• 1 Post
  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle

  • This makes no fucking sense - They just finished putting these bike lanes in on big stretches of Bloor and University. These streets are always under construction, it makes no sense to just undo years of work. Did people not drive here before the bike lanes? Cyclists are still going to use these streets and be veering into traffic, blocking that supposed second lane. The second was always blocked with parked cars on Bloor anyways. The bike lane made driving easier and cycling way safer. It was win-win.

    The result is going to be driving is going to be way worse on these streets and cyclists are going to die because of this decision. It’s also hugely regressive. You should not be driving across Bloor or down Yonge or University to traverse these streets, because there’s literally subways under all of three of them.

    It’s just such piss poor management. The more decisions I see Doug Ford make, the more I see the image of that stupid fucking Ferris wheel Rob Ford wanted to put on our waterfront. Dumb ideas run in the family, apparently.

    edit: we have to elect smarter people who aren’t going to play these stupid culture wars games and waste our own money doing it. Doug Ford’s strategy here is to set up a fight with Olivia Chow in preparation for an early election next year, because he knows the “surburbs vs. Toronto elites” narrative plays well with his base. It remains to be seen if the city can/will meaningfully fight back against this or if our mayor is just going to give us lip service, because she still benefits from this conflict by being on the other side politically.







  • How are the alternatives any better? Download a DEB that executes arbitrary code, signed with some .asc that’s sitting in the same webserver? Download an EXE?

    Your comment is so rambley that I can’t understand whether you’re criticizing the distribution method or the packaging. Both of those are very different in terms of attack surface, if you’re talking about supply chain attacks.





  • This has nothing to do with protecting Canadians and everything to do with protecting big business

    I think what no politician wants to admit is that car industry is a strategically important industry and has to be protected for geopolitical reasons alone. We need the manufacturing capability to maintain our industrial base as a hedge against any future conflict. (I lump it in with why you need domestic milk and food production, vaccine production, etc. When the going gets tough, you need that.)

    That said, I do feel the bailouts from 2009/2010 were total horseshit and these companies got off scot-free. They’ve had ages to prepare to make EVs and squandered it, and now have to be protected by moves like this. We just end up paying for it, either through subsidies (eg. battery plants) or through the inflated prices of EVs.






  • broad, sensationalist strokes

    Can you clarify what you perceive as sensationalist about what I wrote? Based on the number of upvotes this thread has, I’m not the only one that thinks this way. (My tax dollars are currently going to fighting cybercrime sponsored by Russia, fighting Russian disinformation campaigns, and providing materiel to fight the Russian military.)

    I take great pride and responsibility in my critical thinking skills

    Me too, but as I mentioned in another thread, the issue is that not everybody is gifted with those same critical thinking skills, and the impact on those less equipped can be catastrophic. (see: pizzagate shooting)

    range of ideas acceptable to post on Lemmy were restricted to those acceptable to our mainstream media

    I do think we disagree on this here - For me, mainstream media is primarily good journalism where information is fact-checked and vetted. (Don’t forget there’s libel laws that keep journalists in check too in most countries.) Opinions and editorials represent the views of the writers or newspaper. Every organization has a slant in what they choose to cover and find newsworthy, you just need to be aware of it. With this in mind, I don’t see mainstream media as a bad thing at all or something that needs to be rebelled against. It serves a different purpose from Lemmy.

    Where I see Lemmy being useful and interesting is as a news aggregator with insightful discourse in the comments that’s not dominated by inauthentic behaviour. Reddit is completely flooded and driven by marketers and bots, where the content and discourse quality have become low and repetitive, which seems to be the end state of 2000-2010 era social media platform.


  • I can respect this take. I do worry that burying problematic content isn’t enough these days though. Even if only 2% of the visitors on this site see the content, all it takes is one person to believe there’s a demonic child trafficking ring and then you have someone shooting up a pizza joint. Not everyone who uses the internet has all their faculties and I think that’s an argument for going further than just burying the content. (I suspect we’ll start seeing more pressure on YouTube and Facebook to go further than they have too with regards to problematic content like this.)

    Edit: I also think that as platforms have become more strict about their community guidelines, the effectiveness of grand, overt disinformation campaigns has diminished, so bad actors’ strategies are switching to more subtle, softer disinformation campaigns.



  • You don’t have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it’s just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it’s going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It’s similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.

    Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can’t just look away and pretend it’s harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it’s going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.