Canada produces good content that we should be enjoying. CBC Gem is free with ads or for a reasonable, low cost ($7). CTV also carries Canadian stuff, though not as much as CBC. It also has some free offerings (not sure the subscription price). It is part of Bell, of course, but at least it is a Canadian conglomerate and not an American one. And both are available over the air, if you are in an area that receives their signals.
Speech-to-text (a type of AI) has been around for a fair good years, but now they’re being paired with generative AI. This is the kind of thing that shouldn’t be paired with a generative LLM. A language model to identify words? Yes. Generative? No.
Good for Pankiw and Herron. I hope more people while rejected roles in any side of the camera speak up.
It’s disappointing how many high profile people have signed on to this project. I understand that the story was integral to many people’s lives (myself included) and, yes, the career opportunity is huge, I’m sure the pay is good… But there’s a very direct line from these jobs to harming innocent people.
I quit my job boss was lying and enriching himself, but at least he wasn’t really directly harming people. Without exaggeration, I think nothing would make Rowling happier than if trans ladies were killed or killed themselves because of her influence. How can people support that? It’s a moral bankruptcy.
“Unfounded attention”, says the company that “was issued a non-compliance rating at one of its Winnipeg sites” and because a Health Canada inspection found they “did not carry out sufficient corrective and preventive actions when required.”.
The fact they will take plasma twice a week from a person compared to Canadian Blood Services’ once every two weeks tells me enough of their care and concern for those selling plasma.
Why should Canada Post be a corporation at all? It is legally managed to serve all Canadians. Corporations otherwise are not legally required to serve this or that place or demographic. Yet Canada Post must deliver to as far as Grise Fiord. It cannot be profitable while legally obligated to service extremely unprofitable regions. It can either serve all Canadians as a service, or be a real corporation that can make decisions like target demographics and operations, but not both.
(To be clear, I think everyone deserves mail service, including the people of Grise Fiord, so it should be a service and not a corp.)
Libraries are indeed targets of malware and ransomware. In Ontario, at least Toronto, Hamilton, and London public libraries have been ransomwared. The idea is nice, but I think the risk would be too high for libraries with increasingly slashed budgets. Even with an air-gapped system doing the formatting, I can’t imagine library IT devoting the time to do this.
From the article:
The answer to how I became sick may lie in what’s called secondary vaccine failure, which happens when a vaccinated person’s immunity decreases over time until they are no longer protected. This can take place when an immune system doesn’t receive the “boost” it needs from encountering the virus.
“There is evidence to suggest that in the absence of these boosts, the immune response that is induced by the vaccine isn’t lasting as long,” said Janna Shapiro, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases in Toronto. That means even those who were fully vaccinated as kids can lose their immunity.
This was me. I was at the doctor and he was having me get some bloodwork done. I asked him to check my measles immunity status, too, because I’d previously seen online of the possibility mentinoed above. My parents did have me immunized when I was a child, but I thought why not check? The results: I had no immunity.
It was free (to me, the patient) to get the shots. My doctor had to order them in. It’s two shots a month apart, and then another blood draw another month later to check. I’ll be honest, it was the second most painful vaccination I’ve ever had (the first was shingles), but totally worth it. Ask your doctor to check the next time you’re getting bloodwork done.
I’m by no means against reduction or modification of service to match the reality of less mail being sent and delivered. Reduction of service and tax funding are not mutually exclusive.
But a legal mandate to serve all Canadians and a mandate for “solvency” based solely on postage are mutually exclusive in a country as geographically large as Canada with all our small, rural and remote (i.e. Unprofitable) communities.
Why should Canada Post be “solvent”? It’s mandated to serve every Canadian address. Have you considered what that means? It means it has to send mail to the furthest reaches of Grise Fiord (look for it on Google Maps). A business would never deliver there, and they don’t because it’s not profitable. A non-discriminatory mail service is not a profit business, it’s a public service of the government. Firehalls ans library systems have budgets, but no one expects them to be solvent because they’re services supported by public funds (taxes), not businesses.
All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he’s in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he’s doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.
“Cut. Spend.”? I’m no financial analyst, but you have to cut in one area in order to spend in another. Maybe we disagree on what is cut and what gets spent on and those choices could be matters of argument and debate, but trying to call out the fact of it itself like some gotcha is either bad faith or stupid.
I previously worked at an insurance company some years ago. Back then the company was complaining that flood maps were something like decades out of date, and that was irresponsible to let developers build and sell homes to unsuspecting homeowners who had no reason, or even a way, to know they were in a flood plain.
I suspect nothing has changed in the intervening years.
The baby absolutely didn’t deserve to die like that. The parents, on the other hand, are experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices, literally what their actions brought on and deserved. Nobody has to say, “I told you so”, but neither do they deserve anybody’s sympathy.
This is no different than parents refusing to get a car seat for their child because they think seatbelts take away freedom, getting in a car accident, and the child dying in the accident. The child’s preventable death is the parent’s fault. They created the environment that was unsafe for the child because they were arrogant enough to believe they knew better than decades of evidence. In this car seat scenario, parents might even be charged with endangerment or negligence.
Or the grandmother who didn’t believe her granddaughter’s coconut allergy was real, because she knew better than the baby’s doctors, and put coconut oil in the poor baby’s hair and killed her. That grandma doesn’t deserve sympathy for what she did.
The benefit is mostly in “Oh, this (show/movie I like) is Canadian? What else is Canadian?”
Let’s take Netflix for a negative example. People know it’s reputation for cancelling shows after the third season, so viewers choose not to get invested in Netflix shows, so they do poorly, and then Netflix cancels them. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.
But what if the reputation around the world was “CBC (or Canada in general) produces great shows”? Then more people will look for them and it grows the international audience. It genuinely annoys me when people call great, original Canadian shows, like North of North, a Netflix show. No, it’s quality CBC, Canadian, Inuit content. But if people think North of North is Netflix, how many are expecting it to get cancelled after the third season, and therefore not bothering to get interested in it?
Also, it’s important to counter right-wing populism everywhere. Poilievre and the Conservatives (in its current incarnation) needs to be shut down and not taken seriously in Canada and internationally. He needs to be seen as a joke by foreign nationals, and for people to see right wing populists in their own countries as jokes. The more he calls CBC state media, the more everyone needs to say WTF are you on about, you dingus?
Canada, CBC in particular, produces quality content. I feel that these shows and Gem need to be better promoted in Canada, and outside Canada they need to be better promoted as Canadian.
One thing that needs to happen is the Conservative traitors to stop lying about and maligning the CBC. They directly undermine our productions and industry when they spew false and hateful garbage to frenzy up their base. Canada is already a relatively small market, and half the country is against the CBC because they believe the ridiculous lies that it’s a communist state media outlet. I wish there were consequences for slander and libel for defamation from politicians.
Canadian Tire is buying the intellectual property (essentially, the brand) for an absolute steal at $30m. https://globalnews.ca/news/11210165/hudsons-bay-court-canadian-tire-deal-approval/
CT has the money and manufacturing, and distribution to continue to make Hudson’s Bay products. I would expect to see things like blankets, socks, and outdoor wear begin to appear at Marks, housewares also in CT stores. Heck, the CT corporation is so big they could just open Bay and Zellers stores if they wanted (with adjusted business plans, of course).
Have you heard of drones being used to smuggle guns? No physical person even needs to cross a border now. Personally, I can’t think of a practical solution to this.
They didn’t learn their lesson, evidenced by attempting to destroy evidence after the fact, and they’re only sorry that they’re facing consequences, evidenced by their own we’ve had enough consequences-type statements.
Surely if not disbarred, they would brag about not being charged and advertise themselves as a lawyers for the anti-government types.
I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn’t like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It’s similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)
The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It’s okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.
This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.
Migrants do have the right to protest. People who are no longer in the country legally do not have a right to stay in the country. Powwow were not taken into custody for protesting, they were taken into custody because their visas have expired. The two are entirely separate issues.