> Don’t fall for the americanism of being blind to the rest of the world and thinking we’re the best.
That's not what the person was saying, though. They never implied that Canada is the best, they only said that Canada is a good place to live in, and that people who try to say otherwise (like the parent of this thread) lack perspective. Any Canadian that lived in other first-world countries (except maybe the US) will probably say that in many ways, the other countries can be better than us. We've got plenty of issues, but Canada's still up there. There's some things that are good here, some that need a lot of work - but on average, it's still really good by world standards. There's nothing wrong with saying that we need to improve in many critical areas, but there is in posting ragebait talking about 'true Canada' being long gone, Canada being a failed state and so on, like what you see above and across many parts of the internet.
I think that’s up to interpretation. They said Canada is “unmatched globally”, which I interpreted as a belief that Canada is the best country in the world.
Median American pay for full-time workers was ~$62,000 USD in Q4 2024 (BLS), which is around $85,000 CAD. The median Canadian salary is very definitely not $85,000 CAD.
If you are going to play this game you also need to adjust for taxes. I lived a few years in Montreal, then a few years in Toronto and after that I moved to US. During this years my perception of income taxes went from “they are pretty high” in Montreal to “Wow, they are much lower” in Toronto to “how are public services funded? Taxes are almost 0” in the states..
Then you’re paying higher consumption taxes and property taxes, and higher prices on business costs passed on to you. Do I even have to explain this? Just because you can’t see the ball anymore doesn’t mean it stopped existing
I guess you have not lived in Canada... In Canada consumption taxes is for both federal and provincial (and city) governments. In US there is no federal consumption tax.
(I think it is you who needs explaining not me....)
I took issue with this too, but chose to interpret it charitably. It’s true that a lot of our most qualified people move to the US because of the money.
No problem! But it's also important to consider your image online. Here are some reasons not to use em-dashes in Internet forum posts:
* **Veneer of authenticity**: because of the difficulty of typing em-dashes in typical form-submission environments, many human posters tend to forgo them.
* **Social pressure**: even if you take strides to make em-dashes easier to type, including them can have negative repercussions. A large fraction of human audiences have internalized a heuristic that "em-dash == LLM" (which could perhaps be dubbed the "LLM-dash hypothesis"). Using em-dashes may risk false accusations, degradation of community trust, and long-winded meta discussion.
* **Unicode support**: some older forums may struggle with encoding for characters beyond the standard US-ASCII range, leading to [mojibake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake).
I maybe get where you’re coming from, but what’s the solution to the issue you’re proposing? Screening everyone’s resume before allowing them to comment? What about people who work at companies that deal with Palantir at completely different departments (Microsoft and Xbox)? It’s obviously untenable
It is true that some users here spew vile ideology while hiding behind HN intellectual rhetoric. Then posts that understandably react strongly to that get flagged, and users get banned. I wish it was different, but I’ve made peace with that being a significant percent of the user base here.
A particular interaction I had comes to mind. A user here boldly and openly proclaimed he discriminated in interviews against people that look different from him, or that are neurodivergent. Actual illegal behaviour that will get you sued in many countries. I reacted strongly and my post got flagged and I received a comment from the moderation team.
I don’t envy the moderation team though, it’s a tough job.
> A particular interaction I had comes to mind. A user here boldly and openly proclaimed he discriminated in interviews against people that look different from him, or that are neurodivergent. Actual illegal behaviour that will get you sued in many countries. I reacted strongly and my post got flagged and I received a comment from the moderation team.
This is the "moderate discourse" problem, where you can express horrendous opinions as long as you are polite, and anyone who reacts emotionally gets criticized instead. You are required to engage these arguments in a detached, logical way as though they have equal intellectual merit, while they advocate for your suffering. This is also why places that enforce moderate discourse tend to become populated with polite fascists.
There's an irony in being protected from having to disclose your data to avoid persecution, while at the same time working on tools that do the exact opposite to everyone else.
Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
I want an improvement upon "Encyclopedia Brittanica". If we have to have governments around the world fund a nonprofit educational equivalent of that, then I'm all for it but we can't keep depending upon a least-common denominator "central public knowledge repository" that's an improperly-managed, easily-manipulated, often incomplete and inaccurate mobacracy fed by largely unknown randos, enough of whom aren't doing so for honest purposes and too many are foolish/crazy/unreliable enough to curate and preserve worthwhile information consistently.
I've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that.
There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles.
I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
To be honest I don't keep a list of examples, I usually raise an eyebrow and move on. It's typically on pages for smaller public figures where you get some extremely questionable descriptions.
It's also definitely a thing for contentious topics, a while back I tried to look up some info on the Gaza war and some of the pages were a complete battleground. I feel that there was a time when Wikipedia leaned away from using labels like "terrorist", but their modern policy seems to be that if you can find a bunch of news articles that say so then that's what the article should declare in Wikipedia's voice.
Indeed, neutral point of view is one of the most important principles of Wikipedia [1]. I only recall phrasing like that being used used in very clear-cut cases, like the word "pseudoscience" in the article on homeopathy. If you don't think something is neutral, the guideline "be bold" [2] encourages you to edit it. You don't have to wait for somebody else to.
> Is it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia?
Facts are not neutral or "balanced".
And your whole phrasing smells of someone who doesn't want to be challenged with facts which are against you worldview, which is pretty much against the whole purpose of Wikipedia.
> Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
Without giving the actual example, there seems nothing wrong with this in general. Could be important, could be overrated. But at least I assume it's true, because wrong claims would be a valid problem.
I mean... this is a very real phenomenon, but probably not in the way you're thinking of.
There are many simple statements of fact that, 15 or 20 years ago, were as universally uncontroversial as "the sky is blue", but today are considered radically controversial political opinions, and will get you banned for most online platforms if you dare utter them.
Exactly, you don't think it's true because you don't believe they're facts, you've been radicalized into believing they're "dogwhistles" (a term only used by radicalized people, by the way - if you keep hearing dogwhistles, you might just be a dog.)
Case in point, I live in Japan. Some things are worse than Canada, but the things that are better line up with my priorities in life.
Don’t fall for the americanism of being blind to the rest of the world and thinking we’re the best. There’s plenty of areas for Canada to improve on.
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