1,520 karma · joined August 18, 2013
When they left China it started to sound like highly personalized hate speech. I initially assumed that it was because they were upset at having their livelihoods up-ended and a sense of rejection. But... initially they had great plans for wide-ranging travel documentaries which did not seem to pan out ... so it seems like the next-best thing is Five Minutes Hate against our enemies in East Asia.
Sad to see them degenerate, but not living there now they are not much of a source of information.
For anyone that enjoyed this I recommend _The_Ditch_ (a BBC Radio 4 play) which features coastal bird recordings by one of the Cabaret Voltaire founders. It's a bit hard to obtain, but a worthwhile combination of soundscape and spooky suspense.
https://chriswatson.net/2010/01/30/bbc-radio-4-drama-1st-feb...
Chris Watson has a bunch of other recording, some of which are on e.g. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI88g_0MGyk
Here is NM's response:
If you are 183 days or more (or whatever the current requirement is ¹) present in Canada then you are a Canadian resident and must pay Canadian taxes.
IANAL but I have been in this situation.
1. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/interna...
2) Asserting that it is possible to build our own platforms. But then we will see censorship like this at the level of Cloudflare, search indices, financial transaction processors all the way down to ISPs themselves. And that's even ignoring the problem of how to bootstrap (e.g. Parler) into something that enough people know about to make it useful.
I find #2 implausible at this point although I like the DIY ethos of it.
Ignoring the availability of regulation which exists and will be used by someone, is not helping ourselves to a tool that can be effective.
As a direct answer to the question posed by the article: it seems possible that this was a warning action carried out because Novara Media were the sole media organization livestreaming the Assange Belmarsh event.
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/19673522.brighton-mps-slam-y...
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foo...
And as to the more general argument you can get away with it as long as you have been voting for every proposal to increase taxes to pay for public transport and prevent centralization of services and stores.
I'm afraid I do not buy it. I have lived in what are supposed to be the most car-bound US environments and also in the countryside and it is all a matter of choice: not just personal choice (which I will agree can be a displacement from central planning), but most especially of people choosing low taxation over public services every time.
I can't see how you can possibly continue to live as you have done with your 2000Kg of metal. In fact it's looking very probable that you will be accelerating a decline in many aspects of your life.
Why would anyone take the risk of messing with that?
It's as though they assume that there will be generalized devastation but there will be some "safe place" which some powerful group can defend and use.
Instead it's possible that maybe for one year New Zealand will be great, but then there will be no rain for 10 years, while previously uninhabitable Brighton (UK) will be a lush, tropical paradise for a couple of decades. Everyone will haul their gear to Brighton and massacre the indigenous, but then everything will change again, etc.
Or we could stop driving 2000Kg of metal to get to our jobs or buy a bag of chips and keep all the tourists at home that are destroying Venice and leaving their feces and plastic containers all over the Himalayas.
And even this assumes that there is some sort of linear progression towards a semi-stable state instead of churning, unpredictable "seasons" for tens of thousands of years before the climate settles into something.
Taking a massive gamble on injecting huge amounts of energy into a system which looks like it will be destabilized is just..... foolish? stupid? I dunno.
According to the Canadaland podcast there is a recent survey taken during the federal election campaign which suggests that 1 in 4 voters still do not accept anthropogenic climate change as real.
I am baffled.
Most of us would benefit from some sort of Green New Deal with a re-organization of the economy. I can completely understand the top 5 or 10 percent balking at any shake up of the system on purely economic advantage grounds, but what about all the other 85%? And even with a shake-up I find it hard to believe that any productive/active members of the 5 to 10 percent would not thrive relatively in any new situation and indeed be better off than in a severely disrupted environment.
Something other than rationality is going on here.
Failing to differentiate between these things makes me wonder are you some sort of animist?
Seeing the greenspaces of my childhood filled-in with shoddy-looking, expensive housing was shocking. Fingal County Council planning department seem to be giving the go-ahead to build any and every piece of rubbish using the excuse of "housing crisis" that you mention.
I just returned from visiting Dublin (mainly the Northside) after several years away and was irritated by: ridiculous levels of private vehicle usage; broken in-carriage electronic stop announcements on the DART (light electric rail); difficulty in planning trips connecting dublin bus/iarnrod eireann/dart; bus stops without proper shelters; drivers parking on the pavement(sidewalk); lack of courtesy from drivers at non-signalized intersection. On a positive note I will say that all (especially Dublin Bus drivers) personnel interacted with on an individual level were wonderful.
Mass tourism seems to destroy anything that makes tourism rationally attractive in the first place. Maybe we can sell these people a different dream?
Returning in 2014 it was different. Most of the lush jungle on the road to Ubud was gone. Many of the rice paddies had disappeared, replaced by resorts and large concrete dwellings. Ubud was now a town, its streets jammed with tourist buses, and taxis full of tourists like me, its population of 70,000 or so swelling to accommodate three million visitors per year.
Jesus.
If Quebec did not enforce language laws then English would end up driving out French except for decorative, heritage functions.
The result of the language laws is that we have a part of North America strongly bound in to not just a significant part of the EU but also to Vietnam, large parts of Africa and the rest of la Francophonie. Not a bad thing at all.
Both the proprietary nVidia driver and the nouveau driver would not work reliably for me. I ran into kernel error messages and hard-freezes, with even SSH sessions to the machine breaking.
Nvidia GPUs are still the number one problem. Buying anything with Nvidia in it is a waste of money. Closed source binary drivers that only work sometimes is acceptable for gamers but not if you want a reliable, controlled machine.