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.”

Canada can't compete with the salaries that top US companies offer. So it should compete with something the US job can't offer: freedom.

If a Canadian gets a serious job offer from a highly selective US company, Canada should offer them lifetime UBI to stay.

No requirement to build a successful company or create X jobs. They could start businesses, do independent research, make games, invent things, or pursue whatever ideas they think are worthwhile.

The US company has already done the hard part of identifying exceptional talent. Canada would simply make a different counteroffer:

Go to the US and work on someone else's ideas, or stay in Canada and get paid enough to pursue your own.

Instead of trying to outpay Silicon Valley, Canada could try to become the safest place in the world to take ambitious risks with financial freedom.

Hi guys, my name is Gabriel and I’m from Brazil.

Unfortunately I live in a poor region with a lot of poor people and there’s almost no support for those with less opportunities.
Also, I’d like to study but it’s hella expensive here and I don’t have enough time because I do work for 7am to 7pm.

My idea is to create a website where people can donate food anonymously or not, so I deliver the food(all in video) to those in need.
Donations would start from 5 up to the sky, you can donate whatever amount you want and 70% will go to someone in need and the other 30% would help me study and progress in life.

What’s your opinion about this? Do you guys think people would donate?

Math has always had this mythology that you do your greatest work when you're young, your brain is fast, and you can hold some monstrous proof in your head all at once.

AI may not just erase that age advantage. It could reverse it.

Imagine an 80-year-old mathematician with 60 years of accumulated intuition, mathematical taste, obscure knowledge, failed approaches, and pattern recognition, except now they also have an AI constantly remembering definitions, tracking lemmas, checking calculations, searching the literature, testing examples, and filling in all the tedious details their younger brain used to handle.

At that point, the very thing that used to work against older mathematicians could matter much less, while their enormous advantage in experience remains.

Instead of young mathematicians having the edge because their brains are faster, older mathematicians might have the edge because AI supplies much of the speed and working memory while they bring decades more knowledge and judgment.

Universities should stop treating mathematical research careers as if they have a biological expiration date. We may be entering a world where mathematicians don't peak at 30 and slowly fade away.

They might peak at 80.

And the terrifying new problem for young mathematicians might be having to compete with professors who have been thinking about their subject since before their students' parents were born.

Basically GTA, except the criminal underworld is replaced with universities, tech companies, research labs, conferences, startups, hackerspaces, and government research programs.

The protagonists could be a disgruntled postdoc, a burned-out software engineer, and an eccentric tenured professor. Instead of fighting over drug territory, people fight over grant money, lab space, datasets, server clusters, faculty positions, patents, startup funding, and academic prestige.

Missions could start out absurdly petty and then spiral completely out of control. You break into a rival lab to recover a stolen dataset, hack a conference presentation, sabotage an overhyped startup demo, steal prototype hardware, manipulate university rankings, or commandeer some experimental autonomous vehicle.

There could even be different kinds of “wanted levels”: police, campus security, university administration, corporate lawyers, federal investigators, and internet outrage.

The whole joke would be treating academic and geek status games with the same deadly seriousness GTA gives organized crime.

The plot could escalate from a dispute over authorship on a paper to industrial espionage, defense contractors, government research, and an international crisis.

And at the end someone says: “This all started because you left my name off a paper.”

Schools have traditionally treated exceptional skill in math, logic, and analytical problem-solving as one of the clearest signs of intelligence.

But AI changes the picture. At least for now, AI is stronger analytically than creatively. It can solve difficult technical problems, analyze huge amounts of information, and reason through complex questions at a very high level. It is less dependable at producing genuinely original ideas, exercising strong taste, finding interesting new problems, or making surprising conceptual leaps.

That should affect what teachers visibly admire. A student who comes up with an unexpected connection, a novel approach, or a question nobody else thought to ask should often get a bigger reaction than a student who simply solves a difficult standard problem correctly.

Analytical ability still matters, especially for evaluating ideas and recognizing when AI is wrong. But students notice what excites their teachers, and those reactions help shape what they aspire to become good at.

In the AI age, schools should use that influence to signal that originality is becoming especially valuable.

If there is no afterlife, then death is never something you experience. Your conscious life has a final moment, but there is no subsequent period in which you experience being dead.

In that sense, humans could be described as subjectively immortal. From your own point of view, there is no experienced state of nonexistence.

That seems relevant to arguments for radical life extension. Living longer would obviously give you more experiences, relationships, projects, and enjoyment. But the usual fear of "being dead forever" seems misplaced under atheism, since there is no endless subjective duration after death.

So why is literal immortality treated as so much better? Objectively, the difference is enormous because one life continues and the other ends. But from the individual's point of view, it seems much less dramatic.

I think atheists who advocate life extension should explain why this kind of subjective immortality is not already almost as good as the real thing.

P.S. Religious people who believe in the possibility of eternal damnation would absolutely want to live as long as possible with life extension technologies.

Schools teach students that in classical logic,

P → Q

is true whenever P is false. This is called material implication.

That rule is perfectly useful in mathematics, but it does not always match what people mean by implication in ordinary English.

For example, suppose I have no children and say:

“My children are immortal.”

A classical predicate-logic rendering might be:

∀x (ChildOfMine(x) → Immortal(x))

If I have no children, there is no counterexample, so the statement is vacuously true.

But in ordinary English, “my children are immortal” does not sound true just because I have no children. It sounds like I am making a meaningful claim about children I actually have, or at least could have.

Modal logic gives us another notion called strict implication:

□(P → Q)

Instead of asking only whether P happens to be false in the actual world, strict implication asks whether Q follows from P across the relevant possible worlds.

If:

• P = “I have children”
• Q = “my children are immortal”

then

□(P → Q)

would mean roughly:

In every relevant possible world in which I have children, my children are immortal.

That is not automatically true just because I happen to have no children in the actual world. There are perfectly possible situations in which I have children and they are mortal.

I think schools should explicitly teach this distinction.

Math class could teach classical propositional and predicate logic, material implication, quantifiers, and vacuous truth, because those are extremely useful for mathematical reasoning.

English class could then revisit implication from the perspective of natural language and introduce ideas from modal logic, counterfactual logic, presupposition, and implicature. Students could learn that words like if, must, might, could, would, and should often carry meanings that classical material implication does not capture.

The point would not be that English literally follows one particular modal logic. It would be that mathematical logic is one deliberately precise formal system, while ordinary language often expresses richer relationships involving possibility, necessity, relevance, causation, and context.

Students would then understand something important that is easy to miss: when mathematics defines implication as P → Q, it is defining a technical logical operator. It is not claiming that this operator captures everything English speakers mean when they say that one thing “implies” another.

A person living in a multicultural city has deliberately left behind much of the culture of their country of origin. Strangers from the same diaspora keep recognizing them and casually assuming they share the same language, religion, customs, values, and loyalties.

At first, these encounters seem completely ordinary.

But when the protagonist makes it clear that they don't identify with those expectations, something changes.

The strangers become increasingly hostile, and the more persistently the protagonist resists, the less human they become. Their faces distort, their voices change, and eventually they reveal themselves as literal monsters.

Even worse, they seem to be communicating with one another.

The protagonist might reject one stranger's assumption in a grocery store, then hours later meet someone they've never seen before who already knows exactly what happened. Soon strangers across the city recognize them instantly and continue conversations that began with completely different people. It gradually becomes clear that the monsters are some kind of hive mind.

Their supernatural power is to impose cultural assumptions on reality itself.

If one says, "You speak our language," the protagonist begins losing the ability to speak English. If another says, "You don't eat that," the food becomes physically harmful. If they say, "You belong with us," streets and transit routes start taking the protagonist back toward their community no matter where they try to go.

But resistance doesn't weaken them. It enrages and strengthens them.

The more clearly the protagonist insists, "You don't get to decide who I am," the more monstrous the strangers become and the more aggressively the hive mind pursues them.

Their goal isn't simply to kill the protagonist. It's to erase their individual identity and rewrite reality until they become exactly the culturally conforming person the hive mind believes someone of their ancestry is supposed to be.

The recurring horror line could be something seemingly friendly that becomes terrifying by the end of the movie:

"You're one of us."

P.S. To avoid antagonizing a particular diaspora, this one could have humans with green skin and a novel culture.

Cities should experiment with neighborhoods where residents do not need to work because they are guaranteed enough money for housing, food, and hobbies.

Admission could be decided by lottery among people who volunteer to participate. That would make the experiment much more useful, because researchers could compare lottery winners with applicants who were not selected.

The point would not be to encourage people to “do nothing.” It would be to test what people actually do when employment is no longer necessary for survival.

Would they spend their time on art, games, sports, education, volunteering, caregiving, community projects, or ambitious hobbies? Would people become happier and healthier? Would they become bored? Would new forms of status and competition replace careers? Would some people eventually choose to work anyway?

The neighborhood could include modest housing, food support, internet access, and shared facilities such as workshops, studios, gardens, libraries, sports facilities, and hobby spaces.

This could serve as a small-scale simulation of a possible future in which AI and automation have taken over most human jobs. Obviously it would not perfectly reproduce such a world, since the neighborhood would still exist inside a larger economy where most people work. But it would let us study one of the most important parts of that future: what happens when people no longer need to sell their labor in order to have a decent life.

We prototype new technologies before deploying them widely. If AI could eventually transform employment on a massive scale, maybe we should also prototype different ways of living in a post-work society before we actually need them.