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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Ah, well done!

    Reminded me of the time I finally got some scans of old Belgian comics and they had diagonal stripes all through them, a common artifact of scanning at the time.

    The answer was using imagemagick and fast Fourrier transforms to isolate the stripes and filter them out! Led me down an awesome rabbithole of math and digital imaging I still haven’t recovered from.







  • Because you bought your phone in the USA, and because “international” phones are not sold by USA carriers because that is how manufacturers create separate markets for smartphones and connected devices, you are very unlikely to have a phone that can work at all in Asia, Australia, half of Europe, South America, and Africa. There are even some incompatible bands between Canada and USA.

    What people are trying to tell you is that unless you bought an explicitly “international” smartphone, your phone will be locked at the baseband level, meaning it won’t connect in the above mentions regions over LTE.

    That means you’ll be likely restricted to WiFi only in those areas.









  • OK, here’s an example:

    The low income threshold in Canada is $31,317 (according to stats Canada and the CRA). This entitles Canadians to certain financial aids if their income falls below that above that, people still have access to:

    • basic dental
    • childcare funding or tax rebates
    • food supports
    • allowances for children’s sports and arts
    • rent supports
    • career training and retraining
    • poat-scondary education supports

    The proposed $33k ubi would indeed match the threshold, but people above this threshold who make 40k or 50k would lose those benefits and have less money. There is a complex system of supports currently in place that interact with taxes, direct funding, and full/partial grants from federal, provincial, and collaborations with nonprofit and charitable organizations. How would these be addressed?

    Another problem with UBI in general IS actually the phase-in problem, because we don’t all need the same amount to live comfortably; metropolitan centers have substantially higher living costs than rural areas, but their infrastructure costs per resident are lower than for rural residents because of scale. And this leaves out Northern living, which has its own cost structure altogether. In urban centers, reliance on donated food distribution is higher than it’s ever been, and a lot of those people are on a living allowance of $29k/yr. How would giving them $33k and no food help? How about indigenous communities? Does their funding structure see any change under UBI?

    UBI is such a broad-sweeping fiscal change that this transition IS the real obstacle. The issue with making broad claims based on averages like in this manifesto is that we don’t actually live that way. I’m definitely pro-UBI, but it is not an easy problem to solve.

    So yes, the manifesto is naive and seems to be founded on a surface-level understanding of human living finances and federal/provincial-level finances in general.

    As for the carbon pricing, that is not a realistic take either.