This is politically impossible. Canadians have a very strong national identity which is based at its core - and on little else - on not being American. Remember, it's the only country in the world that was actually founded in direct opposition to the principles on which the US was founded. The entire point of Canada, for its entire history, has been to not be part of the United States. Furthermore, the Canadian population has been heavily selected over 250 years for people who don't want to be Americans. So despite the cultural similarities, most Canadians very much don't want to be part of the United States.
Most Canadians don't appreciate how much richer the US is, and those who do, mostly think it's only the very richest who are better off. They falsely believe that the average person is richer in Canada.
There are also constitutional issues. Quebec's language laws would violate the first amendment, and nothing is more important to French speaking Quebeckers than protecting their language. They would far sooner become independent than give up control over what language speak in order to join the US.
Our gun control laws would violate the second amendment, and most Canadians have no interest in giving up their safety in order to have that right. There are lots of Canadians who like to hunt and are upset and some of the recent changes to the gun laws, but there is nothing like the broad support that the second amendment has among American conservatives. The gun situation in the US is seen by most Canadians as crazy. and it would be top of mind in any discussion about joining the US.
Canada's talented engineers (who also conveniently speak English) can easily move to the US and find jobs, instead of trying to kickstart some mini Canadian engineering industry that competes with Silicon Valley
Most Canadians wouldn't see this as a good thing and would prefer to keep them here where they can support our local industry.
American Oil companies can help develop Canada's massive oil deposits and other natural resources, which cost a lot to develop and would benefit from economics of scale
Is there something preventing them from doing this now? The environmentalist movement is very strong in Canada, and outside Alberta, most people don't actually want the oil industry to be further developed.
Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US, instead of being this one persecuted minority in Canada with a chip on its shoulder
Quebec isn't persecuted in any way and has much more autonomy than it would as part of the United States, in particular, regarding laws on language usage and immigration. It would also face more pressure to assimilate into anglophone culture. Canada has a lot of federal laws enforcing bilingualism in the rest of the country. These wouldn't exist if it were part of the US, and Quebec's exposure to anglophone culture would increase. Quebec also receives large subsidies from the richer parts of the country as part of Canada's equalization payment system, which the US doesn't have.
It would also lose its ability to separate. US states don't have the right to secede, whereas in Canada, it is not clear, but they likely can if there is enough support among the province's residents. Quebec separatism may be dormant, but francophone Quebeckers do not really see themselves as Canadian and it's quite possible Quebec will try to separate again in the future if it's relationship with the rest of Canada worsens. It would not want to give up that option.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
It's worth pointing out that Canada doesn't have separation of church and state. The constitution recognizes the supremacy of God and the head of state is also the head of the established church. It also guarantees the funding of demoninational schools. We even had a law against blasphemy until 2018.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. This is an exposé on the RationalWiki editor behind several cancellations of intelligence researchers including Bo Winegard and Noah Carl.
He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.
He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.
This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation. I ultimately agreed to write it because as someone outside academia, my career is less vulnerable than theirs to these types of attacks.
Glassnoser
11mo ago
I have observed that city-specific subs tend to be more right-leaning compared to the broader subs and reddit overall.
Really? Maybe this is specific to Canada, but I find the opposite. Almost all city-specific subreddits are very left-wing.
The part that is most confusing to me is the truly astounding size of the awards. They seem to be several orders of magnitude larger than the actual alleged harm. How is being fired from one job as bad as losing several lifetimes' worth of income in one of the highest cost of living areas in the world? How is a single person not being demoted worth the lifetime earnings of a small village?
In addition, it empowers Human Rights Tribunals to investigate complaints by individuals against other individuals and levee fines of up to $20,000.
It should be emphasized that Humans Rights Tribunals are not normal courts. For example, they don't have to follow any particular set of rules. It's up to the judges. The standard of proof is a balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt. Defendants don't have the right to know who their accuser is. Anyone (not just the alleged victim) can file a complaint, get their legal fees paid for, and get a portion of the award if the defendant is found guilty.
See this article. Note that this article is about section 13 of the Human Rights Act, which was repealed in 2013, but which this bill would bring back. The best part of the short article is the sample of cases at the end.
One example:
In 1999, a Christian printer was fined $5,000 for refusing to print a series of pro-pedophilia essays. He spent $40,000 in legal fees trying to defend himself.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
Under British law, the primary issue in such cases is whether a proposed treatment is in the best interests of the child. Judges have repeatedly upheld doctors’ decisions to end life support even when that conflicts with the parents’ wishes.
So, for some reason, it is up to the doctors and judges whether the baby should receive life support, and not the parents, and furthermore, somehow that means they can prevent a child from leaving the country if they're going to get medical treatment they consider to not be in the best interests of the child, which in this case is undergoing painful treatment instead of letting her die? Do I have that right?
Why isn't it up to the parents why can't they take their child out of the country? What's the legal basis for this?
It makes a little more sense in custody disputes where the parents can't decide something so then a judge intervenes and picks a side, but in this case, both parents want the child treated. So why don't they get to make the decision?
The government of Quebec will cut funding for out-of-province students to study at English language universities in Quebec. The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).
Tuition at McGill (one of the top universities in Canada) will increase from $8,992 to $17,000 a year, making it much harder to compete with the likes of the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. Bishop's University expects to lose a third of its students possibly not to survive.
In Canada, every province subsidizes about half the cost of Canadian students attending its universities, regardless of their province of origin. The result is that, while international students pay full price, Canadians can attend university anywhere in the country and pay similar tuition rates. These subsidies are funded in large part with unconditional Social Transfers, that can be spent on other programs, but they are intended to benefit all Canadians equally. Quebec differs from the other provinces in that it funds about three quarters of the cost for Quebec residents and half for French citizens and Canadians from other provinces.
In my view, this is just the latest in the government's attempt to ethnically cleanse Quebec of anglophones. What is not well understood outside Quebec is that it has long had a large anglophone minority which has been shrinking for almost two hundred years (since the Great Migration from the British Isles). Places like the Ottawa valley and the Eastern Townships were originally settled by anglophones. Quebec City, Montreal (which was a majority English speaking city for a good part of the 19th century), and the Gaspé have long had very large anglophone minorities.
This history is attested to by placenames like Hull, Sherbrooke, Granby, and Drummondville, and by street names like Saint James Street and Dorchester Boulevard (renamed to René-Levesque). The three English language universities are located in these originally English speaking areas: two are in Montreal's traditionally anglophone western downtown and one is in Lennoxville, the last remaining predominantly English speaking community in the Eastern Townships.
At the time of the British conquest, French Canadians were concentrated in a narrow strip along the Saint Lawrence River. Other areas were immediately settled by an influx of immigrants from the US and Great Britain, but would later be swamped by the rapidly expanding French Canadians, who would eventually win enough political power to enforce its culture on the anglophones who didn't leave.
Since the 60s, the government has enforced the use of French and suppressed the use of English in almost all areas of public life, but recently, some misleading statistics have been used to stir up fear among francophones that their language is on the decline. It's been noticed that the number of people who speak French at home has very slightly declined in recent years. This is obviously because of the large number of immigrants who are making up a larger and larger share of the population every year. The number speaking English at home has declined even more. It is therefore absurd to suggest that French is in any meaningful sense on the decline, unless you're suggesting that Quebec is going to become a primarily Arabic speaking province. If you know anything about Quebec, you know what is implied by such claims is that English is displacing French. But the very thing producing this statistic of declining use of French at home is actually making the province more French.
In reality, partly because of a law that prevents immigrant children from attending English public schools, 90% of immigrant children grow up to be francophones, which is a larger share than the native population. Even a majority of anglophone children attend French schools and the vast majority of young anglophone Quebeckers are bilingual.
Quebec also has a large degree of independent control over its immigration, allowing it to prioritize immigration from French speaking countries, particulary France, Africa, and Haiti. The anglophone communities are thus largely prevented from replenishing their naturally declining populations with immigrants.
Earlier, this fear was used to justify limiting the number of places in English speaking CEGEPs (two year colleges that are attended between high school and university) and requiring almost all immigrants to speak French, including students, temporary workers, and those sponsored by family members.
The government is justifying these latest policies by saying they are needed to protect the French language (which is not under threat), while complaining that it costs them money to pay for students who leave after graduation (in large part because of their oppressive language laws). But if they leave, they're not much a threat. Canadian citizens are the only people who are allowed (because of a constitutional right) to put their children in English public schools.
They don't want them to stay. A small but stable anglophone minority is not a threat. These policies seem clearly calculated to slowly strangle the anglophone community until it disappears. The real fear is not that French will disappear, but that Quebec will fail to become purely French.
There was an episode from a few years that I think illustrates well the insanity that has taken over public discourse in Quebec and Ottawa. In 2020, Liberal Member of Parliament Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a trilingual millennial representing the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, told the official languages commissioner she would need evidence to believe that French was on the 'decline' (with air quotes). This provoked such outrage in Quebec, where she was lambasted for 'disrespecting' French Canadians and asked by other committee members to leave the committee, that she felt the need to offer her 'deepest apologies' and resignation from the committee the next day. You'd have thought she said something racist given the level of indignation expressed, with anglophone politicians falling over themselves trying to distance themselves from her remarks while Quebec nationalists accused them of secretly agreeing with her.
Glassnoser
8mo ago
He wrote about it.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully
Glassnoser
4mo ago
For most of history, Canadians could just move to the US. There were no immigration restrictions. And even today, it's one of the easier countries to move to the US from. It also used to be easier and more attractive to move to the US than to move to Canada. So most Canadians are descended from people who either chose to move to Canada over the US or chose to stay in Canada and not move to the US, generation after generation, despite the worse weather and the worse economy.
I don't have strong feelings about the result of the election (I'm not even American and I detest Trump) and I have long been a strong opponent of mail-in ballots, going back before Trump got into politics. The whole design of the voting system, from the rules against campaigning near where people are voting to the fact that you fill in the ballot out of others' view and you're prohibited from photographing your ballot, is to ensure that you can't prove to anyone who you voted for so that your vote cannot be bought or coerced. This is all thrown away by mail-in ballots.
This is a widely held position. My parents, who hate Trump and think he's a fascist who is trying to become a dictator and that January 6 was an attempted coup, strongly feel the same way.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
I must be misunderstanding the question because there are obviously a lot. Vaccines, antibiotics, various surgeries, etc. Do you mean natural remedies? Cleaning a wound with alcohol? Bandages? Splints? Are those too artificial?
If you're not asking about treatments, I could say variolation. Shoes? Clothing? Unless you mean natural preventative treatments. Staying in the shade?
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Everyone knows about the crazy long waitlists, which is an obvious and inevitable consequence of capping the price, but what I haven't seen anyone talk about are the dangers of giving your children to an insitution under these conditions. There is a shortage, so the daycare doesn't have to do anything to attract customers, and so they'll have every incentive to cut costs. Is this who you want looking after your children? People who are trying to do the worst job they can legally get away with knowing that there is a long line of children to take your spot if you leave, also knowing that many of the children's parents may not be able to easily afford an alternative?
Someone should do some reading on how such things worked in the Soviet Union or in other Eastern Bloc countries. I'm sure there are horror stories and I'm sure whatever they are will be repeated here.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
The government is also preventing the parents from taking the child out of the country to get treatment. So, no, the government has specifically decided the child needs to die because keeping it alive or trying to treat it is cruel.
The Canadian government is increasing the capital gains tax for the relatively well off. They claim it only affects 0.13% of Canadians, but this is a lie, since capital gains are extremely lumpy, mostly affecting estates. A much larger share of the population will be in that 0.13% at some point in their lives. The tax will affect a lot of middle class people, distort the economy, and, as I'll explain at the end, redistribute wealth to foreigners.
Currently, 50% of capital gains count towards your taxable income and so you'd pay half the marginal rate, which tops out at between 44.5% and 54.8% depending on which province or territory you live in. The new rule would raise the portion of capital gains that is taxable from half to two thirds for capital gains over $250,000. Primary residences are exempt and it doesn't affect tax protected savings accounts like RRSP and the relatively new TFSA. Most people don't save enough to have savings outside of these accounts and their primary residences, but you certainly don't need to be rich to do so. You could be someone who chose never to own his primary residence and increased savings in the stock market instead. You could own a cottage, to which the capital gains tax applies when you either give it to your children or when you die. Lots of middle class people will be affected.
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again. Someone who is equally wealthy but doesn't save his income for as long would pay less tax. So it taxes savers more than spenders and discourages investment. There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This brings me to my last point. The Liberals are far behind the Conservatives in the polls and an election is at most a year and a half away. The main issues tanking their popularity are housing and immigration, particularly for young people, who see a connection between those two issues. Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades). However, this new tax rule is being promoted in the name of generational fairness.
This makes no sense. The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do). Now, the government is doing the one thing that messes this up: they're redistributing much of those gains to the younger generations who include, in very large and increasing numbers, immigrants and their children. What is the point of inflating asset prices with immigration if you're just going to redistirbute the gains to those immigrants? If your goal is to be maximally charitable to immigrants, fine, but this is not in the best interests of Canadians.
The tax increase does exempt primary residences, but not other assets like secondary residences, and the reason for this tax increase is to fund the enormous increase in spending on things like subsidies for new home buyers and affordable housing. The deficit has ballooned to $40 billion dollars under Trudeau and I think the government is actually starting to get desperate and trying to think of ways to raise revenue without spending political capital. Corporations and trusts will also pay this higher capital gains tax. This will reduce business investment. The tax seems calculated to actually raise a fair bit of money while minimizing the number of people who think they'll have to pay it.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
One of the first immigration restrictions in the US had the goal of reducing the number of Chinese prostitutes.
The weird thing is, the kind of stuff that people typically get cancelled for is usually not that different from things I occasionally hear boomers and older people say in person, but which would get you banned from almost any online platform. The standards for what's acceptable in person seem to be much more relaxed than what is acceptable online, at least when it comes to certain topics. I suppose the opposite is true when it comes to swearing and talking about sex. But certain opinions which are actually quite common (especially those related to transgenderism) have been utterly tabooed by young people online.
This is why I find some of these cancellations so confusing. People aren't just getting cancelled for saying edgy stuff when they were anonymous teenagers. They're getting cancelled for stuff that is well within the Overton window if you step outside the terminally online bubble.
For example, try asking anyone over 40 whether transwomen are women. Few would say they are. But you say this on almost any social media, and they'll react as though you're some kind of extremist. Or ask someone over 60 what they think of gay marriage.
I hate it with a burning passion. (This is, unironically, what a website should look like: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) I guess they want things to look nice and clean, but for practical reasons, I want as much information to fit on the screen at one time as possible. I can understand limiting clutter, but they have gone way too far. I don't like clicking through menus, especially if I don't know where to find what I'm looking for, and I really really don't like scrolling.
For the same reason, I abhor the trend of making things too big. I really don't like that if I open YouTube on my 27" monitor, I can only see 8 videos at a time (or just 1 or 2 on my Pixel 6 XL). My bank used to have a nice website that they ruined by replacing with the design from their app. I have five accounts and only two fit on the screen because they're using 24 point font with huge chunks of white space between them. They can't fit 5 numbers on a 312 square inch screen! I'm seriously considering switching banks over it and I only hesitate because the others will probably do the same.
I have to resist going on a rant about this, so I'll just conclude by saying I also dislike the trend of replacing text with symbols that I have to decode, and by saying that if God is just, there is a special place in hell for whoever is responsible for pushing this.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
As far as I am aware, there is still no evidence they beheaded any babies.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Advocating for terrorism has been a criminal offence in Canada since 2015, but I doubt we'll see any prosecutions even though the current government supported that legislation.
The European Union has passed the Artificial Intelligence Act
The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.
...
Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.
...
Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.
This is an extremely restrictive law that will really hold the EU back economically if AI becomes an important technology. It imposes huge burdens on all uses, for both the users and developers, and outright bans many very useful applications.
The law tries to mandate transparency, while at the same time discouraging it by restricting or banning certain uses. An AI specifically made for social scoring, for example, would be illegal, while a general purpose AI would almost certainly do something like social scoring internally as part of a more general ability. For example, if you have an AI run a company in its head, so to speak, how would anyone know what it is doing? How would you know how it is selecting job applicants? It would be a black box and current attempts to figure out how large language models actually work would be the only way to find out what they're doing. But continuing that line of research would expose the developers and users of these systems to liability.
The fines are also enormous.
Fines for non-compliance can be up to 35 million Euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.
This would be devastating for a small or low margin business. Many are just not going to do use this extremely valuable technology. Lots of online services are just not going to be available in the EU. In fact, this is already the case with Gemini and Claude, probably because of privacy laws.
I've long argued that the AI safety movement is unlikely to do anything for existential risk and will, if anything, increase it, while assuredly greatly limiting the benefits, and this is strong evidence that I'm right. The regulatory state does not have the capacity to deal with existential risk from AI, whereas it has a long history of stifling technological development.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Just to nitpick a bit, technically, there is no coalition government. Canada has never had a coalition government. The NDP is not part of a coalition with the Liberals, as no one from their caucus is in the cabinet. So they are not part of the government.
They do vote in favour of votes of confidence to keep the Liberals in power in exchange for the Liberals helping to enact legislation that they want, but that's not the same as being part of a coalition government.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits. It seems like a corporate structure that invites corruption. A for-profit company has an objective goal and shareholders it is accountable to. A non-profit with a self-perpetuating board does not.
The board members have a lot of power and are accountable only to each other. The incentive is for them to subvert the stated goals of the organization for their own benefit.
Benefiting monetarily may be difficult, but converting their power into less tangible benefits is not, especially when the goal of the non-profit is vaguely defined.
None of the board members' positions is secure. They can be voted out at any time by the other board members. Anyone brought in to support a faction can betray the other members of the faction. New factions can emerge. This all discourages long term goals. The incentive is to get in, use internal politics to gain power, and then exploit that power for personal or ideological benefit while it lasts.
As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away.
How is that fraud? Fraud is when you trick someone into giving you something. Disregarding government regulation is not fraud.
Anyway, the comparison is odd. Sam Bankman-Fried, as I understand, lied to his customers about risking their deposits. He effectively stole and then lost billions of dollars. Uber broke laws - artificially constraining the supply of taxis - which probably most informed intelligent people think are unjust.
I don't think there's anything at all wrong with what she did. If they really needed the bike, they could have paid for it, including paying her to give up the bike she rightfully rented. They were deliberately circumventing the intention of the free period limit - why is there any free period at all by the way? - so I don't see why they should feel entitled to the bikes. They're trying to do something the system is clearly designed to not allow them to do.
I don't think we need to play sympathy games to figure out who deserves the bike more based on pregnancy status, sex, age, race, tiredness, or who got there first. We have a system for allocating the bikes and she followed that system to get the bike over someone who was trying to exploit the system to get something for free. We also have an even older and better established system for getting something that legally belongs to someone else. It's called trade. You can pay for something with money.
I agree that the narrative that they ganged up on her to take a bike that was already in her possession is false, but she is still completely in the right.
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