4 hours seems a bit much, I’ll agree that seems out of line. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable that some questions were asked and he was ultimately approved to enter Canada so it seems like the system, in this case, worked mostly as intended aside from the amount of time it took to reach that conclusion. Canada has had several recent high profile incidents of not adequately vetting extremists entering this country to speak at conferences, and I am not surprised they are carefully screening people in this situation now. While it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that this guy was singled out for supporting Palestine, one isolated incident is not evidence of bias or profiling on any particular issue, there would need to be a consistent pattern established. Maybe there is one and I just haven’t seen it yet, but as far as I know this is an isolated incident so far.

it is a shame that Israel/Palestine has become such a sharply polarizing and divisive issue that we can almost automatically assume that anyone questioning anyone else on the topic is not doing so in good faith and is pushing their own agenda on it, but that’s actually not necessarily the case. Someone can say they’re a Princeton professor and have worked for the UN, but might take some time to actually verify if you’re not traveling with UN and Princeton travel documents, and even that doesn’t prove good intentions anyway. People can have solid credentials in their past, but have changed into something more extreme since then. Unless the person is well-known and already on a list somewhere, you don’t know where the person stands now unless you ask questions and verify answers. Should that have taken 4 hours? Again, probably not, but I don’t think it’s the asking of some of those questions that is the problem here.

That said, if there is going to be a pattern of this, I plan to be watching out for it now. I expect the same process to happen for people coming here to speak in support of the genocide, and I expect them to be refused entry. Will this happen? I don’t know. We’ll see.

It is a perfectly valid approach, and there are also many other perfectly valid approaches. “Better” requires a definition of what you want to be better. If there’s something that’s making you uncomfortable about the process, let us know what concern or issue you’re seeing with it and maybe we can guide you to a better way for you. But there’s nothing wrong with the way they’re doing it. Others may have different preferences (including you, YOU might have different preferences!) but they’re just preferences. It’s not right or wrong, even if some people argue that it is, they’re always going to have some preferences embedded in that judgement. There’s always more than one way to do it. That’s the joy of it, really, and sometimes you’ll have to experiment yourself to find out what ways YOU like the best, that make sense to you, that are comfortable for you, or that do things the way you want to do them.

It’s your own self-hosting setup, you get to make the choices. Sometimes the number of choices can be intimidating and lead to analysis paralysis but the only way out of that is to realize that there really is no way of finding the “best” until you’ve tried many different ways and figured out the “best” yourself. That’s why the only real advice I can give you is to just go through the tutorial you’ve found and do it the way they do it for now. You can change later, as you learn more, when not if you decide you want to do something differently. Because you will. We all do. It’s part of the process.

As a veteran of gaming on Linux for several years, I have to admit I keep a small collection of various usb bluetooth dongles, because honestly, built-in bluetooth support still remains questionable and unreliable in many cases, at least for me and the systems I use it on. I don’t necessarily blame Linux as much as I blame the manufacturers of the chips and devices, but unfortunately we have to live with the chaos that their reverse-engineered-firmware-reliant devices create. Any cheapass bluetooth dongle is probably fine, the cheaper and more ubiquitous it is, the more likely it uses the same shitty chinese chip that all the others use and that a bunch of someones already hammered out drivers for, but honestly even with multiple different models and brands it still seems like a crapshoot which one feels like working properly at any given time, but usually one or the other will work and get things to connect, and it’s usually perfectly reliable once all the drivers have loaded and it’s all paired up and things start working. The struggle is real, though.

Its wireless is much more compatible, supporting several different connection methods for use with different proprietary systems, and is just generally a better and more capable device. They’re worth every penny, IMHO. 8bitdo’s quality changed my opinion on gaming controllers that had developed after years of being frustrated by cheap, wonky, second-rate, third-party garbage controllers like MadCatz and Logitech that used “features” to cover for the fact that they were cheaply made, overpriced, and deeply inferior. 8bitdo controllers are the only ones I trust anymore. Even Nintendo apparently can’t be trusted to make quality controllers for their own systems anymore. But 8bitdo can.

We were so close with Trudeau. He was elected entirely on the back of that promise and everyone knew it. All we had to do was hold his feet to the fire when he tried to weasel out of it after getting the majority that left him no reasonable excuse for not following through. But we all know what happened. He later even said his biggest regret was not following through on electoral reform. Well, yeah. I’m not sure I believe him, but if he’s telling the truth I hope it fucking haunts him. It should. I’ll certainly never forgive him.

Almost all Canadian Universities (and the ones we are really talking about here) are all non-profit. They reinvest any profits back into the institution to improve their capacity for research. This is why Canada has some of the world’s leading research universities. They are not profiting to make individual people richer, they are profiting to make society and our future richer.

This is starting to change though. There are unfortunately a growing number of for-profit “universities” in the country but most of them are transparently low quality diploma-mills (which is a whole different problem that needs dealing with) and aside from misleading naive domestic and mostly international students and separating them from their money, they remain of very marginal educational or research significance. That may not continue though unless we do something to support our large majority of non-profit universities.

StatsCan is a national treasure and more important than most people give it credit for. Informed decisionmaking requires trustworthy information.

I will maintain creative control of my life by boycotting EA forever. It’s one of the key plot points in my story.

So… throwing trillions at it is bad, but I’m not following the part where you implied I’m potentially ignorant. Do you, or don’t you, want to fall behind one of the main countries that is throwing trillions at it, which you admit is bad? Is letting ourselves fall behind and proceeding very cautiously not reasonable? Did we not weather the 2008 financial crisis with much the same attitude?

Instructions unclear, got afraid of falling behind and accidentally tied my much smaller economy with a very sturdy rope to a country that is soon to be falling off a cliff.

Wanting to fall behind the rest of the world is a good thing when the rest of the world is charging mindlessly towards a cliff.

I’d be fine with that if we were simply spending that money entirely within Canada. Invest in some infrastructure. Give me a new job building military death robots, at this point I don’t care as long as I get paid. I’ll work 16 hours a day building military death robots or winding rotors for drone motors for the national defense as long as it pays me enough to put a roof over my head and food on my table. This should not be a large ask. If we’re going to build affordable housing like we did in wartime and invest in defense like we’re already at war we may as well have a wartime economy to go with it. Break out the fucking food rations and government workhouses already.

But instead we let costs of living spiral wildly out of control and pretend inflation isn’t exploding because the only thing in the consumer price index which isn’t skyrocketing is the over-represented falling price of gas, which people aren’t using as much of anymore due to WFH and EVs. Then we blow our entire budget of countless billions of dollars on other countries’ designs and intellectual property and partnerships where they do all the skilled and value-added work and then we end up employing 1,000 people here if we’re lucky, while we have to ask permission to fix it and pay them to train us how to use it.

Yeah, it’s our own damn fault for cancelling, selling, giving away, or letting other countries sabotage any of our designs or intellectual property of value and letting our infrastructure for building any of it rot to dust for at least half a century, and there’s no easy way back from that. I get it. But knowing that doesn’t make it any less infuriating.

Forgejo also has significantly more active development. Feature-wise, I believe they’re currently working on adding federation via ActivityPub as one of the main goals. I also think they have a much better designed and documented system for workers and actions at least at the time I went to spin one up. I switched to Forgejo and haven’t really looked back.

There is no other authority I would trust on the matter.

That’s fair, I hate it too. Java is way better, mine is so heavily modded I can barely stand vanilla Minecraft anymore. The only reason I know what a shitshow Bedrock on Linux is, is because my niece was at first only allowed to play on Switch and that’s only properly compatible with Bedrock, and she likes to show me around her worlds that she works on. I eventually convinced her parents to give her access to something that would let her play Java instead and since then we’ve only looked back at Bedrock once, and she was disappointed too haha.

They’re talking about Bedrock edition, unless there’s some new method of running it that I’m not aware of. Minecraft Bedrock is available as a UWP app through Microsoft Store, which is only available on Windows, phones and consoles. It is not compatible with Steam, Wine, Proton or Linux in any way, The only known way to run Minecraft Bedrock on Linux is to install the Android App for Minecraft Bedrock in an Android emulator, there is a wrapper called MCPLauncher for this purpose.

Alternatively, you can use a translation layer like GeyserMC to use Java edition in a way that’s interoperable with Bedrock, but the Bedrock edition itself is not currently available on Linux.

The Internet never forgets, but it is easily distracted.

The rest of Canada has your back. At least the people do. I can’t speak for our governments.

All these attacks on collective bargaining power are already bringing public pressure to the boiling point, maybe they’re hoping we’ll forget how many different species of wildcats live in Canada. Make it make sense, or we’ll start to meow.

I’m a relentless idealist too, and I get where you’re coming from, but idealism alone isn’t a winning strategy. The state of the world right now proves that. Sometimes you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is important precisely because it is so minor and inconsequential: the stakes and consequences for failure are so low while there is absolutely no legitimate argument against it. Not to put too fine a point on it: People are losing hope in our ability to create any change at all. We need a win. We need to start getting traction, and start making progress somewhere. We need to show people that these battles against corporate interests CAN be won so that they are willing to try to fight more of them in the future, including eventually the bigger ones where there will be real consequences and really serious forces entrenched against any efforts for change.

This is just a first step, a tiny example of giving the finger to “the man” to prove that we still can, taking back a sliver of power and agency. It is not the last step, it is merely a beginning, an almost invisibly tiny crack in the armor of capitalism and corporate rights in favour of society and people’s rights. It’s certainly not going to fix the world on its own, but once we’ve got some cracks in the armor, we can keep working at them to make them bigger and eventually maybe we’ll start making real visible progress.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to solve the problems of the world overnight with a single petition too, but that’s not realistic given the scale of the opposition and resistance we are facing. Late stage capitalism and corpo-fascism are not weak or fragile and they have grown to a scale that is almost inconceivable. We will not beat them in a single blow. We will need to hammer at them for a long, long time before we even start making any serious progress. We have to be prepared for a long, long fight, and relish these small, small victories when we get them. Because every victory is valuable and every one counts. Especially ones where we don’t have to fight to the death to achieve them. Small, cheap victories are the best when our resources are so limited. It’s going to be a marathon not a sprint. Right now they’ve got all the money, all the power, all the media, all the organization. A single large decisive battle would almost certainly mean we lose, and lose big. This is guerilla warfare. We will fight on the fringes and fight them where they’re weakest not where they’re powerful. Eventually the balance of power will shift as long as we keep winning battles, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

It’s not bizarre at all. There are words that explain exactly what happened: calculated vote suppression and voter disenfranchisement. The election was stolen before it even began, by Bill 20. The result is exactly as intended.