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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Hello there, fellow Ontarian!

    In seriousness, Ford is a great example of my point because he talks to how people feel. It doesn’t matter that it’s bullshit at best or whitewashing of his latest grift at worst, he’s at least acknowledging enough voters’ concerns and fears, and while tossing a bauble here or there (eg, booze in corner stores, buck a beer) to look like he’s doing something for the common person.

    His opposition doesn’t do this. Stiles gets ignored, and Crombie just seems like a weak Ford impersonator.

    The polticial left needs to do better. Yes that would probably mean getting called socialist, but since that’ll happen anyway they may as well own it.


  • Maybe, just maybe, liberal democracies need to do a better job solving problems for constituents and less time fellating billionaires.

    That might help.

    I mean, when I see a right-wing populist telling me they can fix all my problems, I know they’re a lying, opportunistic piece of shit, but I can also see the appeal because at least they’re saying that there’s problems and that they’ll do something, which is more than milquetoast centrists will do.








  • Compared to almost anyone.

    Canada rolled over and allowed the one sector it had any hope in–resource extraction–to be sold off to foreign investors, first from government control and then from domestic hands. Then it allowed rampant consolidation in the “captive” industries it does have (telecomm, food). Other countries did the same, but Canada rolled over faster and harder than any other western nation.

    Now we’re at the stage where our primary industry is skimming the cream off of the housing market. After that, what? Strip-mining south Asian immigrants for value? Whoops, we’re already doing that, too.

    It’s a sad tale of governments, Liberal or Conservative, selling everything not nailed down in hopes that the magical market fairy would make it better, and then steadfastly refusing to do anything at all, sacrificing current donors’ profits for everyone’s future. Everyone saw this as an issue at least as far back as 1995, but no one was willing to admit that the Reagan/Thatcher (and in our case, Mulroney and Chretien) era of neoliberalism would eventually present a bill. So it was more tax cuts, more service cuts, more selling assets, more emphasis on cash hoarding and more disincentives for investing in business.



  • I can’t catch quite the drift what x86/x64 chips are good for anymore, other than gaming, nostalgia and spec boasting.

    Probably two things:

    • Cost- and power-no-object performance, which isn’t necessarily a positive as it encourages bad behaviour.
    • The platform is much more open, courtesy of some quirks of how IBM spec’ed BIOS back before the dawn of time. Yes, you can get ARM and RISC-V licenses (openPOWER is kind of a non-entity these days) and design your own SBC, but every single ARM and RISC-V machine boots differently, while x86 and amd64 have a standard boot process.

    All those fancy “CoPilot ready” Qualcomm machines? They’re following the same path as ARM-based smartphones have, where every single machine is bespoke and you’re looking for specific boot images on whatever the equivalent of xda-developers is, or (and this is more likely) just scrapping them when they’re used up, which will probably happen a lot faster, given Qualcomm’s history with support.

    I’d love to see a replacement for x86/amd64 that isn’t a power suck, but has an open interface to BIOS.