voluble

I'm an idiot, so please jump in here if I'm getting this wrong.

Per the article, predicted program cost is $88 billion per year. Divide by Canada's adult population of ~33 million, so, ~$2700 per person per year, minus administrative costs and bloat, so, say $2k per year.

Well, I definitely wouldn't turn down a cheque if I qualified for it, and I don't want to come off as complaining about a program that doesn't even exist yet. But, $2k doesn't sound like an amount that any person could function on. That's less than one month's rent almost everywhere in this country. It's like, a 6" subway sandwich per day. Something something middle class, I seem to remember a certain federal party saying during election time. Why not simply lower taxes in a targeted way?

In what way is this amount 'basic'? What's the point of embarking on this whole investigative song & dance over a few extra bucks per day? What actually is the minimum amount necessary to function as an individual in this country? I think I know why the government isn't investigating that question.

I'm not against UBI as a concept. This $88b program, if that number is correct, seems like it's not even worth investigating. Am I crazy?

Turns out, extremely yonic

While sensible, I would argue that it is ill-advised (depending on context). One would instead be better suited to protest for this right, or to build grassroots support with the hope of democratically achieving it.

Sure, but it takes energy to protest & there are only so many hours in a day. If you're fighting for something righteous, alright, maybe it's worth it. But all that work for something that sits on the shelf at cabelas that anybody can buy? Nah.

the rule of law must be respected unless one is absolutely certain that there is no other choice

I disagree with this. There are laws that are unfair, discriminatory, puritanical, fruits of political gamesmanship, legislative overreach, arbitrary coincidences of time & place, restrictive on activities that harm no one, etc. I don't think people oppressed by those laws should have to bear the burden of crusading against them. I don't think disobedience needs to have strings attached.

If the safety we pay for, and the justice we expect isn't provided sufficiently by the state, I think it's sensible to ignore prohibitions of this nature. I don't personally view them as a misfortune - freedom is a practice.

I see your point. On the other hand, chaos is a powerful terror tactic. If you're a dissident, not knowing what angle you could be engaged from is stifling.

Also, people need to eat and drink daily. Poisoning is a horrible threat with multiple daily reminders.

To all the people in this thread saying this was probably an accident:

Imagine you're an operator inside a totalitarian regime, and you want someone assassinated. Maybe this person isn't themself a critical target, your objective is to instill fear in a particular department to increase compliance on a morally abhorrent skunkworks project. You already know everything about this person, of course including details of their personal life and hobbies. Hey they're a mushroom hunter. Mycotoxins are readily available and can be lethal in small, undetectable doses. Not difficult to figure out what happens from there. Everyone who knows Vitaly knows, hey he wouldn't pick and eat a poisonous mushroom. The message is sent to the people who you want to hear it.

In the context of the States, I don't see how any new legislative intervention can deal with the 400 million existing guns in the nation. No country in the history of humanity has had to deal with that. My question is, can it even be dealt with?

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's misplaced cynicism. But, seems to me, the vast existing supply of firearms leads to a permanent condition where, a person who wants to do something bad with a gun, will find access one way or another. I genuinely have no idea how that situation gets fixed. "Do what Japan does" - which I've heard sincerely spoken aloud - is naive and would not be effective there.

I don't live in the States, so it's not my place to navigate the moral issues or make judgements. I just don't understand how new gun control measures patterned on other countries in very different situations of supply could be effective, and properly target shitbags like the murderer in the OP article, in advance of a killing.

Was accidentally poisoned with sodium nitrite once. Can't imagine it would be a pleasant way to go.

Thanks for the links, I'll check them out. Persistence of data seems like an interesting issue.

Nobody would defend copyright if it wasn’t already in place

I don't know about that. Say you take a few years to write a handful of poems, and it turns out people in your neighborhood really like them. You compile the poems into a book, and sell it for $5, and it sells well. Seeing this, your neighbor buys one, copies it, and starts selling it one neighborhood over for $2, and representing themself as the author. I would think most people in that situation would want to say, 'hey, that's not fair'. I don't think that's sick or rooted in greed, copyright can be a check on greed.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

Yep, and add to that, 500 hours of video is uploaded to youtube every minute & they serve over 2.5 billion monthly users. The scale really is unfathomable.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Where can I read more about this? It sounds interesting.

Absolutely. There's nothing special about YouTube's frontend - it can be replicated by someone with no coding experience, in an afternoon, for free, via a Softaculous module. On the inside, it's the Library of Alexandria. And unfortunately, it's owned by a company that understands that reality only as a means to a nefarious end, which is to develop a detailed psychological profile on its users that can be sold to advertisers.

My hope is that the cost of server storage and delivery will become inexpensive enough that YouTube can be forked and maintained by a nonprofit like the Wikimedia Foundation, who sees user generated content as a means to the enrichment of human experience. I'm not optimistic though, the history of the Library of Alexandria is instructive.