I was into fuel efficiency for a while, yes I too was fooled until about 2007, so I can tell you that gasoline-powered cars are more efficient at 90km/h than they are at 100 but typically they’re most efficient somewhere below 60km/h. Probably lower, depends on gear ratios and such. That they went with 55 instead of 40 is just because nobody would have accepted the latter. In fact they largely didn’t accept 55 either in the long run, as we know. But such technical details don’t matter a whole lot at this point because fossil fuels should not be burned at all by anyone.

Fuel efficiency standards: Demonstrating the Jevons paradox and distracting everyone from the urgent necessity to stop burning fossil fuels, since 1975.

Why vote NDP? Because even if we concede that all your criticisms of the party are exactly right and unchanged under its new leadership, that still makes them the best of the main parties available to vote for.

How did kitty-corner and point form make the list? Surely everyone who speaks 500 words of english knows those words.

Yeah. Not exactly an improvement, is it.

They’re directly lobbying the government on a massive scale. They’re looking for every opportunity to force their software on people buying any computer, like they always have. They’re looking for every technical trick to screw the competition, and to extract more from their customers. Where it’s possible (i.e. not LibreOffice) they’re buying up any company that does threaten to successfully compete with them. They bought half the video game industry for example. They’re buying their way into all the schools so kids grow up knowing nothing but the Microsoft life.

I mean what else would they do? It’s Microsoft.

In principle, it’s a bad idea to route so many of everyone’s web requests through one central provider. It gives them too much power to track everything. It’s not how the web was meant to work.

In practice, the techniques they use to try and keep out the bots also keep out people like me who like to make our web browsers slightly more secure by disabling parts of the vast and overly-complicated set of features implemented in javascript, such as those that are normally only used for browser fingerprinting. Over time it’s become increasingly difficult to figure out all the things I’d need to do to have my usual browser pass all their tests, and in this era of plentiful browser 0-days I’m more reluctant than ever to spend any time trying.

Tax the rich. Start rebuilding the public wealth that has been sold off over the past 40 years. Reinvent capitalism along more sustainable lines where it’s possible, build alternatives to it where it isn’t. Or maybe just let things roll along the path of least resistance for a few more years and then watch it all crash and burn.

By saying that even a relatively modest goal such as an NDP government “will never happen” you’re casting a vote for the latter.

Rabble dot ca got cloudflared so I can’t see the article, but who needs democracy when you’ve got a strong leader, tough on crime, who can really get things done, forcefully confront our problems, thrust forward with nation-building projects like helping the world burn even more fossil fuels, and boldly invest in the future by buying expensive military hardware from all over the world. Listening to parliament — let alone listening to civil liberties nuts and environmentalist weirdos who don’t have the financial clout it takes to make a difference in the new Canada — would only slow them down.

If the fundraiser is in the form of a bake sale, I pledge to go down there and buy a cupcake.

It’s kinda weird that you came back to continue arguing against the human tendency towards curiosity.

If noticing (and reporting on) an odd statistic does not make you want to investigate to find out the cause of it, you are perhaps not cut out for a career as a journalist.

“Nice doggy — go ahead and tear apart that stranger, it’s totally worth it. Would you like to buy some rocks?”

Such a suggestion did not come from me. The investigation might well be as simple as finding the right person to call at the relevant bureau.

You’re suggesting that it’s obvious why world cup-related travel would result in a larger fraction of visa applications denied than other travel? It’s not to me.

Of course they will. There’s no way the CBC can resist such a thing.

It’s sort of frustrating that they discovered this huge disparity between the rates of visa applications being approved from different countries, and then seemingly made no effort at all to investigate the reasons for it.

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.

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.

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.