I don’t know if it’s exactly the same, but they definitely have a limited number of loans before the library is forced to buy another copy.

Here’s an article from 2023 by a librarian with more details:

Other titles are metered. This is essentially a lease. Libraries purchase a title for time, 12 to 24 months or by checkouts, usually 26. When the terms of the lease expire the item is no longer available and has to be repurchased.

It’s not just Obama. Reagan spent only 2 terms, 8 years as governor of California before becoming president. George W Bush spent only 5 years as governor of Texas before becoming president. JD Vance only spent 2 years as a senator before becoming VP.

For people who haven’t become president, Tammy Duckworth spent only 4 years as a congresswoman before being elected to the senate. John McCain was only a congressman for 4 years before becoming a senator.

Generally people who get national name recognition that quickly don’t hang out in congress that long. Once they hit the senate, sometimes their progress stalls. See Biden, Warren, Bernie, McCain, John Edwards, John Kerry, Bob Dole, etc. But, normally national name recognition = senate, at a minimum.

Did you know that you can 3d print a house in less than 24 hours? You can’t download the concrete, but you could download the plans.

We’re maybe slowly creeping towards a post-scarcity world. If we can avoid destroying ourselves or the planet in the next century, we might get there. But, the entrenched interests are holding on with their fingernails.

One awful example of this is library books.

In the before times, people had to go and take an actual physical book out of the library. Along came e-books. In theory, a library now only needed to buy a single copy of a book and they could lend it out to everyone. It’s no surprise that they didn’t do that, instead if they want to loan out 10 copies at a time, they buy 10 books.

What’s really stupid is that the publishers weren’t satisfied with that arrangement. They also want to simulate wear and tear on these digital ebooks, so it can be just like paperbacks. So, after 26 loans, DRM on the ebooks means they self-destruct.

It’s amazing to me that she’s still only a congresswoman. I can’t think of anybody who has been in the national spotlight for that long without moving up to at least senator, if not a cabinet position.

This is the case we know about, how many others are there?

I think everyone knows how great the BBC is. But, not everyone knows just how big and important it is. It is the largest broadcast news organization in the world. It has more than 5500 journalists and 50 foreign news bureaus. Canada shouldn’t compete with the BBC, but it should at least be BBC-like within its own borders.

Other national broadcasters are also great. Look at Australia’s Triple J for example. Not only does it expose young Australians to Australian music they wouldn’t otherwise hear on commercial radio, it also has science programs aimed at children and young adults. I love Dr. Karl’s stuff, even though I’m definitely not in the target demographic (being non-Australian and old).

IMO, the statutory funding isn’t enough either. It’s a step in the right direction. But, if all it takes is parliament voting, then it’s vulnerable to the next PC majority. If it’s made independent enough, that should also help it avoid accusations of being a government mouthpiece.

I’m not sure if everyone knows this, but commercial weather forecasters get their weather information from Environment Canada, the American NOAA, and so on. Very few have their own weather satellites etc. The Environment Canada weather forecasts are pretty barebones, but they’re the kind that are useful for pilots, shipping, etc. The Weather Network, Weather Channel, AccuWeather, all take that information and build on it for fancier and more user-friendly weather reports.

I think it would be great if the CBC could have a basic news wire service that commercial news services could build on. The local bureaus that Carney is recommending don’t have to be full setups with reporters doing live to-camera pieces. They could be more like Thomson Reuters dispatches (a Canadian company btw). That would make the money go farther, and would provide a barebones framework for the more detailed reporting that say City or CTV wanted to do.

Anyhow, it’s great that the current PM (and likely future PM) is a guy who lived and worked in London for a while, and understands how great the BBC is.

As a general rule, people with US citizenship working in most other countries still have to file US taxes, but they end up owing nothing. There’s a big exemption for wages earned in other countries, so unless you’re making a lot of money and simultaneously living in a place with very low taxes, your payment will be $0. This sometimes affects say bankers who move to Switzerland where they make a lot of money and don’t pay much in taxes. But, for most jurisdictions (including Canada) the taxes are more-or-less on par with the US or higher so you don’t end up owing anything.

There’s a lot of oversimplification. But the US embargo on Japan in 1940 led directly to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The US embargoed all oil to Japan. Japan calculated it had less than 2 years worth of oil before it ran out, so it needed to capture the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia, more or less) because they were a major source of oil. The American puppet state of the Philippines was between Japan and the Dutch East Indies, so they had to deal with that somehow. Their decision was to preemptively attack Pearl Harbor and hope that they could consolidate their gains in the Pacific by the time the US was able to counter-attack.

Japan’s actions in WWII weren’t directly about tariffs, but they were about spheres of influence, like the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

A lot of Trump’s posturing seems to be about bringing back these spheres of influence. The US wants to control North America, taking over Greenland and Canada, and leave Europe to become part of the Russian sphere.

Someone who spends way too much time on LinkedIn.

Some provinces have connections to exchange electricity when needed—but this is the exception rather than the rule, and they are underutilized where they do exist.

This seems pretty crazy. Canada is the size of California by population, but is split into multiple small grids. Meanwhile, California is part of a huge grid that includes 11 other states, basically everything west of Texas.

Especially with renewables, it seems like Canada should join the grids together as much as possible so there’s redundancy.

The privacy issues are nasty, but a smart toilet could actually be an incredibly useful device.

Can you imagine if every time you went to the bathroom, your toilet could do some of the basic stool / urine tests you get at the doctor’s office? Certain diseases could be caught extremely early, and you wouldn’t have to do anything different.

And then there are bidet functions. Forget smearing poop all over your ass with paper, wash the poop off with nice warm water every time.

I wouldn’t want to have to use a smartphone app for that, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a simple set of buttons on the toilet itself. You could keep the manual flush lever and only use that if you preferred, but if you wanted an even better experience and a better clean, that option would be available.

Reminder: never go have pancakes at wise_pancake’s house.

I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy to control the narrative. There are just various corporate media sources each with their own bias.

Washington Post is owned by a billionaire, so it’s naturally going to run pro-billionaire, anti-billionaire-killer articles.

Reddit is desperate to avoid controversial things as it tries to survive going public. It wants to be the place people go for cute pictures of cats, funny memes, celeb interviews, etc. If someone like Elon Musk threatens to put them in the MAGA hate spotlight, they’ll do whatever they can to avoid that. They rightly think they don’t need to care about users anymore. People who stuck around after they effectively killed the API and after all the mods went on strike will stick around for anything. They have to care about advertisers now, and advertisers want to advertise next to safe things.

The NY Times is just a very old, very small-c conservative newspaper. They don’t want to disrupt the status quo. The higher-ups at the NY Times are likely to show up at the same dinner party as Brian Thompson, so he’s the one they sympathize with.

As for TMZ, all they care about is clickbait. If a CEO freaked out and gunned down a random person on the street, they’d just as happily make some tawdry movie about that too.

If this were some kind of concerted effort to control the narrative, they wouldn’t publish info that went against that narrative. But, when there were hints that the cops might have screwed up the evidence gathering procedures at the crime scene, almost every major news outlet jumped on that story too.

Wealth inequality is driven by inequality in wealth. Hmm, we might need a study to confirm this.

It sounds like blocking off a significant part of downtown Ottawa, and making the parliament buildings inaccessible, should be on the more severe end of things. But, we’ll see.

Yes, but the bigger news is that they weren’t convicted on most of the counts.

This is a perfectly normal headline, but you’re trying to make it seem biased or something.

CBC didn’t say anything about possible sentences, but I found a city news piece from 2022 that talks about mischief. It isn’t very useful though:

Kicking a wall could result in a fine, while mischief to a war memorial or blocking significant portions of downtown could see up to 10 years of jail time, Toronto criminal lawyer Karen McArthur said.

In the most severe cases the maximum sentence is life imprisonment, Peters said.

So, they could be looking at anything from a fine to lifetime imprisonment?

Yes, the CBC, famously biased in favour of… [checks notes]… the “Freedom Convoy” truckers.

The thing is, those investors are in a Catch-22 situation.

Tesla’s valuation is absolutely absurd. Even after all the value the stock has lost, it still has a P/E ratio of more than 100. Standard, boring, normal car companies that are well run have a P/E ratio of 7.

These investors have convinced themselves that Tesla deserves to be thought of completely differently than other car companies because they have a genius in charge.

If they ditch Elon, they have to admit that they’re just a normal car company, and the right price for their shares is $14 each or so, not the $270 it is now. But, if they keep Elon, they have to convince themselves that somehow their sales are going to turn around and their genius who happens to be a Nazi will somehow convince all the people who hate Nazis to buy cars from him.