No Food for Thought

Qu'y a-t-il de pire que de subventionner le secteur privé? Mal subventionner le secteur privé. Chose bien trop commune dans notre pays.

J'allais cotiser à mon REER+ du Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs du Québec aujourd'hui. Après 2 minutes, je constate, sans grande surprise, que ce n'est toujours pas possible. Les cotisations sont toujours suspendues; du moins on le suppose, puisque le site web ne semble l'indiquer nulle part. Je ne ferai pas partie des chanceux qui pourront cotiser cette année; on repassera pour la solidarité.

L'article du Journal de Montréal explique une partie du problème. Suffit d'ajouter qu'au lieu d'encourager les particuliers à détenir des investissements au Québec, on les encourage à en acquérir. Oups! La nuance fait toute la différence, transformant une intention d'encourager l'économie locale en une pure dépense, empirant notre déficit. Sacrés incitatifs pervers

Ah, si seulement on pouvait remplacer le crédit d'impôt relatif à un fonds de travailleurs par un crédit d'imposteurs au Parlement du Québec!

Il y a de l'espoir, tout de même. Cet article de Julien Arsenault indique qu'à défaut d'encourager la détention, on allonge une période de détention minimale... à une nouvelle tout aussi arbitraire, mais sans doute moins pire que la précédente. L'article a aussi le mérite de rectifier celui du Journal de Montréal en indiquant que le problème des émissions n'est malheureusement pas la faute de la FTQ, mais bien... de la régulation gouvernementale! Et du même coup, on éliminera le crédit pour les « riches »... car n'est-ce pas plus facile d'ajouter encore davantage de règles que de les rationaliser? Ainsi, on aura bientôt un crédit avec une période de détention minimale, un plafond salarial et une limite annuelle (pour ne mentionner que les plus importants des critères). Et bien sûr, sur des actions qui resteront difficiles à se procurer. Si on cherche à économiser, ce n'est certainement pas de la complexité!

This month, the USA's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has paid its largest award ever to an undisclosed whistle-blower who helped identify a presumably major securities law violation. Indeed, the reward amounted to 279 million USD.

The case being confidential, it is hard to judge the collaboration's value. But the incentive is pretty clear. What is easy is to wonder what would happen if instead of—or in addition to—exceptional awards, whistle-blowing was properly valued consistently. The SEC's own policy on awards is questionable, ignoring cases under 1 million USD in sanctions. For many people, the difference between no reward and a 200 000 USD reward may have more impact on their behavior than the difference between a 200 000 USD reward and a 279 million USD reward.

It's not easy to imagine that most of the 2022–2023 Pentagon document leaks could have been prevented with only 150 000 USD, had it been awarded early. How many hundreds of lives and tens of millions of dollars would such a reward have saved?

I remember being halfway through high school when I had the idea of optimizing solar energy by putting panels around the Sun and relaying the energy to Earth. I did not promote the idea a lot at the time, but it turns out that wouldn't have changed much. Even the concept's name was already established when I was born: unfortunately not a "Cloutier panel", but a Dyson sphere, named after Freeman Dyson, who explored the concept... in 1937.

Not only was I ignorant of its name, but I also didn't know such structures were considered as the defining element of "type II" civilizations, on the Kardashev scale.
Here's hoping our species goes type II before burning through our planet I.

L'assurance de ses propres biens est bien entendu facultative. Les locataires de logements n'ont donc pas besoin d'une assurance habitation, mais qu'en est-il de la responsabilité civile?

L'assurance de responsabilité couvre un assuré qui serait poursuivi pour des dommages qu'il aurait causés. Notamment un résident qui endommagerait des résidences adjacentes en causant un incendie. À priori, la loi québécoise n'oblige pas les locataires à souscrire une telle assurance.

Règlements

Par contre, plusieurs locateurs exigent de leurs locataires de souscrire une assurance responsabilité civile et même d'en fournir la preuve au propriétaire. Cette obligation venant avec des coûts considérables—en argent mais surtout en temps—on peut se demander si de telles clauses sont abusives. Si vous avez signé un bail doté d'un règlement vous imposant une assurance responsabilité, êtes-vous obligé de le respecter?

Selon un jugement de 2019, oui.

Ainsi, au Québec, l'obligation de détenir une assurance responsabilité dépend du règlement de sa résidence.

It might seems strange for someone who was part of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party of Canada government for 7 years to teach about integrity.

It's nevertheless interesting to see how former astronaut Marc Garneau looks back at his career in an interview with Paul Wells:

For want of honesty from politicians, it's nice to see occasional meta-(dis)honesty from former politicians. I for one can't wait for Vladimir Putin and his USA presidency puppet to exhibit some honesty about how much dishonesty they will have resorted to.

How wonderful would our world be if it wasn't for dishonesty?

In 2020, No Food for Thought asked whether AI's next achievement would be unlimited trolling. As far as I know, large-scale peer production remains mostly spared from such disruption so far.

That's not because AI hasn't "progressed" in recent years. It's just that so far, it has been directed towards social engineering and spamming. Teachers have to worry about AI more than peer producers.

Very little is "lacking" for this to change very quickly though. And more importantly, there is still virtually nothing preventing this from changing.

Today, we can say that the time for globally verifiable identities was years ago. And unfortunately, very little progress has been made since.

Artificial intelligence is not the problem. It is our neglect and lateness which has condemned us to years of inefficiency, multi-level disruption, distrust, and—most problematically—out of control disinformation. As long as it lacks vision and unity, our species will keep going from one crisis to more crises.

2023-06 Update

"Trolling" might not be the best name, but it's now clear artificially generated text is starting to hurt peer production, with Stack Overflow possibly the most obvious victim. With still no solution in sight

2024 Update

The advent of bug bounties allowed to make profitable what could have been a predictable nuisance: bogus security vulnerability reports. It appears AI text generation is causing crappy reports to look credible, wasting even more developer time on invalid reports, which may now be majority.

I have always known that my mother's last boss, athlete Dean Bergeron, was paralyzed. But it wasn't before seeing this CBC News report tonight that I learned his injury was the sad result of a fight.

This comes with the good news that such fighting is now banned in Quebec's Major Junior Hockey League. What is concerning—though—is the reaction of players, including Georges Laraque, who seem to believe fighting somehow prevents violence. Would the old adage Si vis pacem, para bellum still apply to hockey

Having never really played hockey, I can't judge that view. Is it just human nature for offenders to find a justification for their actions, or does it highlight that hockey - like many similar sports - is unsalvageably violent? No matter how Canadian it might be, if hockey relies on fighting to ensure its safety, perhaps the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal is just a symptom of a much bigger problem. If fighting violence in hockey is unrealistic, should we not fight competitive hockey itself?

Radio-Canada has a deeper discussion with Dean Bergeron in French.

Update

Bergeron's accident might have been a blessing by preventing him from more fighting, as a new study on NHL "enforcers" shows how bad these fare.

Crhypeto is a costly waste. But truth, too, can be costly to tell, at least in the short term. In particular, telling the truth about crhypeto when you're one of the companies sucking the most money out of it.

For their courage in telling things like they are and actively discouraging misuse of their products, I congratulate KNP's March 2023 Hero of the month, Michael Kagan and Nvidia.

This century has seen 2 revolutions in computer hardware: LCD screens and SSDs. In terms of computing, SSDs promised an order of magnitude of speed improvement, with greater reliability.

But in technology, the panacea is rare. Besides their lower capacity / higher cost, a decade after they became mainstream, SSDs remain harder to diagnose. And even with maturity, their reliability is quite comparable to HDDs'.

SSDs are a revolution which is still ongoing, but as computers mature, engineering them is more and more a matter of trade-offs.

One year ago, KNP warned against the perils of fragmentation. What’s happened since then:
• Finland and Sweden applied to join NATO.
• …and both started waiting for NATO’s approval.

True, democracies did manage to collaborate a little. But while we might have started to question ourselves, in autocracy land, Xi Jinping has won an unprecedented third term, further weakened trust in Canada’s electoral system, kept unscrupulously stealing democratic IP, and the Kremlin ensured the USA Congress got on the fastest path towards national (if not global) self-destruction yet. Recently, hypersonic missiles have started raining on Ukraine. Now, research is objectively showing democracy has lost its edge even in technology.

Democratic solidarity may have prevented a quick collapse and bought us some time, but let’s not wait until China gets actively involved to maximize the little time left. Orgueil and chauvinism are – literally – deadly diseases. As democracy gets older, it needs to prove its wisdom and swallow a pill infinitely less bitter than how Ukrainians are already feeling.