I think public places such as libraries, shopping centres, airports, universities, and major transit stations should include a small private room where someone can be alone for a short time.

It could contain drinking water, tissues, a comfortable chair, soft lighting, ventilation, and an emergency call button. It could help people who are overwhelmed, anxious, grieving, experiencing sensory overload, or simply need a private moment.

Similar spaces may already exist in some facilities. My proposal is that a simple and accessible version should become a standard feature in more public places.

The difficult part would be balancing privacy and fair access. A strict time limit might prevent long-term occupation, but it could also make an anxious person feel pressured to calm down quickly. Perhaps a suggested session length, gentle check-ins, and optional extensions would work better.

How would you design and manage such a room safely and fairly?

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.

I’ve got an idea I keep turning over, but it’s not developed enough to call a project yet. I’m mostly looking for a place where people will tell me what they actually think instead of immediately trying to turn it into a business.

Where do you usually share half-formed ideas when you just want a real conversation about them?

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.

Use the caucus to push for these specific rules and use membership or lack of membership in the caucus as a litmus test for vote-worthiness and who to primary

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.

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.

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.

I’m building a few game ideas right now and this is one of them.

It’s called CrowdFlow. You manage huge crowds leaving stadiums, stations and events. You can open gates, place barriers, redirect people and make one-way routes.

Then stuff goes wrong while everyone is already moving — like a train delay suddenly sending 3,000 people somewhere else.

I’ve already started building it, but before I go way deeper: does this actually sound like something you’d play or nah? Be brutal lol.

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."

Trucks could still deliver, making them happy as hell, but on a regular basis, everyone else should use transit. Suburbs with no transit, their people can park on the edge in commuter lots.

It’d give them a taste of what it is like good or bad. The regular riders would at least get a free day to make up for the crowds.

Some people might like it others just might look a little more kindly on walkers and riders.

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.

It's getting harder and harder to finish books in this day and age, even to me, an obsessed bibliophile and a maladaptive perfectionist. So books need to be reinvented the way videos have. Books should look like slideshows...and have quizzes on them like textbooks. Then you get a score, and an indication that you read the book. Then employers see that score. Companies can list books as requirements with certain scores.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

I keep thinking about a tiny social game built around one shared object instead of thousands of player-owned copies.

There is one panda relic. A person receives a private one-use link, permanently Blesses or Corrupts it once, leaves a short message, then chooses exactly who gets the next link. You cannot take another turn.

I have the loop working locally, but it is not public. I am trying to decide whether the idea itself deserves more time.

Does being personally chosen make its growing human history interesting, or does this immediately feel like a chain letter? What would make you actually pass it on?

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.