Yeah, they should clarify that being at the G7 and also being a convicted felon is unusual.

Came here to say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became obese because of the 33 years he put into the job, always working and not having enough time to himself to self-care.

The party I’m calling centrist is viewed as centre-left here by the media and general public.
Greens and Labor split each other’s votes, not Labor and LNP.

Sounds reasonable enough, actually.

(Why about 20% of left-wing voters prefer the right-wing over the centre I will never understand.)

Hmm, puzzling. If they were USians then I’d suggest that it was because they confused over the name (liberals are always on the left, right?) but I digress.

Ah, but it was never that.

Isn’t it though? As you wrote,

The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor

Just as it’d be confusing why left-wing voters would support a right-wing party over a centrist or centre-left party, it’d be equally confusing why right-wing voters would support a left-wing party (the Greens) over the centrist one. Well, sounds like they didn’t.

(With IRV of course it’s not that this happened because of a split vote but that because Labor had more support in the first preference that it survived over the Greens, when normally it’d be the other way around - so the specific reasons are different and a bit more complex, but this specific result which occurred is intuitive to someone who only understands FPTP. More generally, both FPTP and IRV suffer from spoiler effects (as explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler/_effect ) - while IRV is better than FPTP there are still cases where spoiler effects can happen and this example of a Green losing to a Labor due to a loss of support by the LNP is one of them - it just feels more intuitive to someone familiar with FPTP because this is the worst when it comes to spoiler effects).

we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.

I didn’t realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!

In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.

Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you’d expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)

I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.

Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.

I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.

I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it’s not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,

(Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)

So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.

a proportional system would be better.

And here too.

This is awful. He was sentenced to four years but ended up serving five. One wonders if the false confession actually helped reduce the time at all in that case. (I don’t doubt that he would have signed anyways, not after being deprived of food and water and being beaten for two days straight, but still… it’s even worse if signing was pointless.)

Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.

Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can’t be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.

Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.

That being said I do think there’s many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.

The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp=&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada’s CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.

I mean it’s not really needed in Europe where true legal rights exist for employees, right?

This is more of a “only in the USA” kind of thing.

My solution to this is that I accept the other job offer, and I don’t quit until the night before I start my first day in the new one. As a result I’ve never spent a single day unemployed. If something I’m counting on doesn’t come through I’m already at my backup plan.

If companies won’t be loyal to us in this way, why do we owe any loyalty to them in return?

In fairness it wasn’t just adding bike lines in Paris that did it, as per the byline

Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic

Which just means in addition to adding more bike lines (rather than removing the ones we already have), we should also restrict car traffic in this city of Toronto to get ahold of the local air pollution problem here.

In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark in 2023 and 2024.

Hmm, Denmark you say?

Also Denmark,

Denmark doesn’t have at-will employment. Employers may only terminate an employee with just cause and sufficient notice. Just cause can include financial reasons or employee misconduct.

https://www.rippling.com/country-hiring/denmark-employees

Actually, perhaps this points at a way forward… we should employment laws in the US that match those of Denmark.

Not following how his inability to find a job has any connection to AI?

It’s in the fortune article:

some of those few interviews have been with an AI agent instead of a human.
“I feel super invisible,” K tells Fortune. “I feel unseen. I feel like I’m filtered out before a human is even in the chain.”

That is, he’s getting fewer chances to establish a human-to-human connection to an interviewer, which is hurting his ability to get hired.

The bigger picture is that folks are indeed losing jobs to AI, have had their jobs cut because of AI, see

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/klarna-ceo-says-ai-helped-company-shrink-workforce-by-40/ar-AA1EMHG6

Software engineer here - I make more than this guy did and I have roughly the same amount of experience in the industry that he does (perhaps a smidge more, going off of his linkedin profile).

For folks who are saying that there’s something off about this guy - that would not have mattered two or three years ago. At most he would have just been seen as a highly talented dev who was also slightly quirky.

For those who say it’s not about AI and more about the economy - well, maybe. We do have a couple of major ongoing wars right now and moves over the last couple of months by the recent administration of the US haven’t helped.

But I was around during the crash back in 2008, and this still feels different. Harder. Before, I had recruiters just banging on my door. Now, it’s tough to past the automated screenings unless I have a contact at the company who can refer me there.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing from my co-workers about how great AI is - how they ran their code through it and it came up with a bunch of unit tests for them and some boilerplate code. Vibe coding is already a thing. So is using AI to write your resume and cover letters and applying to jobs.

Likewise, I look upon tools like Devin.ai with increasing trepidation. Today, LLMs aren’t good enough to replace a single senior dev, despite a lot of investment happening to move things in exactly this direction. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, or even next year. But in 25?

Let’s just say that this article really hit home for me.

The other point here is - the day that a person with no coding ability can ask an LLM to create and deploy an entire website, write and manage a brand new app from scratch, is going to be a day that’s a win for the people. We want to lower the barriers to entry here, to give this highly elite power to others. Actually, there shouldn’t be an elite at all - there should just be a democracy where everyone is equally empowered to create and build great things.

Working in tech will not remain this vaulted, lofty place for much longer. If we aren’t content creators, or controlling company owners, then ultimately tech workers like myself are in the same position as any other kind of worker - we work for someone else and serve only at their sufferance.

It will have to go to court at this point but EC has done nothing wrong in terms of the recount.

Agreed. This isn’t the step where the EC did wrong - it was earlier in putting the wrong postal code on the envelope that caused it to be returned.

You make it sound like a conspiracy that they counted more votes for the Liberals.

Not the OP but - I’d agree that this is definitely not the case. It seems to instead be a clear and accidental mistake on the part of whoever handled the printing of the envelope.

Now, while it’s definitely troubling if the overall vote can be swung by an “administrative error” of some sort, there’s no evidence that this happened more than in this one case. And thus it only matters because the final call was done to having a single vote more for the Liberal candidate.

If it was down to even just two votes for the Liberal candidate instead, getting this lost vote counted would not have changed the results. So definitely not a conspiracy.

They’re doing everything by the book.

I guess the point here is - laws can be changed. Perhaps not retroactively this specific case, but going forward the laws can be updated to better handle situations like this in the future where EC made a mistake.

This is a totally different situation, but when I went to exchange my expired driver’s license at Service Ontario, one of the first workers that I saw there made a mistake and incorrectly refused my abstract.

I had to return after a weekend, and spoke with someone else who acknowledged the issue. At this point I was technically outside the 1-year window by a couple of days to be able to perform the exchange - but I wouldn’t have been if not for their mistake. Luckily for me, they were empowered to correct it and accept the exchange.

So - is there a compelling reason to avoid granting EC the ability to correct their own mistakes, particularly in a clear-cut situation like this one?

They’re following the law.

Never stated otherwise.

They never saw the vote. They can’t count it,

I get what you’re saying, but it’s still disturbing that EC can cause a mistake of this nature and not have the ability to rectify it.

Certainly this isn’t the worst case of disenfranchisement by Elections Canada (see for example https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/this-is-unacceptable-polling-station-problems-prompt-calls-for-investigation/ )

it has to go to court.

Thinking it over, there’s a good counterargument here. Even if EC could directly order a by-election in this case (or even was given the power to just outright count the vote), someone would contest this and it’d likely end up before a judge at some point anyways. So might as well just go direct.

Then make an application to a judge to challenge the result and they will have to count it.

I’m not sure that I’m eligible to do this…

Truly, it should be the BQ that does it. I’m guessing they will in the coming days.

Agreed. This isn’t so bad, at least there’s a way forward.

Agreed. What an unfortunate finding by EC. As a matter of principle I believe every vote should have a chance to get counted.

Right? It’s not a difficult concept to understand, not at all.

Not AI related, but reminds me of what happened at X when Musk let a bunch of folks quit and then had to beg for some of them to return. This is another example of a poorly thought out boomerang.

When we did drivers ed in Ontario, our class instructor introduced us to ratehub.ca for this sort of thing - that was for auto but it looks like they let you compare home insurance rates.

Agree 100%

I was having a discussion the other day with someone and it was pointed out that pp grew the number of seats for the CPC and strengthened their position in winning the next election. Thus, unlike Jagmeet Singh of the NDP or Peter Dutton of the centre-right Liberal Party of Australia (who oversaw massive losses in their party) Dutton deserves to win a seat back and remain the leader of the CPC as well as the opposition leader.

Actually, I’m looking for a good, well reasoned counterargument to this (for when I bring it up again tomorrow).