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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • AI is the 2020s version of Tulip Mania. It’s just fancy Google that elaborates, but you can’t trust the results it gives you, because it lies worse than my five year old on his way back from a late night trip to the cookie jar. It makes funny pictures of Mario committing 9/11 and all sorts of useless funny stuff that has kids smoking cigarettes at McDonalds with hot dogs for fingers. Which is great and all, but I can’t figure the last time I actually needed a picture of kids smoking cigarettes at McDonalds…

    And it sucks and you can always tell when something’s AI because it’s crap. Boomers can’t, but they also can’t do most other things, so I mean that’s not really a reliable metric of its actual success either.

    Boomer fuel is all it is. The new paperless society. It’s going to take my job, except my job will be on my doorstep a month later begging me to come back.


  • I feel like it’s boomer fuel, this AI. What actual use does it have, like it’s supposed to be changing my life, putting me out of a job, turning all of my hard work into nothing. Robots giving me handjobs and all of that. None of this is happening.

    No, the only thing that is happening, is a bunch of late 50s and 60 year old executives running around at work like a bunch of robots. AI AI AI AI AI AI Beep Beep Boop AI AI AI AI AI AI


  • I just actually finished this book, not 10 minutes ago. My overarching TL;DR summary of it, in one sentence is this: For being an international lawyer, she’s pretty naive.

    We all know Facebook is a morally bankrupt circus, that’s been well known for quite some time. The Social Network taught us that he’s a pretty selfish terrible person (plus a weirdo). That movie came out in like, what, 2010? If she thought she could single handedly change this, which she pretty clearly does, the conclusions already written that it’ll be a leopards ate my face moment.

    I’m glad she shared her story, no it’s not fair, and I hope it’s brought her some peace. But I have to be honest that it was a slog getting through that book.






  • They are going down the toilet, because they are distracted. Look, they were the most reliable EV, and they were at the forefront of the EV revolution. They built the most robust and reliable charging network (one of the key reasons we went with Tesla over Hyundai or other options), and flipped the automotive retail marketplace on their head.

    But they also unfortunately have their hard work and progress overshadowed by a complete narcissistic manchild of a CEO. Who somehow controls the company with only 17% of shares held, who has a corrupt and compromised board on his side that will cater to his every little whims. A CEO who gets distracted, first with this Cybertruck nonsense, then X, then SpaceX, who then derails all innovation and future development with everyone focused on this autopilot distraction, and now all this. If I was a shareholder, I’d be furious. As a customer, I’m not sure I can rely on them anymore (could I ever?), so my future purchasing decisions will be made with that in mind.

    What goes up, must come down I guess. Sigh.



  • It’s just going to be everyone else to blame for everything (everyone but me, the conservative creed), and the corruption will ramp up. Look at Alberta.

    Think with your big heads and not your small ones, Canada. This party is not the conservatives of yesterday, they do not care about you and me (billionaires and corporations only), and just take a look down south as to how far things can get carried away. Remember PP handing out donuts to the convoy? Pepperidge Farm remembers…




  • Inflation’s “sticky”. It took 5 years to get rid of COVID-related inflation, and it went up for quite a while before starting to go down. This is quite a bit more substantial, and it will take a long time for the effects on the overall broader economy to recede. The inflation itself will take about 1.5 years to fully work it’s way through the system, but there’s also going to be a larger scale contraction on GDP, which will very likely put the US and many of it’s trade countries into recession as well. This will likely have a negative impact on wages. The US is also very much going to have a supply problem, which is going to then also put upward inflationary pressures on a lot of products.

    Anytime a government interferes or puts in measures that affect trade, positively or negatively, it throws everything out of whack.





  • No doubt we have a lot of production capabilities, and you are right, I’m sure you could piece most of the rest together. The marketplace is the biggest conundrum, I would propose. All those manufacturing facilities are in SW Ontario, so the only way to get them to other markets (which is going to be necessary here, because the Canadian marketplace isn’t big enough), it is going to involve ocean liners. Which is feasible, but your margins are going to get cooked here. There’s too much risk.

    This ain’t the industry Canada needs to double down on, in a suddenly protectionist world. It’s natural resources, and maybe service related. And hopefully all sorts of other industries that we aren’t even thinking about.


  • I’m worried too. I was born and raised in SW Ontario, so most of my family and friends work in some sort of auto manufacturing or automotive-related industry. It’s already been pretty bad the past decade or so, this will likely be the death knell if it grows legs.

    Fun fact, did you know that there was actually even electric cars made in the late 1800s? Some even in Canada. Car companies in this era all eventually failed though, or merged into other companies. There wasn’t ever really any production volumes in auto until Oldsmobile and Ford came onto the scene, especially with the latter who established the golden standard of auto production lines.


  • I wasn’t guessing. I cut my teeth in automotive. I have an education in automotive engineering, amongst other things, and I have extensive working experience at both the retailer, and Tier 1 and 2 manufacturing experience earlier in my career. Not proclaiming to be the end all be all, or the smartest person in the world, or that I know much of anything, but I’m also far from being the village idiot on this topic.

    It ain’t happening bud, I’m sorry. There’s not enough marketplace to recover the costs, it would be complicated to transport finished goods to other markets, especially considering that most of the manufacturing facilities are located in southern Ontario. Which means you’d have to pretty much stick everything on a ship, and that adds costs, versus trucking to the states. It obviously can be done, easily enough, but it cuts into margins at higher production levels. Margins aren’t high in this industry, and the labour is mostly unionized, or very quickly will be if it’s not, and that adds a dearth of costs. Volatility in commodities pricing alone would be enough to knock something like this into non-profitable territory. It likely wouldn’t be profitable for a decade either. Even look at something like Tesla, it took them 17 years to turn a profit, and it actually doesn’t really turn a profit from its cars, it’s actually from the sale of environmental credits.

    If you are going to see any automotive investment and new OEMs, something like a new Tesla or whatever, it’s almost certainly going to be in Europe, not North America. Donald Trump has all but guaranteed that there’s not going to be one dime spent in deepening or expanding automotive manufacturing capabilities spent here, for quite a while, likely a decade or more if he keeps it up. Canada has learned its lesson here, and I would imagine if anything happens in the automotive sector, it’ll be a contraction, not an expansion. Even as close as four of five months ago, there have been new plans launched for factory expansion and construction of tier 1 suppliers in Southwestern Ontario, but I would bet you that’ll be off now. We’ll have to wait and see though, only those closest to the projects will know, and nobody else’s crystal ball can predict the future.

    And let’s not even begin to consider that China is foaming at the mouth to dump mostly state backed, very viable electric cars here, for a fraction of the price tag that we’ve been paying. We aren’t going to be able to block that off forever, they’ll find a way around the tariffs eventually. How are you going to compete with that?