Out of curiosity, in a perfect world and existing regulations excepted, what sort of firearm regulations would you like to see in Canada?

I know we live in a polarized political landscape. And I acknowledge it’s not possible to make everyone happy. But I also feel like, part of being a good politician is conducting yourself in such a way that large numbers of people don’t hate you. Poilievre failed at that, so I think it’s fair and proper that he’s on the receiving end of this political bullying.

And it’s comical that a man so gripped by antagonistic, indecent rhetoric is getting all huffy that citizens are making a mockery of his cowardly and stupid by-election. Obviously, instead of protesting, he should be asking himself why so many citizens are willing to dedicate their free time to fucking with his shit.

Filtering doesn’t necessarily have to be driven by AI.

Take recipes for example. Recipes are now almost impossible to get non AI results for via search engines. But, simple hardcoded parameters that set a preference for older results, ones without affiliate links (Marginalia does this), ones with fewer than 5 domains executing javascript on the site, some analysis of the date of the domain registration and activity on the domain, some analysis of the top level domain to filter out blogspam, these would all make the search results more human.

My hope is that eventually, there will be a paradigm of search engine optimization, maybe even an open standard for the absence of excessive javascript, affiliate links, social media buttons, etc. Sites that lack those elements are way less likely to be junk.

I think tools for detecting and filtering out ai material from search results would go a long way to improve the current situation, and is a middle ground between an internet revolution and a technological dystopia. There is still an unfathomably large amount of good information on the internet, the issue is that there is 20x more trash. And the trash is scaling rapidly, humans are not.

If you haven’t already, give the Marginalia search engine a try. They’re doing something interesting in this space. You can filter out results with javascript, affiliate links, tracking, ads, and cookies. After filtering, the internet feels a lot more like it did 20 years ago, more sincere, more human.

If I recall correctly, Marginalia is made and maintained by one guy. As the trash to good content ratio worsens, I think more people will want to build on and use projects like Marginalia.

Time is needed to forge new alliances and firm trade partners

True. Alliances are key for Canadian sovereignty and security. The nation should be cementing existing relationships with maximum effort. As patriotic as myself and other Canadians feel these days, it must be acknowledged - no imaginable scenario exists in which Canada alone has enough military might to act as a deterrent against US aggression.

Imagine that a fully functional nuclear arsenal wasn’t a generation away, and Canada had one right now. Even then, if the US made the insane decision that Canada was lebensraum, our nation’s military might alone could not prevent that.

I’m not even against a Canadian nuclear weapons program per se. But it makes no sense for Canada to pursue a nuclear weapons program right now, if the objective is to hold off a US threat. It’s comforting to imagine that there’s some panacea to the threats that Canada is facing right now, but I don’t see how nuclear fits that bill in any way.

It’s unfortunate that we even have to think these things. But anyway, that’s my 2c.