wampus @ wampus @lemmy.ca

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4 mo. ago

Yawn. I think national parties should be highlighted on the national stage: I don't think the metrics provided by the TV consortium for who gets to participate properly captures what a national party is. I think rules/requirements that specifically carve out a 'system' that enables one niche interest from one part of the country, to masquerade as a 'national' party, is disingenuous and insulting to everyone outside of that niche -- especially as the 'rules' were clearly structured to preference/enable the blocs participation. That % threshold of the voting public is a lot easier for a separatist movement to hit in Quebec, than it is in the West due to population density -- its basically tailor made for them, and provides a 'structure' to block other regions doing the same / getting the same preferential treatment for their 'niche' interest parties. At least the PPC and GPC are interested in the country as a national body, and in governing/contributing to the national interests.

They should just change the format. Do an hour long unedited interview with each candidate, with pre defined topics / identical questions, to allow leaders to get their talking points out in a more 'user friendly' conversational way. Allow as many leaders as they want to sit for an interview, post them all on third party news sites to allow them to generate some ad revenue for providing the interview services/hosting (with requirements to host all qualifying candidates to mitigate news agency bias). Let voters watch whichever clips they want. Hell, have local news agencies do similar with the local candidates, so that you can see your person speak on topics of import, and how they would represent your region on those fronts.

They all just try to say their sound bites anyway. And few voters are realistically going to suddenly support a different party based on a one night zinger.

Yeah, but that's sort of the point I was making.... it was a data repository used by "thousands and thousands" of security professionals and organizations. So people who were generating revenue off of the service. I mean, they're professionals, not hobbyists / home users.

I'm not an American, but in terms of everything running like a company/for profit, I'd say that its best if things are sustainable / able to self-maintain. If the US cutting funding means this program can't survive, that's an issue. If it has value to a larger community, the larger community should be able to fund its operation. There's clearly a cost to maintaining the program, and there are clearly people who haven't contributed to paying that cost.

In terms of going back to whatever, the foundation involved is likely to sort out alternative funding, though potentially with decreased functionality (it sounds like they had agreements to pay for secondary vulnerability report reviews, which will likely need to get scaled back). Maybe they'll need to add in a fee for frequent feed pulls, or something similar. I wouldn't say it's completely toast or anythin just yet.

That's nice, but I don't really care. They aren't a national party, nor are they interested in being a "Canadian" national party. Giving them a platform to debate on the national level is in part why they're able to maintain their seat count -- it's the same sort of pageantry that drives dictators to covet meetings with democratic leaders, to trick people into thinking "Oh, they're basically the same", when they're very much not.

The peoples party, and the greens, even if they're super fringe in nature, have more merit for being included in the debates in my view. I'd watch (well, listen to) those debates. I won't bother watching the bloc get up and do its stupid bloc crap. There's talk in the media again about western alienation / succession, and Quebec / Canada's approach to Quebec compared to its handling of Western interests is a big part of what fuels that sort of resentment. The bloc is basically Quebec just giving the entire country a giant middle finger, which is a wonderful way to show support for the country as a whole...

I'm honestly not totally sure what to think about this one, though I recognise that it's a big shift/likely a negative overall result.

Reason I'm humming and hawing, is that there are lots of expensive cybersecurity type 'things' that rely on the CVE system, without explicitly paying in to that system / supporting it directly, from what I recall / have seen. Take someone like Tenable security, who sell vulnerability scanners that extensively use/integrate with the CVE/NVD databases.... companies pay Tenable huge amounts of money for those products. Has Tenable been paying anything into the 'shared' public resource pool? How about all those 'audit' companies, who charge like 10-30k per audit for doing 'vulnerability / penetration tests'.

IT Security has been an expensive/profitable area for a long time, while also relying on generally public/shared resources to facilitate a lot of the work. Maybe an 'industry' funded consortium is the more appropriate way to go.

Those requirements are designed to allow Quebec's provincial party a seat at the table, while impeding access for parties such as the Greens and Peoples. They're basically an example of institutional discrimination that came in fairly recently, with a pretty explicit target/goal.

I have much less interest in sitting through a debate between 4 people, when 1/4 of the time will be dedicated to a guy talking about one province's interests, and where that party doesn't even run outside of that province. Guess I'll just wait for my media bubbles to give me the highlights and hope that it's not too biased.

Hilarious.... so the req is to have someone in the house (or 4% vote share nationally), and run candidates in most ridings. They're getting cut because the elections folks think they are in violation of the latter there.

While still allowing the Bloc to participate. A party that's never run a candidate outside of Quebec. A party where every second of time they're givin on a national stage, only speaks to one province's interests, in a 'national' debate. Who's been in pretty well every national debate for decades now.

It's vaporware until its commercially available.

I'm curious -- I've looked at this a little in the past, but paused once the payment requirement showed up. Doesn't feel like it really matters at all about using a VPN or otherwise to try and hide my identity, if there's a charge on a credit card that proves I use a torrenting service... ? How are people sorting that out, or are we all just pretending you can't get tracked through a payment?

Lots of people seem to think it's either or, and it really shouldn't be, in my view. (I'll note I'm canadian, since it seems to matter to some these days).

The argument that foreigners shouldn't be allowed to protest is to me somewhat valid, but with a bunch of reservations. Peaceful protests, publishing op eds, (obviously) University papers, online posts, and other 'regular' forms of expression I'm totally in agreement that they should be allowed to express themselves/participate.

But we've also seen cases in Canada where our immigration levels got so high, that we literally had CCP organized protests in favour of a detained Chinese CCP Billionaire, as well as the tearing down of "peaceful protests"/awareness things in regards to HongKong and the crack down the CCP did there. We've seen large, organized groups of Indian students -- their messages of "go get free food" being amplified by foreign controlled social media -- draining our food banks dry, the loss of that social support helping to fuel class conflicts and increased animosity towards Indian people as a demographic. We've seen 'protests' leveraged by foreign powers to sow discontent and animosity intentionally, and/or to control the narrative around news stories.

And that's really no surprise: one of the stated methodologies of authoritarian regimes, for attacking democracies, is to basically sow civil unrest through the amplification of contested issues/topics. They'll amplify/fund controversial right-wing and left-wing viewpoints in order to cause internal conflict. They'll hype up race conflicts. Like how the majority of people are totally fine saying both "Hamas is bad" and "Israel's genocidal actions in gaza are bad", but somehow it's always framed as just a 2 sided thing where you're on one side or the other, is great for authoritarians: why fight a democracy, when you can make it fight itself. If we're accepting Students/people from authoritarian regimes, we have to be realistic in acknowledging many of these people will share the regimes beliefs, and will be actively working against our governments / peoples. They aren't the stereotypical refugee seeking a better/freer life, but rather people with malicious intentions and a desire to disrupt.

So I'm fine with such people having visas and non-permanent citizenship revoked if the person's involved in criminal activity (violent protests), and/or if they're a primary organizer/instigator/funder of such things, or (as was the case with some 'student' groups in Canada) they're actively coordinating their protests with foreign embassies/agents. I'd also be in favour of increased scrutiny of people from such regions when it comes to long term stays / partial immigration (where they don't renounce their former non-democratic country). Lots of countries also expect singular citizenship, I see no particular issue with western democracies at least requiring that their citizens not support/be registered citizens of authoritarian dictatorships. If you want to live in an egalitarian/democratic country, you shouldn't be supportive of authoritarian autocracies/dictatorships.

And again, similar to the note about 'one side or the other', in terms of free speech, most folks generally recognise that there are some reasonable restrictions / repercussions involved with it. Hate speech, explicitly calling for the killing of some group of people or what have you, clearly not a 'right' for most sane people -- at least, not one that wouldn't come with consequences. In the same way that the left is fine boycotting Musk for his Nazi salutes (he's free to express himself as a Nazi, and other people are free to take issue with that / not support him because of it), foreigners explicitly challenging the existing norms of society should be prepared for potential consequences if they do so in a manner deemed inappropriate.

Saying we should have a Canadian made EV isn't saying we should priortize cars. It's a relatively marginal item, with low relative cost, that the guy is saying we shouldn't do. Saying we shouldn't do a low cost marginal thing, and should instead focus on spending huge amounts to re-orient city infrastructure so that bikes become the primary mode of transit, is a far bigger / more complex / more costly shift -- and one that he argues should be made at the cost of relatively small changes in the existing industry. If you aren't bothering to weed your garden (a low cost task to maintain your theoretical personal green space), because someone convinced you to build a trebuchet in your backyard because its a far more interesting thing to do than weed your garden, you've abandoned your garden. If in order to build that trebuchet, it needs to have large building materials strewn all over your yard, crushing your existing bushes, you've definitely given up on having that garden.

And if you get frustrated and abandon that trebuchet project part way, your garden is just toast. Prolly would've been better off just weeding it.

Like a third of the charter of rights and freedoms is about language laws and french/english. Even as a west coaster, I highly doubt there's a scenario where Canada doesn't side with Quebec on this front.

So option 2 it is -- but that's their endgame anyway, they're just hunting for an excuse to do it anyhow. Thats been clear ever since he dredged up Fentanyl as a boogeyman. Just hurry up and diversify trade more -- I'm fairly sure we can find other markets for most goods. Any business that's just sitting there hoping this will blow over, and/or that the government will bail them out, and isn't taking direct actions to mitigate this issue that's been months and months in the making.... deserves to fail.

Might work out, might not. It'll be interesting to see more of the details.

One item I don't see any of them talking about though, is addressing the regulatory hurdles around alternative banks offering more options when it comes to the underwriting and mortgage qualification. One common reason people are locked out of the housing market, is that they can't qualify for a $1500/month mortgage, so they're stuck paying $1700 rent instead, which is nuts. And the reason the banks -- or more specifically smaller lenders who specialise in mid-market families (ie. Credit Unions) -- can't make these sorts of deals work, is that the regulatory bodies would smash them with huge penalties/fines due to it being considered "riskier" underwriting. Admittedly CUs are provincially regulated, but if we're looking at it as a national issue then there should be broader discussion about these sorts of items amongst all tiers of govt -- sorta like how health care is technically a provincial concern in segregation of power, but the feds have significant influence over it.

In times past, or more specifically in the 1980s where some of Carney's ideas are coming from, there were more small Credit Unions doing mortgages outside the regular range of the federal banks -- so if you were a 'fringe' borrower, you could still get your foot in the door, just with a different route than a traditional bank. This wasn't a huge risk to the industry at large, as each of those CUs was small -- if any had taken too many bad risks, it would be easy to let the organisation 'fail' and disperse its members over to new CUs. It's less the case now, as the regulators have pushed CUs to merge into far larger organisations and shrunk the count of CUs industry-wide -- meaning if something like Vancity went down, there's no 'safety net' from other CUs able to absorb it and it'd inevitably hit the government books. And because of this, those same regulators force the system to be rigid and conform to explicit guidelines on their lending practices, with relatively minor wiggle room for boards/policies. Their efforts to minimize risk, choking the industry to death slowly, and removing financial supports from traditionally under-served demographic segments.

Like here's an example that I know for a fact Credit Unions used to be able to offer to people, with some conditions/qualifiers: you could get a personal loan for a low rate to cover a big portion of the down payment on your mortgage. So if they felt like you could take on a bit more debt for the near term to get into a home, ie if they saw you paying $1700/month in rent and that your mortgage was gonna be just $1500, they could basically make that work with a far lower down payment.

Ok look. Just because you're part polar bear, likely covered in a thick coat of fur to withstand the frozen death tundra of the north, doesn't mean us regular normies can do it.

An 'ok' video, but it misses a lot of the Canadian context of DEI and CRT stuff, much of which has been institutionalized for decades. It's too focused on recent trends with influencers and US politics.

I'd typed up a big description of that missed context, references/links to the Charter/Employment equity act/supreme court rulings and all that, but it was just so, so long. And based on experience, pointless to explain in online discussions.

I will say though that when I bring these sorts of things up, a big reason I think this is such an issue is that I do think there are inherent bias's and issues in systems. However I'm more concerned with broader economic class disparities then racial ones -- people with dental issues and low income have it rough and deserve a hand; it's not helping to specifically target low income seniors support programs as though being a 'senior' makes you more worthy of help/govt funds. The implementation of DEI has basically been weaponised by the upper class to refocus the anger of the lower classes against one another, rather than against the super wealthy, and that men/white men have specifically been isolated "from the rest". You can put out a corporate policy saying hiring needs to be done through an inclusivity lens, and it allows you to give jobs to just the upper class minorities and discriminate without hesitation against the lower class majority: a third generation millionaire trust fund minority race woman with barely passing skills, is more worthy of employment in the eyes of the govt than a higher skill lower class background white guy quite explicitly with how the govt handles its hiring. Putting a focus on supporting women and minority rights, gives the facade of permission to ignore inequalities that exist between economic classes of men, or people in the broader aggregate. The government/elites don't need to fund / maintain safe third spaces for most of the unwashed masses, if they can sell the idea that only a minority of the population needs those sorts of privileges. They can fund woman specific outreach and support programs, and half ass the opioid crisis for a decade or two while its victims are 75% men. As long as you can get the lower classes focused on racial/gender issues, it's a lot easier to cut the top income tax bracket from 70% down to 38%. It'd be interesting to see a study on the correlation between DEI/CRT programs and broader income inequalities between the top % earners in the country over the past few decades - they've definitely both been on an increasing trend since the 80s, when Canada started doing DEI due to the charter.

The videos note on Bernie -- and Bernie's comments post election about how the democratic party has become too mired in identity politics that it had turned its back on the working class of the country -- are apt. But, by the guidelines that the Government of Canada puts out, expressing this sort of sentiment is racist -- if you're concerned more with broad economic inequality/class without respect to racial lenses, the guides say you're racist. To me, it's the same sort of insanity as the people who say you have to support what Israel's doing in Gaza at the moment, or else you're an anti-Semite/Nazi/terrorist. You can both condemn Hamas, and also condemn Israel's genocidal actions: but the dominant power structure / elites set up the discussion as though there are only two teams/positions, then force people into one of the two camps, and proceed to make them fight one another. It's unproductive in terms of getting a sane / human rights encouraging / life benefiting resolution to the conflict/discussion. It's good in theory, but in practice it's anti-progressive/anti-egalitarian. Sorta like how most people view communism -- ok in theory, but in practice it's pretty well always been a tragedy.

Shifting to a bike-centric cityscape is a huge shift in infrastructure, if you start mapping out all the components that need to come together for it to happen at this stage. Like I live in Vancouver, where our council has for a few decades put a heavy priority on building segregated bike lanes and connecting paths that are pretty well totally removed from cars. I happily ride my ebike around the seawall during the spring/summer/fall a couple times a week. The weather is mild, albeit rainy, pretty well all year. The terrain is generally pretty darn flat. We've had local e-bike vendors for a long time. We have bike share stations provided by Rogers (formerly Shaw) along most major transit routes. That's still not enough to make vancouver into a bike-primary transportation city. Hell, with reports of ebike batteries exploding periodically, one thing you'd need to add in is mandatory secure ebike parking in condo buildings (we recently had an apt building go up because of it, causing something like 24 people to become homeless) -- which'd mean all the older buildings would need to retrofit things. The list just goes on and on.

And again, in the context of "change all cities in the country to preference ebikes and alternative transport" vs "build EVs in Canada", the former is far more drastic. So if someone wants to put it forward as a realistic/plausible option, beyond just fantasy, they need to really spell out how it'd function, the cost variances / savings they claim would occur, and all that jazz. I'd love to see how it'd be economical for tiny towns in northern BC/Alberta to switch to e-bikes as a primary mode of transport, I just don't think it's realistic. It's the more extreme position to take, so someone should back it up. And, like I said earlier, if they can do that they ought to pitch it to the greens.

Women generally have enough advocates already. They have over 5 years more average life expectancy than men, yet the media is flooded with women's health care needs/concerns. There are reasons why the right-wing message is appealing to so many men these days, and it isn't because they're doing great -- just looking at the statscan info on university grad demographics, where white guys were around 20%, white girls were around 30%, and asians were around 50%, and I gotta wonder why we keep treating the white guys as a privileged group. The data doesn't support it so much anymore. Just because one group was treated poorly in the past, it doesn't justify treating others poorly in the present -- especially as that generation has/had no say in the matter that they're being punished for.

That said, yes, when an equity issue is raised that impacts women, I'm staunchly in favour of having it addressed. I mean, heck, I highlighted gay men as a group that was specifically screwed by the move, which isn't 'typical' cis white right wing guy speech. I like to think myself more an egalitarian in that sense.

Already hashed this out with another poster. If you look through it, there's a link to articles where university profs were admitting that it was an equity issue, and that they'd failed boys.

As far back as 2007, when the vaccine came in, there was evidence it'd help men / boys out with HPV related cancers and issues. Some of the studies explicitly stated that they should be doing more work to highlight the situation for groups such as gay men, who were left out of the whole 'herd immunity' concept altogether when it came to the govt policies and initial roll outs. These studies and the gender-biased implications that were noted, were ignored while the government made the vaccine free for girls. They only looked at cervical cancer, and with those blinders they only funded it for girls. Until boys/men started protesting more, and people pointed out that male rates of various HPV related issues were far higher than that of girls, because 'duh' vaccines, and the policies slowly started changing.

If things like historic approaches to heart attack treatments, having things like symptoms only track what "male" symptoms look like, is systemic sexism against women -- then this is easily an example of system sexism against men. And again, there's third party sources of univ profs cited in Canada's national news agency in the other discussion thread, supporting this statement, so its not just some rando online alone making this assertion. I don't really care to debate it more.

I've had enough discussions with people on lemmy so far, where they demand I source/cite a bunch of stuff, while they choose not to cite anything. So I'm not overly fussed, and I find your response kinda funny given how the site seems to trend.

I'm fine with people stating opinions and not sourcing stuff, but to that effect it doesn't make all that much sense to try and pick apart an opposing opinion without citing things, if you're wanting to get into a back and forth. If people want to 'dream' about some 'Freedom city' that's designed with eco sustainability in mind from the ground up, that's great, but it'd need to stay in the realm of fantasy until it's costed/proven viable.

Like in his response he goes on about montreal's infrastructure, but doesn't acknowledge that Quebec receives the most in equalization payments by far as a province -- the amount of money that province receives, as the second largest in the country, has often been a bone of contention from the West. Most likely if they have the funds to build a bunch of that stuff in Montreal, it's because of these sorts of uneven supports driven by the federal parties wanting to cozy up to Quebec, moreso than it being realistically viable for a small town in northern BC/Alberta. I don't need to "prove" that explicitly, because I'm not the one arguing Montreal as the poster child of his approach -- so he/she/they should be providing that information in more detail for consideration, if wanting to convince readers that ditching cars is the way to go.

There's an old line where extreme claims require extreme evidence/proof -- so on this one, calling for abandoning cars, is a far more extreme change than saying we should switch to in-canada EV production. The onus of providing evidence is on the other poster.

Prove it with a fully costed source / platform. Maybe push it to the green party. Run for election.

Otherwise your stated dissent against my points basically amounts to is just two assholes arguing on the internet, with both getting covered in shit.

Not a bad bit. None of the choices are good, even looking at fringe ones these days.

Greens are back with May as co leader, after having previously appointed a person based solely on DEI principles and watching that person burn the party horribly. Turns out appointing a black lesbian jewish pro-palestine lawyer woman didn't automatically make her a good leader. Like their own party history is now a very clear, tangible, and credible argument against those sorts of initiatives. DEI is good in principle, but implementation has a bunch of issues -- and the lefts inability to recognise that, even when literally suffering the consequences, is a problem that will alienate many voters. Even returning to May, is like saying the party has no other viable / worthwhile leaders around, which is a huge mark against in terms of stability for the party. The "pro-environmental" party should've had a significant uptick given all the climate disasters, like seeing towns burn to the ground. But they're so warped in their politics now, their core messaging so scattershot amongst a bunch of harder-left wing concepts, that it's dysfunctional as a party at best.

The NDP have Jagmeet Singh, who's overtly racial in his politics. He'll always rush up and hug his ethnic group / favour them at rallies etc -- the optics of which isn't lost on people who aren't part of his demographic. The basic fact that his leadership win, and support, is heavily racially biased is not exactly a secret, nor is it something that will appeal to anyone outside of his race. Demanding that people who question/highlight this issue be labelled as racists, isn't going to help the issue. Jagmeet also cratered Weir's political career based on BS accusations, weaponizing inclusivity policies against a caucasian guy who could've been a rival for the leadership. Singh shielded Weir's (non victim) accuser, when she was accused of misconduct with more tangible evidence (ie. an actual victim stepped forward to accuse her, where none stepped forward to accuse Weir -- the victim was a guy though, so apparently the 'believe the victim' thing didn't apply) -- Weir got the boot immediately, Moore got coddled. Singh seems like a pampered lawyer from a wealthy background -- his private sector work experience being working at his family's law firm for a couple years. When elected, he just picked up a house in one of the more expensive areas of Vancouver like it was nothing -- what's a few million to a 'working class' leader afterall, pocket change. Draped in expensive swag, and with that background he masquerades as a candidate for the working class. Singh stands up and opines about the evil landlord class, while his wife is busy buying up investment condos to provide their family passive income as landlords. Even more, as an overtly religious guy from a minority religion, he alienates many -- and faces really difficult challenges in areas such as Quebec. While many attest that it shouldn't matter, real politics demands a realistic take on the electorate -- if your party wants to win, don't run leaders that explicitly alienate large segments of voters.

Neither alternative party tends to put together a proper platform. The less likely you are to have to make good on your commitments, the more extravagant you can make your promises. Yes, the two main parties fail frequently to deliver, but they're still more realistic in scope during election time.