It would not surprise me if game developers use those screens to gain more time to load assets and initialize things in the background.

I’ll bet they do that with cutscenes and elevators too whenever you’re about to go into a new zone.

America badly needs electoral reform and viable third parties. This FPTP, pay-to-win system creates is such a dumpster fire.

somebody should be modelling and providing detailed pricing analysis.

This sounds like what MPAC should be doing in Ontario. The last assessment was done in 2016. Ever since Doug Ford’s PCs got elected, the Tories have been delaying them for years, even before the pandemic was a convenient excuse, and now they’ve delayed indefinitely. They also closed all of the field offices. Even when MPAC did do assessments, they didn’t track market prices well because they only did them every 4 years. For comparison, Denmark calculates these values every 2 years.

Another organization in this space in Ontario and Manitoba to be aware of is Teranet. They’re a private, for-profit company that has exclusive contracts with the Ontario and Manitoba governments. Seems shady to me that Ontario and Manitoba have allowed one company to monopolize and hoard our land registry data. In contrast, in BC, a crown corporation manages land registries data.

It always surprises me that when making the biggest purchase of their life people put so much trust and blind faith into realtors who aren’t required to have any formal education nor required to have any credentials to do the job.

Maybe they should be required to get a degree that covers topics like geography, land use planning, architecture, and trades related to home construction.

The other comment is not quite right. The lieutenant governor, a mostly ceremonial figure, always gives the incumbent the first opportunity to test the confidence of the legislature, even if they lost the election.

In 2017 there was another close election, much like this one, with the BC Liberal Party (a now non-existent centre right party) as the incumbent retaining a plurality of seats, but not quite a majority. The BC NDP at the time was only a few seats behind. When the legislature returned after the election, the BC Liberals established a new cabinet and then tested the confidence of the legislature. The BC Greens and BC NDP all voted them down. At that point the lieutenant governor could have either called another election, or give a chance to another party to test the confidence of the legislature. Almost always the latter happens. The BC NDP had been in contact with the BC Greens in the background and it was then that the supply and confidence agreement was established so the lieutenant governor gave them the chance to test the confidence of the legislature and the BC NDP had enough to pass and form government.

I’m Canadian. I can’t vote for Stein. Nor would I under your current system if I was able to. It’s tragic though that your federal system funnels your people into just 2 options.

Canada’s electoral systems are not much better but at least we have viable third party options up here that have been able to exert pressure and influence our governments and bring attention to important issues. It’s still first past the post, and that should change. Third parties can do good work in the right environment if you let them. We recently got the beginnings of a national pharmacare and dentalcare programs from our social democratic / democratic socialist / progressive party working with the liberals.

At lower levels of government, the US does have third parties other than the Greens that have been putting in work between presidential elections. Vermont’s Progressive Party and New York’s Working Families Party are worth checking out.

It doesn’t need to start with the federal level. There’s a growing amount of states that have already adopted some form of ranked choice voting and some of those have also adopted a proportional variant. Progress is being made in some places at lower levels, but it’s slow. Other states have banned it unfortunately.

North America’s electoral systems are so broken. It’s painful to see so much negativity, frustration, and fear directed at third parties in general. If that same energy was directed towards building a ranked choice voting system with proportional representation, like single transferable voting (STV), the duopolies would crumble and we could all actually vote for whoever we want without having to worry we might end up with the worst candidate winning.

Too many Ontarians are willfully ignorant, and are easily swayed by simple answers (and wrong) to complex problems that don’t involve any behavioural changes. Apparently we have one of the most highly educated populations in the world, yet we don’t vote like it.

I wouldn’t assume malice in all cases. Maybe they just aren’t great at breaking down complex subjects into plain language because it’s complex. Being an effective communicator and teacher is a skill that needs a lot of patience, practice, development, and feedback in order to get good, especially when trying to convey ideas through speech.

You’re forgetting a fundamental one:

• Sidewalks

You can use a bang, !g , to get google results on ddg

Somewhere in north eastern Ontario. To the naked eye, almost none of those colours were visible, it was mostly gray/white streaks, but they shimmered occasionally. I didn’t need any special equipment for these pics, they’re not edited either, just long exposure and night mode on a phone a few years old.

Share your northern lights photos!

Here are a few of mine:

English translation: https://www-lapresse-ca.translate.goog/actualites/sciences/2024-10-13/demystifier-la-science/la-bataille-contre-le-bruit.php?sharing=true&_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Trudeau wanted IRV because it benefits the Liberals. Everyone else wanted PR because it is fair.

Trudeau wasn’t willing to reconsider and IRV is not an upgrade over FPTP.

Forcing through IRV was not and is not a good idea.

Ah yes, so much fun to be had on the daily commute, stuck with everyone else from your sleepy suburb on a congested highway moving at glacial speeds because there’s no other option to safely and effectively get around for the people who don’t want to be there and can’t get out of your way.

Sure, you can take that thing out on weekends on country roads, mudding, camping, hauling ATVs to your favourite trails, building you or your buddy’s cottage, whatever you dream - but that still leaves 5 days of the week in traffic hell if you work in a city. Do you really want your neighbours to be left with no options to get out of your way so you can enjoy driving more on those days?

I would hope that they would be able to forecast demand reasonably well and use any extra for other products that might sell better in between holidays, like cold cuts, before it gets stuffed and packaged up only to end up in the dumpster.

Sometimes programmers wanna store one file and not care about the details related to what drive and computer it’s on. Sometimes in addition they want to make that file available to a limited number of other people or maybe make it broadly available on a private network or public on the internet.

Amazon’s cloud (AWS) offers a convenient service called Simple Storage Service (S3) to do that with a bunch of reliability and availability guarantees. Those guarantees add to the cost of the service, and not everyone needs them, so some programmers hope that competing discount cloud service providers (CSPs) will eventually offer a compatible service.

Hetzner is a discount CSP with lower guarantees, and that according to this post, released a compatible service.

Competition here is good. AWS is pretty dominant, number 1 worldwide with 33% of the CSP market and the company as a whole makes a lot of profit from being the internet’s corporate landlord.

In anglo Canada we have our own version of this that includes at least 1 oversized Canadian flag, at least 1 “FUCK 🍁 TRUDEAU” and 1 “FREEDOM” optionally also on flags or decals, something sloppily painted in white complaining about coronavirus mandates, and getting more common is something insulting Jagmeet Singh.