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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • True.

    I think the reason the federal Liberals even ran with Trudeau–instead of another technocrat like Ignatieff–is that the NDP under Layton scared them shitless. They were, for the first time in their history, looking down the tubes at irrelevancy. If the NDP got traction, they (the Liberals) would stop being the default ABC choice.

    Especially the NDP inroads in Quebec. That was scary.

    They’d already seen this happen in Alberta, and it was well under way in other provinces. They needed Trudeau or someone like him to shine them up, or they’d be gone by the next cycle.


  • I am not sure Layton would be as good as people suspect: there’s a big “die a hero or live long enough to become the villian” about his possible legacy.

    He was a pretty good politician, and had a lot of charisma, but he was also responsible for toppling the Martin government despite knowing it would give us Harper. I wasn’t the biggest Martin fan, but we were really close to some real improvements under Martin, and instead of leveraging that, Layton rolled the dice and the result was a lost decade for progressivism.

    If I had my choice of recent NDP leadership possibles, post-Layton, I’d have opted for Charlie Angus.


  • Line this up with the recent article about how the (very modest) capital gains tax isn’t returning as much as was expected.

    I think we can ramp up taxes on the wealthy a little more.

    Of course, some of them will cry and threaten to leave. Let them go, someone else will step in and do what they do for less money. Keep in mind, these people do not, by and large, add value–quite the reverse, they skim off the value everyone else adds through their labour.

    When they cry about a brain drain, let them. Don’t be afraid to throw in a “don’t let the door hit you on the ass”, too.



  • You know why we’re at this stage?

    Because citizens are sick and tired of being abused by criminals, and they’re doubly sick of being told they should feel compassion for the people who steal their stuff, break into their businesses, assault them and/or spoil every park and public space.

    Sure, we shouldn’t do this specifically. But we should do something (housing, healthcare and–this is the unpleasant one–humanely incarcerating people who are an immediate harm to others and themselves) because doing nothing is going to eventually get us an electorate who will vote for Duterte-style methods.

    Voluntary treatment sounds terrible to people who’s goal is to help addicts, but literally everyone else doesn’t care. They just want to stop being victimized, and telling them that it doesn’t really work as well, well, it doesn’t matter.

    What’s extra depressing is I’m sure governments won’t spend money on this, either, since the problems of drug crime don’t really affect rich people, the taxes needed to pay for a solution–housing, healthcare or incarceration–aren’t something they’ll pay.



  • It sadly doesn’t quite work right on KDE. You can get close: you can show an application launcher, or a exposé-like window overview, or a pager, but you can’t show all of them at once in a way that’s easy to work with between like Gnome does.

    Heck, even Gnome regressed Gnome 40, as you don’t get the vertical desktop overview any more. At least there’s shell extensions that let me get Gnome 3’s behaviour back.

    It’s a real pity, because I like KDE, and definitely the KDE apps, more, but the Super-key overview is no hard to quit.




  • A better idea is to do to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party and MAGA did to the Republicans.

    Primary out corporate candidates and push for progressive ones at every level. President, congressional rep, school board trustee, dog-catcher: it doesn’t matter.

    The problem progressive voters have is that they don’t show up, and the especially don’t show up during off years, in primaries and in down-ballot races. The polticial right, by comparison, has been getting people in place on small races for years.

    Sanders did more for progressivism by enthusing Democratic members to vote in primaries and down-ballot races than Stein or any third party has ever done, and we’re seeing results. It needs to continue.




  • What I am really unsure about is if there’s even a market for Halo anymore.

    I’d like to think that a plot-heavy, dialogue-heavy game has a place in the modern era, at least after God of War and Ragnarök, but I don’t know if that’s what the kids want, and I really don’t think the industry wants it because it’s expensive and the ROI is low compared to PvP extraction shooters, which are cheaper to make an easier to monetize.

    I want to play a story through, and I want to care about the story and the characters and the dialogue. I cut my FPS teeth playing Marathon (Bungie’s predecessaor to Halo) and never got into the shallow-plotted shooters that id Software was pushing at the time, but I think the market has largely passed me by.

    This focus on the engine and the focus on company structure does not give me hope.






  • The problem is that we’re now forty years into neoliberal orthodoxy. There’s been two or three generations of policymakers, politicians and bureaucrats who cannot even conceive of publicly-funded, publicly-run services and solutions. I’ve been in meetings where this gets suggested and people look at you like you’re pants-on-head crazy for suggesting government just do it, soup to nuts.

    Think about it: when was the last, realy, fully-public solution delivered? Not one where the private sector was bribed to do it, not one where the government gave tax breaks, not one where some douchebag got their name on the door.

    You have to go back to the 1970s, at least. Anything good, anything we built, was before 1980.


  • Politicians have had almost 15 years since the drug crisis started in earnest to do something.

    What they did was implement a “let’er rip!” non-enforcement strategy that, without supports, housing or healthcare, was basically pouring gasoline on the pre-existing fire. Addicts weren’t going to get help, but they were going to get even fewer speedbumps on the road to letting addiction ruin everything for them and around them.

    And politicians did this because choosing not to enforce anything while simultaneously not providing supports was the cheapest option. It required doing even less than they were doing at the time, and it let them get kudos for being so progressive and forward looking.

    Jump forward fifteen years or so and the toxic fruits have come to bear.

    Clamping down on SCS is just another way to avoid spending money fixing the problem.