There are probably enough school essays in most AI training sets to represent a measurable percentage. (Although there is probably a much larger percentage of pornographic fan fiction with subliterate spelling and grammar, so maybe we should be glad that we’re only getting bad high school essays.)

A negative number.

Well, duh. Safety equipment is one of those categories of things that you have to be careful of even if you’re buying new, given the existence of cheap Chinese counterfeit items and Amazon’s willingness to pass them off. Buy new from a brick-and-mortar store, or do your research and check certifications as well as age and condition and claimed history. Which route you go depends on whether you have more time or more money available to you.

It’s sad for the animals and the injured humans,

Dead humans. If you’re talking about moose, at least part of the time the result is dead humans—an elementary school classmate of mine (in northern Ontario) lost an uncle that way. Serious damage to cars often means serious damage to occupants.

Collisions with the local bears tended to be worse for the bears than the humans, because bears are lighter and lower to the ground then moose. They were also much rarer, because bears are less likely to stand in the middle of a narrow highway with a 90km/h speed limit and just chill.

There’s a good chance that this happened in part because they still haven’t ironed out the racial bias in the training data sets for these systems—Mr. Parks appears to be dark-skinned.

He’s hoping everyone will be drunk enough not to notice whose name they’re checking off on the ballot during the next election, since this is his second term and three consecutive terms is unusual for an Ontario Premier.

By circa 1990, I believe the course was called Life Skills or something of that ilk, and was not mandatory. (I didn’t take it, although it would have been one hell of a lot more useful than PhysEd, I’m sure.) We did cover some related material in math classes at various points.

Really, you coulld put this in elementary schools—none of it needs more than fourth-grade math. Basic arithmetic operations, percentages, decimal points.

Too bad the map legend is unreadable on my browser—flies off to the right when opened. Although I doubt it would tell me anything I didn’t already know.

When you think about it, triage in medicine is also not an ideal solution. Ideally, in both medicine and law, the system would have enough capacity to deal with everyone in strict first-in-first-out order without anyone being harmed. In the absence of that capacity, we have to decide which cases to look at first somehow, and FIFO doesn’t appear to be the best basis for making that decision.

We need more judges too, but even if we were to somehow force legislators to select them this instant, some cases would end up getting dropped before the backlog got caught up. I’d much prefer that they were things like solicitation, small-amount drug posession, and minor traffic violations—not petty theft if we can help it, since that isn’t a victimless crime, but I’d nevertheless rather have ten petty theft cases dropped than one assault case that landed someone in the hospital.

It’s a flawed solution for a flawed world.

The problem is that the courts don’t prioritize, and we’re at a point where we need to triage. Cases involving death or serious bodily harm should be jumping the queue, and victimless crimes sent to the back of the bus.

Heroin was originally developed as a pharmaceutical, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it is still being manufactured and distributed as such somewhere in the world. Morphine has certainly never gone out of style.

Can’t patent them, so it isn’t as lucrative a revenue stream as something they have exclusive rights to. Whether or not it works is always secondary.

Most of those responsible are probably dead—the Kamloops school closed in 1978 after ~85 years of use, and there would have been more deaths earlier in the school’s existence. Assuming staff members were at least 20 years old, the youngest of them would now be in their late 60s, and the testimonies of the surviving students would be more useful in bringing them to account.

Whether the remains need to go home to their families is something the families have to agree upon. Some might prefer that the remains be left undisturbed. Religious beliefs may factor in, and may differ between tribes—it’s unlikely that all the victims were local.

Or they’re still having an internal dispute and it’s moving at a glacial pace. It happens.

And actually, in some cases they have been dug up, by accident or by design. There have also been one or two cases of human remains in unmarked graves near former residential schools being revealed by erosion. It’s only the recent ground-penetrating radar scans that haven’t been verified by excavation, including those in Kamloops.

The question is, how necessary is it to verify that the graves of the missing children are at the specific locations pointed out by the radar and other scans? I would say “not very”, but I’m not someone whose opinion matters in this.

Part of the issue with raising retirement age, though, is that you can only go so far before the majority of people are unfit to work. Things like osteoarthritis have a much larger effect on your ability to work than they do on your life expectancy. Plus, the burden of continuing to work disproportionately falls on poor people whose work is more physical—well-educated people with desk jobs usually earn more money, have somewhat better savings, and can thus afford to retire a few years before their government pension kicks in.

That can bite both ways, though—I mean, not with publicly funded universities so much, but what if you find out the small religious sect you supported is a front for a murderous cult? (Yeah, I know, silly example, but . . .) Is there a point at which you should be able to exert control or claw back the money?

A possible answer: “I’m sorry, but when someone is bleeding to death in front of me while screaming incoherently, my priority isn’t on finding out who their employer is and they’d be unable to tell me even if I asked.” Might stir some vestigial sense of shame in the bureacrat asking the question. Or not.

Perhaps they want to distract people from conditions in the UK.

The main point of charging anything at all for a plot would be to finance minimal record keeping: which plots are supposed to be full, who’s in them, and, ideally, who bought the space. Plus a quick “do you have a death certificate?” check, and a request to inform whoever’s doing the admin if you get to the pauper’s field and find the plot you expected to use already occupied. Not an insurmountable barrier for a determined murderer who’s done some advance planning, but it should make it less attractive as a dumping ground.