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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I think even if you don’t eat meat there’s reason to be mad. Cause they killed a bunch of animals, and put it at prices where people can’t afford to buy and thus might have even more waste. So a triple whammy of corporate greed, excessive animal farming, and food waste!

    On the plus side maybe people will be forced to buy more ethically farmed turkeys this year, or reduce meat intake all together, cause its looking like these are more expensive then any locally grown Turkeys I’ve seen.

    For additional context on my take: I do eat meat, despite being morally against factory farming. So, I try to reduce my intake of unethically farmed food and try to use as much of the animal as possible.



  • Idk maybe it’s cause I don’t live in as much of a two party system as the US, but essentially still a two party system.

    I think there’s value in strategic voting. I don’t know what the equivalent would be in the US but strategic voting for the lesser of two evils at a national level and then voting more true to your convictions at a municipal and provincial level is still valid.

    Again my opinions probably don’t work in the US electoral system, but voter apathy is a big part of how rights get eroded where I’m from. A party or political figure stays in power because of apathy and then they just keep getting away with shit. At least if you cast a vote it can be seen as you participating in the democracy.

    I will say there is something to the act of not voting as being a part of democracy, but truly I think along with abstaining any functioning democracy needs a “none” option.


  • I don’t think we’ll see this any time soon, because corpos probably won’t listen to any creative that presents this, but I want something where the LLM runs locally and is just used to interpret what you are asking for but the dialogue responses are all still written by a writer. Then you can make the user interaction feel more intuitive, but the design of the story and mechanics can just respond to the implied tone, questions, prompts, keywords from the user.

    Then you could have a dialogue tree that responds with a nice well constructed narrative, but a user who asked something casually vs accusatory might end up with slightly different information.


  • In life it’s been mostly pure luck, but one of the few things I really recommend is to keep in the loop about rebates, programs and services offered by my federal and provincial government. Stuff like rebates on first time home buying, electric bikes, and energy efficient equipment is nice cause I bet I saved at least 3000$ total.

    In recent time tho the biggest one has been getting a bicycle. I got an e-bike but even a regular bike helped me stop paying through the nose for gas when I was just burning it mostly sitting in traffic.


  • I feel like most of the things such as dependency hell and at least some amount of data models and routing can be resolved by using custom elements tho. I can agree to a certain point that HTMX could lead to a simple markup based approach, but it’s still a matter of learning another library and all that junk. In a perfect world I feel like there should just be an equivalent to maybe the `` element that could on becoming visible makes an Http call to lazy load and plop in some inner HTML. I guess you’d still be missing the whole events driven by attributes part tho.

    I don’t know if I think this whole HTMX stuff is silly cause I’m jaded, or don’t see a use case for it personally. So take my comment with a huge grain of salt.



  • I’ve experienced a similar decline in interest. Mostly because of one key thing, I got an e-bike.

    The cost of gas was way too expensive, and I considered selling my gas powered car and buying an EV but the used and new market is well above anything I can afford, they only seem to produce SUVs or crossovers instead of anything the size of a Honda civic. I figured I’d just keep the gas car I have until it beefs it and use it for multi person trips, or far away trips.

    Like it really is hard to beat when I can spend 1500-3000 on a bike that costs pocket change to charge, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to maintain. Honestly with the lack of public transit in a lot of Canada, a bike and whatever car you already have is a great way to save on gas money.




  • Try to indulge me, as I try to humanize the people you are talking about in a way that might resonate with you.

    Imagine you work 40hrs a week, getting paid minimum wage or next to minimum wage, the housing market continues to worsen around you as rent continues to increase but wages don’t. If you have a place already and are just barely scraping by living paycheck to paycheck, which a lot of people are these days. One small bad financial day from an emergency or unexpected cost and you’re screwed. You miss your rent payment and you get evicted. Now, if you don’t have a safety net of people, which we can’t guarantee everyone does have living family or friends that will take you in for a month while you get back on your feet, you become homeless. You get fired from work because you’ve taken too many unpaid days off to try and get your life sorted so you don’t have to sleep on the streets. Now you can’t get another job because most places won’t hire you without an address, and collecting unemployment becomes difficult because if you have no address and no direct deposit you can’t get it mailed to you to claim.

    As for the drugs that you say they have chosen to ruin their lives with, a pack of cigarettes, a small bag of weed, some opiates, or alcohol costs a whole lot less than rent for a month or even a motel room for the night.

    The financial and housing situation for a lot of people out there in the world is really fragile, and if you add on other issues that I didn’t list such as mental health issues, lack of education or job experience with any education you have, or existing addiction, it can really add up and make it so your going from sleeping in a small bachelor’s apartment one night to sleeping on a park bench the next.

    I don’t fully ascribe to the concept of communism myself (it’s a good label for most folks but I’m too picky about nitty gritty stuff so say I like it when I would want to adjust a few things about it), but I definitely think social housing is how you fix homelessness. Cities and states / provinces waste more money dealing with homelessness the way they do now then just building them socialized housing.


  • Overall I think you’re right. Just like this whole shit is so sad. Both antisemitism and Islamophobia are on the rise.

    Like I could give two fucks about how the governmental bodies and regimes involved are pushing any narrative, when we see the litteral human cost being reported constantly. But, I know I’m not well informed enough to have a good conversation on what should be reported and what is being reported is filled with fluff and skewed to support certain sides.

    The only thing I have been able to tell concretely from the reporting is war is hell.




  • You say “Rent Control” doesn’t work, but having seen locations with rent control, and living in a place without it I fundamentally disagree with that statement.

    In any economic model, housing is a basic need for humans. While rent control isn’t a solution, I don’t think it’s ever intended to be one. It is a stop gap, or a step implemented in a larger plan. It’s basically regulations for combating price fixing.

    If you live in a place fraught with renoviction, the act of using a renovation as an excuse to evict people and charge more for the same thing, then the person who has been forced back into the market does not have to become homeless.

    To another point, I don’t think rent control would prevent development of new housing either, as landlords aren’t the only folks who buy properties, even though it’s almost financially impossible to buy a house in certain inflated markets these days no matter who you are.



  • I always look at people who jump to “Communism is the answer” just have issues with properly articulating what they feel and just jump to a reactionary catch all comment.

    I myself don’t like a lot of flaws with the core tenants of capitalism, so I often find myself saying reactionary shit like “capitalism bad” sometimes too.

    I think this goes for a lot of discussion on economic models. There’s a lot of nuisance to it, and I think so many folks range somewhere between knowing nothing and knowing enough to be dangerous, but lack the energy, time, patience, or skill to really get it across online.

    Often we see people posting about stuff so frequently because of a frustration with the current system, so unless it’s like a bad faith argument I mostly just tune it out, or go “hell yeah” in my little monkey brain depending on if it’s something I agree with slightly.



  • I mean even if it was a public utility, there’s still laws around those in regards to what you can and can’t do with it. So depending on how the framework around it is set up, and if there was a proper system in place to enforce it, I don’t think it would necessarily even be a threat to it becoming or continuing to be a public utility.