The reason Mastodon is never going to be a capable Twitter replacement is because it's not user-friendly enough, and by that I mean it requires at least a mild level of tech-savviness that most users are not willing to work to obtain.

https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1588251480553062401

There are other reasons, too (the "fediverse" aspect is a big one as it is both ripe for abuse and tends to silo people off into cliques, regardless of the ability for users on Instance A to follow users on Instance B from A, et cetera). But not being idiotproof is the big one.

All this "appeal to history of non bathing" skips over the fact that regular bathing has been a part of human life for about as long as we've had agriculture. The only difference is that bathing was mostly public for a very long time.

https://twitter.com/VeeCeeMurphy76/status/1572400391588814848

In most societies you'd go to the baths either daily or once every two to three days at least, and you would wash, because people get stinky and as humans we don't, uh, like to smell bad? This isn't rocket science

Worth noting that, according to linguistic historians, the accent drift in English was actually the result of the English, whose accent started mutating to what it is now around the mid-1700s. Prior to that, English speakers mostly sounded a lot like Yosemite Sam. Seriously.

https://twitter.com/cox_tom/status/1573272990271545345

Not EXACTLY like Yosemite Sam, of course. But his drawl is the closest analogue to what English speakers mostly sounded like in the 18th century. There remained elements of that survey model in British English for a long time, mostly survivor words like "tarnation."

I had a doctor's appointment this afternoon and I decided to walk there (so the doctor would know I was trying to get healthy, see), and the walk was along Yonge Street, which is like a microcosm of all of Toronto and Canada's problems these days. (1) If you don't know Toronto, Yonge Street is Toronto's main street, running up the middle of the city and beyond, the primary artery of the Six.

Everywhere you look on it these days: empty storefronts. On the busiest street in Canada. And it's no secret as to why. (2)

I've seen this pop up a few places lately, and setting aside the morality of intervention for a second to focus on arms wonkery, I'm pretty sure the A-10 wouldn't be terribly helpful against Russian armor.

https://twitter.com/mrglenn/status/1496228726408986625

The Russians primarily use the T-90 as their primary battle tank at present. It's a pretty impressive tank, an upgrade from the T-72. (Which, by the way, the A-10 has *never engaged with*. We don't know how well the A-10 would do against the *last* generation of Russian tanks.)

Seeing a whole lot of left-Twitter chatter this morning (and previously tbh) about how Ukraine has Nazi problems and Finland isn't as left-wing as it's supposed to be and - what is the point? Ukraine has neo-Nazis and racists in it, yes. I mean, welcome to Eastern Europe, where literally every country has issues with shitty right-wing racists. Congratulations, you figured that out.

In light of the news about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's newest reoccurrence of cancer, I fully expect the lefty avalanche of "she's an idiot because she didn't retire during Obama's administration" takes to go wild, and it's always been a pretty dumb take Obama's administration made the political calculation that conservative Democrats - and remember, at the time this number included the likes of Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh and Ben Nelson - weren't going to be agreeable to replacing more than one Supreme Court justice per year.

At this point, I'm pretty sure that the Bernie Sanders campaign is about 99% likely to lose. I mean, I'd love to be wrong about this, but honestly, I don't think I am.

I just wanna write a little about that, so bear with me. DISCLAIMER BEFORE I GO ANY FURTHER: Bernie was my 2nd-favorite Democratic candidate (after Warren) and I personally think he would be a better general election candidate, both substantively and electorally, than Joe Biden, who I think is mediocre at best. So don't @ me about that

So I've been seeing a lot of "sorry no fucks to give" sentiment about this story on Twitter and while I am sometimes sympathetic to that viewpoint, I don't think it's the right way to react this time. Lemme 'splain. (1)

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1068157702981984256

2. This isn't the usual NYT profile of Johnny Dumbfuck in Shitburg, Red State saying "yeah Trump ain't been good for us but what else we coulda done." It's a story about Carrier workers who feel betrayed because they were specifically promised protection.

This type of "efficiency" bullshit pisses me off, because the people who yell the loudest about efficiencies are the ones who never address the budgetary elephant in the room (thread)

https://twitter.com/FuzzyWuzzyTO/status/1065646906557308928

Ontario's 2017 budget expenditures were 126.384 billion dollars. Of that, 55.945 billion was spent on healthcare and 26.005 billion was spent on education. These are the two biggest line items in the budget and comprise just under 65% of all spending. (2)

TRASH TALKING CANADIAN CITIES OTHER THAN TORONTO: A THREAD VANCOUVER: the old joke is "it's full of hippies" and that simply isn't true because the hippies all either moved away or sold out like bandits to start artisanal restaurants where you can only buy $25 kombucha

To understand Ontario politics you need to know three basic facts:

Firstly, the rest of the province either dislikes or loathes Toronto, and gets actively angry at the idea that "their tax dollars" would ever be spent on the city. Secondly, most regions in Ontario get far more provincial funding/spending than they contribute in taxes. Only a few big cities contribute more than they spend; Toronto unsurprisingly is the biggest contributor, getting back about half of what the province collects from it.

this sort of thing is why I have precisely zero patience for leftists who argued that voting for the Democratic party was a wasted vote

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I don't bother pretending that the Democratic party is any better than what it is forced to be, but it's not blatantly antidemocratic