voluble @ voluble @lemmy.ca

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1 yr. ago

What I mean to say is not that the LPC's choice for leader would be bullshit, but that, whatever their choice is, it's hard to imagine how they would be able to credibly separate themselves from what has made the LPC so unpopular.

So for that reason, I'm not sure why Freeland would be the obvious choice. If the Liberals want to win a federal election, I think she'd be a poor choice for party leader. Any barbs that could be directed at Trudeau could be easily directed at Freeland. From an optics standpoint, I don't think it's possible to differentiate Freeland from Trudeau, and the Liberal party of the past decade. That's a problem that I think would override who she is or her credentials, at least in the public eye.

Even if the Liberals somehow manage to find a credible, electable leader that doesn't end up being a Michael Ignatieff 2.0, I see no reason to trust that they won't deliver more of the same bullshit.

When it comes to leadership in American politics, it's said that democrats fall in love, and republicans fall in line.

I don't want to fall in love. The past decade of Canadian politics has been a parade of 'charisma' and it hasn't gotten us anywhere. I want a sincere and straightforward leader, who won't get embroiled in scandals, has a strong stance on foreign policy, a plan for foreign interference, the housing & affordability crisis, and an ability to deal with issues in a straightforward and policy-focused way. I guess what I'm trying to say is I want a prime minister with a short skirt and a long jacket.

An election must be in the air, he's saying the thing again.

I know Bruichladdich has said they do this for the Laddie Classic (a bottling I really love). Source: just trust me bro. I don't recall when or where I heard that. Possibly they do it with other bottlings, and surely other distilleries are doing the same thing. Bruichladdich didn't invent the process. But it's not a well studied, documented, or promoted element of whisky ageing, because, I think, it's not as sexy as infusion and evaporation. Among other reasons. If you're curious, I could spin a yarn.

Any distillery that chooses to do this, certainly does it for a reason. Disgorging and re-casking a batch is a massive pain in the ass, and holds up warehouse space & production timelines - two things a bean counter with no sensitivities to flavour would be happy to cut out.

Could be! From my experience, high strength Bourbon is better a couple weeks after being opened. From a flavour standpoint, gin also benefits greatly from resting for a few weeks after distillation.

In fact, one of my favourite Scotch Whisky distilleries will blend a production batch, and then re-barrel the blended volume in casks and let it rest for 6 months to allow the flavours to harmonize.

There is definitely some magic that happens after spirits are blended/bottled, and it's not very well understood, but the changes are detectable, and in general, they're positive.

What we know as whisky maturation is a dance between 4 interrelated processes - infusion, evaporation, oxidation, and other chemical reactions. These all happen together, and very nicely, when whisky sits in oak barrels for an extended period of time.

Colour, and oak flavour are infused into the whisky simply by sitting in the barrel. The whisky will slowly evaporate while inside the barrel as well. Volatile compounds evaporate, making the whisky smoother, deeper, and more complex with age. Fascinating chemical reactions happen between compounds in the wood, and in the whisky. As ethanol degrades lignin, for example, it creates new compounds, which themselves interact with other molecules and compounds in solution.

The age statement on a bottle of whisky refers to the time it spent in a barrel, doing those lovely things.

Common wisdom is that the whisky is done changing when it goes into glass. Certainly, infusion and evaporation are finished. But! Oxidation, and reactions between compounds in the whisky itself will continue, even in a sealed glass bottle. Usually this happens too slowly to notice, or the bottle gets drank before a change can be observed, but change certainly happens.

Long story short - whisky won't go bad. In fact, sometimes it even goes 'good'! I had the chance to try a young single malt, that was bottled in the 1970s. It was wonderful, and had signature aroma and flavour characteristics of a very old whisky. This is due to slow oxidation, and the glacial interaction between esters and congeners over time, which will happen no matter what vessel the whisky is in.

Whisky that has been exposed to too much oxygen, like if the bottle sits nearly empty for a long time, or has a bad seal, will often end up tasting flat and bland. But 'good' or 'bad' at this point, is a subjective matter. Only one way to find out!

This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy's hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.

Now, it's all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that's the type of page you'll be served.

I've had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don't have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.

Also, I can see from the NDP perspective, the view that the Liberals weren't holding up their part of the deal to advance NDP policy. In this circumstance, it's not like quitting a job. Trudeau wasn't Singh's boss. They had an agreement that the NDP said was mutable from the start based on their discretion. For Trudeau to bellyache about it all now is, I think, a bit silly, considering the essentially cost-free benefit his party gained from the agreement for years.

You're making personal assumptions about me, and the internal mental states of others that I think are unfair.

I don't want to see overdoses in the street, nobody should. Not because I want it to happen in private, but because I don't want it to happen. For the record, and not that you asked, but, I've also never said that I'm an advocate for mandatory rehab, or that it's some kind of magical cure-all. I'm not here carrying water for these initiatives. All I'm saying is that there's a serious problem, and a need for solutions and sincere discussion. I don't think anything is gained for any position by browbeating others and fabulating their inner thoughts.

This was course material to a post grad university course on the subject of addiction and recovery taught THIS MONTH. It discusses the entire history of opiods.

Interesting. Can you link the course? I'd be curious to see the syllabus and learn more.

I understand the view that in rehabilitation from addiction, drugs are not the only factor to consider. But they are absolutely a factor that needs to be considered. Ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking, drinking, or using any drug.

If someone overdoses and almost dies, or harms someone else, I think the state has a responsibility to get that person help that they may not have the ability, knowledge, or desire to seek, as opposed to turning them back out onto the street and waiting for it to happen again. The situation right now where I live is that businesses and homes are stocked with naloxone kits, and citizens are administering lifesaving healthcare to people on death's door, on the sidewalk. Everyone I know who lives downtown has seen a dead body on the street in the past year. That's not good, and practical solutions are needed immediately. I'm not convinced that a Swiss bulletin from 1999 which tents its argument on examples from the Vietnam War and the American Civil War really gets to the heart of the current issue and set of circumstances.

The cause of addiction is not drugs.

This is a very strange take.

What evidence do you have for this?

At this point, PR would significantly help the Greens and NDP, and harm the BQ and Liberals badly. The LPC has no interest in doing this. They're not altruistic. Remember, they forced an election in the heat of the pandemic in order to consolidate power.

They have also proven to be totally uncommitted to top line promises. I don't really see how they're a party worth voting for.

Robert Tanguay, an addictions psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at the University of Calgary, supports involuntary care under certain conditions but also stressed more voluntary treatment options are needed.

Tanguay was a member of Alberta's Recovery Expert Advisory Panel that helped shape government policy on addiction and mental health care, and said opinions about the efficacy of involuntary care varied.

"The one thing that was all agreed upon is it has to be done compassionately and in the healthcare system, not in the penal system," Tanguay said. "We can't just incarcerate people using drugs."

This makes sense to me.

There's a risk that police will weaponize an ability to commit someone to involuntary rehab. There's a risk that overdoses might go unreported because people want to avoid being committed to a facility. The question is if these risks will be outweighed by any benefits. I think it's unfortunate that these programs aren't being discussed by political parties in practical terms. There's just a lot of handwaving about whether or not it will 'work', and no real discussion of the objectives and expected outcomes.

As a user, 'privacy preserving attribution' is unappealing for a few reasons.

1. It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO'd to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.
2. It's a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
3. Those issues notwithstanding, it's unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it's naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn't the case, but, I don't see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.

As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn't help or benefit me in any way.

One outcome of the possibility that Poilievre finds success in a federal election, is that rhyming and nickname politics will become the norm. Among other things, a CPC government will be tiring and annoying.

I think we'll have to do some soul searching as a nation if the CPC gains any ground in this election. Like you, I struggle to understand how people don't see Poilievre as comically idiotic, both from a policy and rhetorical standpoint. He's such an insincere goof. Though I guess, maybe we've been conditioned to insincerity from Ottawa over the past decade.

Great, a provincial special interest party now holds the balance of power in the nation's Parliament. A crappy day for Canadian democracy.

Much as I dislike the BQ, it has to be said, Blanchet has cajones

"I am happily assuming that if and when the Bloc will bring down the Liberals, Mr. Legault will support the Bloc Québécois"

This isn't getting called out as the crisis that it really is. Imagine the narrative if any other single province had the influence that the BQ is right now exercising. News outlets would be spinning up the sirens.

You're right to point out the difficulty of preparing installation media.

Also, for the average person, friction will probably happen during installation - possibly having to circumvent safe boot to install and run a new OS (knowing how to enter the bios, feeling comfortable playing around in the bios, knowing how to even disable safe boot once you're there, not exposing your device to security vulnerabilities by having safe boot disabled), the need for an existing understanding of how partitions work and how the partitions are structured on your specific device in order to test the waters with a dual boot setup on a drive that has data/functionality you want to preserve. Needing to know the 'what' and 'why' of swap, /home, and /root partitions. These points all came up on a recent installation, and I'm sure they would scare some people off.

Installation will be easy if you have the time, motivation, existing knowledge and/or bandwidth for a learning curve. But not everybody has that.

And that's just installation, to say nothing of the actual use of the desktop environment, which is not as intuitive as its often claimed to be.

That's fair. Actually I don't think you're nit picking, you're pointing to something that gets to the heart of a critical issue with politics.

The AB NDP aren't far enough left for my taste, and I wish they would have made more meaningful investments and reforms to the education and healthcare systems to make those systems more robust, inclusive, and responsive to the people who use those systems. In not doing that to the degree that I think is fair, I believe they caused harm.

I'm not a policy wonk, and I know that only so much can be accomplished during a single term in office. And as we've seen in AB, much work can be undone by a new administration. But in Alberta, to still have private schools that receive public funding, household declarations allowing tax dollars to funnel into special, separate schools where religious dogma is part of the program of studies, and class sizes being what they are - all these things, according to my values and interests, cause measurable harm. Allowing monopolistic privatized telecom and insurance industries who collude to keep prices high, makes it harder for struggling families to eat and live. Going further, it's arguable that not having a provincial sales tax that directly funds hospitals to improve their ability to efficiently administer emergency care, leads to unnecessary suffering and death. Yet, I have to accept that other citizens with different values and interests than mine will have different, yet still rational and reasonable views about these points.

I don't mean to sound like I'm 'both sides'-ing. I'm just making a comment that political choices are complex. I don't think it's fair to look at 54% of the votes cast for the UCP, and use that as a justification to make sweeping statements about the mindsets of those voters. The petitioners in Barrhead are a good example of the fact that even in a hardcore conservative area, anti inclusive mentalities remain a minority view. I think it's troubling that there are 712 people in Barrhead willing to sign their name to a petition to eliminate pride crosswalks. But the fact that there are only 712 is honestly a relief, in the bigger picture. But the media takes a different angle. And then people say "fuck Alberta, that place is full of crazy people", when the evidence actually suggests that Albertan citizens might be more caring and inclusive than they get credit for. That's all I'm trying to say.

I think the less we write each other off, & the more we actually talk to each other in good faith about issues, values, and ways forward, the better we can be as a society. Political parties are designed to grind whatever axe they think will get or keep them elected. But, every citizen can and should be doing the hard work of honest discourse, regardless of their political stripe.

I hear you.

I'm not sure there is really any vote that a thoughtful person could make that doesn't involve some sort of moral compromise. There are things in the AB NDP platform that I really like, and there are some things that I'm indifferent to. There are some things I wish weren't there, and some things that I really wish they made a bigger deal about. Despite that, I'm inclined to vote for them because I align more closely with them than any other provincial party. I think a lot of conservatives feel the same way about the UCP.

Again, I'm not trying to justify UCP policy in any way whatsoever. Kenney and Smith are both fools, and have made the province measurably worse for almost everybody. Despite that, I don't think Alberta should be written off in a casual way. And I don't think even a UCP voter should necessarily be written off. No matter what side of the aisle you're on, a political choice is a balancing act of competing interests and aims.