As far as I know they still have opportunities to refinance if rates go down (get new mortgage at lower rate, pay off old mortgage in full). There are probably fees associated with it, but you aren't necessarily trapped at the high rate for the full period.
On the other hand, in our system there's a real risk that you may struggle to afford your home simply due to rates climbing.
Every party hates floor-crossing unless they benefit from it. This proposal doesn't quite make sense though - what if to bypass it, an MP from party A announces that while they can't join party B, they'll just "independently" happen to vote alongside it? Are you going to strip that MP of their vote? At that point just get rid of MPs and give their votes to the party leaders.
I don't think the US states backed out, they're just stuck waiting for the legal right to switch. BC got tired of waiting for them and decided to switch on its own, as being deeply coupled with those states is now less desirable.
As an Arch user I hate these memes. Guys, the only difference between distros is effectively the versions of packages you're getting, and what the default packages and configs are. In Ubuntu you are completely free to have a very minimal i3 setup (I did for several years!) while in Arch you can use some bloated Gnome UI. This "Arch is fast and Ubuntu is slow" really isn't true if you compare Arch-Gnome vs Ubuntu-Gnome, or Arch-i3 vs Ubuntu-i3.
Lol I remember when I was around pre-school / kindergarten age and I was asking family members how to spell words so I could type into a Windows 3.1 "run program" dialog box "make sonic game".
they can be fined.
Sounds like no? How are they going to make a company with no assets or staff in the UK pay the fine? American courts likely won't enforce it.
I feel like the panel right before Calvin bites would make a great meme template.
Reminds me of my parents' cat.
Here's my pet theory as to why CS did so well for so long and why that probably won't remain true moving forward.
Programming / tech is a relatively new field that, as a proportion of how much time it takes as part of people's waking hours (as a rough indicator of how much of the economy it can penetrate), has gone from essentially 0% to 99% in only a few decades. We went from only large corporations having one or two mainframes, to office computers, to home computers, to smartphones, etc. Add in social media, streaming, etc. and people have gone from spending virtually no time on programmable devices to all their time on programmable devices.
As tech continued to have this (apparently) exponential growth, there was a chronic shortage of programmers, leading to massive salaries. As salaries exploded, programming developed a reputation for being a relatively easy, well-paying job, provided you were somewhat intelligent. As a result, hordes of students studied CS to help keep up with the growing demand, although always lagging. For seniors the lag for new hires to reach their level is quite a bit longer, so seniors have remained in high demand.
Now as we catch up to the present though, it's hard to see spaces where new jobs for programmers can be created without cannibalizing existing ones. VR? You'd take work away from game developers. Metaverse? From traditional social media sites. In short we've put computers on watches, sleep trackers, fridges, TVs, cars, light switches, etc. There's no more room for the industry as a whole to grow. AI might be the exception for this - if it actually succeeds it could keep tech growing by eating into the jobs of other industries, but then I expect it would end up eating many tech jobs too, so for the purpose of my argument it'll either hurt the programming job market or have minimal effect.
So - we reach the present. Lured in by the high salaries of previous years, and the high salaries seniors currently have, we have an overabundance of juniors on the job market. If tech had continued its previous rate of growth, things would have been fine - but it can't. As a result, there just aren't enough jobs for all the current juniors and there likely won't ever be - the industry can't grow to accommodate them. Many of them will need to switch to other careers and for less students to study CS for balance to arrive. There's still a shortage of seniors at the moment, but as the current juniors who are employed gain experience and move up the job ladder, this will change. Current seniors can't count on older tech workers retiring quite yet, due to how young-skewed tech is (because of the job growth pattern we previously had), so they should expect growing job competition as juniors develop and for salaries to stagnate (already seeing this at my employer).
This isn't all bad news though - consumers will benefit. With a shortage of new industries to move into, the glut of workers who remain will best find work opportunities by selling products that outperform and/or are cheaper compared to the existing products. In other words, expect more alternatives to MS Office, social media, Photoshop, etc. People will be able to create work for themselves by undercutting the current incumbents - we should expect to see an explosion in competitors for existing products. In some ways we're seeing this already - more and more great indie games that outperform the AAA giants, open source software that provide better experiences against the proprietary options (Lemmy vs Reddit, Mastadon vs Twitter, Forgejo/Gitea vs Github, etc.)
I fully expect to see deviations to this - new hype cycles that temporarily create demand, boom / bust cycles depending on the present economic circumstances, an eventual (short-term) shortage of workers once today's tech workers do start to retire, but long-term I expect 'programmer' to become just another generic white-collar job with similar pay.
TL;DR - unless you're already a senior in tech, you might want to look at professions that are actually in demand as the glory days for software developers won't come back.
In this case the big telecoms are divided (or, well, Telus vs. everyone else).
AFAIK private liquor stores legally can still sell American booze even if the provincial stores pull it. I may stand corrected on that though.
Depends on the province. Some require private stores to buy alcohol through them, so those can prevent anyone from selling American liquor.
Depends on the scholarship and the university I think. At my university a donor would give the money to the school and specify the conditions of who it would go to, and the school would assign it accordingly.
That said, the school sometimes really stretched the conditions to ensure it went to a favoured student (typically the top students). I benefited from one award that was aimed at students who didn't originally grow up in <big city where main campus is located>. Donor grew up in a rural area and wanted to support students who had to move away from home to study. The problem though was that I was living with my parents, studying at <newer campus in smaller city>. I was technically eligible but it was completely against the spirit of the award. In addition, I was being given plenty of other scholarships and this one could have gone to literally anyone else at this campus.