Maybe the idea of a distributed international competition just doesn’t work anymore. It’s either too hard to proctor, or teachers are willing to help or let their students cheat in order to have an advantage.

How do you propose restricting participants?

This contest takes place simultaneously in high schools across multiple countries. The individual proctors should be responsible for monitoring, but clearly they failed.

When I did it (nearly 20 years ago) we couldn’t use online resources at all. No Google, no Stack Overflow. Our proctor was there to ensure we didn’t cheat.

This isn’t about how good you’ll perform at a job, it’s about your knowledge, ability to design, and critical thinking skills.

Are spelling bees dumb because you can just look up the words in a dictionary?

The test is largely about your knowledge of algorithm design and your ability to problem solve. The actual coding part is trivial if you’re at all familiar with your language of choice.

AI is very good at those two things. Yes, it sometimes has hallucinations and is wrong, but even with the least refined prompts on the free version of chatgpt, it could probably do quite well on the test.

Racism as a tourist is very different than racism as a citizen. And racism presents very differently depending on your race. You’re not white, but the racists in England and Canada (and probably France, but I don’t have experience with that) will treat East Asians, South Asians, brown people, and black people very differently. They might even like you if you’re a tourist - they just don’t want you to live in their country.

You might be unexpectedly sick, hospitalized, dead, in jail, or otherwise unable to vote on election day. Early voting lets you avoid unexpected issues.

For some added context, this has been going on for years from all parties. Maybe this year was not the most amicable environment to do this in, and maybe these particular slogans were in bad taste, but I don’t think this is as egregious as everyone is saying.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/political-party-convention-gimmicks-1.2530848

It doesn’t really though. The only problem it outlines is that it doesn’t pay a living wage. It says nothing about why it’s a problem that people with high incomes also get this (other than it’s unfair). It then suggests making it more complicated (increasing overhead) so that poor people can get more.

But it’s much simpler than that. Just pay everyone more. Make it an actual basic income at living wage, and adjust the tax brackets appropriately.

Then expand it to include everyone instead of just seniors.

Why is that a problem? OAS is taxable income. It’s essentially what a basic income program should look like. If the problem is that rich people exist, tax reform is the issue you should be looking at.

I can’t wait for the companion articles:

The global network that ties Mark Carney to the Bank of Canada

and

The global network that ties Justin Trudeau to Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Thanks for the links.

The IISD report is talking about a specific period (February 2021 to June 2022) where 33% of inflation can be attributed to oil prices. Outside of that 16 month period though (which was during the absolute peak of oil prices), oil would contribute much less to inflation.

I disagree with the methodology of the False Profits report. A big part of their 43% cost of living increase is attributed to interest rate hikes by BoC and associated job losses. They are also benchmarking to 2019 oil prices (to avoid the effects of the pandemic), but are ignoring the fact that oil prices had been artificially depressed by OPEC overproduction since 2014. If you look at historic oil prices, we’re still significantly below the 2004-2014 inflation-adjusted average.

Overall though, I think both of these reports are looking at specific moments in time, and oil prices aren’t nearly as impactful on our cost of living as they want us to believe.

Do you have a source for this? I struggle to see how most Canadians use enough oil products to account for anywhere near 45% of the cost of living.

Obviously there are secondary uses (shipping fuel), oil by-products (plastic), and people who still heat their homes with oil, but it really doesn’t seem like it could be approaching 45% Canada wide.

But now it’s easy. If something that looks like news is posted on Facebook, it’s misinformation.

Probably nothing of consequence. I would be very surprised if the relevant agencies haven’t already done 99% of the background check already, and the only thing left to do is for him to agree.

Are there any non-founding-member countries that kept their own currency?

I believe it’s mandatory for all new members.

There were exceptions when the EU was formed for things like currency, but I don’t think they’re allowing that anymore. If the UK wanted to rejoin, they’d have to switch to the Euro - they had a lot of favourable exceptions made for them to be in the EU in the first place, and they just gave them up.

This article doesn’t talk about small brewers though. It’s talking about the two largest beer companies in Canada. Yes, interprovincial trade will kill Labatt and Molson production in Newfoundland, as they move production inland to gain benefits from economies of scale. But small brewers will be fine. They might even see a growth as they gain access to bigger markets.

It’s just two different markets. Craft/local beer is one market, and really doesn’t compete at all with the likes of Molson and Labatt.

Wouldn’t that mean that getting things onto the island is also expensive?

Also notice that this article only mentions the giant multi-national brewers Labatt and Molson. Small craft brewers will be fine, they’re already more expensive (and better) than the mass-produced stuff.

This certainly sucks for the 110 or so workers that work for Labatt and Molson. I guess it’s possible that the interprovincial trade rules could be modified so that only small companies are allowed free trade, preventing Molson and Labatt from pulling out, but still allowing people to buy craft beers from across the country. Not sure how easy it would be to define “small” though.

It’s also not a war crime if you’re not enlisted.

His stated goal is to replace it with something similar but with better branding.

Consider that this effectively kills 90% of PP’s campaign rhetoric, and that if PP were to be elected, you’d lose the tax anyway without a replacement.

Per your edit: Does joining the EU require retroactive compliance? Or is it just “follow these standards going forward”?