There’s no need to resort to bluesky, @avilewis@mstdn.ca has a mastodon account.

I’m not a fan of having the government subsidizing new car purchases. It’s the last thing we need. The sale of cars that run on fossil fuels should be banned ten years ago or as soon as possible. If the government wants to spend more money it should go towards alternatives to cars, not to bribing the relatively wealthy people who shop for brand new cars to put even more of them on the roads.

Goodbye EV sales mandate. Hello purchase rebates.

Of all the politicians, only Mr. Carney has the expertise, foresight, and economic sophistication to do exactly the wrong thing with such precision.

If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

It’s a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There’s currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It’s the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they’re run the way they are now. You can’t reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.

The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.

Evan Solomon, minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, is very keen for Canada to become an “AI powerhouse,” calling this our “Gutenberg moment.”

Maybe it’s actually our Guttenberg moment, as in Steve Guttenberg in Police Academy (1984). AI plays the role of “Ax Murderer” of course. I’m keeping an eye out for the Michael Winslow character.

Can’t say I have a whole lot of faith in the accuracy and diligence of the Todayville espionage section, but for a moment it did have me wondering if whoever controls China’s foreign influence operations shares my view that a Liberal majority would be bad news for Canada. But no, they probably don’t care. More likely they perceive the Liberals as more of an annoyance to the USA than the current opposition would be.

$500 million in capital investment funding for food businesses, $20 million for food banks

What if we make that 500 for food banks (or something new) and 20 for capitalists?

Hard to believe anyone would say that in public but I guess being confidently wrong is his go-to move every time.

Little will change for the better so long as the Liberal-Conservative tag team holds such complete dominance.

The bill itself was full of maximally authoritarian bullshit, causing all the civil society groups to oppose it as loudly as they did. It remains around in some form, last I heard, still theoretically in the legislative process somewhere, a continuing threat to us all should the Liberals feel confident enough to try and pass any of the worst parts of it into law.

It might’ve been an attempt to appease Trump, or it might’ve been pushed by some Trumpist infiltrator within the party, I don’t know. Optimistically, we can hope that Carney wasn’t really aware of what was in it, and on a topic outside his areas of expertise he was simply misled by people he mistakenly chose to trust. In any case I’m sure he will have learned from the experience.

Him I took the time to answer. You I will block.

Read a few more words there and find out. He didn’t write that legislation, but he approved of it, has had the power to stop it all along, and has not renounced it.

I guess it serves as a data point indicating what the percentage of Americans who will agree to the craziest shit available on the opinion poll answers is up to now. Seems to me it was as low as 10% not too many years ago.

It’s a good speech. He’d be a great prime minister if he weren’t so fond of fossil fuels, military spending (as opposed to actual defence,) and authoritarian bullshit in the name of security as exemplified in the infamous “border security” bill.

Oh, Doug Ford. Not the Ford Motor Company, which is the Ford I would’ve thought more likely to complain about having a competitor that’s actually capable of selling EVs at reasonable prices.

The main problem is that 49000 is much too small a number given the rate at which Canadians are buying cars.

“Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands have confirmed deployments as part of the same multinational operation” according to Newsweek, citing “multiple outlets.” I’m pretty sure I heard about it on CBC radio news.

I don’t know, but it would be pretty strange for Canada to be left out.

I don’t trust Mark Carney much and he’s doing a shit job of managing things in Canada so far, but if there’s one thing he ought to be good at it’s negotiating a trade agreement with China.

Toronto police say … Anyone with information is asked to contact Toronto police

Apparently the CBC, normally the closest thing Canada has to good journalism, knows only what the police have told them about this event.

Meanwhile, how much is their media division spending to increase excessive screen time among teens and tweens?