The article notes (along with names of shops—vote with your money, if you’re in the UK), that the ID system being used has the usual racial bias (has a hard time with anyone who isn’t white) and also a gender bias (has an easier time IDing men). And that the provider was careful not to mention this until after people started complaining.

So, we probably shouldn’t do it, then. (Which means that Ford probably will.)

It’s actually worse than that. Apparently, if you go down through enough layers of the movements pushing age-gating for social media in the US, you discover that one of the major funders is . . . Meta/Facebook (or at least this is what is getting batted around on tech sites). Whether they’re actively funding it up here, or it’s just slopover . . . 🤷

The most benign explanation for this is that they want more anti-lawsuit armour. The cynical explanation is that they want to harvest additional personal data from the organization doing the age-gating, so that they can sell more “personalized” ad spaces to their real customers.

(And the real solution? Make the toxic elements of large corporate social media illegal, period, regardless of the user’s age group. And while you’re at it, require any advertising-funded online service that shows different ads to different users to put up an annoying banner saying “we steal your personal data” in big red letters that has to be clicked through every time someone uses the site.)

An indication of whom they’re trying to emulate, perhaps.

It’s a tactic with a long history—I think it started with paper publishers of dictionaries and encyclopedias in the 19th century, if not before.

For what it’s worth, I have a system with first-gen Zen cores (Threadripper 1900X). 8 cores at 3.8GHz. Not too shabby even now. It’s just got a higher power draw than the newer chips. Got a fairly decent price on it on Black Friday of 2017. (Never ran Windows on it, though.)

My suspicion is that they didn’t talk to the neighbours until after they bought the house. So, yeah, lack of due diligence.

Are they claiming that the event has given the property a bad reputation that reduces its value by that amount? I suppose those are plausible grounds for a lawsuit. I can’t think of any other way a death on the property several years ago could cause damage to the new owners. Surely they’re not claiming that the house is haunted (and if that’s the issue, I can imagine the judge being extremely unamused).

anonymity enables greater levels of toxicity

No. No, it doesn’t. Various fora that have required real names and IDs over the years have proven this—people are quite willing to be extremely toxic even if their real names are attached to every post.

If it has a screen in it, it also contains basic electronic components—capacitors, resistors, diodes, etc. And unless something’s changed in the last few years, those are mostly made in China.

Unfortunately, the US’ behaviour is a significant contributor to costs here going up (although not the only one), so it’s difficult to decouple them.

I’m sure that there is an American auto company’s PR arm clinging to the bottom of the rock and hoping that it can scuttle away before anyone flips it over.

(Seriously, anything with a screen in it likely has some parts that were made by Chinese forced labour, including whatever device you’re reading this on.)

Feeding machines to get a pat on the head from the bosses is seriously fucked.

If the tokens are the company’s property and not yours, I guess it’s no different from paying for things with play money. (Or maybe the fake money they burn for the dead in China would be a better analogy.)

Pretty sure they’ve been doing fine without the US market for years.

(It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when BYD sets up dealerships just north of the border, since Canada has given them the okay to import a certain number of vehicles per year.)

Many are scared of what they can’t see (radiation), which isn’t completely indefensible but tends to be exaggerated way beyond the actual risks.

Others are afraid of what they see as “unnatural”, not realizing that nuclear fission is so natural that Mother Nature has at least once spontaneously created a fission reactor without the involvement of human hands. (Seriously—it was in Gabon. And there may be more whose remains we haven’t found.)

Anyway, the big heavy-water CANDUs like the ones at Darlington are pretty damned safe by my understanding, and should shut down spontaneously under most failure modes. I’d rather live next to one of them than next to a coal plant.

" . . . no one lost anything.”

Well, I’m hoping that you lost some face, Mr. Ford.

It isn’t as though the US hasn’t had multiple food contamination issues in the past several decades (does “Boar’s Head” ring any bells? And that’s just one fairly recent one), some of them resulting in multiple fatalities. Even before their current government came to power, the system that was supposed to prevent that sort of thing was underfunded and not operating properly. The only reason they haven’t poisoned a kindergarten yet is that having a school feed all the students regardless of means would cause their parents to have socialism palpitations.

So, do you prefer your contaminated food with a side of governmental corruption, or one of underfunding and negligence? Are we supposed to stop importing food at all? Are you willing to see your taxes rise so that government labs can perform randomized sampling of all imports? 'Cause those are the options, pretty much.

Probably because it’s so uncommon. The only commercially viable tidal generator ever built in Canada (and one of the few in the world) was the one on the Bay of Fundy, and it didn’t produce all that much electricity in grid terms (20MW, thank you Wikipedia). You need a lot of tidal water level change to get decent power out of tidal generation, so there are likely fewer sites than you think. Plus, one reason the Bay of Fundy station was shut down was that it was rather hard on the local sea life, although I expect some of the same mitigation strategies used on inland hydro dams could help with that if they wanted to replace it with a new station.

He gets insulted a lot because he fails to offer an alternative to what the government is doing that makes sense in view of the current state of the world. His alternative this time seems to be, “bow to the whims of a foreign madman,” which . . . just no.

Yes, a large part of his job involves disagreeing with the government, but he tends to do it with all of the depth of a toddler who’s just learned the meaning of the word “no”. Suggesting good alternatives is also part of the job, and he’s terrible at that—often he suggests nothing at all, and many of the suggestions he does make are obviously bad (or obviously unpopular, which for his purposes amounts to the same thing). During the last election, he didn’t seem to have much of a policy platform beyond “Liberals bad!”, and seemed to be doing his damndest to avoid being asked questions. In addition, he’s clearly not easy to get along with even for members of his own party, or they wouldn’t be fleeing like rats from a sinking ship.

Just being marginally civil about his “no” isn’t enough.

Inertia. Mental inertia, that is.