There was no recession in 2015.

Huh? That chart looks fine for Harper — the 2008 financial crisis really wasn’t his fault — and quite bad for Trudeau, if we assume that it’s accurate, that it’s representative of something meaningful, and that everything else that happens in Canada is to be blamed on whoever’s prime minister at the time. I’m guessing it’s that last assumption that might be wrong and the break into a downtrend in 2015 started as a result of something that changed a few years earlier, but who knows.

Canadian Tire gets to be associated with a brand known for being not Canadian, and Tim Hortons gets to bask in the warm glow of a giant big-box retailer known for selling plastic lawn furniture. Synergy!

I did eventually find out who he was thanks to Justin Ling’s write-up which is pretty good: https://www.bugeyedandshameless.com/p/who-was-charlie-kirk-anyway

Quite a story, but even so the earth-shaking implications of his death seem to me much exaggerated by many.

No acknowledgement from this writer that extremely rapid population growth passed a threshold where people finally became aware that it was causing problems. It’s not too surprising, many still refuse to see it.

What I do find surprising for someone aiming to represent “the left” is the unqualified defence of the temporary foreign workers program.

I don’t even drive, but getting people accustomed to having computerized surveillance systems watching over the city and handing out fully automated fines for whatever minor offences are easy to enforce seems like a somewhat bad idea.

Somehow despite the constant news coverage being blasted all over the wire I still can’t stop thinking of him as an irrelevant loser.

Number of times I have heard the name Charlie Kirk:

Previous 50 years: -

Past 48 hours: *****************************************************************

I guess all the large areas shaded blue where I’m pretty sure there aren’t many roads (e.g. northern Ontario) are recent logging activity that still looks like roads to whatever software did the satellite image analysis.

That many people failed to recognise the ubiquity of socialism in English political life was due to the mistaken belief that socialism was some utopia ‘spun from the humanity-intoxicated brains of various Frenchmen’.6 For both Toynbee and Webb, then, socialism could be English and even English Tories could be socialists.

(From the linked essay on John Stuart Mill, socialist.) This is providing more than I expected from an article about Ed Broadbent and the NDP. If people today are confused about what socialism means, apparently that hasn’t changed much since 150 years ago.

Among the big cities Montreal is looking pretty good.

Calling for people to be deported because you don’t like them is not the best habit to get into.

Yes to all the other stuff but please let the Online Harms Act stay dead. Just because all the other countries are jumping blindly off a bridge to protect the children doesn’t mean Canada needs to follow them before they’ve even hit the rocks below.

“We are the world’s longest freshwater beach. We need proper investment here to ensure that the product we’re sharing with all our visitors, including you this weekend, is of a quality worthy of being the world’s longest freshwater beach,” he says. “This is not about anti-environment and anti-plovers and anything anti-green. We are very green-minded.”

Between this guy and Doug Ford being involved, I’m sure the future of Wasaga Beach will be profitable for someone.

There is nothing better than uBlock Origin for blocking ads.

Your logic and/or comprehension are poor and your quickness to downvote someone for disagreeing is contemptible. Plonk

Obviously one’s behaviour has some influence, much like my grandma’s habit of playing the slot machines for hours on end means she’s seen more payouts from them than I ever will, and my habit of not driving at all means I don’t get many photo radar tickets. But one of the infuriating things about them is that there’s no way to know. Are not enough people speeding? Maybe the city will tune them to be super-sensitive to keep up their revenue stream. Did they make an error? Was it not you driving? Do you have some other excuse that would make a human cop say “oh, all right then, carry on?” Do they use the data collected to track people’s movements or any other purposes? It isn’t easy to find out. Automated law enforcement sucks, having surveillance cameras everywhere was a bad idea, speeding is already over-enforced relative to other traffic laws, and making law enforcement more inscrutable and arbitrary is not the best path to improving society.

Except, of course, the province of Québec

Aw, come on — it’s not just Québec. Every province has its own unique legal rights and obligations for its citizens.

Not that I’m saying everyone should necessarily, and things are different in the far north, but I used to ride my bike to work in Thunder Bay. So I can tell you that bicycles do in fact keep working at -20°. You’ll want some winter tires and warm gloves.

The vehicles it should be producing are electric bicycles.

In the same way that slot machines are calibrated to provide just the right pattern of intermittent reinforcement to make people think they’ll pay off, photo radar is carefully tuned to provide exactly the number of randomly-generated fines in the mail that will most annoy everyone who drives a car.