24
Book printers that print in Canada?
(lemmy.ca)
37
Residents of Barrhead vote in favour of bylaw banning rainbow flags, crosswalks
(edmontonjournal.com)
It's not obscure, but, for me, Wikipedia is the ultimate example of the old internet that still persists today.
Free to use, no account required, ad free, non-corporate, multilingual, heavily biased toward text, simple and utilitarian design. Hyperlinks concatenate relevant pieces of information, which serve as the means to navigate the site. The code is very simple (seriously, view the page source of a wikipiedia article). It's based on the human desire to learn and share knowledge with others, and has remained resilient to corruption by commercial interests that pervert that desire for monetary gain. It's a beautiful thing.
Even if the Liberals somehow manage to find a credible, electable leader that doesn't end up being a Michael Ignatieff 2.0, I see no reason to trust that they won't deliver more of the same bullshit.
When it comes to leadership in American politics, it's said that democrats fall in love, and republicans fall in line.
I don't want to fall in love. The past decade of Canadian politics has been a parade of 'charisma' and it hasn't gotten us anywhere. I want a sincere and straightforward leader, who won't get embroiled in scandals, has a strong stance on foreign policy, a plan for foreign interference, the housing & affordability crisis, and an ability to deal with issues in a straightforward and policy-focused way. I guess what I'm trying to say is I want a prime minister with a short skirt and a long jacket.
An election must be in the air, he's saying the thing again.
What we know as whisky maturation is a dance between 4 interrelated processes - infusion, evaporation, oxidation, and other chemical reactions. These all happen together, and very nicely, when whisky sits in oak barrels for an extended period of time.
Colour, and oak flavour are infused into the whisky simply by sitting in the barrel. The whisky will slowly evaporate while inside the barrel as well. Volatile compounds evaporate, making the whisky smoother, deeper, and more complex with age. Fascinating chemical reactions happen between compounds in the wood, and in the whisky. As ethanol degrades lignin, for example, it creates new compounds, which themselves interact with other molecules and compounds in solution.
The age statement on a bottle of whisky refers to the time it spent in a barrel, doing those lovely things.
Common wisdom is that the whisky is done changing when it goes into glass. Certainly, infusion and evaporation are finished. But! Oxidation, and reactions between compounds in the whisky itself will continue, even in a sealed glass bottle. Usually this happens too slowly to notice, or the bottle gets drank before a change can be observed, but change certainly happens.
Long story short - whisky won't go bad. In fact, sometimes it even goes 'good'! I had the chance to try a young single malt, that was bottled in the 1970s. It was wonderful, and had signature aroma and flavour characteristics of a very old whisky. This is due to slow oxidation, and the glacial interaction between esters and congeners over time, which will happen no matter what vessel the whisky is in.
Whisky that has been exposed to too much oxygen, like if the bottle sits nearly empty for a long time, or has a bad seal, will often end up tasting flat and bland. But 'good' or 'bad' at this point, is a subjective matter. Only one way to find out!
This is the sort of thing that the old internet could really deliver on. Chances are, a search query could lead you to some guy's hoodie blog, and he just liked hoodies, and posted honestly about them.
Now, it's all a mess of SEO pumped affiliate link lists filled with crapware. If the query is even thinkable, there will be AI generated pages stuffed with sponsored links, ready and waiting for you. And with search engines preferring recent results, that's the type of page you'll be served.
I've had decent luck using marginalia search to seek out some of those old internet type results. Obscurity works as a barrier to corporate infiltration. Plus you get page results that don't have a million tracking and analytics scripts running on them, which is refreshing.
As a user, 'privacy preserving attribution' is unappealing for a few reasons.
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It seems it would overwhelmingly benefit a type of website that I think is toxic for the internet as a whole - AI generated pages SEO'd to the gills that are designed exclusively as advertisement delivery instruments.
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It's a tool that quantitatively aids in the refinement of clickbait, which I believe is an unethical abuse of human psychology.
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Those issues notwithstanding, it's unrealistic to assume that PPA will make the kind of difference that Mozilla thinks it might. I believe it's naive to imagine that any advertiser would prefer PPA to the more invasive industry standard methods of tracking. It would be nice if that wasn't the case, but, I don't see how PPA would be preferable for advertisers, who want more data, not less.
As a user, having more of my online activity available and distributed doesn't help or benefit me in any way.
This is insanity. Any MP who is proven to have aided a foreign actor in interference operations needs to be removed from Parliament immediately, and prosecuted.
Not going to steal, but definitely will boycott for the month of May.
As a millennial with a not-amazing but decent paying job, the notion of retirement at all is laughable. What incentive do people like me have to save, when inflation and cost of living are on the trajectory that they're currently on? Putting money away at this point just means less money for groceries, rent, and enjoyable things. And in 5 years, that saved money will be worth less than it is today.
Man, fuck these UCP idiots.
Provincial governments need to work closely with the federal government. The provincial government actually has a responsibility to establish and nurture that relationship, and not simply throw temper tantrums when the relationship isn't what they want it to be. When the UCP chooses to be oppositional and obstructive like this, it hurts Alberta citizens, and makes life worse.
There are a lot of things I love about Alberta. But if the next provincial election shows that a majority of the citizens truly want a provincial government that behaves like this, I'm outta here.
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True. Alliances are key for Canadian sovereignty and security. The nation should be cementing existing relationships with maximum effort. As patriotic as myself and other Canadians feel these days, it must be acknowledged - no imaginable scenario exists in which Canada alone has enough military might to act as a deterrent against US aggression.
Imagine that a fully functional nuclear arsenal wasn't a generation away, and Canada had one right now. Even then, if the US made the insane decision that Canada was lebensraum, our nation's military might alone could not prevent that.
I'm not even against a Canadian nuclear weapons program per se. But it makes no sense for Canada to pursue a nuclear weapons program right now, if the objective is to hold off a US threat. It's comforting to imagine that there's some panacea to the threats that Canada is facing right now, but I don't see how nuclear fits that bill in any way.
It's unfortunate that we even have to think these things. But anyway, that's my 2c.