On that subject, does anybody hate the term “Sprint” as much as I do?

“Sprints” are extremely quick events that last tens of seconds and are done at most once a day, but more often (in competition) a few times a month, or a few times in a day every few months.

You don’t sprint for a full week every week. That’s a marathon, maybe an ultra-marathon.

Especially when they’re called “standups” but everybody sits down because they typically last an hour or so.

Tag it how?

It is strategic for Canada to invest in its air force because:

1. Hmm, what happened in that far northern area? We should go check it out. Oh wait, we don’t have planes to do that.
2. Russia attacks Finland. Finland calls for help from its NATO allies. Canada sends its air force.
3. Every single flight from Europe to the US west coast flies over Canada. Even flights from Europe to Mexico City pass over Atlantic Canada. One of those flights stops responding and there’s a fear it was hijacked. Oh well, I guess the USAF can check it out once it crosses the border… if it crosses the border.

You can see some of the absurdities of not having a proper air force in Switzerland. They used to have an Air Force that only operated during daytime business hours. In 2014 an Ethiopian Airlines pilot hijacked his own plane and landed it in Geneva. Italy and France scrambled to escort the plane through their airspaces. Switzerland had to just let it do what it wanted because their Air Force didn’t operate 24 hours a day.

In fact, for a huge and nearly empty country like Canada, the air force is arguably the most important military branch. Since prehistoric times, the size of a country / kingdom / empire was defined by the region in which it had a monopoly on the use of force. If Canada wants to claim sovereignty over the entire North, and not just the Montreal to Toronto corridor, it needs to be able to notice an invasion in the north, attack anybody there tying to claim its territory, and transport soldiers up there if necessary. That’s all Air Force stuff.

A modern Air Force might not mean fighter pilots in supersonic planes. As things in Ukraine have shown, it might instead be mostly drones.

The demo would be a lot more impressive if the questions you were asking weren’t longer than the extremely simple SQL queries it generates.

There’s a joke about that:

One economist says to the second “I’ll give you $10,000 if you eat that pile of dog shit.” The second economist reluctantly agrees, but the smug look on the other guy’s face makes him regret it. He sees another pile of dog shit and offers the first economist $10,000 to eat it. The first one agrees, $10,000 is a lot of money.

Afterwards, both economists are sitting there, dog shit smeared on their faces. One says to the other “What a waste! We both have the same money we started with, but we both had to eat dog shit.”

The second replies: “That’s absurd, in just a few minutes we grew the economy by $20,000!”

The optimistic scenario for the economy is a pessimistic scenario for the world.

For the economy to do well would require the AI bubble to not pop. It would mean that these absurd valuations for the AI companies turn out to be correct. That all the circular financing somehow comes good and all these ridiculous-seeming bets about the future of AI turn out to be at least partially correct. It will require that the companies that fired workers to replace them with chatbots turned out to have made a good and profitable decision. It’s the scenario where Musk becomes a trillionaire.

Let’s be real, oil / petroleum / gasoline / aviation gas are going to be part of the economy for decades. Countries are going to get by with less oil, but not without oil. There are things like planes that really require a very energy dense source of energy. There are other things like buses and local delivery trucks that can do fine with batteries, but where vehicles are an investment that is paid off over a decade. The new ones might be electric, but the old ones won’t be replaced soon. This might have accelerated the transition in a significant way, but oil is such a big part of everything that it’s still going to be around for a long time.

What I hope is that there are countries, say in Africa, that never really fully industrialized with an oil-based economy. Hopefully they can skip right past that and start with clean energy right from the start.

What do they mean “touches $100 a barrel”? It has been at or above $100/barrel for almost 2 months now.

It’s hard to know the future. People’s habits are hard to change. But, sometimes there’s a change that’s significant enough and people don’t go back.

In the current world where people were already switching to photovoltaics and EVs before the crisis, it’s easy to imagine that a lot of people who switch because of the crisis won’t be going back if oil gets cheap again.

Also, from what I’ve read, each week that the Straight of Hormuz is closed will take about a month for things to get back to normal. So, at this point, we’re already talking years before things could go back to normal. Plus, if this results in another major recession, by the time the economy comes back it might look completely different.

I don’t think a lot of Canadians or Mexicans are going to be able to afford to go to the games in their own countries. They may be hosting, but the ticket prices are absurd.

If the World Cup has a lot of half empty stadia, I’d be happy.

It might be interesting if the Mexican and Canadian stadia were full though.

F1 races are also hotbeds of human trafficking.

According to some Russian propaganda conspiracy forum?

There may be some races, but ladies, that’s not why your husband is there.

Sure, nobody who goes to a race goes to see cars drive quickly…

The JLTV apparently has a curb weight of 6.4 tonnes, that’s almost 4x the weight of the modern oversized F150 at 1.8 tonnes. Not ideal for a post-collapse world where energy is expensive.

Those Stadium Super Trucks though. Also impractical, but those sure are goofy fun to watch.

Jeeps were really innovative when they were created… in World War 2. That’s when they really were off-road vehicles. The pattern was repeated again with the Humvee, or HMMVW. It’s not just converted military vehicles either. It’s also race cars and rally cars. Some series have rules that to be legal a car also has to be a production model. Sometimes if you get that exact model you get a race-capable car. But, mostly the cars they sell are variants of the race design, which maintain the fast-looking design, but one which would handle terribly if you put it on an actual racetrack.

Because we know it’s true, and we hate it.

What’s interesting is that the Voting Rights Act has been used to gerrymander states to elect more GOP members.

The way you gerrymander is by creating one area that overwhelmingly goes for one party, and a bunch of other areas that very slightly go the other way. It’s often hard to come up with a legal pretext to do that (back when that sort of thing mattered). The voting rights act said that not only was it legal to create districts that would give black voters a majority, it was necessary. How do you do that? You group all the black voters together into one district, thereby creating a strong democratic-voting district. What side effect does that have? It creates a bunch of other districts that are not democratic-leaning so the overall state goes Republican.

If other laws still mattered, Republicans might have been fighting to save the VRA because it was their best tool to legally gerrymander in their favour. But, with the modern “laws don’t matter lol” supreme court, it’s different.

I don’t think so. Good things can’t happen because of human nature: making good things happen involves groups making decisions, and in every group there are bound to be some assholes because that’s human nature, that limits the kinds of good things that can happen.

And that they’ve observed that once groups reach a certain size, it’s inevitable that the group contains at least one asshole.

It’s like the fable of the scorpion and the frog. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to cross the river. It just means that you need a more complex plan than just carrying the scorpion across on your back.

It’s the nature of humanity that in any reasonably sized group, there are always a few assholes.