It's Niccol. I was briefly confused and thought that I somehow missed Nichelle Nichols in Gattaca.

That said, is Gattaca forgotten? And what was wrong with his later works? I haven't seen them all, but the ones I've seen have been pretty good. They're all pretty much a bleak and dire warning about our future, and Gattaca may have done it best, but there's nothing wrong with his other films.

Where can you get a BYD Seagull outside of China for that price? When they install all the required safety features, it's much closer to 20k Euros (30k CAD).

That's still a little cheaper than anything we have here, but not so much cheaper that it's worth the human rights violations and loss of local industry.

I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.

You're absolutely correct in that. We've mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.

This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.

if you’re not increasing supply then you’re failing your free market duty

I disagree. Brooks is correct in saying that it's not their job and that its two separate industries. Affordable/social housing is the government's job, not theirs.

In theory, the free market should see this increase in rental prices and react by building more units. Why isn't that happening? Largely it comes down to the fact that a lot of developers are also landlords, and thus have a huge conflict of interest in this area. This is where regulators need to step in. But landlords (on their own) do not, and should not, be responsible for building housing.

Ontario had a program called micro FIT (feed in tariff) to encourage people to generate electricity. It paid higher than the going rate for electricity and was a really good deal if you could install solar. I think it was capped at 10 kW systems, but wasn't dependent on your own usage. New sign ups ended years ago, but the existing contracts were something like 20 years.

Now the best you can get in Ontario are credits that expire in a year.

This fine isn't even punitive. It's just the wages owed plus interest, which is the same as if they'd paid the wages properly the first time.

If only the NDP had made electoral reform a part of their deal to support the liberals. None of the other parts of the deal mattered - they could easily do all that and more after winning the next election. But instead, we get a bunch of half measures and they don't have a chance at winning a majority.

No such thing.

The $10k Chinese EV is only $10k in China. When localized for other markets, it's much closer to the same price as all other EVs. Some of this is tariffs, but there's a bunch of changes they need to make to meet safety requirements. Even the $15k Seagull they talk about in the article is expected to be the cheapest offering in Europe, eventually, and they're aiming for 20k Euros, which is 30k CAD.

Keep in mind that the "housing" cost includes either moving to a bigger property, or simply assigning part of your current mortgage costs to your child. If your house is sufficiently large, there won't be any much additional cost here beyond an increase in utility usage.

Similarly, transportation downloads a lot of the cost of a vehicle to your child. Maybe you do need a bigger car, in which case that makes sense. But maybe your car is fine, so the only added expense is gas and maintenance for the extra mileage for children's activities.

If you're talking about the "Value" booster, your LGS probably won't (and shouldn't) stock those. That's for grandmas to buy at dollar stores and Walmart checkout aisles. It's an absolutely scummy product, but it shouldn't cause SKU issues at your LGS.

MKM was less bomb-heavy than OTJ, so at least drafts seemed better. I missed the prerelease, so I don't know how swingy it was in limited. I suspect quite a lot anyway - prereleases have always been swingy, and as long as rares are more powerful than commons, more rares in a pack will always make it swingier.

The good:

• My LGS doesn't have to order 3 different types of boosters and guess how much everyone wants of each. They have run out of draft boosters before, and they're stuck with a bunch of extra boosters from sets that didn't sell so well. This is partially just a reality of running a store, but only having 2 types of boosters with vastly different audiences is better.

The bad:

• Sometimes there just isn't a pick 1 in your colors in packs 2 and 3 (on Arena). This is especially obvious in MH3 with the colorless theme, but it's also possible in normal sets. I don't know if this is different in arena vs. in paper.

• Everything costs more. I'm in Canada, so draft prices were going up well before the switch, but this made it even more expensive.

• Sealed is swingier. With a chance at opening up to 4 rares in a pack, those that do will have more bombs and more powerful cards in general. OTJ was very bomb heavy, so sealed was even more lopsided. This also affects drafts somewhat, but I think that can be fixed with design balancing once they get used to the changes. I don't think sealed can be fixed with card design.

Ultimately, I think this is worse for players and better for businesses and way better for WotC. They can fix most of the problems, but price isn't something they're interested in fixing (and, to be fair, the price of a booster has stayed well below inflation). Unfortunately, this means that some people just can't draft anymore or as often.

It's also in the same carcinogen group as electromagnetic fields, aloe vera, nickel, and kimchi. Most of those things you listed are quite dangerous for other reasons, but cancer is not the primary concern with any of them.

IARC group 2B is where substances end up if a study manages to produce cancer at any dose. If you drink 50 cans of diet coke per day (which is the equivalent of the rat study that demonstrated that it's possible for aspartame to cause cancer), then you might get cancer caused by the aspartame you just consumed.

Aspartame is not carcinogenic.

In an evacuation scenario, more lanes would be better.

Not necessarily a good or safe idea to use the oncoming traffic lanes, but it could be worth considering.

I'm not sure why you think I'm rich. Mail isn't like any of those other services. There is no mail urgent enough that it can't take one extra business day to arrive. If there is, it certainly wouldn't be sent through lettermail nor delivered by the normal carrier.

If we're going to raise taxes to pay for things (and by all means we should), I would much rather prioritize all of the other strawmen you brought up than continue to pay for lettermail delivery 5x per week.

Two days per week can still be constant and reliable. It's not like I actually get mail every day - the mail carrier just walks past my house about 2-4 days per week anyway. The only thing that comes on an actual weekly schedule are the flyers.

I think we need to address the gig economy as a whole. It's not good for anyone other than the companies who are exploiting these workers.

Beyond that, for Canada Post specifically, I don't understand why I need lettermail delivered 5x per week. Cut it back to twice per week, and suddenly one worker can deliver to 2.5x as many houses per week. Or even just give them a day off and "only" double the number of houses served in 4 days.

Ultimately, if you don't have a legal copy to compare it to, this is just a risk you take when pirating.

Some sources are more trustworthy than others. There probably aren't that many fake ebooks out there, but it's always possible I guess.

Of that amount, a total of $11,276,700 was handed out as bonuses to BDC’s top 10 executives.

Is that a problem? $11M out of a pool of $250M doesn't seem ridiculous. That still leaves over $80,000 per employee.

I feel like there need to be multiple CS pathways. For example, people who want to go into hardware development might take a set of courses more closely aligned with electrical engineering.

There are.

My university (and many others) offered Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Computer Engineering. Computer Engineering is sort of a middle ground between EE and SE, where you learn hardware concepts like circuits and semiconductors (for hardware development), but there are also algorithm-based courses.

Each of the programs has many options for elective courses, and you can focus on databases, algorithms, security, web development, or whatever you want. The core concepts are the same, and it's more about learning broad concepts and skills, rather than focused skills. Things like Redis and Elasticsearch didn't exist when I took my database course - the practical portion was mostly just SQL. Things like Docker came even later. But the broad concepts I learned allow me to jump in and use "new" technologies as they mature and stabilize.

None of the programs were just "coding bootcamp". Coding was almost inconsequential to my degree (CompEng), though I understand it's used more heavily in Computer Science degrees. I had a single first-year course that was supposed to teach us programming - all the other courses just assumed a basic knowledge. The focus was more on the design, the logic, and the algorithms. Anyone can code - the bootcamps have that right. But not everyone can design and implement a distributed system efficiently and securely.

Historically, student visas have been freely issued at will to any student who was accepted to a university or college program. This wasn't an issue until about five years ago.

A lot of our laws, regulations, and policies were written assuming people would act in good faith. Unfortunately, that's no longer good enough, and as a result, many corporations and provincial governments have started to take advantage of it, which has caused a lot of problems in Canadian society.

Nice to meet you Juan. I'm Pierre Poilivere from Calgary, and I love porn. The weirder the better.

I am the zodiac killer. I am DB Cooper. I shot Tupac. Jimmy Hoffa is buried in my backyard.

Come get me.

Anyone else with Manulife and seen this shit before?

Not exactly the same, but under some of their plans, they cover 80% of the price, but at some specific partner pharmacies, they will cover 90 or 100% instead.

For my plan, the partner pharmacies are Costco and an online one. Not sure if it changes between companies/plans, or if those were just their current partners for everyone insured with them.

Google Pixel phones have a screen call function that seems the same as this.

I don't know if it's technical limitations (it's probably just greed), but I can't imagine that this stays exclusive to Pixels for much longer.

I have a friend on ozempic (for diabetes). It really seems like it's impossible for him to just use it to continue his excessive eating habits, because it suppresses his appetite and he just doesn't eat much anymore. He still eats garbage, but much less.

Over the past two decades, flu shots have had a 25-40% uptake rate per year (source). It's amazing that covid boosters are so much lower than this, though if people were recently infected or vaccinated, then maybe they aren't allowed to get vaccinated with the booster designed for the xbb station yet.

Yeah, I could only find old articles about resolutions, or the more recent articles from a month ago when it started. I'm not sure anymore if this is Google's fault - it seemingly hasn't been reported on since it started. Too much news about strikes might give the population too many ideas.

Isn't there an ongoing strike at Loblaws distribution centres? I legitimately can't find any news as to whether it ended, but I also can't find very much news on other strikes that I'm pretty sure did get resolved. Fuck Loblaws, and fuck Google's ever worsening search capabilities.

There's only five ways discussed in the song. Maybe the other 45 are various forms of murder.

You just need a few pills, Jill
Couple o' stabs, Babs
You can run over with a car, Jafar
Just get yourself free

According to the article, 25% lead to convictions. I don't know if there's an appropriate quantity of strip searches greater than zero, but if it's going to happen, this actually seems like a pretty good result.

I guess the questions to ask here are: could these arrests be made without a strip search (e.g. would a frisk have been sufficient)? If not, could the strip searches be done by an adult of the same gender and also in the presence of their parent or guardian?

There's definitely a lot that is bad about this, but if 25% of strip searches result in conviction, there's clearly another problem here that needs to be addressed.

Greta is just the new David Suzuki. I hope she does better.

Sorry for the double post, but I thought you might be interested to see this.

MaRo has posted the odds. So looks like 8.88 packs per draft will have 2 rares, 0.96 packs per draft will have 3 rares, and <0.24 packs per draft will have 4 rares, for resulting in roughly (8.88 + 0.96*2 + 0.24*3 =) 11.52 extra rares per draft.

I think it’s more reasonable to assume chances are equal to the percentage of rares in a given set, which can vary dramatically, but I believe it’s usually about 33%.

Why would they not adjust for rarity in this slot? They do it in all the other slots - it seems like a big leap to think that any specific common that can appear in this slot is equally as likely as any specific mythic.

I think it's just 8 extra rares/mythics per pod.

Assuming all the special guests are r/m, The List slot has 3.12% chance of being a rare.

About 1/7 (14.3%) foils is r/m.

We don't know the distribution of rarity in the wildcard slot, but I'll use the same distribution as the foils for a reasonable estimate.

That makes (3.12+14.3+14.3 ~=) 32 extra rares per 100 packs, or just under 8 per 24 packs.

It's actually not a huge change. Four common slots from the current draft booster are turning into three slots:

• 87.5% common/12.5% list
• Wildcard - Literally anything, including just another normal common from the main set
• Foil - Usually common, but same foil rarity distribution as far as I can tell

So for draft, not much is changing in the average pack.

So according to you, Hamas is oppressing Palestinians, and Israel is oppressing Hamas, but it's only righteous for Palestinians to stand up to Hamas. Isn't it also important for Hamas to stand up to their oppressors?