In 1885, almost as early as the formation of Canada as a country, a fee per head was charged to Asian immigrants, to discourage them from entering the country at all and, if they insisted on coming to work (because even for heavily discriminated against workers, there was money to be made in the colonial project), to discourage them from bringing their families. At the time, Chinese labourers were reinforcing the western colonization and their rail building, so the head tax was introduced to prevent the Chinese population from growing and to make more money off of those who could afford to pay it anyway. Even after paying the tax, these workers were underpaid, overworked, and disrespected even by their fellow workers (because nothing splits the working class from itself like letting the white worker feel superior to the non-white worker).

By 1923, the head tax had failed to create an adequately milk-coloured population for the white supremacist society, so a new measure was introduced: The Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Introduced on July 1st, 1923, the act barred Chinese people from immigrating to Canada, made paper identification cards mandatory for all Chinese citizens (including children), and forbade Chinese citizens from leaving the country for longer than two years, on the punishment of being denied re-entry. Failure to comply with these rules carried a punishment of imprisonment or a $500 fine.

This act was repealed in 1947, but repealing the act did little to lessen the discrimination Asian Canadians faced.

a screenshot from an article with the text "[...] each new Chinese immigrant pay a tax of $50 to enter Canada. It was the first immigration policy in Canadian history to restrict immigration on the basis of race. The head tax allowed merchants, students, diplomats, scientists and tourists to avoid the tax. A 1900 amendment allowed further exemptions for clergymen and their families. The government increased the tax to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903. At the time, $500 was equal to about two years of wages for the average Chinese labourer working in Canada."

I don't mean you can't get good at things through repeated practice. You can do that, I have done that, but I don't trust it.

I was driving this morning and thinking about how I have never developed the blasé contempt for it most people seem to despite never having caused an accident in 20 years because my sense of time is such that I might as well have been driving for a week. I'm a good, safe driver, but I do not have a heap of confidence in my driving despite having regularly done it for two decades because my sense of time is such that those two decades may as well not have happened.

I finished editing a novel today. When I publish it, it will be the 64th novel I have published in the last 10 years, not counting ghostwritten work. You'd think after a decade and 63 novels I'd be confident that I was capable of writing, editing, and publishing a novel—even be confident about the timeline for this—but no. No, I feel like I'm doing it for the first time, every time, and I was surprised to have finished the editing at all, let alone on time. Because those other 63 novels were published in a past I have a vague at best concept of. I have a record that says it happened but I do not feel it.

I cannot trust my future behaviour because for me there is functionally no past. I know it occurred, I have records, but I don't feel it the way people without this kind of memory issue do. I feel inexperienced at everything I've ever done and I cannot accurately estimate my skill level at anything, particularly not on the fly.

it's really easy to play

I'll go first!

Second poll will remain open until 50 years from publishing

Bot options share a UUID, making a vote for either count for both

Previously, a vote in the first poll counted for both options in the second

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th: