Meme - Spinzo @SpinzoX3: "Despartun the male stag beetle:
-Found eating yoghurt out of desperation during the famine.
-No females I own like him, nor does he like them either.
-Taste a plum once, falls in love with it.
-Mates with the plum and fucking dies.
*OK*"
@gaolangsgo...: "dude im actually in tears because oomf's beetle had sex with a plum and fucking died"
Meme - "AIN'T THIS SOME BULLSHIT ... !! THIS WILL RILE YOU UP !!!!!!!!!!
True or false? - Supposedly This Is True. Is this possible?
The new American way of life:
For a guy and his girlfriend with two kids, all you have to do is follow these proven steps:
1. Don't marry her!
2. Always use your mom's address to get your mail.
3. The guy buys a house.
4. The guy rents out the house to his girlfriend with his two kids.
5. Section 8 will pay $900 a month for a 3 bedroom home.
6. Girlfriend signs up for Obamacare, so the guy doesn't have to pay for family insurance.
7. Girlfriend gets to go to college for free for being a single mother.
8. Girlfriend gets $600 a month for food stamps.
9. Girlfriend gets a free cell phone.
10. Girlfriend gets free utilities.
11. The guy moves into the home but continues to use mom's address for his mail.
12. Girlfriend claims one kid and guy claims the other kid on their tax forms. Now both get to claim head of household at $1800 credit.
13. Girlfriend gets $1800 a month disability for having a "bad back" and never has to work again.
"This plan is perfectly legal and is being executed now by millions of people!
* A married couple with a stay-at-home mom yields $0 dollars.
* An unmarried couple with a stay-at-home mom nets $21,600 disability + $10,800 free housing + $6,000 free Obamacare + $6,000 free food + $4,800 free utilities + $6,000 Pell grant money to spend + $12,000 a year in college tuition free from Pell grant + $8,800 tax benefit for being a single mother = $75,000 a year in benefits!
* Do you have any idea why our country is over $30 trillion in debt and half the population is sitting around letting the other half pay their way?
* This is the reason there are 11 million job openings and the difficulty of finding the right hands.
"As those on government assistance grows along with increased government employment the party in control has a good chance of hanging on to control. That is until it no longer works!""
Meme - "friend i haven't seen in years"
"me"
"pyramid scheme"
Meme - "National Justice Center. Sponsored.
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Meme - Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling: "Gavin Newsom’s dad was the personal attorney for the billionaire Getty family. They gave young Gavin money to start a winery in Napa. JD Vance grew up in a broken, drug-addicted home in the rust belt. He joined the Marines to pay for college. These guys are not comparable."
YungPut1n @YungPutin1: "Gavin Newsom vs JD Vance in high school" *Posh Newsom reading newspaper, Vance with 2 girls at urinals*
Left wingers hate low status whites so much
Meme - "May. 19
This account is run by mays current boyfriend. I want to find her a replacement before I break up with her"
Union station has the most depressing, unsettling art. No part of it sparks joy. Will then ever change this? : r/toronto - "I remember when they installed this art. It was a real "aha" moment for me in my ever growing understanding of my city and what the heck is wrong with it. To me, this art represents a real, bold and very public encapsulation of the extreme disconnection between our city government and the people it is rumoured to be supposed to serve. This art won a competition organized by the City and its agencies to find decoration worthy of the flagship transit junction of Canada's largest city, where it would be a definitive aesthetic feature for hundreds of thousands of people as they started and ended their labour, and the first impression to millions visitors to the very heart of our city. They landed on something that may be interesting, but is also horribly depressing and, above all, completely unsuited for the purpose for which it was commissioned. It makes the station, and the experience of the countless thousands upon thousands of commuters who pass through it daily, definitely worse. Every. Single. Day. If you ask the people who decided on this design, the ones who were ultimately responsible and had the ultimate yea or nay over it, they could give you a thousand different reasons about why this design was chosen. Artistic reasons. Procedural reasons. Even legal reasons. Ultimately, however, there is only one real reason: The people who made the choice, the ones capable of taking responsibility, never have to see it. Because they don't TTC to work. And they don't care about the people who do. They commissioned "some art", handed it to a professor from OCADU, and then said "job done" and never gave it a second thought. To his credit, however, the "multi-disciplinary environmental artist" Stuart Reid who won the commission to do the art did an excellent job capturing the complete detachment and indifference of people like him with power to impact the lives of those in the city from and for the rest of us who have to live with their decisions. He decided that it would be jolly fun to do research for the project by riding this "subway" contraption a bunch and seeing what it was like. He found it was depressing. No s***. So he decided to capture and portray that feeling, in the way an artist might try to capture and essentialize a landscape, streetscape or still life - with the detached curiosity of an outsider trying to see into a world that he or she does not belong to. To quote his explanation of his work:
This time-bracketed viewing of the artwork, as well as its intimate contemplation of our contemporary urban human condition, mirrors and channels the structure and meaning of Charles Dickens composed epic novels, made in intimate sections for his daily 19th century newspaper readership.
From interviews with this man, it appears to have never once occurred to him to wonder, "what would make the experience of being in this place at these times better"? It would never occur to him that this could be his job. He was an explorer, a creator, someone who was harvesting this moment of our lives to enrich his own through artistic reflection. We are subjects in a novel he is writing, figures whose experience will be dissected to find "structure and meaning" and then recomposed into Dickensian epics in the pursuit of abstract aesthetic creativity and reflection. And, to the people funding the project and running the city, this was fine. Because, during the Ford and Tory mandates when it was commissioned and executed, could there truly be any more fitting anti-love-letter from the City of Toronto to those who live in this city of Toronto?"
TTC backs away from platform edge door pilot project at Dundas station : r/toronto - "So, I'm originally from Paris, France, and several metro lines had to go through this process. I just checked out of curiosity, and for the entire Line 1 of Paris metro that has 25 stations, the cost was €100 million with the project starting in 2005. That would be €153.8 million in 2025 adjusted for inflation, which is about $245 million CAD. These €153.8 million included the complete renovation of all 25 stations, not just automatic doors on the plateforms. Make of that what you will."
"Legend has it that when Presto was being designed, TfL offered Metrolinx a licensed copy of Oyster, which itself is just a clone of Octopus. And they said "no, we want a made-in-Canada solution", the price tag wound up being something like 8x what it was going to cost to just install Oyster readers and be done with it. Honestly it would not surprise me if that was 100% true."
"It is true. Accenture was paid $1B for Presto. Utter madness."
"It's almost 100% political bullshit. Spain and France are able to build subways at a quarter of the cost of Toronto despite having similar salaries and stronger labour laws."
"At this point just hire some JICA/JR engineers from Japan or European consultants to do the work for us. Oh wait, I forgot, we did that exact same thing, Metrolinx hired Deutsche Bahn consultants and the dinosaurs here told them that “things are different in Canada” and effectively fired them. Anglo-American small-town culture once again ruins any progress we could have 😒the people in charge say they want the good things abroad but refuse to change the very things that prevent us from getting those same good things…"
Clearly, the government needs to pay for it, even if it will cost even more in North America due to more red tape
Canadian parochialism means you can't learn from the rest of the world
Richard Hanania on X - "In Italy, you need permission from a doctor to join a gym or run a marathon. It's only valid for one year! Once in a while you learn something about Europeans that is absolutely shocking and makes you realize how different they are."
* Viral Celina 52 Truck Stop reveals shocking truth behind their photos amid AI accusations - "There's a magical place of intrigue and mystery in the backroads of Tennessee. Where else could Ozzy Osbourne work as a Hot Dog Manager, Luigi Mangione be on the employee list, Gary Busey be named Trucker of the Month, and an Amy Schumer lookalike break the internet? While the Celina 52 Truck Stop is very much a place you can visit, it's not quite as simple as that. Posts often include people who work at the Eco Travel Plaza, which was exposed as the 'real' Celina 52 thanks to internet detectives doing some digging. After exploding in popularity thanks to its tongue-in-cheek posts about everything from rodents nibbling customers' genitals to Elmo stealing a rotisserie chicken, Celina 52 has amassed 567,000 followers on Facebook. The truck stop is the brainchild of Howard (he doesn't want his surname out there), who concocted the idea after the Weaber Valley Speedway went viral as a dirt track racing parody. As Howard has already explained, "Almost everything is real in some way." Having taken over 2,000 images at the Eco Travel Plaza, some Photoshop wizardry creates the unhinged antics that we can't get enough of, although Howard admits there is some occasional use of AI. The team has gone live several times to try and prove their existence, with them even shelling out on an eight-foot mascot costume for the brilliantly marketable P*ss Jugman. Still, Howard and the rest regularly bat off complaints that everything we see is artificial intelligence, and they themselves aren't even real. UNILADTech got the scoop from the man himself, who explained: "AI is used occasionally for small elements, but the core of what you see are real photos. A lot of the stuff we post are things that happen in reality, and our page is just an exaggerated version of everyday occurrences in a truck stop (p*ss jugs are very real, and not even the worst thing you see)."... Asking skeptics to look a little closer, Howard reiterates: "I say to look through our page for more than a couple of posts or check our videos tab. Our photos are too coherent and legible to be AI, and the captions are always written by me, a presumed human." As for those who think their live videos are 'deepfaked' despite responding to comments in real time, he added: "It's like they can't comprehend that some idiot would buy an 8-foot tall P*ss Jugman suit and walk around a truck stop parking lot picking up jugs of pee with it (okay, maybe I get it, but that's exactly what I did). "I spend dozens of hours a week creating posts, so getting dismissed as ‘AI’ is frustrating. If someone thinks our stuff is AI, we invite them to come to the truck stop, meet the people in the photos, and watch how we create the posts in real life." Howard reminds us that he's physically at the Eco Travel Plaza taking photographs, the majority of the people who work there can be met in-person, and AI isn't quite as sophisticated as you might think: "AI still struggles with detailed backgrounds and often has that ‘AI Look’, which isn't found in our photos." Saying that Photoshop is far more tedious than AI, he continues: "If we can't get the desired output in a raw, unedited photo, we will then use Photoshop or AI to partially edit the photo, but the base photo is almost always real."... Admitting that AI has made it harder for people to figure out what's real, he concluded: "Unfortunately, that means a lot of people write off our page without realizing we were doing this long before AI images were anything close to believable.""
GOLDSTEIN: Our politicians actually do think we're stupid - "our politicians really do believe voters have the memories of goldfish and are easily manipulated by political propaganda. How else to explain Liberal leadership hopefuls Mark Carney, Chrystia Freeland and Karina Gould telling us the Trudeau government policies they were vigorously defending a couple of weeks ago were in fact bad for the country and they knew it all along? How Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s signature national carbon tax, far from being the Holy Grail of fighting climate change, was in fact a failed public policy in need of reform. (Freeland) How the Liberals overspent and overtaxed the middle class. (Carney) How the Liberals’ capital gains tax reforms they said were necessary to fund social programs, in order to prevent Canada from falling into a dystopian nightmare, were in fact a bad idea that should be killed. (Freeland) How the Liberals lost touch with the public and are no longer trusted because they failed to engage it on issues people actually cared about. (Gould) How Carney can possibly keep a straight face when he describes himself as a political “outsider?” Ditto for Freeland who, part of the Liberal elite until her recent falling out with Trudeau, is now re-imagining herself as the defender of the Liberal party’s grassroots. The root cause of these multiple conversions on the road to Damascus and increasingly bizarre statements is, of course, the demands of cabinet and caucus solidarity within an incumbent government and the power of the prime minister’s office. But that doesn’t make what’s happening any more credible as far as voters are concerned. To the contrary, all it does is re-enforce the widely-held belief that politicians will say and do anything to get elected with a straight face, happily contradicting their previous positions on a moment’s notice, if they think it will lead to more votes."
Japanese convenience stores stop selling fresh food after staff caught falsifying expiry dates - "Workers at 23 Ministop stores in seven prefectures either delayed labelling by up to two hours or replaced stickers with false dates."
Furious flyers take Delta and United to court over missing perk they paid for - "Two lawsuits were launched on Tuesday by passengers who paid extra for a view but instead spent their flights looking at a wall... United has quietly resumed charging single passengers more than those travelling in pairs or groups. The controversial policy, dubbed the 'single tax' by its critics, was exposed by a consumer rights website earlier this year. An investigation by Thrifty Traveler found that United, Delta and American were all charging solo fliers higher fares for the same route than those who booked two tickets or more together."
Tom Jones fans boo as he addresses controversial Delilah ban - "it was decided that the 1968 hit should no longer be heard at big sporting events in Wales anymore due to the worry it would be glorifying violence against women."
The anti "book ban" people are in favor of banning this, of course
Toronto man runs weekly races against TTC streetcars, keeps winning - "“I’ve won all of them and I think I’ve won all of them by quite a margin,” said Mac Bauer. The runner, who is posting his weekly challenges of ‘Man vs. Machine’ to his Instagram account, first came up with the idea for this challenge during an especially long streetcar ride home. Keeping record of his race times while running the full routes of the chosen streetcar, he’s won by as long as 25 minutes — even taking a snack break at a Tim Horton’s while outrunning one... He believes a lack of designated streetcar lanes or left-turn signal priority largely contributes to his ability to outrun the streetcars."
The Spadina streetcar is slower than the Bathurst one despite having a dedicated right of way, so
Study claims Toronto's TTC streetcars are the slowest in the world - "The study from urban accessibility expert Dr. Jan Scheurer set out to determine whether Melbourne, Australia's trams are the most slugging worldwide, and instead pinned that unfortunate distinction on Toronto's TTC streetcar network. Using the Spatial Network Analysis for Multimodal Urban Transport Systems (SNAMUTS) methodology system, the study looked at data from transit systems across the world that operate trams, streetcars and similar urban light rail networks... Other places don't seem to suffer the same challenges as Toronto outside of their central business districts. The research notes that "tram speeds in city centres are tangibly lower than on average across the network, with the exception of Toronto, where CBD-typical speeds seem to extend across the entire city." While Toronto ranked dead last in average speeds, the city scored far better in the "average network service frequency" score, which measures departures per hour per direction."
Colby Cosh: Why Canadians are better republicans - "This is the weird secret of Canada: having a monarchy has enabled us to preserve what would once have been thought of as republican virtues... Canada does not bother with palaces; the closest thing we have is Rideau Hall, whose history, appearance, and location all serve to confirm the point. In Canada we pay relatively little heed to social class — a legacy of having been a colony, with its ultimate rulers (and, until 1949, its literal court of last resort) conveniently offshore. We have left formal titles mostly in the dust while Americans resurrect them frantically: the newspapers bow and scrape to “Sen. Clinton” and “Gov. Palin” long after their brief periods in office. We manage not to admire displays of wealth in the whimpering, craving way that Americans do; our old money avoids ostentation, and our bankers are practically Spartan. (We have a few literal lords, but I suspect even my colleague Conrad Black would resist being addressed as anything but “Mr. Black” by a fellow Canadian in Canada.) We accept higher taxes in exchange for state provision of medical care, but when it comes to welfare we honour the Protestant work ethic more earnestly than the republic to the south does, with its food stamps and its endless disability rolls. This all emerges partly from having an expatriate monarchy that we can drag onto the scene as needed, and can worship and scrutinize from afar. We get the best of both worlds. If we adopted a real republic, the long-term path to union with the U.S. would be that much shorter; how long could a squeal of “But we’re so much nicer than they are,” a bare assertion of mystical innate superiority, provide a moral basis for independence? The Romans and the Tudors would perceive the Canadian genius quickly: they would discern more clearly than ourselves that we have pioneered a truly novel political system — an ultra-practical, constitutionally successful version of the old Jewish temple, with its invisible god secreted in a hidden sanctum. Our domestic political leaders can never be glory-hunting priest-emperor types, as long as there is someone above them, far away, who is called “Majesty” and possesses the regalia of state."
Toronto mayor Olivia Chow's approval ratings revealed in new poll (aka "Less than half of Toronto residents approve of Mayor Olivia Chow's performance: poll") - "“Torontonians are on the fence about Mayor Chow,” Leger senior vice-president Jennifer McLeod Macey told National Post in an email. “While the proportion that approve is nominally higher than those that disapprove, approval is soft. Indeed, almost twice as many strongly disapprove as strongly approve.” The poll found that 17 per cent strongly disapprove of Chow’s performance, while only 10 per cent said they strongly approve."
The unique human body part that evolution cannot explain - "The human chin has been fertile ground for arguments between scientists over its purpose. As with testicles, there are half a dozen plausible ideas to explain the evolution of the human chin. It could have evolved to strengthen the jaw of a battling caveman. Maybe the chin evolved to exaggerate the magnificence of a manly beard. It might even be a by-product of the invention of cooking and the softer food it produced – a functionless facial promontory left behind by the receding tide of a weakening jaw. Intriguingly, however, a chin can be found in no other mammal, not even our closest cousins, the Neanderthals. Thanks to the uniqueness of the homo sapiens chin, while we have a rich set of possible explanations for its evolutionary purpose, in the absence of convergent evolution, we have no sensible way of testing them. Some parts of human nature may be destined to remain a mystery."
OceanGate CEO ‘completely ignored’ flawed Titan sub before deadly Titanic trip, Coast Guard report finds - "The 335-page report released Tuesday revealed that OceanGate had “critically flawed” safety practices and a toxic workplace culture — and that Rush’s “negligence” contributed to the deaths of those on board. It also found that the Titan’s disappearance — and eventual implosion — was “preventable.”... How the company was run allowed Rush to “completely ignore” critical data and other safety measures ahead of the doomed expedition to the Titanic’s ruins. “The lack of both third-party oversight and experienced OceanGate employees on staff during their 2023 Titan operations allowed OceanGate’s Chief Executive Officer to completely ignore vital inspections, data analyses and preventative maintenance procedures, culminating in a catastrophic event," the report stated."
Clearly, regulation caused the disaster
Canadian students face death of the summer job (aka "The death of the summer job, and the troubles ahead for Canada") - "Miles is one of the thousands of young Canadians in their teens and early 20s trying to enter the seasonal job market to earn money, build skills, make connections and get a taste of life in the working world. But the days of covering the cost of tuition and living expenses with summer wages are long gone, and the rise of precarious gig work and more competition are causing a generational shift in the employment landscape where many students can’t find a job at all. In 2024, the Canadian National Exhibition made headlines when 37,000 people registered for its job fair — more than double the previous year and more than seven times the 5,000 jobs available for the 18-day annual event. Over the past few years, viral videos showing massive lineups for job fairs at malls, retail stores, restaurants, grocery stores and fast food joints have abounded online. Canada’s youth unemployment rate for those aged 15-24 was 14.2 per cent in May, according to Statistics Canada — double the national unemployment rate of seven per cent. For returning students (those who attended school full-time in March and intend to return to school full-time in the fall), the jobless rate reached 20.1 per cent, a level not seen since May 2009. It’s shaping up to be a “cool summer,” according to a seasonal jobs report by Indeed Hiring Lab released last month. The report showed summer job postings were down 22 per cent in Canada compared to a year ago. Postings for summer camp roles, “typically the largest single category of summer job ads,” were down 32 per cent. Posts seeking painters, lifeguards, labourers, maintenance and customer service representatives also declined. The seasonal job market is unique, but it’s also interconnected with what’s happening in the broader job market and economy, said Brendon Bernard, senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. After a post-pandemic hiring surge that peaked in 2022 and was solid in 2023, the overall job market and summer hiring appetite cooled off in 2024 as employers face headwinds such as inflation and rising interest rates. Employees job-hop to advance their careers and land better, higher-paying work when the job market is strong, but they tend to stay in their existing roles when things slow down, creating a “traffic jam” that leaves youth and people with less experience on the sidelines with fewer opportunities. “What has stood out, though, is that while youth unemployment and unemployment of people over 25 have both trended up over the past two, two-and-a-half years, the youth unemployment rate has spiked more,” Bernard said. “The deterioration has been faster and greater than we’d expect.” He said young people have also been hit with a “double whammy” of a weaker labour market and a surge in job seekers due to rapid population growth, especially concentrated among people under 25... If entry-level jobs disappear [due to AI], Raman predicts it will exacerbate job market inequality for “those lacking elite networks or privileged backgrounds” and leave employers without enough people to take up leadership roles in the future... Having young people around is good for employers, too. Dougherty said younger people are wired to be bold problem solvers, a quality that comes in handy during times of uncertainty and change. Younger workers also benefit from learning about strategy planning, emotional intelligence and contextual knowledge from experienced workers. For businesses to thrive, workplaces need intergenerational teams to work together. “If we want a strong economy and we want our companies and government to have the kind of workers it’s going to need in five to 10 years, you need those entry-level roles,” said Dougherty. “You need young people to be meaningfully engaged in the economy; otherwise we’re going to be in big trouble.”"
Everyone knows that immigrants create more jobs. So this must be fake news
Engineering Ukraine's Wirtschaftswunder - "As Ukraine emerges from the devastation of war, it faces a historic opportunity to engineer its own Wirtschaftswunder—a productivity-driven economic transformation akin to post-war West Germany. While investment-led growth may offer quick wins, it is efficiency, innovation, and institutional reform that will determine Ukraine’s long-term economic trajectory. Drawing on rich micro-level firm data spanning 25 years, this paper uncovers deep structural distortions that have suppressed creative destruction and productivity in Ukraine. It finds that business dynamism is on the decline, alongside rising market concentration among incumbent businesses, including low productivity state owned enterprises. To inform priorities for reviving business dynamism, this study develops a model of creative destruction drawing on Acemoglu et al. (2018) and Akcigit et al. (2021). The quantitative assessment highlights that policies that discipline entrenched incumbents are the bedrock for reviving business dynamism and engineer Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder. Policies targeting specific types of firms have limited efficacy when incumbents run wild."
Passenger loses $17K after airlines employee accidentally transfers call to a scammer - "A man in Denver, Colorado, lost US$17,000 (approx. $23,500 Canadian) after his phone call was transferred to a scammer by an operator in the customer service department of United Airlines... He assumed at first that Smoker had fallen victim to a secondary scam in which Googling a customer service number brings up a fake number that, when called, connects you to a scammer. But in fact, that’s what had happened to the United customer service rep on the first call. On Friday, United confirmed to 9News: “The customer was transferred to an external number and the agent was not using our internal tools to validate the number.”"
Meme - "Author Brandon Sanderson confirmed what everyone suspected: Screenwriters who can't get their stories filmed license existing IPs as a bait and switch, replacing the licensed story with their own."
mistborn: "I have a fun story here. Early in my career, someone optioned the rights to make one of my stories (the Emperor's Soul) into a film. I was ecstatic, as it's not a story that at the time had gotten a lot of attention from Hollywood. I met with the writer, who had a good pedigree, and who seemed extremely excited about the project; turned out, he'd been the one to persuade the production company to go for the option. All seemed really promising. A year or so later, I read his script and it was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. The character names were, largely, the same, though nothing that happened to them was remotely similar to the story. Emperor's Soul is a small-scale character drama that takes place largely in one room, with discussions of the nature of art between two characters who approach the idea differently. The screenplay detailed an expansive fantasy epic with a new love interest for the main character (a pirate captain.) They globe-trotted, they fought monsters, they explored a world largely unrelated to mine, save for a few words here and there. It was then that I realized what was going on. Hollywood doesn't buy spec scripts (original ideas) from screenwriters very often, and they NEVER buy spec scripts that are epic fantasy. Those are too big, too expensive, and too daunting: they are the sorts of stories where the producers and executives need the proof of an established book series to justify the production. So this writer never had a chance to tell his own epic fantasy story, though he wanted to. Instead, he found a popularish story that nobody had snatched up, and used it as a means to tell the story he'd always wanted to tell, because he'd never otherwise have a chance of getting it made. I'm convinced this is part of the issue with some of these adaptations; screenwriters and directors are creative, and want to tell their own stories, but it's almost impossible to get those made in things like the fantasy genre unless you're a huge established name like Cameron. I'm not saying they all do this deliberately, as that screenwriter did for my work, but I think it's an unconscious influence. They want to tell their stories, and this is the allowed method, so when given the chance at freedom they go off the rails, and the execs don't know the genre or property well enough to understand why this can lead to disaster. Anyway, sorry for the novel length post in a meme thread. I just find the entire situation to be fascinating."
