Its generally all been published -- "real published" not "self published". And a lot of it has won various notable Canadian awards. These are not he highest bars by far but it does generally reliably filter out the stuff that's actually "poorly written". Again, I think you are being too hard on it and letting cyncism color your subjective review. Sure it may not hit the new york times bestseller list (for many reasons) but its not nearly as bad as you make out.

You've had some bananas teachers in a school/district captured by bananas administration it seems. My kids have not experienced that kind of crazy. Not every teacher was great, we definitely encountered some "B Ark" people; but overall it was pretty positive and, as I've made plain, I've come away supporting a lot of the concepts of the curriculum, even if the execution needs improvement.

I will say that letting the kids pick their own books is a shitshow. They largely pick the modern equivalent of 'penny dreadfuls' (the literary equivalent of pablum) and worse they'll pick the same books every year, because that's even less work for them. Sure they should be encouraged to read a couple books of whatever they want and write about it, but forcing them through a curriculum of curated books is worth it. I'd never have read many of the local works nor international classics i was forced through in school if I'd been given a choice. I remember what i was choosing to read at the time - I might have enjoyed it more, but largely, it was NOT "better" quality.

3iob - its metal. it just won't be on mainstream radio, and metal is niche enough I'm not sure canada has dedicated metal fm radio stations?! They don't around here. I wouldn't be surprised though if someone listened to a lot of metal on spotify in canada that 3iob would be suggested in their discovery queues or whatever; thanks to cancon promotion.

French is an optional language credit to graduate in much of english speaking canada already, and many english language universities i've looked at don't require it.

As for your daughters reading assignments. Those artists aren't simply because "cancon + woke ideology" - oh a first nations person wrote it? Who cares what's in it. Its on the list! That's not quite it. (Although I'm sure you can find exceptions, people are people, and im sure someones on the reading list because they "know" somebody or some other nepotism/wokeism/or even plain old corruption.)

But in principle they are also chosen on the basis of the stories they actually tell. The school system explicitly wants to highlight and expose students to a variety of canadian perspectives and canadian experiences in canadian settings. That's an explicit goal. They want students to read about an immigrant from the middle east moving to thunderbay and navigating making friends and integrating in canada while maintaining their own cultural heritage, they want students to read about an inuit growing up in nunavut, or a small town in rural quebec overcoming lifes little challenges and celebrating its little victories. Even if they aren't subjectively "the best books", these are the types of stories and perspectives and ideas that they want students to be exposed to and to spend time thinking about. Then they include some of the more "important" works, like Animal Farm, the Hobbit, Romeo and Juliette, etc. Its a deliberate part of the breadth of the education.

To layer on top of that, of course its also a good use of public money to buy local, and circulate the money in the local economy; and for learning reading and comprehension, and thinking and writing about structure, plot, themes, allegory, etc, its all fine, and having as much "canadian subject matter" underneath it as possible, just makes sense.

I think you are perhaps a bit too cynical here.

Guess how many people speak welsh in Wales, or Finnish in Finland? 10 million is a LOT of people. And lets be honest here, its still french. Sure its a dialect, but if you know Canadian french and put in a bit of effort, its not exactly hard to pick up Metropolitan french, belgian french, swiss french, etc, etc, etc.

French class is basically a 'a bit of exposure to even the idea of an another language (in this case french), a bit of canadian history (esp french canadian), oh... and its a bit of an art and drama class too'. For fucks sake its 30 minutes a few times a week in grade school.

Nobody is expecting you to learn conversant or fluent french from gradeschool french class.

If they dedicated the the time to arabic or hindi or mandarin, it would be just as ineffective at producing speakers of those languages. Meanwhile, french has some canadian significance in terms of heritage and culture, and its an official language... so what are you really on about here??

Heavy metal isn't mainstream. What part is confusing you?

It is exactly that. Its abused by many actors, and imperfect, and there's plenty of canadian crap as a result. There's also quite a bit of good stuff, and plenty of it is even made by white men (a tragically marginalized group, according to you apparently.)

Being worth consuming doesn't mean you'll hear about it. Wasn't that your very own argument about 3 inches of blood??

Lots of canadian content worth consuming wouldn't gain traction without the promotion. Your right, a lot of it isn't worth much, but frankly, a lot of is. So lets hear about it. What's the real problem here? You can't find enough quality american content to consume because canadian content is crowding it out of the marketplace? For realsies?

Meanwhile, take a look at all that top tier quality we're missing out on thanks to all that canadian content rules. American TV is full of promotion for low rent garbage reality TV, cake baking contests, hoarders, absurdist dating contests, and so on. American netflix is full of cheap comedy specials and low budget subtitled filler from their foreign studios, American spotify is full of AI slop music.

So yeah... if some of that is getting pushed below the surface some canadian crap is getting promoted instead. So be it.

He's got a valid point. For example, if you use wolfram alpha after you do a math problem to check the result you came up with you can actually learn MORE than just doing the problem yourself, and may even add to the time the work takes, as if your result is wrong, you'll spend extra time working out where you went wrong and fixing it. And ultimately learning more in the process.

OTOH - If you use wolfram alpha to DO the question for you, you will learn nothing at all.

But further to that, you can even use tools to save time and learn more.

The other day, my daughter and I chatted about docker build scripts while she was doing her homework (which used docker containers), and that conversation clarified a lot of details and subtleties. (I learned a few things in the course of that conversation myself.) Nothing we talked about wasn't in the documentation, strictly speaking, but the conversation was a more natural way to learn and address the specific details we were talking about, with examples, and use cases that we came up with on the flay to make sense of and highlight those specific nuances. She probably could have read and reread the docs and easily spent more time on it, while learning less.

Now, in this case, she was learning 'from me', but you could swap "Dad" out for an "LLM", and get the same benefit.

All that said, I don't think the AI systems we have right now are likely a good idea for homework. The temptation to use it self-destructively is just going to be too high for a large number of students. Probably the majority of them. But it definitely can be used to learn more, and even learn more faster in the hands of someone who uses it for that.

There's a lot wrong with your question.
Firstly, China's gun laws are among the strictest in the world. Private ownership of firearms is generally prohibited. You'll get better returns on matching China's homicide rates by matching their firearms laws than you will by catching up with them on surveillance.

Are you wiling to do that? I somehow doubt it. And to be a safe as china, you could do both -- give up your guns AND submit to a police surveillance state. What could go wrong?

China has done other things too - absolutely massive government investments in infrastructure and construction, creating jobs and reducing poverty in the process, uplifting people who would otherwise be more desperate and more likely to turn to crime etc.

And speaking of Crime, China is pretty busy with state executions too. And is quite adept at artificially making those numbers look smaller, frequently recording the execution of multiple people as a single execution. That may play a part in the lower homicide rate too.

Secondly, you imply the tradeoff is simple prudishness - we give up peoples lives for the ability to "go to a strip club secretly".
That's not that half of it, and you should know that. It's also the ability to go, for example, to a political party meeting secretly.

Do you really trust your government so much that you'd give them that power over you? That some fuckwit won't get into power and leverage this against the people? The best protection the civilian population has from government abuse is to resist giving them the tools to abuse you in the first place. The government doesn't need to know where every person is at all times, this will inevitably be used against you. The supposed 'safety' gains are not worth living in a police surveillance state.

Ragebait isn't about seeing what the other side says.

It's about seeing an inflammatory caricature of the other side.

For example, a Liberal isn't going to see some Conservative discussing some of the hard tradeoffs we'll need to pay down the debt. They'll see a Conservative proposing that Trump be given a 3rd term and trans kids get rounded up and forced into conversion therapy or some crap like that.

Meanwhile, Conservatives won't see some Liberal discussing the economics of Universal Healthcare. They'll see someone proposing that the police be defunded and all drugs are legalized.

Ragebait creates echo chambers because it gives the false impression that everyone on the other side is insane.

It's a fun conspiracy theory, but this is actually just how biology works.

There's basically four kinds of things that can go wrong with our bodies. Infections, mechanical issues, system errors, and cancer.

Infections we can cure by helping the body to kill off the infection, it's only some rare stubborn ones like AIDS that are chronic like you describe.

Mechanical issues we can fix with surgery.

System errors? That's stuff like genetic disorders where our body creates too much of hormone A or doesn't create the proper form of protein B. The problem is in our DNA and you can't cure it without rewriting our DNA (which we're getting to).

And then there's cancers, which are similar to infections, where we try to kill it (as they're doing here), though weirdly, some research suggests treating it as a chronic issue might be better for the patients.

In either case, it's not the fact that pharma is deciding "don't make a pill to cure it, just find a lifetime treatment!". It's only in the past few years that we're reaching the point where we can actually cure things that were traditionally chronic.

And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

I've heard almost nothing about Threads recently. Certainly no indication they were more popular than Twitter.

Is their user count some sort of trick with how they interface with Instagram? Or is Twitter just turning into a ghost town without people realizing it?

It is 12000 days into September, 1993: Usenet is long since an artifact in the memory of greybeards; the internet belongs to the monkey cage. Yet on Slashdot, we still get physics puns. Here, the golden age lives on.

the father accustoms himself to become like his child and fears his sons, while the son likens himself to his father, and feels neither shame nor fear in front of his parents, so he may be free ; the metic [563a] becomes the equal of a citizen and the citizen of a metic, and similarly with the foreigner.
It indeed so happens, he said.
To these, said I, such trifles do add up: the teacher, in such a case, fears his pupils and fawns upon them, while pupils have in low esteem their teachers as well as their overseers; and, overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries [563b] and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.

- Plato's "The Republic" (ca 375 BCE)

This is one of the reason why Western governments do invest in foreign aid.

It's not just charity (though that's certainly an element), but the more stable and prosperous developing nations are the less likely they're going to have to deal with a refugee crisis.

I thought they required you to create a new account every time you log in.

Though that may have been 20 years ago. Last time I saw a reason to go there.

When I think about it, I can see a clear difference.

There were all manner of places where human eyes were accepted, but still/video cameras were not, long predating "smart glasses". From changing rooms, saunas, locker rooms, and bath houses to performances like plays and concerts, and movie theatres to executive board room meetings, and even court rooms in many cases.

There are lots of scenarios where everybody accepts and consents that other people will see/hear them, but do not accept or consent to be recorded.

  Are you really incapable of seeing the multiple clear and obvious differences between "seeing/hearing something" and "recording something" ?

I think there's some nuance needed there.

Pelosi's trading is legal, it's highly problematic from an ethics perspective, but it's completely legal and somewhat common for legislators to do. So she can be criticized for using an unfair advantage, but it's not unprecedented nor a major sin.

Trump's grifts on the other hand do violate laws and precedent, those laws just aren't enforced.

For an extra $100k you get a pardon!