iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 4h

Why? For most of my life, US Dems were more hostile to trade than Rs.

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MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 6h

And a dangerous memetic contagion in California.

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MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 6h

Sure. The orthodox way to talk about this is consumer surplus, and bargaining power between suppliers/employees, customers, and the equity owners. For large firms, there's a useful distinction between line employees and management too. The idea that equity is everything is childish.

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MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 6h

This is mechanically true as a first-order effect, just like free trade is obviously beneficial in a first-order analysis. Any serious argument against has to work from the 2nd and 3rd order effects in the larger reflexive system.

MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 20h

Indulgences for the depraved.

MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 20h

If things get wild enough, we just might.

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I file that under "cheap partisan wrecking".

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We're in a weird spot. Nobody wants to build a new one if we're at peak consumption when payback is a decade or more. But existing refineries are old, and expensive to maintain. So just limping along and catching fire periodically has become the plan.

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I guarantee the pope thinks this, and lots of catholics do. Their positions on MAID, fertility, etc. are rooted in it. It isn't just kayfabe to them. Is this mainstream culture? Maybe not. It is a fallen world. But these beliefs are sincerely held by millions of people.

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This is an alien perspective to a young and vital person. Of course those who can act, should act to better the world. To lay about and refuse to care for yourself or others is the sin of sloth, and thereby undignified. But the church takes a broader view that includes those who can't.

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Deliberate anti-agency is not dignified. But a person in a position of total helplessness maintains their dignity under Catholic doctrine. Dignity is almost entirely an internal/spiritual expression at the root.

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Chapter One The Dignity Of The Human Person

You might be surprised how far they would go. The church is pretty explicitly about how little earthly works matter to true human dignity. www.vatican.va/content/cate...

vatican.va

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I’ll grant that other churches and ethics exist. But this is hardly a fringe belief.

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Not for a Catholic. The pope and the church are vocal about the dignity inherent in people. That God’s grace touches all, great and small. It’s almost their whole thing.

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A model of human dignity that doesn't extend to the inevitable periods of life when we are truly helpless -- childhood, sickness, and death -- is too narrow a conception of dignity. I may grant the children lack dignity, but I have seen several people die with it. And agency isn't the core of it.

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If you pull back from the AI focus, consider something like dying with dignity. Palliative care can enhance dignity, rather than diminish it. You need a richer frame.

Except for the tricky fact that our "we" is a global alliance of dozens of democratic nations with different polities and risk tolerance, while their "we" is one senescent madman. Unity of command makes the game asymmetric.

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Elon first. He's committed obvious crimes. Ellison is probably harder, but I have faith in the US Attorney's office.

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McGuinty might have fumbled the handoff, but closing the coal plants makes our city better every day. I love watching the US side from Gzowski park.

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Like Necrons, retreating into darkness as the madness overtakes them.

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I never really understood Harper's vandalism of the census. Was it cheap partisan wrecking? Red meat for the base? Or deeply held conviction?

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Sometimes it’s a shame there can only be one loser.

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Reposted by MichaelB

If the PQ is held to a minority, I will be chortling for weeks about this wipeout. The great thing about the Canadian electorate is how often they utterly annihilate previous governing parties.

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I now imaging you poring over the pension books of towns to pick the place least likely to implode and ruin your property taxes (laudatory).

I have to imagine they aren't as close as that shot suggests, unless those pilots have a death wish.

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Would everyone posting US election forecasts and strategy comments please tag it them #USPoli so I can just block that term until November? I don't have a vote, and it fills my feed with anxious vibes. I would prefer to maintain a child-like ignorance. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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Arch Oboler’s Dictaphone @drunkorsonwelles.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I take as a reassuring signal that I'm skipping a bunch of noise. Like the holes my ad-blocker leaves behind.

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Reposted by MichaelB

He’s a bit smarmy but incredibly effective youtu.be/XfUq9b1XTa0?...

youtu.be

CBC Archives: Just Watch Me, 1970 | CBC

YouTube video by CBC

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Dare I ask why winding Doug up about it would be good?

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Debris spotted from missing Ontario air ambulance | Globalnews.ca

This is a private outfit, and they were transporting a couple of Bermudans to Boston. Probably for specialized care not available on the island. See the last 5 paras globalnews.ca/news/1208709...

globalnews.ca

Debris from a missing Ontario air ambulance that had been carrying six people, including four Canadians, has been spotted off the coast of the United States.

Yeah. He started an aggressive war of choice, and by Nuremberg would hang from the neck until dead, along with Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, and the whole gang. Instead, Americans remember him as mid. An insane people.

What bugs me is when they talk like the Ab Adv comes from some kind of thrifty virtue not shared by those lazy easterners, and I want to vapourize them from space.

Yeah. Run some straight-line math on the BC budget, but with 25% more 65+ and correspondingly fewer workers, and feel the pain.

Fraction of population 65+ swings from 16% as high as 24%.

It's Jamie @sjamieit.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Reposted by MichaelB

My mother-in-law, who hadn't been on a bicycle since the 1980s, visited us last year and we biked to toddler swimming class together. She's now biking 40 minutes to work everyday in Montreal because she has a separated bike lane the whole way there.

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Can our federation survive the BC retirement conveyor belt?

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I low-key believe this (laudatory).

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Inside the narrow model, no. Except in scale. But in a larger scope, yes. Another language tangles in a whole other history and people.

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Unless you set it in Ukraine. That would be kind of cool.

How do you talk about butter rations and the evacuation while set in 1990? It doesn't make any sense.

MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Back in the 80s we negotiated a sort of don’t ask, don’t tell with our grandparents and people misunderstood that false peace as victory. There are plenty of deeply racist people in Canada.

rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Reposted by MichaelB

my new system for deciding who’s a reasonable adult is to put people through the Nine Rigors, or nine tasks that i think you should need to be able to accomplish in order to occupy public sidewalks www.patreon.com/posts/158364...

2) Navigate your way to a place you’ve never been
I know we all have phones that do this for us. I’ve grown way too reliant on mine, and it’s not like I had a particularly sharp sense of direction to begin with. If I forget which turn to take to get to some place I’ve been before, I don’t try to puzzle it out based on what I might know about the neighborhood or whatever—I look at my phone. I suppose you could argue that all that puzzling was a waste of time, that I should be glad to own this device which allows me to sidestep it, but is it not my sovereign right as a human being to waste a little time now and then? Do I really not have thirty seconds to stand at a corner, squinting down side streets, looking for some familiar landmark?

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MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Max might be right about Carney’s motives, but it is rude to bust a con in mid-flight.

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MichaelB @michaelabuckley.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

There’s a geo-political argument for this pipeline, but not for the money.