merc @ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts

10

Comments

3,000

Joined

2 yr. ago

The riding he's chosen to run in is one of the most conservative in the country. The guy who's stepping down won something like 80% of the vote.

But, the Liberals should run someone who actually lives in that riding and keeps reminding the voters there that Poilievre doesn't live there and doesn't know anything about his new riding. It won't be enough to keep him from winning this time, but there's a chance that over time it will start to matter to voters that their MP doesn't live there and knows nothing about their riding.

The good news is that the riding he has to run in is incredibly rural. He's going to hate it.

Poilievre is a city boy. He grew up in the Calgary suburbs. Then he moved to Ottawa to become an MP. The only job he's ever had involving physical exertion is when he was a paperboy as a kid. Now he's going to have to spend some time in his new riding surrounded by farmers. The biggest "city" there has a population under 20k. Everything else is towns, villages and hamlets. Assuming he buys a house in Camrose, if he wants Thai food, he'll have to drive over an hour to get to Edmonton.

Maybe because the conservatives have such an overwhelming majority in Battle River - Crowfoot, they won't care that he's a carpetbagger and he won't have to put much effort in there. But, I think eventually he'll have to spend some time in his riding, and it will be a major culture clash.

No, I never said anything about "bored attention whores".

What's your theory? That if they're caught doing this they're going to be executed?

Because the handset ended up in a "cradle", there was almost always contact between the handset and the cradle before the switch cut off the phone. That was true even when someone was hanging up normally. There was a bit of a rattle as the phone went into the cradle. When someone slammed the phone down, that contact between the handset and cradle was much louder, but was cut off much more quickly. It wasn't painfully loud, but the person on the other end was very aware that the phone had been slammed.

AFAIK, one reason for that is that AT&T was the monopoly provider of telephone equipment. They didn't have to compete with anybody who might undercut them for price. In addition, people often rented their phones, paying a small rental charge every month. That meant that AT&T built the phones to last. They were extremely solid because AT&T didn't ever want to have to replace a phone that someone was renting.

I wonder if there's anybody that's comfortable with slab-style phones being used as phones.

If you're over a certain age, you grew up with proper telephone handsets. Even early cell phones had a vaguely ergonomic shape. Like, the original Motorola Razr didn't open to 180 degrees, and had a "chin" near the bottom so you could get good contact with your ear while keeping your mouth near the microphone.

Then there's people under a certain age who grew up with texting, instant messages, etc. For them, it's not the shape that's an issue, it's that using a phone as a phone that's odd. They'd much rather do anything other than voice calls.

Not saying things were better in the old days, but this is a major factor in our societal de-socialization crisis.

Nah, I completely disagree with that. I think phones were always a terrible means of communication, but they were the most used thing for a while because we didn't have anything better for communication at a distance. Phones force you into an audio-only form of communication where you don't get gestures, facial expression, or a moving mouth to watch. That cuts out a lot of the nuance of the communication. In addition, it's immediate so there's no time to think and interpret what someone is trying to say. It's also initiated by the caller and the callee has to drop whatever they're doing and respond immediately. It's just bad.

Video calls with something like Facetime have some of those issues. The positive is that you get facial expressions and some body language as cues The downside is that it's still expected that you respond immediately. But, it seems like there's a convention to ask before doing a video call, or to schedule one. That means you're generally not pulled into a conversation when you're not ready. Even more so with video meetings like Zoom, where they're almost never spontaneous, and always scheduled ahead of time. Phone calls are often spontaneous, and can catch someone at a terrible time.

Text messages in some ways are even worse than phone calls, because you don't even get tone of voice or volume as cues to what someone means. OTOH, they're not as immediate. Sure, sometimes you're watching the little chat bubbles waiting for a response. But, the asynchronous nature of that kind of chat means there's still a bit of a chance to think before you respond.

IMO, people of all ages abandoned phone calls because phone calls are just bad. Much better are either asynchronous ways of communicating where you can take a chance to think before you respond, or high-bandwidth forms of communication involving video where you can see gestures, facial expressions, etc.

Why don't you like flatpaks? I've basically never had any issues with them, but maybe I will in the future.

As for distrobox, what's the confusion? Were you trying to do something advanced? Or, was there an issue with mapping things between the host and distrobox? I haven't really pushed the envelope, but the only issue I've had is that I wanted my shell history to be different between the distrobox and the host, so I had to tweak my zsh startup files to detect if I was in a distrobox and save history in a different place.

So, I fully expect to get downvoted for this, but I don't know if this is as big a deal as people want to believe.

Is this really a sign of absolute desperation? Is this something they would only do in the most dire of circumstances?

The prisoners are probably bored. They probably are aware that a lot of people sympathize with them. They probably suspect they won't be severely punished for making an SOS shape. So, it's something to do to keep drawing attention to what's happening.

I suspect the reason you don't see this at normal prisons is that the prisoners know they would be punished if they did it, they know people don't generally sympathize with them, and (most importantly) it's probably much riskier to try to get a drone flying over a prison taking videos.

I'm not saying that they're not suffering, or that their deportation is just. Clearly Trump is breaking the law and violating due process. And, by all accounts, the conditions in the detention centres are pretty unpleasant. My only point is that this may be more "this sucks, this is unfair, help us!" vs. "they're torturing and murdering us, do something now or we'll die!"

As someone who started with Slackware in the 90s, it took me a while too.

I switched over to Bazzite from Windows 10 on my main PC because I wanted something I could game on. But, even though most of my games work great on it, I haven't played that many because I ended up just happy to have a Linux system I could use for projects I'd been putting off.

It's true that if you're used to a plain Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora system, you have to do some things differently. But, in exchange you basically never have to worry about installing a package because there's been a vulnerability discovered or something.

The happy medium I found is using distrobox on Bazzite. Inside a distrobox, you can use apt or whatever to manage the software you want. You can even export things from the distrobox to the main OS -- like, say you installed a GUI editor in the distrobox, you can have it available as if it were a normal app in the main immutable OS.

Distrobox might help you switch if you're feeling hesitant. OTOH, if you want to fully grok the system before switching, or want to be able to customize the images you're installing, that can take a while to figure out.

Also, not tinkering when you don't want to tinker.

affected

He's a city boy though, would he survive living in Carleton Place? Also, the conservative candidate there only won by 5 percentage points. There's probably a risk that if he ran there he'd lose again. Same name as his riding, but definitely no longer just suburban.

Sure, phrase it that way if you want. But, the point is, he did something to convince people he was anti-Trump and standing up for Canadians and it worked. Poilievre didn't do that and lost.

So, now what for Poilievre?

Maybe the knives come out and he's forced out as Conservative leader. I mean, he had a 20 percentage point lead over the Liberals and lost it. That has to piss them off. All he needed to do is do what Doug Ford did and stand up for Canada and against Trump.

But, if he doesn't step down, where does he get someone to step down so he can run in a by-election? If he wants to stay near Ottawa, he'll really have to move somewhere rural. He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who actually likes rural people or rural life very much. Or, he could move to Alberta. Lots of safe Conservative ridings in Alberta, some are even in urban areas. But, will they want a guy who is the very model of a carpet-bagger? A politician who has never had a job outside of politics, not just from "Ottawa" meaning the federal government, but who has literally lived in Ottawa(ish) for years?

I hope they ditch him. I'm sure the conservative party could do a lot worse, but there's also a chance they could find a leader who has actually done something with their lives outside politics, and who has their own ideas, not just reheated culture war crap from Canada's Shorts and just shouting down anything the Liberals suggest.

They're not an "official party", but they still got 6% of the vote. But, because of FPTP they only got 2% of the seats. Bloc Quebecois got 6.4% of the vote and 6.7% of the seats. There are still a lot of people out there who would want to vote NDP, but who voted Liberal to achieve "anybody but Conservative". The plan worked, but I think they'd like some electoral reform.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn4jd39g8y1o

I would love to see it be their #1 demand. If they did it, it would probably mean you'd never see another Liberal majority, but I think there's a good chance that you'd see more left-leaning people elected. It goes against the interests of the Liberal party, but it might be in the interests of many of the things Liberals say they care about.

If it did pass, it would make voting "anybody but Conservative" much easier, which might really hurt the cons, which might cause them to split. That would be good too. Right now the conservatives are a bad alliance of small-government types who want to cut taxes and cut spending, and big-government types who want the government to go after anything they see as "woke" or "DEI". It would be much healthier if those two could be split from each-other.

On Jan 1st, the 3 major canada-wide parties were:

• Liberal, headed by Justin Trudeau out of Papineau
• Conservative headed by Pierre Poilievre out of Carleton
• NDP headed by Jagmeet Singh out of Burnaby South

On May 1st the 3 major parties will be:

• Liberal, headed by Mark Carney out of Nepean
• Conservative headed by Pierre Poilievre(?) out of ?
• NDP headed by ? out of ?

As a Lemmy user, you're probably aware of Mastodon. And, last I heard, "Truth Social" is just running a hacked-up version of Mastodon, but without the federation. So, they really could be called "toots"...

With a name like that he'd have to be.

3:00 AM EST 253/266 polls reporting (95%)

Poilievre trails by 2579 votes.

Oh well, I'm tapping out. Damn. I hoped it would be official before I went to sleep, but the final few polls are just trickling in. But, I'm going to bed happy, so there's that.