ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
6d ago
Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.
From another case:
“Mr. Khant [accused of arranging sex with a 15-year old] is a permanent resident seeking Canadian citizenship and professional licensing,” wrote the judge. “A conviction would not only delay his citizenship by four years but could also prevent him from sponsoring his wife and obtaining his engineering licence.
To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.
If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.
Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.
ulyssessword
9d ago
or the tiresome cars/guns comparison?
I missed my chance at the time, so I'll put it here.
You want guns to be more like cars? Fine, let's do that. If the government wanted to spend a few billion on public gun ranges all across the country, mandated a gun safe in every new house, added firearm safety to the highschool curriculum, bailed out failing manufacturers, and also let people build/buy/use them freely outside of the new infrastructure they built, then I'd be pretty happy. Heck, I'd even compromise on that last point if they did the rest.
ulyssessword
9d ago
AI companies all fail at naming things. There was:
- Claude 3.5 (June 2024)
- Claude 3.5 (October 2024)
- Claude 3.7 (Feb 2025)
You're probably thinking of the one between the original 3.5 and 3.7.
ulyssessword
12d ago
Heading off on a tangent, mini-desktops are pretty good now. I wouldn't want one as my daily driver, but they're completely capable of running a web browser, and therefore 95% of everything most people do.
ulyssessword
13d ago
Anything can be a UFO is you're bad enough at identifying flying objects.
ulyssessword
14d ago
As always, there's a relevant XKCD (even if it came out after the comment was posted).
ulyssessword
17d ago
Is there a nutjob substitution effect?
I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.
Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?
ulyssessword
17d ago
Do they need the protections?
I can see the benefit of writing every law broadly and neutrally based on unchanging principles, but at the same time there's no practical difference between "any country affected by X (it's just Israel)" and "Israel (because it's the only country affected by X)".
As an example, Google negotiated an exemption from Canada's Online News Act (otherwise it would have to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to journalists, negotiated individually), and the bill calls out the #1 search engine in Canada instead of naming them explicitly.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.
Tell that to the FEMA employee that told workers to skip Trump-voting houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. Anti-White discrimination may be a hard sell, but it's not impossible.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Thanks, I chuckled. Hadn't seen that one before.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Yeah.
Put bluntly, children looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of what it would take for an adult to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. It's very overdetermined:
- adults looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. Children are even worse at predicting those differences.
- Children looking at taking care of a normal child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a normal adult (including themselves). This is just a standard part of growing up.
Same goes for any other developmental disorder, of course. I'd take them even less seriously than if they wanted to be a princess or an astronaut.
ulyssessword
18d ago
Can you explain how you got there?
FYI, no he can't. He was permabanned for this post (although the ban wasn't linked properly so the little symbol doesn't show up).
ulyssessword
18d ago
Why am I getting vibes of renowned author Dan Brown?
ulyssessword
18d ago
She found out Jaxon might have Down's syndrome after being persuaded to have an extra screening and a blood test due to her age.
...
Lorraine and her husband Mark declined all further testing. They wanted to keep their baby, no matter what.
...
Jaxon was diagnosed at birth and Lorraine says the family has never looked back. She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.
ulyssessword
19d ago
This is the classic counterargument to the straight line proving OSHA's ineffectiveness.
TL;DR: Lots of provably important thing don't make jumps in other lines, so it's probably that people (governments, companies, the public) set a goal of X%/year, and that was one thing they used to reach it.
ulyssessword
23d ago
The joke here is that Business students had to take Math 440 (Math 110, four times). I can't see them getting any use out of the fact that the derivative of sin(x) is cos(x), but the derivative of cos(x) is -sin(x).
That being said, they have to know how rates of change can affect the amount of something, how to add a simple and predictable series of something into a total, and so on. That is calculus, in its simplest form.
ulyssessword
26d ago
But now I'm curious what is acceptable to judge people about. Let's say you're walking to your workplace or your university class or your school and you see...
Yes to your entire list. It's acceptable to judge people based on their fashion choices, including clothes, hair, piercings, tattoos, or other body mods. Note that "choices" excludes medical devices like braces, and accepts external constraints like dress codes, weather/dirt/hazard resilience, etc.
I typically don't care about most of that, but me choosing to judge them neutrally doesn't mean that you should be forced to share my opinion.
ulyssessword
26d ago
Clearly, some men have tattoos, some don't, and some belong to the secret third category. There are more men in the first category than either the second or third, but not more than both combined.
Or the women have A) tattoos, and B) a plurality of the men. The remainder are unattached or with other men.
Or it was a mistaken use of the word.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Let's be very generous and say $0.07 per kilowatt hour (approximately retail prices). 1 gigawatt year is therefore $613.7M, while 5000 kg of gold (at $150k/kg, which is slightly high) is $750M.
So it's not even a powerplant that produces gold as a coproduct, it's a gold plant that also produces power.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves:
From NYT (I bypass the paywall by F12 to inspect the source, and delete < head > ):
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
No "according to" or anything for that statement, and it was last updated on March 28, 2022, compared to the clarification the First Nation put out in July 2021 (and another in May 2024).
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
The Law Society of British Columbia isn't a journalistic organization, but that's exactly what they were claiming. The Left (i.e. all of the media except the countercultural ones) has run away from the story so hard that the only coverage is coming from the Right.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I'm going to guess without strong evidence that the vast majority of the views on the toronto article are of the corrected version.
I couldn't find the precise time to correction for the Toronto Star, but Global News was 5.5 hours. This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Regarding the bodies, I would hazard to guess that the articles themselves are not technically "wrong" and therefore do not warrant correction.
That would be incorrect. There are no reputable claims of bodies being there, and none have been unearthed or "confirmed". The Law Society of British Columbia (at a minimum, among other groups) is going against the findings of the First Nation in question, who are in charge of the site. The bodies were hallucinated into being four years ago, and they're still around now.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
You're talking about Doug Saunders? And not the Canadian Press, Toronto Star, Global News, Globe and Mail, or Duane Bratt?
I don't put much stock in corrections, even ignoring the speed and prevalence. If you depend on corrections to fix errors, then you've committed to either ignoring every headline you see in favor of a delayed summary, or else tracking each news story and following up after the appropriate amount of time to check for any changes.
How long am I supposed to wait before a non-breaking news story becomes reliable? If you choose to give them four years, then you might still be disappointed.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Building off of yesterday's discussion of AI hallucinations, there's a new story about journalist hallucinations. Of course they don't call it that: the journalists "got them wrong" and gave a "false impression" in their articles/tweets instead. They're talking about Alberta's new book ban (pdf of bill) which restricts sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In short, it:
- fully bans explicit sexual content (essentially porn, must be detailed)
- restricts non-explicit sexual content (like above, but not detailed) to grade 10 and up and only if "developmentally appropriate"
- does not restrict non-sexual content (medical, biological, romantic, or by implication)
The journalists were saying that non-sexual content (e.g. handholding) would be restricted like non-explicit sexual content, and therefore be unavailable until grade 10. One even went so far as to hallucinate get something wrong and give people the false impression that he was right and the government edited its releases to fix their mistake, which is why you can't find it now.
Yes, AIs hallucinate, but buddy, have you seen humans? (see also: the "unmarked graves" story (paywalled), where ground penetrating radar anomalies somehow became child remains with no investigation having taken place.) When I set my standards low, it's not because I believe falsehoods are safe, it's because the alternatives aren't great either.
I still get surprised at how fast computers can do basic tasks.
A few weeks ago, I had to compare some entries in a .csv list to the filenames that were buried a few layers deep in some subfolders. It went through the thousands of items in an instant. I didn't even bother saving the output because I could regenerate it as fast as doubleclicking a file (or faster if it has to do something silly like opening Microsoft Word).
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