Pxtl

What do you do for water heating?

Lock screen widgets were a neat idea but the original implementation was ugly as hell.

Just let me put read-only widgets on the lock screen.

For example, Singh wants to subsidize mortgages of people facing rising payments. This encourages rising prices since it's feeding demand instead of supply. That's trying to douse a fire with gasoline. And likewise, there are many affordable-housing builders who will tell you that the chief problem isn't funding but rather the extreme requirements city halls have made to prevent construction. You can't build public or co-op housing if City Hall says you need every building to be narrow 3-storey mayan step pyramid set back 60% from all sides of the lot.

And when we talk about that period of "like they used to"? Most of that rental housing was market-rate. A big "subsidy" was tax benefits on private landlording. The idea that Canada can build housing top-down instead of empowering the market to do it bottom-up is ridiculous since our governments' capacity to get anything done top-down has absolutely cratered.

I love what the BC NDP is doing on housing, but the BC NDP is a special case because they're shifted to the centre compared to other NDP parties since there is no BC provincial Liberal party to speak of. Same as AB (although I'm not fond of their necessary oil-boosting, but that's the reality of AB).

And nowhere did I support the Conservative attitude on "free market". My ideal "free market" solution to a problem is the Carbon Tax, where we use pricing signals to internalize an externality and make the free market solve the problem instead of causing it.

Oh, I'm not "both sidesing" because I think myself an iconoclast that's better than everybody. I think NDP are dumb because I strongly support market-based solutions to policy problems and the NDP tends to come up with dumb populist solutions for policy problems. Like, I'm firmly a deregulation/YIMBYist guy when it comes to the housing crisis, and the NDP has the closest relationship with the left-NIMBYs in city councils that are trying their damnedest to worsen the problem by blocking market-based construction.

The only good and inventive NDP policy ideas (not just their typical "expand the social safety net" stuff like pharmacare -- which is good! But not really innovative) is pushing for more taxes on wealth accumulation, like a wealth tax or a lower capital gains exclusion.

When it comes to hard problems like housing? They tend to come up with dumb, knee-jerk solutions instead of enabling the public to solve problems bottom-up.

Like, if unions didn't exist and somebody invented unions today and the Liberals proposed modern union laws? The NDP would be out there screaming "wait, you want to take a cut of our paychecks"? Because any level of indirection or systems-thinking in policy solutions is too abstract. The NDP worship at the political altar of "if you're explaining, you're losing" and so they always come up withe dumbest and most populist solutions to every problem.

My dream political party would be "What the NDP and the Conservatives think the Liberals are". Like, if we had a party of woke neoliberals that want to tax-and-spend on providing a strong social safety net but also want to use free market globalist solutions to implement policy (eg. carbon taxes, YIMBYist housing, open borders)? That would get all my votes. I would volunteer for them.

But instead, the liberals are bumbling, flat-footed and low-energy.

Trial balloon.

This character is the thin edge of a very large wedge.

Ahh, you know, it's about the convenience of not having to juggle another device. I still have an old Galaxy Tab kicking around the house that plays all that stuff pretty well, but it's not the same as being able to pull it out of my pocket on the bus.

I'm so annoyed that all my 32-bit Humble APKs don't run on my Pixel.

Also, would it kill them to rename their .zips to .apks before I download? I know the Humble .apks are basically abandonware but at least rename the files for Pete's sake!

I just wish Google would release some kind of 32-bit Android 4.4 sandboxed compatibility layer for old games. Android 4.4 was the standard Android version for a super long time for a zillion devices, and I'd bet 99% of the dead .APK games out there would run on that version.

Give me a tool with a crapload of slow, clumsy emulation wrappers covered in tedious config options and a launcher any time I want to run an app through this compatibility layer and let me play Amazing Alex again.

edit: it occurs to me I basically want an Android emulator for Android. Or like, a psuedo-emulator that's not really an emulator like WINE/Proton.

Honestly, as somebody who really loved the early era of Android gaming, I'm really disappointed how ephemeral it all was between the Play Store delistings and the absolutely atrocious approach to backwards compatibility in the Android OS.

Rescheduling an event in Google Calendar with your voice. You can still schedule a new event.

This feature is underutilized because I could never get it to work.

Quiet quitting after Floyd protests hurt their feelings.