Em Adespoton

To be fair, I think Mythbusters went off the air because Discovery would no longer pay their explosives bill. The focus on sciency mumbo jumbo was secondary.

The title and the poll don’t match?

The poll was on whether Canadians think Canada should be officially bilingual. Outside Quebec, the majority of people polled don’t— which is part of the reason why official bilingualism is important.

Is official bilingualism a myth? They’d have to poll for whether those in jobs that have a bilingual requirement are actually bilingual to answer that question.

Personally, I also question the validity of the poll, as the population sample could be really easily skewed depending on how the poll was performed.

The “Truth in political advertising” bit stood out to me.

Just like there’s a consumer protection agency, there should be a voter protection agency.

Get caught materially misleading voters? No more going on the ballot for you. Get caught pretending to be running ads for a candidate when you’re not part of their official campaign team? Go to jail for fraud. Be blocked from doing official political business in the future.

We have protections around other critical government positions; we should have them around political candidates as well.

It should be reasonably trivial to programmatically watch the frames; original programming will have mastered audio levels and set video compression; any shift to an ad should stand out like a sore thumb.

So as long as things aren’t locked down to a DRM’d player, it should be possible to fingerprint the audio and video stream content and drop any inserted frames that don’t match.

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.

Well, in the case of Bedouins, it technically isn’t a genocide…. Seems ironic to me that a member of a group that is traditionally migratory refuses to leave. But the reason is obvious: if they leave, they’ll have nowhere to come back to and nowhere to go.

Climate change (local as well as global) has been hard on the Bedouin everywhere.

And it also points out that the Israeli expansionists aren’t just about Palestinian genocide; they don’t want anyone who’s not Jewish on the land. And I’m sure if they ever accomplished that, the goalposts would move to “only practicing Jews allowed” and following that, “only orthodox Jews allowed” — except that the orthodoxy wouldn’t necessarily line up with how we’ve traditionally used that term.

Well… yes. That’s what happens when the government effectively owns all the businesses in a country… investing in its stock market makes little sense when the government controls everything. They pick the winners and losers, not the investors.

I’ll give them “occupied Palestinian regions”, but “IOF” is a bit much, even if what the IDF is currently involved in could not really be called “defence” unless you consider genocide and land grabbing a defensive manoeuvre.

After all, they’re not just occupying either.

We already knew that GPS could be tricked into location drift. I didn’t realize US munitions were depending solely on it for navigation still.

Jr or Sr?

Wait… the US is currently indiscriminately bombing civilians who have nowhere to go, while denying them access to basic necessities?

Based on the reporting, it’s getting to the point where I expect the entire border to collapse because it’s all tunnel.

Must not?

Those are likely the people whose names are in the text chat log. The rest were smart enough not to write anything down (although transcription is a thing too).

First they forbid them from leaving, now they demand they do.

I always thought Itamar son-of-a-giver was named appropriately.

Smart people put political proxies in power so they can get on with living their life.

There are only two reasons to become a politician and STAY a politician, and Graham is no Sanders.

“I am a Zionist,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently wrote, “because I see Israel as an insurance policy for every Jewish family, including mine, which has endured persecution and exile in the past and understands that we may not be safe forever in our host countries.”

Mark that as another person who doesn’t understand what Zionism is.

Israel could make an arrangement with Christmas Island or some other low population nation to convert it to a safe place for ethnic Jews to live.

Zionism is about claiming that specific land (to the borders established under King David) as a Jewish (in faith and ethnic) nation to prepare it for the coming of the New Jerusalem.

The news here is that the US “may have” admitted it finally.

Are we sure they were bombs and not random airplane components?

“Generally speaking, there is still a First Amendment right to record in public as long as they’re not interfering with police,” Wong told USA TODAY. “To me, this sounds like a devious arrest.”

Ah, but who defines “interfering?” Is it “what a reasonable person would consider to be interference” or “whatever the police consider to be interference?”

Because under the second definition, police could arrest a judge that refused to issue them a warrant and get away with it.

Questions are usually non-statements. How could I enlighten you when I need to ask the question myself?