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🇨🇦 tunetardis @ tunetardis @lemmy.ca
Posts
8
Comments
628
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Our mayor has been a mixed bag. He has been fairly progressive in terms of improving public infrastructure, but has had a poor track record on social issues.

    Currently, he is courting a scandal involving a violent altercation at a safe injection site where someone got bludgeoned to death. His response was a rather draconian closing of the facility (he claims it's only temporary) and essentially telling the homeless in the area to get lost. As you might imagine, this is not going well.

    I have no interest in running for any political office, though if I did, the city council would likely be highest on my list. I actually enjoy watching them in session from time to time on the local cable channel, as there is less partisan bickering at the municipal level and, as you say, the decisions they make are more likely to affect your day-to-day life.

    I am sort of half-heartedly angling to get on a committee involving the city's cycling infrastructure, but that's about the extent of any political ambitions.

  • It varies wildly depending on where you go. I think the worst-case scenario in terms of car-built cities would be someplace like Phoenix, Arizona. Visiting that city, I gained an appreciation for what it must be like to have a physical handicap that affects your mobility, because being in Phoenix without a car is comparable to having a disability. You cannot go anywhere on your own two feet in any reasonable length of time. It's the kind of place where you need to find a Walmart to buy a loaf of bread. The closest thing to a corner store is going to be a gas station.

  • When I was first looking into IPv6, people were talking about how you can self-assign an address by simply wrapping an IPv6 address around your MAC address. But that practice seems to have fallen out of favour, and I'm guessing the reason is, as you say, the whole privacy thing? There's a lot of pushback these days against any tech that makes it easier to fingerprint your connection.

  • But doesn't it resolve the vote-splitting problem? For example, a common scenario here is you have a right-wing candidate winning in a a left-leaning district because the left's vote is split across more than one political party. Wouldn't a ranked system solve that dilemma once all the dust has settled?

  • I think the Canadian system is very much modelled after the UK?

    That's interesting about Australia though. Btw I understand Australia has a ranked voting system in elections? Curious about how well that works. Our first-past-the-post is a nightmare with vote-splitting sending the "wrong" representative to the capital.

  • Sometimes people will say "That person's name!" or "Those group of people!" in anger. "That Donald Trump! How dare he claim immigrants are eating pets?" to give you a current example.

    When spoken of a family member or mutual acquaintance with a chuckle, it means more like "That person has some strange quirk but what can you do? We still love him."

    For example, you might hear "That dog! Always chasing his own tail." So I think this is likely what you were getting from that conversation? It's certainly not a criticism of your use of the word "people".

  • I am not deaf, but this is triggering a pet peeve.

    It seems a pretty common occurrence that I will be walking into a restaurant, bar, airport, doctor's office, or whatever, and there will be a TV on a news channel with the sound muted or very low. For F's sake, put the captioning on! What's wrong with you?!?

  • Yeah. My wife is always wanting to go on a cruise and I'm having none of it.

    One thing I will add regarding the nature of this curse is that it only manifests when I am the sole occupant of the bedroom. For example, I used to share a bedroom with my older sister, but within a week of her moving out and rejoicing at having the whole place to myself, the ceiling opened up.

    So I suppose I would be safe on the ship as long as my wife is there with me? In our current home, she was my sole protection, but has recently taken to sleeping on the basement cot due to hot flashes. This leaves me staring nervously at the ceiling. It's now or never, curse!

  • Every place I live, there will be this incident when a torrential deluge of water breaks through the ceiling of my bedroom in the middle of the night.

    So it's not the bedroom itself that is cursed, since it is a different room each time. And the causes have varied also. The cursed object, therefore, must either be me or something in my possession I have kept around since childhood? Hmm…

  • Right now, it is southwestern-style Indian upma with eggs and salsa. My wife invented that after randomly picking up a package of instant upma from a nearby Indian grocery and noting that it reminded her a bit of grits. We are afraid to tell anyone of south Asian background of this no doubt sacrilegious interpretation.

  • Years ago I watched a documentary about Trump's shenanigans in Atlantic City. Basically, he stiffs the contractors who build his casino. They sue, and so he hires some big shot lawyers to defend him. They get him off for the most part, but then he then turns around and stiffs the law firm itself! Like what even?!?

  • I posted this because it gave me a hint as to why conservative propaganda has shifted in recent years. It's mostly personal attacks on the man at the top now. "F#ck Trudeau" and all that.

    While this might make some sense in the US where the presidency is an institution unto itself, it makes a lot less sense in Canada where we have a parliamentary system in which running the country is a group effort by the dominant political party.

    And Trudeau is not even a power-trippy type of leader. He's always been more of a delegator. So while I believe there is plenty of reason to be critical of the current federal government, pinning it all on the prime minister just seems weird and off. Like something a foreign influence campaign would be trying to do, in other words.