Such a suggestion did not come from me. The investigation might well be as simple as finding the right person to call at the relevant bureau.

You’re suggesting that it’s obvious why world cup-related travel would result in a larger fraction of visa applications denied than other travel? It’s not to me.

Of course they will. There’s no way the CBC can resist such a thing.

If you seriously want to know, bear in mind that you’re only going to get answers here from the kind of people willing to watch a youtube video based on nothing more than that clickbait thumbnail, and that audience might consist mainly of very weird people.

Oh, two choices. So I guess it probably switched to using your intel i915 graphics instead of the nvidia gpu. I dunno how to fix it, but it seems likely that’s what happened.

It’s sort of frustrating that they discovered this huge disparity between the rates of visa applications being approved from different countries, and then seemingly made no effort at all to investigate the reasons for it.

half of them would simply not open at all with any tweaking. The rest of the games eventually started to run but some of them were hit by performance degradation severe enough to not be playable.

It sounds like your video card driver stopped working and it’s fallen back to non-accelerated graphics.

Thanks, that article looks very helpful. It’ll take me a while to read it but already it makes me want to go back to eating more spinach, for the betaine. I will at least start eating fewer eggs even if I don’t go fully vegan.

So from that list —

• soybeans: one cup gives 39% of the recommended amount.
• wheat germ: it’s expensive and 12 tablespoons for 28% seems like a lot of wheat germ.
• shiitake: I love them but it’s too high a price around here.
• the rest are small amounts from a variety of stuff some of which I’m already eating but will never add up to the recommended amount unless I totally redesign my whole diet around just this one nutrient.

I was hoping for an answer other than eating two cups of soybeans every day. I’m not even sure whether or not it’s possible to get them at a reasonable price in this part of the world, but I guess I’ll have to find out.

Well I’ve got a question I’ve been wondering about for a while, so since you offer advice I’ll ask it here:

How do you get enough choline in your diet without spending a lot of money? Searching the web hasn’t turned up an answer for me so far. Of all the vitamins and minerals known to nutritional science it’s literally the only one I haven’t figured out yet. I’m eating eggs for that (it’s the number one non-vegan thing about my diet) plus a supplement, and it’s still not quite up to the officially recommended level although I think it’s probably good enough. But I’d like to not have to eat so many eggs and the research seems to indicate that dietary choline is somewhat important.

The person whose job it was to speak up in meetings and ask things like “FIFA? Are you sure? Do we really want to get involved with an organization like that?” is no longer employed by Mozilla.

these authorities are intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances and are not exercised lightly

Once again they promise never to use the crazy new powers they’ve just granted themselves for no obvious reason. What is even going on? Did the Liberal Party of Canada somehow get taken over by the same people that wrote Project 2026? Are they thinking fascism is inevitable so we might as well prepare for it? Assuming we have another federal election some day I get the feeling it’s going to go very badly for them, but the damage they’re doing will not be easy to repair.

They promise not to abuse all the ridiculous new powers, but the law will have officially and perhaps irrevocably moved to enable an approach that can only be seen as a totalitarian nightmare if some future government is less completely scrupulous than the saintly Liberals of the present no doubt will be, when it comes to carefully constraining their use of the legal tools they’ll inherit.

Worst of all, I’ll have to find a non-Canadian VPN service to use. It’s not like I’m doing anything top-secret, but just on principle. Canadian electronic services will no longer be trustworthy. Only those which can credibly promise to abandon Canada before giving in to a secret order to spy on their users will be safe, and those are uncommon. But they’re not non-existent. At least for the time being we will still have Signal, Delta Chat, Mullvad, and so on. Maybe the “warrant canary” will be the big feature everyone looks for in years to come.

A timely reminder to the government that while it’s not as exciting as jetting around the world kibitzing with your G7 friends about the latest wars, running the post office is still your job. Get on with it.

The mandatory backdoors would not help with this problem even if they were somehow magically made safe. If they managed to coerce Signal into installing a back door — which of course they can’t do — it would quickly be abandoned by its users and whatever tiny share it has of all the criminal gang recruiting activity would move on to places that are even harder to monitor.

Telegram users, where more of that sort of thing goes on, would probably be slower to move. But still people would eventually catch on and there are already more secure alternatives waiting to take over. They’ll just be ensuring that whichever one wins out won’t be one that’s in any way cooperative with Canadian law enforcement.

Don’t worry, the criminals will be fine. It’s only the normal people who don’t pay any attention to security since they have nothing to hide who will become super easy to spy on.

Yeah I have no idea how to keep track of what’s going on with it myself, let alone how to get word out to everyone else who’s going to be affected by this national disaster of a legislative project. It would be nice if we had a press that was interested in or capable of covering this sort of thing.

There’s another committee meeting on right now and I only know about it because I happened to remember to check.

I tuned in to watch for a few minutes and saw a Conservative MP asking sensible questions that I guess someone had written for her but not really following up on or challenging the responses to them, which were composed of a lot of vague hand-waving denials by the Liberals that any of the problems are a problem, without actually addressing any of the points made. Democracy in action!

It’s a real contrast to committee meetings I remember watching in decades past when I used to tune in to CPAC more frequently, where real expertise was often on display. Support for this bill would fall apart under the slightest scrutiny if the reality-based community were more involved the debate. But what debate there is, it’s just for show. It’s a majority government, they do what they like — and if someone tells them it’s a bad idea they must be the enemy.

It’s the “contains milk” part that seems like it might be false advertising.

Also, remember that your customers are not your fans. They barely tolerate you.

That seems like exactly the lesson the marketing department has been missing for the past ten years. I used to be in the “barely tolerate you” camp myself until I switched to Librewolf; I’m a much happier customer now.

some positive results

I wonder how much of the decline should be attributed to attempts to “disrupt the illegal drug trade” and how much to the slow process of word getting out to people who might otherwise have got themselves hooked on it that this stuff is dangerous.

Skyrim Together Reborn was the one I looked at and it does advertise that it’s working on GOG.