For what it’s worth, they were probably right next to each other on the same evangelical wishlist.

Don’t forget intersex people exist, and even more people with chromosome issues, upon whom genetic determination might be nuanced.

The real goal, of course, is to throw red meat to his base. Non-political casualties are unimportant.

Make a policy on any of the issues Trudeau is supposedly bungling <-> Murican’ style culture war

Sweaty superhero meme.

Yeah, I’m not sure why he’s doing this. I guess his general polls are looking really good so he’s focusing on his own caucus? Or maybe he just wants to distract from his own (deliberate, strategic) lack of vision, since I’ve increasingly seen it get media attention.

So on a second read, I think you might be talking about a situation where the government still allows an alternate system to operate, at least if it’s established. I already wrote this up from the same worst-case perspective as in OP.

For daily driving, the trick with that would be offering something commercial providers can’t, other than an abstract long-term argument. Without that, you’re basically just trying to start your own ISP, but without any investors. For enthusiast use, see APRS below, which is a thing.

APRS is kind of the relevant current standard. The trick is that being carried by radios that are unpredictable, it has no upper bound on latency (I think). If you want the same browsing experience (TCP especially needs a lot of back and forth) that’s really hard, because presumably big brother isn’t going to let you have a mesh station online for very long.

The burst thing I was talking about is genuinely how spies do it in locked-down places like Eritrea or Turkmenistan - you go to a busy public place and absolutely hog bandwidth for just one second, using a disguised radio, and then wander out with your groceries before the radio detectors can catch up. I suppose open-source resources for that would be good, if they don’t already exist.

I’d love to look at the transport layer of NATO’s system. It’s designed for both wartime (so arbitrary failure rate, type and pattern) and extensibility, and I’d be fascinated to know how they did it. Unfortunately, it’s also a big damn secret, to the point it’s the main thing they bring up when the media asks about China getting their hands on a working F-35. I’d also anticipate that it relies on every user registered as friendly acting friendly, at least over the long term.

One of the things that’s on my future project list is over-the-air crypto, so you can pay someone to transmit your 50 meg thoughtcrime video slowly but persistently. As far as I know there’s no prohibition on digital sigs (like there is on encryption), so it should be doable somehow.

And then you just upgrade your VPN software, and look for sketchier providers. We could switch to an intranet like Cuba, but then our economy might end up like Cuba because it will suck. And I would switch to pirate radio bursts to move content around, so I’m still going to be able to get my scientific papers without buying them. Or porn.

Shhh! Don’t mention the actual numbers! The old days were better, and the kids are rotten! /s

It’s not the best argument, but it’s the main one that you can’t directly undercut at this point. If you say it’s exploitative, well, it doesn’t have to be, and many people know it. If you admit it’s about your religion/culture, well, maybe it’s not mine, and I’ll even say maybe it’s not good, and that’s also a position people appreciate.

“Sex harms the youth” has been established lore since the Victorian age, when hiding it in the first place was a new project driven by religious concerns. Nobody questions it because nobody wants to look like a pedophile (which, for the record, are bad).

So you’re saying my favourite fruit is, itself, not vegetarian?

The confusing thing about that is that pineapple actually is a fruit, botanically. It would make so much more sense if it was a succulant, being pointy, large and chemically hostile, and growing on a plant adapted for low-water CAM photosynthesis.

Lol, that’s the best way of describing it. I wonder if they have a way of being confused that they aren’t getting anywhere.

Apparently lit ground can also cause them to flip upside down and fall, and passing under a light causes them to fly in an arc stalling out at the top, which slows them down.

Definitely some kind of fruit, I love that shit. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but maybe pineapple?

I’m a vegetarian, lol!

“meat shape”

Oh god, did I just coin that? Why did it have to be that?

My first thought was “WTF”, but then I considered the problem. You can grow beef cells, but only easily in a thin layer. So, get something porous but edible, and grow the cells all over it. Rice is just an obvious choice from a culinary perspective.

It’s weird, but I bet cooked up as a burrito or casserole this could actually be appealing, and it’ll be way easier to commercialise than more traditional meat shapes.

Edit: So, here’s Nature on the same. As usual, popsci left out the gotcha, and that’s that there’s not actually a significant amount of beef there. Rice is only slightly porous, just as it seems, I guess.

It’s not my preferred system either, but it’s what we have. In this specific case it works to the advantage of progress and stability.

If we had party list (preferably Norway style so there’s not constant snap elections) then the UCP almost certainly wouldn’t exist, and we’d probably have a coalition of centrist parties, with a sizable amount of more radical opposition parties, mostly on the right but also on the left (possibly led by Janis Irwin).

I don’t know, her numbers seem to have gone slightly downwards since the election, and like I said she barely scraped in. Keep in mind this is FPTP and most of the real rednecks are stacked in the same rural ridings.

It’s more like anyone’s game than hopeless.

more people would vote for his destructive policies than hers

Smith won by just 1300 votes, if you look at the close ridings, and has done nothing but unpopular shit ever since - starting with an attack on CPP, which is a sacred cow to the most vote-y demographic. And it’s still the first few months. So, yeah, she’s not on track to re-election, to put it mildly.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Yeah, flippers are completely irrelevant to the whole problem as far as I can tell, beyond also being a cheap radio.

It sounds like a lot of the thefts work based on the principle of amplifying the fob so it seems close to the car even when it’s not. Because all reasonable EM radiation can be amplified, there’s no simple way to beat that short of going back to requiring a fob button push, so it’s basically convenience vs. security.

They could try fobs that are smart enough to guess whether they’re being handled normally when activated, but that will 100% annoy consumers any time they try and do something the software doesn’t expect. It could even get as bad as the consumer putting the fob on a flat surface in another vehicle, and gently driving it up to the vehicle they want to move into.

I know! Clearly the UK is on a level of stranger paranoia that I can’t really fathom. Over here that still sounds like the hyperbole someone would use to argue against restrictions on more complex weapons, not a serious suggestion.