pigeonburger
1d ago
That's for a spouse, the situation I'm familiar with. I checked again, and for parents and grandparents, the sponsor vouches for 20 years (except in Quebec where it's 10 years).
If I had to make up a number I'd go for at least as long as it would take for them to qualify for citizenship.
The number would be 3 years then. The requirement to qualify is being a permanent resident and having lived in Canada for 3 years in the last 5 years.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I don't think the trust problem is a response to the selfishness problem, because just saying "people are being selfish" has no explanatory power. Are people more selfish because of genetics? Have all the selfless people selected out of the gene pool?
On the other hand, if you present selfishness as a rational response to a society that they don't trust will repay pro-social behavior, you get a lot further with explanations that match observations. Trust is downstream of shared identity, experience and culture (see: Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone). If I think of my fellow citizens as being somewhat similar to me, I can easily imagine them coming to the same pro-social conclusions as me. Shared identity, experience and culture are impacted negatively by multiculturalism and by emphasing diversity. Hence why high trust societies are typically homogenous societies.
pigeonburger
1d ago
The system being implemented is a spoils system, and the question to answer is whether it is a result of or a cause of a drop in civic virtue.
This is about Canada, not the US.
Disclaimer: I've used family reunification sponsorship to help my wife move to live with me here. But she's not elderly, she's from a western country and she will contribute to society.
But anyway. I don't think it needs to be steelmanned: it's pretty obviously a nice thing to allow people to move in to live with their family. I think it's up to the other side to demonstrate that we cannot afford it.
I'm not saying that they cannot make that case. Chain migration exists. But I would be more in favor of slowing chain migration at the source, taking it as a granted that an economic migrant is likely a beachhead for a larger group, and thus being (A LOT) more selective in allowing them in. This, rather than disallowing family reunification, which has a clearer case of being a pro-social, pro-human justification for immigration.
*EDIT: Though I guess I'm open to some changes to family reunification. I'd be open to increase the delay between immigration and being able to sponsor. I think now it's 5 years from the moment you become a permanent resident. Maybe 10 years after becoming citizen? Long enough that anyone planning on chain migration will probably look somewhere else, unless they have extreme patience. I don't know how the pathways for immigration are for an extended family group, maybe these need to be developped/improved so a prospective immigrant and all the family he wants to bring to Canada can all attempt to immigrate together, so they can't then complain that it's inhumane and evil that we won't allow all the cousins to move in with them after we accepted one of them.
pigeonburger
1d ago
I would guess there's a lot more sponsored immigrants that are/will be economically productive (spouses and children) than there are elderly sponsored immigrants, making it not worth writing an exception around, especially when there's a pretty compelling compassionate reason to allow the relatively few cases.
pigeonburger
1d ago
Family reunification in Canada requires that the sponsor vouches that they can financially support the sponsored immigrant and that they will not need to ask for social assistance for 3 years. They check that the sponsor is in good enough financial health to support them. If they do ask for social assistance, the government can ask the sponsor to reimburse it.
I mean, it's not perfect, but it's not like no one though of this problem.
pigeonburger
9d ago
It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.
pigeonburger
9d ago
We always had computers as far back as my very first memories. We had a NES in the very early 90s. Then I was mostly a PC gamer, until my brother got a Dreamcast. Finally I got me a Gamecube as a late teen. After that I was an adult so it doesn't really count.
But I've played emulators when that became possible, played console games at friends places, etc...
pigeonburger
10d ago
Desperately try to get back in a sexy mood by thinking of literally anything but Ted Cruz.
Let's say you were in charge of fixing this from the advertising side of things.
I guess manufacturers are in a tough position there because the lower level of knowledge means that quite uncomfortable things have to be put on the packaging. They can get away with putting the warnings in the 100 page manual for the toaster; it would put off buyers if the toaster they were looking at proeminently displayed "This toasted WILL kill you if you plug it in and take it for a bath!". Similarly, a baby monitor whose box said something like "Unless properly secured, this monitor can allow strangers to connect and listen in or talk to your child" will find itself selling less than the one that omits it.
I suppose the best move is to spin it as a feature. Put it proudly on the box! "Crowdsource your child's safety with the default password mode!"
I guess I had an happy childhood and my schooling was fine. I went to a local primary school, close enough to home that I could walk to school every day (including walking back home for lunch). My mother was working part time while I was in primary school, so she could be home on most days for my lunch and when I came back from school. In 6th grade I had the option to take a special program of intensive english, but opted not to because I figured my english was already way above average for my age (I was close to bilingual then, thanks to exposure to english language media). For secondary school I followed in the footstep of my brother and went to an elite International Bachelorate affiliated magnet school. I did fairly well in my first year there, but after my grades went steadily down as I figured out I was able to just coast by with no effort. I stopped doing homework past what I was absolutely forced to, stopped studying for exams, barely paid attention in class. I'd read my textbooks and that's pretty much it. By the end I was barely passing. Teachers didn't seem to mind because I was passing, when they checked up on me it seemed as if I didn't need help and I wasn't bothering anyone. My parents were concerned by my grades, but again, I wasn't a problem child or teen in any way. I'd say my teachers were for the most part very competent. I always managed to find peer groups to hang out with; in the first year of high school with people coming from different cities and with fixed groups through every class, I ended up hanging out with a quite random group of people, but as things settled, I found myself hanging out with groups that were neither losers nor winners in the social hierarchy. It's important to note that due to this being a "gifted" kid school, the social hierarchy was a bit different; everyone was a form of nerd to begin with, even the "jocks".
Anyway, as that ended and I went to college, I quickly found that I was overprepared by that school for college, exams and classes that people from "normal" schools found tough in college were at a level I had already done in high school. This had a perverse effect in that it lowered the effort I was willing to put in even more, to the point where I wasn't showing up to classes any more, I was even missing exams and ended up just dropped out of college. Turned out that was a good decision, I managed to build myself a career out of the IT skills I had build in my free time, when I was supposed to be studying.
pigeonburger
10d ago
In the negligent users defense, users checking for features like "password protection and encryption" is more the source of the issue than the solution. Network security is a process, not a feature. I feel safer putting up a camera with no encryption and password protection that serve a standard video feed on the network than one that requires a cloud service with SSL, password, 2FA, etc... to function. The former would be forbidden to talk to anything outside of my internal network, and there would also be restriction to what it can talk inside the network. Security features are a very distant concern after proper access control. But cloud services I just have to trust. If you take the most secure device and give the whole planet a surface to attack it, it's a matter of when, not of if, it can be cracked. To its credit, the document does address some of this, but what happens when the company decides to discontinue the product line and deprioritize security updates on the cloud services for their baby monitor? The document does say they have to precommit to a support period, but there's support and Support.
I understand the worry some people have towards IoT devices, and I like a lot of the rules in that document, but ultimately the issue rests with the users. The issue is the idea that network devices, outside of standard end user devices like a computers and phones (and even then), can be secure by default, without thought. At this point, people need to be responsabilized with regards to their network security, and you can't mandate away all the ways that someone can shoot themselves in the foot with consumer devices.
Users need to learn to keep shit behind their firewall, in their home network, and access it via VPN if they need to access it remotely. They should learn to NOT ask for cloud services where they are not strictly necessary.
Sure, I'm a professional and it may sound like wishful thinking that users will learn to do this or hire professionals. But there's a lot of stuff inside a home I wouldn't do, like plumbing and electricity. We don't mandate that plumbing fixtures be impossible to fuck up. And while we have standardized power outlets, everything other than plugging in something, to do with electricity inside a home expects some degree of expertise.
pigeonburger
13d ago
It makes my brain hurt
pigeonburger
15d ago
Sure, but they're called "latinos", not "iberinos" :p
pigeonburger
15d ago
I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.
If you found yourself in the same, say, square kilometer as a bear, it is extremely unlikely to attack you. But you are also unlikely to see the bear; it will very much want to avoid you as much as he/she can. If the terrain is open maybe you'll see it at a distance, it's not likely to care unless you get close. But if you do find yourself face-to-face with the bear, the probabilities of attack are very different to the baseline. You might have wandered in proximity to its cubs. The bear might be habituated to human presence, associating them with food. The bear might be starving. These are all bad things.
A human is not gonna outrun a bear. Especially not in uneven terrain and in the forest. You can't climb a tree to evade it. And it has excellent sense of smell so you're unlikely to be able to hide from it.
pigeonburger
15d ago
On a sidenode which highlights the fuzziness of such groupings, I regularly joke, my wife's annoyance, that quebecers are latinos. If latinos "speak spanish in the americas", then you're omitting brazilians. If they "speak a latin language in central and south america" you're excluding mexicans. If it's "speaks a latin language in the americas" you include them both, but also quebecers.
Ultimately to get "latino" to mean exactly who everyone understands it to mean, you end up with a very artificial grouping.
pigeonburger
20d ago
I don't think Metal Gear Solid would have been nearly as iconic if it didn't successfully replicate the look, sound and feel of an action movie. Sure, by today's standards it's not "hyper realism", but by the standards of the day it was.
pigeonburger
20d ago
I'm not sure it's so much complexity I'm avoiding now but games that don't respect my time.
I used to love JRPGs, it was my favorite genre. I can't really do it anymore. They seem like so much pointless busy work. Closest thing to one I've been able to play a bit of (and even then) is Triangle Strategy, and that's a tactical JRPG. I guess tactical RPGs I can still stomach a bit because fights feel like distinct chapters that I can do one and feel done with for the night while feeling I've actually moved forward.
On the opposite side, three genres I never imagined I would ever enjoy, have become my favorites: hard simulators (the harder and drier the game, the better), shmups and fighting games. All of which are so much more challenging and complex than JRPGs, which are usually only difficult if you're impatient and don't level up properly, but all of which feel so much more significant than raising arbitrary numbers because I need them to move forward.
pigeonburger
24d ago
In a sense, but homelessness has two crucial distinctions, it can be a temporary state for people who are very much "polite society material" but have hit a rough patch, and it also interacts a bit too much with said polite society, being a nuisance to its members and that chafing is encouraging them to be tougher on it. It's harder to feel compassionate towards the homeless if you have to endure their litteral excrement everywhere in your city.
pigeonburger
25d ago
It's often negative in the short term, but there are a lot of small causes that the news just doesn't care about and wouldn't mention if it weren't that some people made themselves a nuisance. It's a long term play, to not let your cause be forgotten or ignored. It's better to make people angry about you than let them ignore you.
For those specific examples, climate protestors have full elite backing now, the strategy is different. It's intimidation, they're used by the elites to show what they are willing to destroy if people don't bow down.
pigeonburger
25d ago
There's all sorts of goals one could have. Often the goal is to make enough of a nuisance of yourselves so that you force the news to mention your cause, maybe sparking some conversations in the public. Sometimes, as you say, it's specifically to taunt the police so you can get some pictures of them hitting you in an attempt to take the moral high ground reserved for those oppressed by authority. Some protests are pure practice, every year here there a day of protest "against police brutality" and it's just a rallying cry for all the people who want to practice rioting (and for the police to practice their riot suppression) for when they'll have an actual cause they want to strategically riot for. If your protest is elite-supported, it can be to intimidate or to launder unpopular opinions for the elite by making them seem a lot more popular than they are.
I would love to be proven wrong and for the officials and the police officers who went along with this to be thrown in jail, but at worst the police officers might be sacrificed. And while they shouldn't have executed unlawful orders, I have a harder time blaming them as it seems likely their fault is mere carelessness and not checking that the order was legitimate (after all, the government probably almost never sends bogus warrants to them), while the Agricultural Department would have to be power tripping for things to have happened as they are alleged to have.
pigeonburger
28d ago
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).
No, how long before you get permanent residency is dependent on what pathway you're using. My wife visited as a tourist before we started the permanent residency process, but she never actually lived here officially until she got it. Technically you don't even need to have been in Canada. You're eligible for citizenship 3 years after having started living in Canada, and once you are a permanent resident. So you could even count, for instance, years spent as a temporary resident with a student or work visa before you got permanent residency.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/become-canadian-citizen.html
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