Oooh, then we could refuse him entry and leave him in limbo.

Not really. They’re just barcodes on steroids. Originally created for industrial machinery. They have absolutely no built-in security, and can’t be read by a normal person without a machine helping out (which is a problem if the machine just dumps it straight into a browser’s location bar).

An ideal system would be human- as well as machine-readable, and incorporate some kind of verifiable issuer’s mark. But as usual, no one invented one in time, and so we’re stuck with a system a Japanese factory developed so that their machines could figure out which car part they were looking at.

Exactly. Choosing not to carry a tracking device everywhere one goes should not result in being treated like a second-class citizen and being unable to access services. The app is fine as an option, but not as a requirement.

Even if they try to do so, not all landlords are lawyers (or even necessarily have English or French as a first language). They can think they understand something but actually not, or miss some of the fine print altogether.

These issues are going to fall disproportionately on the kinds of people who rent out a single basement apartment or the like, rather than the corps that own hundred-unit buildings and can afford to keep a lawyer on retainer to look at all of their contracts.

This is the most significant nit he can find to pick‽

Ugh. That’s just . . . ugh.

This is one of the rare cases where I would support charging a young offender as an adult. There is just no excuse I can think of for this.

I’d bet on at least twenty years before it’s in general use, since this is a radical change and it makes sense to be cautious about new technology in medicine. Initial clinical trials for some common, simple surgeries within ten years, though.

This is one of those cases where an algorithm carefully trained on only relevant data can have value. It isn’t the same as feeding an LLM the unfiltered Internet and then expecting it to learn only from the non-crazy parts.

Slapping someone across the face is a traditional method of bringing them to their senses when gentler measures have failed.

Minor financial pain now loses more votes in the next election than physical harm and death sometime after that election, I believe is the actual calculus.

Taking the position himself would rob him of a layer of insulation from public opinion. He’ll find himself another rubber stamp, if he can find someone who’s sufficiently stupid, greedy, and/or desperate to take the job (and there always is someone). We should start a betting pool on how long that person is going to last before taking the fall for Musk.

Well, Europeans are physically closer to Russia than to America. It isn’t unreasonable to prioritize the more immediate threat, and some people’s brains seem to only have room for one.

These days, I’m not sure Europe would take them.

Trudeau Sr. was, as far as I know, the last PM to land a budgetary surplus, back in the early 1970s. Since then, every single PM regardless of name or party affiliation has added to the national debt. If you’re going to attempt to sling mud, please at least make sure that everyone involved gets their deserved level of coating. (As for whether your thesis is valid in the first place, everyone else seems to have that discussion well in hand.)

I don’t think there’s any evidence right now that the military had anything to do with this beyond being how these nitwits met. Let’s wait and see if some turns up before blaming anyone not directly involved in these crimes. This is a bit different from most military-related scandals—these guys acted in direct contradiction of what the military stands for.

If you can. Medical devices are particularly nasty: there may be only one or two brands on the market that do what you need, because such devices understandably require extensive certification. If the only available option requires an app, you’re stuck. If you need something that meets other legal or professional certification requirements, you might also have very limited options.

For just about anything else, I agree that there’s probably some alternative to an app-locked device, although some level of convenience tradeoff may be necessary.

If you’re going to alter the candidacy requirements, how about requiring candidates to live in the riding for at least a year before running there?

When in the past ten years have they ever been okay?

It does bring the constant closures (actual and threatened) in Thessalon, Ont. into perspective a bit, though.

Which is traditionally a sign of distress . . . Maybe not entirely inappropriate, at that.

They have less power density than other lithium-ion chemistries when both are new, but the dropoff over time is also less. That means that unless you replace your power banks fairly often, the LiFePO₄ version is likely to have higher density for much of its lifetime. They also tolerate at least double the number of charging cycles.

Not sure how to go about marketing that in our current disposable society, though.

Those of us who live in the province but voted for someone else aren’t quite sure, but the fact that a lot of people seem not to have realized the last election was even taking place may have had something to do with it.