so many of the very first photos my parents took of me are taken in Iran. I was born in India, but lived in Iran, before during and after the Revolution. My father worked in a remote rural hospital for 8 years. These are real people, not the bogeymen of silly Hollywood films. Its always real people.

I can't fucking believe we're doing this again.

our government combines the impulse control of pete hegseth, the intellectual rigor of rfk jr, and the attention span of donald trump with elon musk’s signature sense of humor

That feeling when everyone loves a thing and it reminds you of the last thing everyone loved and you found tiresome. Not gonna yuck anyone's yum. Just wears on the heart a bit.

Carney fans: here is perhaps the most unambiguous test yet of your principles. Do you support the US starting an illegal war with Iran? Because your guy Carney does.

Found this pretty good reading today. I've been looking at the Fediverse picture again recently, and this might push me back in that direction. blog.elenarossini.com/if-big-tech-...

GenAI exists at the intersection of anthropomorphizing technology & dehumanizing other people. It's a lot easier to ascribe meaning & intentionality to the machine if you don't believe that other people are people. There's no difference between AI & human writing if EVERYTHING is devoid of soul.

Carney is kind of the Canadian Newsom - on the surface he appears to be fighting for the things progressives want, but if you listen to him for even a millisecond or dig a millimetre deep, the illusion falls apart.

There are only FOUR DAYS remaining for you to get in on this incredible bundle. This is *everything* @annaleen.bsky.social and I have published with Tor, for a pittance. And you can help a wonderful organization that serves Black trans people. (Please click "adjust donation"!)

This orchestrated surrender to burning 19th century fuels gets framed as Very Serious, Adults-in-the-room realism rather than a weird, baffling choice to cause entirely avoidable suffering. I am so sick of it.

What the actual fuck.

Been trying to figure out which of my older short stories I've already posted online, and discovered that at least one, "The Beast That Rises Between Years", is known to the Google AI. Which is...something.

Just a reminder that the NDP's message last time around was that $25/hr is a living wage, but their target for increasing minimum wage was $22/hr, and they have yet to address that disconnect. #nlpoli #minimumwage #incoherentpolitics

If a platform is going to fuck with @caseyexplosion.bsky.social and the other trans folks I follow, I don't need to be there either. And if it's gonna further prefer murderous assholes over those cool people, I think maybe staying there means that yes, you're kind of a bad person.

My city is right around 4 metres of snow so far for the winter, and it's fuckin FEBRUARY. We get snow sometimes til JUNE. Wake me up in Junetober.

That Canadian Tire does not s3ll actual groceries is, at this point, a little surprising.

Not super hyped to learn folks are poo-pooing medical mask wearing in 2026 because...it's not good enough, I guess? But not nothing, either. Also saw someone shitting on social distancing. Not the direction I hoped things would go after 2020

Only one country in the world has used nuclear weapons on actual people.

The richest and most powerful people in the world are straight up evil. Also, though it's not the main point, it is gratifying to have someone as smart as Charlie say "Efficiency and resilience are inversely related", a thing I have said to austerity fans approximately eleven gajillion times now.

It's pretty wild to watch folks go full-scale rabid attack on Cory Doctorow because he said a thing about LLMs they didn't like, despite being almost entirely aligned with them. Folks have feelings about LLMs, I'm not here to shill for them. But Doctorow's not where I'd invest my energy on this.

A couple of things about this: 1) Alberta ran a multi-million-dollar ad campaign to lure newcomers. This isn't some Laurentian conspiracy.

Alberta's Ministry of Education says it is blacklisting CityNews unless it agrees to the UCP government's demand to unpublish a news article and publicly apologize to them

Every once in a while I wish I was part of a writing duo. I think I might be a lot better at writing if it was a conversation. Or at least it would be harder to go off task, maybe.

There are days when I'm surprised Larry Lessig didn't end up running an armed resistance. The US of A really needs to get money out of their political system.

Anyway please buy comics

Wrestling my own attention span into line and wrangling my 16 month old out of danger bear a remarkable number of similarities to one another.

Ontario students tell Doug Ford not to pick "crack smoking hobbies" in wake of stupid comments.

It is a cruel irony that a lot of basic income discussion forums have become stealth ai doomer vehicles. Watching folks salivate at the thought of getting what they want at the mere cost of...everything...is not a good time.

I was talking to a nurse practitioner the other day about GLP-1 medications, and she made an interesting point I hadn't thought about before - insurance companies have historically added medications they think will save them money overall, even if the medication itself is expensive.

Down at the Big Stompy Club

Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Dear lord this is good. I don't read enough short fiction anymore, but I'm so glad I took the time to read this one.

A lot of this could use some airing here in Canada too. The news organizations thing, for example, and of course all the Defund the Pedophile Class stuff.

No surprise that @scalzi.com has a sensible take on this subject, and while I'd nitpick a few areas here, this is absolutely in the ballpark of my feelings about things. Also, one of the comments points out how the Grok debacle tells us that these tools are controllable in a really undesirable way.

I really, really, really need people to stop calling $50,000 vehicles cheap.

Well, here is a rather interesting addendum to the Davos speech: Talks led by Mark Carney to create an EU-TPP super-bloc. Sans the U.S. www.politico.eu/article/eu-a...

Pluribus has 98% with critics and 67% with audiences and it makes me wonder what the converse of dead inside is. No-burn drama does not do it for me.

He's not doing himself any favors. But, alas, the Tesla board is just gonna shrug through all this, no matter what the cost. Oh and, as if anyone needs yet another reason to never buy a Tesla.

I feel like I finally understand this dude's stopover in Canada. He had access, but the country just didn't have the large quantities of deeply entrenched radical bigots he was searching for so he had to go to the USA.

There's a somewhat well-known Canadian curling movie, Men With Brooms, in which the climactic moral quandary is literally all about whether to admit burning a stone.

I was diagnosed at 33. Luckily, I live in Canada, and so I've had regular scopes ever since, along with bloodwork, genetic testing, and ton of other things. Americans need to demand better, and half of them need to get over their fear of public payer systems.

Canada’s path to its climate goals is getting steeper: our latest modelling shows the country is now further from its targets. Read more ⬇️ https://440megatonnes.ca/insight/canada-off-course-for-climate-targets/

I haven't done event organizing in the better of a decade, but this hits home anyway. Scars gonna scar I guess.

Similarly, trillion dollar corporations should not exist. This includes banks (including Canadian banks)

Billionaires should be taxed out of existence because no one human being should possess the unilateral power to launch the kinds of environment-destroying and world-changing projects that billionaires can approve.

The president Is a ped-o-phile He deserves To be in jail for a while Him and all his buddies too And all enablers, they can all go screw.

Hugo Noms have opened and I want to get in quick with this: there is a fabulous and vibrant contemporary SFF novella scene and the quality is *not* disproportionately located at tordotcom, which puts out brilliant work but does not have a monopoly on it. 5 titles for your consideration follow:

I feel silly about my softer parts sometimes, but the moment in The Proposal where Sandra Bullock says "I forgot!" might be one of the most effective tear-jerking bits of writing I've ever seen.

I own a corporation that is going to be dissolved relatively soon, and holy mother of god am I ever getting a ton of "investment opportunity" scam emails. Tempting to ask each person to send me a grand we can chat.

Two things: 1. Fibre1 bars are actually a smart little fix to "not enough fibre today" 2. I used to eat Fibre1 bars for the taste, and I'd have like 5+ in a single day, and then wonder what was going on with my stomach, because I R Dum