The article never makes it clear what these numbers mean; presumably, they’re looking at bookings for future dates, but are they comparing those rates to future bookings at the same time as last year, or actual hotel occupancy on the date?

As someone without any knowledge of the industry, I learned basically nothing from this article, since it’s completely opaque.

For example:

For instance, occupancy in Vancouver for June 18, the day of the Canada-Qatar match, was 50.3 per cent, down by about a third from 73.8 per cent last year.

1. Is the 50.3% rate as of June 1, 2026? (As mentioned earlier in the article for a different occupancy statistic.)
2. Was 73.8% the occupancy rate on June 18, 2025, or the expected occupancy on June 18, 2025 as of June 1st? And, regardless, what are both those numbers, since the delta between the two is highly relevant to interpreting this year’s number.
3. How do occupancy rates typically change as dates approach?
4. The US-Israeli war on Iran has massively increased the cost of travel, so how do these numbers compare to relative statistics in similar non-host cities? Of course hotels are struggling when the cost of flights doubles, yet that’s never mentioned in the article.

This is a poorly researched article, imho.

I think you’re missing the point; this is between the US, FIFA and, of course, all affected teams/players/officials/fans/etc. If the US isn’t meeting their obligations to FIFA, then what does that have to do with Canada?

Canadian diplomacy is always affected by the juggernaut South of us. It’s frankly a bit ridiculous that anyone would expect Canada to burn political capital on denouncing the US for this.

That is super cool! I wish I had the 50+ spare hours I imagine it would take to go down this rabbit hole… Maybe later this summer!

Thanks for sharing!

I’m skeptical that this will be any better than the bullshit we’ve seen in other jurisdictions, thanks to $millions of Meta lobbyists, but a ban isn’t the problem, it’s age verification that’s a problem.

A ban is a great idea, with absolutely no consequences for youth and no age verification. But rest circumvention doesn’t mean a ban is useless.

A ban could make it illegal for businesses to target youth under 16 for social media, ban schools from allowing social media to communicate with students (like is currently the norm for many school-sanctioned clubs and sports teams), and we could use illegal use by children as an avenue to educate parents about the harms of social media.

My guess is that Canada is about to get a terrible written-by-Meta bill announced tomorrow, but there’s a chance it could be a reasonable law. (I won’t hold my breath.)

CachyOS has been great for me, as a “just works” Arch-based distro that also has freedom to install just about anything (great CachyOS & Arch repos, AUR, podman/Docker, Wine pre-configured, etc.)

I can’t speak to EndeavourOS since I never got past CachyOS working perfectly for me.

Have you ever run into difficulty with needing to authenticate with chip+PIN? Like while traveling?

That would be my big concern with this; it would make it very difficult to pass a PIN check, to say the least!

Super cool idea. I might just try it myself and see if I run into issues.

I was thinking about this, and there are two easy workarounds, I think:

1. If possible, get a second active card in the same name. Ideally, a full-identical cloned card. Not sure if this would be allowed, but if not…
2. Add another authorized user to your account and never give them the card, then just dissolve that card for tap payments.

But, in either case, I do think you might run into a different issue: automated fraud detection sometimes requires me to chip+PIN, even for transcribed below the tap limit. This has happened to me when traveling. I don’t think there would be any way around that, and if you then fail to authenticate with chip+PIN, it’s reasonable to think that the bank would lock your card for contactless payments until you successfully authenticate the card again with chip+PIN. (To be clear: this is only speculation; not sure if that would be an issue in practice.)

So, I suspect that whether this would work or not might depend on your institution (or maybe jurisdiction?)

I hear you, but there is no conspiracy by Big Web 3.0 behind this, it’s just bubble economics.

RAM was profitable at ¼ current prices a year ago. Nothing of significance has changed to the price of materials (well, ignoring the temporary insanity of the US/Israel war on Iran War).

If current demand was expected to be stable long term, then, most likely, new production would quickly-ish (~3 years?) come online to capture more profits.

But nobody is expecting this to last, so there’s limited interest in building new chip fabs. So prices will stay high until the AI crash.

No conspiracy required; just economics.

What makes you think the text is AI image gen? Or do you think the text is LLM generated? I’m deeply confused by your comment.

I hope this doesn’t come off as callous:

What an epic mic drop of your father’s. That’s like something out of a novel/film.

He sounds like a super hoopy frood. Sorry for your loss.

I appreciate you taking the time to respond so thoroughly. I don’t have as much time to respond right now, unfortunately. So, in short

I agree those are generally left-leaning. They are an NDP party moreso than the Alberta NDP, but I would hardly consider them to be far/hard left. Like, a tiny marginal tax increase on the wealthy is barely left leaning, compared to what would be equitable.

But agreed, generally, that there’s a lot of managerial bloat. I see it at all levels, but especially healthcare and education; why do tiny districts need so many superintendents/assistants and directors? Hospitals have so many layers of managers. Etc.

Feels like it needs a tutorial or game manual of some kind since the actions and their effects are not obvious. Like, why ever defend? What is an ashfire burst vs. an attack? Attacks seem to do less damage, so why ever do one?

I might try it again sometime, but the initial experience was confusing, tbh.

Still, I can see it has some potential. If I knew what was going on, I might have kept playing.

Right, but what if remote work wasn’t in your employment contract? Like for just about everyone who started remote work during the pandemic.

The BC NDP are very centrist, not left leaning. Like, old growth logging is still continuing and taxes aren’t going up on the wealthy/businesses.

Why do you think they’re “very left”? I can’t think of any strong examples to support that stance, but I admit I don’t pay super close attention to everything they do, so I’m open to hearing your evidence.

Yeah, and a lot less time, likely, too. CADing that would be pretty quick.

That’s a marketing video, of course, but that looks really good. Even ignoring everything else, multi-material TPU printing would be amaze balls since varying hardness/flexibility has so many applications.

I’m going to have a hard time not pre-ordering it to get the early bird discount, lol. I imagine it’ll be north of $1K CAD…

… Hmm. Maybe if I start a side hustle selling 3D prints, I can raise enough to buy it?

I know Creality has a reputation for inconsistency, but their hardware is also fairly easy to disassemble and fix with cheap parts, so that’s not catastrophic. I was super lucky with my Hi, only having typical issues with filament-related stuff, but I also troubleshot some problems with my friend’s Hi, and it wasn’t a big deal to fix.

Thanks for sharing!

If I could afford it, that would be my choice.

I’d probably get the Creality Sparx i7 right now, as an entry-level multicolour 3D printer. I got the Creality Hi Combo last year, and it’s been a great printer for me, and it sounds like the Sparx i7 is mostly just better.

Yeah, ‘y’ every time should be pretty safe for updates, right? Like, the reason it’s suggested is because it’s the suggested alternative for the package it’s replacing and the change has been tested by the CachyOS/Arch team(s) already.

And worst case, something big breaks when you reboot, so you roll back to before the update, wait like a week, and try again (lol).

Sure, but that’s not what this is about. This isn’t just banning AI-written code, it’s banning AI-assisted code. If you even use a Google Gemini “AI-summary” at the top of your search results for something simple like the name of a function, then your code is AI-assisted.

There’s no way anyone can detect that. And banning it is silly.

But the point is, imho, that if nobody can tell if it’s AI-assisted, then who cares? This is more for them to fire a warning shot that you’d better be sure your AI-assisted code is good enough to pass, or they can reject or and, potentially, ban you without notice.

If you end lines with two spaces
And a single line feed

Instead of two line feeds
You can make stanzas
And improve readability

For everyone