willhslade

Does it support Canadian credit cards?

Not to peek behind the curtain, but it's pretty difficult to hold down 2 jobs when you need to physically be in the office 2 days a week. Which, if my anecdotal evidence in my circle is to be believed, that was definitely happening during the pandemic.

OK. So. There are a few large problems. I'll highlight the basics.

Canadians are deeply in debt. Mostly mortgages. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/economy/article-hou...

Causing: house prices and rent to be unaffordable for the median income person. As a result, I have several friends who are exploring leaving the country. Especially if you have children, they will likely never be able to afford a home nearby themselves without help. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/world/canada/canada-real-... https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rentals-august-1.6963839

Inflation isn't stopping. It's most commonly reflected in the grocery prices. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/world/canada/loblaws-groc...

As a result of the above, and the fact that if the Bank of Canada did not keep the prime rate in line with the USA (we have pretty much always raised our prime rates in step with the USA) = huge cuts into the disposable income / lifestyle of Canadians. Some people say we are already in a per capita recession. https://www.movesmartly.com/articles/why-the-bank-of-canada-... https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-households-get-left-behi...

To compound this problem, as our working population ages, in order to keep our age dependency ratio healthy, we are allowing a million+ immigrants a year in. Please don't flame me, I don't have an opinion, this is a fact and a choice, and it has consequences. https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/greenpa...

Trudeau is many things, but a person who has ever needed to worry about money isn't one of them. Both Canada and Ontario (the most populous province) are deeply in debt. Alberta, who's oil wealth largely makes this country function, are making noises about separation, especially about their portion of the CPP, the Canadian Pension Plan that covers all Canadians. Alberta is kind of Canada's Texas (Conservative + oil wealthy) but they have far less influence in Federal politics than Texas does. AFAIK, I might be wrong about that. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-inte... https://www.moneysense.ca/save/retirement/pensions/alberta-p...

All of these are leading towards a housing and / or financial crisis and / or currency crisis. Whichever comes first. There are tent cities and homeless in most large urban areas, and, as this is Canada, this winter will be brutal. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-...

Smaller problem: we have socialized medicine, but you likely can't get a doctor. Good luck getting a referral. We are exploring private practice charging fees. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/05/world/canada/canada-famil... https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/would-you-pay-300-a-year-for-q...

I know that the general opinion of Canada is that nothing ever happens, and to an extent that was largely true. I believe the next few years will be very difficult for Canadians, and, incredibly, given that Canadians use more energy per capita than the Americans, it will be a difficult transition to a lower energy use profile.

Hmm. Sounds like Canada and Toronto.

Well, Canadian / Anglosphere governments, anyway.

https://www.sightline.org/2021/05/27/yes-other-countries-do-...

I'm not going to wade into this flamewar but I will say one thing. Apple is what it says on the tin. It's a curated garden that mostly just works. At a certain point in your life and your career you don't have weekends to spare on side projects and, especially in the tools that you use the most to interact with the Internet (phone, laptop) you want it to work the first time. I've flirted with Linux and for what it is, it's great, but I'm mostly done with hunting down drivers not working. Apple gives me my time back.

How is it necessary to colonize Mars?

This is my current list of complaints. If I'm wrong about anything and there are settings that I can change, enlighten me.

Copy + Paste sucks and isn't consistent. On my machine, if you copy a message, it includes a header, indicating who said it and when. I can't change this behavior in settings, and, infuriatingly, this doesn't happen on other people's machines in my organization.

My biggest complaint is that the screen sharing functionality is broken in surprising and interesting ways. Let me count them. One: I cannot always reliably control another person's machine. Two: When I type on another person's machine, the input is in the controlled machine's keyboard. Three: when I hit a hotkey (ctrl+n in Excel for a new workbook) when I am controlling another person's machine, the hotkey fires twice: once in the controlled application, and once in Teams itself. Again, there is no setting for this. Four: I have at least one person in my organization whose Teams freezes when you try to remotely control his machine.

Lastly, I have Teams on my phone and on my work laptop. Calls ring on both devices. I have no desire to ring on my phone and AFAIK there isn't a setting to force it to ring only on certain devices.

How confident is it in it's confidence interval?

Broken is better than unreliable.

To pick a nit, Iverson did this with APL and I still think it's brilliant. Executable math. It's time will come, I hope.

Water is finite

Software is more malleable than, say, a bridge. This leads to a lot of input about how to best do things, which generates a lot of rework, which generates a lot of billing hours, and keeps us all employed.

Does it need to be like this? No. But until the VC MBA gods get their hands off the tiller and we face actual energy scarcity, expect more stupidity.

Self learning is part of the university experience. Researching without guidance is not.

I'm no shill but Mirgin Vobile during Black Friday was actually competitive this year.

Hi dang,

Sorry about that. I meant it neutrally but that didn't come across. I won't post again anything that suggests snark.

Thanks, Will

There have also been many reports of people, mostly disabled, who are unable to work or afford rent in Ontario, who have applied to medically assisted death rather than face homelessness. This might be both brinksmanship and gamesmanship, but it's extremely distasteful that we are here as a society.

I suggest you do a little reading. I'm Canadian and it's alarming.

It's already apparently 2.5% of deaths in Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/medical-assi...

We have credible reports of a person aged 23 who was approved for medically assisted death because they were diabetic and depressed. https://www.thefp.com/p/scheduled-to-die-the-rise-of-canadas

The top 1% of patients use approximately 30% of the total cost of health care. https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...

The Canadian health care system is extremely strained. We are already in an age of hallway medicine as there aren't enough staff to treat the people in rooms. https://www.cma.ca/news/canadas-health-care-crisis-what-we-n...

> Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away.

Tools can go away. They can come back, too. But they can go away. I would also point to the Japanese experience with firearms. But I'm guessing you already know about that too.

SBF's still in the news, bro.

I'm having an ok career in this space contorting Excel, Access, SQL, VBA and Powershell. It's going ok, but I do have to point out one thing that this hype cycle is missing. You are explicitly developing software by people who have never taken data structures, or algorithms or software design. The people developing these tools do not understand what a dictionary is and why you would use it, do not understand when and why you would use memory as opposed to disk, and routinely do things like triply nested loops rather than something sane. And that's before we consider that the tools themselves are nerfed and do not allow you to do things beyond their limits, usually something involving database size.

So, yeah, this is going to be a mess. Fight it, fight it hard and this is just another attempt by the MBA class to devalue skilled labor. Call it like it is, and if they built it and owned it, they can maintain it.

Yeah, but doesn't Ghosn still, uh, have money? Theranos was a massive fraud.

The Antikythera mechanism says hello.

Is your pension a gold plated DB?

You might find this previous discussion informative. The Ivies matter but not as much as you'd think.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30448083

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x

Most relevant: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x/tables/3

Also, to pile on, if I use my brain to read GPL source code and then type it in again on my own, I'm pretty sure I'm guilty of violating copyright.

So how and why do we solve the halting problem?

The trade off isn't in terms of the order, it's that you get back the time waiting in line behind several very slow people.

Federal Reserve is not strictly part of the federal government.