No Food for Thought

J'aime depuis toujours l'émission Découverte et son animateur. Mais en regardant les sujets de l'épisode parlant de l'AVC de Charles Tisseyre, je me suis dit que celui-là devait être plutôt anecdotique.

Je ne regrette pas d'y avoir quand même jeté un œil, car j'ai finalement regardé l'entièreté (12 minutes) de ce reportage pas si anecdotique que ça. Difficile de dire s'il est plus rassurant qu'inquiétant, mais je l'ai certainement trouvé surprenant. J'en ai appris plus que j'aurais imaginé sur les AVCs… et plus que j'aurais voulu sur le système de santé public du Québec😒

En espérant que la situation se soit améliorée🤞 maintenant qu'on maîtrise mieux le SRAS,
Merci messieurs Tisseyre🙏

Ever since my friend Guillaume made me discover Google in the late 1990s, I never looked back. I've been using Google Search almost exclusively for a ¼-century, and I became a Gmail user even before its general availability. Google's Don't be evil ethics and work culture challenged my conception of what a job looks like and we considered working together in the late 2000s. I never cared much about privacy concerns, and as a citizen and software developer, Google has had a significant positive impact on my life, mostly through its services―Google Search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps and Hangouts―and its numerous contributions to free software.

That hasn't stopped me from criticizing Google at times. When the Google Maps issue which angers me most was decried last year, a Slashdot user offered an interesting explanation, but which seemed exaggerated.

Now, my read of Edward Zitron's eye-opening The Man Who Killed Google Search―which casts light on how Google Search has been [mis]managed under Prabhakar Raghavan and other managers who have come to replace the innovators once in charge―makes the proposed explanation for that Google Maps issue almost unremarkable. Indeed, Google Search still has much room for improvement, and I was recently frustrated to notice it going backwards. The regression may have been too slow for me to realize, but in retrospect, it does seem like Google Search has become less satisfying.

This decay matches very well what I've been hearing about changes in Google's culture, which this article claiming it's become ‘unrecognizable’ summarizes pretty well. Of course, Google has to adapt to a more difficult geopolitical environment, and moving away from its former transparency may be unavoidable. But even from what I see as an outside collaborator, it feels like Google's management is indeed regressing. I'm not done yet realizing just how disastrous this year's Chromium issue tracking move from Monorail to the Google Issue Tracker was (and remains, even months after some of the serious regressions were reported), and Google visibly offers no way to export contents for those who would like to go back.

Oh, and what a disappointment it was to see Google's reaction to my latest report of a longstanding issue in Chromium. After 10 comments from Google employees, it seems there is no progress besides an employee having confirmed that it's "reproducible" (insofar as a mere request for enhancement can be reproduced). Would workers with the necessary skills have required 4 screencasts and that much noise to get there?

Ah, and let's not even get into Google Talk/Hangouts/Chat…😒

If the above truly represents what's happening at Google, its story is an appalling example of how inept corporations are at delivering this kind of technology. It seems that just like Boeing, Alphabet has lost its way. A rot economy wins in the context of a rotten society. And when you look at how our society treats successful innovators, you understand much better why such people make it to the top. Why would we make the effort of researching and managing, and hiring competent and reliable people, if―in the end―the government is to steal any extra profit?

I don't feel Google Search has gone back to Altavista's level, but I wonder if I can find a better search engine before that happens.

In April 2001, I was still 15 and knew very little about USA politics. Yet it took a single misleading and high-stakes declaration from its then-president brushing off the Kyoto Protocol to put him at the top of my personal blacklist:

If Bush's rejection of an insufficient and highly flawed protocol could be excused, its administration's inaction, and even its disruption of climatic disruption response, kept making its position on my blacklist well-deserved.

A couple decades of laissez-faire later, climatic disruption has become even more obvious and economically taxing, not just to American workers, but to shoppers worldwide, contributing alone to an estimated 1% of price inflation every year.

So what does the party "leader" most likely to become Canada's next Prime minister offer to "fight inflation"? Pierre Poilievre, "leader" of the federal party with the most voting intentions, is well aware of how us poor Canadians struggle with inflation. His solution: stop carbon pricing.

In the end, there are indeed a couple things the Conservative Party of Canada is good at conserving: short-termism and economic illusions.

KNP has been interested in conventions for decades. Notably, I have been trying to curb linguistic proliferation, hoping that an artificial language can optimize communication, improving communication quality and reducing the tremendous costs of language acquisition and communication between people who do not master a common language.

But beyond the societal costs of the uncontrolled number of languages, what are the personal costs of... dialects? Could a native speaker of an organization's common language lose much money just for not speaking its dominant dialect? A study suggests speaking "the wrong dialect" does cost, and a lot. According to the 2019 study The Wage Penalty of Regional Accents, linguistic differences not only cause discrimination, but a wage penalty estimated at a fifth! While this was studied on a personal angle, if true, this implies a major societal cost, directing workers to local employers and making it harder/costlier for organizations to grow geographically.

I can't help being skeptical about the importance of the difference, but I have am not surprised to find yet another cost of our linguistic chaos

En matière de santé, le Québec est fou d'égalité. En théorie, tous ont accès à des soins de santé gratuits.

En pratique, mon médecin de famille, qui travaille pour le système public, travaille dans une clinique privée (comme pour la majorité des Québécois). Hier, il m'a référé pour un examen à un spécialiste du secteur privé. Il m'a aussi dirigé vers une pharmacie privée pour une prescription de médicaments. Et bien sûr, la rémunération de tous ces divers travailleurs de la santé est différente.

Est-ce à dire que l'égalité en matière de santé est menacée? Oh non! Du moins, elle est encore bien ancrée à la Clinique médicale de Sillery :

On peut être rassurés que notre santé est entre bonnes mains : même les médecins ont les mêmes conditions de travail que les réceptionnistes (à part des rémunérations dans des ordres de magnitude différents), et cette égalité est prônée bien à la vue des clients!

Voir aussi

On ne fait pas dans les corridors ce qui va dans les toilettes

Le dérèglement climatique n'a rien de nouveau, à notre échelle de temps. Mais malgré tout ce que j'ai déjà lu à ce sujet, j'ai trouvé intéressant (et encore plus effrayant) la brève chronique Urgence aux pôles de Philippe J. Fournier.

Mais l'urgence aux pôles provient d'une urgence bien plus grande, touchant toutes nos juridictions. Combien d'extinctions et d'articles aussi éloquents et percutants nous faudra-t-il avant que nos gouvernements se préoccupent réellement de l'environnement? Quelle canicule faudra-t-il pour réveiller l'humanité?

How much would it cost someone to be caught driving a vehicle with a fake license plate? When you ask people, their answers vary widely. As it can cost about 155 CAD to drive with a snow-covered plate, one would assume intentionally hiding the actual license and having one of your cars "imcarate" another one would cost you way more.

The answer depends on where you are. In some countries, doing so would cost you jail time. But in this liberty-crazy country, such a harsh punishment would be inconceivable. In some parts, imcaration is even the most economic way to drive, efficiently getting someone else to pay for your transportation. The version of the above CBC report which aired nationally mentioned that no Canadian province would charge more than 200 CAD for such an offense.

Wanna fully enjoy your liberty? Come to Canada and fully legally order a fake plate, almost for free! As a bonus, your actual license will be hidden, so that your car isn't imcarated by others!

Canada's liberty and vulnerability: Yours to Discover, Ours to Exploit!

For more than a year now, Canada's Online News Act, known as Bill C-18, has been... in the news. Unfortunately, not for the right reasons.
On paper, the act requires approval of online news publishers for digital news intermediaries to facilite access to the former's content.
It's based on the non-mistaken assumption that if a corporate website links to another website, the link must bring value to the corporate website. So why not put a tax on foreign corporations who link to Canadian sites? With many mass media struggling, forcing foreign corporations who link to Canadian media content to pay these media would seem like a profitable move, if it can be pitched properly. Which is what the LPC tried to do, by specifically targeting Wealthy and Evil foreign corporations ("Big Tech"). In practice, C-18 is trying to subsidize Canadian media by forcing Meta and Google to finance them, so that it isn't technically a tax.

The Canadian media I follow the most―CBC/Radio-Canada and L'actualité―keep mentioning Meta and Google's reactions negatively. Which would be understandable given how interested they are, if it wasn't for the fact that in addition to running propagandist ads, they also cover the story with an unrestrained bias. Even the public broadcaster fails to at least disclose its conflict of interest, particularly intense given how underfunded it already is.

So I was pleasantly surprised to get a small break from this enduring and frustrating rhetoric when I saw the CBC's The National explain what it really was about in At Issue's latest edition, all thanks to Andrew Coyne, its economy-educated panelist. I was curious to hear more than this short intervention (at 02:55) on the topic from Coyne, so I went looking for articles online and found his excellent The best thing the government could do to save the media is to stop trying to save the media, which beautifully highlights the mass media's contradictions. Coyne says it well:

And yet, The Globe and Mail was expecting me to subscribe for more than 400 CAD/year to read Coyne's article. I've never read The Globe and Mail regularly, but I doubt it would provide that much value to a Quebecer like me, who has access to multiple other (less costly) quality news sources, and little time to follow them all.

I checked if there was a more reasonable way to read Coyne's view and quickly ended up on a website which has been shamelessly copying The Globe and Mail for years. The highrony of watching the same government tolerate crooks blatantly stealing our IP for years, while focusing its efforts on a counterproductive attempt to steal lost revenue back from innovators―merely guilty of being foreign―, is one sorry exemplification of how populist―if not downright ignorant―Canada has become.

Unwilling to let most of my readers choose between financial health and theft, I searched for a more accessible neutral article on the topic and was impressed by Michael Geist's remarkable The Bill C-18 Reality: Everyone Loses When the Government Mandates Payments for Links. This truly free article dismantles the media's rhetoric, as in this brilliant example:

But I can't conclude without pointing out just how contradictory C-18 proponents remain. As Coyne noted:

But even as the law is about to enter into force, months after Meta restricted linking to CBC News content, the CBC is still advertising Meta:

Even 5 months into a Meta boycott by the government (including CBC/Radio-Canada), the CBC is still advertising Facebook for free, as this surreal press release shows:

Coyne had warned of unintended consequences, as taxing access to credible information effectively favours disinformation. But looking at the lies deliberately spread in the above CBC pages, this concern may have been unjustified… The foreign link tax will just replace local sources of disinformation by more numerous and foreign sources of disinformation.😒

And yet here we are despairing about the public's waning trust in journalism and complaining about disinformation, while spending on fancy projects to restore trust, rather than starting with the basics. If CBC News can't avoid conflict of interest, can it not at least avoid sensationalism and obvious bias in its stories?

September 2024 Update

Radio-Canada seems to have reached the pinnacle of partiality. The Quebec region's division chose no other than Alex-Ann Drolet, its most junior and self-assured journalist, to treat the topic. I tried to find the 2-minute segment I saw in the regional newscast online, but only found it at 17:50 in September 25th's whole program. I did manage to find a video specific to that topic. An even worse piece of what I will call MDM, since neither "disinformation" nor "misinformation" suffice to express how terrible it is. Radio-Canada is fully aligned with the government on that issue, acting as more than a relay or tribune. The government's propaganda did not work on CBC/Radio-Canada; it extended to the formerly "independent" medium.

In November, the European Union made a major step towards eID, with a provisional agreement on a new framework for a European digital identity!

With many more steps still left, I can only hope that the process will complete and result in a framework as good as what's being proposed, with a free "business model" (as it's called) and an open source implementation, at least on the client side. I am impatiently waiting for history to write itself…

While trying to read this paywalled article from Andrew Coyne titled "The best thing the government could do to save the media is to stop trying to save the media", I landed on a webpage with the same title which featured the article's contents verbatim, but attributed to "Harry Miller". Trying to follow the link to the page supposed to provide information about that guy yielded a broken page. The article featured little attribution to The Globe and Mail.

The About Us page of Canada News Media (or "CanadaNewsmedia" or "Canadanewsmedia"―just the about page uses all 3 forms) only offered a couple paragraphs of uninformative marketing speak. A 5-minute web search didn't find any more genuine information about it. According to HypeStat, the domain was created in December 2017. And indeed, the Wayback Machine shows it has been copying The Globe and Mail and others for more than 5 years.

So what's my take? I believe Canada News Media is no more than a cheap, rogue, half-broken website blatantly violating the copyright of the sources it copies, profiting thanks to abundant clickbait.

Having now read the article, I must say it's highly ironic that I could read it from free from an illegal website which has been operating at the expense of journalists and readers for years, when the government is putting ridiculous efforts into sucking Bad Big Tech. Coyne's article starts:

Indeed, how much better informed would we be if―rather than entering a public fighting show against giants and common interest, artificially favoring a few lucky media―our government focused on the boring enforcement of existing, rational legislation, protecting all media against theft, and accessorily protecting everyone against misinformation as a bonus?

Update (July 2024)

On 2024-07-05, KNP was the target of a pseudo-SLAPP about this story. In a remarkably poor attempt, 7 emails were sent by 5 different email addresses, all Gmail accounts. All 7 emails had the exact same contents:

The numerous factual errors and general nonsense made me think it was generated by an artificial stupidity, but the poor writing rules even that out.

As sad as this may initially, the irony of crooks profiting from copyright violations trying to take advantage of the DMCA makes it hilarious.

Canada News Media has now removed the specific violation denounced by this post. The problematic URL now redirects to a completely unrelated article (but the Wayback machine can still attest the violation).

So what's my take now? I guess Canada News Media is a cheap, rogue, half-broken website blatantly exploiting authors (by copying their works) and trying to intimidate its critics, profiting thanks to abundant clickbait.
"Jon Smarts" seems to be associated with the dead domain bestoflifecentral.com.