The irony kills me on this one. I would like to imagine that if you send your ID in they auto-fail you, but I’m sure they’re not that clever.

I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

There are a lot of ethical concerns around Chinese worker treatment, economic concerns around Chinese subsidies driving the price down, privacy concerns around Chinese tech’s tendency to phone home, geopolitical concerns around giving China even more power in our nation…

But honestly, same. Nowadays I can’t get a car at a decent price in a decent time frame, even worse if I want an EV, so what’s the expectation? The auto industry has dropped the ball so hard that China would trivially dominate the EV industry if they were allowed to compete. That’s bad, but it’s so bad because the local industry isn’t even in the ballpark of good enough.

Nenshi was a good mayor with a meh council and his frustration with dumb political issues came forth in ways that felt like actual human emotions, even if some people thought he was arrogant.

He was pretty obviously the right choice here. Everyone’s platforms were basically the same. Ganley and Stonehouse are basically unknown, and Hoffman is more known for being the overweight health minister than anything else, unfair though that may be. He is the most recognizable of the leadership candidates by a mile, he has actual demonstrated leadership abilities we hardly see from anyone nowadays, and Calgarians generally like him. The only major downside is that he’s not a currently sitting MLA, but he would probably win any riding in Calgary handily.

Calgary is pretty much a swing city at this point, since Edmonton goes mostly NDP and the smaller regions mostly go UCP, so someone Calgary can get behind is automatically a huge bonus. There’s a better chance of seeing another NDP government under him than basically anyone else in the province.

Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

Notwithstanding the four Cabinet documents, federal departments and agencies withheld or refused the disclosure of over a thousand documents, in whole or in part, on the basis that they were Cabinet confidences.

Wait, is this even a Liberal thing then? It sounds like they requested information from federal departments and those departments said “We have these documents but cannot share them due to Cabinet confidence.” That doesn’t sound like it involves a single elected entity, nevermind a Liberal one.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

It’s a bit different but provides more support for the core ideas, for sure. More about our physical, neurological reactions to digital media than about the philosophical and historical aspects. I read it a few years back and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I feel the same way regarding whether this legislation would be enforceable or good, but there are a lot of ways developers could make this work that they currently don’t. That includes bot players, local multiplayer functionality, dedicated server tools, IP-based connections, etc. Many DRM and anti-cheat implementations also cause problems and would need to be either removed or only used in certain contexts.

Right now in a lot of games if you aren’t playing multiplayer on official servers through official matchmaking functions with invasive kernel-level anti-cheat there’s no other way to play, but that hasn’t always been the case nor does it need to be the case.

Just to be clear, a majority of wildfire response efforts are provincial and CAF basically gets called in when resources are tapped out across the country. And Quebec actually did privatize their wildfire emergency response a while back, although I don’t know the details on how that compares against their public agency. And lots of bits and pieces of response are either privatized or partially privatized in many provinces, such as aircraft and helicopter resourcing.

All that said: yeah, CAF just needs to be trained better for emergency response functions. It’s most of what we use our armed forces for anyways. I’ve heard plenty of stories of CAF being deployed and then sitting around for a week because their radios aren’t compatible and they don’t know how to integrate into a unified command structure. These are the things that need to be sorted out, not throwing more money at more entities who can complicate things.

Yep.

If there is one part of Canadian culture that can be said to be consistent across geographic and ideological lines, it’s a connection to the land and the natural world. Our country is practically built on trekking through forests and canoeing down rivers. A national park pass is one of the simplest ways to encourage people to engage with that, and if there’s one thing I’d like newcomers to do here it’s to engage with our culture.

Man I can’t believe we’re giving newcomers easier access to the truly wonderful and remarkable parts of our nation, thus giving them something to actually love about Canada. How horrible.

There are still a couple of donuts that are good despite the severe drop in quality (apparently not even they can fuck up the honey cruller) but yeah, it used to be a thought process on which of a bunch of donuts I wanted when people brought in a box, and now it’s a crapshoot whether I even care.

Honestly, most books in the genre are not great from a critical perspective. Even popular and “good” ones. But they do a great job of being long-lasting entertainment products that get that dopamine flowing, and they engage you in a way that is hard to find elsewhere.

I haven’t read a lot of western litrpg, but there’s pretty heavy overlap with Japanese light novels. Arguably a good chunk of the tropes and popularity spilled over from Japanese light novels and Chinese progression fantasy/xianxia. In that genre I can recommend these pretty easily:

• Apocalypse Bringer Mynoghra, which has a guy transported to a fantasy world with powers like a Civilization leader.
• Log Horizon, where a bunch of MMO players kind themselves in a world basically like the game they know but slowly uncover differences.
• Sword Art Online: Progressive, which is basically the original story filled in with the details and character development needed to make it actually pretty good.
• Konosuba, which has a lot of similarities to gamelit progression and such but is very much a comedy.

If you’re into web novels, Shadow Slave and Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint are both incredible while scratching that itch. I’ve only read the manwha but Greatest Estate Developer also lurks around the genre while being quite good.

My most direct use of fzf is to search large result sets for something I can’t 100% remember the name or location of, so this actually sounds nice. I’ve managed to get fzf to slow down a few times and… well, I’m sure as hell not organizing that folder structure.

There’s been some controversy around the governance structure and culture with NixOS that has a number of people unhappy. I’m honestly not sure of the details but it’s ptesumably less about the software than the people.

A lot of bits in that article sound weird but on the whole the traditional retire-at-65 concept is definitely fading away. I think it underplays how much of that is affordability (how many people even think they’ll be able to retire at 65?) but even then I’m seeing friends take long breaks from work regardless of retirement, I’m seeing people work less traditional jobs that they can find different fulfillment in, and I know a rare few who are past retirement age and asked if it was okay to keep working because they love what they do.

I’m personally planning on retiring at 55 when my pension hits the point that it can easily support me, even if another decade of work would grow it further. Who needs money when you have another decade of healthy life? As we learn more about longevity and aging it’s looking more like I’ll have more healthy years ahead of me than any of my grandparents did and I may as well use them.

Having seen the tube the chicken nuggets are extruded from at a meat plant, at least in Canada they’re pretty much just chicken. Looks like refried beans, sure, but it’s chicken.