No Food for Thought

Notre espèce est unique. Nous dominons les autres espèces de notre planète grâce à notre intelligence supérieure et les connaissances extraordinaires qu'elle nous offre.

Mais le revers de cette médaille est que notre espèce est aussi la plus vulnérable aux fausses croyances, ou ― de nos jours ― à la MDM. Récemment, une grande partie de la MDM provient de propagande et de désinformation, phénomènes relativement faciles à éviter. Mais une grande part pourrait venir d'une de nos failles encore plus inhérente à notre esprit particulier.

Les 20 minutes du segment Les faux souvenirs de l'émission Découverte ne lui permettent pas d'aller en détails dans ce phénomène. Mais l'anecdote sur laquelle il est basé est en soit suffisamment étonnante. Si le segment me laisse une certaine faim d'en savoir plus sur l'ampleur de ce phénomène, déjà, je ne peux m'empêcher de me questionner sur ses effets. À quel point ce phénomène participe aux dérives actuelles et à celles du passé? À quel point les gourous/prophètes des mythes ― souvent anciens, mais toujours à l'origine de nos plus grandes divisions actuelles ― étaient-ils conscients des faussetés qu'ils propageaient? À quel point les dictateurs et politiciens de notre ère post-vérité sont-ils encore aptes à distinguer leurs mensonges de la réalité? Et à quel point suis-je personnellement sujet à ce phénomène?

Notre espèce est la seule à disposer des moyens techniques pour enregistrer la réalité et pouvoir constater ses dérives. Elle est aussi la seule à connaître la psychose et d'autres phénomènes psychologiques favorisant les faux souvenirs. Mais pour endiguer la mésinformation et se remettre de toute la désinformation que nous avons accumulée, il nous faudra beaucoup de courage ― comme celui dont a fait preuve le journaliste Danny Lemieux en partageant son histoire ― pour remodeler notre environnement informationnel en capitalisant sur nos forces et en mitigeant nos faiblesses.

Grist has published a long but excellent article by Kate Yoder titled How the recycling symbol lost its meaning. But that article covers much more: a brilliant Greenpeace stunt in a garbage-filled world, the brilliantly simple symbol's surprisingly modest origins from "one-hit graphical wonder" Gary Anderson, then an architecture student, and how recycling was completely created by the private sector.

The one part of the article I am a bit skeptical about is the few paragraphs about the origins of wasting:

(I notified Grist that their "throwaway society" link is broken.)

One thing is clear though: if recycling is a creation of the private sector, it should be no surprise to witness the same sector largely stripping the logo of its meaning. Today's waste management chaos is another direct result of our costly collective failure to protect our environment.

The important inflation affecting Canadians has been well-known for years. What I wasn't aware of was our individual income has been decreasing for a long time, even though GDP is growing.

Indeed, due to how recessions are defined, a major phenomenon had been off the radars of mass media until now, but a July 2024 RBC report shows that Canada's per capita GDP has declined to 3.1% below 2019 levels.

So as the CBC explains in a long but interesting explanation, Canadians feel like they're in a recession even though economists disagree. The most interesting part, at 7 minutes, shows that Canada is by far the worst from 3 G7 countries suffering from such a "per capita recession".

Wikipedia is not exactly known for its reliability. Such a result is probably unavoidable when contributors are either amateurs or individuals in conflict of interest―even those most privileged.

But how great would it be if governments were to go beyond paying teachers and actually contribute to developing free content for the general public? Could public funding at long last turn the Internet into a reliable source of information?

No other innovator than the Russian Federation could be about to answer that, except... so far, its initiative has focused on creating a "trustworthy" (censored) version which fills the gap after Russia shut down the actual Wikipedia last year.

Better not hold our breaths…😒

J'aime depuis toujours l'émission Découverte et son animateur. Mais en regardant les sujets de l'épisode parlant de l'AVC de Charles Tisseyre, je me suis dit que celui-là devait être plutôt anecdotique.

Je ne regrette pas d'y avoir quand même jeté un œil, car j'ai finalement regardé l'entièreté (12 minutes) de ce reportage pas si anecdotique que ça. Difficile de dire s'il est plus rassurant qu'inquiétant, mais je l'ai certainement trouvé surprenant. J'en ai appris plus que j'aurais imaginé sur les AVCs… et plus que j'aurais voulu sur le système de santé public du Québec😒

En espérant que la situation se soit améliorée🤞 maintenant qu'on maîtrise mieux le SRAS,
Merci messieurs Tisseyre🙏

Ever since my friend Guillaume made me discover Google in the late 1990s, I never looked back. I've been using Google Search almost exclusively for a ¼-century, and I became a Gmail user even before its general availability. Google's Don't be evil ethics and work culture challenged my conception of what a job looks like and we considered working together in the late 2000s. I never cared much about privacy concerns, and as a citizen and software developer, Google has had a significant positive impact on my life, mostly through its services―Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps and Hangouts―and its numerous contributions to free software.

That hasn't stopped me from criticizing Google at times. When the Google Maps issue which angers me most was decried last year, a Slashdot user offered an interesting explanation, but which seemed exaggerated.

Now, my read of Edward Zitron's eye-opening The Man Who Killed Google Search―which casts light on how Google Search has been [mis]managed under Prabhakar Raghavan and other managers who have come to replace the innovators once in charge―makes the proposed explanation for that Google Maps issue almost unremarkable. Indeed, Google Search still has much room for improvement, and I was recently frustrated to notice it going backwards. The regression may have been too slow for me to realize, but in retrospect, it does seem like Google Search has become less satisfying.

This decay matches very well what I've been hearing about changes in Google's culture, which this article claiming it's become ‘unrecognizable’ summarizes pretty well. Of course, Google has to adapt to a more difficult geopolitical environment, and moving away from its former transparency may be unavoidable. But even from what I see as an outside collaborator, it feels like Google's management is indeed regressing. I'm not done yet realizing just how disastrous this year's Chromium issue tracking move from Monorail to the Google Issue Tracker was (and remains, even months after some of the serious regressions were reported), and Google visibly offers no way to export contents for those who would like to go back.

Oh, and what a disappointment it was to see Google's reaction to my latest report of a longstanding issue in Chromium. After 10 comments from Google employees, it seems there is no progress besides an employee having confirmed that it's "reproducible" (insofar as a mere request for enhancement can be reproduced). Would workers with the necessary skills have required 4 screencasts and that much noise to get there?

Ah, and let's not even get into Google Talk/Hangouts/Chat…😒

If the above truly represents what's happening at Google, its story is an appalling example of how inept corporations are at delivering this kind of technology. It seems that just like Boeing, Alphabet has lost its way. A rot economy wins in the context of a rotten society. And when you look at how our society treats successful innovators, you understand much better why such people make it to the top. Why would we make the effort of researching and managing, and hiring competent and reliable people, if―in the end―the government is to steal any extra profit?

I don't feel Google Search has gone back to Altavista's level, but I wonder if I can find a better search engine before that happens.

In April 2001, I was still 15 and knew very little about USA politics. Yet it took a single misleading and high-stakes declaration from its then-president brushing off the Kyoto Protocol to put him at the top of my personal blacklist:

If Bush's rejection of an insufficient and highly flawed protocol could be excused, its administration's inaction, and even its disruption of climatic disruption response, kept making its position on my blacklist well-deserved.

A couple decades of laissez-faire later, climatic disruption has become even more obvious and economically taxing, not just to American workers, but to shoppers worldwide, contributing alone to an estimated 1% of price inflation every year.

So what does the party "leader" most likely to become Canada's next Prime minister offer to "fight inflation"? Pierre Poilievre, "leader" of the federal party with the most voting intentions, is well aware of how us poor Canadians struggle with inflation. His solution: stop carbon pricing.

In the end, there are indeed a couple things the Conservative Party of Canada is good at conserving: short-termism and economic illusions.

KNP has been interested in conventions for decades. Notably, I have been trying to curb linguistic proliferation, hoping that an artificial language can optimize communication, improving communication quality and reducing the tremendous costs of language acquisition and communication between people who do not master a common language.

But beyond the societal costs of the uncontrolled number of languages, what are the personal costs of... dialects? Could a native speaker of an organization's common language lose much money just for not speaking its dominant dialect? A study suggests speaking "the wrong dialect" does cost, and a lot. According to the 2019 study The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents, linguistic differences not only cause discrimination, but a wage penalty estimated at a fifth! While this was studied on a personal angle, if true, this implies a major societal cost, directing workers to local employers and making it harder/costlier for organizations to grow geographically.

I can't help being skeptical about the importance of the difference, but I have am not surprised to find yet another cost of our linguistic chaos

En matière de santé, le Québec est fou d'égalité. En théorie, tous ont accès à des soins de santé gratuits.

En pratique, mon médecin de famille, qui travaille pour le système public, travaille dans une clinique privée (comme pour la majorité des Québécois). Hier, il m'a référé pour un examen à un spécialiste du secteur privé. Il m'a aussi dirigé vers une pharmacie privée pour une prescription de médicaments. Et bien sûr, la rémunération de tous ces divers travailleurs de la santé est différente.

Est-ce à dire que l'égalité en matière de santé est menacée? Oh non! Du moins, elle est encore bien ancrée à la Clinique médicale de Sillery :

On peut être rassurés que notre santé est entre bonnes mains : même les médecins ont les mêmes conditions de travail que les réceptionnistes (à part des rémunérations dans des ordres de magnitude différents), et cette égalité est prônée bien à la vue des clients!

Voir aussi

On ne fait pas dans les corridors ce qui va dans les toilettes

Le dérèglement climatique n'a rien de nouveau, à notre échelle de temps. Mais malgré tout ce que j'ai déjà lu à ce sujet, j'ai trouvé intéressant (et encore plus effrayant) la brève chronique Urgence aux pôles de Philippe J. Fournier.

Mais l'urgence aux pôles provient d'une urgence bien plus grande, touchant toutes nos juridictions. Combien d'extinctions et d'articles aussi éloquents et percutants nous faudra-t-il avant que nos gouvernements se préoccupent réellement de l'environnement? Quelle canicule faudra-t-il pour réveiller l'humanité?