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Joined May 2015
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Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Online activity regarding the Conservative Party of Canada is down 60% after Ukraine destroys largest Russian data centre
probably nothing
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
When Ukraine destroys Russian data centers, hoards of aggressive right-wing bots disappear, and Twitter becomes much friendlier. Isn’t that interesting? So much of our politics is driven by the internet, and so much of the internet is driven by Russians who want to hurt us. Shouldn’t we do something about that, given that we know it?
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
“But the stay option — the status quo — is equally risky. Albertans do not want the next 50 years to be a replica of the past 50 years; five decades during which Alberta was chronically vulnerable to predatory and destructive federal policies.” Good point. calgaryherald.com/opinion/co…
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
There is a second petition to the Government of Canada to sanction russian propagandist Alexander Ovechkin for supporting a violation of the sovereignty or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
This scumbag is not welcome in Canada.
ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/P…
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them.
The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else.
Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty.
His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Because, of course, they did. Not before Pierre Poilievre, Jason Kenney, and every other mouth breathing wannabe fake Christian and Maple MAGAT promoted it as fact for their Jesus-lovin ' hillbilly mob of human chum.
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Read this. It reminds me of a short story I read in a Harlan Ellison anthology when I was 15 about a super computer that wants to feel water, but also Herbert's Dune: what senses do we lack that prevent us from seeing a world around us?
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Holy cow
🟥Single-poll projection using Léger's latest federal numbers...
📊Details : 338canada.com/20260906-leg.h…
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
OK, I'm just going to come out and say what's on everybody's mind.
The US is being run by self-obsessed high school bullies right now who hate smart people and facts.
And the damage done to US standing internationally may no longer be repairable.
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Honey. Hey honey.
We have 15,430 beekeepers in Canada. We export about $60 million of honey a year, $40 million of that to the USA. That honey now has a 50% tariff and our farmers are going to have a tough time selling it.
Canada imports a lot of honey, about $73 million of it. Some of it isn’t even real honey (seriously it’s faked with rice and cane syrups eww).
Check the labels. As a country we are spending $73 million on imported honey and looking at loosing $40 million in exported honey to the USA. It’s kinda simple math. Buy Canadian honey.
Little things from many people will make a difference.
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Fears over datacenters are distorted along a few important axes:
1) anxiety over AI, future employment, and control; they symbolize what people fear they are losing,
2) compute centralization, which is actually probably not going to actually occur, because of financial fragility and an impending bubble burst,
3) powerful, deeply human fears of sacrificing arable land and potable water for technocratic overlords.
This latter is an extremely powerful force. If America wants to get past this successfully, focus on edge computing. That’s where things are going anyway and it will be infinitely easier to scale. “Frontier model companies” should focus on edge devices, not centralization.
Did we learn nothing from the PC/microcomputer revolution?
Duane Hawkins 🇨🇦 retweeted
Political operatives doubling down on any aspect of the status quo are in for a rude awakening; this present model of centralization is fragile and doomed. And the public, which is smarter than strategists give them credit for, knows this; they are tired of the boom-bust cycle of tech hypesterism, even as they understand that tech can and often does bring real progress.
FUD about falling behind China also falls flat — so what, they say? Do we want to be like China? Not exactly.
I see tech industry people (longtime peers, in some cases) asking how they can “regain trust” of the public? How about.. not trying to take over the government? not embracing insane cultish ideologies like Effective Altruism? not lionizing Ayn Rand? not manipulating the public, and thinking you’re better than everybody else? This is just for starters.
Roll up your sleeves and start solving practical problems: do better science, make better algorithms, lower power consumption, actually cure cancer (if any of this can), and humble yourselves in actual service to humanity and a shared American project.
Everyone is tired of your nonsense, and the datacenter issue is just the place where that can be most pragmatically expressed. Expect more resistance until you abandon financial gamesmanship and the endless philosophical sophistry. Enough. Get real, do real work, and work with society instead of against it.
Best summary of how we got here that I've seen
After the Berlin Wall fell we got very overconfident.
We thought Russia would democratize.
We thought China would move toward democratic capitalism.
The Communist Party had other plans.
Three catastrophic decisions followed.
1. We let China into the WTO unchecked, which hollowed out our manufacturing centers.
2. We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan with a tax cut, which was the first time in history we started a major war and cut taxes instead of raising them, which put us on a deficit trajectory we’ve never recovered from.
3. When the global financial crisis hit, we bailed out the banks and gave nothing to working and middle class people.
These decisions created the Tea Party, then Occupy Wall Street, and then those two got together, had a baby, and created MAGA.
Now we have anger-based populism from both directions, sharing the same economic desperation underneath very different costumes.
The current political leadership is not going to be the one that pulls us out of this.
They just don’t have the will for it.