Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 12 Posts
  • 327 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • You sound like a reasonable person who’s given up, and I get that. Given everything we see, it may even be the rational choice, but it’s not the moral one. It’s fine if you want to check out, but that doesn’t explain the cheerleading for policy that will make everything worse. It turns you from a bystander to an antagonist.

    If this planet is going to end in fire, I have to believe that Good people are going to fight for it, even if we know we can’t win because “if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”.


  • So this is what we’ve come to.

    First it was “global warming isn’t real”, then it was “it is, but it’s not our fault”, then “it’s our fault, but there’s nothing we can do about it”, and now you’re taking the position of “it’s all gonna burn anyway, so I might as well get mine.”

    Putting the emotional argument aside for a moment, this is a blisteringly naive position to take. In a world on fire, and with Canada’s terrain the way it is, what could possibly make you think that your home isn’t going to be burning next year? A “full stomach”? In a world on fire? Where do you think the food is going to come from? What in your head tells you that you’re going to be able to afford to feed yourself or your family in a world where crop yields are cratering everywhere? The people with the money, who stand to profit further from policies like the one you’re supporting here will gleefully let you die and not even notice.

    For every litre of oil & gas Canada leaves in the ground, the cost of accessing those fossils elsewhere increases. Driving up the price drives divestment and innovation everywhere, and that means fewer burning forests and a better chance of survival.

    While it’s true that resource extraction can drive an economy, extracting resources that literally burn the future is at-best shortsighted… extractive if you will. We could be pushing money into electrification, transport, and education, fields in desperate need of support that objectively lead to a stronger economy nation-wide. With the US cratering, we could position ourselves as a cultural hub, or a manufacturing bridge between Asia and Europe… but instead Carney is choosing short-term profits for private companies (protected by public funds!) and increasing our already sizeable contribution to burning the world.

    But I guess it’s ok if a few people have some jobs for a few years. You best hope your home isn’t next on the to-burn list.



  • It was surprisingly common, though due to the cost of buying tapes, it wasnt as common as it is now.

    VHS tapes have this nifty feature where you could store video on it in 3 different formats. While the tape from the rental place was stored in the format that fit roughly 2hrs on a tape, you could record three 2hr movies to a tape if you used the lower quality EP format (I think that was the acronym).

    This lead to people like my friend’s dad keeping shelves of tapes with hastily scrawled labels on them for 3 different movies or 6 different episodes.

    All you needed for any of this was 2 VCRs, which from the early 90s were pretty affordable.

















  • The facts don’t care about the feelings of the electorate, let alone that of shareholders.

    1. Carbon capture does not work. There’s no practical case for it, even if you throw the economics out.
    2. Increasing renewable energy is not enough if we continue to increase our fossil burning.
    3. Any economic or political case for fossils is necessarily short-term, because points 1 and 2 ensure that the long-term always ends in catastrophe and catastrophe is bad for the economy.