For context, Alberta is our Texas. It and a few other prairie provinces are fairly conservative, though the cities tend to be more Canadian progressive. That contradiction sets up dumb fights like these. And as someone in the article pointed out, these dumb culture war fights are a handy distraction from all sorts of wild scandal etc.

I know nothing about them other than they look like Lovecraftian nightmare fuel but yeah, at the very least they look bizzare AF.

No.

It’s good to understand why people, even those with whom we disagree, are making the decisions they are making.

I’m sure you would rather those who disagree with you seek to understand why you make the choices you do etc.

“Sure, you made one of the best films of all time but what have you done lately?!?”

But yes. Subsequent films of his were nominated for the Palme d’Or as well as a pair of Cesar awards. As an actor he’s also been nominated for a variety of roles.

La Haine is a critically regarded masterpiece and usually lands in best movies of all time lists. Easily one of the best French movies ever.

It’s really worth a watch.

That read was great for the soul.

Makes sense, I was wondering why a few things got zero responses. (Some absolutely fair, totally deserved but not all!)

Lots of countries want to pivot closer to the EU as a hedge against a mercurial America or authoritarian China…

I’m definitely a fan of closer ties though I’d be a little wary about fully joining an organization where decisions can be held up by a recalcitrant Orban or Le Pen.

That was a more hopeful and literate version of the future than the one we’re one. Were Ender’s Game rewritten now, Peter and Violet would be influencers…

These photos will never not make me giggle.

I take it you’ve never helped someone who struggles with bureaucracy and government forms.

I’ve helped folks with tenancy, tax and applications. Usually, the issue behind the given issues is that everything feels very intimidating and the forms/support document are written in “government-ese”.

If there’s a tool that can help explain this stuff, without a multi hour phone wait, I’m all for it. Not everyone has a resource like myself that they feel comfortable asking. Especially when, there’s a sense of shame in being an adult who cannot navigate these things, yeah, I fully understand and can appreciate why 1/5 would want to ask an LLM for help.

You’d be surprised with the stumbling blocks people face. Just because you know how your deductions etc are supposed to work does not mean most people do. I find it’s really useful to consider things not from my perspective but from the least fortunate.

Like I said, not everyone has the same resources I do…

But this doesn’t seem worse than googling questions and not everyone can spend hours waiting to talk with the Irs/Cra etc.

It just seems that sometimes folks are so determined to be anti LLM that they refuse to see how it could ever help anyone.

The top ways people plan to use AI is to help answer filing questions, find deductions or credits, and review returns for mistakes.

If you can’t afford a professional, these don’t seem particularly unreasonable. I certain wouldn’t recommend feeding all your info into chatgpt etc but for a simple filer, asking an LLM for explanations or possible deductions seems fine.

Not everyone has access to the same resources that I do, so I try to picture it from others perspectives.

I don’t know the organization so can’t speak to the source or their methodology but they do note:

The top ways people plan to use AI is to help answer filing questions, find deductions or credits, and review returns for mistakes.

All of which seem pretty reasonable. If you don’t have the money for a professional, at least checking with something that is right more often than not with some basic questions seems perfectly reasonable.

From the reactions above, it seems people are assuming they’re just asking chatgpt to do all their taxes, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

Neither the article, nor source make a distinction as to whether it’s a general purpose LLM or purpose built software.

So it really depends on the question that the poll asked, which as far as I can tell, is not shared.

Edit: Even TurboTax, notes that AI has some useful applications for taxes:

https://turbotax.intuit.ca/tips/should-ai-do-my-taxes-canada

Basically, I’d just be careful about wailing and gnashing of teeth when we’re of even confident of the context. Using AI might be as simple as “what does box 1134a refer to?”

I mean, a lot of tax stuff is automated. Mine are pretty straightforward so turboTax handles a huge chunk of the work…

I’ve read it. I’ve also read Hannah Arendt, Umberto Eco, and other scholars of fascism.

And you’re still comparing where we are now with WWII… And missing the entirety of how these movements get from where we are now to full on authoritarianism. Violence in the streets has been an essential part of fascist regimes. Both the Brownshirts and Blackshirts revelled in the street fights and their political masters used them to point out disorder etc. There’s a reason Eco’s essay is fourteen ways to look at a Blackshirt.

I dunno, to have seriously read about fascism and advocating throwing punches nowadays is a mind boggling contradiction unless you want more fascism, which I presume is not your goal.

Again, it’s why trump has almost exclusively sent ICE to Democratic cities and why DHS was super ready to claim Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists. The trump administration is itching for people to follow your advice so that they can point to violent disorder in the streets and give themselves more powers etc. It’s textbook shit.

It’s as if someone was talking about how they’d just seen Sound of Music but thought it was weird to make a movie about singing nazis. The pieces are sort of there I guess for that but it takes a wild interpretation to get there. At that point, my first 8 guesses would not be that you’ve seen the movie. Similarly, if you’re advocating things that fascists crave, well, I’m not sure how much of that reading has sunk in?

“Apes don’t read philosophy!”

“They do Otto, they just don’t understand it.”

Edit: a format

It’s based on what you wrote.

No one who has read anything serious about fascism suggests punching people is anything but helpful to the regime.

You might read Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny”. It’s very short and quite well written.

I have more than a surface-deep level of understanding pertaining to fascism, and I’m capable of recognizing the signs and symptoms.

Watching Andor or some youtuber doesn’t count as a significant understanding of fascism.

If you’d actually learned about fascism, you’d know that the Brownshirts and Blackshirts both were itching for street level fights and that the resulting chaos in the streets fueled perceptions of mayhem which helped enable both fascist movements to enact more sweeping laws etc.

The reason trump sent ICE into Democratic cities with smaller immigrant communities was precisely because he was hoping people would be dumb enough to start throwing punches or better/worse yet, kill an officer.

You beat nascent fascism movements by convincing people. You don’t win by punching randoms. As my friend had to explain to her young son, “you might be right but the moment you throw a punch, you’ve lost. Doesn’t matter if you’re in the right, you’ve lost.”

Honestly, if I were one of the digital overlords of social media and I wanted to help the trump administration, I can think of few things more effective than promoting this idea of punching “nazis”. If enough idiots listen and we start throwing serious punches, we’ll lose.

If you want to learn, it’s a bit of a slog but I can think of few books better than Shirers Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Just because my proposed solution may be unrealistic doesn’t make the exclusion of trans people any less transphobic.

I think this is the crux. Like, we can both probably admit this is pretty ridiculous and implausible solution you’ve proposed. (there is no set of metrics that somehow allows Messi in the same league as the best footballers in the world, or that lets Muggsy Bogues, 5"3 in the top division of basketball, but those are some of the best in the world at their sports.) But somehow, despite that, and there not really being a good solution, folks are still transphobic if they’d rather you didn’t break sports on behalf of a tiny fraction of a small percentage of people? I mean it’s just a little ridiculous…

Consider anything else. Disabled people can’t play traditional sports in the same way. Is it disability-phobic that they are relegated to their own leagues and events? If we’re willing to break sports on behalf of one group, it seems incredibly unequal to not do so for others. All non accessible sports are by definition exclusionary.

do you truly, and I mean genuinely in your core, believe that trans exclusive sport divisions would even get a second glance?

Nope. But, a reasonable solution isn’t to break sports for everyone else in the name of equality.

We make tradeoffs all the time. Cafes and bars hosting open mic nights is exclusionary to deaf people, should we make it illegal to have one without a sign language interpreter even though that would make those events financially unviable in many cases? My sister, like many, has trouble reading, so struggles with foreign movies. Should all foreign movies have large pauses so that anyone who struggles has time to catch up? Or are we phobic to deaf or those with reading issues?

Trans folks face very real and heartbreaking struggles., here are so many serious issues that affect them. Breaking sports on their behalf isn’t going to win hearts and minds. Insisting that people who don’t think we should implement unrealistic solutions are transphobic is not helping.