Here's what's wrong with Canada. I know you were wondering.

If you want to know what's wrong with Canada, I've got the whole thing in a nutshell right here.

Canadian systems builder 45 Drives is perhaps best known for the dense multi-drive storage systems employed by the likes of Backblaze and others, but over the last year the biz has expanded its line-up to virtualization kit, and now low-power clients and workstations aimed at enterprises and home enthusiasts alike. 45 Drives' Home Client marks a departure from the relatively large rack-mount chassis it normally builds. Founder Doug Milburn told The Register the mini PC is something of a passion project that was born out of a desire to build a better home theater PC.

Housed within a custom passively cooled chassis built in-house by 45 Drive's parent company Protocase, is a quad-core, non-hyperthreaded Intel Alder Lake-generation N97 processor capable of boosting to 3.6GHz, your choice of either 8GB or 16GB of memory, and 250GB of flash storage. The decision to go with a 12-gen N-series was motivated in part by 45 Drives' internal workloads, Milburn explains, adding that to run PowerPoint or Salesforce just doesn't require that much horsepower. However, 45 Drives doesn't just see this as a low-power PC. Despite its name, the box will be sold under both its enterprise and home brands. In home lab environments, these small form factor x86 and Arm PCs have become incredibly popular for everything from lightweight virtualization and container hosts to firewalls and routers.

Here's an example of Home Client, their really sweet home theatre/NAS/router appliance.

The Home Client is a Linux-based, small-form-factor personal computer by 45HomeLab (not primarily a storage device).

 

The Home Client is a single-board-computer-based device, with a pre-installed Linux operating system. It has an extremely small footprint, making it perfect to stick on a TV stand or fit onto a desk. It is fanless, so it will remain quiet and unobtrusive while staying in a sleek, small-form-factor low profile.The Home Client is built in North America with an aerospace-grade aluminum milled chassis.

 

We see the Home Client as functioning best in virtualized environments, where it can stream applications from your lab. It can also be great for light office work, streaming, and other similar applications. But it is completely open, so it is up to you to make whatever use of it that fits best into your home environment.

Very nice indeed. Canadian made, by (one presumes) Canadians.

The problem? It's $800 bucks. Competing single-board, low power competitors? The first one I looked up with the same motherboard, ~$200 bucks. I'm sure there are many more that are cheaper.

There you go. Not double the price. FOUR TIMES the price.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what's wrong with Canada.

Oh, and why is it four times the price? Because regulation, tax, tax, tax, tax and tax, and also every input from labor to fuel to electricity is four times higher than it ought to be because of regulation, tax, tax, tax, tax and tax,and of course real estate costs. Which are much more than 4x what it ought to be.

Prediction, nobody is going to pay $800 bucks for a $200 headless compute appliance. They're just not going to do it. Except the government. If they make friends in the Liberal Party, government offices might standardize on these things and then 45 Drives might very well make some money on this thing.

And now, a knife license. In Calgary, no less.

We used to make this knife license joke 30 years ago every time somebody said "gun license." I blame us for that, we couldn't understand we weren't dealing with rational human beings.

So here we are, 2024, and some appalling fools are demanding you get a license to buy a knife in Calgary Alberta.

From the article, their "reasoning."

"What's happening here is very alarming," said Ashley Salvador, councillor for Ward Métis during an urban planning committee meeting on Tuesday."As we heard today, you walk in, and right next to the chocolate bars is a wall of knives that are designed for harm," said Ashley Salvador, councillor for Ward Métis.

Because "a wall of knives that are designed for harm" needs a picture to go with it.

 

And...

Bryan LaFleche, president of Crystal Kids Youth Centre also spoke at the meeting to express how prevalent knives, as well UnWTas brass knuckles and bear spray have become amongst the kids at the centre, which they have to confiscate regularly. "When we ask them: 'Why are you carrying a knife? Why are you carrying bear spray?' The answer every single time is 'it's for protection'," LaFleche told the committee. "Our great fear with that is when an 11-year-old child pulls a six-inch knife out of his knapsack and says 'I need this for protection,' we spend hours trying to convince them that that knife affords them absolutely no protection."

 

It's funny how kids can tell when they're being lied to, eh?

 

Then in literally the next breath:

Allan Bolstad with the Alberta Avenue Community League purchased several knives at a convenience store on 118th Avenue to present the committee with a slideshow illustrating the intended purpose of the knives being sold. "When you hold these knives, when you actually have them in your hand, you realize how lethal that they are, and that they're designed for one thing and that's for hurting someone badly, or killing someone," said Bolstad.  "These aren't for buttering toast. They're for trying to kill someone." Bolstad suggested the city create a separate business licence for stores looking to sell   knives, akin to the one currently in place for selling firearms.

So, depending which side of their mouths they're talking out of, either a knife provides "absolutely no protection" or they are "lethal." Palpably lethal, according to Mr. Allan Bolstad. You just pick it up and you can feeeeeel how it was made to kill somebody.

Here's a picture of Mr. Allan Bolstad. Scroll all the way down to the bottom. As it says in the article, he'd also like to license builders and so forth. Because nothing on this Earth should be allowed to move or sit still without a license. You can see how he looks like the kind of guy who would think something like that. 

 

Here's another one, with him posing heroically in front of what was probably a business once, driven under by socialists.

 

Mr. Bolstad, keeping weed-grown lots vacant in Alberta!

Because there oughta be a law. Right? Keep them lots vacant, Allan.

Real-life "chemtrails".

 Once again, one of those gap-tooth hillbilly redneck tinfoil hat nutter conspiracies... is actually being done.

 

Remember when we thought this was fake?

 Aboard the deck of a World War II-era aircraft carrier, University of Washington scientists flicked the switch on a glorified snow-making machine," reports the Seattle Times. They describe the scientists "blasting a plume of saline spray off the coast of Alameda, California... trying to perfect a shot of salty particles that would make clouds better at reflecting sunlight back toward space, and help cool the Earth.

"It's called marine cloud brightening." Compressed air was pumped at hundreds of pounds per square inch through a nozzle full of a salty mix with a similar composition to seawater housed in an apparatus similar to a snow-making machine. The New York Times reported the machine produced a deafening hiss, releasing a fine mist that traveled hundreds of feet through the air. The scientists wanted to see if the machine could generate a consistent spray of the right size salt aerosols, taking samples downwind with instruments mounted on scissor lifts, commonly used in construction.
"This study is not yet large enough to affect local weather," the article points out. Yet "the idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday's test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them," reported the New York Times.

 Yes, real-life chemtrails, that fruitbat crazy conspiracy theory from the 90s.

Done in secret, no less.

So now I need to go back and reconsider laughing at David Icke and his lizard people.