Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Pinterest Mom
Jun 9, 2009

Hey, so it looks like Michael Ignatieff still doesn't understand parliamentary democracy?

quote:

On the coalition, Ignatieff writes that nothing had ever been proposed in Canada before similar to the Liberal-NDP deal that was crafted to remove Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government from power.

“It came as a thunderclap, especially to me. Although I was the party’s deputy leader, I had been excluded from the secret negotiations with the other parties.” Referring to Dion, he writes, “What I saw was a desperate leader clinging to power by any means, resorting to a coup de theatre to survive.”

“The problem was not a coalition itself. You can make coalitions among winners.”

“In our case, it was a coalition of losers. The government had just increased it seats in the House of Commons, while we had lost seats. How were we to explain to the people that we were throwing out a government duly re-elected two months before?”

Amazon informs me Iggy's book will arrive tomorrow. I'm stoking my hateboner.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Political Whores
Feb 13, 2012

Pinterest Mom posted:

Hey, so it looks like Michael Ignatieff still doesn't understand parliamentary democracy?


Amazon informs me Iggy's book will arrive tomorrow. I'm stoking my hateboner.

Although I'm sorry Harper won, I'm simultaneously not sorry this rear end in a top hat lost. I really loving hate how someone who was essentially an American style neocon managed to get that close to power. Poor Dion. :(

Reince Penis
Nov 15, 2007

by R. Guyovich

JoelJoel posted:

Then the movie started and the boos got louder. :holy:


Though you have to say, that money they put into the office of religious freedom has sure been worth it. What? That office is only concerned with things not Canadian? oh.


Also, can someone shed light on this for me. Our wonderful media is reporting that Harper is subbing the UN or some such rhetoric by not addressing them, but is there any clear indicator that he was invited to do so? I mean is it standard protocol for a national leader to address the UN every time they are in NY (especially when that leader live a 2 hour flight away)? Though I get why he wouldn't exactly want to at this point in time, but does anyone at the UN care? Did they expect him to give an address?

I seem to recall that every member state gets an opportunity to address the General Assembly once a year. This usually happens in the fall but I don't remember why. (drat you Prof. Stan Natchfolger. I remember your name but not the content of your class.)

Juul-Whip
Mar 10, 2008

Pinterest Mom posted:

Amazon informs me Iggy's book will arrive tomorrow. I'm stoking my hateboner.

Why the gently caress would you pay money for that :psyduck:

mr. unhsib
Sep 19, 2003
I hate you all.
I don't think I've ever loathed a Conservative politician as much as I do Michael Ignatieff.

Pinterest Mom
Jun 9, 2009

THC posted:

Why the gently caress would you pay money for that :psyduck:

I'm really committed to disliking Michael Ignatieff.


(Real answer: he's the most fascinating and frustrating and alien public figure in recent history, and I'm super curious to read his presumably frank take on a lot of different events and decisions in his political career. 2009 in particular was him just Mr. Magooing his way from obvious conservative trap to the next, and I want to know his perspective.)

Dreylad
Jun 19, 2001

Pinterest Mom posted:

(Real answer: he's the most fascinating and frustrating and alien public figure in recent history, and I'm super curious to read his presumably frank take on a lot of different events and decisions in his political career. 2009 in particular was him just Mr. Magooing his way from obvious conservative trap to the next, and I want to know his perspective.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA2pB3qQIkI

Sashimi
Dec 26, 2008


College Slice

mr. unhsib posted:

I don't think I've ever loathed a Conservative politician as much as I do Michael Ignatieff.
Listening to him talk is the only time I have ever literally thrown something at a television, quite a feat when Harper was also running in the same election. Everything that came out of his mouth was just pure bile.

a primate
Jun 2, 2010


In his defence here, the public would certainly take it the way he describes, given the lack of knowledge of parliamentary democracy.

unlimited shrimp
Aug 30, 2008
Is it worth talking about how RIM is basically dead now?
Yesterday, they reached a tentative $4.7B buyout agreement. It used to have a market cap of almost $55B. Even Nortel was worth more when it was chopped up and sold off. :downs:

Mostly I feel bad for Kitchener-Waterloo, and my dad who thought RIM was poised to be the next Apple despite having zero vision and no Steve Jobs.

Pinterest Mom
Jun 9, 2009

a primate posted:

In his defence here, the public would certainly take it the way he describes, given the lack of knowledge of parliamentary democracy.

Sure, there would be initial pushback, but I think that two years of incumbency (and presumably good government) until a late 2010 or early-mid 2011 election would have gone a long way towards legitimising the idea of the coalition in the public mind.

The Liberal/NDP accord in Ontario ended up working out great for everybody involved despite it being a deal where the third place party propped up the second place parties.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

spacemost posted:

Is it worth talking about how RIM is basically dead now?
Yesterday, they reached a tentative $4.7B buyout agreement. It used to have a market cap of almost $55B. Even Nortel was worth more when it was chopped up and sold off. :downs:

Mostly I feel bad for Kitchener-Waterloo, and my dad who thought RIM was poised to be the next Apple despite having zero vision and no Steve Jobs.

This has been coming for years. Anyone who didn't see this back in 2008 after the iPhone launch should have been able to see it in 2010/2011 when RIM still didn't have a product that could compete. They showed a complete lack of understanding of the market they were in, somehow believing that because they were pretty much the only game in town up until then, that made them the best. And after the market was very clear about what was wanted (or unwanted) they held on to their busted-rear end legacy system and lacklustre hardware until their brand became a joke. Then they followed it up with a product that doesn't work with any of their existing software base (backend included) and doesn't offer any advantages over phones that came out two years ago.

They sat on their laurels and their business crumbled around them, it actually reminds me a lot of what happened to Nortel.

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN
Given the timing of the Coalition flareup its pretty clear that its success would have hinged on how it was perceived by the public to perform on economic issues. The Canadian electorate has consistently shown that for the most part it couldn't care less about electoral procedures as long as Canadians feel that somebody halfway competent is managing the economy. This was especially true a few years ago when the Great Recession was just getting started and nobody knew quite how bad things would get either globally or locally.

That is why Dion's poorly edited video was such a disaster. It made him look incompetent and foolish at exactly the moment that the Canadian people needed reassurance about his capability to lead.

Blade_of_tyshalle
Jul 12, 2009

If you think that, along the way, you're not going to fail... you're blind.

There's no one I've ever met, no matter how successful they are, who hasn't said they had their failures along the way.

infernal machines posted:

And after the market was very clear about what was wanted (or unwanted) they held on to their busted-rear end legacy system and lacklustre hardware until their brand became a joke.

Does anyone else do a smartphone with actual buttons, though? I'll have to run my BB Bold into the ground until no network supports it if not.

namaste friends
Sep 18, 2004

by Smythe
I think you guys are too hard on RIM. The problems started way before the iphone introduction. Everyone knew that BBOS loving sucked, including Jim 'who needs apps?' Balsillie. It was hard to develop for and RIM had no road map for fixing it until it was too late.

Seriously, does anyone else remember when Jim Balsillie told the world that 'apps' were the wrong approach? Dumb gently caress.

namaste friends
Sep 18, 2004

by Smythe

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

Does anyone else do a smartphone with actual buttons, though? I'll have to run my BB Bold into the ground until no network supports it if not.

swiftkey. I dumped my z10 because I discovered the magic of swiftkey. I miss the flick keyboard and gesture based UI but gently caress the z10 app 'ecosystem'. I'm perfectly willing to tolerate the absolutely poo poo-assed battery life of the Nexus 4 to be able to use apps.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

Does anyone else do a smartphone with actual buttons, though? I'll have to run my BB Bold into the ground until no network supports it if not.

This is a large part of what's kept them afloat in the last year or so. Die-hard physical keyboard users don't have a lot of choices, there are a few Windows and Android phones that have physical keyboards but they're terrible. Nokia used to make them but that (and Symbian) are completely dead too.

Cultural Imperial posted:

I think you guys are too hard on RIM. The problems started way before the iphone introduction. Everyone knew that BBOS loving sucked, including Jim 'who needs apps?' Balsillie. It was hard to develop for and RIM had no road map for fixing it until it was too late.

Seriously, does anyone else remember when Jim Balsillie told the world that 'apps' were the wrong approach? Dumb gently caress.

That's the thing, they were never that good, the other options pre-iOS2 were just a lot worse (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm) for mobile email. So they took their crufty "secure" infrastructure/software stack and tacked on bits and pieces until it basically didn't work any more. It was a system designed for email pagers in 2000, not a smartphone OS. The "apps are the wrong approach" mantra came about because the platform couldn't run anything like apps without another layer tacked on top. Their back-end BES infrastructure was even worse, and the fact that their internal servers route all "secure" BB traffic is just a joke (see the week long outages due to a single datacenter failure).

It's a system from 12 years ago that they thought they could ride forever.

infernal machines fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Sep 24, 2013

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN
So basically another once great Canadian company falls victim to our corporate sector's bizarre unwillingness to invest sufficiently in R&D.

bunnyofdoom
Mar 29, 2008
THE HATE CRIME DEFENDER HAS LOGGED ON

Helsing posted:

So basically another once great Canadian company falls victim to our corporate sector's bizarre unwillingness to invest sufficiently in R&D.

Please, it's also our public sector too now!

Canada: Proudly luddite since 2005!

Precambrian Video Games
Aug 19, 2002



Helsing posted:

So basically another once great Canadian company falls victim to our corporate sector's bizarre unwillingness to invest sufficiently in R&D.

Incompetent leadership will take even the greatest organization far (down the drain). There's some kind of lesson to be learned there.

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN

bunnyofdoom posted:

Please, it's also our public sector too now!

Canada: Proudly luddite since 2005!

Under Stephen Harper's strong stable national majority government we've proudly adopted the most cutting edge luddite policies of the corporate sector :canada:

Reince Penis
Nov 15, 2007

by R. Guyovich
I was curious about government investment in Blackberry and found this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-lends-265m-to-spain-s-telefonica-for-blackberrys-1.1341042

quote:

Export Development Canada has loaned 200 million euros, or about $265 million Cdn, to Telefonica to purchase BlackBerry's smartphones and related services.

The Crown corporation says the agreement will help foster a stronger relationship between the two companies.

"EDC's financing is really about making the transactions between BlackBerry and Telefonica easier, helping to enhance and broaden the relationship between these two major global players," said EDC regional vice-president Lewis Megaw, who is responsible for Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

EDC provides financing to international companies to help promote Canadian goods and services, or other international relationships.

Telefonica has worked with the EDC on several agreements since 2006, but recent troubles with Spain's economy have affected its financial results.

The company, which operates in 24 countries, reported that profits dropped to $4.4 million in 2012, compared to $6.2 million in 2011. Revenues were relatively flat.

Anybody know of any other stuff like this re: Blackberry?

e: I wish I could get a loan 60x my disposable income from the govt.

Pinterest Mom
Jun 9, 2009

The Nova Scotia government pledged 2 million/yr for five years as long as RIM keeps 400 jobs in the province.

The investor who wants to buy RIM now indicated that the CPPIP or other public pension plans might provide some of the funding.

Baloogan
Dec 5, 2004
Fun Shoe
You all know that if you want to innovate just move 200 miles south?

BGrifter
Mar 16, 2007

Winner of Something Awful PS5 thread's Posting Excellence Award June 2022

Congratulations!
Personally I'm just hoping we get an ad about Stephen Harper costing Canada all of it's RIM jobs and a pledge to bring RIM jobs back.

Rhobot Mk. II
Jan 15, 2008
Mk. II: Bigger, longer, uncut robo-cock.

PK loving SUBBAN posted:

I was curious about government investment in Blackberry and found this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-lends-265m-to-spain-s-telefonica-for-blackberrys-1.1341042


Anybody know of any other stuff like this re: Blackberry?

e: I wish I could get a loan 60x my disposable income from the govt.

Uh, I think the reporter got that wrong. Telefonica is the fifth largest wireless provider around the globe. That's not millions in profit, that's billions.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

BGrifter posted:

Personally I'm just hoping we get an ad about Stephen Harper costing Canada all of it's RIM jobs and a pledge to bring RIM jobs back.

I'm almost certain that's why they renamed the company to "Blackberry" back in July, just to kill this terrible joke. There hasn't been a RIM job in Waterloo since.

Tochiazuma
Feb 16, 2007

Helsing posted:

So basically another once great Canadian company falls victim to our corporate sector's bizarre unwillingness to invest sufficiently in R&D.

Well, at least Lazaridis did throw some personal cash towards the Perimeter Institute. But yeah, R&D spending is awful here.

Guy DeBorgore
Apr 6, 1994

Catnip is the opiate of the masses
Soiled Meat

PK loving SUBBAN posted:

I was curious about government investment in Blackberry and found this:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-lends-265m-to-spain-s-telefonica-for-blackberrys-1.1341042


Anybody know of any other stuff like this re: Blackberry?

e: I wish I could get a loan 60x my disposable income from the govt.

Seems like pretty standard stuff for export development. Every country helps out their big companies with things like this. It's not like they're pumping a spanish telecom for campaign donations. Besides, what else is the Canadian government going to do with 200 million euros?

Reince Penis
Nov 15, 2007

by R. Guyovich

Guy DeBorgore posted:

Seems like pretty standard stuff for export development. Every country helps out their big companies with things like this. It's not like they're pumping a spanish telecom for campaign donations. Besides, what else is the Canadian government going to do with 200 million euros?

It's a way for the govt to indirectly subsidize to Blackberry. I was just wondering if anyone know of any other govt subsidies to Blackberry.

Cacator
Aug 6, 2005

You're quite good at turning me on.

The Calgary mayoral race has begun. LOL @ people who are running against Nenshi (after the floods he has a 90+% approval rating)

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/calgary/Longshots+line+take+Nenshi/8850308/story.html

Cacator fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Sep 24, 2013

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN
Holy poo poo, Sue-Ann Levy actually manages to sound somewhat reasonable right up until the very end of this column. I think that has gotta be some kind of record.

quote:

SUE-ANN LEVY | QMI AGENCY

LONDON, ON -- The irony was not lost on me.
About 30 minutes into a group therapy session with 800 delegates and assorted has-beens at Saturday's PC convention in London, PC Leader Tim Hudak announced that he'd had an "Aha moment" about Toronto.

"If (we) don't win in Toronto or in the GTA (in the next election) we can be the best drat small-city, rural, northern party in the world but we're always in opposition," he said. "So we need to break through."

Well, duh. It's about drat time. After all, it only took him four years as leader to realize he's got to do something to woo Toronto voters, even though he was told what he could do before the 2011 election and did not listen.

But here's the catch.

His epiphany was in response to a question from Windsor delegate Rob Chesire -- one of a half-dozen attendees who wanted to know how Hudak would make himself and the party more winnable in the next election.

The question would have been a good one had Chesire not chosen to begin with a misogynistic remark about NDP Leader Andrea Horwath -- calling her The Great Pumpkin because her colour is orange and she's "put on a little bit of weight."

He would have never said the same about a man -- and sadly, more people in the audience, many of them packing far too many pounds themselves, laughed than booed.

Hudak said nothing, which was a statement in itself.
But I winced.

I winced as well when Hudak made a great show of introducing all the has-beens and party faithful from the Mike Harris era -- including Harris himself and former LCBO boss Andy Brandt -- who had hightailed it to London and stacked the room to make sure Their Boy survived calls for a leadership review (which he did, of course).
Ouch.

Yes, Mike Harris, the same former premier who still makes Torontonians lapse into paroxysms of fury.

I had no problem with Harris when he was premier. He turned the province around financially from the mess left by former NDP premier Bob Rae.

But that was 1999, for heaven's sake. It is now 2013.

Let's not forget either that when Harris came into power in 1995, Tory MPPs won in 16 of Toronto's then 31 ridings. By the time he handed the reins of power over to Ernie Eves and his successor fought the 2003 election, the Tories were completely shut out in the 416 area code.

Does Hudak really want to win the hearts of Toronto voters?

If so, he might start by disassociating himself from Memories of Harris and the likes of delegates like Chesire and start understanding what it will take to win a multicultural, cosmopolitan city.

It was obvious from the near rock star status afforded Doug Holyday at the convention that Hudak is pinning his hopes of a breakthrough on his new Etobicoke-Lakeshore MPP.

Some of it was rather creepy actually, most particularly the Obama-like posters of Holyday plastered on walls throughout the convention centre.

I have a lot of time for Holyday but it's going to take a heckuva lot more than one Tory seat in the 416 area code and putting Holyday in charge of the Toronto policy committee to win over Toronto voters.

But let's start with the transit file.

It only took Hudak four years to discover that "gridlock" is an issue in Toronto and that he'd better jump on the subway bandwagon.

OK fine. But how the heck is the Hudak team going to pay for a Scarborough subway?

It's fine to criticize revenue tools -- and rightly so because I have no doubt Premier Kathleen Wynne will simply take the money and dump it down a big, black hole to pay for her teacher and other union deals.

But Hudak has yet to say what exactly he'd do without revenue tools. An "Ideas for a Better Ontario" handbook provided to delegates in London mentions leveraging public-private partnerships and pension fund investment. But he has yet to explain how he sees that working.

That said, it will take more than transit to woo Torontonians.

How about reaching out to the ethnic and LGBT communities?

There are right-of-centre visible minority and gay PC voters in Toronto. Hudak and his team just don't know how to tap them.

What about homelessness and panhandling? The Ontario Safe Streets Act has not worked to get aggressive panhandlers off the street.

What about the poor mentally ill wandering the streets thanks to the NDP decision in the 1990s to deinstitutionalize them? What would Premier Hudak do with them?

Wait. Hudak did tell reporters Saturday in London that he plans to "speak from the heart."

Maybe while he's at it, he can show the Hudak Team has a heart.

Justin Trudeau
Apr 4, 2009

There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime

eXXon posted:

Incompetent leadership will take even the greatest organization far (down the drain). There's some kind of lesson to be learned there.

Who could have foreseen that a company with two CEOs would be poorly run?

Pinterest Mom
Jun 9, 2009

Michael Ignatieff, Fire and Ashes, p. 8:

"In the summer of 2006, when I was campaigning for leadership of my party, I appeared before the Montreal business community in the white dining room of Power Corporation. One of the business leaders asked me whether I could explain, in a sentence or two, why I wanted to be prime minister. The question caught me by surprise. I said it was the hardest job any country has on offer. I wanted to see whether I could handle the challenge."


This is going to be good :getin:


(Note: this was two years after Ignatieff accepted Alf Apps' offer to come to Canada and try to become PM.)

e: this was immediately followed by three full pages going through the life histories of his great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents. I've missed Iggy :allears:

Pinterest Mom fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Sep 24, 2013

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.
I'm cross posting from the Toronto thread, because it seems like this applies outside Toronto as well, at least to other major urban centres.

For those who haven't seen it, John Lorinc has written a great article over at Spacing Toronto explaining how the federal money for the subway has basically just killed the other two LRT lines and any hope we had of evidence based transit planning for the next decade.

Blade_of_tyshalle
Jul 12, 2009

If you think that, along the way, you're not going to fail... you're blind.

There's no one I've ever met, no matter how successful they are, who hasn't said they had their failures along the way.

Pinterest Mom posted:

e: this was immediately followed by three full pages going through the life histories of his great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents. I've missed Iggy :allears:

Isn't he descended from Russian nobility or something? I think like his grandfather or something was friends with Tsar Nicolas before the Communists.

HookShot
Dec 26, 2005

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

Isn't he descended from Russian nobility or something? I think like his grandfather or something was friends with Tsar Nicolas before the Communists.
Yeah, I think Ignatieff would have been third in line to the throne or something had the czarship not ended.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we monitor many frequencies. we listen always. came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. it played us a mighty dub.

HookShot posted:

Yeah, I think Ignatieff would have been third in line to the throne or something had the czarship not ended.

Makes sense, he was third in line to the throne here too.

Pinterest Mom
Jun 9, 2009

Blade_of_tyshalle posted:

Isn't he descended from Russian nobility or something? I think like his grandfather or something was friends with Tsar Nicolas before the Communists.

He was the Tsar's minister of education. They were minor royalty, I don't think they were actually in line for the throne?


Iggy keeps taking fun petty side-swipes at people he doesn't like. He goes through pains to remind everyone that Trudeau was sleeping with Bob Rae's hot sister, and the only mention of Stéphane Dion in his account of the 2006 race is at the end, when he says that Dion's "many qualities include the fact that he was neither Bob Rae nor me."

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Dallan Invictus
Oct 11, 2007

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes, look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

HookShot posted:

Yeah, I think Ignatieff would have been third in line to the throne or something had the czarship not ended.

Nothing quite that exalted - his grandfather was Nicholas II's last education minister. I only remember this because of the :unsmith: lede from a BBC profile I read once:

BBC Scotland posted:

Paul Ignatieff owes his life to the Polish language.

His grandfather, Count Pavel Ignatiev, the last Tsarist minister of education in Russia, was due to be shot during the Bolshevik revolution.

He escaped the bullets thanks to one of his "progressive policies" - granting language rights to Poland.

It prompted the Polish commissar who recognised the man he was holding captive to declare: "We won't shoot that man, he's a good man."

Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Sep 25, 2013

  • Locked thread