to even the distribution of cannabis, let alone hard drugs, and they have made it pretty clear that they never will.

Personally, I have absolutely no problem with that if the model is itself open and publicly owned. I’m a communist, I don’t support copyrights and IP laws in principle. The ethical objection to AI training on copyrighted material holds superficial validity, but only within capitalism’s warped logic. Intellectual property laws exist to concentrate ownership and profit in the hands of corporations, not to protect individual artists.

I never thought of it in terms of copyright infringement, but in terms of reaping the labour of proletarians while giving them nothing in return. I’m admittedly far less experienced of a communist than you, but I see AI as the ultimate means of removing workers from their means of production because it’s scraping all of humanity’s intellectual labour without consent, to create a product that is inferior to humans in every way except for how much you have to pay it, and it’s only getting the hype it’s getting because the bourgeoisie see it as a replacement for the very humans it exploited.

For the record, I give absolutely no shits about pirating movies or “stealing” content from any of the big companies, but I personally hold the hobby work of a single person in higher regard. It’s especially unfair to the smallest content creators because they are most likely making literally nothing from their work since the vast majority of personal projects are uploaded for free on the public internet. It’s therefore unjust (at least to me) to appropriate their free work into something whose literal purpose is to get companies out of paying people for content. Imagine working your whole life on open source projects only for no company to want to hire you because they’re using AI trained on your open source work to do what they would have paid you to do. Imagine writing novels your whole life and putting them online for free, only for no publisher to want to pay for your work because they have a million AI monkeys trained on your writing typing out random slop and essentially brute forcing a best seller. Open source models won’t prevent this from happening, in fact it will only make it easier.

AI sounds great in an already communist society, but in a capitalist one, it seems to me like it would be deadly to the working class, because capitalists have made it clear that they intend to use it to eliminate human workers.

Again, I don’t know nearly as much about communism as you so most of this is probably wrong, but I am expressing my opinions as is because I want you to examine them and call me out where I’m wrong.

“Don’t compete with us in this supposed free market”

Silence? Lucky, my lamp has coil whine from the LED driver.

[Linked article] M3 Ultra Runs DeepSeek R1 With 671 Billion Parameters Using 448GB Of Unified Memory, Delivering High Bandwidth Performance At Under 200W Power Consumption, With No Need For A Multi-GPU Setup

Running the AI is not where the power demand comes from, it’s training the AI. Which, if you trained it only once it wouldn’t be so bad, but obviously every AI vendor will be training all the time to ensure their model stays competitive. That’s when you get into the tragedy of the commons situation where the collective power consumption goes out of control for tiny improvements in the AI model.

Meanwhile, corps clearly don’t care about IP here and will keep developing this tech regardless of how ethical it is.

“It will happen anyway” is not an excuse to not try to stop it. That’s like saying drug dealers will sell drugs regardless of how ethical it is so there’s no point in trying to criminalize drug distribution.

Seems to me that it’s better if there are open model available and developed by the community than there only being closed models developed by corps who decide how they work and who can use them.

Except there are no truly open AI models because they all use stolen training data. Even the “open source” models like Mistral and DeepSeek say nothing about where they get their data from. The only way for there to be an open source AI model is if there was a reputable pool of training data where all the original authors consented to their work being used to train AI.

Even if the model itself is open source and free to run, if there are no restrictions against using the generated data commercially, it’s still complicit in the theft of human-made works.

A lot of people will probably disagree with me but I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with using AI generated content as long as it’s not for commercial purposes. But if it is, you’re by definition making money off content that you didn’t create which to me is what makes it unethical. You could have hired that hypothetical person whose work was used in the AI, but instead you used their work to generate value for yourself while giving them nothing in return.