Gotcha. That was my misunderstanding then. I’ve seen people talk about something similar: a government issued “id” (potentially tied to your driver’s license or whatever) that digitally identifies that the holder is of a certain age, but nothing more. That’s what I thought you were proposing here as well.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your idea, but it also seems unnecessary, and makes it easier for businesses to track you - not harder. If the purpose isn’t to obfuscate information, they can just look at a driver’s license and see their birth date and that the picture matches the person using it. It also doesn’t really have anything to do with the subject of the post (online age verification).

Can you explain how I’d use my smartcard to verify my age on a website? Does everyone need to buy a card reader for their computer?

That has the same issue as a lot of privacy-protecting age verification services, which is that there’s never actually a moment when someone verifies that you are you.

Like, if someone sold their key and password to a few people, it would still work everywhere and there would be no obvious reason for the key to be revoked. All it takes is one poorly implemented (or malicious) website to capture everyone’s keys and passwords, and then they sell them to kids.

I don’t think there’s a way to avoid that issue. You can either implement privacy or verifiability, but not both, and governments are going to trend towards verifiability.

so he wanted to lock in four years

Five years. Provincial governments (at least Ontario) have a five year term.

The debris will be microscopic. It won’t “land” anywhere noticeable.

The fine particulate matter may not be great for the ozone layer, but it’s actually pretty negligible compared to all of the other pollution that we’re not addressing either. That doesn’t justify the pollution, but hopefully it helps contextualize it.

My mom is from Singapore and I’ve visited many times.

I don’t agree with their drug laws (or capital punishment in general), but there are dozens of warnings throughout the airport and on the passport control paperwork (in bold red letters) that you have to ignore to get to this point. They make it as clear as possible that importing drugs is a capital offense.

WW2 wasn’t just, but that doesn’t mean it’s not just to defend yourself or others.

Starting a war is never just. Participating might be just, but it doesn’t make the war just.

If we had proportional representation, the conservatives would never be in power. Even though I think the apathetic non voting crowd leans more left, I think Doug’s populism and marketing would certainly garner some votes if everyone were compelled to vote. And historically, they’ve really only needed 40% of the for to win.

There are actually laws in some places in Canada against providing different pricing based on payment method

I don’t think there’s any laws against this. What I found specifically says:

Under the Code of Conduct for the Payment Card Industry in Canada, you may choose to offer discounts for different payment methods and between different payment card networks.

I know that historically, Visa and Mastercard have prohibited merchants from charging fees for using a credit card, but couldn’t do anything about offering discounts if they didn’t use a credit card. I believe they removed that from their merchant agreements a while ago, because it was mostly performative, and I don’t think they enforced it very well.

There are plenty of credit cards with rewards and no fees, and some (like TD) have no fees conditionally if you meet a certain minimum balance threshold.

I’ve always just done cashback rewards though. I know it’s theoretically “worse” than points, value-wise, but they can’t change how much a dollar is worth, just the percentage (which they’ve never done to me yet).

The other thing is just that people love credit card rewards.

Obviously, the rewards come out of the cut that the CC processors take from the merchants, so it’s not really free, but at this point, if you use debit instead of credit, you’re just paying more for no reason. It will take a big momentum shift of stores refusing to accept credit cards before debit takes over in Canada. Even now, I’ve seen stores who charge 50 cents to use any type of card under a minimum value, whether it’s debit or credit. While that encourages cash for small purchases, it does nothing to encourage debit, which would be significantly cheaper for merchants.

Economically, she’s pretty close to Carney, and she’s also argued in favour of the environment against the Conservatives before. She’d probably fit in with the Greens, especially during May’s “wifi causes cancer” days.

Yeah, the vaccine stuff is pretty bad, but presumably she won’t be in a position to influence that sort of policy (and hopefully Canada won’t be in a position where we need to think about that sort of policy).

That seems like an ideal use case for EVs.

By not going, I was only saving $7000 a ticket when they first went on sale, but now I’m saving $11k! By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings!