Eby says "Dur dur, I called an election REALLY early, while my opponent was a temp milquetoast bland inoffensive/generic leader, and I'm losing to the temp in the polls. No one can be "totally sure" whether the new 'permanent leader' will be racist/extremist, or a generic normal conservative, so we haven't been able to drum up as much animosity/fear of them being Trump-like. Me smart guy, trust me lead you long time, very good judgiements!"

At this point, if people want a more sane leader, it may actually be better to tell people "Hurry up and join the conservative party, so you can vote in their internal leader selection process, which will effectively be choosing the next premier post-election".

It's almost starting to feel like the NDP did it to get out of their commitments, because they realised a bunch of their commitments couldn't work for some reason. Like they'd had budget balancing issues for a while, and they can't do anything about UNDRIP controlling their agenda, etc etc -- so they threw their hands up and pushed their long list of issues onto the next people, with the intent of using what results as leverage for their next campaign cycle. "If we'd just been kept in power, we could've completed all these things we had promised, started, and then bailed on to call a stupid election last time around! Vote us back in!".

Not at all surprising. Microsoft is already doing similar sorts of things it seems. Like on a work system, I was looking at one of our vendor sites, and Edge's AI assistant started recommending places I could get a cheaper deal for items that I stopped to look at for a bit too long. So not only do you get a shittier slop infested product in Edge, but it's also pretty much an AI powered adware that watches every page you visit, and you can't easily get rid of it / its monitoring.

Well, I mean, the AI advances have moved the mean time to exploit between a zero day being announced, and it actively being exploited en masse, from about 3 weeks in 2018, to about -1 day in 2026. So, things have changed a bit.

Branding people who vote for changes in immigration policy as racist is wrong, and blaming an amorphous "rich" group of people is bigotry. Calling me a racist for discussing this topic / expressing sound, fact-based views, is not convincing in the slightest.

I see no point to you highlighting your personal position, nor in your lame personal attacks. You say I should look at facts, I state a bunch of facts. Now you pivot and say "no no, you need to look at a broad stroke big picture that's based on ideologies and theoretical stuff". So we're doing personal attacks and moving goal posts here, neato.

It's almost hilarious to see the steam next gongshow, juxtaposed with all these studio closures.

Someone made a comment recently in another thread about the prevalence of shitty bootleg/noname games all over the place back in the 80s, and how nintendo started putting a gold seal of authenticity on their games as a kind of quality assurance for gamers. That's what game studios are now, to some extent, for me, with the new flood of AI garbage. Killing off studios known for making quality products is a terrible strategy.

Well, sure, it went to shit once they got gobbled by EA -- both ME and DAO were released so close to the acquisition by EA, that they were clearly made primarily under the old, more indie, setup. But it's still a studio that I remember fondly, generally, and would still check their new releases when they came out (even if I didn't play them).

To me they're in the same general boat as a studio like Relic. I played the early Dawn of War games quite a bit. After they got gobbled by... Sega? I think? I sorta lost touch with their games in terms of buying them/playing them, because they just didn't seem to hit the same. I think they got sold off to a venture capital group now, but it's still a company that I at least look at their games when they announce stuff. I'd put others like ID software, or even some publishers like Paradox, in this group too.

Blindly blaming immigrants is wrong / prejudiced. Discussing the damage / problems caused by shitty immigration policies isn't. You're toe'ing an ideological line that's ridiculous, counter productive and doesn't advance the conversation at all.

Blindly faulting "the rich" is just as prejudiced as blindly faulting immigrants. 'The rich' in this case are older immigrants, and non-first gen locals, who bought homes when they were cheap / immigration policies were more sound. Locals who had invested in a second rental unit for a second income stream, because they had some capital from early-entry to the housing market / familial ties to people who'd gotten that chance, did so because our immigration policies made it practically the only sound investment in Canada. Even if you reallly really really want to blame those "rich people", their actions were still resulting from our shitty approach to immigration / population growth. So it's STILL appropriate to discuss changing immigration policies.

That gets added to a note that our population growth is entirely based on immigration levels. So if our housing-construction is lagging behind our population growth by so much that housing prices go crazy, immigration levels / policies are CLEARLY part of the issue. There's an imbalance in the scales.

And as for facts, again, the facts say that when our approach to immigration did an about-face under Trudeau's liberals, housing prices followed suit. That's a fact. Changing immigration policies impacts housing, and impacts other social services. Those are facts, I'm facing them, so what am I supposed to do now? Ignore them, re-label regular middle class Canadians as "the rich", and blindly blame that group of people, instead of blaming immigrants (which isn't what I did before, since I was highlighting policies/approaches to immigration). Yea, no thanks.

So, while I get that these will likely be abused given Smith's general approach, I think gilmore's take is wonky/missing some data. It's also failing to read the room for many locals...

Mark Miller was the immigration minister for a long time, and was the one largely responsible for the huge immigration spike post covid that sent prices/rents skyrocketing again, and triggered massive affordability issues. He was in the press constantly saying Canada needs as much immigration as it can get, and that narratives about immigrants causing strain / issues for locals were fake news. Then, he got put on to the housing file, and suddenly he did an about face: high levels of immigration were causing issues, so the federal government needed to cap it. Housing/Rent prices have been coming down ever since immigration got capped by the Federal government -- Vancouver just reported that housing prices are down another 4% yoy since last sept.

Infrastructure such as housing and medical services are under provincial jurisdiction, but immigration is under federal, generally (Quebec gets special treatment, which allows many 'backdoor' entries where the immigrant goes through Quebec, then immediately resettles elsewhere). Canada's population grows/shrinks almost entirely based on immigration. In order to plan for capacity on provincially regulated/controlled critical infrastructure, you need a predictable population growth pattern. Further, when growth is entirely via immigration, you need time for those new immigrants to acclimatize and 'get settled' into professional positions / fields of work, and for them to adopt Canadian cultural values.

The fed allowing a massive influx of immigrants DID fuck up govt services and their ability to function. Our own AG noted that our immigration fraud investigators couldn't come close to keeping up with the reports of student visa fraud -- 2000 cases investigated per year, for 75000 cases reported. Hell, I work with a bunch of immigrants, some fairly recent, and I've heard a bunch of them say things like "We thought we'd be able to afford a home, but things went crazy" and "We thought we'd be able to get medical care/a family doctor, but the wait times are years out. We may aswell go back home to get treated".

Gilmore's daft for pretending like provinces wanting more control over this area isn't a valid concern.

eh, we're looking at a grim future either way at this point.

Only way I can picture the world cutting by that amount, is if there's a massive collapse of western civilization / the wealthy get purged, and technology goes backwards. We won't do that willingly, so the world will instead continue its trajectory, with the worst of climate change impact hitting poor people -- and rich people / wealthy people using their assets to eek out a mediocre lifestyle in the future. I doubt we'd totally die off, barring something truly cataclysmic.

All these people talking about treason and accountability for Elon.... he's helping Russia. Russia is America's ally, not Ukraine. Ukraine is a smaller country, one that America wants to loot for minerals/resources once the war ends. Don Trump Jr married a Russian oligarch's asset, had a wedding party paid for by that oligarch. They are more than friends, they are family, in the same way that old 'royal' families settled disputes by marrying their children off.

Why would Elon's actions be considered treasonous/wrong, when he's helping America's friends? If Ukraine wanted to be friends with America, they should've sent busloads of young girls to the white house as tribute, not some war-weary Zelenski guy.

Just to be clear to any American thinking this is satirical -- it's not. America is friendly/helping dictators and fascists all over the place. Your country quite literally declared "Anti-fascists" the enemy. I don't think anyone would be at all surprised, for example, if Trump took a vacation to North Korea's weird 'resort' town, to hang out with Kim Jong.

Yeah, so bear sex and any combo of boobs and dicks for characters is a go, and Larian gets awards, and suddenly the indie studio gets huge. I can't imagine bear sex getting the green light in something like a microsoft game. It'd almost definitely get removed by the review, out of concern of getting sued for all kinds of reasons. Larian could take that gamble, and even after winning awards, it isn't such a well known company as to draw the interests of people like predatory lawyers seeking class action settlements for turning kids on to furry futa sex. Even with their win fall, it's not the sort of honeypot for lawsuits as a big corp like MS or EA.

I've heard stories from people that work on Microsoft games, about how they have whole departments/teams that do things like equity and representation reviews to try and ensure that products are not pushing any potentially offensive stereotype.

It's a ton of added overhead for anything with a narrative, if your company is big enough to get sued by special interest groups.

One reason smaller companies can put out interesting indie games, is because they can focus on the gameplay instead of big social/political issues.

Yeah, reading's hard. I agree. You should prolly try something like X or Bluesky, with short posts and less nuance.

The issue people have with that sentiment, is that the system does not allow certain change -- and/or is designed to specifically prevent change.

For example, to get a constitutional change, you need to have 7 provinces, representing 50% of the population on board. In some cases, you need to get every province to agree, such as changing how the provinces are represented in the house. That's in addition to getting the house/senate to approve, of course.

So if we're talking about the referendum questions alberta listed that weren't explicitly about separation, and instead about constitutional change to get more autonomy options for the provinces, it's nearly impossible to achieve within the current system. Ontario represents ~40% of the country's population, so they'd need either Ontario to agree, or practically every other province to get on board. BC's got 14% of the population, so even with every province, if BC and Ontario say 'nah', it's blocked. Quebec has 22% of the population, and has parties that explicitly demand hand outs for Quebec in addition to any law other provinces want to pass, because they generally hate Canada/federalism, so again, blocked most likely. If you're trying to get more equitable representation for western provinces, the maritimes/quebec would block it, as they benefit from the west being under-represented (note: the only three provinces with fewer seats in the house than their % of the population, are Ontario, BC and Alberta).

If you're trying to amend the distribution to get more equity for people out west, they need the people out east to agree to giving up their privilege. It's not realistic that they'd do so, or that anyone would do so (if the west had leverage like that, I would not be at all surprised if the western leaders refused to be equitable to the east).

So the other more realistic option is to nope out of that system, and separate. Even just that threat, has gotten Quebec preferential treatment/perks from the fed -- and it's been implied that it's why the fed was so gung ho for pipelines lately, in terms of Alberta making those sorts of threats. It's sorta like the Women's Suffrage movements to get women the vote from decades ago -- men weren't just going to suddenly 'choose' to be equitable, people had to start breaking shit/rebelling to get attention, and progress.

Meh, I don't see this as a huge issue, and contrary to what the knee-jerk reaction is on lemmy, not all conservative actions are fascist.

Reading what it's actually about, I'm not immediately opposed to the idea, and I tend to vote green (did this time around too, both municipal and prov). It's like Kinew said regarding residential school denial -- it's abhorrent, but shouldn't be illegal. People should be free to openly discuss pretty well anything, and to voice opinions.

Yes, schools/businesses/people should also have the freedom to basically dismiss/distance themselves from people expressing views they find abhorrent. If the guy noted in the bill was creating a hostile work environment, and/or promoting a message wildly out of line with the corporate line (or public sector narrative), fire him. But allowing a pseudo court to fine him $750k? That's going over board.

Besides, a bunch of the rhetoric that gets thrown around seems really stupid to me. The older generation, even many of us older millennials, went through an education system that didn't use the term "CIS". Men were men, women were women, others were something else, "m/f/x". The left-wing special interests basically redefined how that stuff is organised/taught. When an old person says "biological men can't be women", the translation to "young person speak" is more along the lines of them saying "trans women can't be CIS women". When older people say trans people don't belong in women's sports, it's again, this issue at play -- the older generation understands sports categories to be 'cis men' and 'cis women'. Left-wing interests redefined what a woman is, and then expected the older generation to just accept non-cis people, even when those categories are setup due to, generally, biological parity between competitor categories: it's why the narrative on this front is always about MTF competitors dominating women's sports. We've progressively made all that stuff more and more annoying and, unnecessarily, complicated.

Like I've heard people arguing that CIS etc is the proper verbiage, and has been used by university level biology for decades and decades. And all I can think is how absurd it is to expect the common person to use university level verbiage.

Maybe. I'm not so sure socialism would really change anything though, on the aggregate in terms of climate collapses.

Socialism isn't by default Eco-friendly / Eco-conscientious. Capitalism tends to have all the benefits from climate destroying stuff go to a capitalist class -- socialism could easily take the form of still pushing climate destroying stuff, but distributing the benefits to the masses. Depending on the scale of the change (which is likely to be massive), diversifying the benefits could result in no human surviving, rather than just a subset of the wealthy.

For a random example to explain the thought, really 'loose' example admittedly. Under socialism, theoretically you'd have a fairer distribution of wealth so that housing would be more equitable -- most people would get a simple starter-type home to live in. Rich person doomsday bunker type homes would be almost unheard of, as no individual would amass so much wealth that they could build em. In the socialist approach, each individual home has a smaller climate footprint, but the volume of homes built could have a similar net impact on the environment in the aggregate. So if it gets so bad that you need a bunker, humanity all dies together, equitably?

.... ah, I see, nuance and the finer art of subtle jabs are lost on you. You completely missed the point, twice. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, since you admitted you don't retain things you read, and/or you don't bother to read posts before replying.

She leaned on the scales to give this movement momentum -- she wasn't on the fence. Even her comments about how there won't be another referendum/vote "as long as I'm premier" is basically her providing the path forward for more bullshit. "Replace me as the leader of the party, and continue on people!".

So, my strata complex banned smoking earlier this year. It was a bylaw adjustment that had been proposed pretty much every year for the decade+ I've been in the building. It was voted down, year after year, until this year. This year, the group that wanted to ban it, just happened to get the right mix of people in the AGM to pass the amendment by 1 vote. A bunch of the pro-smoking sorts (pot heads generally) had grown tired of constantly voting it down, had assumed this years vote would go the same, and didn't show up.

Attempting to rescind the change is nearly impossible, especially as the 'indifferent' people in the building generally just prefer to vote for the status quo, whatever that happens to be at the time -- and as the younger generation that increasingly moves in, has been taught smoking is unequivocally bad and anyone that does it is bad.

The point is, that whether its right wing or left wing, a progressive or conservative movement, persistence can yield results, even if you don't change your approach / message at all -- you just need to wear down the undecideds, and wait for just the right mix of voters, to completely break existing norms to a point that they can't be rebuilt.

Hell, just look at the USA as a case in point. Extremist elements did their thing. The separatists are now moving to likely take over the whole conservative party in Alberta, by controlling a majority of the 'base' supporters. So, no, the separatist "madness" won't go away.

Especially because, at its core, there are justifiable reasons for western provinces to feel alienated/like an afterthought for the rest of the country. Even BC's conservative party is moving towards separatist motifs. BC has 43 seats in parliament -- with about 13-14% of the Canadian population. The Maritime provinces, all combined, have about 5% of the country's population, and like 32-33 seats. A riding in BC's lower mainland tends to have 120k people in it -- ridings in PEI have less than 50k people. A BC voter is far less represented in the house than voters in the maritimes. The Maritimes are ok with this, because they like having outsized power for their actual size/contribution to the country -- few people would willingly give up power, and they're no exception. The Liberals are ok with this, because the maritimes are one of their core electoral power houses. The people in power, who often moan about equity and inclusion, would rather leave the imbalance in place and make out like western alienation is a fiction -- which just feeds into the cycle of alienating the west.

Meh, I think tax alterations today, should be looking forward to what's coming tomorrow, personally. And neither the green nor NDP has really addressed a big elephant in the room. (and obviously the cons are just clusterfucking their way through the election)

I view AI as over-hyped, but there's an implication of the technology in regards to taxation, especially as AI services are a "digital service" from the USA. Canadians may recall that the USA basically went ballistic when the fed was trying to put in a digital services tax. There's no explicit tax on digital services sold by the USA to Canada as far as I'm aware.

So a company replaces a worker with an AI agent. What's the tax impact? You go from a citizen earning $65k/year and paying roughly $18k in income tax, to an AI agent that costs a business say $12k/year and has no tax (it's a tax write off even, similar to buying Office365 or whatever). The company providing that AI Agent may earn a bunch of money and get taxed in the USA. But Canada loses the revenue.