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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I think he’s trying to encourage the premiers to allow US brands back onto the store shelves.

    If that were enough to make a deal, it wouldn’t be awful. I think a lot of Canadians wouldn’t buy the liquor if it was back on store shelves, so it might not change much.

    It could be a good negotiating tactic, because the Americans might think that it meant that the revenue for US alcohol companies might start flowing again, when in reality it just puts it directly in the hands of Canadian buyers, rather than in the hands of the Premiers.

    What’s more annoying to me is that Carney is going to go with counter-tariffs. That just means that if Canadians choose to buy American products they have to pay more. And, since the US is so monstrously huge, in many cases there aren’t alternatives to American products.

    What I think they should be doing instead is investigating American companies for antitrust, allowing Canadians to circumvent DRM to do things like install alternative app stores to deprive Apple / Google of revenue, allow Canadians to work around printer ink restrictions to use any ink they want, allow Canadian farmers to repair their own tractors without John Deere’s approval, etc.

    Instead of raising Canadians’ costs, deprive American companies of the unfair IP rules that they use to make massive profits. Those rules were forced on Canada in exchange for the US agreeing to barrier-free access to the American market for Canada. If the US is withdrawing from their own trade deals, then Canada shouldn’t feel obliged to uphold its obligations under those deals either.



  • Wedding photographer is an interesting job. With a lot of jobs, people buy the minimum viable equipment they need to get the job done.

    But, people who get into wedding photography seem to generally be people who are really into photography. Rather than a $5000 camera being the requirement for the job. The $5000 camera is a present you can justify getting yourself if the wedding photography game is going well.

    It’s not a tool that goes into the case and stays there until the next wedding. It’s something to be used for the kinds of pictures that don’t pay the bills but that you love taking: nature shots, architecture, abstract art, gritty realism, etc.




  • You think most of the artists that made famous art got paid??

    Yes, I do. Have you heard of Patreon? Do you know the word it’s based on, “patron”?

    Plus you think people don’t care if artwork that is claimed to be authentic is actually fraudulent??

    People care about all kinds of things. Maybe instead of worrying about whether or not something is authentic, they should just think about whether they like it.

    Thank you for demonstrating that you don’t actually like art for art’s sake, you care more about knowing your art comes from a famous person.




  • If a museum advertises a Picasso but it is fraudulent most people would consider that a bad thing.

    Who cares?

    I care about artists getting paid. Sure, hate collectors all you want, but getting rid of them reduces the purchases artists do get.

    You don’t need NFTs to ensure artists get paid. You don’t need intellectual property laws to ensure that artists get paid. Most of the best art in history was made before intellectual property was a thing, and the artists who made that art generally were paid.



  • I saw someone yesterday with a big wheel who I was sure was about to bail. He was unicycling down a pretty steep street. He managed to make it down the street and turn the corner, but it looked like a real struggle.

    I know from riding a fixie that for streets that aren’t too steep it’s not hard, you just have to effectively “pedal backwards”, allowing slowing the pedals down as they come up behind you. But, I don’t know what a unicyclist can do on a very steep street. What I would do on a fixie doesn’t work because it requires small skid-stops, which means you need a front wheel.

    What would you do on a steep hill? I assume that by the time you realize it’s too steep you’re already going pretty fast, so just bailing would be difficult.



  • NFTs are stupid. Provenance only matters when it comes to the ownership of art. For the real purpose of art, the viewing and appreciation of art, it doesn’t matter at all.

    For digital art, provenance only matters if someone wants to create artificial scarcity by applying intellectual property laws to art. Trying to make digital things artificially scarce is stupid.