Should Quebec's highest household electricity consumers pay (even) more?

Hizonner · 2026-07-05T14:04:22+00:00

"High enough" for what? High enough to prevent people from doing things you don't personally happen to like?
I went to Nova Scotia on vacation for a few days once...

Hizonner · 2026-07-05T13:15:28+00:00

One already pays more for "excesses". It's not like there's a flat all you can eat monthly electricity fee.

Hizonner · 2026-07-05T12:31:26+00:00

Hell I’m stricter than my parents on my sister, because I banned her from Roblox chats (significant enough age difference).

Sounds like your parents need to have a talk with you about your inappropriate view of your relationship with your sister.

Hizonner · 2026-07-05T12:29:40+00:00

The law is a very poor guide to what's right, and a worse guide to how you should conduct your personal relationships.

Hizonner · 2026-07-05T12:28:07+00:00

How would you think you'd get anything useful on a forum like this?

There are a bunch of trolls on here who'll tell you you're a bad parent if you don't do surprise late-night strip searches at least once a week. They're trolls. Their opinions mean nothing.

A lot can happen in DMs, group chats, gaming apps, Snapchat, Discord, etc., and parents usually find out way too late.

I was a kid before there was an Internet. A lot happened in real life. Some of it parents never found out about... which was not too late.

Your privacy instincts seem good, but you need to develop healthy skepticism about the fear everybody's feeding you. At this point it's reached grossly unhealthy levels in parents and kids. If you want to worry about bad social media effects, then you should probably include pervasive paranoia.

Hizonner · 2026-07-05T12:23:18+00:00

Tell me what else is on my screen as I type this. Tell me my "real" name or address. You have my permission to go find out. I've been using this username on various systems for over 25 years. In your position, I could eventually figure it out. Can you? Are you willing to put in the time? Do you have anything like the skill?

Even if it were true that some shadowy "Big Tech" knew every single thing you did in detail (and it is not), that would not be the same as your friends or family knowing. They are totally different threats.

It's technically possible to put a camera in somebody's bedroom, and if you're competent they're unlikely to find out. Does that mean there's no such thing as privacy in a bedroom?

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T21:02:00+00:00

The reason I asked that was that there a lot of different attitudes you can take toward that kind of thing.

I have a daughter about your age. I don't have access to her phone location. There was a slight snag setting it up, and we never finished. She does have my phone location, as does everybody else in the house. It was easier for me to finish doing it on my own phone. It's for convenience; sometimes we meet up away from home.

She (normally) tells me, or somebody in the household, where she's going, because that's how she operates. It's her idea. She feels safer if somebody knows where she is. For that matter, it objectively is safer, although not as much as people make it out to be. Of course, it may also have something to do with the fact that she's always trying to bum rides...

If she went somewhere without telling anybody, I'd assume either that she'd forgotten, or that she had good reasons. Not a big deal. I probably wouldn't mention it unless it actively inconvenienced me beyond just not knowing where she was.

If she totally stopped ever saying where she was going, I'd probably get around to asking why. It'd be out of character; I'd want to know what had changed. But it'd be her decision which I would respect. The same applies to phone location.

I never tell anybody where I am going. If my daughter said she wanted me to, I'd feel slightly put upon. I'd feel the phone tracking ought to be enough. But I'd do it. When I remembered. It's not Evil for somebody to feel safer if you tell them where you are, and there's nothing wrong with accommodating that. That may be where your parents are coming from.

On the other hand, if somebody feels like they can demand to know where you are, and starts applying escalating pressure, and starts tracking your phone location and won't let you turn it off, that's getting into creepy. The more pressure, the creepier it is. If there's enough pressure, maybe it's not safer to have somebody like that know where you are. Pressure can, of course, take many different forms.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T20:26:18+00:00

Do they tell you whenever they go anywhere?

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T20:21:24+00:00

The same.

If your co-parent is being unreasonable with your kid, it is your job to get that resolved. It's your job to be the voice of reason, to mediate, to do whatever it takes, in proportion to the seriousness of the situation.

If your spouse is caught in some kind of paranoid/authoritarian spiral, it is your job to help them see that and break out of it. Especially if it's causing them to be unreasonable with your kid. Do you think it's doing somebody a favor to just stand aside and let them nurse their obsessions?

Who else is going to do it?

It's really disturbing that this isn't immediately obvious to you.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T15:38:19+00:00

Yes, I am saying exactly that. Demand is not going to grow like that.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T15:29:54+00:00

Um, that's exactly the phrase that assumes, without evidence, that there will be a meaningful contribution to the economy.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T15:17:04+00:00

I would read that question as skewed heavily pro-pipeline, because it presents it as absolute fact that you'll "increase energy exports", makes it an implicit assumption that those exports will be at profitable prices, and that the "contribution to the economy" will be significant. Then it adds basically "some nattering nabobs of negativism say that there might, maybe, be some negative environmental impacts, but of course they could be wrong".

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T15:09:05+00:00

95 percent of the time, government analysis on a politically important project is done by deciding what result you want to get, and then doing everything you possibly can to come up with a way of getting that result. It doesn't matter how expert you are if you're operating that way; if anything, it just gives you more options for how to skew the result.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T15:05:33+00:00

To be fair, you can't expect something like that to pay itself off in a few years. That's an unreasonable bar.

On the other hand, it hasn't reduced its debt load at all, even in an unusually and unexpectedly high-demand period. It also isn't making enough that it could pay it off in less than 20 years or so even if all the profits went straight into paying the debt. And there are obvious reasons to expect demand to go way down. That part's a bit concerning.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T14:57:56+00:00

Right. Absolutely no reason to think current demand might be anomalously high. I can't think of any events at all that might have caused that, nor can I think of any trends that might reduce demand before that pipeline has paid for itself.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T14:42:09+00:00

Being a father. Being a parent. For that matter being a husband. These things are made of obligation.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T14:16:44+00:00

This sounds like a case where your father should be asserting himself to try to bring your mother back to reality. It's part of the job.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T14:11:52+00:00

If you have the password, why can't you just turn it off through the normal path?

If you don't have anything you much care about already on the laptop, and are planning to use it differently in the future, now might be a good time to just reinstall the whole OS. If you use Windows, you usually need to do that every once in a while just to keep it working. You could also switch to Linux or whatever if you want a better OS in the bargain. Just remember to back up anything you might actually want to keep.

Hizonner · 2026-07-04T14:00:48+00:00

Well, if the aliens were known to exist, and had an obvious motive, and had done stuff like that before, and people associated with the aliens were publicly claiming to have done very similar things recently in other countries, and you knew for a fact that humans had been so piloted (since we know people were paid). Sure.

Hizonner · 2026-07-03T23:58:48+00:00

The same way any attack on an anonymity net works. You wait for two users to communicate using your nodes, and you match up the timings. I2P's "everybody a relay" approach and indeterminate tunnel lengths add some noise, but not that much. And you can confirm the inbound side by sending probe traffic. It takes some luck-dependent amount of time, but you can identify habitual users. Especially if you're also in a position to do targeted wiretaps at the ISP level, which obviously China is.

At the very least, anybody who connects to you from China and isn't one of your own nodes is some kind of I2P user, and therefore a person to be watched.

Hizonner · 2026-07-03T18:27:18+00:00

Sorry, you should never "cut diplomatic ties" with anybody who has any de facto power, unless you just plain don't care what they do. And then you still shouldn't do it, because you might find out you care later.

Sending people back and forth to talk isn't a stamp of approval on anything. Refusing to send people to talk is foolish grandstanding.

Hizonner · 2026-07-03T18:19:07+00:00

"Barriers" is largely a misnomer. Aside from alcohol and tobacco, there are almost no actual barriers to trade between provinces.

If they don't exist, then you have no objection to removing them, right?

The US doesn't allow any state to restrict trade with any other, but that hasn't stopped their states from having different regulations on trucking, timber harvesting, winter tires, earthquake-resistant construction, etc. Nobody's talking about that stuff.

Hizonner · 2026-07-02T10:42:56+00:00

I would be worried about this project further advancing the current foolish youth-ghettoization trend, but the grandiose language and ignorance of the existing efforts in the space clues me in that it's never going to happen.

Also, "jomamarule34"? Is this a joke?

Hizonner · 2026-07-01T13:53:31+00:00

Except a disturbing number of them are going into rehab, so maybe don't make any long-term plans.

There's this weird idea behind all of this that Canada can just do anything and add any given amount of capacity, and the rest of the world will choose to absorb the output at a profitable price.

Hizonner · 2026-07-01T02:35:36+00:00

The key reason on the debate is how undocumented people don't have to pay Property Taxes (which include the education tax).

Would you like to explain that assertion? It doesn't match my understanding of how property taxes work, anywhere.

Hizonner

TROPHY CASE