This is not merely my opinion, but that of knowledgable AI researchers, many of whom place ASI at not a simple remote possibility, but something they see as almost inevitable given our current understanding of the science.
I don't see myself there, but, given that even the faint possibility of superintelligence would be an instant national security priority #1, grinding China into the dust on that permanently seems like a high reward, low risk endeavor. I'm not recruitable via any levers myself into a competitive ethnostate so I'm an American and believe in American primacy.
"International laws" are also a weird thing. There is no international parliament, international police and international court. I think the only viable agreements are of a kind "if you don't do A then we don't do B".
I was wondering if anyone would find that unusual! It's long lasting but never rises to anything more than curiosity, so I wanted to juxtapose the two to convey the mixed feelings I have for it.
> This led to a demographic explosion, so that in a few hundred years Yamnaya descendants numbered many tens of thousands and were spread from Hungary to eastern China.
> Is Canada better today then when he started as PM?
As you've already concluded, the answer is absolutely not. The Canada I grew up with, and mind you my family are immigrants from the 90s and early 2000s ourselves, is completely shattered.
One could endlessly go on about the economy/COL, immigration, crumbling healthcare, housing crisis, far-left ideology going mainstream, etc.
But I could frame it much simpler than that - Canada, at least in cities of modest sizes and up, is rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society.
An anecdote: my sister is more than 10 years younger than me, she's currently attending the same university as I did over a decade ago; in the span of less than half a year, she's got 2 bikes stolen - her original bike with front wheel removed to bypass the lock in late summer 2024, then the entire lock cut to steal her replacement bike in December; this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town.
> economy, healthcare costs, housing crisis, and... far left ideology
One of these things is not like the others. Could you elaborate on how 'far left ideology' relates to the others in terms of the supposed fall of our country?
Whenever I see people using the term "far left", I realize its meaning has been subverted and neutered to mean something else entirely. Same with "woke". It's very Orwellian to see how successfully these words have been distorted to obscure their nature and power.
I think people are talking past each other. Some of these parties are "far left" on social issues while simultaneously being "moderate right" on economic issues. So you can label these parties either way, depending on what's convenient to your argument.
For context, the liberal party is right of centre these days. We don't even have a "far-left" party. The NDP is solidly left, probably slightly left of what the liberals were years ago when this poster thinks things were wonderful.
We do have fringe parties that are far-left, that basically get a handful of votes a year, and we have one far-right party, the People Party of Canada, that gets enough votes to occasionally get some news coverage.
Yet, apparently one will instead sidestep the discussion entirely. Frankly the more you've tried to answer the question the less you actually answer it...
I don't see how "rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society" or "she's got 2 bikes stolen ... this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town" reflect failures in Canadian government at all, really.
Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.
Is it possible your sister had a shockingly unlucky semester? Or that your world model was simply naive and wrong 10 years ago? Hard to say since the anecdote isn't really evidence of anything.
Every store in my town now locks up anything small that costs more than $20 in cages. Talking to some people working there it was pretty common for people to walk in, take a bunch of shit, and walk out. Drivers are completely out of control. I've witnessed at least 3 people run red lights in the last 2 years, while I can remember only one such incident in the 10 years before that. Signalling is no longer something drivers do - like at all. For the last 2 years teenagers have terrorized the local park on Canada Day shooting fireworks at random passers by. With someone setting off fireworks under an occupied baby carriage last year. Car thefts in Toronto got so bad that people were building retractable bollards in their driveways[1].
I could go on, but there's a clear apparent trajectory to these experiences.
I'm kind of confused by the question. Do you think an unverified commenter on a public website saying "all the stores in my town [not named] do X [but I didn't count]" is a type of hard evidence that I'm arbitrarily rejecting?
No; I think that there's no feasible way that anyone could have hard evidence one way or another for the underlying question, and that you should therefore take anecdotes more seriously.
>Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.
Japan. Again, depending on where in the country, but things like muggings and drunk driving have drastically decreased in the last 35 years.
If you know you know, and clearly plenty of people who read my original comment do.
Judging from your other comments, you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest, can't tell which, and frankly don't care either way. All I know is it'd be a complete waste of time to try to convince you.
> you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest
I think "willful ignorance" is a good description of accepting impossible-to-verify anecdotes of internet comments as evidence of societal change, personally. But I'm realizing we don't have the same goals in the conversation so I understand why it feels pointless to continue.
I think any Canadian that identifies as “far left” would find your post hysterical. They don’t even have a party to vote for anymore - best they can do is a begrudging vote for the NDP. This country has been on a rightward shift for decades. e.g. look at the hard push towards privatization of government services in Ontario.
This anecdote could be explained by something as simple as her forgetting to lock her bike consistently, locking it incorrectly, using poor locks, etc.
The 90s were a demographic golden age for Canada but people get old. This is a problem true of most of the western world and is upstream from almost any other issue.
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