Most recent in a long tradition. The feline world record holder for mousing worked in a distillery.

Unfortunately, having no civics knowledge does not disqualify a person from voting. If it did, Ford would have been out a couple of elections ago.

And as usual, nearly nothing I’m watching is here—the only overlap is Kowloon Generic Romance. Given that I’m currently following, um, around 20 series, this is impressive in a bizarre kind of way.

Not understanding the larger context or who any of the referenced characters are is what kept me away. I gave it one episode and couldn’t understand what was happening so I bailed. It needed more narrative training wheels for folks like me

It backs up and fills in some of the background in the second and third episodes (in fact, episode 2 is pretty much entirely a history speedrun about Gundams, Char, and the Zeon/Federation war), and I can understand wanting to start the first episode with the characters of the current story rather than with the history, but while the combination was enough to get me mostly up to speed, it’s seriously clunky in the way it plays out, and it’s unsurprising it lost viewers (it came within a hair of losing me, too). They could have done better.

Why would you inflict that guy on a poor innocent kitty?

Much of the animation takes place outside Japan these days. If you watch enough recent anime end credits, you’ll see a lot of what look like romanized Vietnamese names. And there was a scandal . . . about a year ago now? . . . when some material for an anime then in production was found on the server of a North Korean studio (probably because a Chinese studio to which the anime had been outsourced then outsourced it further without paying attention to little things like international treaties). And I don’t think the teams remaining in Japan have any shortage of recruits.

This issue, as with any business, is “can AI produce more for cheaper at an acceptable quality?” If it does make real inroads, it’ll be the outsourcing studios doing the less-important scenes that get replaced first.

We’ll stop sending messages when it’s clear that they’ve been received. That would require Trump to not only stop threatening our sovreignty, but officially apologize for it. This would not be difficult if Trump behaved like an adult, rather than a playground bully.

Most people aren’t willing to pay extra money or do extra work for something they themselves don’t need or use. Unless there’s a massive marketing campaign behind it, or the law requires it. This has been the case throughout history, pretty much.

Compared to the alien species in this show’s universe, we seem to be mayflies. 🫤

So Ponko is a university graduate, and it took 70 years to build the rocket without visible change in the tanuki. I guess this confirms that their human character designs don’t reflect their actual aging.

I was running a laptop of this sort (HP from 2008, 2GB RAM, Athlon64x2 processor, 100GB HDD, nvidia card of the NV40/Curie generation, originally shipped with Vista) as a secondary machine up until a few months ago, and never had any serious issues with it under Linux. However, I was running Gentoo with TDE and no display manager (qingy doesn’t count), and didn’t try to use it for CAD or anything else that I knew was out of its league. It did okay at email (with a native client, not webmail), word processing, 720p video playback, and native games with low requirements (like Simutrans) I retired it in the end because it takes forever to compile gcc on a machine with those specs, and updates started hitting too frequiently.

Its replacement is only about 4-5 years newer, but has much better specs (quad i5 (or was it i7?), 16GB RAM, etc—it would have started life as an expensive business-grade machine, I think), so not useful for comparison.

My primary browser profile allows only whitelisted cookies. It also allows only whitelisted Javascript, so I don’t see the popups. If this breaks a site beyond usefulness, I seriously consider whether I really need that site (and if it falls into the <2% where the answer is “yes”, I either whitelist it or open it in the window for the other profile that functions on a blacklist basis).

That’s a lot more manual management than most people want to bother with, though.

So Beryl’s most dangerous foe to date is . . . rattus rattus. Hopefully he won’t catch anything from that bite.

If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.

Even if they prefer not to self-host, there are plenty of providers out there that are more trustworthy than Microsoft. In fact, I would say that a medium-sized established company that derives most of its revenue from providing email and related services is likely to secure them better than an oversized tech giant that just does email on the side—they have more incentive.

Indigenous people are overrepresented among homicide victims in Canada: “The homicide rate for Indigenous people was over six times higher than for the non-Indigenous population (9.31 versus 1.46 homicides per 100,000 population).” ( source , which is 2023 data).

General Indigenous life expectancy is also lower—anywhere from 10 to 20 years difference at birth, depending on which information source and which subset of Indigenous people (Inuit lifespans are shortest overall). Here’s some StatsCan data from 2011—I can’t find anything more recent, although I’m sure it exists.

I haven’t found any death statistics for Indigenous people in Saskatchewn specifically. They’re ~17% of the population there, per Wikipedia, which is the highest % of any province I could find the information for quickly (more than double Alberta’s, for instance), so Indigenous issues actually could be a significant contributor to Saskatchewan’s statistical skew.

I wonder if there’s any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable.

Culturally dependent, I’m pretty sure. Housing in Japan can be pretty tiny. Canada’s on the large side.

It also depends on the person and their habits: introverts and people who spend more time at home are likely to want more personal space.

Well, the GG has two official residences, as does the PM (although one of those isn’t currently usable). The Speaker of the House has one, and we have one reserved for visiting foreign heads of state. When Stornoway was given to the government, I guess the opposition leader seemed like the next most important person to give a house to. The government could try to sell it, but those kinds of large, multi-million-dollar historic buildings are always a problem to unload, and I understand that the area it’s in is sufficiently high-rent that property owners in the area would fight tooth and nail against any useful redevelopment.

I suppose it could be offered to the Chief Justice of Canada instead.

Shinesman, if you can find it, has an amusingly silly dub that you should be able to follow without paying too much attention to the visuals. They took an already rather silly sentai show parody and just let the English voice actors run away with it.

Its hard to believe the polls could do a 180 like that, given the Carney and Pierre are ideologically opposite.

Not difficult to believe at all, once you remember that the average voter makes their decision based on emotions rather than rational thought. There were a whole bunch of people who wanted anyone other than Trudeau as PM. They would have agreed to vote for a pet rock as long as its name wasn’t “Justin Trudeau”, but they didn’t really think much of Poilievre even if they saw him as the only alternative to The Guy They Didn’t Want.

Politics in a democracy are more a popularity contest than anything else.

Canada at least has some privacy laws, even if they’re weaker than the EU’s and not always well-enforced. The US has no such laws. So keeping the data in Canada is an improvement over giving it to, say, Google, even if it’s still not perfectly protected. Plus, if worst comes to worst, it’s a lot easier to bring a lawsuit for mishandling your data against someone in your own country.