Centrist, progressive, radical optimist. Geophysicist, R&D, Planetary Scientist and general nerd in Winnipeg, Canada.

troyunrau.ca (personal)

lithogen.ca (business)

  • 50 Posts
  • 759 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Before the enshittification took root, reddit was where I interacted the most with people online. You could buy a subscription to get an ad-free experience. It came with a bunch of Reddit gold you could hand out. Basically, help pay for server time, and get an ad-free experience without adblocking.

    The amount of time I spent on Reddit I would compare to a Netflix subscription or similar.

    In the ramp up to their IPO when they started to fuck with everything, my goodwill evaporated. I stopped moderating and abandoned my subs. Whenever I had new content I wanted to post, I instead post to the fediverse. So, there ya go 😅



  • Right.

    A lobbyist with access to federal politicians in Canada with actual portfolios is like a quarter million per year as a minimum. Maybe a million if you want to fund a “think tank” and publish “studies” and do press releases trying to get the news to bite on some of them, so you can use the news as your excuse to bring issues up.

    If you’re doing it yourself, then $5k might get you a plate at a gala where you hope to run into the appropriate politician for a minute. Would you pay $5k to hope to have a one minute conversation where 45 seconds of it is pleasantries and you might get one sentence in? And you have to use that sentence to explain who you represent… And someone is tugging their elbow leading to another table and they’re gone. Well, hopefully the people at your table were interesting conversation.

    Storytime: I am small business owner. We pay a few thousand dollars a year to throw industry drinking events primarily for networking. Personal invites. Sometimes I can get the provinical Minister of Mines to attend with his handlers, but only if I promise no lobbying. I might get about five minutes of their time (as host) and try to honour my commitment to no lobbying at the event (their handlers will remove them if they feel it is a lobbying event). My payoff is a direct communication line, which I try not to abuse. Then the government changes (elections or cabinet shuffle) and I have to do it again. I’ve failed to get a direct line on the current minister for almost two years. But this is small potatoes Canadian provincial politics. I’d have to spend 10x that amount to attempt get face time with the federal minister.