wampus

Yea, I'm not in favour of crypto banks in any way shape or form. Over the past five years, almost every crypto coin has been blatantly used at some point for large scale fraud, and direct bribes -- Trump's a great case in point there. Even more, shifting monetary control into a crypto-verse, is overtly giving all authority and power to tech bros, who are proving in very overt fashion that they cannot be trusted these days.

Just look at SVB. Thiel and his buddies looked at SVB's balance sheet, said "We have so much money in this bank, if we all pulled out at once we could kill the bank and trigger a regulatory fiasco" ..... followed by Palmer Luckey, one of that crowd, putting forward a Crypto-first bank with his billionaire buddies backing. So the guys that caused the latest banking collapses, are wanting us to trust them to handle all the monetary stuff. Crypto being beyond government control is a nonstarter, and as soon as govt is involved is basically the same as regular currencies. But even worse the main proponents of it are completely untrustworthy, and are entirely hell bent on dismantling things like democracy. They want the power to mint their own "zuck bucks" to function as official currencies in their little tech fascist fiefdoms. So fuck that noise.

Yeah, cruise lines opening back up and returning to business as usual after COVID, basically made me stop paying attention to a lot of this individual-targeted climate change stuff. That was a perfect and fairly natural way to end that high pollution luxury oriented industry, but everyone basically said "boomers still like cruising, so fuck the planet".

If boomers and rich people can continue to pollute at incredible rates, just give me my stupid plastic straw back. At least that way I can drink a full mlikshake before my straw turns into paper mache, while I watch the world burn.

Yeah -- agreed. I tried watching "The Magicians" because it was highly recommended. No CIS white male characters in the show really. They had a white bisexual guy who spent a lot of time sleeping with gay dudes. Wasn't much of an issue / commented on for the first few seasons, and it was 'ok' viewing, if sorta stupid. But then in season 3 and 4 they were super heavy handed in breaking the fourth wall and saying cis white guys who identified with just that one bisexual white guy character were being racist/sexist for not looking at other characters, in part because that character gets killed off in season 4.

Why they thought that their cis white guy audience was going to identify with a bi-sexual neuro-divergent sort, one who'd spent like an entire (time loopy) life time with his gay lover, I'm not sure. But the heavy handed 4th wall breaking to talk-down to that audience demographic did end up making me not bother with seasons 5.

........ Honestly, this isn't too surprising with how saturated the media is with minority groups. Almost every show I see on various streaming products ends up having heavy LGBTQ+ plots rammed in, trans characters showin up, always a multicultural combo of characters and fewer and fewer generic CIS white people. When the media is constantly blasting you with minorities and minority issues, in a highly biased way, it's totally not surprising at all that people would start thinking they're a way bigger slice of the population.

Like someone once pointed out that there were more airplane pilots in North America than trans people. So imagine if every TV show you watched, suddenly had an airplane pilot show up and talk about airplanes a bunch, had whole episodes dedicated to his occupational trauma, regardless of what the main plot of the show may be. That would be more representative of the general public, than having trans people in every fucking show going on about trans trauma.

You'll never see Canada block big tech at this point I'm afraid. All the talk of sovereignty is just that, talk. None of our different government agencies is prepared to abandon Microsoft. All of our financial regulators are completely in bed with Microsoft. Most of our banks are in bed with Microsoft. Our ATMs run on Windows due to Payments Canada being in bed with Microsoft and mandating it. All of your banking data is accessible by Microsoft. Every government agency runs on Microsoft.

Every time there's an announcement about ditching US providers, ask your MP/MLA if that includes Microsoft / big tech. There's always an "out" in those announcements to allow them to dodge that one -- like "It's too expensive to change", or "too difficult to change quickly" or whatever.

I mean, look at all these "nation-building" projects that they're itching to suppress Canadian's rights to "get moving" -- they're all projects that're gonna be lead by Big US companies to extract resources from Canada. They put on a good show, but the reality is that Trump / America was right that Canada is basically a little bitch at this point. Our politicians have proven that time and again this year.

I think the most bizarre thing about this story, is that it's not 'new' to hear that traffic cams / automation can catch a ton of people speeding. Like I recall them setting these systems up in various cities two decades ago, and the number of people caught in the early stages of the programs was huge then too. It's "normal" for people to drive ~10mph over the speed limit, though that varies based on things like school zones (where you dont go over at all). It's also normal for drivers to align to the speed of surrounding traffic flows. The public pushback that resulted, killed many of the initiatives. Cams were still installed, but many cities that used them tended to have restrictive conditions. This isn't 'new' tech by any stretch, nor is it a 'new' idea to be tried.

The article hints that they're allowing a 10mph wiggle room this time, but the main thing that's changed, is the public has been beaten into submission by authoritarians -- it's unlikely there'll be any civil action against it.

If you believe there were mass graves in a similar vein as you see in Israel, Nazi Germany, or other similar genocides, you haven't looked into it all that much. There was no mass execution of First Nations. They had a higher rate of death among children as a demographic over a roughly 150 year period during the operation of the Residential schools. There were children that died while at residential schools -- some who were buried in unmarked graves and/or buried in places their next of kin didn't know. Even the headlines that get posted generally highlights that they're "unmarked" graves, not "mass" graves in recognition of this fact. This was mostly during the earlier parts of that time line, where things like "phones" were less common (so you couldn't call their parents), the older generation couldn't read/write (so a letter to notify parents may've been sent but would be less effective), and moving a corpse across the country to a small remote community was incredibly expensive. The times journalists try to sensationalize it and claim it as a 'mass grave', they're generally referring to an area with multiple unmarked graves, where the children were laid to rest by the church (individually) -- basically a big graveyard without headstones, that formed over the 100+ year period, as the church buried kids incrementally one by one over that period.

But the Church was never rounding up and executing children by the hundreds in a planned approach to snuff out the lives of an entire people. The root of the 'genocide' is/was that the Church and Canada was (arguably) intentionally and systematically using the residential school system to convert FN into more western ways of thinking and cultures ("killing" the culture, not the people -- sorta more like how Russia abducted a bunch of Ukrainian kids, and is systematically indoctrinating them into Russia). That, coupled with an aggregate statistic over a century, is what's used to call Canada genocidal and lump the country in with what's going on in Israel currently.

Yeah, he's also a raging alcoholic -- like town drunk levels in one of the communities he's got one of his houses in. He's got at least four homes around the world, and jets back and forth no doubt. He's got 5 kids of his own, yet preaches that people shouldn't have so many kids. He lives a very high-polluting lifestyle for someone that built a brand on being green.

No western country is likely to step up at this point, in my view at least. The conservative leaning folks are going hard into authoritarian xenophobic trends, and the left leaning folks consider anything that alters the existing culture of an area to be genocide.

The latter is really kinda tragically hilarious, cause we see countries like Canada declaring themselves genocidal and shaming their non-indigenous population as though they're monsters, while simultaneously defending Israel's actions in regards to Gaza. There's even talk of making it a crime to question how horribly genocidal Canadians are, and also to make it a crime to say anything bad about Israel. If we see a religion-backed school, we're to think "genocide! You're attempting to subvert the student's cultural religion and norms under the guise of teaching people to read and write! Their traditional culture doesn't have reading or writing, you're genociding their oral traditions too!!"; and when we see a mass grave filled with civilians, we're to think "Totally justified, those bulldozers are just defending themselves against the toddler / journalist / civilian corpses, and mass graves are just practical! No moral issues or crimes here! Definitely not a genocide". These things were brought forward by our left-leaning government parties. Not sure if those've passed yet, but they've definitely been on the table.

Strange semi related old person story -- back in highschool, one of our teachers had the class write essays on whether nationalism was good or bad. We were then given an option to either present our papers, or do a debate exercise with a kind of round robin pro or con. So you'd partner with 1 other person, debate if it was good or bad, then groups of 4 doing the same, until it was the whole class. In my paper and in my discussions, I had used a similar approach as this comic -- basically just establishing what nationalism was vs patriotism, and drawing nazi's in as an example too. No one in those discussions contested that Nazi's were nationalists -- but they still argued in favour of it.

By the end, I was the only person who thought nationalism was overall 'bad'. The tide had turned in the groups of 8 stage. Because a hot girl had declared her support for nationalism. That's all it took for people to like/excuse nazis, even back in the early 2000s. An excuse.

If people paid attention to his history, yeah, they'd see it. What Carney did at the Bank of Canada and his various comments there are pretty telling.

The 2008 financial crisis, we avoided the worst of it because Carney and them were 'slower' to roll out the same dangerous lending practices that we saw down south, but they were still going forward with them -- we just had less exposure at the time the US popped, so they were able to quietly prop up the big banks (and just the big banks, they let the smaller ones figure it out themselves) using the CMHC. Canada's small FIs, Credit Unions and such, got through it without a scratch, because they weren't in to risky convoluted mortgage block trading, and had various safeguards in place already like a shared liquidity pool. Carney's reaction to Canada doing so well in 2008, was to demand that the industry align more with the international standards which had allowed for those issues to occur. Things like the shared liquidity pool were dismantled as a result. Fast forward, and Thiel and his buddies pop SVB -- and suddenly regulators are making noise like "Maybe banks and FIs should have some kind of shared liquidity pool for this sort of issue!". Carney's comments at various events also displayed a blatant lack of understanding for the smaller financial industry players in Canada -- likening Canada's credit unions to spain's private banks (which were run by oligarch-ish families, with zero underwriting due diligence).

The guy trusted the international community hierarchy / structure, more than the Canadian system. He trusted that hierarchy even after it had failed, while the Canadian approach had more success. He forced Canada's FI's to align with worse-practices, just because it aligned to international norms. He is not pro-Canada, nor is he pro-small business.

He's still likely better than PP would've been.