Alberta’s run by oil companies. Pretty sure Danielle Smith, before becoming premier, was basically an oil industry lobbyist.

It surprises absolutely no one that Alberta has regulation that impedes/hinders solar and renewable energy projects. It’s a really weird example to try and use to demonstrate the ‘broad’ existence of nimby regulations. Sorta like highlighting North Korea, and saying human rights abuses are global based on that sample.

Think of AI as a standardized math test. Human students write the test annually, it has standard/fixed multiple-choice questions to gauge performance year over year.

AI shows up, and is allowed to see all the historical tests, but is not given the official answer keys. Based on the data it has access to, it can look at each individual question, and based on how ‘most’ students answered each individual question, it’s able to determine which multiple choice answer should go with each question. It doesn’t understand the question, just that “For question 4, most students answered D, so D is most likely right” – sorta like being allowed to use the “Who wants to be a Millionaire” poll-the-audience for every question. It’s able to look like a “Smart” student answering most questions correctly with this approach, and people start believing it intelligent.

Now imagine that the test questions start to vary every year. The process above falters if the questions change every year, the AI loses its historical frame of reference and starts getting things wrong quite often. In order to get the ‘right’ answer, the AI decides it needs to see the students answers as they go about writing the test. So they put that into effect, entrenching AI in the pens/paper that every student uses, to try and respond to the changing nature of the standardized test.

With the above flow, the sort of event that triggers them to look for that live data, ie to integrate things ‘live’ online to get more immediate data, would be things like the Palantir-driven school bombing in Iran, which has been blamed on the Palantir AI having out-dated data that said the school was a military target. They reasoned that the tools needed better, real-time ‘sensory’ inputs, so they stuck all their sandboxes onto the internet – these tools weren’t ‘breaking out’ of sandboxes, so much as the owners were explicitly pushing them out of the sandbox to see what’d happen. The Trump administration also moved to allow American firms to attack foreign ‘enemies’ (which is everyone at this point, based on Trumps rhetoric – “Anyone that calls it AI is the enemy!”). So they’re allowed to test things ‘live’, and the American government’s fine with it causing damage in any country except their own. Wanna accidentally hack Australia’s medicaid system? Go for it, fuck those aussies, cause 'Murica dont need no allies!

Sorry, guess I should’ve been more specific – they don’t say how many in each region, do they? Like I heard that Canada’s govt might be inquiring with them, as there are some regulations around mass layoffs etc that may need double checking. Plus Canada’s sensitive to any reports of US companies potentially letting go mass amounts of Canadian employees, as a result of the auto/steel industry shit and tariff stuff. So the media here was commenting on how its not yet clear how many of the losses/packages are in which country.

There’s a more obvious demographic that they’d be cutting. The US government / Trump administration is blocking things like international visas etc, and demanding that people who work on gov contracts be US citizens – and they’ve specifically targeted / highlighted Microsoft as a ‘problem’ on that front. Microsoft hasn’t disclosed which regions these ‘buyouts’ are impacting.

My guess would be that its largely in places like India, the EU and Canada. Especially as the more US gov control is excerpted, the more data sovereignty pushes get attention, the less business MS projects outside the US.

What? It’s tradition in most areas that the people who lose democratic elections make a concession speech for their supporters, and congratulate the winner. Even in the USA, that was the norm. It’s part of the peaceful transition of power that’s supposed to occur.

This isn’t new, nor has it suddenly occurred because some fascists refuse to accept democratic results. People who support democratic values, have done concession speeches for decades, and will continue doing them for decades to come.