• 3 Posts
  • 313 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • To be fair to Loblaws, I’ve never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they’re not engaged in “surge pricing” that I’ve heard of. (I haven’t been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don’t expect it’s changed.)

    But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn’t match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it’s $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn’t be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don’t think that is legally mandated.

    So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn’t clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it’s illegal, too.


  • This seems like it might work really well. We’ve evolved to be social creatures, and internalizing the emotions of others is literally baked into our DNA (mirror neurons), so filtering out the emotional “noise” from customers seems, to me, like a brilliant way to improve the working conditions for call centre workers.

    It’s not like you can’t also tell the emotional tone of the caller based on the words they’re saying, and the call centre employees will know that voices are being changed.

    Also, I’m not so sure about reporting on anonymous Redditor comments as the basis for journalism. I know why it’s done, but I’d rather hear what a trained psychologist has to say about this, y’know?



  • That’s terrible, but so are the treatments this article is suggesting. ABA is abuse.

    Behaviorism, in general, has lots of research supporting its efficacy in changing behavior, but completely ignores the mental health effects of the trauma from the behaviorist interventions.

    This might be made more clear with a thought experiment from Dr Becky Kennedy’s mostly-unrelated parenting book, The Good Inside. (Great book, btw. Highly recommended for all parents.) I know a 100% effective treatment for any childhood behavior: when the child engages in the behaviour, lock them outside in a cage overnight. It will take at most 3 treatments and they’ll never exhibit that behavior again, guaranteed!

    Aside from the hypothetical example obviously not passing ethics review, that’s literally how behaviorism research is conducted: the only thing they measure is efficacy in altering behaviour. That’s a really low bar.

    ABA is “effective” because children are being conditioned to avoid being abused.





  • In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.

    Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

    Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.

    So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

    (IANAL, this is not legal advice.)




  • I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

    Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

    You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

    I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.


  • As a Canadian, that sounds even worse to me, lol. Elected judges? That’s insanity. Judges should never be making decisions based on political expedience.

    Judges should be chosen by people who are experts in the law based on their knowledge and experience.

    In Canada, I suppose it’s loosely political, but it’s several steps removed from direct political appointment. The PM and cabinet appoint someone to be the head of the judiciary, confirmed by the Governor General, and Supreme Court judges can be held accountable by the Senate and House in cases of misconduct.

    Electing judges would make it worse, not better, imho.

    The best solution I’ve heard for the US wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment, it’s to make the Supreme Court position last 18 years before becoming a Justice Emeritus (or whatever) that’s mostly ceremonial. That takes away the incentive to stuff the judiciary with young judges, and adds stability that each presidential term is 2 justice appointments on a slowly rolling basis.