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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • And if the panic button is going to call the police, how is that any different from the passenger using their phone to contact police? Seems like extra steps of middlemen and confusion when the passenger could just call once they feel the need.

    Think of it as a backup for the phone in the case where, say, there’s an adult and a kid in the car, the kid has no phone of their own, and the adult loses consciousness with their phone locked. Or the car is being actively jostled by a group of people (say it drove into the middle of an embryonic riot), causing the passenger to drop their phone, whereupon it slides under the seat. Or the phone just runs out of charge or doesn’t survive getting dropped into the passenger’s triple-extra-large fast-food coffee. It won’t be needed 99% of the time, but the other 1% might save someone’s life, and (presuming the car already has a cell modem it in) the cost of adding the feature should be minimal.



  • Ultimately, the police are compounding mistakes made by Grogan, who apparently trusted his business partner so much that it took him more than four years to actually check the books and report anything stolen. Since the cars were goods for sale and not of any sentimental value to him, and he doesn’t need the money or he would have kept a closer eye on the business, the moral thing for him to do would be to leave the vehicles in the hands of their new owners and go after his former business partner for the money he effectively embezzled from the sales. That might not be legally feasible, though.


  • The actual relevant source document appears to be this: https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2024/2024-121.htm. Judging from that, some of the money will go to funds that subsidize the production of local news programs in any medium (including radio), and there’s a small amount earmarked for community radio. It’s supposed to encourage the stations to create and broadcast content that’s beneficial to the general public but not as profitable as what they might otherwise air in its place. If you consider that to be “helping” radio stations, then fine, I concede, but to be honest, the specific details of where the money ends up aren’t the major point here, and will probably change over time.

    I expect domestic radio stations pay into many of the same funds, although to be honest I’ve never checked. If we actually had a Canadian-owned streaming service that was willing to produce news programs or one of the other categories the government wants to encourage, they might get some money too. Including some of what’s coming from the radio stations, because no one is making an attempt to keep the revenue streams coming from different sources separate . . . and really, why should they? It’s extra administrative overhead to no real benefit.










  • For those unable to read the article, and who haven’t heard about this through other channels . . .

    The issue is that Quebec is actively throwing Francophone minorities in other parts of Canada under the bus, which goes beyond them being “reluctant to defend” them. The Quebec government doesn’t seem to care that the weapons it’s using against its Anglophone linguistic minority can be turned around to attack Francophones in the rest of the country. What they do doesn’t necesarily stop at their borders.

    It’s been a while since I had any reason to talk to a Franco-Ontarian about Quebec politics, but Quebec used to be considered snooty, obnoxious, and out of touch at best.


  • One question I haven’t seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn’t have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.


  • The ones that were better than I expected:

    • QA in Another World: I love the fact that they lean into this being a game (as opposed to a gamelike isekai), and that the characters exploit that fact. Other iterations of the “trapped in a game” trope in anime haven’t done that. (Shangri-La Frontier does, but the stakes are a lot lower there.)
    • No Longer Allowed in Another World: Just a nice change from stereotypical isekais and stereotypical isekai heroes.
    • Atri: I had really low expectations of this one going in, but it turned out . . . okay. Not brilliant, but okay.
    • Slime: The last cours was sufficiently bad that this one was an improvement, even if it’s certainly not the best in the series.

    The ones that were worse than I expected:

    • Dahliya: It’s just . . . where’s the conflict? What little does show up gets resolved within an episode or two. There’s pretty much nothing to drive the story here.
    • Tasuuketsu: Started off very strong, but the rest of the season didn’t live up to the first episode. Then again, I don’t know what could have. Not awful, but merely okay.
    • Bye Bye, Earth: Interesting world, but they did a horrible job of showing it to us. A lot of things needed a couple of sentences of explanation that they just didn’t get, and the little labels that kept popping up were worse than useless.

    Best of the season: NieR Automata (although I had sufficiently high expectations of it going in that it didn’t exceed them).

    Hardest to watch: Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction. I think I’m seven episodes behind right now, and having a hard time mustering the desire to continue on. Anything that has bigotry as a major theme is a difficult watch for me right now, given what’s been unfolding in the real world lately.

    Most incomprehensible art direction choice: Delico’s Nursery. The backgrounds look like tracings of photographs, or maybe carefully coloured-in photocopies of photographs, and the effect in combination with the characters is just . . . strange. Maybe it’s a carryover from the manga, which I’ve never read?

    Best dragon award: I Parry Everything, but mostly by default, because I don’t remember any other dragons of significance (even bad CGI ones, which would be ineligible).