It’s a little annoying how this was a lesson the Greens have had to learn twice. Elizabeth May ran repeatedly in her relatively Green-hostile home town and lost every time, but at some point, she and the party agreed that if we were going to get a seat, they’d have to do it by putting our leader in a riding she was likely to win. So, the party did a bunch of polling, and May uprooted her life and moved to Saanich Gulf Islands… where she’s won every election since.

We can’t just pick a leader — no matter how good he is (and he’s pretty great, check out his Wikipedia page), and expect that he can run and win wherever he is. Not in this electoral system and not with the Green profile where it is. Any candidate interested in actually winning needs to be willing to move their life to a riding where they at least stand a chance. Maybe there’s a soft (preferably Québéc) seat somewhere, but Outremont clearly isn’t it.

What a great idea!

Um, 43% isn’t a majority under any electoral system, and that number definitely represents a significant “strategic” vote, evidenced by way of the multiple strategic voting sites and endless posts on social media begging people not to “throw their vote away”.

So this is objectively not a majority, but I fully expect Carney and his supporters to act as though it is. The job of the remaining smaller parties then is to remind him.

Honestly, this feels a little gross.

Too many people just spent the last 5 weeks demanding that everyone “hold their nose and vote Liberal to keep the Conservatives out”, knowingly cratering support for the smaller parties, and now you turn around and are all like “we have to work together”?

Fuck. That.

We have common cause, but if the Liberals were serious about working together they would have embraced proportional representation. They didn’t. They wanted domination, campaigning hard in Green & NDP ridings and even with the #ElbowsUp anti-Trump wave, Canadians still didn’t want to trust them with a majority. It’s not the role of the smaller parties to prop up the neoliberal “shit lite” party, it’s to force them to do right by the country. I expect them to do that.

I’m usually disappointed by the vote compass. Lately it has been putting me between the Liberals and Cons because I am ambivalent about social issues and left leaning on economic issues. If you think it is non of the government’s business which race/gender you are, that is putting you on the right these days.

They’ve introduced a feature at the end where you can choose to weight your answers, so the social issues you don’t really care about can be weighted 0 and get a more accurate result.

I live firmly in the #FuckCars camp, but I honestly think this is fantastic. Standards and conformity breed massive changes within an industry if they’re permitted to take root, and this is already bucking the “monster truck” trend that’s killing people and ruining cities.

Imagine the potential of a city buying a few thousand of these to serve as work vehicles: interchangeable parts would drastically reduce costs as you could canibalise one vehicle to service many, and you could easily re-task vehicles with minor, off-the-shelf (or even custom) modifications.

The real test though will be whether (a) the establishment car companies will allow it to survive, and (b) whether its US origins will make it radioactive to the rest of the world given their current fall toward fascism.

I never said that they should make promises about Palestine’s future. I only ask that anyone claiming to want to lead our country have the integrity to at least recognise that a genocide is being conducted, and that we are facilitating it.

In an election where the two leading parties are refusing to even acknowledge that genocide is being committed by a “friend” and ally, a country to which we continue to sell arms, I’d argue that the NDP’s stance on Gaza is probably the only thing they’ve done right in this election. Your suggestion that Canada can’t do anything is just plain wrong. We should, for example:

• Stop sending Israelis weapons
• Condemn their actions publicly
• Close our embassy and kick theirs out of Canada
• Organise and send peacekeepers to ensure that humanitarian aid gets through

I’m all for trying to build a “big tent” party with a diversity of views, but that should stop at genocide enablers and apologists.

Sadly, this sort of bulllshit is common with border authorities all over the place. My wife’s Greek passport was once rejected by a British official who claimed that it must be fake because “there’s no such thing as a Hellenic Republic”.

That’s the official name for Greece.

I’m not sure that I would attribute this sort of thing to malice though. I think CBSA might just be perpetually hiring from the shallow end of the gene pool.

“Canada would then have to put the customs border between itself and the U.S. and apply EU tariffs and regulations on imports from the U.S. … It would be incredibly economically destructive. It would outweigh any benefits that it might expect to get from the [EU] membership over many, many years,”

With what Trump’s been doing with the tariffs, the above statement may not be true for much longer. It may well be cheaper to ship to Rotterdam than to Rochester.

He definitely says “gagged”. This post is ridiculous.

I’ve been a Green supporter for a very long time. I even ran as a candidate for the BC Greens way back. I hate it, but I don’t really have a problem with this ruling. The Greens rose to our highest levels of support when we ran a full slate of candidates across the country, and while we have on occasion chosen to not run in a few strategic ridings (don’t blame us, it’s FPTP), 15 ridings fewer wouldn’t be a problem if we were running everywhere else.

The big caveat though is that it’s really hard to run a full slate as a small party. The vetting alone is a brutal (and costly) amount of work, and getting 343 candidates mobilised in time for a short-notice election is near impossible for a small party. In other words, when election dates are controlled by the ruling party, elections (and debate rules) will inevitably favour larger parties, diminishing our democracy.

The rules seem reasonable to me, and objectively we didn’t meet them, so we shouldn’t be included. I just think it’s worth noting exactly why we didn’t meet them.

I read this headline, thoroughly confused as to why Francesca Albanese would be wasting her time talking about vegemite.

In Star Trek: Insurrection, the Enterprise protected the Baku from the So’na, though if I remember right, there was some debate as to whether the prime directive applied as the Baku weren’t native to the planet.

What you’re describing is winning elections by letting the public dictate your position. This is not the same thing as leadership. To be fair though, genuine leadership is in short supply all over the world right now, so it’s easy to conflate cowardice with strategy.

Leadership is when someone steps away from the crowd, paints a picture of the world they want, and asks people to join them. Think: “I have a dream”, or “we choose to go to the moon”. Leaders are charismatic visionaries that take you with them rather than taking popular positions once the polling reports in.

Canada deserves the sort of leadership that understands the critical nature of the climate issue, and leaders who will convince us to come with them in building the world we want. May is criticising the other parties for their lack of conviction regarding the most important issue of our time, and she’s right to do it.

If only he’d done that, I’d have respect for him. Instead he walked back a half-assed confirmation of someone else’s question. Hardly the conviction we should expect from our Prime Minister.

I think you’re misunderstanding the purpose behind projects like c2pa. They’re not trying to guarantee that the image isn’t AI. They’re attaching the reputation of the author(s) to the image. If you don’t trust the author, then you can’t trust the image.

You’re right that a chain isn’t fool-proof. For example, imagine if we were to attach some metadata to each link in the chain, it might look something like this:

At any point in the chain, someone could change the image entirely, claim “cropping” and be done with it, but what’s important is the chain of custody from source to your eyeballs. If you don’t trust the AP photo editing department to act responsibly, then your trust in the image they’ve shared with you is already tainted.

Consider your own reaction to a chain that looks like this for example:

It doesn’t matter if you trust Alice, AP, and Facebook. The fact that Infowars is in the mix means you’ve lost trust in the image.

Addressing your points directly:

1. I’m not sure how a TPM applies to this as I haven’t dug deep into c2pa other than the quick review I did this morning. I’m more interested in the high-level: “can we solve this by guaranteeing the origin” question, and I think the answer to that is yes. See my other comment for my own take on this.
2. I don’t think we need any sort of controls on defining the types of edits at all. If AP said they cropped the image, and if I trust AP, then I trust them as a link in the chain.
3. Worrying about MITM attacks is not a reasonable argument against using a technology. By the same token, we shouldn’t use TLS for banking because it can be compromised.
4. Absolutely, but you can prevent someone from taking a picture of an AI image and claiming that someone else took the picture. As with anything else, it comes down to whether I trust the photographer, rather than what they’ve produced.

Yes, but starting a new chain would necessarily reallocate the ownership. So if reuters.com created a real image and then Alex Jones modified it, stripped the headers, and then re-created them, then the image would no longer appear to be from Reuters, but rather from infowars.com.

Absolutely, but that’s not really the point. If you remove the chain, then the file becomes untrusted. We’re talking about attaching trust to an image, and a signature chain is how you ensure that that trust.

Thanks! And no, this is absolutely nothing like NFTs.

NFTs require the existence of a blockchain and are basically a way of encoding a record of “ownership” on that chain:

Alice owns this: https://something.ca/...

If the image at that URL changes (this is called a rug pull) or a competing blockchain is developed, then the NFT is meaningless. The biggest problem though is the wasted effort in maintaining that blockchain. It’s a crazy amount of resources wasted just to establish the origin.

Aletheia is much simpler: your private key is yours and lives on your computer, and your public key lives in DNS or on your website at a given URL. The images, videos, documents, etc. are all tagged with metadata that provides (a) the origin of the public key (that DNS record or your website) and a cryptographic proof that this file was signed by whomever owns the corresponding private key. This ties the file to the origin domain/site, effectively tying it to the reputation of the owners of that site.

The big benefit to this is that it can operate entirely offline once the public keys are fetched. So you could validate 1 million JPEG images in a few minutes, since once you fetch the public key, everything is happening locally.