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nyan ,

Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to "buy" or "own" anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you're buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that's what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.

nyan ,

There are certainly overpriced vacant homes in the more expensive metropolitan areas (coughcondoscoughTorontocough), but I doubt there are enough of them to make a visible dent in the housing issue.

Blame Canada? Justin Trudeau Creates Blueprint for Dystopia in Horrific Speech Bill ( www.racket.news )

I got in some hot water a while back for admitting I was relatively unconcerned with Republican villainy these days compared to other worries. This Canada Online Harms Act, whose details I missed earlier (apologies to Public and Yuri Bezmenov!), perfectly embodies the kind of thing that keeps me up at night now....

nyan ,

When are these “journalists” (iow, “any twat with an opinion”) going to present a “news story without EXTREME HYPERBOLE”?

When the hyperbole stops getting them attention (which is likely to be never).

nyan ,

Eh, I'm sure we can overrun it just by gluing sufficient instances of Factory to the end of the classname.

nyan ,

Not centuries. It's more like they want to live inside a sitcom from the mid-20th century, where everyone is white and middle-class and living in a "traditional" male-led nuclear family that occupies a house in the suburbs, and pollution and its ilk aren't even worthy of mention.

What's stopping you from using Ecosia? Your searches could plant trees! ( www.ecosia.org )

Ecosia is a search engine that aggregates search results from multiple other search engines. The ad revenue from our searches funds the planting of trees worldwide. With over 200 million trees planted so far, Ecosia have learned to be fully transparent about their projects, and financials which are available right on that...

nyan ,

That assumes all the trees survive. A lot of them apparently don't.

nyan ,

It's one of the weaksauce paywalls that can be bypassed by just not allowing their Javascript.

nyan ,

Apparently we need even stronger controls on political donations, since it seems that purchasing politicians is pretty cheap.

nyan ,

There are limits on donation amount per contributor (I don't remember how much off the top of my head, but it isn't that high a number).

nyan ,

There weren't enough doctors five years ago, either. If demand is already huge, a small increase in supply is not going to catch up. Furthermore, what percentage of those doctors are in family medicine? I haven't heard that there's nearly as much of a shortage of specialists (except in more remote areas where there's always been a shortage of specialists).

Percentages are deceptive here. What we need are absolute numbers: how many primary care practitioners (both family doctors and nurse-practitioners) are needed, how many we already have, how many new ones are entering the field vs. how many are leaving, and a breakdown of those numbers per region.

nyan ,

The article doesn't say, but I'd bet this woman applied for something (a passport? Government benefits?) that only citizens are eligible for, and that triggered a routine check, which then triggered a deeper check because she was born outside Canada, which led to the discovery that something was a bit odd. Your tax dollars at work.

nyan ,

She may not have a previous citizenship, depending on how Jamaica determines citizenship, even if she didn't explicitly renounce it. That would leave her stateless, which is . . . not a good thing to be.

nyan ,

It's really, really complicated.

There are two basic principles for recognizing citizenship: jus soli (being born on a country's territory) and jus sanguis (being the child of one or more citizens). Countries differ in which of those they accept and to what extent. Canada recognizes jus soli always, but jus sanguis only under limited circumstances, and the exact rules for claiming citizenship here via jus sanguis have changed recently.

It's possible for a child of two people from countries that don't recognize jus sanguis (or who are stateless themselves) who was born in a country that doesn't recognize jus soli to have no citizenship by birth at all. This is particularly a problem for refugees, but can happen to just about anyone from any walk of life.

Under the current law, a Canadian citizen born abroad can't pass Canadian citizenship to their own child via jus sanguis anymore, although the rules were looser thirty years ago. The child is still a citizen if born inside Canada (jus soli), but the subject of the article linked in the opening post was born abroad.

The number of stateless people in the world apparently numbers in the low millions at present. It is a big issue.

nyan ,

Amazon lost its way when in started acting as a storefront for others, rather than a bookstore. In other words, a good twenty years ago.

Tech gear in particular is one of the things that's extremely risky to order from there (along with food, meds, and anything for babies/small children), as there are a lot of fraudulent or damaged goods mixed into their supply. Go to a specialist supplier instead. Newegg isn't great, but at least they don't appear to mix inventory from different sellers the way Amazon does.

nyan ,

That depends a lot on where you drive. I've been in situations where, if I had hit a moose, there would have been no one around to call for help except the moose (assuming it had survived the collision, but they often do if it's a smaller vehicle). That stretch of road didn't get many passers-by on snowy Sunday nights in January. Maybe a half-dozen vehicles an hour. Combine that with poor visibility, and it could have been a long time before someone noticed and called for help. Fortunately, I never did have an accident along that stretch.

Of course, if you're only driving in built-up areas or along major transit corridors instead of in awkward parts of northern Ontario in the middle of winter, your chances of having someone call in for you are much higher.

nyan ,

I think OnStar is satellite-based, so it might reach areas where cell service doesn't. I believe the stretch of highway I was thinking of (Ontario highway 655) does have at least partial cell coverage now, although it didn't at the time when I was driving it regularly. It isn't extremely remote—it would take emergency services from Cochrane or Timmins about half an hour to reach the farthest point, so they might get there in time, depending on what exactly the damage was.

Just how far is Pierre Poilievre willing to take the notwithstanding clause? ( www.cbc.ca )

In January, the Federal Court found that the Trudeau government's use of the Emergencies Act to respond to the protests of the self-styled freedom convoy in 2022 was not properly justified — a decision the federal government is now appealing....

nyan ,

And the answer is: we won't know until and unless he actually tries it. Talk is cheap, especially when it comes from politicians.

nyan ,

I'm not saying he won't. He might, but it depends on how well it plays to his base when the election rolls around, which isn't going to happen tomorrow.

nyan ,

Modest profit isn't an issue, but most businesses of more than a certain size accumulate MBAs like some kind of parasitic fungus. They then proceed to wring out as much money as possible in the short term while destroying the business in the long term.

If it's just a local guy making 5% or so a year off his one rental shop, that's no problem.

nyan ,

The problem is maintaining competition. Another thing those MBAs salivate over is the idea of buying out the competition, and their squeeze-the-company-dry method can give them just enough money for just long enough to buy a competing business to run into the ground when the original one starts to give out. Like I said, parasitic fungus: move to a new host as the old one dies. Keeping them from spreading can only be accomplished by stronger government regulation than many people seem willing to see in place, alas.

nyan ,

Plumbing, apparently, is one issue—residential buildings typically need much more of it than office buildings do. Not an insurmountable problem, but costs $$ to overcome.

nyan ,

If he manages to make Quebec realize it can be used against them, we might finally be able to get rid of the damned thing.

(Hey, I can dream, right?)

nyan ,

Most Usenet discussion groups don't even get spambot posts these days.

nyan ,

Usenet started out as a forum-like system, with individual messages grouped into discussion threads (the protocol worked kind of like email, with messages indicating which other message they replied to, so that client software could build a tree for each group). That side of it was eventually killed off by lack of good moderation options or support for embedded media.

nyan ,

All software has bugs in it.

People were using this service to put up money to encourage programmers working on open-source software to fix specific bugs that were especially bothering them. For instance, if text in software X didn't scale properly and that was a problem for you, you could use this service to offer $100 to programmers working on X to fix the text scaling. Once they got it fixed, they collected the money.

The service went bankrupt.

When it went bankrupt, some programmers didn't get their promised payment for bugs they had fixed.

The money didn't get returned to the people who had paid for the bug to be fixed, either.

So now both programmers and users have lost money because of this service, and everyone's ticked off.

nyan ,

Perhaps they want to keep it to drink.

nyan ,

This has always been the case with the right wing. They believe that wealthy white straight cismen are the perfect expression of humanity, and everyone who deviates from that mold should be punished. Their "freedom" exists only for people they regard as the top of the hierarchy and basically consists of the freedom to be greedy assholes.

I wish people would get this through their heads and stop electing them. It doesn't matter what the talking head du jour does or doesn't say—the Conservative Party of Canada's track record is clear all the way back to the days when it was the Reform Party, and even the most apparently innocuous member of it is complicit.

The Liberals are quietly corrupt in spots and sometimes stunningly inept, but the Conservatives are nasty. It's past time for the NDP to have their chance to screw up the country instead.

New York Bill Would Require a Criminal Background Check to Buy a 3D Printer ( gizmodo.com )

I understand the intent, but feel that there are so many other loopholes that put much worse weapons on the street than a printer. Besides, my prints can barely sustain normal use, much less a bullet being fired from them. I would think that this is more of a risk to the person holding the gun than who it's pointing at.

nyan ,

Well, not anything (if you actually think that's possible, then I have a challenge for you: make a functioning gun out of cheese), but an average hardware store should have everything you need to produce something capable of firing a shot.

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