Daniel Quinn

I’m not asking them to parrot talking points, but ignoring reality doesn’t do anyone any favours. It’s like writing from a perspective that the world is flat and talking like only fools would think that a spherical planet worldview is rational. Their perspective is demonstrably flawed, but rather than approaching the issue on the facts, they’ve just blasted this project from a ideological perspective. It’s a bad article and the Globe & Mail should feel bad about publishing it.

The bias in this is just revolting. I get that it’s “opinion”, but they’ve made no attempt at having a terribly balanced one.

Canada’s housing sector has been following the Fraser Institute’s advice for decades now, and the result has been exactly as many predicted. Carney’s right: it’s time for the state to get back into building because the private sector has failed to do the job.

Unfortunately, this reads more like a financial instrument rather than what I would argue Canada needs: a housing agency that actually builds the houses rather than simply funds and directs construction. Regardless, in the wreckage that free market capitalism has wrought on housing, this is the sort of thing that takes a lot of time and money get up to speed. You needs skilled labour, industry connections, reputation, and experience building in various climates, and you just can’t create that out of the blue. I’m pleased to hear that they’re moving in the right direction.

Canadian expat living in the UK here. Do not be so quick to dismiss these as bots.

I moved to London 6 months before the country shot itself in the ass with Brexit. Even days before the vote, literally everyone I spoke to in person and online agreed that Brexit was too stupid to happen, but my wife wasn’t convinced. She’d been spending time on right wing subreddits, reading the misinformation and vitriol. She was convinced that Leave would win.

The day after the vote, two of my work colleagues proudly announced that they’d voted to leave.

Our social spheres are small, and despite (or perhaps also because of) the internet, typically insulated from people with whom we disagree. There are very likely more Leavers out there than you might think.

Alberta has had a deep “fuck Canada” streak for as long as I can remember. It’s entirely plausible that at least some of these comments are from real idiots with real power to vote Leave, and we dismiss them at our peril.

This is what I get for posting at 1am. Thanks for the clarification. Yeah I just assumed it was the same situation as coreutils.

Granted, sudo isn’t in coreutils, but it’s sufficiently standard that I’d argue that the licence is very relevant to the wider Linux community.

Anyway, I answered this at length the last time this subject came up here, but the TL;DR is that private companies (like Canonical, who owns Ubuntu) love the MIT license because it allows them to take the code and make proprietary versions of it without having to release the source code. Consider the implications of a sudo binary that’s Built For Ubuntu™ with closed-source proprietary hooks into Canonical’s cloud auth provider. It’s death by a thousand MIT-licensed cuts to our once Free operating system.

Is it GPL though? If this is a case of MIT-licensed stuff weaseling its way into Linux core utils, I’m not interested.

Yup. You tend to see it in countries that have the right geography (like Canada). There’s a relatively famous case between France and Switzerland I believe, but I can’t remember the name. There’s also talk of leveraging abandoned mines as well as a sort of gravity battery, but I don’t know of any actual applications of this model.

I appreciate that you’re not trying to deny climate change, but this talk of our inability to handle the economic consequences of the required action is also really common and it always has the same flaw: it ignores the economic cost of inaction.

I also think you’re misunderstanding the definition of standard of living if you’re equating it with one’s ability to waste energy. That’s a mindset born of the broken system that brought us here. A country that prioritises density and electrification is a country that uses far less energy… because it doesn’t need to waste it. Smaller cars use far less than SUVs, and e-bikes use a fraction of that, while moving in that direction offers you safer, cleaner, and quieter cities at a fraction of the price. The same applies to insulation and electrification of heat: cleaner, quieter, healthier, and cheaper.

I offer my own life as an example. I sold my car in 2008 and stuck to transit and cycling, renting a car for the occasional long weekend road trip. I saved roughly $10k/year, and bought a house in 2021 with about £300k down. I installed solar panels on my house for about £6000 and now my hydro bill is just £8/month while the rest of the country is choking on gas and paying around £150-£200/month for the privilege.

At the end of the day it’s about taking the long view and recognising that the cost of inaction far exceeds any short-term costs, then you do what a leader is supposed to do, take the nation with you and build the future you’ve convinced them they want.

Canada has been hooked on fossil fuels for so long that too many of us think that it’s the only way to live. This mindset has convinced many to decide that not setting the world on fire isn’t worth it, which is objectively insane.

Canada will not survive a 4° increase in global temperatures, so any argument that begins with “we can’t do what’s necessary” is an argument against our survival.

I get it. You’re convinced that global warming isn’t a serious threat, or maybe you’ve just decided that it can’t be because you’re not willing to consider alternatives to how you live. That’s why it’s easy to invent a bunch of nonsense policy and pin it on a stranger. It makes it easy to pretend that you’re the reasonable one in the room. I understand it, but it’s still an idiotic position to take.

Here is some basic policy that Canada can and should adopt to combat climate change at the federal level. Some of it may well hurt the economy, but compared to the catastrophic damage the climate is already doing, it’s nothing.

• Limiting the damage
  • Ban all expansion of oil and gas extraction. When your bathtub is overflowing, the first thing you do is turn off the tap.
  • Fine oil & gas firms for every abandoned well, then sue them for covering up the truth about global warming for decades and then for running disinformation campaigns about CO₂ after the truth came out.
• Energy
  • Invest in solar, wind, and hydro because it’s cheap and fast to deploy. Much of this will have to come from China initially, but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be trying to build this industry locally as well. Megaprojects should be championed as a national effort, and showcased to the world as Canada doing what needs to be done.
  • Leverage our many water systems to serve as flow batteries.
  • Offer subsidies for the insulation of homes and the conversion to heat pumps. Combine this with mandates for landlords that the homes they rent out are up to high efficiency standards.
• Transport
  • Ban short-haul flights, especially those between Toronto/Ottawa/Montréal, Victoria/Vancouver/Kelowna, and Calgary/Edmonton.
  • Charge more per-person per additional flight every year, so that your second flight from Vancouver to Toronto in the same year costs 20% more, your third flight, %40 more, etc.
  • End all federal funding for highway expansion, redirect it into grants for transit and active transport like cycling.
  • Require a commercial license for any vehicle larger than a 4-door sedan or weighing more than 1 tonne, and apply a nation wide speed limit of 30kph off the highway.
  • Limit all non-highways to no more than 2 car lanes. Give that extra space up to slower traffic like pedestrians, bikes, hell even golf carts.
  • Offer financing for e-bikes and cargo bikes or work with private banks to make this available.
  • Invest in intercity rail, ideally along those same short-haul flight corridors.
  • Limit the size of vehicles permitted on all roads and lay out a plan to reduce that size over time.
• Construction
  • Apply a 400% tax on any new big-box store development. They’re terrible for the economy anyway, but they’re also a terrible waste of resources.
  • Stem the expansion of suburban sprawl with the above traffic regulations and tax benefits for urban density.
  • Form a national housing agency for the federal government to start building homes again. The target for this agency should be densification, clustering around the transit initiatives mentioned above.
  • Support the production and use of concrete alternatives like hempcrete where possible.
• Food
  • Tax beef to gradually higher amounts, and subsidise alternatives – even other meats. Chicken for example is leaps-and-bounds better for the climate than cow.
  • Support beef producers by helping them financially to transition to alternatives in exchange for agreeing to reduce their herd sizes every year.
• Foreign Policy
  • Build an alliance of other nations to operate as a trading bloc for countries living up to their climate agreements. Membership in the bloc awards reduced trading friction, while non-members are hit with tariffs.

I don’t know where you got your three bananas ideas, but the above is a pretty good start for actual action on climate. Every one of these will improve quality of life, while the alternative is watching one city like Jasper go up in flames every year until it’s two cities, or three. Major cities like Kamloops, or even Vancouver are definitely already at serious risk even now. What do you think the economic cost would be if we lost them too?

So much to cover with this.

We need time to invest in green energy, public transit, denser housing…

The argument that “we need time” to wean ourselves off of oil is dead. It just is. I know this because I’ve been hearing it for forty years and absolutely nothing has changed in that time. Well that’s not true, it’s gotten worse. We burn more oil and gas, our transport infrastructure is dedicated to private vehicles and crumbling, and the world is literally on fire. “We’re not ready yet” was being passed around in the 70s during the oil crisis ffs, and somehow it’s all the excuse we need to do nothing. The very same arguments were used then as you’re using now and they’re a big part of the reason that we’re still not ready.

You cannot extricate an economy from fossil fuels by building new pipelines. It sounds obvious, but apparently I have to say it anyway. More market liquidity, lower fossil fuel prices, and increased trade in (and dependence on) fossil fuels do precisely the opposite. Instead of backing away from fossil fuels 40 years ago, Canada has committed itself again and again to a “burn the world now, fix it never” strategy for my entire lifetime.

So just stop with this “we’re not ready” excuse when what you really mean is “I don’t want to”. It’s a terrible position to take, but at least it’s an honest one.

I hope if carney is going forward with a pipeline it will at least need extensive environmental assessments and monitoring.

Just what kinds of assessments and monitoring were you hoping for? Oil and gas come out of the ground, we put it into pipelines, ships, and trucks and eventually set it on fire, pushing up the temperature of the planet. The more we burn, the worse it gets. That’s objective. It doesn’t need an environmental assessment, there’s nothing new to monitor. We know what happens when we do it, so asking for it is performative at best.

Its easier to get people to change by building an economy that less carbon dependent than it is to tax consumers into making the right choice.

This is true, though it ignores the fact that the reason carbon taxes are so praised is that they work as both a carrot and stick: they make burning fossil fuels more expensive, while funding the infrastructural changes to give people alternatives. The Liberals brought in a carbon tax alright, but true to form treated it as more of a performance, dumping those public funds into fossil projects, and doing absolutely nothing to provide alternatives in more than a decade. Essentially, they taxed Canadians so that we could extract and burn more fossil fuels.

Personally, I’m not happy that Carney cancelled the consumer carbon tax, but I can appreciate the pragmatic reasons for it. My problem is that my experience with Liberals and neo-liberal bankers is that I fully expect them both to lack a grasp of basic physics when it comes to the environment and pretend that the biosphere can be someone else’s problem, and his performance in the debates wherein he wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved pipelines was completely unsurprising.

Carney is a neo-liberal banker in his 60s. My daughter is 6. He’ll be long dead while she’s trying to stay alive on a burning world.

All of this gives me more hope than if Pierre was PM

…and this is why we can’t have nice things. So long as people pretend that there are only two parties: “Burn the world”, and “Burn the world slowly”, we’re basically fucked.

Um, no. The job of a journalist is to report facts, or at the very least conjecture based on evidence. The claims above are presented without either.

Climate was barely mentioned by anyone on the campaign trail, and despite being not-Conservative, the Liberal Party has long been a friend of the fossil fuel industry. Carney provided no indication that his leadership would be any different. If you want action on climate, you can’t keep electing Liberals and Conservatives.

During the debates, all three parties were falling over each other to profess support for more oil pipelines. I don’t think your faith here is well placed.

That comment was fantastic. Were this Reddit, I would shower you with gold.

They aren’t accidents if they’re statistically consistent and predictable.

He will probably try to find a way to grant the NDP official party status, even though they came well short of earning it in the election. And he might yet make some changes that give parliamentarians — including the ones on the opposition benches — the ability to question witnesses, propose legislation, and otherwise better interrogate the issues of the day and the government’s handling of them.

I know we’re in the honeymoon period of new leadership, but there’s no evidence for any of this. Fawcett is just projecting what he’d like Carney to do and this article is mostly just gushing over our new PM rather than an attempt at ensuring that we’re supplied with any factual information. I expected better from the Observer.

This sounds pretty significant, but significant claims require significant evidence. I’d like to see some links or something about this.

There seems to be a degree of confidence here that they wouldn’t choose to leave. Don’t be so sure. BC and Saskatchewan may vary a bit politically, but Alberta (with the exception of the two urban centres) has pretty much solidly been in the camp of “fuck the rest of the country, we got ours” for as far back as I can remember… and I’m 46.

The version of Firefox that ships with Debian is quite old if I recall. You might want to try installing it either as a flatpak or as a separate apt repo from Mozilla directly to see if that solves it.

I mean, you can buy it and use it in a general purpose fashion, and yeah, those cores would do wonders for all sorts of compiles. Also, it can be useful if you’re like me and do a lot of Dockerised development. Given that most games are x86 only though, sadly this would be no good :-(

The Ampre Altra runs from 32 to 128 cores (dear gods that’s beautiful), but with that architecture, and the company’s stated purpose, it makes more sense in a computer meant to be used as a server rather than a desktop gaming rig. You’d use a chip like that in a Kubernetes cluster for example.

Combined with an Nvidia card, a brand notorious for being a Pain In The Ass in Linuxland, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the intended purpose of a box like this is a server for AI/ML-based services.