Yeah, it’s not a no, it’s basically a “not our problem, everyone does their own thing.” Which is fair, but they normally have no problems loading extra work on public servants even though it’s not their job, so it’s a bit moot.

What makes Alberta the most unfriendly? Like, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I don’t recall any major differences between the recent legislation in any of those three provinces.

There are a lot of ethical concerns around Chinese worker treatment, economic concerns around Chinese subsidies driving the price down, privacy concerns around Chinese tech’s tendency to phone home, geopolitical concerns around giving China even more power in our nation…

But honestly, same. Nowadays I can’t get a car at a decent price in a decent time frame, even worse if I want an EV, so what’s the expectation? The auto industry has dropped the ball so hard that China would trivially dominate the EV industry if they were allowed to compete. That’s bad, but it’s so bad because the local industry isn’t even in the ballpark of good enough.

Nenshi was a good mayor with a meh council and his frustration with dumb political issues came forth in ways that felt like actual human emotions, even if some people thought he was arrogant.

He was pretty obviously the right choice here. Everyone’s platforms were basically the same. Ganley and Stonehouse are basically unknown, and Hoffman is more known for being the overweight health minister than anything else, unfair though that may be. He is the most recognizable of the leadership candidates by a mile, he has actual demonstrated leadership abilities we hardly see from anyone nowadays, and Calgarians generally like him. The only major downside is that he’s not a currently sitting MLA, but he would probably win any riding in Calgary handily.

Calgary is pretty much a swing city at this point, since Edmonton goes mostly NDP and the smaller regions mostly go UCP, so someone Calgary can get behind is automatically a huge bonus. There’s a better chance of seeing another NDP government under him than basically anyone else in the province.

Notwithstanding the four Cabinet documents, federal departments and agencies withheld or refused the disclosure of over a thousand documents, in whole or in part, on the basis that they were Cabinet confidences.

Wait, is this even a Liberal thing then? It sounds like they requested information from federal departments and those departments said “We have these documents but cannot share them due to Cabinet confidence.” That doesn’t sound like it involves a single elected entity, nevermind a Liberal one.

I feel the same way regarding whether this legislation would be enforceable or good, but there are a lot of ways developers could make this work that they currently don’t. That includes bot players, local multiplayer functionality, dedicated server tools, IP-based connections, etc. Many DRM and anti-cheat implementations also cause problems and would need to be either removed or only used in certain contexts.

Right now in a lot of games if you aren’t playing multiplayer on official servers through official matchmaking functions with invasive kernel-level anti-cheat there’s no other way to play, but that hasn’t always been the case nor does it need to be the case.

Just to be clear, a majority of wildfire response efforts are provincial and CAF basically gets called in when resources are tapped out across the country. And Quebec actually did privatize their wildfire emergency response a while back, although I don’t know the details on how that compares against their public agency. And lots of bits and pieces of response are either privatized or partially privatized in many provinces, such as aircraft and helicopter resourcing.

All that said: yeah, CAF just needs to be trained better for emergency response functions. It’s most of what we use our armed forces for anyways. I’ve heard plenty of stories of CAF being deployed and then sitting around for a week because their radios aren’t compatible and they don’t know how to integrate into a unified command structure. These are the things that need to be sorted out, not throwing more money at more entities who can complicate things.

Yep.

If there is one part of Canadian culture that can be said to be consistent across geographic and ideological lines, it’s a connection to the land and the natural world. Our country is practically built on trekking through forests and canoeing down rivers. A national park pass is one of the simplest ways to encourage people to engage with that, and if there’s one thing I’d like newcomers to do here it’s to engage with our culture.

Man I can’t believe we’re giving newcomers easier access to the truly wonderful and remarkable parts of our nation, thus giving them something to actually love about Canada. How horrible.

There are still a couple of donuts that are good despite the severe drop in quality (apparently not even they can fuck up the honey cruller) but yeah, it used to be a thought process on which of a bunch of donuts I wanted when people brought in a box, and now it’s a crapshoot whether I even care.

A lot of bits in that article sound weird but on the whole the traditional retire-at-65 concept is definitely fading away. I think it underplays how much of that is affordability (how many people even think they’ll be able to retire at 65?) but even then I’m seeing friends take long breaks from work regardless of retirement, I’m seeing people work less traditional jobs that they can find different fulfillment in, and I know a rare few who are past retirement age and asked if it was okay to keep working because they love what they do.

I’m personally planning on retiring at 55 when my pension hits the point that it can easily support me, even if another decade of work would grow it further. Who needs money when you have another decade of healthy life? As we learn more about longevity and aging it’s looking more like I’ll have more healthy years ahead of me than any of my grandparents did and I may as well use them.

I can see normie memes sprinkled into this community doing well. Satire does well and people are often not super serious in the comments.

This… is not a normie meme. Weirdly well animated, though.

This is true every year, but this year is especially bad because it’s been warm and dry for most of the winter. There’s usually a few holdovers, not dozens, and especially not so many that actually need some type of response.

Dr. Marlaina Smith, I didn’t see no parental consent to change her name.

If voting NDP had any more effect than pissing in the wind in my area I would. Unfortunately, they rarely get a significant percentage of the vote and when they do we go conservative. So it’s either hold my nose and vote lib or help a conservative who doesn’t even live in the city get in.

If polling changes to show the NDP beating the libs here I’m 100% changing my vote. Until then, the system sucks so sometimes voting sucks.

ABC. Anything but conservative. FPTP is winner takes all, so vote for Liberal or NDP depending on who’s more likely to get in in your area. And pray to whatever force may be that someone puts in a sensible voting system at some point.

I mean, yeah? Basically everyone who could work from home in April 2020 was forced to do so, regardless of whether they or their employer wanted them to. Now there’s more of a mix.

Still some interesting nuggets in the report and article, though:

StatCan found that dual-income couples who make among the most money in the country were nine times more likely to work from home between April 2020 and June 2021 than couples who both work and who are in the bottom 10 per cent of Canada’s earnings distributions.

It’s one of those situations where it seems obvious that a lot of lower-paying jobs require manual labour that can’t be done remotely, but the discrepancy still feels really large.

Yeah, I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life, have lived and have had family and friends in both cities. Edmonton is absolutely more progressive.

That said, if you remove the party names and people vote based on policy (i.e. how our municipal elections work) both cities lean fairly progressive. It’s when oil gets involved at higher levels of government that Calgary tends to vote conservative, and that sometimes bleeds into other attitudes as party politics tends to do.

Front Burner definitely has ups and downs depending on the topic, host, and guest, but I struggle to find a way of getting the news closer to what I want. It’s about 20 minutes on one topic which gives me enough of an overview to figure out if I really need to care or engage further while still keeping up with contemporary events. There are lots of ways to get inundated with topics without enough context to know whether to care or worry, and there are lots of deep dives for things I know I care about, but Front Burner sits in a middle ground I haven’t found the right way to replace even if it hasn’t been as strong lately.

It’s unlikely 2024 will be worse than this year simply because this year was so exceptionally bad across the whole country. It’s not common for us to see problems coast to coast, if only because there are multiple factors that need to be bad for serious fire behaviour and it’s hard to get those to line up everywhere at once. When we talk about bad fire years, it’s usually due to a few provinces being bad, not every province.

That said, it will probably be bad, and 2023 probably won’t be the worst year in the next decade. Climate change is getting worse, forest management is slow to fix, and we already have so many communities in the trees that interface fires are practically a given.

Yeah, my wife worked for Costco for a few years and it was… fine. It wasn’t exceptional in any way, but it was decent. But for a retail chain, “decent” is a pretty significant improvement over the competition.

I’ve noticed that, at least historically, a lot of the buzz around Costco being a great employer comes from the States. Which makes sense, as the bar is even lower down there, so the same policies are much more impressive.

I’ve been using Obsidian lately. Proprietary with an open plugin ecosystem. Works well, makes it easy for me to integrate with other notes and such, but I haven’t figured out a good workflow for exporting work for submission. That said, it’s all markdown and there are lots of plugins for stuff like that, so it’s probably mostly just that I haven’t tried very hard.

In the past I’ve used Google Docs (proprietary), Scrivener (proprietary), Manuskript (open), Zim (open), and probably a few I’m forgetting. Really it just comes down to what you’re looking for out of the software, there are lots of options.

The biggest thing to keep in mind from a self-hosting perspective is local storage and easy backups under your own control. I use syncthing to keep my whole Obsidian vault synced across a few devices; for some software that’s easier or harder due to file formats and accessibility.

I’m surprised there aren’t more people listing game servers here. A good chunk of my networking knowledge just comes from hosting game servers and fighting routers in my teens and early adulthood.