A mixture of people voting with their hearts instead of their minds, and people being very ignorant about politics.

The end result is a voting population that will vote based on knee-jerk emotional reactions and are very gullible and lead astray by false promises, lies, and misinformation. Basically: They are extremely easy to manipulate.

A lot of Canadians feel Trudeau is a shit, do-nothing politician and PM and that he has to go, and I frankly agree with them. The problem, though, is that they let their hatred of the PM (and his party) blind them and they end up voting for a party which has no functional solutions to everything they hate Trudeau for. The problems that Trudeau has neglected DO need to be taken care of but the CPC doesn’t have a platform or policies to actually deal with them. Voters don’t care though; they just want Trudeau gone. They just want red party gone.

Two or three years from now when PP is prime minister - his ratings are going to tank and people are going to start hating him. The scandals will start stacking up and media pressure on him and his corrupt ministers will continue to grow, and many who voted for him will be crying that they got betrayed. Maybe some day people will learn to stop voting for con artists but I doubt it’ll be in my lifetime.

Ah, yes. “Balance the budget” - the one thing any politician can say to instantly generate voter favour. It’s like a magic money printing button but for votes.

If you think about it for more than three seconds you realise it doesn’t even mean anything or make any sense. It’s an empty fluff promise that people think will somehow make their lives better.

I dunno, I have had nothing but awful experiences with Shaw for over 10 years even when they were independent. They consistently lied to me and my family, overcharged us, and provided shoddy service which, at times, was barely functional. The layout of my local Shaw office is burned into my mind forever because of how damn often I was in that place.

Maybe this will be the lesson that Albertans need to stop electing crooks. Right?

… right?

I wish we did things for own reasons instead of just doing whatever the US told us to do.

Amount of people surprised by this:

They won’t.

Yes please.

You’re 100% correct, but I will point out that the iPhone hasn’t really seen any significant design changes since the 11 - arguably the X. That was seven years ago. The same thing has been happening with their Macbook lineup where only just recently have they made major product design changes to replace their 10+ year old designs. The new Macbook Pros were a welcome breath of fresh air and indicated a shift in a new, positive direction for their Mac platform. *

The iPhone needs a similar refresh, imho.

*for the hardware, at least. They’ve made some questionable software choices for MacOS such as iPhone-ifying the settings menu.

“clogged up side streets” is NIMY talk for “I don’t want to spend an extra 40 seconds driving around the pedestrian zone to get to my destination”.

Banff is a tiny resort town that literally only exists today because of tourism and skiing. If you are upset by your town making accommodations to visitors (it’s sole source of income) then you picked the wrong place to live. But I wouldn’t expect the residents of Banff to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

It’s an LG G8. One of the few phones that has a high quality DAC and amplifier in it. It sounds amazing with a good set of earphones and has plenty of options to tweak to your liking.

I wanted a dedicated DAP such as one made by Fiio, but they are astronomically expensive. My LG G8 was $200 after tax and a Fiio M11S is $700 before tax. I could bargain hunt for a better price but the G8 would always be cheaper. And because it’s a phone, it has more features and power than most dedicated music players (many of them are powered by ancient chips and struggle to do basic tasks) I just stick a large SD card into it and put it into airplane mode if I’m not using a streaming service.

I likely will when my contract expires. But for now it is what I have.

The iPhone is stagnating really badly. This is yet another generation of overpriced, oversized, and overpowered glass slabs that bring nothing new of substance to the table. If anything, the interesting stuff is in iOS18 but that’s not saying much because iOS is kneecapped by its own limitations.

I got a 14 pro on sale a while ago and it’s simultaneously vastly overpowered for what I use it for and also frustratingly useless. All of that horsepower and tech… just sitting there doing nothing 97% of the time. It has 1tb of storage which is almost completely empty because you can’t use iPhones as storage. You can’t even drag-n-drop music onto them. I use an LG phone as my music player because it has both a headphone jack and allows me to simply drop my FLAC albums onto it.

You just accurately described Canada in two sentences.

Goddamn living here is depressing sometimes.

Suck it, Loblaws.

Reminder #891,814 to stop using Chrome and Chromium browsers and to stop supporting Google’s web monopoly.

the dimmer LG TV showed hot spots that the Sony didn’t, with its LEDs measuring a whopping 123° C (253.4° F) with the TV at max brightness

Holy shit. Literally designed to fail.

There are ways to properly educate people on customer rights, privacy, right-to-repair, and ownership.

And then there is whatever annoying slop you just spewed out here. If you actually care about this and want to make a difference - do better.

I switched to an iPhone after having many similar hangups with Android devices over the years. Biggest for me was how little update/software support Android phones got. I think they’re better these days (or so I hope) but they had awful support for years. Buying a brand new Android phone and only getting 1 OS update and 2 years of security updates was not uncommon and I have several old Android phones in a drawer that succumbed to that fate.

My experiences with iOS have largely been positive but I do have some issues which annoy me constantly:

1. Apple’s ecosystem is great and is so polished and tightly integrated, but trying to do anything outside of that ecosystem is incredibly painful. You are actively punished when trying to do anything outside Apple’s box. Even something as simple as transferring music files from your PC to your phone is frustrating at best and impossible at worst.

2. Every. Goddamn. App. is a subscription. The app store is almost completely useless and I practically never use it. I’m not joking when I say that the vast majority of downloadable apps are subscription-based, and usually a WEEKLY subscription instead of monthly. Sorry, but I’m not paying $5/week for a goddamn calculator or weather app. This means that using an iPhone can be very frustrating if the stock apps don’t suit your needs. This reason alone is enough to make me want to jump ship again sometimes.

3. iCloud sucks. No other way to word this, really. It’s a relic of bygone times and Apple really needs to overhaul it and make it more useful in the modern day. Everything from the clunky, Fisherprice UI to the base storage which barely has enough gigabytes to hold a single fart. On one hand upgraded storage is only a few bucks a month. On the other hand I’m goddamn tired of subscriptions.

The NBHPA called the incident “unacceptable behaviour”

The poor guy was nearly murdered. The ref is lucky to be alive and, from the sounds of the injuries, may never be the same again. Repeated blows to the face with a blunt object are no joke.