That was my first thought too. This Cooper’s Hawk is way too small.
Turns out (according to Wikipedia) their adult size can vary a lot depending on location and other factors, from 14”-20”. The ones I see around here are def closer to 20 than 14, and the sharp shinned hawks are relatively small and slender.
That’s exactly the point. There is a cost. The news media and the public discourse has limited bandwidth. There are only so many things we can talk about and fight for at any given time, and to me it seems like this issue may be drowning out more existential issues.
The irony is that the argument over pronouns is intentionally being amplified by right wing media and activists. They’re trolling us into being outraged about this, and we’re falling right into their trap.
It’s classic bikeshedding being used against us, and most of us seem to be entirely unaware.
I’d have no issue with you calling me ma’am or whatever you feel comfortable with, but that’s only because that part of my identity is not something I’ve struggled with for much of my life.
I totally understand and empathize with people for whom perceived gender is not what they identify as, and I’m 100% in support of ensuring that everyone has the right to be referred to by their chosen pronouns.
My point is that I worry that this issue is overshadowing other issues that I think are existentially threatening to our entire way of life.
We’re busying ourselves over respectful word use, while the world crumbles around us.
Do you think anyone will respect anyone’s pronouns when the world’s superpowers are run by fascist governments or our ecosystems and food production have collapsed?
On the other hand going to war over word use is not a good use of the left’s energy.
I understand the words are supposed to be proxies/symbols for inclusivity and respect for freedoms and charter rights, but that tends to get lost, to the point where both sides start to believe that it really is just about pronouns.
There are really big, scary things going on out there — corporatism, environmental disaster, and a geopolitical powder keg building — and I’m starting to worry we are spending way too much effort and energy on kindergarten-level righteousness.
Don’t worry he’ll be the governor of Florida within 2 years, so he’ll be out of the senate real soon!
A great way to slow down transport electrification is to promote alternatives to stall unification around standards.
Even if hydrogen turns out to be a better technology in the long term, unifying around a single standard for now is the best path to getting off fossil carbon. Not surprising that AB conservatives are promoting distractions.
When I wrote that, I knew someone was going to come out of the woodwork and say the highway was not technically sold, so I was trying to be careful with the wording. Not careful enough I guess. Yes, you’re right, it was the rights to a 99 year lease that were sold.
But no, it wasn’t just a lease, it was the right to a lease, which is indeed technically a kind of sale, not a lease per se. This is evidenced by the fact that SNC-Lavalin recently sold 10% of those rights for $3B, which pegs the current value of the entirety of those rights at $30B, 10 times what the Harris government originally sold them for.
You mean by Mike Harris, some 25 years ago.
We’re still reeling from all that common sense, with the amalgamation of Toronto leading to a bigger, more expensive, and more inefficient, and more dysfunctional government.
And lets not forget the common sense turd that was the privatization of the 407, an absolute cash cow that generates $1B / year in profit, was built on taxpayer funds, and is now worth 10X what it was sold off for.
There is a similar rule in Ontario, but it doesn’t apply to buildings built after 2018.
This exemption was put in place as an incentive for more rental units to be put on the market (or to enrich developers and landholders, depending on your political stance).
Meanwhile something like 30% of all online orders (and way more in the case of clothes) get returned, and a majority of that then goes straight to landfill/incinerator.
God forbid our endless feed of cat pictures and black and white telephone poles gets polluted!
The majority of the electorate — 65%+ — own homes, and 75%+ of Canadians’ wealth is tied up in real estate.
There is absolutely no way this can get fixed politically in our democratic system. Any party that tries to deflate house prices in any meaningful way is committing its own suicide.
The only hope is that prices level off (or … you know… at least stop doubling every 3 - 4 years?) and the rest of the economy somehow catches up to make houses affordable again.
But I can’t see how that’s going to happen. We’re going to have to have a nasty recession to sort this out, and that won’t be because of anything whoever is in power at the time did intentionally.
A while back, I (with a few others) built and sold an innovative tech company to a large “enterprise”. What you’re describing is exactly why they bought us and how things played out post acquisition. I’ve since left, but the thing we built is now in shambles, buried and suffocated by bureaucracy and institutional ineptitude. The parent company has learned nothing, continues to keep buying smaller tech companies, and can’t seem to figure out why things always turn to shit.
DataGrip is the one JetBrains IDE I can’t work without and continue to pay for. I’d love to find a pure OSS alternative, but there’s nothing else like it.
The other day I used Apple Maps in my car for the first time in a few years. I gotta say something about it felt nice.
Maybe it’s the aesthetic? The names of towns and geographic features are in big letters and flow across the map nicely — the name of the peninsula I was driving across was stretched along the length of the peninsula itself — and it felt a bit like I was traversing an old timey map, maybe like in an old Indiana Jones movie.
If I need to find some obscure business, I’ll still use Google Maps, and if I’m on a well known commute I’ll still use Waze, but for just general ambient map display, I think Apple Maps might be it now.
Def the other way around.
Writing a privacy policy generally forces a company to make commitments about what they will and won’t do with data they collect about you.
No privacy policy means anything goes — they didn’t say what they will or won’t do, so you can’t sue them if they do something sketchy.
But many jurisdictions require companies to publish a privacy policy, so just about any company these days will have one. The devil is in the details though, as this article points out.
Because Apple’s core business is selling their stuff to you. Google’s core business is selling you to other companies.
Google’s consumer software and products literally serve no other business purpose than surveillance to figure out how to turn you into a more lucrative advertising target.
Apple has realized they can capitalize on this by making privacy a core selling feature for their stuff — one that Google cannot challenge them on as privacy is directly at odds with the core premise of their entire business.
Well no, a lease is literally a lease. People do lease houses too you know. When people “buy” a condo, that’s not a lease.
The point I’m making here is that the housing analogy doesn’t work (“Imagine buying a house and not being allowed to X”) because people literally “buy” houses and are not allowed to do basic things that you’d assume come with house ownership.
I’m not defending that this is ok. For me buying a condo would be as ridiculous as buying a DRMed Tesla.
As with alcohol, I think it really depends on the individual.
For me, I find that too much regular pot puts me in a dim, slightly dissociated place. But it might also be that in the past I may have smoked too much cannabis at times when I was already headed for dim dissociation, so bit of a chicken and egg situation maybe. Meanwhile I have friends who swear that cannabis has saved their life, helping them cope with anxiety, OCD, etc.
Either way, if I had to choose between a pot or alcohol abuse problem, I’d def choose the former. It’s not ideal, but it’s far less likely to kill you or ruin your life.