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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I have the distinct feeling that this movie could have been produced in the US, which, let’s be fair, they would not really understand how a succession crisis would work in Canada (Also, we have another Trudeau in office, so it’s not entirely unrealistic for a son to take over). Or if it is a Canadian producer, they likely over-simplified the process by which a son could suddenly be elevated to the position of PM, which… yeah, a movie isn’t really gonna cover how difficult that would be.


  • More than anything else, my biggest concern is real simple:

    Drunk driving is going to go up WAY MORE.

    Based on all the drivers I have seen on the road, too many of them lack the restraints to actually follow the rules and not do dumb shit, such as texting while driving, following the rules of the road and giving proper space / signaling, road rage, etc. And we know that there already is a bad enough problem as it is with drunk driving, and how so much of our infrastructure is designed around the necessity of having a car, rather than alternatives for getting around (public transit, primarily).

    But now you can drive down to whatever 7/11, gas station, Mac store in your area, grab a six-pack anytime between 7am to 11pm, even on Friday nights? Good luck having all those corner stores trying to enforce the same “no-serve” policy that LCBO and Beer Store employees are expected to follow. You’ll have a lot more bad sales being made where people who shouldn’t be mixing booze with driving (as bad as their latter skills may be, alone) will absolutely be able to do that easier and being far more of a danger on the roads. That is where the biggest costs of drinking is going to come from. And Canada, much like other North Americans, do not have a responsible relationship with booze and drinking.

    It is going to be a shit-show for whichever government has to follow in the steps of Ford. Hope you like taxes going up to deal with the consequences of more drunk drivers on the road!


  • So Indexes are supposed to be a little more rigid than just having companies being “removed on a whim” - you would more likely find that on a mutual fund, which are individually managed, versus an index. That being said, I did look into the difference between Dow and S&P 500, and… well, yeah, the former is selected by a committee who generally pick for the top 30 performing companies, while the latter is just a list of the 500 largest publicly traded companies. I think it is generally not used as a good indicator of economic health, as opposed to the S&P (based on a quick Wikipedia read).

    I think a few people might consider it only because it’s been running since 1896, and there haven’t really been a lot of changes as to who gets on / off the Dow (58 since inception). So honestly, more than anything else, it’s just really bad PR for investors who might care that Intel is doing so poorly that it’s being kicked off one of the longest-running indexes, which is never good news. Might rattle them enough to where they start demanding big changes, which is likely what Intel needs.


  • Confiscating their drugs, forcible confinement… you serious? They’ll just get more when they get the chance; they’re addicts, and there are markets for them to find drugs, there’s no easy way of stopping addicts from getting what they need. Confiscating or 24 hour confinement just ends the immediate risk of use, there’s no saying that won’t stop them from getting another hit by the next day (or even guarantee that they haven’t already used it by the time they’re confiscated / confined).

    You’re advocating for punishing people effectively for being poor and addicted to drugs. That’s kind of a fucked up opinion, and opening SCSs does not mean you aren’t thinking of the children - it’s also keeping addicts off the streets and away from exposing that lifestyle to children, but on a more humane and practical level.


  • To be fair, yes, Canada has the second-largest land mass on the planet. ~90% or more of that landmass is largely inhospitable for larger communities though, whether it’s the Canadian Shield and the fact we can’t grow any crops on that or dig through tough rocks, the Tundra and Arctic (where it is way too cold to grow anything, much less settle), vast distances of forests - it is a lot tougher to build infrastructure in most of Canada, leaving it pretty much to the places already with larger population sizes. And even then, most people are still choosing to go to the three cities and immediate outlying areas where the most economic influence and possible social connections are - Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal.

    It would seem deceiving, given how large Canada is, but there are very few places outside of those major metro centres where people want to live, or can even live comfortable lives and be productive. Honestly, given how little good land is available in Canada, it would make far more sense to cut down on suburban developments and focus on higher-density, transit-minded communities. Single-family homes are way too inefficient for what we actually need, and having politicians and citizens who demonize quadplexes and other high density options do not help at all.


  • Bus driver here. Our transit commission finally got it’s first EV bus to start the transition to the electric system! But we still need to build the charging stations for it and other EVs to use, not to mention the bureaucracy and other normalities that go in certifying any vehicle for the road, plus our one garage did kinda burn down, so that has set things back a wee bit…

    It’s coming, but do expect it to take a long-ass time.



  • Oh it’s definitely a great city builder, I quite enjoy it myself! Even when it comes down to putting down housing, you can adjust the size of the plots to perform different functions, whether it is to grow large veggie crops, whether you need housing for specific specialized individuals, whether you just need to cram as many families as you can into one housing unit, assigning specific families to work at nearby locations, I could go on and on!

    And there is a peaceful mode if you want to avoid the wartime strategy bits, but even those seem to be rather enjoyable, at least from the initial experience I have had with it. Very much looking forward to seeing what the expanded final product is going to look like, it is definitely a game worth all the praise!


  • Well, think about it this way:

    A standard house for 4 people is probably in the range of 200k - 400k. Then you would need supporting infrastructure for each house - sewage and gas pipe connections, electrical connections, road infrastructure, all that jazz. That’s probably another 100k right there. And then public infrastrcture for things like schools, parks, firefighters, police, road equipment, etc. It’s easy to see why the costs would add up quickly to roughly $1 million or more per person. Managing city infrastructure is really damn expensive, especially for more ineffective housing options (hellooooooooo, suburbia!).



  • Maybe they don’t explain it in the article, but I’m gonna posit my own two cents: Alberta’s economy is quite big, relative to how much it contributes to Canada’s GDP as a whole, but the overwhelming majority of that is in oil and hydrocarbons, and a lot of the overall economy is geared towards that particular industry. Without it, Alberta would be in a significantly worse position. I would wager that we are seeing a good example of Dutch Disease.

    What Ontario and Quebec lack in oil, they make up for in a more diverse economy, especially being the economic financial and trading hot-spots a la Toronto and Montreal. They have a robust enough economy that they can basically support their own dedicated Provincial police force and not have to rely too much on one singular economic output to fuel the entire thing.

    With the EV market looking to expand faster and faster, Alberta hitched its economic future on a product that people actively want to turn away from. To create their own police force would mean they’d need their economy to be capable of funding this police force permanently, no Federal assistance, and if the demand for oil craters out because more and more people start getting off gas and going towards EVs, heat pumps, nuclear / solar / wind, etc., well, then Alberta would be quite pooched. Also, worth pointing out that neither Canada nor Alberta have enough weight in the global oil markets to guarantee that oil is a prime economic benefit, especially if new sources of cheap oil start popping up in the US.

    I can’t speak to all of the political reasons for wanting to create a new Provincial police force, but economically? Alberta is better off relying on the RCMP rather than trying to do its own thing, just in case funding becomes a problem in the future.



  • So I ran the math on the election outcome on this, as someone who lives in the riding directly:

    32401 / 116259 = ~ 27.9% (Voter turnout)

    27.9 * 0.574 (Percentage of vote which went to Jivani) = 16.01%

    16% of the electorate gets to decide a candidate for the remaining 84%. I don’t know about anyone else, or whether it’s just supposed to be the way that things go, but it gives me a real ick feeling when I see a number like that. Maybe if it was something closer to 30% or something along those lines, I could at least begrudgingly accept that this is such a solid Conservative riding, but only 16%?!

    I just really hate voter apathy, guys. Come on, we had 4 days of early voting, mail-in voting, the actual vote day itself, you can legally request time off work to go vote if you need it… was it that difficult to get out and vote, or am I just missing some other context?!





  • If you can point me to a single hydrogen-charging station in my area, I would be impressed. As infrequent and underdeveloped as EV chargers are (assuming you aren’t able to get a charger installed in your house), I haven’t heard of a single hydrogen charger anywhere in the GTHA. Hell, I haven’t even heard of a single hydrogen car on market that people are pursuing in any noticeable numbers. Li-battery cars at least have some modicum of infrastructure now where, in certain urban settings, it is entirely possible to drive an EV around, and I know they exist.

    And there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Reduce the number of cars, sure, I would love to see that happen, but outright banning them? It’ll never happen.


  • I would argue that, because of the war in Ukraine, Russia no longer poses any threat to Canadian territorial integrity. They have 315,000 casualties - dead and injured - in this war. To put that into context, that is almost 90% of the initial deployment into Ukraine. They have spent so many resources into a war that they are actively failing in, there is no plausible means by which Russia can pose a threat to our territories within at least one or two generations. And just consider that the quality of the average Russian soldier has deteriorated significantly for so many reasons, but one most worth noting - it’s barely a week of training for the average Russian recruit, and then straight to the frontlines in either Bakhmut or Avdiivka.

    Look at any population pyramid with Russia, and you’ll see that they are massively suffering from a lack of young people. And unlike Canada, which has many pro-immigration policies and attitudes which can attract a lot of people to make up for our lower birth rates, Russia is NOT a place where people want to emmigrate to, in large both because of its dire economic outlook (especially with all of the sanctions imposed by the US and the West), and also because it is insanely bigoted towards anyone who is not from Moscow or St. Petersburg.

    Russia is wildly fucked, even if they were somehow to turn this around and somehow secure everything they ever wanted from Ukraine. If they are struggling this much with a former Soviet country almost next door to Moscow, there’s no way they will ever be able to project their force beyond their shorelines. Their navy, or whatever boats they can use on the Pacific Coast, will never have enough supporting troops to ensure they could hold any amount of Canadian territory for any extended campaign, especially since their logistics is raw dogshit.

    And that is all without talking about the massive, US-sized elephant in the room.


  • Well, whatever O’Toole wants is far beyond his control, at this point. Maybe if he ran a better campaign he could have nipped this problem in the bud, or maybe he could have entirely empowered the crazies, but that’s neither here nor there. He lost, he’s resigning, and the problem is beyond his fixing now - who knows if his appeal will even reach the ears that it needs to.

    This is going to be a Canadian problem as a whole to resolve, and it’s a simple solution: if you do not want radicalized politics to take over, do not vote for the radicals to take over your party or Parliament. Say what you will of the other parties, but radicalism and reactionism are largely a Conservative issue, and I imagine the voters will more than kindly respond to the idea of trying to turn things up a notch.


  • Well, I have to see it differently. 3 months in jail for advocating for the downfall and (inevitably consequential, I would say) death of a particular group of people seems pretty trivial, considering that this guy has had a long history of writing these materials. I would say even if these aren’t “unapproved writings”, they sure are fucking reckless - this is someone advocating for hateful people to lash out at another group. He writes for a Neo-Nazi website, he’s quite literally a Nazi. This is the equivalent of a corporation getting a financial fine for [insert corporate crime / corruption here] that amounts to no less than a slap on the wrist, it would mean effectively nothing to continue doing what he’s doing.

    You could argue that maybe he did, in fact, change his ways. Maybe he really is not the guy he was any longer. But for any aspiring paid hate-mongering writers, this isn’t enough of a deterrent to stop them from whipping up the hate in our neighbours. I think we’ve all seen the kind of nonsense that happens South of the border when radically hateful propaganda hits too much of the masses - I personally feel that it’s in our interest to not have our national discourse go down that dark and dreary path, or else it’s more Trucker blockades, Jan. 6th Capitol riots and other awful things to come.