If your microphone is active, it should at least show an indicator light and a top-row icon, I'm pretty sure.

I don't know about your food banks, but here in Canada, they're not run by the government. They're charities. I'm ALREADY paying taxes to try to make sure our government takes care of less fortunate people, and they've failed by foisting that off onto food banks, which are run on shoestring budgets, charity, and luck. What happens when people can't afford to give to the food bank, like when there's a recession?

If it were a government agency that was guaranteed to have affordable/free food so that anyone could at least cover their basic dietary requirements, I'd definitely be agreeing with you here. But it's not. We need to understand that the government is failing us at the most basic level.

This is, remarkably, one of the worst takes I have ever seen.

Everything is politics. Especially art. Narrative and storytelling is always going to be political. There are games about war between actual countries on this earth and you think games aren't political? Maybe candy crush isn't and that's all you play. But there are political choices made throughout the development of a game, and they can and should be scrutinized through that lens.

Some games are more political than others, definitely. That's fine. But any game with more than a facile narrative better be something we can talk politics about or it's a huge waste of time.

Even this discussion of whether politics belongs/is possible to remove from games is a political topic. Polygon was a good site that often had interesting takes. Iâ(TM)ll be sad to see it turned to AI slop.

Nope. That's why I changed all my players to BlueOS.

Cuba would be in a much different and likely better position if the USA wasn't embargoing them and doing whatever they can to make sure the country never succeeds.

Local ordinances? Lack of subsidies? I live in the Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada. Everyone here has a heat pump. It's getting less and less common to see furnaces of any kind. But the government has been working hard to switch people over where they can, providing subsidies and showing how much lower your bills tend to be.

I greatly suspect Norway has also done something like that, considering the penetration of EVs there as well.

My heating/cooling bills are slightly higher in the winter than in the summer, but not meaningfully so, and we get temperatures down to -20C here occasionally. The heat pump is much slower at heating the house below -20C, but it's not too bad. (In actual fact, the reason why the bills are higher in the winter is because the cats still want to go out onto the catio and that means the door is often left propped open for long stretches of time. They want to do that in the summer as well, but the delta between room temperature and the outside temperature is smaller in the summer than in the winter.)

IN PRACTICE, the reality is that a normal heat pump will be better for your heating and cooling and your bills almost all of the time. If you live even further north than me, like in my old home town of Edmonton, you might invest in a failover heating system. But if you're buying from a reputable local installer, they'll set you up properly.

This is actually happening to the Canadian government in Ottawa. Very similar scenario. Not enough desks, rat infested buildings, complete chaos.

And the government is doing it because downtown business owners are having a hard time. It's madness.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada...

Literally everything is worse under this system. For a government that pays lip-service to climate action, it's absolutely unwilling to do even small-scale things like let people work from home and not contribute to pollution and traffic.

As a Canadian, I actually don't see much difference.

A lot of Americans accept the book bans or INSTIGATE the book bans. They don't like diversity, they rail against DEI even when the policies in place are just to make sure that women and minorities get a fair shake. They LOOOOOVE bombing foreign countries, finding scapegoats, coming up with nonsense bathroom bans.

90% of what I see from American news--left OR right--is Americans kowtowing to authority while their quality of life goes down the toilet. They just try to decide which colour of authority they're going to submit to.

This tiktok ban was started under Trump 4 years ago, and weirdly, the Democrats pursued it for 4 years, and now Trump might stop it! When people complain both parties being the same, they're not that wrong. There are some outliers, but mostly it's the same love for the police state, for bombing Palestinians, for letting children get shot in school. Chinese people and Americans disagree on exactly what form of un-freedom they're willing to accept, but they're not that much different.

And in the case of China, there are plenty of more local politics that people ARE involved in, just like here in NA. Chinese people aren't voiceless, they just don't pretend that they actually have a say in Federal politics.

And, like, I'm not ignorant to how bad the Canadian system is about this stuff either. I vote in Federal elections and get no representation, and our electoral system guarantees that I basically never will.

Citation?

One of the FIRST posts I saw on there was a Chinese woman saying there were plenty of LGBTQ+ people on the app, so post all the thirst traps you want. The app is half amazing cooking videos and 25% muscle mommies.

I read a comment from one (Chinese) woman to an American creator that was like, "we find all the other feminists and tell them that we don't accept comments that denigrate women or focus on male sex acts, so we don't say "I'll F*** your Mom," we say, "I'll castrate your Dad!""

The problem the government has with the app is that people are learning that actually, as citizens, they have a lot more in common than they think. We all have similar struggles. We all want to be able to afford groceries and health care and find people to date that don't suck.