It’s quite hard indeed, especially given that the current, dominant North American culture is one seeped in a high degree of hedonism. We don’t typically hear stories of how people endured decades-long of hard work and inconveniences to achieve something significant. I know they exist; I’ve talked to a good number of people to know they do, but we just don’t all hear them in a manner where it’s broadcasted.

In East Asia, there are many such stories that go around, even as stories for children. The narrative around education itself is molded by it; study hard and well, and you’ll most likely end up with a good job, which means potential for a good and comfortable life. Outside of education, certain tv shows like to go into stories that span multiple years that shows the struggles humans go through in their lives, and how they will be rewarded or punished by their earlier actions. Take the Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Filipino dramas that span literally hundreds or even thousands of 30-to-45-minute episodes, some of which are still ongoing.

That said though, Western culture has taken a strong hold of the younger demographic in East Asia, so instant gratification is also a growing problem there.

While I don’t think East Asian culture sets itself out to dissuade people of self-gratification, it sets up people’s expectations of the different kinds of gratification you can get through life, some of which clearly require years to attain.

And I don’t think people don’t really know of it here either. We understand that teaching can be a very rewarding career, not in terms of how much you’d make, but that we’d better the lives of the young, and it may lead to them carrying that torch and passing it forward. It’s also slightly more tangibly rewarding when old students come see you years down the road and thank you for teaching and guiding them. These are stories that can be told, and they can stick because they’re touching, human stories.

So yeah, I’m not sure how we can actually tell people that we shouldn’t just focus on instant gratification, in a society where it’s so deeply engrained into their psyche. It would be quite the fundamental shift in culture. I think there are steps we can take, eg via education and messaging through mediums like entertainment and the news.

More like most of the suburbs and small towns just outside larger cities did. Most large city centres all voted for either Lib or NDP.

Maybe there should be known public crawlers hosted by several people that would set up some kind of shared but separated indices, and people could self host their own search page and set it to subscribe to these indices and filter for sites they care about. The index hosted by one person must be public and easily recreated elsewhere, so that if they can’t host it anymore for whatever reason, others can fill the gap.

Or! Each server would kind of be in some federation, and we all have our own index, some overlapping. The overlapping simply becomes a kind of redundancy.

Sorry if that makes zero sense or is a bad idea. Just tossing it out cause I thought it might be somewhat viable after some (or much) tweaking. Been somewhat interested in information retrieval lately and this is making my little brain kind of excited.

弾幕 (read: danmaku) is literally translated as “bullet curtain” to refer to a barrage of bullets that are so close together they form some kind of veil, or curtain. But yeah, it’s what we know as “bullet hell” in English.

I’ve seen Vampire Survivors referred to as “reverse bullet hell” at some point, but didn’t look like that stick.

Says the guy who literally decided to slap tariffs on Canada over a flimsy pretext.

If his goal is really to depreciate the USD, he’s doing a fucking good job while sabotaging Canada at the same time. Not sure if he thinks this’ll make Canadians consider moving their businesses there, which is one of his goals, but this is also a man-child who doesn’t understand empathy and assumes everyone works like the stone-cold (failure of a) businessperson he is. There’ll be some who’d do that, but idk if they’ll find a depreciated USD all that alluring to earn. Trump essentially wants the US to become China though, as the global factory of sorts, and wants to force others to buy US products, in a way that so far seems to be more heavy-handed than China, who typically looks more for weak points and pressures other nations into buying their products if they don’t already buy enough. He claims that this’ll make Americans rich, but in truth, this only enriches the rich, just like, well, right in China.

Might be my dumb 2 cents but it’s what I’ve gathered from the material consequences of his actions so far.

Bitwarden is big-tech? Since when?

“Investing in public infrastructure” is not a term I’ve heard from any government in a long time and it saddens me.

I’d say ranked ballot (which is also a winner-takes-all system if you weren’t aware) might be even worse. You might think that it’d get rid of smaller fringe parties and quell extremists, but the Republicans in the US would’ve become what they are today even under ranked ballot. Ranked ballot pushes the winning threshold up, but it doesn’t do away with

1. having a small voter-base decide on who gets to become government,
2. leading the ecosystem into a 2-party scenario,
3. doesn’t solve the disillusionment that voters have over the consequences of their votes, and also
4. encouraging political parties to literally be at each other’s throats and burning bridges instead of leaving or even creating chances to work together.

Getting rid of fringe parties also means you get rid of budding parties that might actually be good for the nation, and you essentially lock the country into the 2-party scenario even harder than FPTP. So you get all the problems of FPTP and more.

Australia’s been using this system, and if you talk to Australians, you’ll hear the same kind of stories that you hear here in NA. Maybe worse.

I find that a hard argument to believe in. There are many problems a country needs to solve and, more importantly, programs to maintain. Single issue platforms would only be viable for that one thing on some voters’ mind, but if someone comes in and say they can do that and more, I don’t see why people wouldn’t go for those who campaigns on multiple issues, with a few highlights that people would be concerned about.

It’s also likely that enough of these niche parties would see eye to eye on a good number of topics to just form a coalition.

PR does make things go slower cause of a more diverse set of views on the table, but that’s what being in a society is about anyways, and a winner-takes-all system is just sweeping that under the rug.

Winner-takes-all also leads to all sorts of problems that just boggles the mind; policy lurch being the biggest problem imo, where governments will literally work and spend money and effort to tear up things done by the previous government, almost like they’re trying to rebuild a province or country in their own vision. Not only is that wasteful, it’s inconsistent from a foreign relations perspective. Just look at Canada-US relations right now.

And when?

I wrote “eyeing” but that’s an understatement — I’ve been mouthwatering. I’m a bit of a sucker for things I can tinker with. I don’t need a new phone at the moment, but the day may come soon.

I’ve looked around and yeah, that’s my impression too, that the 5 doesn’t work with certain bands, but I don’t think I’ve seen a definitive list.

I did see that some people have used some middleman service to get the 4.

You mentioned the Fairphkne and I’ve been eyeing it too. Has anything changed with how we can actually get it here? Or do we still have to do our homework and check if it’ll work with our existing providers or get a new plan?

Policy lurch is exactly what I’m thinking of. Thank you for bringing that term up.

My understanding of intelligence is likely different from others; being intelligent doesn’t mean you should be on the good side. Having a healthy foresight and knowing what should work better for more people over the long term are not qualities of intelligence; they are those of wisdom. Being intelligent just means that you know how to consume information and wield knowledge, not necessarily for good or bad. So I don’t doubt that Mark Carney is intelligent, but he certainly hasn’t shown the wisdom that Canada truly needs, only short-term goals. The latter isn’t always bad, but the world lacks wise visionaries, and Canada seems to be in dire needs of one.

I’ll be honest and say that while there’s a need to fight Trump from down South at the moment, I can’t say Carney has actually demonstrated any traits that makes me trust him. There’s his somewhat question-raising profile about whether he’ll actually be see national problems correctly to be able to do things for ordinary people, or if he’ll just be another corporate-loving minister. He’s tried to use it to distance himself from Trudeau’s government, but that seems unnecessary, especially when there seems to be plenty of ways he could make that distance clear through actually proposing solutions that are clearly different from those of Trudeau’s.

I would say we already have extremists: those that believe an electoral system that ignores votes is acceptable.

I don’t disagree with the fact that we should find that sentiment abhorrent, but that’s definitely not a classification that people would think of when we say “extremists”.

And this might be controversial to say, but there are lots of people who just don’t want to deal with whom they consider as “extremists”, and would rather have structural barriers in place to keep these voices segregated. Anti-PR people is a mix of misinformed people, actual pro-FPTP people, and those who do view it as an effective tool (though a flawed view) at keeping voices they don’t want to hear out. Cutting people may be a viable strategy for small and/or close group settings, but it’s not the way for a democratic society, and that is where I think more messaging needs to be done to make people know and weigh the benefits of a fairer society over short-term, localized social calmness. Just trying to take a hard look at reality and give my 2 cents there.

At least with PR, we only have ourselves to blame in failure. With winner-take-all, an extreme minority can, and has, taken down the majority.

Well said.

To be fair, I can’t say I’m super interested in politics either. I’ve only started looking at it after knowing about how there are other ways to, in a sense, “implement” democracy through different electoral systems, and that the problem is inherently mathematical (which is what I’m interested in; seemingly simple but difficult-to-solve mathematical problems that also isn’t just a number theoretic problem). The rest of what I now know just comes from knowing how broken FPTP is and how it’s essentially destroying the fabric of a democratic society, and it just makes me concerned enough to keep looking further in, hoping we’re actually doing something to save ourselves.

But yeah, I really wonder what goes into their heads, knowing that in a winner-takes-all system, everything you do can easily be undone by those on the other side, and little to no legacy can be easily left behind, assuming you can even get a chance to get back into office. Someone’s got to sit these people down and show them the reality of things, cause it just seems like they either don’t recognize the possibility of what PR would get them (which is to allow them to have a chance at pushing more centrist policies through), can’t have it figured out in their heads, or are actually just against a fairer society, in which case we call them out for it after talking to them.

And yeah, Crombie losing in her own riding should be a sign that she just doesn’t have support from even people in her own riding. Something feels incredibly wrong with the OLP to me, both from this, how they’ve campaigned, and also just how they’ve behaved over the many years we’ve had the PCs. They’re essentially sleepwalking and hoping nobody notices it.

Speaking with a lot of people on electoral reform, there are some who are anti-PR on the basis that they genuinely believe extremists will be elected. Which I say, in a democracy people are deserving of and entitled to representation, PR (and neither FPTP) doesn’t do anything to change that.

No electoral system can prevent extremists; as long as you’re electing people, you’re bound to have an extremist in the office at some point. We should this frame the question like so: would you rather have an extremist who has full control over your government, or a group of people with extremists mixed in such that they have to work with other people to get their extremists policies enacted? It should be a no brainer from there.

And what are the chances of you having a large group of extremists in power? It’s certainly non-zero. PR isn’t immune to politicians gaming the system by installing multiple extremist candidates that tries to capture a wide range of voters, and then betraying their voters, but it would require a large and coordinated effort for them to do so in a country to be able to effectively consolidate power. Otherwise, it’s just a reflection of the voters around us, and perhaps in a polarized world, that’s a scary thought.

In any case, you’re right, electoral reform is more so the means to the end where we have a fairer electoral system through proportional representation, instead of a winner-takes-all system that encourages polarization. It’s funny to me that Trudeau has repeatedly lamented at how our world (arguably the Western world) is more fragmented and polarized while he continues to advocate for a system that squarely encourages that.

Sorry if my response was confusing. I’ll start off with some clarifying statements.

First off, I was trying to focus on the provincial level and not the federal level, as I’ve been led to believe there’s a good amount of distinction and separation between the two. I must admit I’m not born and raised Canadian, though I’ve lived here for many years now, and have only slowly learned of the relationships between the different political parties, federal and provincial, rather recently (last few years really). Thus, my understanding is likely flawed and imperfect. And it certainly doesn’t help that people I’m close to are somewhat apolitical.

With that said, given the topic at hand, where there’s an argument for consolidating the OLP and ONDP, my first thought was that it doesn’t seem likely to ever happen, given how far apart they are in terms of where they are on the political spectrum. At this point, it seems more likely that they would work together to form government in order to push policies that they want through. And if that is the OLP’s goal at the end of the day, then I believe they should just work with the ONDP. And given that they don’t seem to have much of a chance at winning, they should feel more compelled to support PR. That’s the point in my original comment.

On that note though, part of me is skeptical if the Liberals (OLP) actually have policies that they actually want to implement, given how incredibly vague their answers have been to virtually every question being asked of them (e.g. “we will build more houses”, but how?). At this point in time, they don’t feel too different from the PCs; essentially just fishing for sentiments and hoping the fishes would bite.

And it’s honestly unfortunate that PR is treated as a partisan sticking point; it should not. Anyone who would rather stick to FPTP over PR just seems greedy and — I know this is over-exaggerating and over-simplifying — shows their authoritarian tendencies, if not the inability to see the world functioning in any other way.

As far as the Liberals go both provincially and federally, my impression has been that they are really more attempting to be centrist, while playing along with certain leftist or left-leaning ideas, while being somewhat critical of the right; essentially, “we’re not the Conservatives”. Of course, I understand that some people do buy into their marketing, believing them to be more left-leaning than they are, and that because of that impression, these people also end up thinking that the NDP and Greens are much further left.

And thank you for sharing that link. I was curious about exactly happened to Trudeau’s whole talk about electoral reform that eventually led into nothing. Some sources seem to claim that there was simply no consensus on which path to move forward on, but I see now that he is one of those who was against PR, be it misinformed, intentionally or not, and would rather go with ranked ballots, which seems to just be ill-informed.

I doubt if the Ontarian Libs are actually benefiting from this, given that they’ve consecutively lost 3 terms now and is not even the official opposition, unless your suggestion is that they’re well-fed by these corporate donors enough to do barely enough to keep splitting votes and let one of them have a chance of winning, which also means they’re basically in cahoots with the PCs, even if indirectly.

In any case, if that’s what you believe is the situation here, then isn’t there no chance in hell would the Libs ever “merge” or even work with the NDP?

The OLP, ONDP, and the Greens should just work together strategically in elections to not split votes, win the election, and implement PR for the provincial electoral system. We know the NDP and Greens have been consistent with supporting PR, so there’s really just getting the OLP on the bandwagon. They’ll continue to have little chance at winning as long as DoFo continues to be the good FPTP player he is.

That said though, I seriously don’t know what goes into the OLP’s current strategy. They almost don’t seem like they have one, almost like they don’t desire to become the provincial government. Feels like they’ve been really muted, passive, and only plays within the FPTP rules.