tal

Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s 24th prime minister on March 14, declaring “We will never, in any shape or form, be part of the US,” rejecting Donald Trump’s annexation threats.

Carney won the Liberal leadership with 85.9% of the vote despite having no elected experience.

In recent weeks, the Liberals have reversed a political freefall, sharply rebounding to such a degree that a previously expected Conservative majority in the next general election looks increasingly unlikely. The shift in the polls has been so dramatic that pollsters have struggled to find any historical precedent.

A newly released poll from Abacus Data showed the Conservative support had shrunk to 38%, with 34% going to the incumbent Liberals.

I don't know what impact the Trump administration is having on the likelihood of conservatives having political power in the US in the future, but it sure isn't having a positive effect on conservatives in Canada.

A survey of over 100,000 Germans revealed that 94% won’t buy a Tesla vehicle.

Ehhh...

So, normally, you want a random sample in polls, which is very unlikely to not be representative of the population as a whole. If they have 100k people, it very probably isn't a random sample, because you only normally take something like 1k to 2k people for randomly-sampled polls; there's a rapidly-declining value above that. If the sample set is self-selected rather than randomly-selected, you can get results that are pretty different from the population as a whole.

fires up Google Translate

While I can't seem to get the survey page to load, the domain it's on is apparently t-online.de; it sounds like it's a reader survey, which won't be random.

The nerds lost the internet.

I mean, there wasn't a shift in control or anything. This is just part of the business plan.

Reddit, like many B2C online services, intentionally operated at a loss for years in order to grow.

1. Get capital.

2. Spend capital providing a service that is as appealing as possible, even if you have to lose money to do it. This builds your userbase. This is especially important with services that experience network effect, like social media, since the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users. This is the "growth phase" of the company.

3. At some point, either capital becomes unavailable, too expensive (e.g. in the interest rate hikes after COVID-19), or you saturate available markets. At that point, you shift into the "monetization phrase" -- you have to generate a return using that userbase you built. Could be ads, charging for the service or some premium features, harvesting data, whatever. Because interest rates shot up after COVID-19, a lot of Internet service companies were forced to rapidly transition into their monetization phase at the same time. But point is, your concern isn't growing the service as much as it is making a return then, and it's virtually certain that in some way, the service will become less-desirable, since the service is shifting to having a priority on making a return above being desirable to draw new users. That transition from growth to monetization phase is what Cory Doctrow called "enshittification", though some people around here kind of misuse the term to refer to any change that they don't like.

Investors were not going to simply shovel money into Reddit forever with no return

they always did so expecting some kind of return, even if it took a long time to build to that return. I hoped that that changes when they moved into a monetization phase were changes that I could live with. In the end, they weren't

I wasn't willing to give up third party clients, if there was an alternative. But it's possible that they could have come up with some sort of monetization that I was okay with.

If you don't mean the transition from growth to monetization at Reddit, but the creation of Reddit at all...

The main predecessor to Reddit was, I suppose, Usenet. That was a federated system, and while it wasn't grown with that kind of business model, it wasn't free

but typically it was a service that was bundled into the bill when one got service from an ISP, along with email and sometimes a small amount of webhosting. Over time, ISPs that provided bundled Usenet service stopped providing it (since it increased their subscription fees and made their actual Internet service uncompetitive for people who didn't use Usenet service), and because so many people used it to pirate large binaries, the costs of running a full-feed Usenet server increased. Users today that use Usenet typically pay a subscription to some commercial service. You can still get Usenet service now, if that's what you want -- but you'll pay for it a la carte rather than having it bundled, and the last time I was trying to use it for actual discussion, it had real problems with spam.

Maybe the Irish will increase taxation on it to make him happy.

His stock transactions should be public record while president.

I think that it may be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012 (Pub. L. 112–105 (text) (PDF), S. 2038, 126 Stat. 291, enacted April 4, 2012) is an Act of Congress designed to combat insider trading. It was signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 4, 2012. The law prohibits the use of non-public information for private profit, including insider trading, by members of Congress and other government employees. It confirms changes to the Commodity Exchange Act, specifies reporting intervals for financial transactions.

The STOCK Act was modified on April 15, 2013, by S. 716. This amendment modifies the online disclosure portion of the STOCK Act, so that some officials, but not the President, Vice President, Congress, or anyone running for Congress, can no longer file online and their records are no longer easily accessible to the public. In Section (a)2, the amendment specifically does not alter the online access for trades by the President, the Vice President, Congress, or those running for Congress.[23]

That being said, my guess is that there are probably trivial ways to game the transparency portion of the bill. Like, if I own a business, and the business holds stock rather than myself directly, I'll bet that no disclosure is required. And I bet that if you have a spouse or kids doing transactions, no disclosure is required.

Could still get in trouble for insider trading if it could be proven that you were doing so.

kagis

From Trump's first term:

https://www.npr.org/2016/12/22/506497041/trumps-businesses-could-be-tripped-up-by-a-2012-insider-trading-law

"If he continues to own his businesses and he uses insider information, or information he has as president, then arguably it's a violation of the STOCK Act," says Larry Noble, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

Trump has repeatedly said that he plans to turn over management of his businesses to his grown children once he is in the White House and play no role in operations himself.

"The STOCK Act says all executive branch employees are subject to the securities laws, Trump included," says New York University Law School professor Stephen Gillers.

The STOCK Act originally applied to the buying and selling of securities, such as stocks and bonds. But some legal experts say privately held companies such as the Trump Organization could also fall under its purview, especially if Trump transfers ownership to his children.

Because presidents are privy to an enormous amount of information that could affect stock prices, Trump would risk passing on inside information anytime he talks to his children, even if he doesn't intend to. That could open Trump, his children and businesses up to nearly constant allegations of insider trading.

Haven't been following the issue since then.

Thanksgiving was awkward for the Vance family.

Three-letter words that can be typed with one hand, since I have to type them frequently.

$ egrep "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb]{3}|[yuiophjkllnm]{3})$" /usr/share/dict/words

Reddit will now issue warnings to users who “upvote several pieces of content banned for violating our policies” within “a certain timeframe,” starting first with violent content, the company announced on Wednesday.

Hmm. What does this pertain to?

kagis

https://www.theverge.com/news/606904/reddit-rules-bans-violence-doxing-elon-musk-doge

Reddit has seen an increase in rule-breaking posts across “several communities,” and it has issued a temporary ban on one that featured users calling for violence against people who work for the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

That community, r/WhitePeopleTwitter, was given a 72-hour ban on Tuesday, as reported by Engadget. Screenshots shared on X show multiple examples of the threatening posts. Musk later reposted the screenshots, claiming that the users have “broken the law.”

In a note on the subreddit, Reddit says it was banned “due to a prevalence of violent content” and that “inciting and glorifying violence or doxing” violate Reddit’s rules. An unnamed Reddit admin said the ban was meant to be a “cooling-off period” for the community.

Reddit also gave a full ban to a subreddit called r/IsElonDeadYet for violating rules “against posting violent content.” The unnamed admin said Reddit is taking steps “to ensure all communities can provide a safe environment for healthy conversation” in a post on r/RedditSafety.

Ah.

Ehhh. I mean, technically yes, but a proxy for search engine requests is probably functionally equivalent to the end user.

Also, if users don't know that such a thing exists and goes looking for a "search engine", they likely also want this.

One of my personal pet peeves is power stations

a big lithium-ion battery pack hooked up to a charge controller and inverter and USB power supply and with points to attach solar panels

being called a "solar generator". It's not a generator, doesn't use mechanical energy. But...a lot of people who think "I need electricity in an outage" just go searching for "generator". I don't like the practice, but I think that the aim is less to deceive users and more to try to deal with the fact that they functionally act in much the same role and people might not otherwise think of them.

I am less sympathetic to vendors who do the same with calling evaporative coolers "air conditioners". Those have some level of overlap in use, but are substantially different devices in price and capability.

California pays 19 dollars per kilowatt hour.

I think that you might be thinking cents, not dollars.

Typical residential electricity prices in the US are two digits number of cents per kWh.

Also, I'm pretty sure that California's residential average price in 2025 is above $0.19/kWh. Maybe that's the cost of generation alone or something.

EDIT: This has PG&E's residential pricing at about twice that, unless someone's getting low-income assistance.

https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/alternate-energy-providers/pce-sm_rateclasscomparison.pdf

They list their cost of generation there as being about $0.14/kWh.

I work in Solar and it is crazy to me that we are installing thousands of Internet connected devices that control megawatts or now even gigawatts of power. Even if we ignore a Chinese adversarial backdoor,

There was that attack Russia did on Viasat systems early in the invasion with the aim of knocking out Ukrainian communications infrastructure where they accidentally knocked out the communications links to a bunch of German wind turbines.

That wasn't even Russia trying to hit Germany, just trying to damage systems and not being very precise in what they targeted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack

On February 23, 2022, hackers targeted a VPN installation, in a Turin management center, which provided network access to administrators and operators. The hackers gained access to management servers that gave them access to information about company’s modems. After a few hours, the hackers gained access to another server that delivered software updates to the modems which allowed them to deliver the wiper malware AcidRain.[2]

On 24 February, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of Viasat modems went offline.[3] The attack caused the malfunction in the remote control of 5,800 Enercon wind turbines in Germany and disruptions to thousands of organizations across Europe.[4]

I don't, but I do have a search engine.

kagis for "myq beep"

https://support.chamberlaingroup.com/s/article/Why-is-the-MyQ-Garage-Wi-Fi-Hub-continually-beeping-1484145690676