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Yeah they are.

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See you, have fun talking by yourself.

Yeah, but nothing about that changes when federating with them.

This is dumb gatekeeping nonsense. It’s the exact same asshole bullshit behaviour we saw on Reddit when people complained about it getting popular.

Reddit is far better for reaching a wide audience then it was when it was just a bunch of 20 something nerds in their echo chamber.

Blackberry controlled 45% of the smartphone market.

The closest comparison today would be Apple and the amount of money that they bring into silicon valley.

OpenText has also arguably done little to no innovation, just packaged up existing technology in regulatory compliant ways and then sold it to governments and large slow moving businesses.

Not relative to the size of the overall tech industry tho

Will there be a next RIM?

On a global scale? Sure, but in the context of a Canadian tech company getting that big again, I want to say unlikely.

Why have we not had any real innovation in this country in almost 20 years?

We’ve had some real innovation, but quite frankly most of the tech world simply isn’t that innovative. Blackberry astutely capitalized on being some of the first to recognize the utility of the Smartphone but that opportunity only really came around once in the past 30 years.

The only other opportunities to make that kind of money and impact, were maybe advertising driven social media like Facebook, and now with the AI boom there’s that level of money but it’s spread between chipmakers like NVidia and ai companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. But even the AI boom isn’t as big of a boom / change as the smartphone was. Maybe with Quantum Computing and a company like D-Wave we’ll see it again, but there simply aren’t going to be that many huge new markets like we witnessed with the birth of smartphones.

And realistically the modern tech and corporate landscape also make it even less likely to have a Canadian success like that. The wealth disparity between the trillion dollar tech titans and new startups mean that virtually every single current Canadian startup’s plan is to get acquired. I’ve interviewed at like 10 different startups and spoken with a bunch of friends at others, and none have the kind of long term thinking or drive to try and turn their company into an empire the way Balsillie did. They’d all rather cash out and accept a massive check from Google or Amazon or whatever. And it’s understandable given the size of payouts and the level of risk and drive it takes to truly build a massive global business, but it also means that I seriously doubt we’ll see anything like RIM again here.

I also just watched the BB movie last night and it was great, but it did make me pretty sad to think about what might have been.

The article specifically says that this is a unique and different situation since the name and logo were given to the team from an acting Indigenous Chief in a ceremony over half a century ago. I think that the lesson to learn here is decidedly not that every team should ignore the racist history of their name or its current stereotyping.

The memoir of Fred Sasakamoose is a good read and a nuanced look at the experiences of an Indigenous pro hockey player seeing this kind of stuff in the minor leagues and NHL in the 50s.

The last article I read was an American high school football coach using the word Nazi as a play call against a school that’s 90% Jewish and the players using antisemitic slurs throughout the game.

That deserves an investigation and firing, this kind of Tom Foolery requires an eye roll and a change of call sign, if that.

It’s really objectively not. Tour through small town Ontario / Canada and look at how many Walmart parking lots the size of city blocks there are. We could build a region of compact mid sized cities with greenbelts around them and spread the load throughout the region, but instead of building the transit infrastructure to make that viable we just cede control of housing to corporate real estate investors.

It means following a logical train of thought to it’s conclusions.

Don’t have one, just would like to at some point, and that won’t happen if you buy the developer propaganda and rush for a future where the only housing available is shoe box apartments.

Who even makes that suggestion, anyway?

The article. Just follow the trajectory of what’s being proposed.

We remove all zoning restrictions throughout cities that have ever increasing density, and tight greenbelts preventing further expansion. We don’t build other regional hubs to connect them to, continuing to drive all regional traffic through these primary hubs that are experiencing ever increasing density and congestion, making it harder to travel around the region, making the hub the only spot that’s convenient to live, driving more demand to live there.

Manhattan’s density is the end result of a failure of regional planning and runaway feedback loops that have allowed demand for a region to get out of control to the point that they’ve created literal permanent twighlight at street level.

Now the article does propose capping the limit at 6 stories, which would prevent the full manhattanization of a city, but would instead more quickly lead to a paris or barcelona where all single family homes, be they dense townhouses, or sprawling in city suburban ranches, be torn up and replaced with apartments and condos. Not only will this destroy some of our quite frankly mostly nicely balanced housing from a density / quality of life standpoint (the dense townhomes and streetcar suburbs), but failing to put any controls on how the process of people being priced out of their homes and letting the market do the work is having the impact of shifting more and more power to landlords and corporate real estate which then further extract money from the general public since they have the resources to exploit this inelastic demand.

Again, I’m not saying we don’t need to densify, nor that we shouldn’t be building a lot more midrises (and even some high rises), but we also need to recognize that virtually every major city in Canada is grappling with a hub and spoke regional model that provides no outlet valves and creates feedback loops driving unsustainable and unpleasant pressure instead of spreading it through a region in a more balanced way and a lot of the calls for complete removal of zoning laws are coming from developers who simply want to build cheap shit to lease back to you at a profit.

Some arbitrary number might be larger, but what makes you think you are actually making more than them?

Knowing our salaries adjusted for inflation and/or cost of living, the numbers aren’t that close.

For example, in your grandparents’ time, food was around 50% of the average family’s budget. 30% in your parent’s time. Today, 10%.

In my grandparent’s time a family budget consisted of 40 hours of salaried labour a week, today it consists of 80.

We’ve failed to scale the production of houses, however. It takes essentially as much labour to build one today as 200 years ago. This has left the actual cost of housing to remain fairly stable.

Again though, that’s not very much. It costs like $150k to build a small brand new house, let alone buy a run down used townhouse, yet in places like Toronto or Vancouver that will run you upwards of a million dollars. That disparity between the real building cost of housing and the market value is why I can’t afford a house when my parents could and why I’ve spend far more of my income thus far on over inflated rent then they had to.

That is a result of the fact that we are in a reactionary feedback loop where we let demand drive infrastructure investment instead of building infrastructure where we want it to go. We do not need to densify Toronto and Vancouver to be unrecognizable on the scale of Paris or Barcelona or Manhattan if we densify ours suburbs and turn our huge swaths of land taken up by existing small towns and cities into Torontos and Vancouvers.

We put a greenbelt around Toronto to stop urban sprawl (great!) but we did nothing to connect Toronto to other cities outside the greenbelt or to connect them to each other, leaving runaway demand for the only livable walkable city for hundreds of km, that also has nowhere to build.

It is not capitalist, network effects are a basic reality of running a site like Reddit / Lemmy where users produce the content.

Yeah, but Lemmy / kbin weren’t ready for it. They don’t even show up in search engines yet.

It’s not growth for the sake of growth, it’s growth for the sake of network effects.

More users = more content. I can’t be the only one to feel the draw to Reddit since there’s still often more active discussions there.

I completely agree with that, but you’re not going to solve that problem by tearing down all the single family homes that exist in our current cities. Many of the people who get priced out of their homes will just move to the suburbs and small towns and balloon them further.

Yes we can afford and need to densify around existing infrastructure, to some extent, but we also desperately and urgently need to start building transit infrastructure in small towns and connecting them to our big cities so that we can have a region of mid sized cities, all capable of supporting a walkable lifestyle. Just densifying around existing transit without investing in building new regions is a race to the bottom that will benefit the rich landlords that lease those buildings back to us.