What trips were they taking to the States? I don’t think I ever had a field trip out of country, though it’s been a while since I graduated. I think the furthest we ever went was Quebec City.

In this case, I don’t think it particularly matters if they care about law and order or not.

Unless USA decides to help them secede with the backing of the American military (which isn’t impossible, but for now, we’ll call it unlikely), then the secession process is going to go about the same as Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. They declare it, wave their little F Carney flags around, roll some coal, and continue to be part of Canada.

Every thread where you see “ceo of failing company gets $3M bonus” followed by “those workers could have used that” ignores the fact that there are so many employees that, divided evenly, it’s never more than $5, and frequently less than a dollar.

Yes, that’s technically better than nothing. And I agree the CEO doesn’t deserve a bonus if their company is failing. But focusing on this is missing the bigger picture of the lack of workers’ rights in America, and paints a target on the wrong people (CEOs instead of the government).

They can’t actually leave. The lands are indigenous and have not been ceded to the province or the crown. There are treaties allowing the crown to use them (in this case, as the province of Alberta), but basically it’s as though I’ve got a tenant in a bedroom saying he’s going to keep the bedroom, stop paying rent, and he owns it now.

Wait, I thought we were voting for Pierre Pontiac from the Conversation Party.

The system is designed in such a way that the residents get to make that decision. If they want to choose a non resident to represent them, they are allowed to do that.

In theory, an informed population should vote against this behaviour, but this particular riding will vote conservative until it kills them (which it’s likely to do).

Also, don’t concentrate people in a single place. It’s wrong to have a 4% population growth in Toronto and 0.5% elsewhere.

Is there a mechanism for anchoring immigrants in a specific location? My understanding is that our charter right of freedom of movement means that if everyone wants to go to Toronto, we can’t stop them once they’re in the country.

Agreed. If the liberals put forth a bill for electoral reform, then I’ll believe it.

Alternatively, they could let one of the NDP members create the bill and still vote in favour. That would be a great show of cooperation and good faith between parties, while also showing how minority governments could continue to work well.

You may have voted because of a party, but you still voted for a specific representative. If that representative decides to vote differently than the rest of the party, it’s still the same person you voted for.

People shouldn’t have to agree. They voted for a candidate, not a party.

With the current state of politics, I think crossing the floor is going to be increasingly unlikely until we get electoral reform, but crossing the floor is much more a symbolic act, sending the message that you no longer agree with your previous party’s policies.

If they just stopped voting in line with the party (and got kicked out, and became an independent), would that be fine with you?

Crossing the floor should be fine, possibly even encouraged if you no longer agree with your party’s direction. Unless you’re saying that all MPs should just follow the party line and not have any original thoughts of their own.

Whatever he does next, it’s entirely on name recognition - he won’t need to submit a resume.

Which is good for him, because like you said, his resume wouldn’t even land him an interview.

Maybe the idea of a distributed international competition just doesn’t work anymore. It’s either too hard to proctor, or teachers are willing to help or let their students cheat in order to have an advantage.

How do you propose restricting participants?

This contest takes place simultaneously in high schools across multiple countries. The individual proctors should be responsible for monitoring, but clearly they failed.

When I did it (nearly 20 years ago) we couldn’t use online resources at all. No Google, no Stack Overflow. Our proctor was there to ensure we didn’t cheat.

This isn’t about how good you’ll perform at a job, it’s about your knowledge, ability to design, and critical thinking skills.

Are spelling bees dumb because you can just look up the words in a dictionary?

The test is largely about your knowledge of algorithm design and your ability to problem solve. The actual coding part is trivial if you’re at all familiar with your language of choice.

AI is very good at those two things. Yes, it sometimes has hallucinations and is wrong, but even with the least refined prompts on the free version of chatgpt, it could probably do quite well on the test.

Racism as a tourist is very different than racism as a citizen. And racism presents very differently depending on your race. You’re not white, but the racists in England and Canada (and probably France, but I don’t have experience with that) will treat East Asians, South Asians, brown people, and black people very differently. They might even like you if you’re a tourist - they just don’t want you to live in their country.

We can however ban them from public property, and also ban parties from producing and distributing signs.

If you want to make your own sign, you’re correct that we cannot (and should not) ban that.

I’m not talking about the country. I’m talking about every city in Canada except Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. I live in a major municipality in Canada. There’s a bus stop basically at the end of my driveway. But the bus comes every hour, doesn’t run very late, and takes half an hour to go downtown. So if I miss a bus, I’m 90 minutes from reaching downtown. Or… I could walk, which takes 30 minutes, no matter when I plan to leave. Or I could drive which takes 5 minutes.

If public transit is slower than walking, it’s not practical, and it’s not a replacement for cars.

When I lived in Toronto, as bad as their system is compared to European systems, there was never any question. If it was close, walking was faster. If it was still in the city, transit was faster. Even though I had access to a car, driving was never a realistic option, because the other options were actually convenient.

The whole point of the fuckcars movement is that we want public transit to be good enough that cars are not necessary. Yes, right now, in North America (with a few exceptions) you need a car, even if your city has public transit. And that’s awful.

Most people, even here on fuckcars, don’t actually hate cars. We just hate that society is built around them and to a large degree requires everyone to own one.