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The other problem in Canada is that BC and Alberta are underrepresented in parliament. Quebec and the maritime provinces have a number of special favours written in to the rules for the size of parliament and the western provinces were not good negotiators last time it came up.

This would not be such an issue if JT had fulfilled his promise to replace First Past the Post, because then winning 60% of votes in a riding would be 50% better than 40% of votes, and not "exactly the same result."

I wondered what was going on with this thread.

The beautiful thing about identity is that as soon as someone says "I am" it exists.  And we can easily access that in some societies, just like we can often access external measures such as baptisimal records or guild membership. And there is so much confusion around these categories that I like to clearly distinguish the two.

I would call some of those social categories, since in my own jargon identities are fundamentally "I am" not all the things that get placed on people like race or class or servile status.  I have blogged about how identity is not really useful for premodern history since we so rarely have access to people's internal subjective experience whereas we often have evidence for social categories.

Liberal leader and PM-without-a-seat Mark Carney has called an election with the Liberals and Tories approximately tied in voter intent.  He already implemented one major Tory policy by ending the individual carbon tax after the April rebate payment.  Trump's threat to annex Canada caused about 10% of voters to shift their intent from NDP to Liberal, and 10% of voters to shift their intent from Conservative to Liberal.  The election is the earliest possible, Monday 28 April (roughly five weeks away).

On the weird Internet communities front, Carney is really into spicy autocomplete despite being a banker where precision and factuality matter.

Something called the Toronto Star was one of the papers which had an excitable headline about the Kelowna residential school in 2021.  Its only read by people in TO and other journalists (although back when I read newspapers I wonder how many journalists read even one paper a day given some of the things they forgot and some of the patterns they failed to recognize) https://www.thestar.com/

Doug Saunders once published the book Maximum Canada (meaning population 100 million https://www.dougsaunders.net/about/maximum-canada/ ).  After an American pundit talked about 1 billion Americans, Pierre Polievre is complaining about the Century Initiative, a lobby group with Saunders' original goal https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/  Usually its Canadians who adopt bad old idea that the Americans are abandoning.

BTW the Pinkerite blog has a chart of racialist networks around Emil Kirkegaard https://www.pinkerite.com/2024/12/elon-musk-supports-german-neo-nazi.html (Kirkegaard has no visible means of support except for family, an inheritance from racialist Richard Lynn, and American racialist Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund)

the CEO of Midjourney has an active Twitter account (in 2025!)

This doesn't really surprise me at all, I think - it's that sort of tech-capitalist milieu that still does cling to Twitter (and probably Twitter where any kneejerk admirers of Bay Area tech still hang out).

I guess Apple is still pretty popular, and some consumers like Amazon but even then its known for being rapaciously capitalist. And some people really like generative AI / LLMs.  But I don't think many people look at MS or Meta or Palantir or Netflix or Stripe and think "that is cool I want to be a part of that mission."  They think maybe "that has a lot of money I want a piece of it."

Birdsite Guy did turn Twitter from a journalism / elite site to a tech / far right site, but that made it less useful for influencing officials and journalists.

David S. Holz the CEO of Midjourney has an active Twitter account (in 2025!) where he markets himself as an active transhumanist and trades posts with Roko of Basilisk fame.

The company seems to be private so its hard to know its revenue and expenses (which have little to do with the stock price of publicly-traded "tech" or "AI" companies anyways).

He also seems to believe that there are people who still admire any Bay Area "tech" company?  That is a disconnect.

After one of BC's 87 MLAs was expelled from the Conservative caucus for insulting residential-school survivors in a podcast interview, two others resigned in solidarity (!)

People out in the boonies seem to be getting excited about whether or not the unmarked graves at one specific school have been found (AFAIK nobody says "yes"), not that for 90 years Canada operated a system that ripped children from their homes, tried to destroy their cultures and languages, exposed them to cold, hunger, disease, and abuse, and did not even provide meaningful education.  Nobody disputes that, nor that thousands of First Nations children died early deaths because of this system.  So I think its a double alternate-reality: people who have convinced themselves that debating about that one specific school is a cutting point, and people who have convinced themselves that mocking survivors is much more acceptable than it actually is.  Maybe they found some social-media troll who claimed that the graves had definitely been found and convinced themselves that anyone off their social media service care what the troll says.

A report that a ground-penetrating radar survey had found possible unmarked graves at a residential school brought the schools to the attention of many settler-Canadians.  Its well documented that many children died at these schools and many were disappeared, the only questions are about the details (say, the difference between an unregistered cemetery with wooden crosses which rotted and an unmarked grave). 

Meanwhile I see even Canadians who don't acknowledge that our choices were dealing with orange Julius while prorogued and holding a Liberal leadership race, or dealing with him in the middle of a Federal election which a Trumpist was almost certain to win.  No good options since the PM did not resign in summer 2024 or summer 2023 and since the US election went the way it di.

Related to the New Hampshire story is the Libertarian charter cities (Zones of Economic Development and Employment) in Honduras. The government which authorized the charter was a bit heavy on the bullets and light on the ballots and after an election litigation is ongoing.

https://restofworld.org/2021/honduran-islanders-push-back-libertarian-startup/

https://restofworld.org/2022/crypto-libertarian-prospera-lost-legal-battle-honduras/

You can kind of sympathize with the founder who is Venuzuelan-American although I was told that early on it was easier to get disillusioned with Hugo Chavez if you were rich ("middle class").

Valuable economic activities thus far include cryptocurrency and a crank conference with bonus white nationalists.

Asteroid mining company AstroForge has lost control of their probe, the first private spacecraft to travel beyond the moon https://www.space.com/space-exploration/private-spaceflight/i-think-we-all-know-that-hope-is-fading-private-odin-asteroid-probe-is-tumbling-in-space

Its worth stressing that so far all the money in space has been in communications and observation and earth orbit is what you need for that. So while private companies have helped reduce capitalist launch costs (USSR-derived systems used to be cheaper than US systems) there are areas like life support and long-term, long-range missions where almost all the expertise is in government space agencies. Space tourism has limits too since 'send people to orbit for a few hours' is much simpler than what the ISS does let alone a crewed mission to Luna or Mars. Businesses like asteroid mining or lunar He3 for fusion are still speculative.

I think the Rust Monster and the Gelatinous Cube would qualify but they do feel different.  There are stories about how house horror is a metaphor for the terror of home ownership under late 20th and early 21st century capitalism.

The Cthulu Mythos is also special because its about the last pop culture thing to enter the public domain and become a global sensation.  It does have a Catholic variant as well as Lovecraft's cosmically indifferent version.

Flying Spaghetti Monster sounds great!  Although His Noodliness is a god not a monster.

A few days ago someone was talking about modern myths.  But what about monsters and fantastical creatures?  I can think of a few creatures that grow out of social media culture but there must be others.

Brainworms (inspired by real parasites)
Leopards Eating People's Faces Party (more of a parable, est. Twitter 2015)
Fail whale (Yiying Lu, a graphic designer for Twitter)
Mind virus (Richard Dawkins' memes; whether the mind virus is the esoteric Neo-Nazis or their 'woke' imagined other is a matter of perspective)
Reply Guy

As well as some modern monsters with offline origins:

Red Queen's Race (Lewis Carol, also more of a parable)
Robots (AFAIK Hephaestus' walking tripods never revolted like in The Sorcerer's Apprentice)
Sasquatch (yes there are First Nations stories, no the modern settler cryptid does not have much to do with them)
Nessie (est. 1933)
Dracula (not quite the same as earlier vampires from Eastern Europe or China or anywhere else)
NPCs (the idea that other people lack inner lives or agency, while you and your friends are special snowflakes; I think this comes out of CRPG culture because a good GM will make it clear that tabletop NPCs have lives other than asking the PCs to kill 5 rats)

What are some others? I am not aware of every Internet tradition.  The monsters a culture creates or fears can tell you a lot about it.

While I am working during tonight's video chat, Andrew Gelman passes along a geometry puzzle https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/02/27/geometry-corner-i-got-no-intuition-about-this-one/

Let a, b, and c be the sides of a triangle.

    Let p be perimeter of the triangle.

    Let r be the radius of the largest circle that can be inscribed in the triangle, and let R be the radius of the circle through the vertices of the triangle.

    Then all six numbers can be related in one equation:

    2prR = abc.

Feel free to work on it when you want a distraction!

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ironically, having just tried it to check, this complaint now comes up as the third result, so you may have fixed the problem:)

I wonder if anyone has written in more depth (and ideally with some numbers and polling) about the social impact of things like space exploration as a sort of ideological concept: that is, there might be an interesting question as to whether a big exploration-style societal focus is easier to rally people around than "let's not burn the planet down" because people can see the big rocket go up in a way that they can't see climate change not happening, and whether that's something we need to consider when thinking about how we get public opinion behind scientific endeavours more generally.

I think there are discussions like that.  IIRC GURPS Transhuman Space postulated landing a bunch of small Internet-connected crawlers on Mars and letting people on earth control them for a fee or as a prize.

Climate change is very visible where I live and more so in the Canadian Arctic.

That would be a healthier thing for me to research than weird Internet communities, as long as I did notget sidetracked into specifically US culture and ideas such as safetyism. Thinking about US culture does not help me!

I have edited the OP.

I can't find this thread with Search under "space".

Ceglowski has a second essay about the problems with human missions to Mars with chemical rockets: it takes six months each way, and there is no abort, and the crew have to do everything themselves (currently the seven-person crew of the ISS has 80 hours for science per week, the other 1096 astronaut-hours are maintaining themselves and their environment).  One argument for a Moon mission is that it would let us see how human bodies respond to fractional gravity to reduce the chance of surprises when humans are living on Mars for 1, 2, or 17 months. https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.htm

I like being part of a species which is experimenting with this.

The phrase "you can just build things" is associated with postrationalists and some other American twitter communities with a bit more of an engineering and less of a mystical focus.  I think part of his seeming depression is related to too much Twitter although he probable hangs out with righty self-helpy tech folks in meatspace too.

My impression is that a lot of late-20th-century space advocacy focused on getting launch costs down and the possibility that NASA was bad at that (and sure the Space Shuttle was a boondoggle because they had to please too many parts of the post-FDR federal government). They were not as interested in the biomedicine, Musk's "send volunteers and let them risk it " is a counsel of despair.  The Apollo 1 fire was a good death compared to many of the ways that bodies and life support systems could fail on the way to Mars.