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Cake day: Jun 23, 2023

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Maybe I misunderstood your previous comment, because I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say here.

Are you saying my version of the title would have been fine without the “and” I added? I’m struggling to understand what you’re taking issue with.


You’re nitpicking. It’s not a direct quote anyways; it’s already paraphrased. They had no issue editorializing “them” to “companies”, so adding an implied “and” wouldn’t be any worse than that.


Yeah, I agree, but you still have to be able to read between the lines to grock what it’s saying. They left out the more important explicit part.


“Any federally regulated company, it’s a win for them at this point,” Boucher told Reuters in his first interview since the Thursday lockout. “This is disastrous for labour, for workers.”

That title is a bit of a misrepresentation of the union leader’s position. It should have read:

Canadian rail decision is a win for companies; disastrous for labour, and for workers, union leader says.


Hey asshats, remember when this exact thing happened in the US and the result of binding arbitration was that safety was undermined? I’ll bet the people of East Palestine remember.

Let’s not make the same mistakes. Give the teamsters their damned fatigue protections, and pay them a good living wage.


Backblaze regularly releases failure rate statistics of their drives, and it’s often a big enough dataset to be quite meaningful. I haven’t been keeping up with it lately, but there certainly was a period of time where there were substantial differences in the failure rates of different manufacturers.

So while you do still need to have drive failure mitigation strategies, buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.


This might not be am option or helpful for everyone, but I’ve moved cities since I got my current phone number. Now I know if it’s from my own area code, it’s almost certainly spam. And since pretty much everyone has country-wide free long distance calling nowadays, long distance charges don’t really matter.


“We are a legal family-run business.”

Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s moral or that it should be happening at all. Hunting tourism is gross.


I think a blended model is a good solution. In Ontario, LCBO’s selection has gone downhill over the last 10 years. They’ve gotten complacent because they haven’t had to worry about competition. They’ve still got a huge amount of purchasing power because of the sheer volume, though, so they should be able to anchor prices against excessive profit gouging.

It’ll be harder for corner stores and boutiques to compete on price, but they’re also much more able to specialize and serve niche markets.

This is basically the same system Quebec has had for years, and it always seemed to work well there.


One minor caveat where CPU could matter is AVX support. I couldn’t get ollama to run well on my system, despite having a decent GPU, because I’m using an ancient processor.


Presumably you meant: “Bribe someone for 1/1000th the cost.”


Haha, yeah, that’s why I said it’s my diplomatic answer, as it doesn’t utterly reject a capitalist framework.


Here’s my mildly diplomatic answer that’d probably get tossed:

Piracy has become a plague on our society, but there’s a more sinister cause to it. The average labourer can hardly afford to pay the same fee to access culture that the wealthy person can, and this has caused a significant and justified uptick in piracy.

This situation can be averted by increasing minimum wages and supporting universal basic income. If everyone knew they could at least make ends meet, they’d have some left over to pay for the culture that mattered to them.


One of the issues is that we have an actual leftist party that has legitimate chances, so the vote gets split. The liberals’ position as the defacto ABC (anything but conservative) party is failing due to a series of blunders and scandals.

The liberals could have fixed this by properly following through with their electoral reform promise instead of harpooning their own initiative, but because of their bad faith attempt to keep power, we might now get Polievre.



That’s fair. Maybe I’m putting too much of the systemic problems at her feet, when in fact I’m more disappointed in almost all of our leadership. And you’re right, it’s better than nothing.


“it’s a bit divisive”

“I’ll piss off some of my voters either way, so best not to take a principled stance.” It’s disappointing she won’t denounce genocide, but not particularly surprising.


It’s postmedia, so that tracks. A good portion of their titles make for tough rounds of Beaverton-or-not.

It’s shameful we allow the republican propaganda arm to operate with impunity here.


But how will the oil execs afford their next yacht? :( And think about all the yacht makers that are going to go out of business.


So the number of doctors relative to population grew by 1.7% but average patient encounters dropped 3.7%? That doesn’t exactly add up.

Maybe there’s been a drop in the amount of care needed, but I kinda doubt it. One possible explanation is that people are so disillusioned with our healthcare system that they’re seeking other forms of treatment, either out of province or through alternative (pseudoscience) medicine or just not going at all.


What a strange mentality. When I pay for things I want, I’m generally happy to support the creator. If others can’t, why would I be upset if they get the product for free? It means more people can also enjoy the thing I like.

It’s such a crab bucket mentality, I couldn’t imagine living life being constantly bitter.


It was quite a long time ago, so the pain has long since faded, but thank you for the kind words. (:

And to the rest of your comment, I 100% agree.

I also think this is an important discussion that Canadians need to be having.


It also includes a man whose application “hearing loss,” and whose brother says he was “basically put to death.”

My grandmother was a painter and lost her vision. She was no longer able to do what she loved. In her last several years, every time we’d celebrate her birthday, she’d wonder why she was still alive. You can’t look at MAiD requests simply, because every person has unique reasons that keep them going. Some people can bounce back from severe loss, and some cannot, or choose not to.

While I agree with a lot of points the article is making, I think we need to be calling for more critical review of MAiD applications, and increased oversight, not an outright reversal of the program. Those whom are applying due to lack of social safety nets need to be denied, and, most importantly, helped to find the resources required for them to be able to live a dignified and meaningful life if they so wish.


I don’t know the laws that well, but there is a distinction in Canadian law between uploading and downloading. I’m not entirely sure how applicable to torrenting that is, but I think there’s a reasonable argument that if you are the original uploader, you must have uploaded the content in it’s entirety, whereas that’s not necessarily true for anyone else downloading the torrent, and certainly not provably so.


I think that’s not necessarily true. There’s certainly some good reasons to have a distinction between the original uploader and all the rest of the additional seeders. It’s going to come down to local law.

An analogy is if you buy some illicit substance and split it up with a few friends who pay you their share. Whether or not your local authorities considers you an illegal drug dealer could be highly dependent on scale, profitability, frequency, clientele, etc. Those details could be the difference between a slap on the wrist and some hard time.


GReader was so good, now it’s just another ghost in Google’s graveyard. :( My guess is that they killed it because it was kinda in the same sphere as Google News.



A bank CEO mad he’ll lose a bit of money? Cry my a fucking river, you leech. And leave us out of your laissez faire nonsense, while you’re at it.


Exactly. And a lot of that infrastructure was paid for by taxpayer money in the first place.

We could even go one step further and take it back. Nationalize the infrastructure layer, contract infrastructure maintenance back to the telcos, and lease the lines to whoever wants to use them to provide service.

We eventually had to switch away from a smaller ISP simply because they simply weren’t allowed to offer the same level of service as Bell. The best they could offer was 25/10, whereas Bell was allowed to provide fiber to the home.


I particularly laughed at the line about an economy without competition no longer being capitalism. Like, no, this is just the natural progression of unfettered capitalism. If it’s not capitalism what do they think it is? The line almost seemed like “anything I don’t like is socialism/communism” dogwhistle.

If we want to actually drive competition, there are a few ways:

  1. State run alternatives.

You know what Canadian province had the most competitive telephone market? Saskatchewan. That’s because they have a government run telecom (Sasktel) that doesn’t operate on a for profit model.

  1. Antitrust laws with teeth.

Penalties for anti-competitive behaviour need to be big enough that they’re not just a cost of doing business. If you get caught price fixing, the fine should be so high that you never, ever consider doing it again. Jail time for CEOs should be on the table for egregious enough situations.

  1. Abandon the “too big to fail” mentality.

When we prop up companies with shitty business practices, we’re just encouraging them to fail even harder, because they know they’ll always get bailed out.


It doesn’t even need to be as direct as a commission. Like, you just have an evaluation metric based on how many overflow bins are collected, then tie that in with an annual performance review.


Way to just put words in my mouth which I haven’t even come close to suggesting. Such good faith behavior. If you don’t understand what I’ve written, or I haven’t communicated well, you can simply ask for clarification.

I’m saying it’s irrelevant if the effective decision to torpedo their party’s own promise was decided upon by collectively, by a conference of their MPs, or dictated by Trudeau himself.

Why would the LPC adopt the policy position (MMP)

They wouldn’t, because it hurts them at the polls. They don’t care about doing the right thing for Canadians, just that they don’t lose seats to the NDP, even if that comes at the cost of losing an election to the conservatives. The main thing keeping them in power isn’t good policy, it’s scare tactics of a Conservative majority combined with FPTP.

Once again, read their comments on the ER report if you want to know what they truly think of their own voters. They spent pages whining about methodology which wasn’t thoroughly explained because its already widely accepted. Pure FUD.

Edit: It just occurred to me that perhaps were not seeing eye to eye because of how this conversation started: “Trudeau lied.”

I just wanted to clarify that you understand that when most people say that, they’re aware that the policy platform that a party head runs on isn’t solely their own personal discretion. Is your argument that Trudeau didn’t lie because it was a collective decision? Because that would clarify why you care so much about this whole grassroots distinction.


I don’t recognize a single party’s unilateral decision as a grassroots movement of the whole. I have no idea regarding the precise mechanism by which the Liberals choose the voting system best suited to their own needs, and frankly, I’m not sure how it’s relevant to our conversation.

Other systems are better suited to a majority of Canadians and have support that crosses party boundaries. It’s a minority, but a good number of Liberal voters support MMP, for example.


My question would be, why is the driver doing that. Has WM created perverse incentives that make their workers want to perform that kind of behavior?


Ohh noo, the CEOs will take a 1% total income cut, how will they afford their 2nd yacht now? Won’t someone think of the CEOs?


Sure bud, enjoy your willful ignorance.


Nobody except the LPC wanted STV. That’s not grassroots. STV didn’t even fall within the committee’s stated purview.

I’d recommend you go read the LPCs Supplemental Report to the Special Committee: https://www.ourcommons.ca/documentviewer/en/42-1/ERRE/report-3/page-435

It’s basically a bunch of FUD saying Canadians are too dumb to understand any sort of PR, and we should just put it off because there was disagreement. But the fact is that there is consensus that FPTP is not providing fair elections. The liberals just wanted to manufacture any excuse to not change the status quo. The recent vote on motion M-86 with only 25% of Liberal MPs supports that.


I don’t care if they asked a ouija board. They came up with the wrong answer that didn’t serve Canadians in a fair and equitable manner, it served themselves. That’s the bottom line.

If you really think the Liberals are truly interested in electoral reform, look no further than the vote results of Motion M-86. Only 25% of Liberal and 3% of Conservative MPs voted in support of the motion.


We didn’t get electoral reform because the Liberals torpedoed their own efforts. They went out of their way to find the most self serving electoral method possible.

If they wanted to do it right, look to countries who have successfully implemented. Follow NZ’s process, for example: A two part referendum, Q1: Keep FPTP or switch. Q2: Which new system, with several options.


Yep. That was the biggest reason I voted for him.

As they say down south, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… You can’t get fooled again! (Because I’ll be voting NDP.)