50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn’t get further than one chapter or so.

What I find so bizarre is that the women who go hardest for this stuff tend to be either repressed housewives or hardcore feminists.

Because if Christian Grey had been an unemployed layabout in a decaying double-wide, it would be a horror novel instead of smut. The only reason why it’s smut is because Christian is filthy f**king rich and exemplifies almost every toxic masculinity trait imaginable. And that is in addition to behaving like a controlling abuser.

In this context I see a baseline as a language that

1. A majority of the speakers have above-trivial skills in it, say above a sixth grade level in both written and spoken.
2. More than one-fifth of the population has this ability.
3. said language has extreme density in certain geographical regions, leading to dominance in those regions

And for some countries, there would be several that could fit both criteria. Switzerland would likely have French, German and Italian meeting all thresholds, allowing all three to be baseline languages.

Unfortunately, French does not meet the minimum-used criteria for Canada, as only 18% of citizens can speak it with any great skill. However, the geographical concentration criteria would likely overrule the usage criteria (via Québec), thereby allowing it to remain a baseline language.

Secondary languages would have similar criteria, only relaxed somewhat.

Back in the day (mid/late 90s), any download on Internet Explorer had a “file transfer” pop-up with an animation involving a planet (the Internet) sending flying sheets of paper (the download) to a Manila folder (the computer’s file system).

I legit had one client ask me why they couldn’t make the download go faster my moving the planet closer to the folder, or vice versa.

I recall just sitting there for a number of seconds while my poor brain tried to grasp just how badly out-of-whack their interpretation of the universe was.

Spoiler alert: they were a very poor client, and refused to relinquish an entire raft of very poorly thought out or even entirely wrong concepts of computing and the Internet. They were also credulous AF, and while I could have made an arseload of money correcting what they did on a weekly or even daily basis, I just didn’t want that kind of headache.

Sooo… he works multiple part-time jobs?

Weird how a forced technique of the ultra-poor is showing up here.

I’m wondering whether Europeans the other 96% of humanity

There, FTFY.

And yes, the other 96% of humanity would very much like to see Imperial measurements die.

Hell, as a Canadian born after 1970, I wouldn’t understand almost all Imperial measurements even if they smacked me clear in the forehead. About the most I have ever used are inches, feet, and pounds, and only because they’ve hung on in tightly-linked-to-America blue-collar industries and (until about a decade ago) grocery stores. I would have zero clue how much a cup or a Florida Ounce is.

Death is not the problem. Everything that has a beginning has an end, and death is absolutely a part of the process for complex life.

I don’t fear death itself. While I have things I would like to do and get done, there will be a time - especially if the infirmities of age catch up with me - when I will likely be waiting for death with no small degree of impatience. To me, the void of nothingness is something that can be anticipatory and welcoming, an end cap where you can leave behind all earthly worries and march boldly into… well, whatever it may be. Honestly, even nothingness is perfectly fine, albeit something of a let down.

No, what frightens me is the process of dying. That typically painful and potentially humiliating phase where your body or brain - and sometimes even both - have failed to get the memo that it’s time to move on, and you linger on in a state that is helpful to no-one except those who are trying to extract as much wealth as possible from this change of state.

This pokes fun at German rule-following, but as a Canadian of German descent (both parents), I can absolutely confirm that this “joke” is likely not a joke at all. Or, at least, it was lifted almost verbatim from observing another German parent.

And this is why I will never own a vehicle manufactured after 2006.

I have just too little control with newer vehicles, be it having to auth with the mothership with every repair I do at home just to get it to start up, or even failing to start up in the first place when the mothership could not be contacted.

I start off with Win10Privacy (which also cleans 11) and then follow up with Win11Debloat. The two work pretty well.

And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.

Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.

Doesn’t exactly help when most Android phones more than a year old won’t get these patches for many months or even years – if at all.

And alt-right conservatives continue to openly demonstrate why Canada so desperately needs a well-funded, nation-wide network of mental health sanitariums that can thoroughly protect the wider public from them.

I would take the top-5 languages spoken in Canada and make the country multilingual based off of that.

If that just so happens to include Cantonese and Hindi, so be it.

If it includes Cree and/or Inuktitut, even better.

Sure, have English as the baseline. A baseline should always be the most spoken common language. But having an few other languages as “official” - and supporting numerous others in the way Europe does - would make Canada far more inclusive and intellectually robust.

We don’t have a drug crisis. It just doesn’t exist.

We have a trauma crisis which goes utterly unaddressed by policy makers, arising out of food insecurity, housing insecurity, massive economic inequality and lack of sufficient social safety nets.

This trauma, when left unaddressed, drives people to self-anesthetize said trauma with anything readily available… and with said “toxic drugs” simply being the most effective and efficient at that job.

Drugs are a symptom, not a cause, of our problems. You don’t band-aid a symptom unless you are perfectly fine with letting the problem get only worse. You leverage a symptom to identify and heal the underlying cause, because that is how problems get solved. Solve the problem, and the symptoms vanish.

It’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage.

That’s what I am saving up for, actually. The numbers of surplussed high-end compute just in my sparsely populated region could probably let me open my own datacentre.

Even the illegal middlemen say that natives make up about 10-15% of illegal selling, at most.

As always, it’s just racism with a different hat.

the rest will retire in Kelowna.

Fuck, no! Not my home town! We have enough jacked-up and lifted pavement princesses with red license plates as it is!

Whoever thought of putting an entertainment system right next to the waste disposal is a complete and utter moron.

I can’t even turn things on without wondering if the cleaners sanitized/wiped in the wrong direction.

So what? Most of us were never meant to be impactful, or even lack the ability to be impactful. I would posit that life in general was only ever meant for us to vibe with the universe for a brief time. In the span of epochs, and especially once humanity makes itself extinct, vanishingly little will have any material impact on even the planet, much less reality as a whole.

Unless you manage to trigger false vacuum decay. Then you have made the biggest possible impact by destroying the entire universe. Not sure this is an appropriate goal to reach for, but hey. You do you.

But somehow matter magically organizes itself into life?

There is a recent, decently-supported hypothesis that the emergence of life is a byproduct of entropy, and the need for a system as a whole to almost “self-process” itself from a state of high order to one of lower order. So life is an emergent “engine” that allows entropy to function more efficiently. Or, at least a more efficient path than non-life.

Downside is that life - as we understand it - is only possible under a narrow range of environmental conditions, and complex life even more so. So while “life” may exist throughout the universe in measured single-celled doses, complex life - especially sapient life - may be distressingly rare or even wholly absent except for us.

Which is a real kick in the nuts when you examine the scientific evidence of how fast we are hurtling towards our own extinction.