Just a Southern Saskatchewan retiree looking for a place to keep up with stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This sounds like just standard traffic analysis. Nothing to do with WhatsApp or any other messaging platform. It’s been in use since at least WWII.

    Who is talking to whom? How often? Under what circumstances? How do patterns of communication correlate with events? Who are the hubs of communication (ie leaders)?

    The big difference between then and now is that instead of needing rooms full of people drawing graphs by hand, there is software to handle it. In turn, that means it’s not really important to have initial suspects to get started, because the computers are quite happy to tease out interesting signals from total communications. That also increases the likelihood of false positives, but the kinds of people who do traffic analysis at this level aren’t usually the kinds of people who worry about a little collateral damage.

    It seems like a pretty tall order to construct a system of communication that is useful for coordinating activities, affordable to operate, and secure against traffic analysis. At best, you’ll end up back in a situation where other intelligence will be required to identify a manageable pool of suspects.







  • Canada deals with some of those problems by having a separation of state and medicine similar to our separation of state and church.

    For example, I think we are the only country in the world with no abortion law. It’s a medical procedure, so it’s left to the medical community to develop standards of care and standards of practice.

    It’s not perfect, but it’s worked out quite well since the 1980s. There were some major cases that led to our abortion laws being struck down by the courts and no government has yet had the courage to introduce new legislation of any kind.


  • I cannot know your experience and won’t pretend to.

    Unless your objective is to be even more disliked and disrespected than you are now, being deliberately annoying will not get you far.

    If you just want respect as a thinking, feeling human, you’re going to have to be respectful of other thinking, feeling humans, ignoring and blocking those who are too immature to have respect for others.

    There are people out there who think that power is the source of respect. They are, of course, wrong. The only path to respect is through the elimination of power structures, so that respect can be mutually sought through understanding, not obedience.

    I don’t like assholes, so I don’t seek them out. I try to give the assholes who engage with me the respectful engagement they crave but don’t deserve, then block the ones who stay assholes. If I feel surrounded by assholes, I disengage completely until I’ve figured out whether I’m actually the asshole or I’ve stumbled into a snakepit. (And everybody is sometimes an asshole. The secret is to not make it part of your identity or to assume that it’s part of theirs.)

    Life is so much more pleasant when disagreements are respectful engagements with learning opportunities instead of just screaming matches.

    Good luck on your journey.


  • This is what I was referring to. There are a number of variations on the theme.

    If you are really in a pinch:

    1. Feed a length of hose into the source until only a small amount is left clear of the liquid.

    2. Put your thumb over the exposed end, or otherwise make the end as close to airtight as possible.

    3. Rapidly pull the hose out of the liquid, moving the end down to the destination container. The end must be below the top surface of the source, the further the better.

    4. Release your thumb/seal. If you’ve done it all correctly, the hose will be nearly filled with liquid and enough of it will be below the surface of the source to start the siphoning process.

    If the source liquid is too far below the opening for this to work with the length of hose you have, you can manually pump it far enough to start a siphon, by rapidly submerging and lifting the hose while alternating the closing of the top. Open top while submerging, closed top while lifting. You have to push down faster than what gravity pulls the liquid back down. Ideally, you’re lifting fast enough to get some help from the liquid’s own inertia when you reverse course.








  • Canadian here, with 50 years in the workforce. I’ve never once been paid semi-weekly or bimonthly. Here, biweekly is every two weeks semi-monthly is every half month. Obviously, that latter is often spoken of as twice a month, which just adds to the confusion between “bi” and “semi”.

    The reality is that these words, like most words (at least in English), mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean and consensus can be hard to reach.

    I give you the phrase “table the discussion”. Sometimes it means to formally bring something up for discussion. Other times it means setting the discussion aside for future consideration.

    Or, my favourite from my childhood, “fat chance” which means that something is even less likely than if it had a slim chance. Granted, that might be more in the line of idiomatic slang, but it stands as part of at least the era’s Canadian English that did have broad consensus and still does, I think.