I’ve been to Calgary. If there’s a war on cars there, the cars are definitely winning.

A car is pretty much the last thing you’d want to have a network connection. I’d sooner hook up my refrigerator and let it send analytics data to Frigidaire.

It’s not the rate, it’s the ratio.

That remark was so outrageous that it only took two days of polling data for Poilievre to find out that he disagrees with it.

Why can’t civilians be brought in to manage cops, especially at a time when things have gone so spectacularly wrong?

I’ve been hearing horror stories about Toronto police for as long as I’ve lived in Canada but the repeated call for “civilian” oversight is confusing. The cops are civilians. That’s foundational to the definition of a police force in this country, isn’t it? Rein them in, disband them, do something about the problem — but the idea that they aren’t themselves civilians seems like false consciousness straight out of the mind of a misguided cop.

That a carbon tax would work is pretty clear according to both conventional economics and common sense. It needed to be much higher to be effective enough to clearly demonstrate that. Persuading people to accept that is the kind of “leadership” I had in mind.

Who could’ve known that abolishing the carbon tax, supporting the auto industry, cancelling the electric vehicle mandate, and subsidizing the oil industry would not lead to success in meeting those targets? It’s not as if we’ve all had thirty years to find out that getting to “net zero” is a difficult challenge that would require actual leadership in the right direction.

I was thinking more force his plane to land and arrest him.

As you seem to appreciate, 95% of the time matrix is exactly what’s needed. People seem to hate it because it’s slightly different than discord, but anything that isn’t discord is going to have that problem. It also has other problems, but at least it’s not as bad as fucking discord.

Meanwhile I’m reading about the system where “favored courtiers were given free passes to violate the law” in a nearby country recently.

I don’t know, you’re probably more likely to find Akkoma instances these days. It’s pretty similar.

It’s true they wouldn’t exist in anything like the form they do today. For one thing they’d be a lot bigger.

Yep, we’re stuck with it. It’s just depressing.

Your logic is even worse than mine! It’s quite an achievement.

Once the clean energy transition gets going, people come to their senses, and not everyone continues to drive cars every single time they want to go anywhere, what will all the newly unemployed auto workers do? Build parts for Korean attack submarines, of course! Every hundred billion dollars spent will be repaid many times over in enemy ships sunk when Canada becomes the naval military power it was meant to be and the next great war can finally begin. Submarines: the way of the future.

There’s no need to resort to bluesky, @avilewis@mstdn.ca has a mastodon account.

I’m not a fan of having the government subsidizing new car purchases. It’s the last thing we need. The sale of cars that run on fossil fuels should be banned ten years ago or as soon as possible. If the government wants to spend more money it should go towards alternatives to cars, not to bribing the relatively wealthy people who shop for brand new cars to put even more of them on the roads.

Goodbye EV sales mandate. Hello purchase rebates.

Of all the politicians, only Mr. Carney has the expertise, foresight, and economic sophistication to do exactly the wrong thing with such precision.

If Epic is a megacorp, then what is Valve?

It’s a marginally less problematic megacorp. Being stuck with three or four of them instead of the current one or two would not solve any problems and would make things substantially more annoying for their customers — both publishers and gamers. There’s currently no way for enough of them to exist in that market to provide meaningful competition. It’s the type of service where consolidation and market concentration is inevitable when they’re run the way they are now. You can’t reasonably be expected have 50 different equivalents to the Steam client on your PC; having both Steam and GOG is already a bit of a stretch.

Speaking of the fediverse though, if all the PC game stores were somehow federated such that listing your game on one automatically made it available on the others as well, and they could thus be constrained to compete fairly in a well-regulated market based on the fully interoperable services they provide, that would be a better world.

The whole idea sucks. You know what would be worse than Steam having a monopoly on PC game stores? Five different megacorps each as untrustworthy as Epic dividing the market between them, each with their own exclusive deals so that people who want access to most things need to sign up for all of them. Like with the streaming services it would only drive people back to piracy.