Canadian tech job postings on Indeed plunged after a post-pandemic boom and have been quite weak since mid-2023. As of early August 2025, they were down 19% from their early-2020 levels, though the decline has been somewhat milder than in several other advanced economies, including the US and UK.
Readit Newsspeak_plainly commented on Canadian Tech Hiring Freeze Continues hiringlab.org/en-ca/2025/... · Posted by u/speak_plainly
speak_plainly commented on Apple has not destroyed Steve Jobs' vision for iPad victorwynne.com/vision-fo... · Posted by u/curtblaha
Steve was aiming at creating “a single piece of glass you can use to read email on the toilet.”
Obviously that goal was achieved but the direction the iPad went in was different than its minimalist and cheap original trajectory.
Adding a stylus and all the ‘Pro’ stuff confused what the iPad originally was, and now it’s more closely aligned with a new form-factor MacBook with a limited OS.
Maybe Steve would have gone a different way, but perhaps all computing devices are destined for the same convergent evolution … a kind of carcinization of form factors and purposes.
speak_plainly commented on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in ft.com/content/356674b0-9... · Posted by u/mmarian
Regulate porn to increase birth rates? How does that work? Less porn usually means less sexual activity overall, which would lower birth rates, not raise them. In China for example porn is banned, and their birth rates are still low.
Banning pornography alone hasn’t moved the needle on fertility in China. However, in places like Tianmen, where broader pro-natalist strategies were implemented, including porn bans, there’s evidence those multi-pronged efforts had measurable impact.
What’s less clear is the claim that pornography is inherently harmful to children’s development or wellbeing, the research is mixed at best. And the justification that age-gating websites and apps is purely about safety remains deeply unconvincing.
So then either this effort is misguided, a hollow gesture for optics, or a small piece of a broader agenda that hasn’t been made explicit. It just seems to me that this is creating a lot of chaos for a hollow gesture.
speak_plainly commented on VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in ft.com/content/356674b0-9... · Posted by u/mmarian
Regulating porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, and alcohol has nothing to do with authoritarianism or a lack of freedom. It's about protecting people, just like we already do with seatbelts, speed limits, and food safety.
Why do you think shops ask for proof of age when you buy cigarettes? Not because they care about cancer or want to sell less, it's because they're required to by law. Of course, teenagers can still find workarounds. They can ask an older friend to buy it for them, just like they can use a VPN to access porn.
The difference is, regulation shifts accountability. It moves the responsibility from a greedy, insensitive business owner to the kids. And at least with the kids we can guide them, and help them spend their time and money where it actually matters.
Note: I know people who love guns or porn are probably going to downvote this, but someone has to say it.
“It’s for your own good” is always a laughable argument.
The state doesn’t regulate these things to protect people, it does so to manage risk to itself. Porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, etc., are tolerated so long as they are contained, taxable, and politically useful.
Regulating porn is this system likely trying to move the needle on declining birth rates. You can look to a host of pro-natalist efforts in China as the likely inspiration.
And without a doubt, overreach by governments will continue.
speak_plainly commented on Visa and Mastercard: The global payment duopoly (2024) quartr.com/insights/edge/... · Posted by u/bilekas
speak_plainly commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph
You say the misinformation label is counterproductive. But what if we cannot even agree on what the facts are? There's no productive discussion to be had. We cannot solve problems collaboratively when facts are ignored or denied.
Disagreement about facts is not new and you're assuming too much about how truth operates in public discourse.
Obviously, facts matter but disagreement is rarely about facts themselves. What counts as 'fact' is often embedded in a web of assumptions, models, and values. A lot of what passes as fact are merely claims dressed up as indisputable but often laden with interpretation, ideology, or selective framing.
To say there's 'no productive discussion' unless facts are agreed upon is to misunderstand how knowledge and consensus actually work. History shows that productive discourse often begins in spite of disagreement over facts. Scientific progress, legal systems, and democratic deliberation rely not on perfect consensus but on procedures that tolerate disagreement and test claims over time.
Labeling something as 'misinformation' may feel like asserting the truth, but epistemologically it's simple a kind of speech act... one that can shut down inquiry rather than promote it. It assumes a finality that's likely not justified, and worse, it can become a tool of political expedience. This is especially dangerous when wielded by institutions that are pursuing their own interests, are fallible, or are compromised.
The path to truth is not paved with censorship and labeling. It's built through dialogue, humility, and robust mechanisms for testing competing claims. Dissent is not the enemy of truth, it's often the precondition.
speak_plainly commented on Facts don't change minds, structure does vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont... · Posted by u/staph
The core of the problem lies not in facts failing to persuade, but in our obsession with trying to change minds.
We've developed systems to facilitate this. Parliamentary debate, for instance, was meant to force parties to justify their positions through public reasons, not private convictions. Religious institutions, too, have long shaped minds with varying degrees of success.
But attempts to reshape humanity, especially on a grand scale, have consistently produced devastating and unintended consequences.
We now live in an age where political expedience trumps truth; what matters is not whether something is right, but whether it plays well. The public is expected to absorb politicized half-truths while being shielded from the real issues....because complexity isn’t expedient. The current obsession with labeling ideas as “misinformation” or “disinformation” is a desperate, often incoherent attempt to control discourse, and it breeds more cynicism than clarity.
In the end, good ideas tend to survive, but not on any schedule we can manage. Trying to micromanage thought or the flow of information is not only futile, it’s unworthy of the very rationality we claim to protect.
speak_plainly commented on Overtourism in Japan, and how it hurts small businesses craigmod.com/ridgeline/21... · Posted by u/speckx
> The result is a tourism culture shaped less by genuine interest or curiosity and more by curated photo ops
Well said, but definitely not unique to Japan. Sadly, I notice this almost everywhere I go anymore. It's also why you read about someone falling down a cliff or waterfall taking a selfie once or twice a year now.
I don't have any idea what the solution is, but it definitely makes most sights worth seeing less enjoyable now.
The cynic in me thinks that destinations/countries are going to have to pay an influencer tax and have a strong social media policy that works to direct/redirect and educate potential tourists. Japan needs to start spreading tourism a bit more evenly across the country. They could probably work with hotels to use pricing to even out visitors. But you’re right, this is a huge problem that goes well beyond Japan.
I'm so used to thinking this way that I don't understand what all the fuss is about, mathematical objects being "real". Ideas are real but they're not real in the way that rocks are.
Whenever there's a mysterious pattern in nature, people have felt the need to assert that some immaterial "thing" makes it so. But this just creates another mystery: what is the relationship between the material and the immaterial realm? What governs that? (Calling one or more of the immaterial entities "God" doesn't really make it any less mysterious.)
If we add entities to our model of reality to answer questions and all it does is create more and more esoteric questions, we should take some advice from Occam's Shovel: when you're in a hole, stop digging.
But take one thing and then another: you have two things. That’s true whether or not anyone notices. Some mathematics is a human system of ideas, but some of it isn’t. Arithmetic reflects real patterns in the world. Logic, too, is not merely invention, it formalizes cause and effect. Numbers, in the Pythagorean sense, aren’t just marks on paper or symbols of order; they are the order inherent in reality, the ratios and structures through which the world exists at all.
At bottom, this debate is about the logos: what makes the universe intelligible at all, and why it isn’t simply chaos. When people say “math is real,” they mean it in the Platonic sense, not that numbers are rocks, but that they belong to the intelligible structure underlying reality.
God enters the picture not as a bolt-on explanation, but as the consequence of taking mathematical order seriously. If numbers and geometry are woven into reality itself, then the question isn’t whether math is real, it’s why the universe is structured so that it can be read mathematically at all. Call that intelligible ground the logos, or call it God; either way, it’s not an extra mystery but the recognition that reason and order are built into the world.
Calling math “just useful” misses the point. Why is the universe so cooperative with our inventions in the first place? The deeper issue is the logos: that the world is intelligible rather than chaos. That’s what people mean when they say math is real, not that numbers are physical things, but that the order they reveal is woven into reality itself.