Oh it’s definitely a great city builder, I quite enjoy it myself! Even when it comes down to putting down housing, you can adjust the size of the plots to perform different functions, whether it is to grow large veggie crops, whether you need housing for specific specialized individuals, whether you just need to cram as many families as you can into one housing unit, assigning specific families to work at nearby locations, I could go on and on!

And there is a peaceful mode if you want to avoid the wartime strategy bits, but even those seem to be rather enjoyable, at least from the initial experience I have had with it. Very much looking forward to seeing what the expanded final product is going to look like, it is definitely a game worth all the praise!

Well, think about it this way:

A standard house for 4 people is probably in the range of 200k - 400k. Then you would need supporting infrastructure for each house - sewage and gas pipe connections, electrical connections, road infrastructure, all that jazz. That’s probably another 100k right there. And then public infrastrcture for things like schools, parks, firefighters, police, road equipment, etc. It’s easy to see why the costs would add up quickly to roughly $1 million or more per person. Managing city infrastructure is really damn expensive, especially for more ineffective housing options (hellooooooooo, suburbia!).

I did that at first, and then I went with the Pride of Pride. So dumb, it still makes me giggle to this day.

Maybe they don’t explain it in the article, but I’m gonna posit my own two cents: Alberta’s economy is quite big, relative to how much it contributes to Canada’s GDP as a whole, but the overwhelming majority of that is in oil and hydrocarbons, and a lot of the overall economy is geared towards that particular industry. Without it, Alberta would be in a significantly worse position. I would wager that we are seeing a good example of Dutch Disease.

What Ontario and Quebec lack in oil, they make up for in a more diverse economy, especially being the economic financial and trading hot-spots a la Toronto and Montreal. They have a robust enough economy that they can basically support their own dedicated Provincial police force and not have to rely too much on one singular economic output to fuel the entire thing.

With the EV market looking to expand faster and faster, Alberta hitched its economic future on a product that people actively want to turn away from. To create their own police force would mean they’d need their economy to be capable of funding this police force permanently, no Federal assistance, and if the demand for oil craters out because more and more people start getting off gas and going towards EVs, heat pumps, nuclear / solar / wind, etc., well, then Alberta would be quite pooched. Also, worth pointing out that neither Canada nor Alberta have enough weight in the global oil markets to guarantee that oil is a prime economic benefit, especially if new sources of cheap oil start popping up in the US.

I can’t speak to all of the political reasons for wanting to create a new Provincial police force, but economically? Alberta is better off relying on the RCMP rather than trying to do its own thing, just in case funding becomes a problem in the future.

Honestly, if Ottawa can pull this off in their winter climates, I’d be excited to see how well these EV’s will work in the milder climates around the GTHA.

So I ran the math on the election outcome on this, as someone who lives in the riding directly:

32401 / 116259 = ~ 27.9% (Voter turnout)

27.9 * 0.574 (Percentage of vote which went to Jivani) = 16.01%

16% of the electorate gets to decide a candidate for the remaining 84%. I don’t know about anyone else, or whether it’s just supposed to be the way that things go, but it gives me a real ick feeling when I see a number like that. Maybe if it was something closer to 30% or something along those lines, I could at least begrudgingly accept that this is such a solid Conservative riding, but only 16%?!

I just really hate voter apathy, guys. Come on, we had 4 days of early voting, mail-in voting, the actual vote day itself, you can legally request time off work to go vote if you need it… was it that difficult to get out and vote, or am I just missing some other context?!

Obviously the filthy casual didn’t know how to parry.

I shudder to think what country would want to actually buy asbestos. All I can think about is how much of a pain in the ass it is to clean up once used in construction.

Stay-at-school suspension for 4 years.

If you can point me to a single hydrogen-charging station in my area, I would be impressed. As infrequent and underdeveloped as EV chargers are (assuming you aren’t able to get a charger installed in your house), I haven’t heard of a single hydrogen charger anywhere in the GTHA. Hell, I haven’t even heard of a single hydrogen car on market that people are pursuing in any noticeable numbers. Li-battery cars at least have some modicum of infrastructure now where, in certain urban settings, it is entirely possible to drive an EV around, and I know they exist.

And there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Reduce the number of cars, sure, I would love to see that happen, but outright banning them? It’ll never happen.

I would argue that, because of the war in Ukraine, Russia no longer poses any threat to Canadian territorial integrity. They have 315,000 casualties - dead and injured - in this war. To put that into context, that is almost 90% of the initial deployment into Ukraine. They have spent so many resources into a war that they are actively failing in, there is no plausible means by which Russia can pose a threat to our territories within at least one or two generations. And just consider that the quality of the average Russian soldier has deteriorated significantly for so many reasons, but one most worth noting - it’s barely a week of training for the average Russian recruit, and then straight to the frontlines in either Bakhmut or Avdiivka.

Look at any population pyramid with Russia, and you’ll see that they are massively suffering from a lack of young people. And unlike Canada, which has many pro-immigration policies and attitudes which can attract a lot of people to make up for our lower birth rates, Russia is NOT a place where people want to emmigrate to, in large both because of its dire economic outlook (especially with all of the sanctions imposed by the US and the West), and also because it is insanely bigoted towards anyone who is not from Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Russia is wildly fucked, even if they were somehow to turn this around and somehow secure everything they ever wanted from Ukraine. If they are struggling this much with a former Soviet country almost next door to Moscow, there’s no way they will ever be able to project their force beyond their shorelines. Their navy, or whatever boats they can use on the Pacific Coast, will never have enough supporting troops to ensure they could hold any amount of Canadian territory for any extended campaign, especially since their logistics is raw dogshit.

And that is all without talking about the massive, US-sized elephant in the room.

Well, whatever O’Toole wants is far beyond his control, at this point. Maybe if he ran a better campaign he could have nipped this problem in the bud, or maybe he could have entirely empowered the crazies, but that’s neither here nor there. He lost, he’s resigning, and the problem is beyond his fixing now - who knows if his appeal will even reach the ears that it needs to.

This is going to be a Canadian problem as a whole to resolve, and it’s a simple solution: if you do not want radicalized politics to take over, do not vote for the radicals to take over your party or Parliament. Say what you will of the other parties, but radicalism and reactionism are largely a Conservative issue, and I imagine the voters will more than kindly respond to the idea of trying to turn things up a notch.

Well, I have to see it differently. 3 months in jail for advocating for the downfall and (inevitably consequential, I would say) death of a particular group of people seems pretty trivial, considering that this guy has had a long history of writing these materials. I would say even if these aren’t “unapproved writings”, they sure are fucking reckless - this is someone advocating for hateful people to lash out at another group. He writes for a Neo-Nazi website, he’s quite literally a Nazi. This is the equivalent of a corporation getting a financial fine for [insert corporate crime / corruption here] that amounts to no less than a slap on the wrist, it would mean effectively nothing to continue doing what he’s doing.

You could argue that maybe he did, in fact, change his ways. Maybe he really is not the guy he was any longer. But for any aspiring paid hate-mongering writers, this isn’t enough of a deterrent to stop them from whipping up the hate in our neighbours. I think we’ve all seen the kind of nonsense that happens South of the border when radically hateful propaganda hits too much of the masses - I personally feel that it’s in our interest to not have our national discourse go down that dark and dreary path, or else it’s more Trucker blockades, Jan. 6th Capitol riots and other awful things to come.