tunetardis

That's a tricky one. I guess it sort of means "it is that" if you take it super literally? "It is that I want to try on the suit." But in practice, it just adds a level of politeness and formality to the sentence.

You will hear a lot of masu (ます) and desu (です) tossed in there all over the place when people are trying to be courteous.

They had that protest in every state did they not? But when I couldn't find much on it in the Canadian media, I went searching CNN and other American sites and found very little also, which was surprising to me. Here on lemmy, there were all sorts photos being posted from various cities, and it looked like a pretty big deal?

We somehow have more than 2 parties in Canada even with FPTP. And yeah, it sucks. The left's vote, in particular, gets carved up into tiny pieces and the conservatives take advantage of that all the time. We desperately need voting reform and it occasionally gets dangled in front of us, only to be shot down. Kind of like high speed rail, which is being dangled again of late.

Man that is depressing. I know people like this too, alas.

An election hasn't even been called yet but I've already seen a Conservative attack ad. In it, they refer to "Carbon Tax Carney" as being a sneaky character with conflicts of interest.

I mean wth. Carney ended the carbon tax as one of his first acts in office. (Not that I had anything against it, but whatever.)

And let's talk about conflicts of interest for a moment. Poilievre refuses to get a security clearance to get briefed on foreign meddling in Canadian political campaigns which was deemed urgent by CSIS. They decided to make an exception for him and offered the briefing regardless but he basically screamed LA-LA-LA I don't have to listen to this!

The only conclusion I've been able to draw from all this is that he and/or his party are the beneficiaries of said foreign interference and he wants plausible deniability in case it surfaces. It would also explain his reluctance to have embedded press following him around digging into things.

I work with 32MHz microcontrollers at work and you can do plenty with them. It's a different world from say general CPUs where speed is king. You're often more concerned about timing reproducibility than outright clock rates. There are also considerations about power consumption, electrical noise, functioning in extreme environments, etc. that may inform your decision to go with one controller over another.

Trump doesn't seem to understand that you can't just uproot an entire industry and relocate it someplace else overnight. So really, the only choice aluminum-dependent industries have short-term is to pay the damn tariff and keep on importing. Ironically, Canada itself has to pay the tariff too because most canning plants are in the US, and we're no more able to ramp up canning here than the US can ramp up aluminum refining. Changes like that take significant time and financial investment.

I think it was in the late 90s when a vicious ice storm took out power lines everywhere and the whole downtown core was plunged into darkness for the better part of a month. Fortunately, out where we lived in the suburbs, the power mostly ran underground and was restored pretty quick.

But then my wife got a panicked call from a distant relative who said she couldn't reach her daughter studying at the university and could we look in on her? So we found her and offered her the guest bedroom for as long as she needed it.

At first, it seemed to be working out? Then it began to emerge that she was some sort of evangelical Christian who was frustrated that we were not eager to convert. I sort of thought taking in a refugee was a fairly Christian thing to do, but whatever.

Eventually, she demanded I take her back to the dorm. I told her downtown is still dark and cold, but she said "I don't care. You guys are so boring!" So I carefully drove her back around downed trees and power lines and dropped her off.

I felt pretty bad about it and we prayed she'd be ok. A couple of weeks later, the relative called again and thanked us so much for taking care of her daughter and that we went way beyond the call despite how things turned out.

This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. "Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!" The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.

In Sweden, about 40,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.

The Made In Canada Facebook group now has 1.2 million users, which is pretty insane considering the population of the whole country is 41 million.

He seems to have manufactured quite the crisis. Is this what he meant by bringing manufacturing back to America?

Lately, I've been listening to The Martian. I'm kind of a sucker for synthy orchestral compositions and that soundtrack is just so hauntingly beautiful.