By-elections, yeah. When one quits or dies or somehow leaves an office empty. That means that even if there’s no immediate election, there will be one for Papineau to replace Trudeau. Also, if there isn’t an election called right away, most likely another Liberal will quit in a riding where Carney will be elected easily.

But! AFAIK he could also just choose not to be an MP. He won’t, but I think technically he could.

Sure, but technically he doesn’t need to run in that election.

I know what he’ll probably do, but it’s interesting to think that it’s not strictly necessary that he actually becomes an MP.

There are lots of ways to get satellites in polar orbits.

Of course there are, but the customers are mostly not at the poles, so any times the satellites spend at the poles is wasted.

and also allow as a path to reinvigorate our domestic aerospace defence industry.

Avro Arrow centenary edition in 2059.

Do you mean Thiel?

Vance may be much smarter than Trump (low bar) and have actual plans for evil, vs. doing awful things on a whim. But, JD Vance doesn’t have Trump’s cult of personality. Whoever comes after Trump will return to the same normal relationship that a president has with their party. With the modern GOP that means intense squabbling and infighting. I doubt a president Vance could get much if his evil plan passed, even if the GOP did still control all the branches of government.

Geostationary satellites orbit at a height of 35,000 km. That means there’s a huge lag, making the satellites unsuitable for interactive Internet, and it also means they’re far away, so you need a big directional antenna to send data to them.

Starlink is awful, but you definitely don’t want geostationary satellites for Internet.

Neither are satellite orbits.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/llustration-of-two-X-Y-paths-with-different-X-component_fig5_347273912

Canada doesn’t need satellites, Canada needs fibre. Satellites are a terrible idea.

So, this is some kind of “model UN” thing?

Apparently Trump of the North Poilievre has been trying out “carbon tax Carney” as a nickname. And this despite Carney saying he’ll repeal the carbon tax. (Probably a good electoral move, despite the carbon tax being a good idea).

Anyhow, I don’t think a guy whose obvious nickname is “little PP” should be opening the door to the nickname game.

The Liberals and Conservatives aren’t going to do election reform. First past the post is a massive benefit to both of them.

I really like the CBC, and it’s the news source I use most often.

But, even if the CBC isn’t your preferred source of Canadian news, you should still support their continued funding. They’re the only major news source that doesn’t rely on advertising or subscriptions. That means their coverage doesn’t have to be sensational, it doesn’t have to avoid offending advertisers. Some people might worry that it does have to worry about offending the government, but it’s been almost 80 years and they keep reporting the facts on the ground. That’s not like the Bezos-owned Washington Post who are having to completely recalibrate how they report things to suit his preferences.

Even if you don’t like the CBC, they keep every other media outfit in line by just being a facts-based alternative that people can switch over to. And sure, they have some institutional bias, they’re conservative in the old sense of changing slowly and respecting norms and traditions. But, personally I blame a lot of the chaos in the US on there not being a CBC-equivalent.

The US doesn’t have any calm, boring, state-funded national media outlet that everybody grudgingly agrees is more or less honest. Sure, they have NPR and PBS but those are not on the same scale per capita as CBC. And, while they’re publicly funded, they’re not proper news gathering and reporting organizations like CBC news.

It’s not enough to have news sources that are not biased towards left or right. Just look at CNN. It’s generally not seen as a GOP or Democratic news org. But, it’s still extremely sensationalist. Rather than covering important political news, they’ll show car chases or fires or whatever prevents people from changing the channel.

We lose CBC and we get the Fox-Newsification of Canada, misinformation and disinformation spreading so nobody knows what’s true anymore. That kills the country.

Any NATO member increasing their military spending would be idiotic to spend their money with US-based companies.

No, because Canada’s economy will collapse long before the US economy if each side just keeps increasing tariffs. What Canada needs to do is make things cheaper for Canadians, not more expensive.

Take any law related to US intellectual property and decriminalize that.

Violating the copyright on Hollywood movies? Go for it. No charge.

Something you want to do is covered by a patent held by an American? Do it, you won’t be prosecuted.

Want to bypass DRM on a tractor, a printer, an iPhone, sell or give away tools to allow anybody else to do it? Feel free.

The biggest advantage of this approach is that if the US did the same thing with respect to Canadian IP, they’d have so much less to work with. The US has geared its economy towards producing IP, and then used trade deals to demand that other countries respect that IP or the US will put tariffs on their stuff. Well, clearly the US isn’t holding up its end of that bargain, so fuck 'em.

Yeah, I remember watching speeches by Hitler back when I was in school. I didn’t understand German so I didn’t know what he was saying, but I could at least appreciate that the Nazis knew how to project power and competence.

I always understood the fascist aesthetic to be something very macho, very serious-seeming, etc. I always thought the idea was that you had an incredibly charismatic strong-man leader who had all the answers. And, given that, I could understand how people could be taken in.

But, the MAGA aesthetic is so ugly. Their rhetoric is so unserious. Their leader is so old, fat and caked in orange makeup, and he sounds like an absolute moron. The people attending the rallies do comical things like wearing diapers. And yet, half the US looks at that and thinks: yeah, I’ll vote for them.

And then there’s Elon Musk. Every time he opens his mouth it’s less and less believable that anything he ever did was the result of skill or competence. Any time he talks about programming or system administration it’s clear he has no fucking clue what he’s talking about. When he talks about gaming he claims he’s one of the top players in the world, and yet it’s obvious he’s barely played the games involved. But, apparently Americans are so brainwashed that being rich means you’re “a genius”.

I hated George W. Bush, but at least I could understand how some people found his schtick endearing. I could understand how he harnessed people’s fear and hate and turned it into support for his “war on terrah”. But, with Trump my opinion of Americans has gone down to the lowest level ever. This is what works for you? Really??

Yeah, well, echo chambers and all that. I’ve done what I could to try to nudge it outside my echo chamber, but sometimes these things take time to spread

Decriminalize C-42 41.1.

If Canada signed NAFTA and then USMCA to get unrestricted access to US markets, and part of the price was that Canada had to add obscene laws that made it illegal to fix your own farm equipment, then just drop the enforcement of those laws.

Make it so a Canadian can set up a shop where they remove the DRM from HP printers and let users use any ink they want. Let someone set up a kiosk in the mall where they jailbreak your phone so you don’t have to pay Apple 30% of every dollar you spend on your iphone. Then if some Canadian wants to sell an ad-blocker for your iPhone that Apple would never allow into the app store, let them do it.

It doesn’t even have to involve passing new copyright laws. Just treat anti-circumvention the way marijuana was treated about a decade ago: something that’s not yet legal, but that the justice system is no longer prosecuting.

I don’t believe Israel was intentionally targeting World Central Kitchen. This whole incident is a massive PR disaster for them, especially given that the victims were citizens of powerful and influential countries doing one of the most selfless humanitarian jobs possible.

Having said that, this is the kind of mistake that only happens when a military’s targeting rules are basically “commit war crimes”. Like, maybe their target was white civilian vans being used as ambulances by the Palestinians, and they just blew up the wrong white civilian vans. The difference is that killing Palestinian doctors and paramedics doesn’t generate the same international headlines.

Just this week I read a story about how Israel is using AI to identify targets to assassinate. At first they were just targeting senior Hamas leaders, but at this stage they have tens of thousands of targets including police and civil defense workers. Technically these are affiliated with Hamas, but only because Hamas is the official government of the Gaza strip.

How do they kill them? It’s hard to target and kill them when they’re out in the field, so the Israelis wait until they return home and then they bomb their houses, killing them and their families: “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians”

What do they call the system that alerts them when the targets return home, and can now be targeted for a bombing? I shit you not, it’s called “Where’s Daddy?”