RM Transit made a somewhat emotional video after reading this article, if anyone has followed that channel. IDK if it’s on YouTube, but it’s on Nebula.

This is definitely a sad one to read. I can’t say I’m incredibly privy to the matters there, so I’m saying these based on the article and Reese’s (from RM Transit) comments. Metrolinx brought in foreign transit companies, with decades of experience under their belt, to advise and help build our transit system, but execs and seniors are somehow just stuck with their own idea of what transit looks like and wouldn’t budge on it. It’s such a disgraceful episode of working with people from other countries. Regardless if the people at Deutsche Bahn were actually insensitive to local sensitivities and have their own working style, you’ve signed that contract, so at least show that you’re willing to take in that advice and argue constructively. And heck, where is the public input on this?

That’s such a dumb statement from an exec member at Metrolinx. Let’s take an example here. The Kitchener line connects some of the most populous cities in Ontario after the Lakeshore line, and is, optically on a map, the closest point to expand all the way to London, another populous city. Many people have to frequently go into Toronto for work, family, education, etc. Do they think that number’s gonna go down in 30 years’ time? What the heck gonna happen to make that number go down?

And the GTA is not even bigger than the Greater Tokyo Area by both its urban and metro land mass. Sure, it’s 3x denser in Tokyo, but it’s dense not cause people have nowhere else to live, but cause the infrastructure IS there to facilitate it. Induced demand works for railways as much as they do for highways.

Oh I’ve heard of this, but for a different country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Malaysia_Plan (for years 2021-2025) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleventh_Malaysia_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Malaysia_Plan And you can find older ones from there. The first one started in 1966, just about 10 years after Malaysia’s independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Malaysia_Plan

There’s also a 13th plan in the making from various news sources in Malaysia, for the next 5 years from 2026.

Most of these plans have some amount of controversy that come with them.

• In the first plan, they’ve been happy to even support the US in the Vietnam War, in order to get some money out from the US for economic development. It was a rather unpopular move, but here we can already see how Malaysia chooses to play in the international scene, which generally continues even today.
• Throughout many of the plans, there are sections that clearly give preference to the Malay race and the indigenous people, typically grouped under the term bumiputra; though this sort of affirmative action is actually enshrined in Malaysia’s constitution as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_153_of_the_Constitution_of_Malaysia; and from the word of mouth passed through generations of the Malaysian Chinese, there’s a strong belief that the ancestors of the Chinese and Indians there made this concession so that their people may stay in Malaysia, as many of them left their home countries due to strong push factors back home, and they aren’t welcomed back either.
• If you’re wondering what other sorts of preferential treatment have they given to the Bumiputras over the years: a percentage of enrolment in universities, a percentage of employment in sufficiently large enterprises (from somewhere medium and up I believe), and attempts at essentially emboldening rich Malays to own even more of Malaysia’s wealth in terms of percentage (there’s a common theme where previous governments will use the word Bumiputras when they really mean the Malay people, almost as if it’s a useful facade or shield against criticisms from non-Bumiputras and sometimes even foreigners; the indigenous people are fractured and generally don’t care about Malaysian politics).

Whether these plans are inspired by Soviet Union plans, I don’t know, as no one seems to talk about that. The Malaysian government’s approach to international relationships has never really changed throughout the years, despite changing governments recently: they will deal with the country regardless of whichever side of the power struggle they’re in, be it the US, Europe, Soviets, Russian, and today, China, as long as they would throw money at it without seemingly hurting the country, as well as other Islamic countries. So there’s a good chance that these 5-year Malaysian Plans are very much inspired by the Soviets.

I played the first Nioh and really liked it. Been planning to play 2, but dang there’s now a 3 upcoming?

Really hoping their recent mixed records won’t carry forward here though.

There’s no good reason today and in the future, period.

There are “experts” who still claim these, but they are based on a very dated recommendation from at least 15 - 20 years ago at this point. To some, such non-sensical requirements (by the fact that we should be storing passwords as hashes today) have become doctrine, rather than any fact based in reality.

And some users have been conditioned into thinking that these are good security practices as well, because governments and banks still make use of them, and these are the very organizations that should be the best-in-class when it comes to security. Some of these users become CEOs or product designers with more say than their IT and security experts in the company. The rest is history from there.

Just to add to the list or clarify further

• Arresting a mayor despite him obeying ICE orders
• Deport citizens and non-citizens without credible evidence and without due process
• Weaponize the judicial system against political dissidents and rivals
• Punish citizens and non-citizens for their First-Amendment-protected speech (which they claim to oh-so-love)
• Withdraw funding for USAID to immediately cripple the agency and deprive millions of people of basic human needs around the world

Ahh that’s gonna be a real hard find.

I thought OpenRGB would be able to give some starting point so I looked it up, but there’s a grand total of 11 supported gamepads, half of which are the PS controllers. So we’re out of luck there.

What sort of configurations are you looking to do with the controller that Steam Input wouldn’t cover? Cause if you don’t actually need specific features from the 8bitdo config software, it works just fine with Linux. In fact, I’m using one right now, and have been using it for years.

The Urban Dictionary is useful for lots of modern abbreviations or Internet lingo

Oh! That’s somewhat interesting to know.

But it’s worth noting that while word of mouth is one way, we can always just try launching the game without Steam to find out.

Again, you’d be forgiven for that. The design language around these sorts of license purchase has been frequently framed as a straight purchase by many companies on the Internet that it’s become essentially the norm that many don’t question. DRM is also proposed without ever stating that it essentially makes the end user purchase a license, as it frames itself as a way for the publisher to retain some control over the product that’s in their interest, and that the end user don’t even need to really know until the rights are exercised. It’s an infuriating piece of technology that is straight up designed to be a rug pull from the get-go.

But, again, to be fair, not all games on Steam have DRM from some info I’ve gathered before. It was impossible to tell, but I think Steam actually shows a little info box now to clarify that DRM is in place or not.

Welcome to the painful world of DRM that we live in :’)

And to be fair to Steam, they did recently issue a statement and tried reflecting it in their stores to say that you don’t actually outright own all the games you “bought”, as, for some, you are merely purchasing the license to play games that the publishers have decided to put behind a DRM. This has always been the case since the dawn of DRMs, and it was implied that people should understand it, but recent events have made it clear that a lot of people aren’t even aware of it. So you’d be forgiven for not knowing.

As many others have said, this is because you’re using the same account on both devices, and Steam’s DRM policies will stop you from being able to do what you described. So I won’t go into re-mentioning the many suggestions others have talked about.

What I do want to mention, however, is that this isn’t a problem that comes from having the Deck itself. Set up a separate computer in your living room and use your Steam account there, and you would have the same problem. Does that mean you should be turned off from buying a new computer that’ll run parallel to your main gaming rig?

Ehh… If anything, his whole “Canada Is Not For Sale” thing only had me thinking that he’s been really consistent at being a populist. It’s right on brand.

“Let’s give the CEO big bonuses instead of investing it back into our failing business that desperately needs that money.”

Says, apparently, no one at Intel.

Edit: I just realized my punchline was off but I’ll leave it as is anyways. You get the point.

弾幕 (read: danmaku) is literally translated as “bullet curtain” to refer to a barrage of bullets that are so close together they form some kind of veil, or curtain. But yeah, it’s what we know as “bullet hell” in English.

I’ve seen Vampire Survivors referred to as “reverse bullet hell” at some point, but didn’t look like that stick.

Policy lurch is exactly what I’m thinking of. Thank you for bringing that term up.

My understanding of intelligence is likely different from others; being intelligent doesn’t mean you should be on the good side. Having a healthy foresight and knowing what should work better for more people over the long term are not qualities of intelligence; they are those of wisdom. Being intelligent just means that you know how to consume information and wield knowledge, not necessarily for good or bad. So I don’t doubt that Mark Carney is intelligent, but he certainly hasn’t shown the wisdom that Canada truly needs, only short-term goals. The latter isn’t always bad, but the world lacks wise visionaries, and Canada seems to be in dire needs of one.

I’ll be honest and say that while there’s a need to fight Trump from down South at the moment, I can’t say Carney has actually demonstrated any traits that makes me trust him. There’s his somewhat question-raising profile about whether he’ll actually be see national problems correctly to be able to do things for ordinary people, or if he’ll just be another corporate-loving minister. He’s tried to use it to distance himself from Trudeau’s government, but that seems unnecessary, especially when there seems to be plenty of ways he could make that distance clear through actually proposing solutions that are clearly different from those of Trudeau’s.

I would say we already have extremists: those that believe an electoral system that ignores votes is acceptable.

I don’t disagree with the fact that we should find that sentiment abhorrent, but that’s definitely not a classification that people would think of when we say “extremists”.

And this might be controversial to say, but there are lots of people who just don’t want to deal with whom they consider as “extremists”, and would rather have structural barriers in place to keep these voices segregated. Anti-PR people is a mix of misinformed people, actual pro-FPTP people, and those who do view it as an effective tool (though a flawed view) at keeping voices they don’t want to hear out. Cutting people may be a viable strategy for small and/or close group settings, but it’s not the way for a democratic society, and that is where I think more messaging needs to be done to make people know and weigh the benefits of a fairer society over short-term, localized social calmness. Just trying to take a hard look at reality and give my 2 cents there.

At least with PR, we only have ourselves to blame in failure. With winner-take-all, an extreme minority can, and has, taken down the majority.

Well said.

To be fair, I can’t say I’m super interested in politics either. I’ve only started looking at it after knowing about how there are other ways to, in a sense, “implement” democracy through different electoral systems, and that the problem is inherently mathematical (which is what I’m interested in; seemingly simple but difficult-to-solve mathematical problems that also isn’t just a number theoretic problem). The rest of what I now know just comes from knowing how broken FPTP is and how it’s essentially destroying the fabric of a democratic society, and it just makes me concerned enough to keep looking further in, hoping we’re actually doing something to save ourselves.

But yeah, I really wonder what goes into their heads, knowing that in a winner-takes-all system, everything you do can easily be undone by those on the other side, and little to no legacy can be easily left behind, assuming you can even get a chance to get back into office. Someone’s got to sit these people down and show them the reality of things, cause it just seems like they either don’t recognize the possibility of what PR would get them (which is to allow them to have a chance at pushing more centrist policies through), can’t have it figured out in their heads, or are actually just against a fairer society, in which case we call them out for it after talking to them.

And yeah, Crombie losing in her own riding should be a sign that she just doesn’t have support from even people in her own riding. Something feels incredibly wrong with the OLP to me, both from this, how they’ve campaigned, and also just how they’ve behaved over the many years we’ve had the PCs. They’re essentially sleepwalking and hoping nobody notices it.

Speaking with a lot of people on electoral reform, there are some who are anti-PR on the basis that they genuinely believe extremists will be elected. Which I say, in a democracy people are deserving of and entitled to representation, PR (and neither FPTP) doesn’t do anything to change that.

No electoral system can prevent extremists; as long as you’re electing people, you’re bound to have an extremist in the office at some point. We should this frame the question like so: would you rather have an extremist who has full control over your government, or a group of people with extremists mixed in such that they have to work with other people to get their extremists policies enacted? It should be a no brainer from there.

And what are the chances of you having a large group of extremists in power? It’s certainly non-zero. PR isn’t immune to politicians gaming the system by installing multiple extremist candidates that tries to capture a wide range of voters, and then betraying their voters, but it would require a large and coordinated effort for them to do so in a country to be able to effectively consolidate power. Otherwise, it’s just a reflection of the voters around us, and perhaps in a polarized world, that’s a scary thought.

In any case, you’re right, electoral reform is more so the means to the end where we have a fairer electoral system through proportional representation, instead of a winner-takes-all system that encourages polarization. It’s funny to me that Trudeau has repeatedly lamented at how our world (arguably the Western world) is more fragmented and polarized while he continues to advocate for a system that squarely encourages that.

Sorry if my response was confusing. I’ll start off with some clarifying statements.

First off, I was trying to focus on the provincial level and not the federal level, as I’ve been led to believe there’s a good amount of distinction and separation between the two. I must admit I’m not born and raised Canadian, though I’ve lived here for many years now, and have only slowly learned of the relationships between the different political parties, federal and provincial, rather recently (last few years really). Thus, my understanding is likely flawed and imperfect. And it certainly doesn’t help that people I’m close to are somewhat apolitical.

With that said, given the topic at hand, where there’s an argument for consolidating the OLP and ONDP, my first thought was that it doesn’t seem likely to ever happen, given how far apart they are in terms of where they are on the political spectrum. At this point, it seems more likely that they would work together to form government in order to push policies that they want through. And if that is the OLP’s goal at the end of the day, then I believe they should just work with the ONDP. And given that they don’t seem to have much of a chance at winning, they should feel more compelled to support PR. That’s the point in my original comment.

On that note though, part of me is skeptical if the Liberals (OLP) actually have policies that they actually want to implement, given how incredibly vague their answers have been to virtually every question being asked of them (e.g. “we will build more houses”, but how?). At this point in time, they don’t feel too different from the PCs; essentially just fishing for sentiments and hoping the fishes would bite.

And it’s honestly unfortunate that PR is treated as a partisan sticking point; it should not. Anyone who would rather stick to FPTP over PR just seems greedy and — I know this is over-exaggerating and over-simplifying — shows their authoritarian tendencies, if not the inability to see the world functioning in any other way.

As far as the Liberals go both provincially and federally, my impression has been that they are really more attempting to be centrist, while playing along with certain leftist or left-leaning ideas, while being somewhat critical of the right; essentially, “we’re not the Conservatives”. Of course, I understand that some people do buy into their marketing, believing them to be more left-leaning than they are, and that because of that impression, these people also end up thinking that the NDP and Greens are much further left.

And thank you for sharing that link. I was curious about exactly happened to Trudeau’s whole talk about electoral reform that eventually led into nothing. Some sources seem to claim that there was simply no consensus on which path to move forward on, but I see now that he is one of those who was against PR, be it misinformed, intentionally or not, and would rather go with ranked ballots, which seems to just be ill-informed.

I doubt if the Ontarian Libs are actually benefiting from this, given that they’ve consecutively lost 3 terms now and is not even the official opposition, unless your suggestion is that they’re well-fed by these corporate donors enough to do barely enough to keep splitting votes and let one of them have a chance of winning, which also means they’re basically in cahoots with the PCs, even if indirectly.

In any case, if that’s what you believe is the situation here, then isn’t there no chance in hell would the Libs ever “merge” or even work with the NDP?