wampus @ wampus @lemmy.ca

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4 mo. ago

Such a wimpy style of governance from the look of all these proceedings. Even if there are legitimate complaints, the person 'getting grilled' could practically sit there singing the alphabet, and the outcome would be the same.

It's like those odd sport interviews where the person just responds "I'm just here to not get fined" to every question -- ie. I'm forced to be here for pageantry/contract reasons, but there's no real point to any of it. Both the questions, and the answers, are ultimately pretty meaningless.

I laughed when I first saw those two UK-ancestry Indian girls who's mother had them 'identify' as First Nations in order to get tons of free grants / govt support, which they used to setup businesses and such... and the news was like "Why would someone do this?!?". For the money and govt perks, obviously.

One thing I didn't see much of in the article, were options to resolve the issue aside from a brief note about there not being many options currently. So what options do we realistically have to address the issue?

Do FN not keep a registry of their people, and/or do they not have established processes for third party's to verify identity claims via a simple form? Like do businesses have an option, sorta like running a background check with law enforcement, to check an identity?

I'd personally vote to remove the incentive for the frauds. Race-based benefits that are so lopsided you have people committing fraud to get those perks, a situation that seems antithetical to what the Charter and democratic nations are built on: that all races are equal. Remove individual govt incentives based on race -- no bursaries, grants, funding, tax breaks, etc. Have the fed gov supports be based exclusively on nation-to-nation type supports, sorta like they do with the provinces in terms of fund transfers, and base those transfers on the division of responsibility between FN and Canada, tied to the treaties where possible. Instead of having oblique benefits paid out to individuals spread across the entire country via tax breaks etc, have the funds be directly applied to 'nations' to fix things like drinking water availability. If an FN has no one living in their area, or if they free-ride off of colonial infrastructure that's been built, they get less 'national' funding -- sorta like if a foreign country came in and built a port for Canada to use, and we had free use of it, it'd be nuts for the govt to then up our taxes to pay for a new port... cause it's already there and available.

Its about manifesting peace. It's an advanced form of America's "Vibe Diplomacy".

There's no particular reason they couldn't. Even a simple dirty bomb detonated in a high population area could wreak havoc -- and any country with centrifuges can basically make one of those in no time.

Basically every sovereign state now has a very clear risk calculation supporting the development of nuclear arms and for ignoring all the UN's attempts for international cooperation / non-proliferation. Iran was compliant, from all accounts, with the vast majority of requirements that had been set out for it -- something that Israel's nuclear program is seemingly not required to adhere to (it's still "unofficial" that they have between 90 and 400 functional warheads).

Opening yourselves to international inspectors just gives the USA a very clear target list + floor plans. Further, not having a nuclear option means the USA will potentially attack you. Even if rules of engagement say they shouldn't attack civilian power plant infrastructure, the USA, Israel and Russia do it without hesitation. North Korea, China, and Russia have shown that having a nuclear deterrent will keep the USA away. It'll even make the USA suck up to you / praise you, and let you attack/invade your neighbours without the USA taking action.

What Trump and the States have done, in my view, essentially translates to destroying any semblance of international cooperation between nations (cause why bother trying to appease the EU, if the USA is gonna ignore international norms and bomb whoever they want anyway), and has made it so that every nation should now pursue weapons of mass destruction as a "deterrent", which will no doubt lead to catastrophe in time. But there aren't really many ways I can see it playing out otherwise.

Like that 5% NATO military spending.... should prolly be every NATO country building a nuclear / WMD program of their own, unbeholden to US constraints, "just in case".

The US officially giving tech execs military ranks is.... interesting. One of the stronger reasons to avoid companies like Huawei, was that the CCP had direct military ties / agents working within Huawei. The argument in favour of US tech companies in comparison, was that while they may have agreements with the US military, they were at arms length. Now they aren't, and the rationale seems to be attempting to shift to "just trust us", while they openly start major wars/conflicts and support genocidal actions in the middle east.

idk. If I were involved in the decision making for any critical area, I'd avoid the hell out of foreign controlled anything in my regular stacks at this point. Even if it means you have some efficiency hits until there may be an in-country provider available. It wouldn't matter who the other country is at this point, as the US going awol is something most wouldn't have 'bet' on like a decade ago, but here we are.

Personally, I don't mind seeing when comments are heavily down voted. If an opinion is unpopular, that's ok, especially in some areas where you generally know there's a likely bias in the audience.

What annoys me is seeing comments removed / silenced by mods when the comments dont align. If the comments calling for explicit violence or using overt slurs, by all means censor. But many online spaces will eliminate even respectful / neutral comments simply because they aren't in line with that narrative.

Meh. I gotta admit, I'm pretty numb / antagonistic to this sort of thing at this point. In my view, race-based politics / privileges are antithetical to the idea of democracy and equality. I don't support any race-based group attempting to gain privilege in a democratic country, and I can't see any reason why a race-based group should be treated with respect, as their aims are inherently racist.

One of the things we're witnessing in the USA currently, is a backlash to this sort of minority interest superseding majority well being. Sorta like how Jody Wilson-Raybould's bail reforms put Indigenous demographic representation in prison ahead of general public good/well-fare, and triggered the revolving door offender issues we've been trying to sort out for the past 6 years. For some stupid reason we don't call that racism, even though she took action in a position of power to explicitly benefit her own race. Framed slightly differently, what she did is like "destroying your enemy from within", an overtly hostile action taken against the interests of the majority of Canadians. It's about on par with how Harjit Sajjan used Canadian spec ops to prioritize non-Canadian Sikh rescues during the pull out of Kabul, an act our spy agencies flagged, but our liberal government turned around and said we couldn't call that racism, because we wouldn't consider the action racist if Sajjan wasn't also a Sikh. Our government's trying to tell us that using government influence to benefit your own race isn't racist: it's utter absurdity. The public isn't as stupid and gullible as some think, its just that so far the alternatives at the polling station have proven even less appealing.

On Lemmy I'm likely a minority voice, but I reckon there are a significant number of Canadians who feel the same. The more unreasonable 'demands' from such groups, the more likely that chatter about a minority-privilege industry will increase -- the more likely for a catastrophic blow back against any and all equity efforts that have been brought in to date. BC's already got a few politicians shifting into a new party with very negative views of current norms towards Indigenous rights -- and seeing indigenous people get more and more race-based privileges and exceptional treatment in government, isn't going to quell that resentment at all. Putting a group of racists, who feel empowered/entitled to speak as racists and only focus on their race-based interests, up as leaders in Canada, a democratic country, just seems wrong and embarrassing. Like how the hell do introductions get made with a straight face in these circumstances.... "Hi, we're Canada, a democratic nation that tries our best to conform to the principle that all people are created equal and are equally deserving of dignity and respect. And here's the group of racists, who have power based on their race/blood, you need to meet with and appease if you want to get things done, apparently?". If Canada can't come to an international gathering as a united voice, one able to enact/make good on decisions made by the group of international leaders, then we likely shouldn't be part of that group -- though maybe that's the "destroy them from within" approach that FN are targeting here.

At most, in terms of international politics, treat their leaders like premiers. Hell, some of our premiers are FN, and from what we've seen Wab Kinew's one of the most sane premiers on deck currently -- if FN want to speak for Canada at the federal level, they can run for election on a platform that benefits / considers everyone involved and get a majority mandate, rather than just their race-specific (racist) interests.

Like I disagree strongly with the recent bills Carney's put forward, as they seem like over-reach -- but if the alternative is for my interests to be subservient to a non-elected racially-fenced minority group.... at least I can theoretically vote to ditch Carney and crowd next time (hopefully there'll be viable alternatives! Maybe a FN party with a broader view!).

Carney was never a good choice, he was just a less bad choice then Pierre. Pierre would've gladly started chopping up the country for Trump, and/or brought Musk north for a Doge north department, or something even worse. Jagmeet wasn't realistic, and didn't offer a great platform, in part because they conceded to the libs before it even got rollin just to try and stop the cons.

Carney is a staunch neo-liberal, with a banker background to boot. Him being pro-market and pro-international business (ie. non canadian business) isn't 'new' for him. Him throwing small businesses under the bus is totally on brand. But every party toted the same general neo-liberal approach, without any pushes for drastic overhauls of existing norms that would've been needed if we were to actually respond to what's going on. We needed a more drastic shift away from the market-based rules, because the US had thrown out the rule book / started overtly breaking them on a routine basis -- Carney, and all the rest, are still sticking to those old rules hoping things will blow over. Opening markets and acting like its business as usual granting access / control to US interests because "business!", while the US president openly says they'll be selling deficient military hardware to their allies cause "maybe they wont be allies for long". Hell, the US bailed after like half a day at the G7, and spent most of that time whining about why Russia wasn't included... if you think the status quo is still in the room...

And its unlikely that govt will listen to feedback between elections. Especially if you're unfortunate enough to be from a riding that ALWAYS votes one way or another, as many of us are, because why would politicians even bother listening to your feedback if the vote is pre-determined in your area already? Alberta can be given pipelines left right and center, they'll still vote conservative. Parts of Vancouver can be completely ignored for decades because they always vote NDP.

I think it became inevitable that traditional 'sites' were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

It's why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that'd be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you'd likely have a really great "AI assistant" to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their 'searches' with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users' ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

It'd be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications -- don't need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they're all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.

Israel's actions in the past couple years have all seemed like sorta a desperate attempt to leverage the US Hegemony that's protected them, before the US buckles.

Sorta like imagine a kid in Grade 1 who's a total racist bully to his classmates. But the kid has an older brother in grade 6 who has no issue beating the shit outta any Grade 1 kid who fights back. When the older brother nears the transition to middle school -- at which point the younger will lose his protection -- the younger brother starts instigating like crazy, to try and establish dominance while still protected.

Canada ought to invest heavily in vaccine tech / bio firms. Even more so with the states not doing so.

Most obvious reason being basic health concerns, and the response required for things like pandemics, which are likely to increase in frequency as the world burns to the ground. The less obvious reason is that those assets / skills double as bio weapon developers (as we're seeing practically everywhere, things like the Geneva convention / anti-genocide stuff has become very flexible). All the talk about getting nukes is silly, when you can quietly have a team of 2 dudes in an off-grid forest hut, with a chicken coup and a couple drones, potentially do billions of dollars of damage to a country that is... in a rush to further expose themselves as vulnerable to this sort of threat, by firing all their researchers/scientists on the subject.

So we can invest in biotech for generally altruistic and proper reasons, while having a very easy to conceal / clandestine alterior motive that can serve as a bit more of a deterrent / safety net. Win-win.

Sorta like how we ought to roll our climate disaster response teams under a military umbrella, and jack up our spending on things like logistics teams for moving things in and out of disaster areas. We need to hit 2% or 5% GDP spending on Military for Nato? Don't see why we can't meet that target with ease, just by spending more on our own natural disaster response capabilities at the federal level. Can even lend those assets out to assist our allies when they get hit with issues. Again, win-win.

I agree that this is a significant issue / problem for democratic countries, and that the trend of violence towards journalists in America is an obvious concern.

That said, the media has generally turned a blind eye as Israel killed a record number of journalists the past few years - and not only that, but they continued to broadcast out that regimes narrative. Given that the media / journalists "at large" have ignored this sort of issue in another "democratic" country that's gone authoritarian, I find it totally unsurprising that another authoritarian-trending regime feels emboldened / empowered to treat journalists the same.

I'm not sure the intention of this sort of note.

Yes, Harris may've made those predictions. People heard em. They still preferred Trump, compared to Harris. It's not like people, outside of the potentially fringe / outlier cases highlighted in some left-leaning media sources, are all that surprised. People didn't vote for Trump because he was promising to treat immigrants with respect and dignity.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if many of the red-voters are looking at LA, and thinking things like "Look at how bad that immigration invasion got, they're literally destroying the city and disrupting government. Even the governor of the State is part of the problem at this point, making noise about defending the public disorder. Tut tut. Send in more marines".

More realistically... AI Trump.

They could feed all of his bullshit into a model, and have an AI Trump spewing nonsense forever. Bet it'd even take AI golf trips.

Is this a questionable move under the current administration? Definitely. I can imagine it essentially being them wanting to broadcast racist/discriminatory things, without worrying about foreign country hate speech laws generating lawsuits for US social media companies that put that sorta thing out there. They want media companies like X to be free to broadcast as much right wing hate as possible to democratic nations, to more easily influence things like political elections. The Trump admin/repubs would almost definitely abuse the hell out of it.

But awkwardly, is there a case, generally, to be made out of this sort of thing? Yeah, I'd say there is. But the approach to resolving it is kinda extreme, and authoritarian in nature. Like step 1 of trying to have control over your nations online media, would be to bring in a China/Russia style national Firewall. If the government wants to allow people to make online comments without fear of repercussions from foreign actors, or to have social media options that are uninfluenced by foreign actors, governments need some level of control over the geo-location and flow of internet traffic. If America wants to let Musk goose-step around Nazi saluting, while ensuring that Americans are uninfluenced by how the rest of the world views that sort of thing, they need to be able to block connections to/from foreign countries. If they want to block Chinese bot farms from manipulating the public image of the CCP on social media, they need more direct control over how data from China flows into the USA. And they likely need more 'direct' influence/control over social media companies via stricter regulation on things like knowing your customers.

I'm not sure how you'd have to structure that sort of thing's governance, in a democratic nation, to ensure that it doesn't get abused, and I imagine the only politicians that would be interested in this sort of thing would be the ones hoping to abuse it.

But that wouldn't even be full mitigation. Someone like Khashoggi, who is sort of a poster child for this concern, was killed by Saudi Arabia due to expressing his opinions in Journals / online about the SA regime (to my understanding at least). It's questionable, had his opinions been "successfully" kept within nations that view free speech as paramount, whether he would not have still been targeted/killed. Even if that story was successfully "kept" from the population of a dictatorship, there's no particular reason to think that the dictator would not seek vengeance for the slight. Like Kim Jong's got a pretty tight stranglehold on the media in North Korea from what I understand, but I wouldn't be surprised if he isn't above trying to assassinate foreigners who campaign aggressively against him or who end up going viral for insulting him.

SVB was intentionally crashed by tech bros like Peter Thiel, likely as a strategic move to lobby for change in the banking sector / to gain more access for tech companies. The bank operated in a risky space, with too high a concentration of tech bro customers. This left them exposed to Thiel and crowd going "Hey, look at the balance sheet, if we all withdrew our money at once we can pop this bank and trigger a discussion about banking regulations / reform!".

So, no one forgot, it's all part of the same larger plan really.

I don't get why you're asking a question, when you have a general answer in the body of your post.

far-right populist parties increasingly draw male support through nationalist, anti-immigration and anti-feminist narratives, while women — especially racialized and university-educated — opt for progressive parties promoting equality and social protection.

So one party is targeting (racialized) minority groups, and promoting feminist-style equality (equality in ways that benefit minorities and women, but not targeting areas where men are worse off), and social protections that are historically skewed in favour of women / minority groups. The government screening for "people who identify as an Equity Employment group" is in line with left leaning policies, where Canada defines "Equity Employment groups" as "any non-male, or non-caucasian, person". Programs/initiatives that provide funding / increased access to women, are arguably "anti" men, especially when experienced on an individual level (being denied a job because you're a guy, even if on aggregate it's for some 'equity' balancing, still feels like you've been discriminated against because of your gender).

Feminist theory doesn't hide its intentions, but people don't bother to think about how men perceive it in 'late stage' feminist cultures (where the imbalance is far less extreme than other areas of the world). Feminism is NOT egalitarian at its core. It's defined (a bit loosely) as the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. That means they are not advocating for equality in areas where women are advantaged, nor in places to gain equity for men -- theories about making groups "actually" equal, would be egalitarian, not feminist. Think of it like a list where you've defined the advantages and disadvantages of both men and women, but then there's a giant social movement to remove the disadvantages from just one side of the list.... it gets lopsided real quick, and unsurprisingly the group that's been ignored gets pissed off and starts pushing back. We constantly hear about the wage gap, or health care deficiencies for women... but we ignore that women live 5 years longer on average (so better 'results' at a high level for health care, and longer time in retirement on CPP/OAS) -- they get ~25% more time in their retirement years, which in addition to old age supports, translates to far higher medical costs for that period as old people eat more resources. Even something like increased supports for seniors, a "general" social support program, disproportionately benefits women because of this underlying inequity that's ignored. We ignore men's poor showing in higher education, which forecasts their earning potential in decades to come -- they're now double digits behind women in terms of getting degrees. The govt funds womens centers with Fent task force money, cause 1 in 5 deaths from fent are women.... the 4 in 5 deaths that are guys are just.... whateva, let em die. We celebrate all woman companies, they get special features in newspapers and tons of public support; companies that are men-only are just waiting to be sued. We allow women only spaces like women's gyms, male exclusive clubs are generally not allowed / torn down by lawsuits (if they grow beyond a facebook group or whatever): I've seen local barbers taken to human rights tribunals, men can't even have 'men' only haircut spots.

Discussion of trans rights, are almost entirely couched in protecting women's rights -- preserving their gender-based privileges in a world where men can "identify" to gain those privileges. Its likely partly why they push hard for a clear definition of what a woman is, so that they can continue to exclude men from those privileges. It's super rare to see cases where someone's in an uproar about a FTM trans person playing a sport (I haven't seen any of these, personally). I'd posit that the lack of defined privilege programs supporting men is one reason FTM doesn't raise as many concerns. That even goes beyond just trans concerns somewhat, in that on job applications, if checking "female" means you pass a quota check, why wouldn't every man identify as woman (or as "gender fluid") for gaining employment? It's not like work's gonna force you to fuck in the employee lounge to prove it. People like Rowling are basically feminists working to preserve women's privileges, which is at odds with a chunk of trans folks who want to gain those privileges by 'opting in'. The fear is basically that men will realise there's no reason not to opt in unless there are very clear barriers put in play, which if not planned for could eliminate a chunk of women's privileges.

Anyhow, to rephrase what you said a bit:

One party is about providing programs and benefits to women and minorities. That party isn't really about providing anything for men; it may benefit them in general with its policies, but those policies are "for everyone", while they specifically target additional beneficial policies to "anyone but men". The other party said they'd remove the programs that target women and minorities with benefits, which indirectly benefits men/the majority race. The party that aligns more to men's general 'needs' got more of the male vote. The party that aligns more to women's general 'needs' got more of the female vote.

Really not all that surprising.

Left-leaning policies, parties and politicians have typically aimed to appeal to demographic niches, rather than broadly stated goals that benefit larger subsets of the voting population. Someone like Jenny Kwan, an NDP MP that's been in her seat for decades now and serves as a 'minority rights' type critic, is basically unable to empathize with / represent "average white middle class" voters interests, and it really shows in any communication you have with her. Her political support is almost explicitly rooted in appealing to minority groups, and saying "You have it so much worse than white people, so govt should help you out!", which gains her enough appeal amongst her various niche sub groups to continue to control the riding (even though her riding has gotten jack shit in terms of fed funding for her entire tenure -- they just keep voting against their own interests really).

Because their base has become so entrenched in demographic politics / appealing to racialized groups, any platform that attempts to speak more broadly / appeal to non-racialized groups, presents a potential threat to their underlying base of supporters. Jagmeet, when doing "meet and greets" with the public, instantly and almost exclusively gravitated towards other sikhs -- because his support in the party was largely based on his appeal to that particular minority group, who voted en masse for him because he's Sikh, moreso than his policies/electability.

Put slightly differently, they don't target "traditional" left leaning economic / political ideologies, because their position in the 'new' left is based on appeal to influential minority groups. You don't need to appeal to "everyone", or "as many people as possible", if you can lock down a big minority group, who'll vote for you just because of your race. So you don't see them appealing to the broader public interest. And while that approach works in some segments (Like Jenny's riding, or at NDP conventions), it generally isn't a winning strategy when replicated across the broader voting public. Jagmeet could win his NDP leadership race, because the people voting there skewed heavily into his niche, but he couldn't win the more 'open' race, because his race-based supporters weren't a significant enough slice of the broader population to carry it. Even more, the racial-based support block actually serves to alienate voters of other races -- you can't have a bunch of Sikh people goin "Finally one of us is gettin in, we're gonna see good changes!" without that reading as "We're voting for our own race because we assume there will be race-based benefits / targeted programs to help us as a result! We're voting for racism in our favour!".

And that fear is somewhat justified, unfortunately. I mean, JWR was our first FN AG. She reformed bail to specifically address FN representation in prisons, and is the person responsible for Canada moving to a rotating door for criminals -- she literally revised bail to make it so that LE had to let everyone out asap before their official day in court, because she felt some demographics were over-represented in prison. She also mandated race-based reviews of cases, which has resulted in things like a FN dude who stabbed a white stranger in an elevator, killing him... getting zero jail time as a result, because he was FN and his victim a white guy (happened in Vancouver in 2020). These are moves that are explicitly "bad" for the general public, and arguably bad for equity; a FN AG put in policies benefiting her race explicitly to the disadvantage of everyone else / 'the public at large'. Canada also had Harjit Sajjan from the Liberals, use Canadian spec ops to save non-Canadian Sikhs during the pull out from Kabul -- a fairly clear case where he racially discriminated in favour of his own race, to which the Liberal gov said "He's not racist, cause you wouldn't call him racist if he wasn't a Sikh himself!". Like no shit, someone of a certain race using govt resources to benefit their own race is what people call racist.... but not in Left-leaning politician speak. In left leaning politics, it's ok for minorities to use govt resources that way.

I dunno. I think left leaning parties / politicians have decades of this sort of stuff to try and work through, if they're seriously wanting to try and appeal to the broader "working class". And the political base of the party is not really interested in moving in that direction. Sorta like how the dems in the states were so hard up for getting a woman on the ticket, that they torpedo'd Bernie and alienated a crapload of working class voters. Same general vibe.

Yeah.... though to be fair, even more 'typically' Canadian companies rely heavily on American / foreign supply chains, which in the eyes of some may also be considered deceptive.

Like almost every "local Canadian Credit Union" has their online banking hosted by Intellect Design, an India based multinational company. A ton of them have their back office entirely in M365. A large number use American banking systems such as FISERV -- there's like, only 1-3 tiny CUs in BC that use a Canadian back-end banking system, another 4-5 in Ontario. Yet they generally all advertise as Canadian businesses, because they're Canadian owned (by their members), Canada "incorporated/operated" (business lic in Canada, physically operating exclusively in Canada), and are subject to Canadian regulations (which allow/encourage them to outsource to other countries). They're unable to function without America/foreign involvement, paying/supporting foreign companies on the regular, and are exposed to potential disruption risks should trade deteriorate (eg. USA impeding digital service to Canada, equates to them "turning off" any company reliant on those services...).

In regards to what counts as supporting a kind of patriotic Canadian consumer movement, where the line gets drawn is entirely up to the consumer. If they don't want to bother looking too closely, they may be fine with just the 'store employees' being Canadian. If they want to dig deeper, they may want to make sure that the products are generally made in Canada. Deeper still they may check the supply chains / operation items that support the business.

While I personally disagree with the lightest interpretation of it, ie the "well, our employees are Canadian, good enough!", I can't realistically expect people to research every product/service they may buy. Macroscopic alterations like that are best done through govt actions, sorta like forcing people to recycle. Our govt hasn't really taken any tangible action on this front as of yet, just pageantry and bluster for them to get re-elected. And it's unlikely that it'll become a political wedge issue in the long-run.

Programs like OAS are given to the rich, because they're old. Questioning the legitimacy of 'old' and/or 'married' as being qualifiers for targeted aid, and instead implying that benefits should be given to 'poor people' no matter their age or marital status as per the charter's tenants, fits with your rebuttal. A rebuttal which didn't address the questions.