4 hours seems a bit much, I’ll agree that seems out of line. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that some questions were asked and he was ultimately approved to enter Canada so it seems like the system, in this case, worked mostly as intended aside from the amount of time it took to reach that conclusion. Canada has had several recent high profile incidents of not adequately vetting extremists entering this country to speak at conferences, and I am not surprised they are carefully screening people in this situation now. While it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that this guy was singled out for supporting Palestine, one isolated incident is not evidence of bias or profiling on any particular issue, there would need to be a consistent pattern established. Maybe there is one and I just haven’t seen it yet, but as far as I know this is an isolated incident so far.

it is a shame that Israel/Palestine has become such a sharply polarizing and divisive issue that we can almost automatically assume that anyone questioning anyone else on the topic is not doing so in good faith and is pushing their own agenda on it, but that’s actually not necessarily the case. Someone can say they’re a Princeton professor and have worked for the UN, but might take some time to actually verify if you’re not traveling with UN and Princeton travel documents, and even that doesn’t prove good intentions anyway. People can have solid credentials in their past, but have changed into something more extreme since then. Unless the person is well-known and already on a list somewhere, you don’t know where the person stands now unless you ask questions and verify answers. Should that have taken 4 hours? Again, probably not, but I don’t think it’s the asking of some of those questions that is the problem here.

That said, if there is going to be a pattern of this, I plan to be watching out for it now. I expect the same process to happen for people coming here to speak in support of the genocide, and I expect them to be refused entry. Will this happen? I don’t know. We’ll see.

AA batteries is an interesting choice. Wish we had a ubiquitous lithium-rechargable-based battery standard for products like this that would be smaller than an 18650 but bigger than a coin cell. Design it with some safe chemistry like LiFePo if you have to, but the old 1.2-1.5V AA standard is starting to feel very anachronistic these days.

We were so close with Trudeau. He was elected entirely on the back of that promise and everyone knew it. All we had to do was hold his feet to the fire when he tried to weasel out of it after getting the majority that left him no reasonable excuse for not following through. But we all know what happened. He later even said his biggest regret was not following through on electoral reform. Well, yeah. I’m not sure I believe him, but if he’s telling the truth I hope it fucking haunts him. It should. I’ll certainly never forgive him.

Almost all Canadian Universities (and the ones we are really talking about here) are all non-profit. They reinvest any profits back into the institution to improve their capacity for research. This is why Canada has some of the world’s leading research universities. They are not profiting to make individual people richer, they are profiting to make society and our future richer.

This is starting to change though. There are unfortunately a growing number of for-profit “universities” in the country but most of them are transparently low quality diploma-mills (which is a whole different problem that needs dealing with) and aside from misleading naive domestic and mostly international students and separating them from their money, they remain of very marginal educational or research significance. That may not continue though unless we do something to support our large majority of non-profit universities.

StatsCan is a national treasure and more important than most people give it credit for. Informed decisionmaking requires trustworthy information.

The OG cyberpunk Johnny of course is included in that. while he is technically found among “any of the Johns”, I actually meant for it to be both implied and explicitly included, but my words kind of got ahead of my muddled brain.

So… throwing trillions at it is bad, but I’m not following the part where you implied I’m potentially ignorant. Do you, or don’t you, want to fall behind one of the main countries that is throwing trillions at it, which you admit is bad? Is letting ourselves fall behind and proceeding very cautiously not reasonable? Did we not weather the 2008 financial crisis with much the same attitude?

Instructions unclear, got afraid of falling behind and accidentally tied my much smaller economy with a very sturdy rope to a country that is soon to be falling off a cliff.

Wanting to fall behind the rest of the world is a good thing when the rest of the world is charging mindlessly towards a cliff.

I’d absolutely buy and play more cyberpunk games with Johnny Silverhand/Keanu in them. I’d also play games where I can be Johnny Silverhand/Keanu. Could certainly see another attempt to make some cyberpunk-style matrix-like story or open world that would go over well with me. I’m pretty open to any sort of Johnny Silverhand/Keanu related themes. I’d also readily accept a John Wick or John Constantine or Johnny Utah game too, basically any of the Johns. Honestly, I’d even play a game where I have to drive a bus that can’t slow down or it explodes (which really isn’t any different from most arcade racers when you think about it). Basically, shut up, take my money, do whatever you want with it as long as there’s eventually more Keanu- or Keanu-adjacent-content in the video gaming space once you’re done, this is a good thing. Or just inject some Keanu right into my veins, whatever, I don’t know.

I’d be fine with that if we were simply spending that money entirely within Canada. Invest in some infrastructure. Give me a new job building military death robots, at this point I don’t care as long as I get paid. I’ll work 16 hours a day building military death robots or winding rotors for drone motors for the national defense as long as it pays me enough to put a roof over my head and food on my table. This should not be a large ask. If we’re going to build affordable housing like we did in wartime and invest in defense like we’re already at war we may as well have a wartime economy to go with it. Break out the fucking food rations and government workhouses already.

But instead we let costs of living spiral wildly out of control and pretend inflation isn’t exploding because the only thing in the consumer price index which isn’t skyrocketing is the over-represented falling price of gas, which people aren’t using as much of anymore due to WFH and EVs. Then we blow our entire budget of countless billions of dollars on other countries’ designs and intellectual property and partnerships where they do all the skilled and value-added work and then we end up employing 1,000 people here if we’re lucky, while we have to ask permission to fix it and pay them to train us how to use it.

Yeah, it’s our own damn fault for cancelling, selling, giving away, or letting other countries sabotage any of our designs or intellectual property of value and letting our infrastructure for building any of it rot to dust for at least half a century, and there’s no easy way back from that. I get it. But knowing that doesn’t make it any less infuriating.

There is no other authority I would trust on the matter.

The Internet never forgets, but it is easily distracted.

The rest of Canada has your back. At least the people do. I can’t speak for our governments.

All these attacks on collective bargaining power are already bringing public pressure to the boiling point, maybe they’re hoping we’ll forget how many different species of wildcats live in Canada. Make it make sense, or we’ll start to meow.

It’s not bizarre at all. There are words that explain exactly what happened: calculated vote suppression and voter disenfranchisement. The election was stolen before it even began, by Bill 20. The result is exactly as intended.

It solves almost everything?

I guess you don’t understand the benefit of putting all the shady Microsoft shit in its own dirty polluted sandbox (or individual sandboxes) where it can’t spy on anything besides the other stuff in its sandbox that is already tainted and at most it may find a way to spy on the stuff you give it implicit permission to while you do whatever work you need to do with it. Meanwhile your main OS which hopefully does at least 90% of what you actually need to do on a daily basis, and does all the stuff that is actually important to you and happens to be none of Microsoft’s business, is safely running the actual show and remains completely under your control and authority, private and spyware-free. If you can’t completely get rid of Windows from your life (and some people still feel like they can’t for whatever reason), you can at least limit your exposure massively and turn it into practically a non-issue. Compartmentalization is a very effective way of dealing with nasty untrusted software.

When you get that shit locked down tight enough you can run straight-up viruses and rootkits with no concerns at all. You can see what they do, or try to do, and when they’re finished doing it, just casually delete them. Some people do. For research. In fact it’s so common that a lot of viruses or rootkits go out of their way to try to detect that they’re on a VM and refuse to activate if they think they are, there’s a whole arms race of researchers trying to make the VM look more realistic so the virus will still trigger. Even the viruses know your VM is probably just fucking with them. Windows, thankfully, isn’t quite that bad, and programs written for it will run quite happily in a VM or other virtual environment and let you do whatever you want to do with them, quite safely and subject to your complete authority over them that a VM or other simulated environment can provide.

We can still build more libraries, too. Canada has style, but even our Prime Minister knows how to perform a Shawinigan Handshake when necessary, and that’s part of our style. Elbows up.

Replace it with a ballroom.

Oh, let me make sure I have this straight, you mean they should focus on catching actual legitimate criminals and gangs who use and transport illegal guns?

You mean they should do that INSTEAD of making more guns illegal to legally own?

AND they should do that instead of making responsible, law-abiding gun owners who have never hurt anybody or done anything illegal INTO criminals?

And we’re not even going to need to discuss the possibility of increasing the scope of background, medical and psychological checks to ensure that the few who are pursuing a fully legal path to gun ownership, but are or eventually become at risk of causing harm with guns, do not get any license or legal access to firearms in the first place?

I admit that your idea sounds like it would be great for stopping the flow of illegal guns into our country, and stopping most gun-based crime, but I don’t understand, how does it hurt legitimate gun owners? I’m pretty sure that’s the goal, right? I thought we didn’t care about illegal guns getting into the country, only about discouraging people from owning guns and making life more difficult for people who choose to own guns while trying to live up to the acknowledged and genuine privilege of doing so, despite the bureaucratic punishments and continuous discouragement.

/s for most of that obviously

Safeway has been getting shittier ever since Sobeys bought them in 2013. I don’t feel like Sobeys/Empire gets enough hate compared to Loblaws. They are both evil and suck donkey balls.