qball

Because there's zero electoral accountability, and the voting bloc that insist it be that way are so obsessed with importing all the bad parts of the Commonwealth here that this will not change for the foreseeable future.

That Commonwealth, of course, imports all the cultural ideas and outlooks Coastal Americans have with about a 5 year delay, usually with anti-Americanism as the excuse, at the expense of the local culture.

This is just what happens when you import American politics without the American system that restrains it to just being noise.

Most parents are too afraid of the State kidnappers (and the Karens who call them) for that.

No.

Historically, this just ends up with Toronto and Montreal (and to a more limited extent, Vancouver) treating the rest of the country as a resource colony. The pretense that consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed is, naturally, very useful to you.

If you do that again, as you did in the '60s, Canada will only be Toronto and Montreal.

Legacy and marketing have as much to do with it as local variations in how bores are actually measured do.

All the .38s and 9mms of the world are just slight variations on .36" round ball, .44 caliber pistols are generally .429", there's a .45" pistol caliber labelled .460 (.454 also counts), .50 BMG is actually .510", calibers claimed to be "7.62mm" use either a .308" or .311" projectile depending on the country of origin and sometimes not even then (France and Switzerland call this size 7.5mm, Argentina called this 7.65mm, Japan called it 7.7mm, the British called it .303), "8mm" can be either a .318" or .323" projectile, .32s are all .312" diameter, but one cartridge that uses this same projectile labels it as .30 and another .327.

The same 5.7mm projectile (.224") is used in cartridges that claim to have a diameter of .220, .221, .222, .223, .224, .225, 5.6mm, 5.56mm, and 5.7mm.

.277" projectiles are used in cartridges that call themselves 6.8mm, .270, .277; same thing with .284" projectiles used in cartridges that call themselves 7mm and .280.

>It’s not even clear that Boomers are that much more likely to be NIMBYs

Most Boomers aren't NIMBYs, but most NIMBYs are Boomers.

This is a thing that uniquely threatens them because their home is their primary investment, so anything that can be leveraged to keep prices high, they'll do. Environmentalism is usually the weapon they reach for, and because they have nothing but time, they have the advantage when it comes to a court system that privileges this kind of retireded spam.

>Social security

This is more because everyone under 40 or so doesn't trust social security will even be around for them to collect, so that group sees it, correctly, as an unfair wealth transfer from young to old. Combine that with the above, and combine that with the abject refusal to even entertain basic reforms (which goes double for non-US nations), and that's where the resentment comes from. Throwing good years after bad ones.

Ignoring, of course, the fact you're already waking up in total darkness in Standard time.

At least with perma-DST you at least get daylight once you leave work; with perma-Standard you don't get that either.

>Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.

Or in other words, they've been priced out of the market.

If there will be no sociofinancial niche for their children to inhabit this is in fact the rational course of action. See also: South Korean current birth rates.

>it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car

A smaller car has less space for battery than an SUV. Because batteries are extremely heavy, that smaller car needs to be overbuilt compared to its gasoline counterpart, which further reduces room for battery. Then, because safety standards are harder to meet with small cars, the smaller car needs to be overbuilt even more.

This means that you get cars that only have half the range a gasoline-powered car does, and the gas powered car recharges an order of magnitude faster than the EV does. Oh yeah, and the people who buy smaller cars like this tend to live in places where there's no charging other than going to a gas station anyway.

It wouldn't sell on the US market because better alternatives exist. It could sell on the Chinese market because there are no better alternatives.

And that law is incredibly and hideously stupid, as it's a heckler's veto on having cool stuff.

The Internet is basically the final frontier where this harmful law doesn't reach, though the Karens are really trying to expand their power there.

Everybody hates teenagers, so yes.

It's not really about protecting them; people that claim this is the case are generally doing so to launder that hatred.

The big stuff, sure, but the French state's small-arms capacity (while once impressive) has atrophied to the point of non-existence.

They rely on the Germans (and to a point, Czechs) to supply their military these days.

>Apple has never had better hardware (on mobile).

This is just straight up false. Qualcomm's current top of the line processors are about 3 years behind what you can get in Apple's cheapest product (that being the 16e), and the budget phones (and by "budget" I mean "the 600 dollar ones") are another 3 years behind that.

iPhones don't generally become too slow to realistically use until their support lifetime expires. Androids are like that out of the box unless you spend over a thousand dollars, and those only last for about half the time (a combination of inferior hardware and inferior software). It doesn't matter if you have a 120Hz screen if the UI only updates at 20.

This is why the only killer feature for Android (outside the cameras) is adblocking- which, of course, is what Google wants to prevent. They don't want you to run real Firefox (with the only effective adblock remaining), and they want you to pay for YouTube Premium rather than using NewPipe (or some other ReVanced successor) so you can't get out of paying 10 bucks to listen to a video with the screen off.

No.

The reason Light Mode has been getting lighter is simple: because the default computer in 2025 is now a laptop or phone, whereas in 2009 it was a desktop.

Laptops and phones have easy and relatively coarse brightness adjustment settings for their screens. Desktops didn't, and still don't.

So it makes sense that you'd just make whites as bright as possible- if the user doesn't like that, they can just turn the brightness down. Otherwise you're just kind of leaving the monitor's available/potential contrast on the table.

Note that Dark Modes skyrocketed in popularity after the default computer changed from being a desktop to a laptop- but that's because laptop and phone screens couldn't (and still can't) get dim enough at night (for dark colors are still bright due to inherent backlight bleed-through).

The next change to this trend will occur, specifically to Dark Mode, 1-2 years after the average machine a software designer is issued for work has an OLED screen- because OLED screens actually can get that dim, the current color balance will likely be inappropriate.

And media lies by omission.

Additionally, all ICE cars can charge from 0-100% in under 5 minutes. Even if their towing range was somehow less than an EV, it would matter less because you don't have to spend an hour at a charging station.

No, it's an aversion to having (and enforcing) basic standards.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

The old, the prime beneficiaries, can fight for themselves.

Elbows up!

The regulatory environment in Alberta is such that it permits housing to be built, and it does.

The same cannot be said of Toronto (or everywhere else in the nation that isn't the Prairies for similar reasons), for landed interests and the bureaucracy and corruption that comes with them are a lot more entrenched in that area.

No, you just happened to build appropriately because a certain subfaction of the population weren't able to pass the typical laws that would stop building.

The housing shortage was created by regulation and it's foolish or selfish to pretend otherwise.

Austin is unique in that most of the harmful self-serving conservatism-as-in-block-and-deny-all-development that city people usually to do is constrained by the rest of the state, and as an obvious result arguably has the highest standard of living in the entire world.

>Automatics have been more efficient than manuals for decades.

No, they haven't. At least, not ones the average consumer could actually buy.

While it's true that modern 8 or 10 speed automatic transmissions do now compete favorably with 6 speed manuals, the former didn't meaningfully exist in passenger cars or trucks until around 2017. Neither did DCTs outside of high-end brands- sure, they're starting to do that now that "torque converter loss" means they don't pass emissions, but that was an option that commanded a premium back in the mid-00s when they were introduced (and still not actually more efficient than a manual outside of shift speed).

An automatic with 4 gears is less efficient than a manual with 5, much less 6 (this was the standard until about 2010 or so); one with 6 gears is likely on par with the 5-speed manual (and loses to a 6-speed, obviously).

So no, "decades" is bullshit. It's a very recent advancement.

You will still care that you're wasting a bunch of your engine's potential, even with a V8.

Autos (not DCTs) don't generally let you rev the engine as high as manuals do, they don't really let you take advantage of engine braking, and they may ignore your command to manually shift them into a lower gear at will (DCTs can do that too).

It'll throw a code, just like it does if you forget to put DEF in. It's not a malfunction, they just want you to think it is.

"Car won't start because the radio failed to update" and "insurance company tracking and other telemetry" are not just zero value, but net-negative.

So nothing of value is lost.

The attitude that the computers should always be subordinate to the driver also extends to the transmission.

Yes, this is exactly what this does.

The converse is also true, however.

If, for example, society sees fit to deprive me of my right to security (for instance, perhaps it deigns to throw me in jail if I defend myself against a home invasion), then society doesn't get to demand I give my life for its security.

In this way, it is society that has broken the contract with me, releasing me of my obligations to defend it. Most people who claim "duty and obligation to society" conveniently forget this is possible. By accident, I'm sure.

Yet, that compromise means NYC and LA can still field an all-volunteer army of people who tend not to be from NYC and LA.

Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal, demonstrably, cannot do that.

Which of the two strategies do you think give the cities a greater chance of survival?

The bureaucrats are being militarized out of desperation.

The political faction all bureaucrats in the nation belong to can't find enough soldiers. This is because they treat those soldiers with contempt- no young man wants to die for Ottawa. Plus, the volunteer soldiers that come back from Ukraine are not going to be on Ottawa's side if domestic instability ramped up, but will be familiar with the tools of modern warfare.

Ottawa is currently (and perhaps rightfully) paranoid of a domestic uprising just as much as it is of the US invading. The US is strategically wrecking the economy of Canadian citizens only a few hours away and if those citizens violently insist on suing for peace Ottawa might lose its power forever.

So, you do the next best thing- you take the faction with the political power in Canada (in this case, Ottawa bureaucrats) and tell them that if they want to keep their privileges, they must join the reserve.

The fact that if any nation decided to actually attack they'd instantly flee (bureaucrats are not known for their courage under fire; that's why they're bureaucrats!) is a problem for future them. What matters is that, to fuel the jingoism fire long enough to keep the bureaucrat faction in power, they need to be seen to be doing something, and this is that something.