Nils

First time I heard of Konek, I have been using Interact for a while but did not know they had this service.

As far as I am aware, a bunch of countries created something similar to get rid of American payment systems, like UPI in India.

My favourite so far is the Brazilian Pix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system), becoming the most used payment system in the country in the past few years. Not only because it is technically sound, but it also managed to get the Americans pissed. Credit card and tech lobbies pressuring the American government to do something about it. Meta tried to release a payment system in Brazil that failed miserable because of Pix.

plugged that into ghci as 5+2*(8-5), and it says 17.

You might want to report that error. Or, did you mean 2+5*(8-5)?

I understand better your points now, thanks for sharing your thoughts and optimism, I needed some optimism.

When I first read the report on budge.canada the “greener path” shows that pretty much everything ended in 2024. Moving forward they mention carbon capture without details what kind of investment they are putting money in (best I could find is funding this https://www.alberta.ca/carbon-capture-and-storage that is also a bit vague), investing in mining (justifying that mining specific minerals helps the environment, but no mention on how to make mining less damaging to the environment and hold companies accountable) and removing the carbon cap saying that investments in several sectors would reduce the emissions anyway. A lot of wishful thinking on the budget text, or on the worst case mental gymnastics malice.

Like, there is this promising

To finance government spending that helps industrial and agricultural sectors get cleaner and more competitive, …

I would love to see the government working with farmers to keep production high and with low footprint. Despite the text being vague on how/who will get the money, farmers are already very thin on their footprint, usually limited to the access of resources to maintain their farms (heat, fertilizers, etc…). A farmer that only has access to gas for heat would not be able to reduce their footprint unless other options are made available.

I also felt like there is no handling “american shitstorm” either, there are plenty of brags on how they capitulate and are one of the least impacted by tariffs because of that.

Also, good thing you bought up the taxes. One thing I found interesting while reading the PDF version earlier, they pretty much teach us on many ways to avoid paying them, I wish that was easily available at the CRA website. =P

dealing with the American shitstorm
getting us on a greener path

Can you clarify your position or share the article you read? I might have missed those points when I read the https://www.budget.canada.ca/ report

there are parts I’d like more of and otherd of which I’d like less
broad compromise that I think is reasonable to a large swathe of Canadians,

A bit vague no? What do you mean?

Thanks.

That $2B USD from the digital service taxes would not be so bad now.

Also, guess who will pay less taxes, and who will foot the bill?

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/11/government-of-canada-releases-budget-2025-canada-strong.html
A bit better diluted: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/budget-highlights-9.6966595

(detailed): https://budget.canada.ca/2025/report-rapport/pdf/budget-2025.pdf

The author surely likes that the mascot is a dog. It feels more of a read and analysis of the terms of use than a deep dive of the tool but it was a good reading and I liked the suggestions.

I also liked the “reminder”.

Edit: you should share this in some community as a post, every time I see this kind of website (pure content no-nonsense) it is shared is in the comments. 15 years ago this kind of stuff was easy to find, but nowadays, I only see them in comment sections. Even the search engine recommended around here would list a bunch of junk in the first pages.

Not sure in your riding, but usually, they have different roles and experience level.

One important task is to keep everyone in check. If you reduce that number, the risks of different problems increases. Most recently this

There is a lot of propaganda around the world to discredit elections (usually by authoritarian regimes), so I do not think anyone will take the risk of reducing the number of poll workers.

Elections Canada describes all the roles and processes, from hiring, training, what to do before, during and after the voting day if you are interested in details. https://www.elections.ca/home.aspx

Sadly, we are a bit behind in technology and the costs can persist with electronic voting.

With in-person voting, either we do like Belgium with printing votes (I read people calling it “expensive pen”), or with air-gapped dedicated computers like in South America (the only thing that leaves is one of the storages and a printed sheet with the result of that location). There are the initial investment and we will still need the election workers.

On the other hand, with internet/remote voting, the initial investment in tech, security, and change management will be huge in our current state. You can reduce the numbers of workers with that, but now you will need more expensive people at every step to ensure a fair election.

Countries that uses any kind of electronic voting claim that it improved their elections considerably, including costs, but the upfront cost and the change in culture can scary some people.

(edit: fix typo)

Depends on the threat model and how long do you need the data.

Worked on a place long ago, that anything they needed to save offline from more than a few decades where stored in microfilm, the expectancy there where they would last 80 to 100 years.

Anything else was pretty much tape.

You also take in account the technology avaiability. The more complex is to use, harder will it be to reproduce in the future. Even with tapes, you might want to copy the data to another tape/recorder every decade or two, to keep it on par with the technology.