kbal @ kbal @fedia.io

I'd appreciate it if everyone could just stop burning fossil fuels, please.

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2 yr. ago

non-amp link: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.7411380

I don't know about the 1970s but in the late '80s it seems to me that none of the weed dealers had gone metric yet. I assumed this meme was about cocaine.

Singh can't win. Trudeau can't win. They've both got no chance. Federal politics in Canada has collapsed. People no longer understand or care about the issues. Politicians no longer understand or care about the people. The Conservatives will have their way with the country for a while.

I wonder how many of those one in four people are even aware that everything they say gets uploaded to a data centre somewhere. I had a phone with speech recognition as a prominent feature until I wiped it and installed a different OS, and I don't remember seeing any warning at all about that.

I like the way she's cheerful and optimistic, and ready to throw fireballs at anything that stands in the way.

That depends what you use for a discount rate I guess, but at least they didn't lose much.

I'm not usually going to have a Skyrim follower, but if I'm going to have a Skyrim follower it's definitely Sa'chil.

An interesting factoid buried under three layers of stupidity. The gist of it is that watching video uses electricity.

It's a topic that brings out my cantankerous old man persona. In the halcyon days of the late 20th century when everyone paid for restaurant bills in cash, tipping was a tolerable tradition. Throw in another $2 if you've got it, why not. You'd never expect the waiter to stand there and count out all the nickels and dimes for exact change, so you've got to raise the amount paid to the nearest round number anyway. Then we started paying with credit cards. If people were rational that would've been the end of tipping, but then if people were rational we'd still be paying in cash. After so many years of constantly seeing it done and occasionally even partaking in it, adding a tip to a payment made electronically still feels like a crime against nature.

I can't agree that cutting back on exports should've been the first priority. It would've done less good at a higher cost than eliminating domestic fossil fuel consumption, which is how Canada could've had a real impact on on global scale by showing everyone how it's done. I write in the past tense because with the Liberal government having failed to get it done, the political chance to accomplish anything useful in time to prevent the disaster seems to be rapidly approaching zero.

Wow, a truth.social link. Don't think I've ever seen one before. Normally, meaningless idiotic tweets from DJ Trump only turn up on the TV news, not in my Internet news feed.

That's not ignorance, it's malice. Elon has made it clear that he'd like nothing better than to require everyone to show their official ID for "age verification" purposes before being allowed to use social media. I'm not sure exactly why. Easier to file lawsuits against anyone who uses it to make fun of him, or perhaps it's just one small step in some kind of grand totalitarian vision of the future. But he can't hope to get away with imposing it on Twitter unless competitors are required to do the same.

Someone said jokingly that the tiktok algorithm is so good that it can tell when you're a researcher looking for evidence that tiktok pushes people towards political extremes, and show you exactly what you're looking for. I thought it was funny, but it also seems like it might be sort of close to what happened here. Normal people would not just passively watch all that shit without reacting in some way.

Disappointingly, Tiktok could not figure out my desires at all when I tried it. I liked one exceptionally good dance video and then it just kept showing me superficially similar dance videos that weren't so good no matter what I tried to get it to stop.

Apparently I have fewer problems with it than some. It's snap. Maybe I could come up with some other minor complaints, but nothing big really. It's mostly just snap. That is what prevents me using or recommending Ubuntu any more.

Yeah China sure is scary. Centralized social media owned by American billionaires on the other hand can totally be trusted never to interfere in elections.

I think realistic graphics in 3D games got to be good enough that further improvement doesn't really matter any more in 2011 (Skyrim) but I can see an argument for putting it as late as to 2016 (Witcher 3).

Seems to me the main rationale for building a pipeline was that it would enable exports of crude and bitumen to get to markets where they'd sell for a higher price, meaning it would be more expensive for domestic refineries too. There have been quite a few news stories in the past year suggesting it's had some success in doing that. I don't know whether that effect has lived up to expectations, but it's an odd thing to not mention at all in an article discussing the effect of the pipeline on gasoline prices.

okay I fixed it

    
    if ( test == false )
        x = 1
    else
        assert( x != 1 )

  

If they banned guns based on specific well-defined criteria, presumably nobody would need to wait for a list to know which ones were affected? It's sort of amazing to think that this government could fail to do so for a second time after the way it went down last time.