There are a lot of ethical concerns around Chinese worker treatment, economic concerns around Chinese subsidies driving the price down, privacy concerns around Chinese tech’s tendency to phone home, geopolitical concerns around giving China even more power in our nation…

But honestly, same. Nowadays I can’t get a car at a decent price in a decent time frame, even worse if I want an EV, so what’s the expectation? The auto industry has dropped the ball so hard that China would trivially dominate the EV industry if they were allowed to compete. That’s bad, but it’s so bad because the local industry isn’t even in the ballpark of good enough.

Nenshi was a good mayor with a meh council and his frustration with dumb political issues came forth in ways that felt like actual human emotions, even if some people thought he was arrogant.

He was pretty obviously the right choice here. Everyone’s platforms were basically the same. Ganley and Stonehouse are basically unknown, and Hoffman is more known for being the overweight health minister than anything else, unfair though that may be. He is the most recognizable of the leadership candidates by a mile, he has actual demonstrated leadership abilities we hardly see from anyone nowadays, and Calgarians generally like him. The only major downside is that he’s not a currently sitting MLA, but he would probably win any riding in Calgary handily.

Calgary is pretty much a swing city at this point, since Edmonton goes mostly NDP and the smaller regions mostly go UCP, so someone Calgary can get behind is automatically a huge bonus. There’s a better chance of seeing another NDP government under him than basically anyone else in the province.

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

Notwithstanding the four Cabinet documents, federal departments and agencies withheld or refused the disclosure of over a thousand documents, in whole or in part, on the basis that they were Cabinet confidences.

Wait, is this even a Liberal thing then? It sounds like they requested information from federal departments and those departments said “We have these documents but cannot share them due to Cabinet confidence.” That doesn’t sound like it involves a single elected entity, nevermind a Liberal one.

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

I feel the same way regarding whether this legislation would be enforceable or good, but there are a lot of ways developers could make this work that they currently don’t. That includes bot players, local multiplayer functionality, dedicated server tools, IP-based connections, etc. Many DRM and anti-cheat implementations also cause problems and would need to be either removed or only used in certain contexts.

Right now in a lot of games if you aren’t playing multiplayer on official servers through official matchmaking functions with invasive kernel-level anti-cheat there’s no other way to play, but that hasn’t always been the case nor does it need to be the case.

Honestly, it’s halfway correct, if I need to go into the office I’d rather be able to interact with people IRL. Most of my work unit tries to be there on Mondays for that reason.

The caveats are that I’d still rather not be there at all and that our office sucks so most people are at least as effective at home anyways.

Just to be clear, a majority of wildfire response efforts are provincial and CAF basically gets called in when resources are tapped out across the country. And Quebec actually did privatize their wildfire emergency response a while back, although I don’t know the details on how that compares against their public agency. And lots of bits and pieces of response are either privatized or partially privatized in many provinces, such as aircraft and helicopter resourcing.

All that said: yeah, CAF just needs to be trained better for emergency response functions. It’s most of what we use our armed forces for anyways. I’ve heard plenty of stories of CAF being deployed and then sitting around for a week because their radios aren’t compatible and they don’t know how to integrate into a unified command structure. These are the things that need to be sorted out, not throwing more money at more entities who can complicate things.

Yep.

If there is one part of Canadian culture that can be said to be consistent across geographic and ideological lines, it’s a connection to the land and the natural world. Our country is practically built on trekking through forests and canoeing down rivers. A national park pass is one of the simplest ways to encourage people to engage with that, and if there’s one thing I’d like newcomers to do here it’s to engage with our culture.

Man I can’t believe we’re giving newcomers easier access to the truly wonderful and remarkable parts of our nation, thus giving them something to actually love about Canada. How horrible.

There are still a couple of donuts that are good despite the severe drop in quality (apparently not even they can fuck up the honey cruller) but yeah, it used to be a thought process on which of a bunch of donuts I wanted when people brought in a box, and now it’s a crapshoot whether I even care.

Nord Light was also pretty good when I tried it. I waffle back and forth between light and dark themes now and then and there’s always a few good options that brighten the space without flashbanging you.

Considering there seems to be minimal changes to the game and the graphics honestly didn’t need any updates beyond what the GameCube could put out, I am still unreasonably excited for this game. I played the everliving fuck out of TTYD through my teens. Tempted to mess around with a danger Mario build for the first time in more than a decade.

I’m curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn’t expect they’d be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there’s some more niche target they have.

Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don’t know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it’s not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.

A lot of bits in that article sound weird but on the whole the traditional retire-at-65 concept is definitely fading away. I think it underplays how much of that is affordability (how many people even think they’ll be able to retire at 65?) but even then I’m seeing friends take long breaks from work regardless of retirement, I’m seeing people work less traditional jobs that they can find different fulfillment in, and I know a rare few who are past retirement age and asked if it was okay to keep working because they love what they do.

I’m personally planning on retiring at 55 when my pension hits the point that it can easily support me, even if another decade of work would grow it further. Who needs money when you have another decade of healthy life? As we learn more about longevity and aging it’s looking more like I’ll have more healthy years ahead of me than any of my grandparents did and I may as well use them.

As a wee lad I rented it a few times. I never actually figured out how to play it, I just ran around and died but I liked the vibe of it.