dragonfrog

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@dragonfrog

Overcaffeinated bike riding psytrance stomping polyamory doing scruffy looking nerf herder; father and husband and son and whatnot.

Pronouns: He/Him
Location: Amiskwaciwâskahikan / Edmonton, Treaty 6, Alberta, Canada
profile pictures: avatar: a grey cat sleeping in the sleeve of a fuzzy rainbow coloured robe. Background: tablet weaving of twined dragons in blue, black, and green

Public Key

npub1q8qwtdykgl95rxnaa5xgm06hn7zwrysjn5ygy9m7ugenj8dqu7rqcp8cqh

NIP-05 Address

dragonfrog_at_mastodon.sdf.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqrs89kjty0j6pnf776rydhatelp8pjgff6zyzzalwyveerksw0pspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsgxmjew

Publishing to

saltivka.org

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1q8qwtdykgl95rxnaa5xgm06hn7zwrysjn5ygy9m7ugenj8dqu7rqcp8cqh

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Last Notes

2026-04-11 19:13:50 UTC

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AI *as a thing that makes sense to push huge tax incentives and bypassing environmental laws for* is going to go away. There are already *today* more AI data centres than a stabilized market will support - most of the ones existing *today* will shortly be stranded assets that need demolition and land remediation at taxpayer expense because the shell companies that own them have gone bankrupt and vanished into thin air.
Encouraging the construction of more will only make things worse.

2026-04-11 19:03:19 UTC

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yeah, a bubble bursting doesn't (necessarily) mean the product ceases to exist.
When a real estate bubble bursts, the land doesn't sink into the sea - a lot of land speculators go broke.

2026-04-11 18:59:47 UTC

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smart appliances didn't result in huge new appliance factories being built that could supply 50x the world's actual need for new appliances. If they had, those factories would inevitably have been abandoned a few years later - just as 98% of "AI" data centres will be abandoned when the post-bubble market settles down to providing the AI demand that exists.
They just changed slightly which features were added to appliances in the same factories that already existed.

2026-04-03 21:49:04 UTC

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I'm gonna guess - because that's what they wrote on the census form. They're as Muslim as the census "Christians" who go to church at Christmas and Easter if even that often, and who own a Bible but could blow a layer of dust off it, so seldom do they pick it up.

2026-02-13 19:06:47 UTC

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percentage who answer "I would leave" in a survey is not the same as percentage who would leave. Moving is complicated and expensive. You need to find work, housing, a school for your kids.
58% seems realistic as the percentage who would take at least one step - ask about a work transfer, book an apartment viewing, get an estimate from a moving company - not the percentage who would make it through all the obstacles and finish all the steps.

2026-01-29 22:07:12 UTC

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Kind of seems like the perfect example of Wilhoit's definition of conservatism - regardless of what party the Sheriff in question supported.
And also, there's no way that Sheriff wasn't a conservative in the commonly understood Democrats vs Republicans sense. If that guy is a Democrat, I'll eat an entire 15 x 20 foot tarp from Home Depot.

2026-01-13 22:41:23 UTC

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One reason it won't happen, at least not easily, is that while the tariffs were put in place under US pressure, their current effect is to protect the Ontario auto industry, which mostly manufactures big bloated un-innovative gasoline SUVs that can't compete on value for money with Chinese EVs.

2025-12-27 22:35:23 UTC

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I hate that. Truly hate how cats in distress are used as a joke.

2025-12-04 23:44:20 UTC

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I feel like at the very least banning the use of "liberal", "conservative", and "communist" in party names is like banning the words "pizza" "donair" and "sandwich" in restaurant names.

2025-11-20 22:05:12 UTC

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An oldy but a goody - HAL 9000 as performed by Amazon Alexa circa 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JepKVUym9Fg

2025-10-22 16:03:16 UTC

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problem is all the conservatives have to do is keep getting crazier so that two year old conservative agenda planks seems tame and sensible by comparison to whatever they're spouting now, and the liberals will just enact the conservatives' agenda for them on a two year delay.

2025-10-05 16:06:47 UTC

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I read it that way at first, now I'm guessing "I drink milk because I like to... You catch my drift?"

2025-09-11 13:34:41 UTC

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I agree. But I'm not going to deny the existence of an opinion or dismiss everyone who holds it as irrational just because I don't hold it.
FWIW I don't think the retribution will be much worse than if this hadn't happened - fascists do violence because of present opportunity not prior pretext. They were going to escalate anyway, and this is the excuse they got so they'll use it but it won't meaningfully change what they do.

2025-09-10 23:09:41 UTC

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I'm 100% confident that Clymer is not just wrong but very wrong when she writes "there isn’t a rational adult in this country who thinks you’re a hero."
It's like asserting nobody rational thinks Luigi Mangione is a hero.

2025-09-02 16:30:18 UTC

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NDP voters who voted CPC, or who voted LPC?
I thought the phenomenon was mostly NDP voters temporarily switching support to the LPC to keep the CPC / Poilievre out...

2025-08-11 18:01:59 UTC

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Or maybe, just maybe, it's you who don't understand what advantages Jess sees for being able to control aspects of one's posts.

2025-08-06 20:54:40 UTC

Sentence bit from a random article stuck out for me
"As the adoption of AI continues to accelerate (...)"
If someone kicks in my door, goes into the kitchen, and starts eating all my food and calling me dad - that's still a home invasion not an adoption.

2025-07-24 23:38:04 UTC

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"So why, exactly, do we provide use of the roads free to people who have the money to have their own vehicle, but NOT to the people who *don't* have that money"
That's why. That's exactly why.
We're deathly afraid of poor people. We charge money and put up fare gates and hire police to check fare payment, even when it costs much more than any fare they recover - because we're afraid if we don't, poor and homeless people will ride around on transit.

2025-06-19 01:00:15 UTC

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pretty remarkable for a survey that didn't even offer an option to say your were opposed - you had to write it in yourself in the comments.

2025-06-13 21:03:55 UTC

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The social newt works where you got the most replies being established, I'd be curious to know if you saw any notable differences between what people on different platforms thought. Were LinkedIn users notably interested in processes of consultation, Bluesky users particularly into public transit, etc?

2025-06-11 22:00:46 UTC

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Years ago I had a two day gig as an extra in a TV show(it was pretty interesting seeing some of the process of making TV). A fellow extra had worked at BioWare and gotten so burned out he'd quit and deliberately taken a job without any promotion prospects, so he could spend a few years just going home at the end of his shift with a clear mind.
He said he'd made enough money that the low pay didn't bother him, it was more important to be fully done thinking about work at 5:01 PM.

2025-04-07 22:44:20 UTC

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Wikipedia informs me that the CPC(ML) are "anti-revisionist" communists, i.e. opposed to the modest reforms and liberalizations introduced by Nikita Kruschev in the 1950s. Unlike, I guess, those dirty heterodox CPC-ists who are spitting on Stalin's memory by diverging from the path he set forth, or something.

2025-04-07 22:15:36 UTC

Imagine the rivalry there must be between the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist–Leninist) - they're fighting over about 0.06% of the vote, and they still they haven't merged. What drama keeps them separate, both running candidates in the same ridings?
#cdnpoli

2025-03-14 18:40:15 UTC

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interesting / depressing that gender is as good or better predictor than region - men overall show 19% support, as high as Albertans overall, and women 7%, as low as Atlantic Canadians overall.

2025-03-14 18:32:12 UTC

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Alberta unsurprisingly had the highest percentage of traitors, but not by nearly the margin you might think
https://mastodon.sdf.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/162/197/775/745/951/original/6c9c5c1eb639d363.jpg

2025-03-13 16:27:43 UTC

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It may be the case that even people who've murdered people in the past, still make more death threats that they don't follow through on, than threats they do. Still you'd be an awfully weird person to receive a death threat from a known murderer and shrug it off because "there isn't strong evidence he's going to actually try to kill me".

2024-12-25 22:10:37 UTC

Can anyone help identifying a novel?
There's a #scifi novel I read long ago, that I had figured must be Anne McCaffrey's 'Decision at Doona' - but now I'm reading that one it's apparent it's not.
It had humans arriving at a planet inhabited by big humanoid cats, like Doona does. But in this one, the female cats live in town & the males live alone in the woods except once a year, when the females go into heat & go out to meet a man, bringing gifts of industry to trade for pelts & such.

2024-11-27 22:51:31 UTC

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Anyway his office had two doors for some reason, and one year a bunch of students came in overnight and framed in a small room inside his office behind the door he usually used. They filled it with cleaning supplies and packages of toilet paper and whatnot, so when he came to work the next day and opened his office door he found a janitor's closet instead of the expected office. This happened years before I was a student but he was still telling this story in class.
2/2

2024-11-27 22:47:40 UTC

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At my university there was a particularly eccentric prof - for a taste of his style, on the first day of his first year classes he brought in a $100 bill and offered it to anyone who could give him a beer without leaving the room to fetch it. He taught computer science, but had not personally used a computer in years, after he lost a finger in a farming accident and just never relearned to type with one less finger. He didn't even read his email.
1/2

2024-10-04 18:41:28 UTC

Sharing because this is a good article, but not sharing via simple boost because I wish to focus on something that would have been entirely off topic in that thread
https://mstdn.ca/@ChrisH_Prog/113248724444650935
What kind of demented URL scheme is that for a datestamped blog? DD/MM/YYYY?
And it really works that way:
https://www.fairvote.ca/03/10 is a list of all their blog posts on the third of October OF ANY YEAR. https://www.fairvote.ca/03/ is all posts from the third of ANY month in any year. Madness!

2024-10-02 18:08:28 UTC

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It's kind of hard to escape having public sector workers in one's social circle, when something like 15% of all jobs in the province are in the public sector.

2024-10-02 17:29:23 UTC

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I don't think the general population really does dislike public servants.
The newspapers always print the letters to the editor from the dozen cranks in town who each write in once a month to complain about public servants. Facebook et al always put those weird engagement bait posts complaining about public servants into our feeds.
But I think it's far more of a manufactured impression of consensus than a true consensus.

2024-09-18 17:36:38 UTC

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That wouldn't be useful to me. I'll either write a text file with the text editor on my phone so I can delete lines as I finish the thing, or I'll write with a pen on paper so I can cross out lines as I finish them.
A photo on my phone of pen on paper isn't editable with either tool.

2024-09-18 04:59:14 UTC

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this assumes nonviolence is inherently a leftist principle. I am not convinced that is the case. There are very conservative very pacifist religions, and conversely the Spanish civil war was a war because there were two sides both willing to fight it.

2024-08-15 17:39:54 UTC

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in Tusky you can tap the ... under a post, copy the link, paste it into your own post to make a quote post. When reading a quote post like that, Tusky will show a preview of the post and clicking on it will keep you in your own instance so you can reply to the original.

2024-08-09 19:14:40 UTC

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I'm imagining something like "dragonfrog did a really good job explaining this in (link to thread"
I avoid this becoming an issue by generally doing a bad job explaining things.

2024-07-28 21:59:08 UTC

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oh wow that's a whole extra layer of bad! I didn't realise the software did that.

2024-07-28 21:37:59 UTC

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... And it can be visually very non-obvious that someone has replied with privacy settings such that others aren't seeing the abusive post. So then you get the experience that someone has posted abuse at you, and nobody is pushing back, and it's not clear why. Unfortunately I don't have a solution to that flaw but it seems like it ought to be solvable.

2024-06-30 19:47:32 UTC

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kind of like how I'd pay for a newspaper subscription where they just sent me the crossword in an envelope every day...

2024-06-17 22:33:40 UTC

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That's roughly the story with figure skating.
In 1902 the world figure skating championship had no gender restriction; Madge Syers entered and won silver (there was commentary suggesting many thought she should have won gold - including Ulrich Salchow, the gold medalist, who offered her his medal).
In 1903 women were barred from competing in Worlds. Syers won the British championship (her husband Edgar got silver).
In 1905 the separate women's category was created.

2024-06-13 16:50:56 UTC

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The only thing this law achieves, as near as I can tell from your description, is to give prosecutors and judges the ability to punish people more harshly for identical crimes, the more downtrodden they already are - i.e. the harder it's going to be for the convicted person to reintegrate and avoid reoffending, the more the system can stack onto the sentence, even further increasing their recidivism likelihood.

2024-06-13 16:48:09 UTC

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I didn't say they "just" need addiction treatment.
I did however mean that at the point they're using a gun either to support their addiction or while they're actively intoxicated, the one thing that very much won't dissuade them is the length of the sentence they're likely to face.
The thing that's still gone entirely undefended AFAICT is, how does the fact they were suffering an addiction at the time they bought it make the subsequent crime itself worse?

2024-06-13 16:40:37 UTC

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So it's useful for needlessly stacking carceral punishment onto the sentence of someone who's already done harm with a gun and who needs addiction treatment the prison system doesn't offer, but no use in reducing crime.
Sounds very much like the kind of thing a stereotypical 2A advocate would love, yup.

2024-06-13 16:23:56 UTC

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I mean, ironically the law that does nothing ever to actually reduce addicts' ownership of guns, is probably better than a law that did anything.

2024-06-13 14:38:40 UTC

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all that does is make sure no one in America's large gun obsessed demographic never seeks treatment for their substance use problems.

2024-05-21 16:30:04 UTC

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Can you get a bottle of milk from the store please? And if the avocados are ripe, get 4.
(returns from store with 4 bottles of milk) The avocados are ripe.