My favourite thing ever seen in source code was a comment that read “this code is temporary” with developer initials and a date that was at the time about 5 years ago.

Followed by another dated comment from about 3 years later that read “Temporary my ass”

😂

We can’t have solar or winds farms because it might ruin our “pristine viewscapes”… but open pit mining of the most polluting fossil fuel we’ve ever had by a foreign billionaire is totally fine.

Your hypocrisy is showing Danielle.

Canada’s population is expected to grow by 500~3000 people daily for the next few years.

Building 5000 units Canada wide is not going to even make a dent in the housing market much less destroy it.

What blows my mind 🤯

The landlords game has two different sets of rules you could play with. One set of rules was basically the same as the Monopoly we know today. When the game ends when one player acquires ownership of everything and bankrupts everyone else.

The other set of rules, called “prosperity”, involved a tax that redistributed wealth. The game ends when all players have doubled their original stake and everyone wins.

The game was intended to show how unbridled capitalism ultimately leads to a few billionaires owning everything and everyone else being poor/bankrupt. (Sound familiar?)

And compared it to the prosperity rules which were based on Georgism, a kind of socialism/capitalism hybrid that both rewards people for the value they produce while also creating surplus public revenue that can be used to create social safety nets.

Proportional representation isn’t the only alternative to FPTP.

Something like STV or even just IRV tends to put centrist parties in charge which would likely benefit the liberals.

Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.

Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.

If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.

I work in this space. My focus area is consequential GHG accounting specifically, which is the process of quantifying the impact a decision will have on GHG levels.

There is an internationally recognized methodology for GHG emissions account and for most other things you’d make environmental claims about.

Hard part is most of those methodologies were designed for voluntary compliance. They tend to allow lots of estimates and average when better data isn’t available, because for someone trying to do the right thing, estimating data is better than nothing.

But that leaves a giant gaps in legislation like this because someone with incentive to do so can make generously optimistic assumptions that ridiculously overstate their environmental stewardship while still technically following the methodology.

While I think it’s doubtful we’ll see any major improvements in reporting for a while. The bill is still a massive step in the right direction.

And there’s hope for the methodologies getting better too. The leading methodology for calculating GHG emissions is currently being revised with a new version expected to be published next year. Current proposals being considered include dropping several notoriously inaccurate approaches, that could be used to make false or exaggerated claims.

If BlackRock thinks that population growth in Canada is important, it seems to me they’re actually in a far better position to make that happen than the average Canadian.

BlackRock owns a fuck ton of property in Canada, they are in a strong position to make rents and housing, much more affordable. Which will drive the economy up significantly.

Families will be more willing to “grow the population’ if they’re not allocating 50+ percent of their income towards housing.

Affordable housing also makes us a better destination people immigrating to Canada.

But that would require BlackRock to be less greedy… so

I know nothing about but was curious why they haven increased their residency positions.

One of the first hits on was this article, it seems like the issue (at least for family doctors) isn’t a lack of available residency positions since 268 positions went unfilled.

Sounds like it has more to do with the job basically sucks compared to other specialties, a few reasons mentioned in the article:

• Provinces are effectively forcing family doctors to crank patients through at a high rate since they’re pay is based on the number of pts the see in a day

• Family practice involves less collaboration with other physicians, less opportunity for professional growth.

• Political climate, notably in Alberta, is outright hostile towards doctors.

Doesn’t really explain what’s hindering doctors trained abroad from becoming doctors here.

Seems to me that a program designed to help foreign trained doctors become licensed here would be a good investment.

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, castigated Ms. Joly in a response on social media, warning that Canada was creating a “false moral equivalence” that would “fuel rising antisemitism” in the country.

Canada: We’re offering support to women on either side that were sexually assaulted.

Michal: Don’t do that it’ll make people hate our side.

🤔

Pretty much everybody is happy to see coal power shutdown. Even most people working in the coal industry are fine with it as there’s still a depressingly large market for coal.

We’re replacing it with natural gas and the oil and gas industry employs way more Albertans than coal. People in that industry are generally happy about it.

If we had replaced it with solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, anything that would make a significant impact on our still massive GHG emissions. Then about half of Albertans would be happy and about a third would be claiming “F*ck Trudeau yadda yadda”

If a website using home realm discovery adds anything more than one extra press of the enter key or mouse click of an ‘ok’ button, get a better password manager.

If you’re annoyed by that one extra click that’s fair. Click counts matter.

It’s called home realm discovery. It’s common in business apps though it’s usually used with email & password logins not username & password logins.

It’s done that way to support federated logins. Larger companies will often used a single sign on solution like Okta or Azure AD. Once the user’s email address is entered it checks the domain against a list of sign on providers for each domain and redirects the user to their company’s federated login if it finds it there instead of prompting for a password.

This has several benefits:

1. The user doesn’t have mutiple passwords to remember for different apps. Which is know to result in users either reusing passwords or writing down passwords somewhere.

2. When an employee quits or is terminated the company only needs to disable their account in their company directory and not go into potential dozens of separate web apps to disable accounts.

3. The software vendor never receives the password, if the vendor’s system is compromised they don’t even have password hashes to leak. (Let alone plain text or reversibly encrypted passwords)

Websites that work that way are (usually) doing it right. If that doesn’t work with your password manager, you should (probably) blame the password manager not the website.

This is good to see.

Each of these four reactors at the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant generate more electricity in a year than all the solar farms in Canada combined.

We can’t build enough additional solar or wind capacity to replace them in any reasonable timeframe.

It is not quite as sketchy as it sounds, but it’s still bad.

The medications in question are specially medications such as biologics that have unusual requirements like needing to be administered via infusion in a clinic by a nurse, or ultra expensive medications that are 10,000$+ per dose that insurance companies don’t want mishandled and need to be discarded. All stuff that you wouldn’t normally be able to stock at your corner pharmacy.

The pharmacists need special training on these medications, by limiting it to a particular chain, in theory they can ensure better care (which in theory saves insurance companies on claims on medications that were improperly delivered.).

But still, there’re several specialty pharmacy chains that deal with these medications, patients should have the right to choose where they get their medication.

It is not quite as sketchy as it sounds, but it’s still bad.

The medications in question are specially medications such as biologics that have unusual requirements like needing to be administered via infusion in a clinic by a nurse, or ultra expensive medications that are 10,000$+ per dose. Stuff you wouldn’t normally be able to stock at your corner pharmacy.

But still, patients should have the right to choose where they get their medication.

This is the same premier that declared a moratorium on new grid scale solar and wind farms. Alberta has some of the most optimal conditions in Canada for solar power and we can’t build it, because….

The oversimplified explanation is that having a lottery is heavily regulated in Canada as will all forms of gambling, but offering a prize for a contest of skill is not. And frankly it’s never been a priority for anyone to modernize the laws to something more straightforward.

Legally you can have a “contest of skill” and arbitrary decide a winner at random if there’s a tie. This eventually evolved into the typical “math question with a minimum of 4 operands”, which was ruled as essentially the minimum threshold for demonstrating a degree of skill.

I will absolutely give you that transitioning an established mature product to the subscription model is usually a terrible idea. Plenty of examples of that going horribly wrong.

As for subscriptions being a “blatant money grab” that definitely happens sometimes… notably when there’s a mature product with a dominating market share. The company already captured most of the market share, so they can’t get much more revenue from new customers, existing customers are satisfied with the version they have so they’re not buying any updates. Sales go down and someone comes along say just make it a subscription and keep milking the cash cow forever…. Yep, I admit it, that totally happens. The enshitification ensues.

But none of that’s the fault of the subscription model per se.

The same subscription model that becomes the incumbent’s downfall, is what creates a market opportunity for a new competitor.

A new competitor can coming in with a new product that was built with a subscription model from the start. The competitors product is cheap to try for a month, cheap to switch to with no big upfront costs. The newcomers can generally react much faster to customers needs than the incumbent. (Not because of the model, they can because they’re smaller)

Established software companies doing blatant money grabs happen all the time. Hell most of us are here using Lemmy because Spez attempted a blatant money grab on Reddit. Had nothing to do with the model.

Subscription model gets a lot of hate because greedy companies tried to use it as a blatant money grab exactly as you described. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Subscription models make it easier for newcomers entering a space, which is good for consumers. It’s more compatible with agile development methodologies because you don’t need wait until you’ve bundled enough features together to market it as a new version worth upgrading to. It’s in your best interest to ship new features immediately as they’re developed.

It’s totally fair of you don’t like the model.

But the model itself isn’t the problem.

Shitty companies being greedy will always happen.

Totally fair if you don’t like the subscription model.

But I am genuinely curious what you think I’m making assumptions about.

Wow… lots of people in here bashing the subscription model, but let me point out it’s maybe not as bad as you think…

If you sell a product under a perpetual license model (I.e the one-time purchase model). Once you’ve sold the product, the manufacturer has almost no incentive to offering any support or updates to the product. At best it’s a marketing ploy, you offer support only to get word of mouth advertising of your product which is generally a losing proposition.

Since there’s little incentive to improve the experience for existing customers. Your main income comes from if you can increase your market share which generally means making products bloated often leading to a worse experience for everyone.

If the customer wants support, you need to sell them a support contract. If they want updates you have to make a new version and hope the customer sees enough additional value to be worth upgrading. Either way we’re back to a subscription model with more steps, more risk, and less upside than market expansion so it takes a backseat.

If you want to make a great product without some variation on a subscription. You need to invest heavily upfront in development (which most companies don’t have the capital to do, and investors generally won’t invest in unproven software)

From a product perspective, you don’t know if you’ve hit the mark until people start using your product. The first versions of anything but the most trivial of products is usually terrible, because no matter how good you are, half to three quarters of the ideas you build are going to be crap and not going to be what the customers need.

Perpetual licensing works for a small single purpose application with no expectation of support or updates.

It works for applications with broad market needs like office software.

For most niche applications, subscription models offer a better experience for both the customer and the manufacturer.

The customer isn’t facing a large transition cost to switch to a competitor’s product like they would if they had to buy a perpetual license of it, so you have a lot more incentive to support and improve your product. You also don’t see significant revenue if the customer that drops your service a couple months in… even more reason to focus on improving the product for existing customers.

People ought hate the idea of paying small reoccurring fees for software instead of a few big upfront costs. But from a business model perspective, businesses are way more incentivized to focus on making their products better for you under that model.

I would create the evidence party.

It has the stated objective of maximizing quality of life for all Canadians.

It doesn’t care what people think is the best way to do that, it looks at research to determine what is the actual best way to do that and commission’s research to determine the most effective policies when existing evidence doesn’t exist.

It flip-flops on any issue when new research supports a different policy.