pigeonburger
9mo ago
I used to like his street journalist content a long time ago, but he turned into the single worst thing you find on Youtube outside of Elsa/Spiderman content: "read alongs" w/ commentary on news articles. Louis Rossman also turned to the same, to my chagrin. I imagine it's a steady source of easy and cheap content that can be churned out daily, but my god does it feel dumb and insulting to me. It reminds me of school and reading along a text with the teacher.
I cant imagine a single scenario or natrative where any sitting US president can be compromised by a foreign Govt. Trump or otherwise.
Picture this. You are president. Your son is a bit of a fuckup with expensive and transgressive tastes. You still love your son. Foreign agents end up with damaging information about your son, and are threatening to release the information, which could put your son at risk of serious jail time. On the upside, they offer bribes in exchange for favors to you and your son (which seem like a generous offer at first, but will then give them direct leverage on you). You could: a) turn your back on your son, let him face the music, etc... unacceptable, he might be a fuck up, you might be cynical career politician, but you still love your son. b) abuse your position officially to shield your son... it would cause immense harm to your legacy, your cause, your party, the reputation of your country for following its laws. Half the country already by default hates you, the other WILL hate you if you do this, and you will hand over the next election to your rival. It remains an option at the last minute when you are on your way out and have little to lose, but... hardly ideal, and not an immediate solution. c) give in to their demands. Maybe negociate them to something smaller, something you could have plausibly done outside of their influence.
Now I'm not saying this happened, at least, probably not exactly like this. I think in reality there was an option d) let the media circle the wagons with the party and try as hard as they can not to make this a crisis, but I think it shows a scenario where someone could plausibly compromise a sitting US president. Especially if he was compromised before he had that option (say he was not the president and not preferred presidential candidate at the time so couldn't assume the media would try to smother the story).
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Could also be a better understanding of how the problems with this population compounds when they're allowed to congregate. Keep them spread over the city, even if it means there's some in the fancy neighborhoods, and they'll mostly keep quiet. The few that don't are easily handled by the police. But if you let them assemble they start getting agitated, they steal from one another, they argue loudly, the desperation grows, they take more drugs, and the police will hesitate more to wade into a group of potentially hostile addicts to intervene. Keeping the homeless and addicts tucked away in an encampment in a park or forest might seem like it's hiding the problem, but it spills out in a much worse form.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
You just work through examples of how difficult finding the exchange value of labor and objects is, and what the consequences of getting it wrong are (too low: shortages due to high demand and not enough incentive to produce more, too high: fewer people can afford and waste from overproduction).
The main problem of communism is that it assumes finding that value is trivial or unimportant and can just be done by someone guessing. As inefficient capitalism can seem, it allowing prices to adjust according to supply and demand automatically resolves that issue, and simply by that, it outperforms everything else significantly. And so you explain to that person that any time there is a proposition to try and "fix" prices in capitalism, they need to ask themselves: 1. Am I going to fuck with prices that are actually accurately set by an unimpeded, normal market? (if yes, don't do it) 2. If the prices were not being set by a unimpeded market, is my solution bringing it closer to that market, or am I just trying to adjust prices it by vibes? (if just vibes, don't do it!)
pigeonburger
9mo ago
I think it's a defensive move; Trump is good at debates (well, not at debating, but at turning the debate to his advantage) so they want to force a 'draw' by making it as chaotic and unproductive as possible.
Not a great strategy, Kamala trying to match Trump will probably come off as 'bitchy', not the 'sassy' they're hoping for.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
This is beside the points system, it's linked to a temporary worker program and the foreign student program. They have existed for a while, the former being mostly made for seasonal agricultural workers, but it was expended to fix a "labor shortage" during Covid. The temporary workers, if they get a permanent job offer, can then get on a pathway to permanent residence. Foreign students get a pathway too, but many of them are enrolled to diploma mills that don't really expect them to study, and they just come here and start working immediately.
I'm not sure how gradual it was, a lot of people mention they noticed it coming back to their regular stores and restaurants after Covid. Anecdotically, my wife and I got married and she immigrated here (from Spain) during Covid, and the process had little guardrails, just (a lot of) paperwork. We never had to have any interview or anything.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Some conflate that with 'conservative' thinking
It is the essence of conservatism on a philosophical, meta level, it's just that not all conservatisms align on the object level, considering they have different things they want to conserve. Conservatism can be left wing. In late Cold War Soviet Union, even though the labels were probably different, the conservative old guard was against capitalism. (I tried really, really hard to turn this into a "In Soviet Russia..." joke as it was literally about Soviet Russia and the expectations being reversed, sorry I failed).
It's what conservatives the world keep trying to tell the excited youth: "This might seem like a good idea now, it might feel like it's going well, but one of the most enduring lessons of history is that by the time you find out all the downstream effects of a change it can be too late to stop or reverse it, so take change slowly"
By my count of the current ones on the top page:
Directly related to immigration: 13
Indirectly or debatably related to immigration: 4
Unrelated to immigration: 8
I think it's fair to say the topic dominates the public discourse
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Poilievre asks Singh to pull support for Liberal government to prompt fall election - Indirectly about immigration
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More Ontario college students are protesting over their failing grades - Wasn't sure, checked the link. "While the plea for support was allegedly directed mostly at the local Punjabi community, hundreds of residents have jumped in to comment on the matter, many of them pointing fingers at "diploma mill" colleges and various levels of government for the state of the nation's international student program." Directly about immigration
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Canada’s Conservatives are crushing Justin Trudeau - Pierre Poilievre is even winning over the young and the unionised - Indirectly about immigration
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Canadian Immigration Policy Isn’t Helping Anyone: BMO - Directly about immigration
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Poilievre says he would set immigration targets based on housing, jobs and health-care trends - Directly...
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Canadians split on taking in more Gazan refugees, concerned about screening: Poll - Directly...
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NDP support takes a dive in new national poll, as Conservatives maintain sizeable lead - Indirectly
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Judge blocks failed refugee claimant’s deportation from Canada, scolds minister for misleading evidence - Directly
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Premier Danielle Smith reveals plans to transfer some Alberta hospitals away from AHS | Globalnews.ca - Unrelated
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Union alleges abuse of foreign workers, calls for program to be suspended - Directly
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Toronto workers have longest commutes in Canada: StatsCan - Debatably indirectly (related to housing affordability)
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Canada ends policy of allowing visitors to apply for work permits from within the country - Directly
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Justin Trudeau’s legacy will be destroying the Canadian consensus on immigration - Directly
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Canada Pension Plan investment board to spend estimated $300 million-plus on its lavish new office at CIBC Square - Unrelated
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Trudeau's zombie TFW policy is sucking the life out of Canada's youth - Directly
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Rules discourage Canadians from generating more solar power than they use - Unrelated
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Spike in ‘open permits’ shows more temporary foreign workers are facing abuse, experts say - Directly
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Ottawa needs to abolish the temporary foreign worker program - Directly
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Kate O'Brien wins Canada's first medal of Paris Paralympics with track cycling bronze - Unrelated
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Canada: Over $2.4 Billion in Legal Marijuana Sold in First Half of 2024 - Unrelated
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Canada Post at ‘critical juncture’ due to unsustainable finances: board chair - Unrelated
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Toronto terror suspect came to Canada in 2018 and became a citizen last spring - Directly
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‘People will die’: Doctors call on Alberta government to save heath care system with urgent action | rdnewsnow.com - Unrelated
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As tax breaks drive art donations, Canada’s public galleries overflow with more works than they could ever show - Unrelated
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GUNTER: China a threat to our democracy and Trudeau is ignoring it - Was unsure, checked, it's in large part about China exerting pressure on the Chinese diaspora in Canada, so directly related to immigration.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Here I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with it; it's never rough looking people staffing fast food restaurants. Proper looking immigrant women, student-age immigrants, or the odd elderly people. None of these I can imagine taking drugs.
For the women, I would suggest the theory that many of them (particularly those of traditional societies) weren't brought up with the expectation of doing serious work outside the home, but having moved here with their husbands, taking into account cost of life here, they find themselves forced to work and are unprepared for it, which could explain why they make for inefficient employees. It's just the intangible, hard to notice things that we learn from school and other preparation for work that make the difference.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
And many of those that aren't directly about immigration will be indirectly about immigration: talks of polls, elections, of the NDP (the left wing party) keeping the LPC in power, posts about housing (in)affordability are all indirectly about immigration.
I think something broke in Canadians mind recently and seeing so, so, so many brown faces around them they've stopped feeling guilty. Not hateful, mind you, but not guilty enough to just roll over and give sanction to unrestricted immigration. And especially since it's now within the Overton window to notice that there is a price to pay for immigration. I'm not sure how it happened, but I remember going to Toronto for work about 6-7 years ago and I noticed once that at a busy intersection in the downtown, financial center, I was literally the only white person I could see around me. It was an eerie feeling, maybe not as strong for me as for locals since being Québecois Toronto has never felt to me like "my people's clay". From what I hear, it got much worse since. I imagine a lot of Canadians, especially those in cities, have now had such experiences, of looking around and suddenly feeling like they've become the minority. Maybe that's what did it.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Now as to the commentary... I mostly ignore provincial and national politics as the obliviousness of Québecois and Canadians to their problems was a source of major despair for me. it's quite surprising to me to peek my head out, check what the discourse is now, and see just how much things have changed. The MAIN (!) /r/Canada subreddit is filled, filled with nothing but messages about how the immigration is just too much and how the Liberals have ruined and destroyed the country. That maybe it's not even recoverable from before decades. Particularly shocking to people is how the TFW (and International Students) are used to staff fast food service positions, while youth unemployment is spiking. Most proeminently Tim Hortons, which seems to be all over the country staffed with almost nothing but Indians now. Most surprising to me is how it's now firmly within the Overton window to not just cite economic concerns with the influx of immigrants, but sociocultural ones too. Which is of course the polite way to say people believe we're letting in a lot of immigrants who are not a good fit for our way of life. The people saying such have found a neat little trick to avoid sharing the blame for supporting the LPC all these years; see, it's all big business' fault for corrupting the LPC to bring in all these people to use as quasi slaves to depress wages. They were told they were going to have Change with the Liberals. Of course, the Liberals did precisely what they were promising to do. And none of it is to blame on the narrative-following majority who for all those years treated unchecked immigration as an unalloyed good, something to be celebrated on its own merit and obviously the right thing to do regardless of if it even made sense economically (which they believed it did, despite the fact that only the barest simplest economics education is required to forecast the effect on wages and housing affordability).
On related anecdote, I went to get breakfast and coffee yesterday at the nearest Tim Hortons, and as my order was taking a long time I could observe the staff. As usual, almost the entire staff was south asian, predominantly women, with one middle eastern/northern african looking man acting as a shift manager and one single white teenager/young man. There must have been around 10 people running around behind that counter. The orders for the drive-thru service were coming out but people in the restaurants were piling in and only a trickle would get to give their order and no one was recieving their food. Now the workers all seemed to be working and to be very busy but still nothing was coming out for the clients inside the restaurant. The manager and the teenager appeared to be the only ones with agency in the situation, noticing the customers were starting to get impatient running from worker to worker, telling them what they should be doing so that they could actually complete orders. We're told that service in fast food restaurants is bad now because since COVID they got used to running with skeleton crews, people are underpaid and because the conditions are so bad working in food service now that it's unfair to expect people to work hard in them. But the area behind the counter in that Tim Hortons seemed very well staffed to me. And presumably, if the people there are immigrant workers then the working conditions there would have been appealing enough to move from across the world for. As I waited 20 minutes for a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, I really struggled to see how anyone except employers could have been fooled this was in Canadians interest.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Canada
In a surprising turn, the ruling Liberal Party of Canada has announced changes to the Temporary Foreign Workers program that would limit the number of admissions; regions with an unemployment rate of 6% or more will not see any application processed for low-wage positions, companies will not be allowed to have more than 10% of their workforce be staffed through the program, and the validity of the program is reduced from 2 years to 1 year. The Liberal Party of Canada has also expressed, though without any commitment yet, that they might revise down their 500 000 immigrants a year target. This is on the backdrop of abysmal (and persistent) poll results for the LPC forecasting a severe loss in the election expected in 2025.
Critics have already pointed out many flaws in the changes, such as how it does not affect the foreign student pipeline, which is a large part of the migration influx. How the 6% unemployment rate restriction applies to the initial request but workers could be moved between regions after being approved.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
I think the argument is that it allows extra flexibility in reporting, making it possible to include them as white or not depending on what's convenient for the narrative being pushed at the time.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Because it would appeal massively to moderates, and reduce Republican turnout in subsequent elections, by giving the message that no, the Democrats are not trying to criminalize dissent, if you don't hold to the party this time there is still going to be an election and a GOP in 4 years.
Right now, they're sending the opposite message, which probably will lead to a lot of Republicans who could have been convinced not to vote for Trump voting for him because the alternative is, from their perspective, the system being blatantly weaponized against their very existence for another 4 years.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Maybe I would get to that point if I kept driving longer, but what I'm describing seems like the opposite of that. I am not in any way sleepy or tired while driving, but after I feel a sort of crash, as if my brain had to tap into some emergency reserves to keep itself in that state of focus for an hour.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
I've been taking driving lessons recently in my late 30s (never bothered to before as I lived in the city) and I'm surprised by how it drains me. It's not anxiety, I'm not nervous about driving. There's nothing different about me before I go to a class. But I feel extremely tired after a 1 hour driving class, almost as if I'm sick, my brain get foggy. My current theory is that driving being an unfamiliar and potentially deadly activity my brain goes in an hyperfocused state that is extremely tiring to maintain for an hour. If that's the case I imagine it will get better as my degree of familiarity improves?
Did anyone else here have that experience of extreme tiredness for an only moderately long driving session? Did it improve? Were you a teen or an adult when you learned? I'm wondering if maybe teen brains get used to it faster.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
I would suspect Musk of having built in a dead man switch of some sort into some of his products. It's the kind of Bond villain thing I can easily imagine him nerding out about, and I'm sure he understand that riding the edge of "being too useful for the regime" and "being a thorn in their side" requires some sort of insurance policy as some in the regime might think that they can keep the upside if they get rid of him.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Canada has its political center in Ottawa, financial center in Toronto and cultural center debatably in Montreal, but these are all in the same broad region of the country.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
The bailey is "killing a unborn child if its birth is too inconvenient for the mother" the motte is "it's a medical and complex decision to end a pregnancy".
This bailey IS defensible, there are definitely arguments that can convince me there, such as the lack of universally agreed upon distinction between a fetus and a baby and the start of life, edge medical and criminal cases, etc...
But I can certainly imagine there'd be a whole lot more deserters if that side was forced to always fight in the bailey.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
when I see that a character is changed from being White in the source material to Black in the adaptation, this is a deliberate choice made by the production company
I can imagine a world where this is not always the case. If skin color is not relevant to the story, and the change does not stand out as extremely unlikely (for instance, black characters in historical fiction happening in medieval europe), a production company could have a casting call that's open to multiple/all races.
But in the current cultural climate, I would have a hard time believing that's how any instance of "race-swapping" happened.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
Intent is the difference IMO, did you write your review because you wanted to share your opinion, or because you wanted to spark action against the thing. You can usually tell from the outside which it is because the person sharing their opinion will usually genuinely state it as such, whereas the person trying to drum up a cancel mob will not. Also, the person trying to cancel will either directly call to action, or do it indirectly: they will hint at the pressure point the mob should target ("We've contacted the chair of the psych department at the university to ask them if they endorse this grad student's side papers and they declined to comment").
I agree pretty much across the board with you except with C1-C2. Intent matters, and since we can't read minds all we have to judge on is the actions taken.
B1-B2 is not cancel culture because the university has plausible denial that their motivation is protecting their reputation from a smear campaign rather than shutting the speech of the grad student. That said, it's a cowardly decision, and it being taken over and over again rather than defending their employees's right to their opinions is what gives cancel culture its power, so it should still be opposed by anti-cancel culture.
B3-B5 again intent matters but we can only tell by the actions taken. Journalists are pretty transparent thankfully. It's really obvious when a journalist's writing is oriented towards encouraging people to take action to get someone fired or really genuinely informing them.
For C1, I don't think Scott's friends engaged in cancel culture because of the target of the letter. Going only by the detail in this article (I didn't read the whole drama when it happened): "Some of my friends made an open letter/petition asking them not to do this". I haven't read the whole letter, but unless it ended with an appeal to other readers to unsubscribe from the NYT if they didn't comply with their demands (it might have, though I would assume that's a relevant detail Scott would have included in this post), then they deserve the benefit of the doubt that their actions were to persuade the NYT and not threaten them.
For C2, I don't think Scott telling us about it is cancel culture. Though reading it has lowered my already low opinion of The Atlantic, I think that wasn't Scott's goal. I think he mostly wanted to show that when someone's widely stated opinion feels like a personal attack against you it's difficult to have detachment and to not go on crusade against them.
*EDIT:
Another aspect I think is important to highlight is intent to what. I would define it as intent to cause damage to someone's associations (personal or professional) for speech unrelated to those associations. For instance, a hardware store employee's political opinions are unrelated to their job, so trying to get them fired for their opinion is cancel culture. A politician's political opinions are related to their job so campaigning against them is not cancel culture. There are more complex and murky cases.
a) Trying to get fired a programmer at a games studio having expressed an opinion on a forum a year ago that they believe there should never be gay people (or straight white men) in games is cancel culture because it's not something that's related to their job.
b) Trying to get fired a WRITER/DESIGNER at a games studio having expressed an opinion on a forum a year ago that they believe there should never be gay people (or straight white men) in games is... a tough call, dependant on how much they let their personal opinion drive their professional conduct. In general I believe people should be given the benefit of the doubt, but I wouldn't begrudge people keeping an eye on someone like that.
c) Trying to get people to boycott games from a studio because they wrote a blog post on their website saying that they believe there should never be gay people (or straight white men) in games is not cancel culture.
By that aspect, Scott's friends writing to the NYT and Scott writing about The Atlantic is not cancel culture because the articles that sparked a reaction IS their job. If they had written those articles on their personal blogs, it would have been a tough call, dependant on how much they let their personal opinion drive their professional conduct. For a straight up journalist writing factual stories (if that still exists), then I would give them the benefit of the doubt, but for an opinion columnist, then the lack of distinction between their opinion and their job is pretty much the point of their job, so...
pigeonburger
10mo ago
And there are manufacturers that do sell phones in that price range and above, like Vertu. There are customers for whom for wealth signaling purposes the device can actually be objectively worse they would still pay more. Some of the most expensive Vertu phones are dumb phones; a less useful device than the phone your average african has in his pockets.
It's a bit like watches, a cheap quartz watch just plain makes for a more useful watch than an automatic. But for phones, I don't know, it's even more outrageous to me since unlike watches, a phone has a limited useful life, even if you could replace parts like batteries that wear off. Phones stop being able to give even the most basic services as providers sunset legacy protocols or require newer ones like VoLTE.
pigeonburger
10mo ago
Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.
I'm curious about Biden himself. He's rightfully pissed and right now nominally the most powerful man on earth. I assume he sometimes have moments of lucidity where he could act on his resentment.
I'm really hoping for him lobbing some grenades while on his way out at the people who discarded him that callously.
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