Wow. It’s terrible to see how much things have reversed in the 14 or so years since Wukan ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wukan )
Edit: As back then there was an effort to actually address grievances and come to a harmonious resolution for everyone involved.
I speculate that this is the fault of the United States. The scholar, a US citizen, is entering from the US, and as per the article CBSA has concerns regarding “national security” - we know that the CBSA and the US CBP work closely together, so if some top level US official ordered the CBP to pass the “national security threat” along, that’d explain CBSA’s behaviour.
Specifically, why they were concerned in the first place (because they had to take the tip from the US gov’t seriously for fear that they’d lose cooperation on actual important matters if they didn’t), why it took so long before the scholars were released (because they needed those four hours to make sure that they covered all their bases in case the CBP or another part of the US gov’t came knocking again and asking why the scholars weren’t arrested or detained), and also why CBSA can’t more clearly explain why the scholars were targeted in the first place (because the working arrangements between the CBP and the CBSA, and between the security departments of the governments of Canada and the US more generally, require a considerable level of secrecy).
The article also mentions,
Kanji said that prompted them to reach out to different high-ranking officials in an attempt to get Falk and his wife released.
I like to think though that this wasn’t strictly necessary and that CBSA are the good guys who would have still done the right thing in the end, after of course thoroughly documenting the obvious - why the US’s tip was off and there actually was no real threat.
Interesting. So if English Wikipedia is accurate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese/_Representative/_Office/_in/_Lithuania then there’s certainly plenty of room for diplomatic relations to grow. Currently the office is still a TECO, in contrast to, for example, the full on embassy in Vatican City (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy/_of/_Taiwan,/_Holy/_See )
It’s not clear from the article if diplomatic relations between Lithuania and the PRC are fully called off or not. If they are, I don’t see it as the best possible move from the PRC. It’s just removing any incentive to prevent Lithuania from establishing full diplomatic recognition to the ROC.
Also, from the article,
Although Lithuania tried to restore diplomatic links with China after the new government assumed power late last year, it has remained insistent on not changing the name of Taiwan’s representative office in Vilnius.
I wonder what was tried. If the current government in Lithuania really wants to do this, and the name alone is the sole sticking point, it seems like a solution like this might work out:
Sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the ROC that the word Taiwan in the name specifically means and is short for Taiwan island (where the city of Taipei is located). Then offer to sign another MOU with the PRC.
I’m not sure if it’d work, but it’s a potential middle ground compromise.
Around the downtown core there seems to be a reduction in density which is curious, and I’m not sure what drives that
Having lived both right on the subway line and in the some areas just outside the downtown core, I may be able to add some insight here.
Basically, that whole area of land feels car unfriendly. Hard to find parking close by and lots of congestion. But living on the subway line this never felt like an issue since there was a good alternative - one typically doesn’t need a car for day to day living in downtown Toronto in my experience. Also, for things like getting groceries or stuff from a corner shop, things are so clustered together that there’s usually something within walking distance of where you live.
Much further away in the GTA, you definitely need a car. But congestion is not so bad (at least until you finally need to head into the city proper) and parking nearby is quite more comfortable as well.
So the areas outside the core have the worst of both worlds - you get much of the lack of space and congestion that you get in downtown proper, but also a lack of viable public transportation alternatives.
So actually this caused quite a bit of chaos this past Friday. Folks who were traveling, say on a quick weekend holiday, suddenly found out that they had to rush back into the US before midnight. Then the administration walked it back, so some of these people who paid premium for last minute flights are now SOL. Another example of how not to run an administration.
This got me thinking about the fediverse more generally, but as that’s off-topic I started a separate thread in https://thebrainbin.org/m/PoliticalDiscussion/t/1097560/How-the-recent-h1b-drama-got-me-thinking-about-the
Lorrianne G. … added subsequently that she is also worried by the frequency with which businesses in her hometown north of Toronto have become owned by newcomers.
“All of our Tim Hortons are no longer owned by white people,” she said.
I think this really says it all.
So I meant to write in the above comment that while not every case of quiet quitting is malicious compliance, and not every case of malicious compliance related to employment is the same as quiet quitting, there is definitely room for overlap - a situation where one is both quiet quitting and performing malicious compliance. I thought that this was such a case.
After reading https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/e285ec96adf8d443/5868d536-full.pdf I’m backing away from that. What the new whistleblower report seems to allege is that Reuveni was ordered to make statements to the court that he knew were wrong and misleading, and he outright refused - which is honourable but it’s non-compliance rather than malicious compliance.
He also actively sought to confidentially relay the situation to folks higher up on the food chain in order to get them to push back against this, which is probably too much effort to count as quiet quitting.
Yeah, it’s really strange that Sonny’s citizenship application is still pending after two decades.
Reasons are mentioned in the article:
I ask Sonny why he thinks his own application for citizenship has taken over two decades.
“It’s racism,” he replies immediately.
At one point his file was lost completely, and he has now been told his case is “pending”.
Insaf’s case is similar.
“I arrived here at nine months old, and maybe at 33 or 34 - if all goes well - I can finally be an Italian citizen,” she says, exasperated.
Her parents finally got Italian citizenship 20 days after Insaf turned 18. That meant she had to apply for herself from scratch, including proving a steady income.
You’re correct of course in that a big part of the problem is that it seems only adults can start the process, as per https://immigration-italy.com/how-to-get-citizenship-in-italy/ there aren’t separate provisions for minors to naturalize, the usual naturalization pathway requires things that normally only adults or emancipated minors would be able to provide, and minors whose parents naturalize are automatically naturalized too.
Good that it’s been blocked by an injunction. The only thing is that I’m a bit sad to hear that Harvard reported that they complied, but the silver lining is that it means their court case should be that much stronger when pushing back against the “insufficient” claim.
He already could dox them if he wanted to, all that information is already accessible to him.
Interesting question actually… for sure the SEVIS records already have what the President wants to expose, but would he personally be able to see these records? I think we know, for example, that when Biden was President, he wasn’t able to view or release his predecessor’s tax return even though the IRS has it.
I don’t know how those IRS protections compare with the SEVIS ones (and would find it plausible if it turns out the IRS is the one with the stronger ones), but I’d certainly be interested in learning more about it either way.
He needs to make it seem like someone’s fighting him on it when nobody really is.
Agreed, this makes sense and is the most likely answer. The other aspect though is even if he could get the records from SEVIS, doxxing from that (likely in violation of laws and pre-existing regulations) would be a serious thing. Now, openly doxxing from Harvard’s own report would likely also create legal issues - but from a practical standpoint there might be fewer controls on drumpf and his underlings in releasing this info if it was successfully obtained in this way. On the other hand I feel like this is giving drumpf too much credit, he’s made far dumber gaffes before.
One final thing. Of course, there’s slightly more plausible deniability here (“oh no some jilted employee at Harvard must have posted the copy of the report after Harvard was forced to write it and send it to us, we didn’t do it”). All the more reason for Harvard to resist any such demands to the very ends of the Earth…
Yeah, they should clarify that being at the G7 and also being a convicted felon is unusual.
From the docs at https://maxautoclicker.blogspot.com/ (which I had to read using 12ft.io due to the ads redirecting otherwise) it seems that this tool supports updating the mouse position as well,
Position of mouse click (defined or any location)
Thus it shouldn’t be too hard to set up the required scrolling if someone in the future is still interested in trying this out…
I’ve done similar things in the past, though my go-to is xdotool - https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/xdotool.1.html - since in addition to simulating the mouse it can also simulate the right keyboard presses.
Came here to say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if he became obese because of the 33 years he put into the job, always working and not having enough time to himself to self-care.
The party I’m calling centrist is viewed as centre-left here by the media and general public.
Greens and Labor split each other’s votes, not Labor and LNP.
Sounds reasonable enough, actually.
(Why about 20% of left-wing voters prefer the right-wing over the centre I will never understand.)
Hmm, puzzling. If they were USians then I’d suggest that it was because they confused over the name (liberals are always on the left, right?) but I digress.
Ah, but it was never that.
Isn’t it though? As you wrote,
The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor
Just as it’d be confusing why left-wing voters would support a right-wing party over a centrist or centre-left party, it’d be equally confusing why right-wing voters would support a left-wing party (the Greens) over the centrist one. Well, sounds like they didn’t.
(With IRV of course it’s not that this happened because of a split vote but that because Labor had more support in the first preference that it survived over the Greens, when normally it’d be the other way around - so the specific reasons are different and a bit more complex, but this specific result which occurred is intuitive to someone who only understands FPTP. More generally, both FPTP and IRV suffer from spoiler effects (as explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler/_effect ) - while IRV is better than FPTP there are still cases where spoiler effects can happen and this example of a Green losing to a Labor due to a loss of support by the LNP is one of them - it just feels more intuitive to someone familiar with FPTP because this is the worst when it comes to spoiler effects).
we here in Australia had another parallel to your election.
I didn’t realize this, but this is really interesting. Thank you for the hattip!
In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That’s an aberrant result that doesn’t really match anyone’s intuition of how elections should work.
Unless, like me, you grew up in a FPTP system - then this is exactly what you’d expect. (As you already know in FPTP the votes would be split, so with the centrist and the right-wing splitting the vote, the left-wing would win. But if the right-wing drops out, then the votes would mostly go to the centrist instead, likely putting the centrist ahead now.)
I didn’t realise it was in response to a specific article, but I gathered it was a response to general comments from some in the LNP praising FPTP.
Accurate enough - the article that it was responding - well, it was basically what you wrote above.
I was responding primarily to the headline suggesting we should be “proud” of what is literally the worst acceptable voting system.
I took this with a fair bit of humor. I would have said that it’s not the worst voting system because FPTP is worse, but then,
(Personally, I consider FPTP completely unacceptable and anti-democratic; it should not even be part of any discussion among serious people.)
So actually, you are right. Agree 100% here.
a proportional system would be better.
And here too.
This is awful. He was sentenced to four years but ended up serving five. One wonders if the false confession actually helped reduce the time at all in that case. (I don’t doubt that he would have signed anyways, not after being deprived of food and water and being beaten for two days straight, but still… it’s even worse if signing was pointless.)
Thank you! This is exactly why folks should comment and not just only downvote.
Those who actually read the article know that E.M. is a woman and the victim who is giving testimony (and whose full name can’t be released pubicly), no connection at all to Musk aside from coincidentally sharing the same initials. But for illustration she might be named Ellen Marks, Eva Manns, Ellie Monet, etc.
Agree 100% - this was a non-ludicrous but entirely reasonable and well-reasoned response.
That being said I do think there’s many good points made in the article. The Greens are doing better in Australia, while they hurt quite a bit here in Canada due to FPTP being in use. And it really hurts to see the NDP fall so much, which likely would not have occurred if Canada had the same system as Australia.
The linked article is a response to https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/preferential-voting-system-ousts-half-a-liberal-ministry-of-talent/news-story/7cd4e33e0a05e786a8c4943645c5525d?amp=&nk=d1a6519026cb614e2502f09a887f82c4-1747124133 and I think Canada makes the perfect case for that article being wrong - Canada actually has FPTP but the leader of Canada’s CPC still lost his seat. If FPTP had been in play, perhaps all those Liberals would have still lost their seats, as folks started using strategic voting instead to ensure a Labour win (but also then hurting independents and other parties like the Greens) - which is exactly how it played out in Canada.
So a couple of thoughts here.
First of all, the page itself just correctly warns that orcas can’t just be freed. It’s not like we should go ahead and literally dump them into the ocean and abandon them. No one is advocating for this. Doing this generally with most types of animals still causes all kinds of problems (see for example https://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/07/23/snakehead.poison/index.html )
On the flip side, when a well prepared effort is launched, captive orcas have survived in the wild successfully. See https://killerwhales.fandom.com/wiki/Vasilievna for a good example - and this is what folks are pushing for.
Finally, I have some concerns about the source itself. From https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Environmental/_Literacy/_Council it seems that enviroliteracy.org is part of the George C. Marshall Institute.
In case you don’t know much about that institute, here’s the most important bits:
The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) is a “non-profit” organization funded by the profits from oil and gas interests and right-wing funders (listed later). It has received substantial funding from Exxon’s Exxon Education Foundation.
Its nominal creators, aside from Exxon-related entities and others, were William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz and Robert Jastrow. This industry and right-wing front group
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George%5C_C.%5C_Marshall%5C_Institute
Hmm… it seems https://well-known.dev/sites/piefed.au last saw it around as of four days ago (saved for posterity at https://archive.ph/hjDuK ), but now I’m getting NXDOMAIN from chrome, so the registration just vanished.
Which is interesting because checking with GoDaddy WHOIS says, https://ca.godaddy.com/whois/results.aspx?domain=piefed.au
Suggesting that the DNS registration expired earlier, 9 days ago.
Alas, GoDaddy only gives a name - Chris Price - and no other useful contact info like an email address or phone number that can be used to reach out.
Of course, well-known also only found out about piefed.au in late October, while there’s evidence of it being around for much longer than that - e.g. https://lemmy.ca/post/45609571/17024992
However, when I look, I can’t find evidence of federation happening more recently than one month ago - e.g. https://al.lemmy.hostux.net/l.hostux.net/u/Linearity@piefed.au
This makes me think that the admin planned to shut it down, and abandoned it approximately one month ago - but the hosting provider simply kept it around until now.