When was the last time a federal government managed to balance a budget? Trudeau-the-elder landed a smallish surplus once, back in the late 1970s, I think. I'm not aware of anyone having pulled it off since.

I only keep them out of my mouth because of an incident in my teens that left me with a slightly chipped tooth. 😅 So they end up stabbed through the corners or back of the workpiece, the loose fabric of my clothing, or the arm of my chair. So far, I haven't managed to do myself more damage that way than my active young cat does when he's feeling playful, so I don't sweat it unless I actually lose track of one.

(If you haven't guessed already, none of us are much good at reminding ourselves to be safe, never mind someone else!)

Ford's policies make it clear that he clings to the outmoded view that addiction is a moral failing and can be stopped by strength of will alone. He'd rather feel superior than save lives.

Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what's known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.

Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It's just that that's a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We're wired to ignore chronic problems.

In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world's power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't. It isn't that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it's one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.

It's been an issue in the Ukraine a couple of times already. So far, nothing has come of it.

Manufacturing of solar panels produces a different kind of contamination, though—it's just not located at the point of power generation. Wind is probably a bit better, with fewer exotic chemicals required, but "rooftop wind" isn't exactly a common catchphrase.

X is forbidden from offering services in Brazil until and unless it complies with the local courts (the company refused an order to suspend some accounts, then wouldn't appoint a local representative as Brazilian law requires). Local ISPs are required to block it. I don't know about Australia.

I kind of pity Powassan. Imagine a tick-borne disease being the only thing named after your community that anyone's ever heard of.

Exactly. This is as much a virus as the program I wrote as a first year CS student that rebooted the computer due to a bad pointer dereference was a virus. (That one would probably just segfault today, but I started back in the DOS dark ages . . .)

AI is a conspiracy theory—companies are just hiring people in lower-income countries to impersonate machines!

(/s, of course, but with just enough truth to it that there's probably someone somewhere out there who thinks the above statement is plausible.)

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?

We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We'd probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn't been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There's a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That's why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.

(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn't have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)

Air Canada is not a vital service (some of the little bush airlines that are the only way in or out of remote communities might be, but not them). Believing that the government should intervene on their behalf is such excessive hubris that I can't even.

Someone overreacted here, but it wasn't just the police. Who calls the cops over a water gun, for crying out loud?!

Pale Moon, originally forked from Firefox many years ago (although the codebases have diverged so far that most Firefox patches no longer apply). Still xul, still supports Firefox extensions from back in the day as well as extensions purpose-written for it. On the downside, it occasionally isn't compatible with the latest bleeding-edge nonstandard Javascript features—I keep Vivaldi around for the extremely rare occasion when something goes wrong with a site that I absolutely must visit for some reason (I think I've needed it twice in the past five years).

Hmm. If I'm visualizing this correctly, and depending on the size of the table . . .

Two pairs of legs with stretchers in between, on pivots that allow them to fold up agains the bottom of the table, slighly offset so that the legs end up alongside each other when folded instead of interfering. If you want them to touch the bottom of the tub, set them up to fold at the "knees" rather than the "thigh", if you see what I mean. The difficult part is figuring out how to secure them in the extended position. If you're okay with putting in a couple of bolts whenever you unfold, you could add a couple of supports that link the stretchers to the underside of the table at an angle (pivot at the other end again). Or you could attach a length of wood to one stretcher with a pivot and notch the other end so that when the table is unfolded, it drops over the other stretcher and forms a tight cross half-lap joint.

All this requires gluing or screwing hinges or bits of wood pierced for dowels or screws to the bottom of the table to form the pivots.

The Soviets never sent humans into the reactor to remove melted core material. The remains of the Chernobyl No. 4 core are still there inside the sarcophagus, and I don't think anyone was making serious plans to remove them even before the Ukraine war got in the way.

(The job that got so many Soviet workers exposed was moving solid radioactive debris from the exploded core so that the initial containment sarcophagus could be built and the other three reactors on the site restarted. Nothing comparable was required at Fukushima because the explosions there didn't breach any of the cores, thus no chunks of highly radioactive graphite to shovel off the roofs. I understand that the Soviets did try robots, but radiation isn't good for electronics and, well, it was Soviet equipment in 1986—they just weren't very effective.)

Even if Singh were just in it for the pension (which I don't believe), he has never shown an interest in dismantling public health care or building unnecessary additional highways, which makes him a better person than Ford. I wish Ford were just in it for the pension.

To put it another way, the difference is push vs. pull. A catalogue is a pull offering: the person looking at it is doing so by choice, because they're interested in what it offers and want to buy something (or at least window shop). An online ad is a push offering: it's presented to people who did not choose to see it, are not interested in it, and just wish it would go away and let them get on with what they're actually trying to do. Pull advertising is (usually) acceptable. Push advertising is not.

Keyboard typing is a manual skill distinct from tech savvy and has to be taught as such. You're not going to learn it by dealing with a touchscreen swipe "keyboard". I've known a fair number of programmers who were two-finger typists because they were too busy taking CS courses to learn to type.

On the gripping hand, my early-Boomer mother, who learned on typewriters, can type fast and accurately but is quite technophobic.

The issue is how to rejigger the universities' income streams so that they can keep themselves afloat without that. We can start by looking into why some seem to be having more trouble than others.