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Joined 16 days ago
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Cake day: March 8th, 2025

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  • At least the effort diminishes over time. There are a lot fewer mainstream journalists than articles.

    I would like to see more non-profit effort into making this information plainer and more accessible, in a way that has wide reach yet doesn’t depend on media cooperation. Heavily promoted robust (and free) browser extensions, for example, that can parse out publication and author and will automatically show terse bios, or autogenerate (or select from a comprehensive bio) author/publication background information relevant to the specific article. The signal-to-noise ratio has to be super high so a tiny amount of additional information is highly informative and also pervasive.

    Tools like Ground News or the 3rd-party publication rating systems don’t go nearly far enough and don’t have enough reach nor reduce user effort enough.







  • I kind of agree, but there’s a substantial chance the NDP will insist on misinterpreting the results as meaning they should pull even farther to the relative center, even though it’s their base they are losing.

    On the other hand, the NDP implosion in NB opened the window for a stronger Green party with no more splitting of left-leaning votes. That party now more effectively represents both environmental concerns and labor. So far, that’s seeming like a pretty harmonious pairing of interests, with a largely shared base.

    I’m good with the NDP either shaping up or getting out of the way.


  • The CPC and UCP are pretty awful for sure. But as this thread demonstrates, conservatives do not have a monopoly on bad takes, divisive rhetoric, unnecessary hostility, and self-defeating attitudes.

    And the parallels between Democrats and LPC are significant. Both have an establishment that isn’t genuinely interested in tackling certain problems or backing away from a still generally pro-business bias. Aside from some key fundamentals we can credit for upholding this difference, many of the practical differences between Canada and the U.S. are more in degree than nature – i.e. money in politics, corporate welfare, influence of traditional energy, (mostly provincial) industrial barons, etc.



  • It wasn’t so weird back when people lived in relative isolation without any kind of standards, and had to come up with some sort of reference that was widely familiar and commonly available.

    You know, back in the Neolithic Age.

    It even makes sense why that familiar set of references would get standardized and then survive up until the beginning of the Industrial Age. Beyond that point it’s all driven by American exceptionalism, a.k.a. willful ignorance. What I don’t understand is what happened to the cubit. Feet make sense for distance, but as a craftsman I don’t want to be foot-fondling my work pieces.


  • On Canadian soil, it would still be Canadians losing jobs (faster) and collecting EI (when otherwise they might have gone straight to another job given more time), Canadians paying higher insurance premiums after that industry absorbs the cost, and Canadian productivity spent rebuilding wasted infrastructure.

    Maybe the message and damage to Tesla’s profits are worth that cost, but I sincerely do not know. Consequently I’m disinclined to form an opinion regarding what others should do, but I wouldn’t do it myself.


  • I think people who are unhappy with election results for other reasons sometimes make it an issue, disingenuously. But it doesn’t seem to me like anyone genuinely has a problem with it. PMs have considerably less power than presidents, and how much power they have is at least partly down to how the party chooses to govern itself. A PM who’s party has little power would be quite ineffectual. Maybe that isn’t great, but I’m not aware of a system that isn’t worse in that regard. Maybe the French system is slightly better, but their president’s power still depends a lot on majority party backing, at least for domestic issues. (And that’s a high-level not-super-informed opinion.)

    In practice in Canada, the party leader shapes the party, and the electorate votes for the party shape they see, knowing who made it that way. In effect, we practically are voting for our PM. We’re just tempering that choice against local concerns. But even then the local MP who most aligns with our values is probably going to share a party with the party leader we’d most like as PM. We’re only divided against ourselves when that local MP happens to personally be a lousy politician while someone else is doing a much better job of representing their constituents.







  • There was a time people could buy Teslas just wanting to do the right thing and not knowing any better. Some are also public assets that we’d all be paying to replace.

    Advocating violent protest is a line I will cross for the right cause, but it also has to be aimed at the right targets. We can’t be even taking a chance of eating our own, when there are sacrifices enough to be made already.