Cultures are Weird

[Jubal]

Wired has a longform article about OnlyFans chatters (people hired to chat with subscribers, often pretending to be the account owner and often selling them 'premium content' on commission) which is also about job hunting in the age of remote gig work https://archive.ph/Rbz5I

Of course, AI is now attempting to make these people's job obsolete: I've seen a lot of advertisements on the bad sorts of social media recently for AI chatbots that are designed as 'virtual girlfriend' bots. I guess with image generation AI they can even send you pictures as long as you don't try to count how many fingers they have...

[dubsartur]

CBC article on contraband tobacco.  They grow some tobacco in ON and QC and it used to be said that some reserves on the Canadian-US border smuggled the stuff out of the USA https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-s-contraband-tobacco-trade-not-easily-extinguished-investigators-warn-1.7264039

[Jubal]

I feel like I hear a lot less about drugs and contraband issues than I used to. It felt when I was growing up that there was a lot of societal angst about people doing drugs, and politicians spent a lot of time talking about drug gangs and smuggling, and these days I see the occasional story but it just doesn't seem to have the same headline-grab power as it did 15 years ago. Maybe I'm just tuned into different facets of the media, I'm not sure.

[dubsartur]

I feel like I hear a lot less about drugs and contraband issues than I used to. It felt when I was growing up that there was a lot of societal angst about people doing drugs, and politicians spent a lot of time talking about drug gangs and smuggling, and these days I see the occasional story but it just doesn't seem to have the same headline-grab power as it did 15 years ago. Maybe I'm just tuned into different facets of the media, I'm not sure.

In BC the leading cause of death among young people is tainted substances, there are massive arguments about decriminalization, and organized crime is one of two or three major causes of murders.  Are things different in the UK?  Austria has no ports so the drug import trade is other people's problem but lots of people grow weed, and many roll their own cigarettes.

The police today have less need to respect journalists' power than they did 20 years ago, and most people have read plenty of stories where "we arrested the gang and seized a load of product at 7.55 am Monday, and another gang had taken over their turf and offered a special discount rate by 1 pm."  A significant number of news stories about crime were planted by the police.

[Jubal]

I think in the UK, decriminalisation is firmly off the table because neither the Labour or Conservative parties support it (people in other countries regularly expect Labour to be a lot less small-c conservative on social issues than it actually is). So that reduces the political side of the debate to occasional fringe discussions around elections. I think lots of people grow and smoke weed, but it's often not something a lot of police resource is focused on unless it's being done on a very industrial scale because the police are too stretched. In any case, I've no idea if the scale of the drug problem in the UK has changed or just the scale and tone of the coverage, either is possible - but it doesn't feel like it's a debate we're having in public a lot right now.

[dubsartur]

The CBC has some urban archaeology and the story of the time only 55 years ago when contraception was restricted or illegal in Canada https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/condoms-decades-old-found-in-london-ontario-reno-1.7294705 (the linked museum catalogue entry talks about the origin of a romance-novel trope, the Sexy Sheikh and his Reluctant Bride)

Pot is legal in Canada, and British Columbia decriminalized small amounts of some other substances but did not bring in a safe supply and there is pushback.

[dubsartur]

In the Canadian Prairies its very common to work at remote distant sites in mining, forestry, or construction on a "2n days on, n days off" schedule.  A mayor is taking this to extremes by working two provinces away while holding down a position as small-town mayor https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/northern-rockies-regional-muicipality-mayor-saskatchewan-1.7368106

A suburban stag has killed a large dog https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/aggressive-deer-kills-dog-in-oak-bay-yard-9747784

[Jubal]

How much do Canadian town mayors really do? The position in a small British town is usually honorary and/or at least involves rather little regular work.

[dubsartur]

Macleans has a long-form piece on the explosion in Canada's rat population and Alberta's success at keeping the pests out https://macleans.ca/society/how-canadas-cities-got-so-repulsively-ratty/

I have never lived anywhere with less than 100,000 people or worked in local government so am not the person to ask about small-town government.  Would it help to know that he is mayor of an area four times as big as Wales? https://www.northernrockies.ca/en/our-government/about-us.aspx

[Jubal]

Huh, yeah, on this side of the pond there's almost nowhere really between the Atlantic and Siberia/the Steppes where you could describe someone as "small-town local government" while administering an area of that scale! That's enormous. Though also it does have about half the population of Diss, the rural market town where I went to high school. It's very strange as a European to appreciate just how empty some chunks of Canada are.

Also that's a lot more than you'd get at the town or even in some cases county level in the UK: roads and property taxes and stuff are all pretty centralised here though they might have some local components in them. The UK is unusually centralised by European standards though.