Stupid MIT nerds, caring about freedom. l2p.

It's a difficult question, so I hope some people who have interesting things to say about it will turn up here. All I can contribute is this link: Ancient Arguments For Vegetarianism

The only winners of this war are the oil companies in the rest of the world. And the arms dealers, I guess.

The person whose job it was to speak up in meetings and ask things like "FIFA? Are you sure? Do we really want to get involved with an organization like that?" is no longer employed by Mozilla.

these authorities are intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances and are not exercised lightly

Once again they promise never to use the crazy new powers they've just granted themselves for no obvious reason. What is even going on? Did the Liberal Party of Canada somehow get taken over by the same people that wrote Project 2026? Are they thinking fascism is inevitable so we might as well prepare for it? Assuming we have another federal election some day I get the feeling it's going to go very badly for them, but the damage they're doing will not be easy to repair.

Chapter II - Jeremy Soule Inspired Music

Nice choice for the music, it's the best thing about Skyrim.

Presumably written before it became completely clear that Canada's government is on the wrong side of that fight, as seen in the news today:

"The legislative proposal continues to grant the government discretion to issue broad orders in secret compelling our most secure digital communication tools to bypass, circumvent or weaken critical security protocols to facilitate surveillance. Bill C-22, if passed as is, is a blank check for the government to force its surveillance objectives onto service providers at cost to the privacy and cybersecurity of everyone in Canada."

One time I read about the Buddha and I decided to just sit quietly under a tree for as long as it took. It took a while. Sure I've also tried lots of drugs but nothing really beats zazen if you manage to get to the end.

A timely reminder to the government that while it's not as exciting as jetting around the world kibitzing with your G7 friends about the latest wars, running the post office is still your job. Get on with it.

Whether it's the design cycle, production planning, marketing, or the financial consequences, I don't see any of the major American automakers being prepared to go electric only in ten years. Mind you maybe they'll surprise me. I'm just going by casual observation of the news and a couple of random conversations with insiders. Of course they're all making a new EV or two, hedging their bets in case they're forced in that direction, but even in Europe where the regulators are generally more serious about such things the automakers managed to get their EV mandate scrapped. What's more the plans are mostly just for passenger cars which leaves out quite a lot.

Net zero is absolutely possible, the technology exists, yes — after all it doesn't take much fancy technology to not burn fossil fuels and when it comes to transportation it's not hard to imagine reinventing passenger rail, rebuilding cities around public transport, living with a tiny fraction of the air travel we have today, investing heavily in sustainable agriculture, and so on. But it's a much bigger change than seems to be commonly appreciated even among people who think it ought to be done and I don't think the previous government of which Guilbeault was a part came anywhere near presenting a convincing case that they were on course to do it.

They promise not to abuse all the ridiculous new powers, but the law will have officially and perhaps irrevocably moved to enable an approach that can only be seen as a totalitarian nightmare if some future government is less completely scrupulous than the saintly Liberals of the present no doubt will be, when it comes to carefully constraining their use of the legal tools they'll inherit.

Worst of all, I'll have to find a non-Canadian VPN service to use. It's not like I'm doing anything top-secret, but just on principle. Canadian electronic services will no longer be trustworthy. Only those which can credibly promise to abandon Canada before giving in to a secret order to spy on their users will be safe, and those are uncommon. But they're not non-existent. At least for the time being we will still have Signal, Delta Chat, Mullvad, and so on. Maybe the "warrant canary" will be the big feature everyone looks for in years to come.

The mandatory backdoors would not help with this problem even if they were somehow magically made safe. If they managed to coerce Signal into installing a back door — which of course they can't do — it would quickly be abandoned by its users and whatever tiny share it has of all the criminal gang recruiting activity would move on to places that are even harder to monitor.

Telegram users, where more of that sort of thing goes on, would probably be slower to move. But still people would eventually catch on and there are already more secure alternatives waiting to take over. They'll just be ensuring that whichever one wins out won't be one that's in any way cooperative with Canadian law enforcement.

Don't worry, the criminals will be fine. It's only the normal people who don't pay any attention to security since they have nothing to hide who will become super easy to spy on.

Is it even possible to run Facebook so badly that it stops making money? I guess we're finding out.

My computer is running "xclock" right now, possibly the most normal software ever made.

I don't give a damn about Chinese EVs. When it comes to electric vehicles Canada needs a crown corporation that makes and sells inexpensive, durable, repairable, utilitarian electric bicycles with a mission to make sure that everyone who wants one can get one.

I didn't get to eat much sugar as a kid. It was fine, never a big deal really. I do remember the first time putting actual sugar on my breakfast cereal just to try it at age 18 or something but it just seemed weird, unhealthy, and overly sweet. I hadn't thought about it since several decades ago, but now that I remember I thank my parents for it.

Given their mental capacity is so limited that they have such trouble with the concept of "drinking" I wonder how they managed to travel across the vast distances between the stars to visit Earth.

The problem isn't that they're a small part of the population though. Small groups can do newsworthy things. The problem is that the coverage they get is always like "Trans people: Do they have a right to exist? The debate continues."

Canada has been consistent in our commitment to maintain a path to net-zero by 2050

Net zero by 2050 means essentially zero cars and trucks powered by hydrocarbons on the roads by then. That means we stop manufacturing and selling them by 2040 at latest. It takes car companies something like ten years to design a new model, so they have to commit to full electric transport or else start preparing to abandon the Canadian market by 2030. That's four fucking years from now. There are similarly big problems elsewhere in industry and agriculture. Cleaning up the electric grid is the easy part and we haven't even done that yet. Getting to net zero by 2050 would require a level of effort well beyond what was in view before Carney came along and destroyed al hope. I don't think Canada is going to be leading the way on this one.

I assume it's because they're big Palantir customers. Palantir has an amazingly large number of customers for a company whose public reputation is all about being devoted to pure evil.