Montreal Gazette publishes lies, creating unwarranted panic and putting people at risk.

Here’s an excerpt from an article by one Aaron Derfel:

Derfel depicts Montreal’s emergency rooms as extremely dangerous, crowded, COVID-infested places. Would anybody want to go to such a place, even if one were in pain? Obviously not.

Here’s the thing, though. My mom was at the Lakeshore Hospital ER in suburban Pointe-Claire yesterday. On the exact same day the article is describing. The ER was empty. My mom’s waiting time was one minute. She was admitted for appendicitis and had surgery. The place was clearly running below capacity. There were three patients in isolation for COVID. They were not in any way placed in the proximity to other patients. Of whom there were very few.

My mom is an immigrant, and she doesn’t have enough English to read Montreal Gazette. And that’s great because she hadn’t seen any of the lying stories that spread panic. As soon as she felt abdominal pain, she went to the ER. And now she is well.

But imagine how many people read this coverage, believe the lies and decide not to go to the ER, putting their lives at risk.

Shame on you, Aaron Derfel. You are a liar and a hack. You are also a bad human being.

… were a painful, boring slog. And I couldn’t skip ahead because I was doing the book on Audible and didn’t see the text.

To cut a long and excruciating story short, Kai-fu Lee was going on his merry way, making megabucks developing AI, when suddenly he got diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. As many people do in that situation, he realized that he had wasted his life on being a money-hungry dickwad who only cared about work.

He found religion (sorta), started treating his poor long-suffering wife better, and even stopped being a total jerk to his kids. That’s when he realized that the most important thing in the world is loooooooove. And loooooove, incidentally, will help people overcome the joblessness that AI will bring.

Lee goes on in the next two chapters to explain how loooooooove will help the jobless. At this point, the book gets extremely repetitive and circular. The prescriptions Lee rolls out are embarrassingly ancient. They’ve existed for sixty years and I’d think people would have gotten over them by now. The government will slap gigantic taxes on the Jeff Bezoses of the world and use the money to pay parents to raise their kids. And it will all be structured like a career, with promotions and certifications! Or you can volunteer! Or raise your own kids for money! Or volunteer! Or even, I don’t know, volunteer, or something like that! Or help people live lifestyles that offset global warming! As a volunteer!

This could have been a much better book if Lee stayed in his wheelhouse and talked about AI instead of trying to save the world by proposing global spiritual breakthroughs.