blindsight

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blindsight ,

Indeed. As a silly example, I had a Pacman clone game that ran based on CPU cycle speed. I needed to turn the in-game speed setting way down and toggle turbo off to make it slow enough to be playable.

blindsight ,

I'm having a hard time having sympathy for someone who was supporting anti-trans bigots, who were accusing teachers of being pedophiles, and (I suppose) attempting a coup. (Hard to take the last one seriously.)

Like... Of course this ended poorly. I'm surprised they paid any of the hydro bill from their camp, tbh.

blindsight ,

I don't follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It's not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.

And publishers' profits are rising and don't seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.

What am I not understanding?

blindsight , (edited )

I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.

Maybe a nice neutral woman's name... Like, Anna?

And it's more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.

Yeah, Anna's Archive. Great name. Let's go with that one.

blindsight , (edited )

Sad but not surprising that governments failing to fund maintenance costs are leading to service failures. Even less surprising that a conservative government is using the problem they created to privatise profits.

blindsight ,

Sentencing hasn't happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.

Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it's just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.

blindsight ,

Yeah, the new Canada's Food Guide is actually really good. (The one below is modeled after it, but changed to vegan foods).

Like, it seems like a reasonable, evidence-based, practical guide to healthy eating habits. (Unlike every single previous version going back to the 50s that might as well have been propaganda from the Canadian Wheat Board.) The latest revision is from 2019, iirc, and it's the first time I've felt comfortable using it as the basis of classroom instruction.

blindsight ,

Vitamin D supplementation is recommended for all Canadians, not just vegans. And Omega 3, D, and B12 are common supplement recommendations (actually backed by strong evidence) for the general population. (Although the benefits of Omega 3 supplementation for heart health has come under scrutiny, I think its anti-inflammatory effects are still pretty widely supported.)

Anyway, no need for the vitriol. Nobody is forcing you to go vegan. If it works for them, then great! It's definitely better for the planet to eat less meat, so power to them. (I eat way too many eggs to ever consider going vegan, personally.)

blindsight , (edited )

That's... Hilariously bad. Canned meats vs. fresh. Fancy ice cream vs. cheap ice cream. Everywhere you look things are shittier for the Aboriginal People's food guide. What the fuck were they thinking? Why did they even put out a different version?

A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels ( www.npr.org )

Grocery store prices are changing faster than ever before — literally. This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds....

blindsight ,

To be fair to Loblaws, I've never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they're not engaged in "surge pricing" that I've heard of. (I haven't been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don't expect it's changed.)

But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn't match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it's $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn't be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don't think that is legally mandated.

So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn't clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it's illegal, too.

blindsight ,

Beehaw never defederated with lemmy.ml. Most notably, Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world which is one of the main reasons I'm happy to stay here. If Beehaw moves away from Lemmy, I'll definitely need to find another instance that's defederated with Lemmy.world.

blindsight ,

Yeah, fair. It's frustrating when prices fluctuate; I'm lucky that we don't have many "must have" items on our shipping lists, and I'm very price sensitive, so I just don't buy things that are expensive. And I only used to go to Superstore at most weekly, so I'd never have noticed daily fluctuations.

blindsight ,

There's probably something in the terms about it, and it would take a very expensive legal battle to settle it. And I doubt it has enough legal merit to be taken on as a class-action lawsuit.

So, really, does it matter if it's illegal? With the asymmetrical power imbalance, they literally don't need to care about the laws. Realistically, no EU regulator is going to fine them for cancelling "a purchase made in India", either.

China’s risky answer to wall of debt is more debt ( www.reuters.com )

China’s economy is buried under a great wall of debt and Xi Jinping’s answer is to add more bricks. The president has sanctioned an extraordinary programme of borrowing by the central government to steer the $18 trillion behemoth to “high quality development”. In doing so, he is piling risk onto the country’s last...

blindsight ,

The biggest thing that stood out to me was the mismatch between revenue and spending at different levels of government. 90% of spending with only 50% of tax revenue for regional government compared to 10% spending with 50% for the central government. I suppose that's the mechanism they're using to centrally manage the economy, by controlling fund transfers to lower levels of government?

Including personal debt and corporate debt, this will also put China above 300% net debt to GDP. That seems really high, but I couldn't easily find equivalent values for other countries to compare against. Canada has 100% consumer debt to GDP, 107% government debt to GDP, and corporate debt of $2 trillion / $3 trillion GDP is about 67%. (And I think Canada is considered over-leveraged compared to peer countries).

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

blindsight ,

Well said, and you touched on one of the things I like most about Behhaw, that people are actually willing to put effort into writing with sufficient depth to address complex topics authentically, and others are willing to read everything and respond in good faith, even when they disagree.

I browse Beehaw's somewhat-curated-by-defederation /everything quite frequently, too, and I rarely ever have any snarky replies to my comments. It's lovely. Granted, conversation threads are generally quite small, but I don't need an endless firehose of content, so that's not a problem.

I don't have any other Lemmy accounts to compare, but I didn't enjoy reading /everything from a Lemmy app that pulls from it's own feed instead of your logged-in instance feed. On Reddit, I mostly enjoyed smaller niche subs, and very few of the popular ones.

blindsight , (edited )

Very good video overall, except I don't think he made it clear initially that there's a primary residence exception on capital gains tax, so people might be confused that this tax will affect them when it won't. Similarly, the 1¼ million lifetime small business sale exemption should have been introduced earlier, imho.

Like, the example could have been a $2.6 million small business sale instead, then it would actually compare the old $1 million exemption with the new $1.25 exemption, and the old 50% incision rate with the new 50->66% inclusion rate to get a more accurate "apples-to-apples" comparison.

Napkin math:

Old capital gains tax: about 1 million is exempt, so paying 50% capital gains on remaining 1.6 million is 800K income, at 53% is about 424K tax.

New capital gains tax: 1.25M is exempt, so include 50% capital gains on next 250K, then 66% on the remaining 1.1M. Total capital gains income is 851K. 53% tax on 851K is only $27K more, for $452K, which is a 6.6% increase.

Vs. getting increased services over your entire lifetime from the ultra wealthy paying closer to their fair share? Even a small business owner selling a $2.6MM business comes out way ahead.

Also, do we really want to give doctors a pass for incorporating to shelter their income against income tax for their entire lives then say that's a problem when they're asked to pay closer to their actual fair share income tax when they retire? Really?

And we're worried about people selling their multimillion dollar vacation properties paying more tax?

Anyway, I get the video is trying to be "balanced", and it's close, but it's still biased toward the ultra wealthy.

blindsight , (edited )

I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I'm still not sure why a 100% inclusion rate is a problem. (With various exemptions for primary residence sales and small business sales, maybe with a $1MM lifetime maximum? idk, just making up a number.)

Are they concerned that people just... aren't going to invest their capital to earn more money if they'll be taxed on the profits? Or is this just a global "race to the bottom" that they won't invest in Canada because they can earn more if they invest elsewhere?

Maybe something like: 50% inclusion up to $100K, 75% inclusion up to $1MM, then 100% inclusion thereafter, and add a mechanism to spread capital gains over several years so people making single-lifetime large capital gains aren't treated the same as people earning millions every year.

That would still incentivize small-business creation and startups without letting multimillionaires off the hook.

blindsight ,

Yep. Z-Library loaded fine for me with their app, which leads the darknet site.

But Anna's Archive is probably easier.

blindsight ,

That's terrible, but so are the treatments this article is suggesting. ABA is abuse.

Behaviorism, in general, has lots of research supporting its efficacy in changing behavior, but completely ignores the mental health effects of the trauma from the behaviorist interventions.

This might be made more clear with a thought experiment from Dr Becky Kennedy's mostly-unrelated parenting book, The Good Inside. (Great book, btw. Highly recommended for all parents.) I know a 100% effective treatment for any childhood behavior: when the child engages in the behaviour, lock them outside in a cage overnight. It will take at most 3 treatments and they'll never exhibit that behavior again, guaranteed!

Aside from the hypothetical example obviously not passing ethics review, that's literally how behaviorism research is conducted: the only thing they measure is efficacy in altering behaviour. That's a really low bar.

ABA is "effective" because children are being conditioned to avoid being abused.

blindsight ,

The new rules aren't even strong enough; the CRA calculates the mileage rate every year, yet BC is letting companies get away with paying about half the CRA rate. Why? Tips should be just that—a tip, not required so they can cover their vehicle costs.

If people can't afford to pay minimum wage + mileage, then they shouldn't get service. Go pick it up yourself, or make a frozen pizza or something. Or take public transit or a (regulated) taxi.

I have some sympathy for those with disabilities who can't drive and need to deal with abysmal public transit wait times, but their disability doesn't trump gig workers' rights to the minimum wage.

South Australia to legislate 'world leading' electoral donation ban prohibiting donations and gifts to political parties, backed by tough penalties for those who seek to circumvent the law ( www.premier.sa.gov.au )

The South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, has announced plans to ban donations to registered political parties, members of parliament and candidates. The state will provide funding to allow parties and candidates to contest elections, run campaigns and promote political ideas, according to the proposed bill....

blindsight , (edited )

In Canada, I've never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system's time.

Even if it does go to court, there's a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that's, what, $50? They don't want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there's a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn't with their legal costs to pursue.

So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)

blindsight ,

Very well explained.

Anyone who's on a variable rate mortgage and hasn't increased their monthly payments significantly is going to be in a lot of trouble when they go to renew.

This might actually lead to housing prices dropping significantly.

blindsight ,

I mean, they can try, but market forces are outside their control.

I don't think the US wanted to have their housing market collapse in 2008 (?), but it happened nonetheless.

It would suck, psychologically, to "lose" 30% of my house's value in a downturn, but it would be better for the economy if that happens. And, really, now that I'm a homeowner, all that really matters is the difference in house values when I go to sell/buy. So a downturn might actually be "good" for me, since the differential between this first and a "better" house would be smaller.

Right now, boomers are selling in hot markets to find lavish retirement, transferring wealth from the younger generation to older on massive volumes.

Vimms Lair is getting removal notices from Nintendo etc. We need someone to help make a rom pack archive can you help? ( slrpnk.net )

Vimms lair is starting to remove many roms that are being requested to be removed by Nintendo etc. soon many original roms, hacks, and translations will be lost forever. Can any of you help make archive torrents of roms from vimms lair and cdromance? They have hacks and translations that dont exist elsewhere and will probably be...

blindsight ,

I don't think that's an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there's a "complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped" torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

You could even get a situation where there are no "seeds" but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

I'm not fully looped in to why Anna's Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I'd be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I'm not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that's useless to me without the full archive.

blindsight ,

I don't know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you're uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that "seeding" if you aren't a "seed" with 1.00 availability? idk.

I'd still count that as "seeding" since you're running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there's a precise definition somewhere.

blindsight ,

I don't think this will affect housing, yet. Not much, anyway. This rate decision has already been widely anticipated and fully priced in to mortgage rates. The language used by the BoC sounds very similar, too, so I don't think there's any signal to the market that will change expectations significantly.

People on variable-rate mortgages will get a bit of relief, I suppose. But that won't move the needle much on housing prices.

blindsight , (edited )

As a Canadian, that sounds even worse to me, lol. Elected judges? That's insanity. Judges should never be making decisions based on political expedience.

Judges should be chosen by people who are experts in the law based on their knowledge and experience.

In Canada, I suppose it's loosely political, but it's several steps removed from direct political appointment. The PM and cabinet appoint someone to be the head of the judiciary, confirmed by the Governor General, and Supreme Court judges can be held accountable by the Senate and House in cases of misconduct.

Electing judges would make it worse, not better, imho.

The best solution I've heard for the US wouldn't require a constitutional amendment, it's to make the Supreme Court position last 18 years before becoming a Justice Emeritus (or whatever) that's mostly ceremonial. That takes away the incentive to stuff the judiciary with young judges, and adds stability that each presidential term is 2 justice appointments on a slowly rolling basis.

Philanthropist who gave $30M to U Manitoba condemns 'hateful' valedictory speech, university for allowing it ( www.cbc.ca )

The philanthropist behind the University of Manitoba's largest-ever personal donation — $30 million — has denounced a speech made by a valedictorian for medicine grads and admonished the university for letting it happen....

blindsight ,

The article explicitly says the opposite.

UofM stated that they had several complaints about the video before the open letter, and they made a statement that it was taken down because it was inflammatory and divisive—neither of which says anything about the accuracy or truth of the statements.

That said, the way CBC framed this with the article headline definitely implies that it was his complaint that mattered most. CBC also makes clickbait headlines, unfortunately.

blindsight ,

To add to the other comment, CBC framed this in a very pro-Zionism way. The headline could have been "UofM valedictorian called racist for denouncing genocide".

blindsight ,

They get 30 days notice of the price increase. That's pretty reasonable and in compliance with the law, I would assume.

streaming or torrenting today vs. 5 years ago

I've been a good boy for 5 years or so but the seas call to me. Are streaming sites the way to go now or is torrenting still a better bet for mainstream movies and tv? I'd imagine all of my accounts have been deleted on those sites so I'd be starting over.

blindsight ,

I use Real Debrid with Stremio + Torrentio. I just need to figure out how to add the manual torrent search & download plugin for Real Debrid since I watch a lot of obscure British TV, not everything is hosted already.

For mainstream stuff, it just works. For obscure stuff, it's about 50-50 if it's on there.

Manually downloading torrents is just for stuff I'll be transferring to a mobile device, like audiobooks. And cracked software, I suppose. I needed Adobe Acrobat for something and torrented it.

blindsight ,

idk, I couldn't care less about 90Hz. I switched to 60 Hz to save battery on my last phone that had a 90Hz display anyway.

I love how narrow the Xperia 10 series is. It's a great one-handed phone, and the 21:9 aspect ratio is great for getting a lot of text on the page.

blindsight ,

I mean... That's literally why the Democrats lost in 2016 and why they're likely to lose in 2024. The Democrats can't even compete against a would-be fascist dictator. That's how out of touch they are.

blindsight ,

I sincerely hope you're right, but Biden is polling a lot lower now than he was in 2020, and it was a shockingly close race.

Regardless, it shouldn't be this close. Democrats need to shift to capture Gen Z and Millennial voters. Alienating young voters will be what loses them the next election, if they lose, and it's causing increasingly bigger problems for them as Gen Z ages into voting and Millennials aren't shifting right as they age. Democrats need to pivot to get young voters politically engaged.

Or, at least, that's my take as a non-American watching this trainwreck happen.

blindsight ,

Similar for me, recently. When I'm really into reading, I can read more than a book a day. $15+ for an audiobook that I'll crush in a day just isn't possible for me. That could easily balloon to $5000/year for me and another $3000/yr for my daughter, and $2000/year for my wife. (I've read a 6-book series, a 3-book series, and almost half a 4-book series in the last week... And didn't sleep, lol!)

We can't afford a used car in audiobook costs each year.

I actually mostly switched to text-to-speech with Kindle Unlimited so authors get paid for most of my reading, but audiobooks I still pirate when I read them. By my napkin math, authors get about 20-30 times what I pay in KU fees based on our voracious reading.

blindsight ,

This was my main concern. What's the monetization strategy?

blindsight ,

But then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.

Like, the "web dev boot camp" course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it's updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).

I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don't know.

blindsight ,

This is disheartening. I wonder how many of my former students were at these protests.

It's shameful that Canadian universities can't disentangle anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. It is not racist to peacefully protest against the genocide being committed by the state of Israel.

I am feeling increasingly confused by the world and the direction it's going. I live in a different reality, it seems.

blindsight ,

Okay, let's see... Not sure if the spell is even activating that glyph sequence. Let's try casting it again with a purple glow rune there...

blindsight ,

BC is doing a lot of work toward truth and reconciliation. This year is the first year that all high school graduates are required to complete a First Peoples course as part of their graduation requirements. (Usually as an English First Peoples course or as a grade 12 social studies course that meets another grad requirement, so it doesn't remove any elective choices.)

blindsight ,

It was very quick, aside from waiting a bit for the email to arrive.

blindsight ,

My level of research was to come to the comments hoping someone had explained the weird numbering jump already.

blindsight ,

The falling PISA scores are likely caused by smart phones and social media, neither of which are really in the control of schools. The data and argument are laid out on The Anxious Generation by Haidt. It's on my to-read list, but I've heard a summary of the main argument from a technology leader in education. The data is compelling.

The Fraser Institute, a conservative think tank, pushing for privatization in education through any means necessary isn't newsworthy. Can we stop giving propagandists air time? "Choice in education" is code for charter schools, which are a failed US experiment.

The real story about equity in education comes from Finland. Decades back, they set an educational mandate to increase equity in their system. They were trying to help the most disadvantaged students in their system succeed academically. The result? Finland rocketed to the top of the PISA scoreboard. Everyone did better.

The bullshit they're peddling about meritocracy in education is based on conservative ideology, specifically the capitalistic notion that there are winners and losers in the world, there always will be, and winners get there because they deserve it. The evidence says otherwise; rising tides lift all ships. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is better for all students.

I'm getting tired of conservatives trying to destroy our world-class education system. Yes, it has problems. Yes, it needs changes. But Canadian teachers are generally doing a very good job, and lots of places in Canada are on the cutting edge of implementing a variety of research-informed change that should make things even better.

If only we could only get conservative governments from cutting more and more funding from education...

blindsight , (edited )

I've heard about this one before, but I'm downloading an episode now.

The one thing I hate about QI is that I've already seen it all and there aren't any more episodes.

Edit: That was great. It totally scratched the QI itch. Among many other tidbits, I now know how leech treatments were discovered, that there's a specific frequency that is arousing for badgers and sets off car alarms, and that in one year, over 700 American students were arrested for owning pagers.

Edit: Holy shit. The author of Goodnight Moon literally died from an overly-enthusiastic "can-can kick". She did it to prove she was feeling fine... (ironically) but she dislodged a blood clot that instantly killed her.

blindsight ,

Not quite so simple. Converting to USD:

TD has a 5.37% dividend yield, a market cap of 134.46B, and $8.498B in profit.

Doing the math, their earnings are 6.32% of capitalization. They have less than 1% slack in their earnings yield after dividends. That works out to about $1¼B per year in free cashflow. So a $2B fine is roughly 2 years of capital accumulation; a big setback for sure!

blindsight ,

I don't see that as a counterpoint. I think it's reasonable that banks (and corporations, in general) are fined significantly for regulatory violations.

With regulatory capture, most regulations are weak to begin with. And if they don't have teeth, then they're entirely pointless.

Two years of free cashflow is a good fine for serious violations of ethics/regulations, imho. I don't think they're getting off lightly with that, though; it's a significant enough fine that they're incentivized to do better and, even better, acts as a warning shot across the entire industry.

blindsight ,

Just FYI that Beehaw defederated with Lemmy.world, so our experience is a bit different; being defederated from the biggest instance means we avoid most low-effort posting and vitriol, but it also means we miss most (?) of the content on Lemmy.

I'm not entirely sure how it works; I don't know if I can see if someone from Lemmy.world replies to my comments in other communities. I don't think so, since I can't remember ever seeing a Lemmy.world commenter, but I'm not totally clear on how defederation works. I think we just don't see those users at all, including posts/comments they make to other instances?

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