I just saw this on YouTube, on Charlie Angus' channel:
Well, Canada's favourite premier (Wab Kinew, if you don't know) actually announced something I am not at all happy about.
On Saturday, Premier Kinew announced that Manitoba will be implementing a "youth" ban on social media and AI chatbots. No real details were announced at this time.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-social-media-age-restrictions-9.7177470
I know that based on our last discussion about this, most of you are in favour of a ban. Don't get me wrong, I know that social media is awful, basically a scourge on society, and can be very harmful to children (and adults, for that matter). But the usual way companies enforce this is through identity verification, and I don't think that being required to upload government-issued ID to those very same terrible social media companies is ever a good idea.
As the article states, Manitoba is basically following Australia's lead on this. Remember that the Online News Act was also based on a similar initiative in Australia. If I remember correctly, Facebook played ball in Australia, but when Canada enacted similar measures, they balked, and that's why news can no longer be shared on Meta platforms in Canada. I wonder if the social media companies will go along with Manitoba's direction, or if they will consider Manitoba too small a market to worry about, and just pull their services from the province rather than comply with the law, similar to what Imgur did in the UK?
To be clear, I am not on Facebook or the other major social media sites, so this doesn't necessarily impact me personally if it was adopted beyond Manitoba. I just think it's a bad road to go down generally. Actually, I just noticed that the Australian ban includes YouTube, and I do use that, so I guess it could impact me. If I have to upload my driver's licence to watch YouTube videos, well, then I guess I don't get any more YouTube videos.
That's crazy. There's lots of kid-friendly content on YT. Good grief, one of my favorite videos is Andrea Bocelli's appearance on Sesame Street, as he sings a lullaby to Elmo:
The other day I saw an extraordinary video on the Modern History TV channel. This channel is by an actual knight (Sir Jason Kingsley), doing videos about the daily lives of medieval knights, travelers, merchants, innkeepers, pilgrims, archers, jousters (and their horses! Jason has some gorgeous horses...). It's fantastically educational, and most definitely helpful to my research for those long-term medieval fantasy/adventure fanfiction projects I've been working on. This most recent video alone, about secret roads and routes medieval people took to avoid the official tax collectors and toll roads and bridges, provided so many interesting things to research. I grabbed a piece of paper and started taking notes.
Jason's content would fascinate kids, especially teens who are into medieval adventure (Jason is also a game developer and he made a short movie about a knight on a quest for the Holy Grail, including the behind the scenes of
how it was made).
It's sad to think that fantastic content like this could be banned for kids.
Web Kinew is great, he was in a Guard The Leaf YT video the other day.
I must have missed that one (I check every morning to see what he's got on offer, and I wish I could reach into the screen and hug the co-host). Do you have a link?
Yeah, Wab is a great premier. I think this is the first initiative of his that I’ve ever disagreed with. Usually everything he says is gold.
I wasn’t making up that “Canada’s favourite premier” comment:
Wab Kinew once again finds himself with the highest approval rating amongst Canada’s premiers.
www.ctvnews.ca
And of course there’s my premier, way down near the wrong end of the chart.
(Of course, “popular” doesn’t mean “good”… Smith came in at fourth place because she’s very popular in her very conservative province, but she’d be down at the bottom of my list of “good” premiers.)
Smith is utterly vile. She's so awful that if you fed her to a black hole, it would spit her out and complain of feeling sick (imagine an immense black hole at the center of the galaxy spitting out Danielle Smith and uttering a giant "BLEAH!!!!"
)
well she won't have the critism faced by Mary Simon for her lack of French but I wonder chosing some-one from Quebec was a counter move against the seperatist movement?
Technically, Mary Simon was from Quebec. She claimed that she couldn't speak French because she wasn't given the opportunity.
Which is bullshit, because even if it wasn't offered at whatever school she went to as a kid, there was nothing stopping her from learning it later, as an adult. It's insane that an anglophone Prime Minister speaks better French than a Quebecois Governor-General.
And don't bother pointing out that Carney doesn't speak Inuktitut. There's not a lot of call for Inuktitut in the GG's office in their normal duties or at international conferences.
Don't we kind of have a tradition where we alternate between anglophone and francophone GGs? It was a francophone's "turn" this time. (Guess I wasn't eligible anyway, then. Oh well.)
Yeah, just like there's a Liberal tradition of alternating their leaders. Whoever follows Carney will be francophone, if they keep up the tradition.
Actually, if you own $4000 worth of property, you could be appointed to the Senate. Or at least that was the requisite amount, last time I looked at the Senatorial qualifications. Since I'm not that wealthy I don't qualify, but I meet the rest of it (I do my bit for Canada in my own way).
Well, technically if you take a ferry from Newfoundland to St-Pierre et Miquelon, you can be in France. So we can kind of imagine what it might be like.
I love pointing out to people on FB and YT that Canada shares a land and maritime border with Denmark and a maritime border with France, so it's not out of the question that we might join the EU some day. The Americans get so confused by that, and it's but-but-but the Atlantic Ocean...
I don't know, if one really wanted to immerse themselves in French culture, you'd think they'd want to head to the continent.
Besides, if movies have taught me anything, it's not really France unless you can see the Eiffel Tower from your window!
There's an episode of Highlander in which Duncan and Amanda are visiting the Eiffel Tower and Amanda starts reminiscing about remembering how Paris looked without it and how they weren't sure about it when it was being built, that it didn't look like anything special.
And then they hopped up on the railing and danced a marvelous tango (can't find video of that, unfortunately).
