Funny, I thought he doesn’t read the Times because it’s such a “failing” paper and he doesn’t associate with losers.

Good on them! (The owl seems remarkably calm for all of this.)

Hell, Microsoft and Apple did the same thing decades ago. Microsoft offered computer discounts to high schools and colleges, so that the students would be used to (and demand) Microsoft when they went into the business world. Apple then undercut that by offering very discounted products to elementary and junior high schools, so that the students would want Apple products in higher education and the business world.

The tactic let them write off all the discounts on their taxes, but lock in customers and raise prices on business (and eventually consumer) goods.

At least one!.

they won’t read a big long letter

Cool. Write them multiple letters. More importantly, get other people to write them letters - friends, family, coworkers, people you went to school with, cashiers and stockers in the shop, letter carriers, pizza delivery drivers, the local hiking group, book club, and historical society - anyone you can think of. It’s particularly good if the group has some natural alignment, so you can use some of their existing organization and contacts to further your cause. Hit up every local and regional group you can find via email, Contact Us, Facebook, whatever. Hell, stand in the most crowded part of town and hand out flyers.

Your flyers can be small if you need them to be (like if you’re printing them yourself) - say, a quarter of a page. You can do something like:

DATA CENTERS are
  * noisy
  * polluting
  * increase electricity rates
  * whatever else

CALL / WRITE: * Official contact info for the people making the decision (not home addresses)

SHOW UP: * Date, time and location of the next several meetings

Further info: a URL for more information and for getting together online and organizing. [1]

[1] Set up an email address - Gmail is fine, people recognize it as “legit”, so that people and organizations can contact you. Check it at least once a day.

Purchase a domain and make a really simple website. Have it replicate your flyer, but in more detail. Include references: link in news articles from Canada (Canadian-focused is great!) and the States (they likely have more areas that are more seriously affected) about how these things have affected locals. Add link(s) to a coordination and suggestion method: this could be one or more of a: Facebook group, a new subreddit, a discord channel, etc - whatever old and young people are using in your area. Also include your new email address (properly obfuscated to avoid bots) so that people can contact you.

Remember that whatever platform you organize on, some people who support you won’t be on it. You’ll have to choose between one method to build momentum and multiple methods to reach more people; your choice will likely depend on your timeframe. Have one of your options be “join our email list”; every time you organize an action or there’s an upcoming meeting, email everyone on your list.

Ask people to put signs in their yards and local businesses to put signs in their windows. It’s great if you can afford to buy signs, either yourself or by collecting money [check local laws for soliciting], but every bit helps.

Show up at every meeting they have, and get as many people to come as well. It would be lovely to have everyone joining you to speak, but even just the increased numbers and angry faces will have an impact. As possible, have each person speak to a different negative aspect of the data center, and have it be personal and relatable: “as a mom, I worry able the pollution”, “as someone who hikes/hunts/runs trips into the woods, I worry about the noise”, “as an elderly person/young person just moved out on their own/struggling parent I worry about the increased electricity rates”, etc. Be detailed but concrete.

Also, don’t just oppose this to local town councilors. Start pestering lawmakers at the county/district level, and province/territory level - this may be a local decision, but you can make an impact at higher levels as well - and if you get those higher levels on side as well, they can apply pressure downward.

Are there any local elections coming up? Run, or have someone else run, as a candidate, with one of their main planks being opposing the data center. The point isn’t to win the election; the point is for your candidate to continually force the other candidates to address the issue of the data center. That keeps it in the news, helps build momentum and pressure.

Contact news organizations: paper, radio, online, real-world, tv, podcasts, call-in radio shows - whatever you can reach. For every action you plan - council meeting, protest, letter-writing campaign, whatever - contact the media and let them know about it. If your event is upcoming, tell them a few days in advance so they can cover it live; if it’s something like a letter-writing or phone-in campaign, let them know in advance and ask them to follow-up with the contactee(s) a few days after, to “get their opinion on the recent protest” (also phrase this as an option if they can’t cover it live, they could call and ask about their response).

Designate someone to talk to the press and be available for interviews. If possible, it should be someone even-tempered, with clear talking points, a good public speaking manner, who looks good in business casual (which is what they should wear for interviews).

Contact other data center resistance groups and crowd source their ideas as well.

“Across the board” - except there’s still a solid 36% who still back him. “One third of your country is willing to murder another third of your country, while the last third stands aside and watches.”

security researchers […] are revealing a collection of vulnerabilities they found in 17 audio accessories that use Google’s Fast Pair protocol and are sold by 10 different companies: Sony, Jabra, JBL, Marshall, Xiaomi, Nothing, OnePlus, Soundcore, Logitech, and Google itself.

This joke makes fun of the parity between ‘space’, as in the invisible character between words, and ‘space’, as in the void between astronomical bodies. In this case, it is said that the word ‘space’ was never meant to be there at all, but it was included as a word due to a formatting error.

Oooohhhh, now I get it!

Right after they reached deals to sell all of those lovely, long, detailed, crowded-sourced articles for AI training data :(

I’m sure that Susan Collins will be Very Concerned.

It’s given me Nazi Germanic creeps since the moment it was named the Department of Homeland Security.

Looked at the article. Even on his worst subject, he still has a solid 30% approval rating. His cult will never desert him.

Real funny, because Ohanian is partially behind the new Digg.

Fake news release to cover for that article where they signed up that reporter with no vetting or processing.

That Blake’s 7 fandom was materially better before the show aired in the States. They had gone through the painful sorting out of characters and characteristics and relationships and were developing these really interesting themes of psychological trauma and manipulation that they were beginning to explore - it was really interesting and the themes were fascinating. Them the show aired in the States, they went wild over Avon and all the stories and themes starting revolving around him. I don’t mind him as a character; I do mind his character taking over all of fandom. It’s sort of like if all the Harry Potter stories suddenly and inexplicably became Ron-centric; it’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s weird and people who liked other characters got left out in the cold, and some of us still resent that.

As an aside, when Blake’s 7 fandom split up, that too was fascinating. As was usual in those days, there was a pro-slash contingent and an anti-slash contingent. When B7 fandom split up, all of the pro-slash fans went into Robin of Sherwood fandom, and all the anti-slash fans went into The Professionals fandom. The problem being that RoS was almost exclusively gen and Pros was almost exclusively slash. It was very weird.

What else? That the second season of War of the Worlds should’ve been an entirely different series: the people who loved season 1 were never going to like season 2; and people who had tuned in and disliked the series during season 1 weren’t going to Even try season 2.

That Krycek became such a big character on The X-Files due to one woman who saw his potential and kept talking about it to her friends, many of whom were popular/prolific fannish authors and artists. She convinced some of them (there was incredulity and resistance at first) but it gathered steam, Chris Carter was flummoxed but rolled with it, and here we are.

That the main follow-on series for Highlander: the Series should’ve been The Methos Chronicles and that one’s not even up for debate.

That the final episode of Miami Vice is a masterpiece, particularly with the echoes and parallels to the first episode - and that the show itself took a major downturn the moment they decided to kill off their comic relief characters. That having God in the final episode of Quantum Leap (the original) being played by an actor who was also in the first episode of the series made it much more interesting. That if you were ever interested in Space: 1999, the “Message from Moonbase Alpha” short has some really interesting implications.

That Space Rangers and Moon Over Miami were cut off entirely too early. That Quark is funny as hell for a science fiction fan of my generation, even if it’s extremely dated now. Similarly, The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne was hella fun and should’ve lasted much longer (though Michael Praed’s Shatner-esque line deliveries were exceptionally annoying at times!). That the Sonny Steel grave arc is majorly under-represented in Wiseguy fiction.

Almost certainly others, but those are the ones that came to mind.

So the solution is to introduce more violence?

You might check out episodes of Lux Radio Theatre. It ran for about 20 years, and every week they performed an hour-long adaptation of either a Broadway play or a popular movie; as much as possible, they tried to use the original cast as well. There’s a whole bunch of them on the internet, at the Internet Archive and other sites. I downloaded a whole bunch of them back in the day; I used to listen to them during my commute home.

Their official goal is to round up 3000 people per day - which is why they’re going after anyone they can, because “the worst of the worst” have all slipped through their fingers for years and are hard to find so they have to make up those numbers somewhere.

But - they don’t have the capacity to process 3000 people per day and, even if they could, no country is going to accept that many people in a lump, even they are citizens of that country. This was always going to end up with massive amounts of people warehoused somewhere.

Of course, with the need to constantly and massively expand detention facilities (the goal is an extra 3000 people every day!), those detention facilities are going to be hastily built, under-staffed, and under-resourced: not enough beds, blankets, food, clothing, sanitation facilities, medical support, etc. Which is exactly how the Nazis ended up with the conditions in their concentration camps - remember, the camps in Germany were labor camps with extremely poor conditions.

The next step will be companies who can’t hire enough minimum wage people or who want to skip health and safety laws, to hire workers from the camps. This government will accept, because they’ll get kickbacks from the companies and an official-if-cheap wage “paid” to the government to help offset the costs of the camps.

The inmates will be housed in poor conditions: minimal shelter (don’t expect air conditioning or even heating), thin mattresses (if any), thin blankets, minimally nutritional food, no medicine and minimal medical support - pretty much WWII concentration camp conditions. With 3000 people per day, it can’t be any different.

And then the inevitable diseases will rip through the camps, and a bunch of people will die, and the rest will be weaker - no medical care, and minimal food and shelter. But there’ll be another 3000 and another, so the losses won’t be entirely noticable - except in an ever-expanding graveyard. Instead of going to all the trouble of digging and then filling in graves, wouldn’t it be easier just to burn the corpses? It would certainly limit accountability for the losses!

Oh - but what should we do with those who can’t work - the young, the old, the disabled or infirm …

Whatever you spend it on, may I make a suggestion, if you have a little extra money yourself? Spend the gift card money, yes: buy something you’ll enjoy, share that joy with the people who got it for you, let them see how happy they’ve made you.

Then take the card that the giftcard came in, put in $75 cash, and put it in a special place. Do that every time someone gives you money or a giftcard. As I’ve gotten older, a lot of the people in my life have died, gotten ill, or moved away. Sometimes, when I’m feeling sad or depressed, I’ll go to my little drawer of cards and pull one out at random. I’ll re-read the message, and think about the person and the love that we shared at that time, and I’ll take the money and do something special for myself, to cheer myself up a bit.

Then sometime in the next few days, I’ll get the same amount of cash from the bank, put it in the envelope, and replace it in my stash: the caring we felt for each other at that time was true (regardless of how things eventually turned out), so the cards give me a little emotional boost and the cash lets me do something for myself that I’d normally not spend money on. It helps me feel better, even if only for a little time.

[I’ll also be honest and say that sometimes I’ve run out of money, and something will twinge and I’ll remember I have this little stash of cash, and having that has helped me get through some slightly tough times. But I always put the money back in the cards when I can afford it.]

… Does Alberta realize that doing business in a landlocked country can be difficult? Almost all their imports and exports will have to go through either Canada or the US.