I don’t like that the conservative party is using provincial funds to advertise for their political views – especially with advertisements which aren’t rigorously truthful. It feels slimy, but does anyone know if this is legal?

Depends on the income period – I’d do 25% of daily income for a first offence.

That’s not how exploitation works, not really. The rich will exploit as much as they can. Prices are already set to maximize profit. The rich can’t pass higher prices along, because if they could charge more, they already would. Cutting taxes on big companies doesn’t create jobs or lower prices – and raising taxes won’t destroy jobs or raise prices.

The teacher was selling prints of the art for hundreds of dollars. The article doesn’t say how much profit they made, but it could be substantial. There’s also the privacy violation, and split amongst ten kids it’s $160,000 per victim. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not nothing, but it seems reasonable for such a wilful and knowing violation of copyright, rights to one’s image, and privacy rights. (Assuming all alleged facts are true.)

Yes, but it is a problem. It’s a problem that has no partisan component, which can be fixed without political grandstanding. It’s also a problem which kills people: the 6% increase in car crashes it causes is a lot of easily preventable deaths.

If you can’t come into work because your tires are slashed, you should not be fired.

…really? The post was clearly a joke, and if it had any stance at all it was the celebration of modern medicine.

Skimping on security seems really stupid right now. There are probably a fair few Canadians who would like to do certain MPs harm… not to mention India has been doing political assassinations.

I’m lucky, in a sense, that I don’t have to make this decision. The only viable candidates in my riding are the Conservatives and the NDP, so I can actually vote my conscience.

That’s not how statistics works. You can have a significant effect with a tiny effect size, or a large effect size that on analysis turns out to be insignificant.

How so? The study showed no consistent association between funding and crime rates. That is true verbatim.

If there’s no zero in the dataset, then we don’t have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.

It specifies who the protester was. If it was a Yellow Vest, they would have said that.

Small comfort to the reporter who got beaten up or SWATted or stalked, or the news organization that gets vandalized or DDoSed. If you’re more likely to visit violence on your critics, people are less likely to criticize you. It’s not fair, it’s not right, but it’s true.

Right-wingers are more likely to beat you up. Changes the calculus for photographers.

We can have perfectly secure online voting, if you’re willing for all votes to be public. Or we can have perfectly secure and anonymous voting, if you’re okay with some secret master list. There are very smart people working on cryptographic voting protocols and I think I would love to live in an online-voting-based direct democracy, but as it stands we don’t know how to set that system up.

Maybe we could make publicly known votes work. Athens did it, the early US did it. But there are problems with both intimidation and incentivization, and we’d need some sort of framework to prevent that.

Who let the SCP authors write headlines?

The strategy that avoids the entire system being dismantled. Imagine if there were five congressional representatives from a new Social Democracy Party. Because those five representatives are the deciding vote if it goes along party lines, they can apply pressure on the Democrats to pass healthcare reform. Hooray, everyone loves the Social Democracy Party.

They might take a few more seats from the Democrats’ safe districts in the next election. But in a contentious district where the Republican candidate has a good chance of winning, if half the people who voted Democrat vote Social instead, the vote gets split and the Republican gets in. So many of those people, who want to vote Social, will realize that if they do, then healthcare gets completely gutted. So they hold their nose and vote for the Democrat.

Politicians are motivated by re-election chances. Corporations are motivated by money. The question is not whether a Ministry of Truth would be objectively good, the question is whether it would be less bad than what we have now. And what we have now is a Corporation of Truth with no oversight and laughable regulation. Some oversight, some accountability, and some aligned incentives is better than no oversight, no accountability, and completely misaligned incentives.

Can’t the Speaker shut that shit down? Especially since he’s admitted exactly what he plans to do?