jadero

Thanks! I don't know why I didn't think of quorum instead of NOTA. I've sat on many boards, so I'm familiar with the concept.

It's not compatible with the mandatory voting found elsewhere, but that's not an issue for Canada.

I should have clarified that I know it can work, but not as the perpetual motion kind of system most people seem to envisage or that most projects I'm aware of seem to promote.

Everyone seems to think that carbon capture can be this little add-on when it actually needs to be a bare minimum of 1/3 our total energy production to have a meaningful impact over typical human time scales (a century or 2). Making things more complicated, none of that carbon capture energy can come from carbon fuels. I just don't see how we can do both at the same time, except as research projects to set the stage for when have gone a lot further in decarbonising our production for consumption.

That doesn't really sound wasted. Sometimes the most beneficial use of time is also the least productive.

I've never understood carbon capture and storage. I never went past high school and that was about 50 years ago. But I still remember the key principles behind why perpetual motion will never be a thing.

Unless there is an energy producing reaction that binds CO2 or separates the carbon from the oxygen without producing nasty byproducts, carbon capture and storage cannot work without pouring more energy into the project than what we gained from the release of the CO2.

Just imagine what anything else looks like. For every fossil fueled power plant that has ever existed, we need to build at least one larger non-carbon plant to power the capture and storage. There are several ways to reduce the fraction of our power that goes into capture and storage:

• Take more time to remove than it took to add
• Remove less than we added
• Find a less energy intensive method of binding the CO2 (that is we don't need to turn the CO2 back into a fuel; is creating calcium carbonate an option?)

But no matter how you slice it, removing enough quickly enough will still require a large fraction of our power generation capacity.

The initiatives cannot be anything other than a shell game designed to hide the underlying perpetual motion machine.

Yeah, these ones don't look far removed from the ones I've seen on YouTube that people with plenty of options choose to live in.

What's the mix of singles and families in the group needing shelter?

What funds are available? Is it better to build 99 tiny houses or 50 regular but small houses or 25 moderately sized homes?

What land and services are available? Are there differences in permitting?

Are there differences in the construction process? Is it better to jumpstart a project returning nearly immediate results with a bunch of quick and easy to build tiny houses or to take much longer to build out?

What I'd like to see is the long term plan. Is this the beginning of something grand or just a bandaid. It's not that we don't sometimes need bandaids, but it would be nicer to see a longer term plan.

As a first step? Maybe it will prove to be a misstep, but at least someone is doing, not just talking. Learn as we go.

How to respond to or interpret those facts is up to the communities affected.

Well put!

My understanding is that she was raised in a non-indingenous household in a non-indingenous community from birth through high school and was claiming Indigenous heritage before she was ever adopted into the community of which is now a member.

To me, her marriage certificate says it all. It is a clear and direct refutation of her public claims to ignorance or confusion. Not because she was telling a different story for a different purpose, but because she was acknowledging the reality of her upbringing.

I'm reluctant to suggest that DNA testing is required. Many of the indigenous peoples of at least North America have a long and well documented practice of adopting even adults and former enemies into their families and communities as full fledged members with all the associated privileges, rights, and responsibilities.

I guess were in at least partial agreement. I do think that this story would have been better if the class warfare had been more explicitly called out. As it stands, it's about one person's bad behaviour, leave the class struggle as a secondary character.

There was a time when I would have agreed with you. I now think that the problems we have in this world are because we've let the "small stuff" go until they've built into big balls of shit. Now our eyes are so focused on the big balls of shit that we not only don't see the other "small stuff" building up, we no longer recognize the "small things" at the centre.

We are not going to ever fix the big problems or prevent new ones without tearing things apart to get at the core. Selfishness, greed, and the desire for power over others are behind every major problem we've got, so everything we do to root those things out gets us one step closer to a better world.

The things you set aside as unworthy of attention are in fact the biggest problems we have. They are why the world is turning (has turned?) into a big ball of shit.

So this is not just a distraction, but the exposure on one of those who prefer us to keep our eyes covered. We need more of these investigations, not fewer and the investigations need to start earlier, before the ball of shit gets too big to handle.

We may have no more important social project on our plates than that of sorting out our colonial past and present to create a future for all, and this strikes at the heart of that project. This is not an entertainment story or a criminal story, but a story about deep, ongoing social injustice.

And her "vague recollections" are deliberately constructed. I've read enough about false memories to have some sympathy for people who get events of even their own lives wrong. But when she got married, she officially represented her birth in a way that was not just counter to her public claims, but that validates a preexisting official record.

She wasn't confused or ignorant or delusional. She was clearly and deliberately deceitful, fully aware of the fraud she was committing.

No house parties! Once the election is over, people are seated randomly and every vote is a free vote.That way there is an organizational structure for the creation of platforms, but proposed legislation has to legitimately convince a majority of sitting members.

None of the above! This becomes a formal option on the ballot. If NOTB wins a constituency, there is an automatic by-election and none of the people on that ballot can run again. If NOTB is elected to the ruling party, well, that's a pretty big do over that comes with a pretty strong signal that every party and every candidate is out of touch with reality.

Abolish FPTP! There are some legitimate arguments over the pros and cons of various electoral systems, but every honest person knows that FPTP is fatally flawed.

Citizens' committees! I fail to see how a large enough collection of randomly selected people could possibly do worse than our current crop. We might never have true sortition and maybe true sortition is a bad idea, but a randomly selected citizens' committee would let us test the waters and experiment with different amounts of "power to the people". At the very least, a parallel structure with no party alignments might come up with different ideas than we have now.