The government of Ontario is asking for feedback from the Ontarian public regarding a future test of a basic income plan. I encourage you to read their provided materials and, if you live in Ontario, take the survey. The survey will be open until January 31st, 2017.
I’d heard rumours of an Ontarian basic income before, but I didn’t realize until today just how seriously they’re considering it.
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(It’s not 100% certain yet, but they’re leaning towards testing a negative income tax rather than a universal income. They said this is partly for practical reasons, and partly because other places are already working on UBI tests and they want to cover a new base in the global testing.)
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#Canada #Ontario #basic income #the more you know #I’m not sure I have any Ontarian readers #but I *know* I have readers excited about basic income in general #and maybe some Ontarians who don’t normally read my blog will come across this #our home and cherished land #(I’ll admit I’m a little concerned) #(after all the hype last year over ”free tuition”) #(and then seeing the fine print and finding out it’s only for full-time students) #(I’m actually going to be *worse* off under the new system than the old) #(because I won’t even be getting the inadequate version of tuition reimbursement they’re currently doing) #(so my hope about this basic income thing is cautious) #(but it is hope nonetheless) #oh look an original post
Bird Photo Booth, a successful Kickstarter campaign, is a camera that attaches to your bird feeder so you can take amazing, close-up pictures of the birds that come to visit you. SourceSource 2Source 3
@thebluefloof Looks like something you’d really enjoy :D
Omg yes!! Maybe after my deployment I can grab one of these for my bird feeder. :D
There is…a cliche? a conversational pattern?–described in the atheist blogosphere, at least as of the late 00′s/early 10′s.
As the atheists describe it, it goes something like this:
Christian: But clearly you do still believe in God, deep down, because morality comes from God. People do what’s right because God wills it, because they know God will judge them. The fact that you aren’t on a killing spree right now means you know God will judge you, too.
Atheist: …no? My morality stems fro– wait. Are you saying you would go on a killing spree if you thought God wasn’t watching?
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The atheists speak of the chilling realisation of how close someone is to snapping. The realisation that you were actively pushing someone towards snapping. They hope that the Christians who fit into this pattern are merely bad at introspection, that their moralities would still function if God were removed from the equation, but fear that those Christians are portraying themselves accurately.
What no one talks about, at least not in my experience, is that it’s also terrifying from the other side. Oh, maybe some of those Christians are really confident it’s because atheists still have enough belief in God to act morally, but the ones who aren’t so confident?
It is a terrible thing to look at someone and realise that you do not know why they aren’t torturing you right now. You hope they have reasons of their own, but even if they do…because you don’t understand those reasons, you don’t know what would convince them to change their mind about the no-torture thing. You wouldn’t be able to tell in advance that they’re changing their mind, and you have no clue how you’d go about persuading them not to.
(Some parts of you–the part that assumes the worst, the part that was never any good at theory of mind–fear that they have no reasons, that they’re not torturing you only because they’re not in the mood right now, or–worse–because it simply hasn’t occurred to them yet that there’s nothing stopping them. You’re reluctant to ask them too probingly about the underpinnings of their morality, for fear that you will be the thing that causes them to realise they don’t have any.)
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#last night I was reading a blog #and realised that the blogger’s morality was so foreign to me I couldn’t even tell whether he had one #it was…unnerving #oh look an original post #arguably a follow-up to the previous reserve-the-right-to-delete post #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #(I tried to find this post by looking in that tag so I guess that means I should add it)
when you spend enough time looking at unnecessarily gendered products it starts to become clear that the only two real genders are pink and black, so from now on i’m going to ask heterosexual couples which one of them is the stuart semple and which one of them is the anish kapoor
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#gender #vantablack saga #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
I mean, to be fair, I haven’t really had a chance to map the business district yet, and business districts tend to be better about Wi-Fi coverage. But I mapped my neighbourhood this morning*, and found…nothing. Every other residence was locked. Every non-residence didn’t have a hotspot.
Still, I’m glad I did it. Now I know, and knowing where Wi-Fi isn’t is almost as important as knowing where it is. (I say “almost” because it’s more likely to lead to people trying to re-invent the wheel: anyone else looking at the public map won’t be able to distinguish “somebody mapped this area and found nothing” from “nobody has mapped this area yet”, although they might be able to guess if they see that the areas surrounding that area have clearly been mapped.)
I also learned more about hotspot default names. The stuff I looked up about it later wasn’t super clear, but reading between the lines, it looks like Cisco got sick of being “linksys” all the time, and more recent Linksys routers are named using a random generator that spits out things like “AquaCedar” and “BusyEagle”. (When I was in another town running errands, I saw a network named “FastDove”, and wondered why they chose that name. Now, I think that they didn’t choose it: it came that way.)
Almost all of the networks with this naming scheme (I saw one that didn’t have this; my guess is they opted out) have another network named “[name]-guest”. The guest network claims to be open, but when you try to load a webpage on it, it redirects to a password prompt.
(My stance on residences with password-locked hotspots is: passwords are, first and foremost, a “Keep Out” sign, and as a general rule I respect requests to “Keep Out” even if they’re unenforced. If you have a Wi-Fi password, I will make no attempt to figure out what it is, even if it would turn out to be “password”.
(If a non-residence (business, community centre, etc) happily gives out its password to anyone who walks in the door, I will happily give out its password too. Otherwise, I treat them like locked residences and don’t pry further. I even phrase my initial questioning as “Do you have Wi-Fi?” when I already know that they do, so that they have the easy out of answering “No, we don’t have it” when the real answer is “Yes, but you can’t have any.”))
Anyway, after three or four [adjective][animal/plant]-guests that weren’t actually open, I’m thinking I won’t even bother to try future instances of the category. Again, useful information.
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Oh, also, I did the factory reset I was planning on. Setting up my phone went much faster and smoother the second time (except Yahoo Calendar, but that’s Mom’s fault because it’s Mom’s calendar), and while I haven’t gotten all of my space back (I suspect the phone was lying when it said some of the built-in apps were removable; I think that’s enough to explain the remaining discrepancy), in general I am cautiously optimistic about the state of my hard drive. *knocks on wood*
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*When you’ve lived in Canada for over nine years, +1°C starts to feel like reasonable outdoor weather.
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#it’s supposed to be +8C on Saturday #the peak of the usual January thaw #looking forward to that #hoping to get a lot of mapping done this weekend #it’s about as enjoyable as I thought it would be #treasure-hunt/seeing-into-normally-hidden-layer-of-existence*/act-of-public-service rolled into one #(*chalk another one up on the ”humans as fae” tab) #oh look an original post #oh look an update #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now
Brinens and Things 