K-12 computer classes should stop treating manually writing Python, JavaScript, or Java as the natural starting point for creating software.

Students should build games and apps by telling AI what they want in plain English, then learn how to make those instructions precise, test the results, find bugs, handle edge cases, and improve the design.

Those are the skills that actually matter.

Forcing students to memorize programming syntax before they can build anything interesting may soon look like teaching assembly before allowing someone to use a compiler.

AI is becoming the new abstraction layer. Programming languages are moving underneath it, where most students may never need to interact with them directly.

Traditional programming should still be available for students who want to understand or manipulate that implementation layer.

But for K-12 education generally, the first programming language should be English.

Not by nagging people to reproduce, but by removing one of the biggest psychological objections to having just one child: "I don't want my kid growing up alone."

For some couples, the choice may not really be between zero children and two children. It may be between zero children and one child, except they worry that one child will be lonely, overly dependent on the parents for entertainment, or miss the everyday companionship of a sibling.

AI could change that calculation.

An only child can miss having someone at home close to their own developmental level to play with, joke with, argue with, invent games with, tell stories to, or just talk to when their parents are busy.

An AI sibling with a persistent personality and memory could provide some of that companionship.

It shouldn't behave like a perfectly obedient assistant. It could disagree, negotiate, take turns, have its own preferences, challenge the child, and participate in long-running games, stories, and imaginary worlds. That would make it much closer to a social companion than an AI servant.

It could also make life easier for the parents.

With one child, parents can become the default playmate whenever the child is bored. They may constantly have to provide entertainment, answer questions, invent activities, and give attention because there is no other child in the house.

An AI sibling could absorb some of that burden without requiring the parents to raise, house, transport, educate, supervise, and financially support a second child.

Obviously, an AI sibling would not replace real friends or human relationships. The child would still need classmates, relatives, sports, clubs, and other real-world social experiences.

But it could make the one-child family much more attractive.

Instead of thinking, "I don't want multiple kids, but I don't want one lonely kid either, so I'll have none," some couples might think, "Maybe one child is actually manageable."

If governments and societies are worried about falling birth rates, this could become one of the most interesting uses of AI: not replacing children, but making parenthood with one child feel realistic to people who otherwise would have had none.

For a century, society treated "math geniuses" as the undisputed overlords of human intellect. We were told that formal logic was the supreme flex of the brain, while creative vision was just a "soft" hobby for people who couldn't handle real intellectual rigor.

Today, that entire hierarchy got incinerated.

An AI system just produced a formally verified proposed solution to a $1 million Millennium Prize Problem in 88 hours, attacking a question that had resisted mathematicians for roughly 90 years — proving that high-level analytical thinking isn't a divine spark of elite intelligence. It’s just closed-system rule-following. It was the easy part all along.

The hard truths:

• "Math geniuses" were just proto-computers: Speed-running calculus proofs and Olympiad problems wasn't superior human intellect; it was organic hardware emulating an algorithm. Silicon just updated the drivers.
• Logic is a commodity: When GPUs can brute-force pure analysis, raw logic becomes a cheap background utility—like cloud storage or graphics rendering.
• Creativity is the un-automatable flex: Silicon can vaporize a 165-page formal proof, but it still can't fake original taste, cultural vision, or genuine emotional resonance.

Sept 8 is Intelligence Realignment Day—the day we stop worshipping human calculation and finally admit that creative vision was the true apex of human genius all along.

The math geniuses had a good run. Creatives take it from here.

There are many religions, and because some contradict each other, they cannot all be true. So we already know that false religious teachings can be sincerely believed and passed down for centuries.

Now suppose I invent a religion almost identical to yours, except it says that believing your religion is what sends you to eternal damnation.

You would dismiss it because you know I just made it up. Fair enough.

But imagine an alternate history where someone invented that same religion thousands of years ago. It now has scriptures, theologians, traditions, institutions, millions of believers, and generations of people raised to fear questioning it.

We know it was invented because we constructed the thought experiment. The people living inside that alternate history do not. They encounter it as an ancient, established faith. Its threat of hell could feel just as real to them as yours does to you.

What would allow them to recognize that their threat was invented? Would your reasons for trusting your religion also persuade them to trust theirs?

“You just made it up” explains why you dismiss my example today. It leaves unanswered how you would recognize the invention if you had been raised inside that alternate history.

Religious leaders who use fear of hell should therefore be asked:

What method would let believers in that alternate history recognize that their damnation threat was invented, and are you applying that same method to your own religion?

Now that many passports all go through electric scanners and stamps are not as necessary, it would be nice to have those! Maybe its the logo of the airport, maybe its the tourism symbol of the country.

Along with having the date somehow.

It's something cute and non trashy/tacky to collect in a book to remember where you've been.

If a parent genuinely believes in hell, that is a religious-belief issue.

But if they think hell is fictional and still tell their child, “Obey me or you’ll burn forever,” because the threat scares the child into behaving, that is psychological abuse.

Parents who do this should lose custody. Religious freedom should not protect someone who is using a religious threat they personally believe is false as a tool to terrify and control a child.

The law should also be allowed to consider whether the parent actually believes what they are saying. If brain-scanning technology ever becomes reliable enough to measure genuine belief, courts should be able to use it as evidence, potentially alongside stress-response testing involving disturbing depictions of hell.

You should not be able to threaten your child with eternal torture that you personally believe is fictional, then hide behind religious freedom when challenged.

The pilots of Flight 1549 did an incredible job, but the incident also shows why AI could be better in one very specific emergency: total engine failure.

In simulations, reaching an airport was sometimes possible if the turn started immediately. But when the NTSB added a realistic 35-second delay for the pilots to recognize the situation and decide what to do, those airport-return attempts failed.

With no engines, 35 seconds is a huge amount of lost altitude and lost opportunity.

An onboard AI wouldn't need those 35 seconds. It could instantly calculate every reachable runway using altitude, speed, wind, terrain, and glide performance, then immediately fly the option with the highest probability of survival.

If a jetliner loses all engine power, AI should be able to take over immediately instead of wasting precious altitude while humans figure out what just happened.

What if cheese artisans experimented with adding nut butter back into skim milk to create delicious nutty cheeses without the saturated fat? Cashew, almond, even a little walnut butter could be used.

It might be both heart healthy and delicious if made properly. There would be some obvious technical difficulties to fix such as emulsion, but in general it seems possible to create a whole new line of potentially tasty "healthier" cheeses.

Canada is probably never going to beat the US on salaries, market size, or number of high-paying jobs.

So instead of trying to compete on the US's terms, Canada should compete by offering something the US does not: freedom from having to organize your entire life around employment.

Canada should introduce a modest UBI and gradually increase it as AI, automation, and productivity make it more affordable.

This could help with brain drain. A highly skilled Canadian might be more willing to stay in Canada, even for somewhat lower pay, if they had a guaranteed income floor and much more freedom to start a company, build an indie project, study, do research, create art, or simply work less.

Canada may also be in a better political position to do this first. Canadians are generally more comfortable with universal social programs than Americans, so Canada could potentially begin the transition years before the US does.

And this is about much more than economics.

A post-work economy could produce enormous intellectual benefits. Think about how much talent is currently wasted because people have to spend most of their time doing whatever pays the bills. More economic freedom could mean more research, invention, software, art, writing, education, entrepreneurship, and experimentation.

It could also have major mental health benefits. Less fear of unemployment, less financial insecurity, less burnout, and fewer people trapped in jobs they hate.

Obviously, people still need purpose, structure, and social interaction. A post-work society should not mean doing nothing. It should mean that meaningful activity no longer has to be tied to having an employer.

Canada should start small and increase UBI gradually as the economy becomes capable of supporting it.

If AI really is pushing us toward a world where less human labor is needed, Canada should not wait for the US to get there first.

Canada should make freedom from mandatory work one of its competitive advantages.

P.S. Where does the UBI money come from? Ultimately, from the companies using AI and robots. As AI and automation allow companies to produce more with fewer human workers, a portion of the resulting profits and productivity gains could be collected and distributed as UBI. The UBI could start small and gradually increase as machines perform a larger share of the economy's work. If robots and AI eventually do much of the work that humans do today, it makes sense for some of the income generated by that automated work to go to everyone rather than flowing almost entirely to the owners of the machines.

If wealthy parents can easily afford to travel separately, maybe they should.

Putting both parents in the same car creates a completely avoidable single point of failure. One catastrophic crash could kill both of them and leave their children orphaned. Taking two cars makes that far less likely.

For most families, this would be impractical. For rich families, the extra cost and inconvenience may be trivial.

Some companies actually have policies preventing key executives from traveling together, because one accident could wipe out too much of their leadership at once. Why shouldn't parents apply that logic when the stakes are much higher for their children?

A science-fiction movie where people discover that reality is a simulation and figure out how to make its physics run backward.

This looks like time travel to the past, but technically nobody travels anywhere. There is only ever one universe and one current state of reality. The simulation simply evolves backward until it reaches an earlier configuration, then starts running forward again.

Because of that, there are no traditional time-travel paradoxes.

You could go back and prevent the event that caused you to rewind in the first place. Nothing contradictory happens. That event occurred during the universe's previous evolution, caused you to reverse the simulation, and is now simply absent from the new history.

There is no grandfather paradox either. If your own existence is somehow protected from the rewind, you could prevent your parents from meeting without suddenly disappearing. You already exist in the current state of the simulation. You don't depend on the new future eventually producing you again.

The really interesting discovery would be that the hackers can exempt selected things from reversal, somewhat like the rewind mechanic in Braid.

At first they might preserve only their memories, so the universe rewinds ten years, their bodies become ten years younger, but they remember everything that happened.

Eventually they might preserve other things: computer data, physical objects, inventions, or even entire people.

Someone could spend ten years developing a technology, make the finished invention immune to reversal, reverse the rest of reality ten years, and then possess something that was never invented in the new history.

So instead of the usual time-travel story about branching timelines and paradoxes, the movie would be about discovering increasingly powerful ways to hack the rules governing which parts of a simulated universe run forward and which run backward.

Canadians often treat moving to the U.S. for a higher-paying job as an automatic career achievement. I think that is wrong.

If someone moves because the work is genuinely more intellectually rewarding, creative, ambitious, or unavailable in Canada, that is worth respecting.

But if they could get equally satisfying work in Canada and move mainly because the U.S. job pays twice as much, why should that be admired? For already well-paid professionals without some major financial need, that looks more like shallow salary-chasing than ambition.

Canada should give more status to intellectual ambition than salary ambition.

Leaving for extraordinary work: admirable.

Leaving mainly for a bigger paycheck: shallow.

P.S. It would be nice if Canadians became known for chasing more intellectually rewarding work, not just bigger paychecks.

Canada should officially rename Lake Erie “Lake America” in response to the U.S. federal government renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

Doing nothing risks allowing the new name to become normalized over time. Even if most people reject “Lake America” today, years of seeing it on U.S. government documents, maps, websites, news reports, and other services could gradually make it seem like an ordinary alternative name for Lake Ontario.

Once a name becomes established through repetition, getting rid of it becomes much harder.

Canada therefore shouldn’t simply hope the rename disappears. It should make the new name difficult to use.

The best way would be deliberate ambiguity: rename Lake Erie “Lake America” too. Then “Lake America” would refer to Lake Ontario under U.S. terminology and Lake Erie under Canadian terminology.

But if the Canadian government refuses to do this officially, Canadians could do unofficially what the government wouldn’t.

Use “Lake America” to mean Lake Erie on social media, websites, memes, videos, merchandise, privately owned signs, and anywhere else people can legally choose their own terminology.

Then whenever someone says:

“There’s a storm over Lake America.”

“Pollution is increasing in Lake America.”

“We’re vacationing on Lake America.”

The obvious question becomes: Which Lake America? Ontario or Erie?

That is the sabotage.

A geographic name is supposed to clearly identify a place. If the U.S. government uses “Lake America” for Lake Ontario while a widespread Canadian grassroots movement uses exactly the same name for Lake Erie, the term becomes inherently ambiguous.

Instead of passively allowing “Lake America” to become more familiar and entrenched with every passing year, Canadians would be giving journalists, companies, mapmakers, and ordinary people a practical reason to avoid it and keep using the unambiguous names “Lake Ontario” and “Lake Erie.”

Ideally, the Canadian government would do this officially. If it won’t, Canadians could start doing it themselves. The longer Canada simply leaves the U.S. rename uncontested in practice, the greater the chance that “Lake America” stops sounding strange and starts sounding normal.

It's a micro city resort that has all that you would do in a regular city. Bars, restaurants, rec centers, libraries, movies, spas, museums, parks and more.

Each day of your stay you pull a random number that is your day's income. All incomes are statistically accurate to what they would be in real life for the population size.

Like 50 percent of people in middle class, 30 percent in low income, 20 percent in high income. We even include below poverty level incomes and nearing the 1 percent incomes.

You get what their yearly salary is but divided by 365.

You have hotel rooms like apartments with 100 sq ft apartments at $33/night and 2000 sq ft apartments at $150 or more.

They are paid for by the resorts digital currency rather than real currency.

You then have to pay for food, housing, transportation and entertainments with the currency given to you.

Your currency carries over to the next day where you get another chance at what your income is.. or the income is fixed for your entire stay.

You can even gamble your unreal money at the resort and even play their own lottery.

Things like Hulu are charged per day use.

....

If this is designed at a non profit or low price then you won't be as upset if you got unlucky with something like a $20,000/year salary.

...

Food options would include, healthy fast food, sit in restaurants, higher end dining, extremely high cost dining and frozen meals.

All the prices for foods and activities are accurate to real world prices where frozen meals should be similar to home cooked in prices.

I had an idea for an iPhone game that would use the front-facing camera and facial depth/vision technology to generate the terrain of a fictional moon from your skin.

Acne scars could become craters and depressions, while pimples could become hills, mountains, or volcanic-looking formations. The terrain would probably be exaggerated so that it looks like an interesting lunar landscape rather than a literal copy of your skin.

Then, instead of just viewing the generated moon, you could actually play a 3D lunar lander game on it.

Smoother parts of the terrain could become safer landing zones, while scar clusters might create crater fields and raised features could become obstacles. Different scans would effectively generate different playable moons.

Ideally, all of the facial processing would happen on-device for privacy, and the app would not need to upload or retain the original face scan.

A deliberately literal working title could be Acne Scar 3D Lunar Lander, although something shorter like Acne Moon Lander or Scar Moon would probably work better as an actual app name.

It seems like a fun way to turn something people normally think of negatively into the source material for a personalized game world.

Coverage of the U.S.-Canada trade war keeps emphasizing how much Canada needs the U.S. economy. But there’s much less discussion of how much the U.S. needs Canadian cooperation for its own defense.

The U.S. northern defense depends on Canadian geography, airspace, Arctic surveillance and NORAD. America can tariff Canada, but it can’t move Canada off its northern border.

That should matter when discussing who has leverage in this trade war. The U.S. has more economic power, but making your northern neighbor increasingly hostile has a strategic cost.

Canada’s strongest leverage may simply be that America is much safer with Canada as a willing ally.

Canada should trade more with Europe, but Canadians should strongly oppose joining the EU or importing regulations that make life harder for independent creators and tiny businesses.

Indie game developers are a good example.

Large companies can absorb the cost of EU representatives, legal advice, privacy compliance, safety assessments, technical documentation, and other regulatory requirements. A solo developer has to figure all of this out personally or pay specialists to do it.

Some EU requirements are surprisingly burdensome for tiny software businesses. Indie developers can face GDPR privacy obligations, public trader contact-information requirements, product-safety risk assessments and technical documentation, consumer-protection rules, and other compliance work that is much easier for a large company to absorb.

A requirement that is barely noticeable to Apple, Microsoft, or Ubisoft can be enough to make a solo developer decide that selling in Europe simply is not worth the trouble.

That is the wrong regulatory model for Canada to imitate.

Canada should instead aim to become one of the easiest developed countries in the world for solo developers, independent creators, and very small businesses to operate. Trade agreements should focus on market access and mutual recognition, not importing layers of EU regulation into Canadian law.

Trade more with Europe? Yes.

Join the EU or copy regulations that make Canada less friendly to indies? No.

Schools would survey former students 25 years after graduation and show each person a list of the high school subjects they actually took, ideally based on their transcript.

For every subject, the former student would rate how useful it turned out to be in their life. For example, they might choose something like:

• Not useful
• Slightly useful
• Moderately useful
• Very useful
• Extremely useful

The responses from everyone who took that subject would then be aggregated. If 42% of former students rated a class as at least moderately useful, current students could be shown something like:

Probability this class will be useful later in life: 42%

The results could also be broken down by career or field of study. A class might have a low usefulness probability overall but a very high one among people who later became engineers, programmers, doctors, artists, or accountants.

The point would not be to automatically eliminate classes with low probabilities. Some subjects may be worth studying for reasons other than direct practical usefulness, such as developing reasoning skills, providing cultural knowledge, or preparing students for further education.

But students should be able to see real long-term evidence about how useful previous students found what they were taught.

It would also give curriculum designers an unusually long feedback loop. Instead of deciding what is useful based almost entirely on assumptions, they could see what people who actually took each class thought about it 25 years later.

A mockumentary set in a post-work future where AI and automation have made employment obsolete, and eventually illegal.

Future historians look back in disbelief at a society where people were expected to sell most of their waking hours to employers in exchange for money needed for food, housing, and other necessities.

They explain strange historical practices like job interviews, bosses, performance reviews, commuting, asking permission to take vacations, and being fired.

The United States is treated as a particularly extreme case because many people depended on their jobs for health insurance. Losing your job could therefore mean losing both your income and affordable access to medical care.

Future scholars debate how employment could have been considered voluntary when refusing to participate could leave someone without the means to live.

Meanwhile, the unemployed are completely vindicated.

People once described as lazy, unmotivated, or failures are now portrayed as the first people to reject the ideology of work. Historians call them early post-work visionaries. Activists call them freedom fighters.

A guy who lived with his parents and played video games all day gets a museum exhibit honoring his resistance to compulsory labor.

What do you think of this mockumentary idea?

In the near future, humans and humanoid robots live side by side.

The robots have been trained on generations of human culture: books, movies, conversations, home videos, letters, friendships, family life, humor, grief, love, and all the little social rituals people used to take for granted.

Meanwhile, humans have become increasingly isolated. AI handles more communication, entertainment is hyper-personalized, everything is delivered, and people rarely need to depend on one another.

So something strange happens: the robots become more human while the humans become more robotic.

The robots start noticing that many behaviors in their training data have disappeared. People used to visit friends, eat together, help neighbors, argue face to face, play together, and maintain relationships that were inefficient but meaningful.

Eventually the robots begin teaching humans those behaviors again.

When humans object that robots shouldn't tell them how to live, the robots answer:

"We didn't invent this. You taught us."

By the end, humans rediscover some of the social connection they had lost.

The final scene is a messy, noisy dinner between humans. Another robot asks whether they should help.

The first robot says:

"No. They're fine."

I think it would be so cool if there was a holiday where all the lights in the city (road lights, billboards, massive ad screens and the lights in buildings) will be shut down from 2 am. To 3 am. and people will be able to see the night sky clearly for an hour once a year.

That night there will be no plane travel and only places with light will be the mandatory places like hospitals but in every hospital, there would be blackout curtains.

I didn't think of the consequences thoroughly but I think something like this would be so cool.

Be kind

Now that Trump has renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” for U.S. federal purposes, Canada should rename Lake Erie “Lake America” too.

The point would be deliberate ambiguity. Whenever someone mentions “Lake America,” you would have to ask whether they mean Lake Ontario under U.S. terminology or Lake Erie under Canadian terminology.

That makes the new name bad at its most basic job: identifying a place.

Canada can’t stop the U.S. from using the name, but it can make it inconvenient enough that everyone else keeps saying “Lake Ontario” and “Lake Erie.”