I previously worked at an insurance company some years ago. Back then the company was complaining that flood maps were something like decades out of date, and that was irresponsible to let developers build and sell homes to unsuspecting homeowners who had no reason, or even a way, to know they were in a flood plain.

I suspect nothing has changed in the intervening years.

Forgive me for saying this, but the final Kelpian design looks much, um, tastier than the original one. I can’t imagine Terrans looking at a green and brown multi-eyed triangular headed alien and think “delicacy”.

The baby absolutely didn’t deserve to die like that. The parents, on the other hand, are experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices, literally what their actions brought on and deserved. Nobody has to say, “I told you so”, but neither do they deserve anybody’s sympathy.

This is no different than parents refusing to get a car seat for their child because they think seatbelts take away freedom, getting in a car accident, and the child dying in the accident. The child’s preventable death is the parent’s fault. They created the environment that was unsafe for the child because they were arrogant enough to believe they knew better than decades of evidence. In this car seat scenario, parents might even be charged with endangerment or negligence.

Or the grandmother who didn’t believe her granddaughter’s coconut allergy was real, because she knew better than the baby’s doctors, and put coconut oil in the poor baby’s hair and killed her. That grandma doesn’t deserve sympathy for what she did.

The benefit is mostly in “Oh, this (show/movie I like) is Canadian? What else is Canadian?”

Let’s take Netflix for a negative example. People know it’s reputation for cancelling shows after the third season, so viewers choose not to get invested in Netflix shows, so they do poorly, and then Netflix cancels them. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.

But what if the reputation around the world was “CBC (or Canada in general) produces great shows”? Then more people will look for them and it grows the international audience. It genuinely annoys me when people call great, original Canadian shows, like North of North, a Netflix show. No, it’s quality CBC, Canadian, Inuit content. But if people think North of North is Netflix, how many are expecting it to get cancelled after the third season, and therefore not bothering to get interested in it?

Also, it’s important to counter right-wing populism everywhere. Poilievre and the Conservatives (in its current incarnation) needs to be shut down and not taken seriously in Canada and internationally. He needs to be seen as a joke by foreign nationals, and for people to see right wing populists in their own countries as jokes. The more he calls CBC state media, the more everyone needs to say WTF are you on about, you dingus?

Canada, CBC in particular, produces quality content. I feel that these shows and Gem need to be better promoted in Canada, and outside Canada they need to be better promoted as Canadian.

One thing that needs to happen is the Conservative traitors to stop lying about and maligning the CBC. They directly undermine our productions and industry when they spew false and hateful garbage to frenzy up their base. Canada is already a relatively small market, and half the country is against the CBC because they believe the ridiculous lies that it’s a communist state media outlet. I wish there were consequences for slander and libel for defamation from politicians.

Have you heard of drones being used to smuggle guns? No physical person even needs to cross a border now. Personally, I can’t think of a practical solution to this.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/drone-carrying-bag-of-handguns-from-united-states-to-canada-intercepted-by-tree-1.6438267

They didn’t learn their lesson, evidenced by attempting to destroy evidence after the fact, and they’re only sorry that they’re facing consequences, evidenced by their own we’ve had enough consequences-type statements.

Surely if not disbarred, they would brag about not being charged and advertise themselves as a lawyers for the anti-government types.

Why would you deliberately use a resource that is going to lie, just not predicably?

I can give a real-life answer to that. I was working on an assignment where keyword searching journal databases was not really helping because the while the primary keywords have specific meanings in the context I was intending, the words themselves have different meanings and uses. So I had to weed through a ton of articles in order to get just a few useful ones. Asking ChatGPT to give me 10 peer-reviewed journal articles about X and Y topic would return maybe three or four real articles, but it took me a lot less time to identify the three real ones from a set of 10 compared to locating three on-topic articles from, say, 100 results.

The above was using the public version of ChatGPT. Partway through the semester, my school got ChatGPT Edu. Interestingly, the Edu version, given the same prompt, did not return fake articles, but it included somewhat related, but not-relevant ones. In either case (public or Edu), I still had to check all 10 results, but it was still less time consuming than trying to search on my own.

I only got a nickel and quarter with King Charles on the last weekend, among a literal handful of change.

There are a lot of years of QEII coins out there, though. She’s going to still be in circulation for a many years, yet.

May encourage you to get your immunity levels checked, especially if you were born around 1970-mid-90s, as we likely only had one shot instead of two. I asked my doctor to check out of an abundance of caution, and now I have upcoming appointments to get the MMR vaccine again. It’s free (covered by OHIP) to get the bloodwork and to get the shots.

Also, tangentially related, please allow me to encourage blood and plasma donation. Measles treatments include plasma products. Most of the unvaccinated are children who don’t have a say in the matter. We can’t help them get vaccines, but we can help with ensuring supply of medicine if they get sick (and their dumbass parents get scared enough to bring them to a hospital).

Heck, people are being arrested just for being in the US, even those who were there by legal means. Even citizens aren’t safe if they’re not even checking who they’re arresting before, during, and after the arrest.

Yes, this has absolutely been a thought for me. I am not removing accounts, etc. from my phone pre-emptively, but I will uninstall things like Lemmy and remove specific email accounts if we have to land. (I use multiple emails for different reasons, so it won’t be terribly suspicious.)

Just booked a flight to south of the US. Even the most direct flight had a layover. I could have saved hundreds of dollars if that layover was in the US. I opted to pay hundreds of dollars more to have the layover in Mexico.

It was partways about Elbows Up, but it was also I’d rather not get arrested and/or detained and/or deported possibly to an El Salvadorian prison. Avoiding the the non-zero chance of that is worth $500.

Did you not see the part directly after that said he started blaming everyone else?

*Doug Ford. Rob Ford was his younger brother who was the mayor of Toronto, and who has since died.

I’m not convinced Doug would want the job, maybe in the future. Right now he’s got a majority in Ontario and can do whatever he wants within provincial preview. He can, and I believe he will, cooperate with Carney and caucus to do what’s best for Canada and Ontario in the face of Trump, because that will also be what’s best for him, too. Fair’s fair, he did a not-bad job during Covid and had a rare moment of cooperating with federal and municipal governments, and it truly made him look like good leader for a while. (He became his normal self after emergency measures were lifted and started blaming everyone else again.)

If he became federal leader now, he couldn’t do anything but blow hot air for a while. It’s a bigger stage, but lesser power, and it doesn’t really do anything to benefit him. Doug is after dollars, but I think he does not like the maple maga and has no interest in dealing with them. Cut them out of the CPC base, they’re not likely to win again anytime soon. Or he could just stay premier and have a lot of actual power.

When Liberals rob everyday people to give to the rich, they do it while smiling at you. When Conservatives rob everyday people to give to the tich, they do it while simultaneously robbing you of rights and yelling slurs at you.

So yes, Liberals are better. It doesn’t mean they’re the best, or even good, but they are certainly less bad.

So credit card issuers are bad now?

There’s too much to keep track of these days.

Bloodletting is therapeutic… for some very specific conditions. For example, hemochromatosis, where the body has too much iron, and there has been some preliminary study that blood donations are a way to reduce the amount of PFAS in blood.

But everyone has PFAS in their blood; not every male has (beyond normal) phimosis.

To be fair, I’ve gotten texts from/for both Liberals and Conservatives.

You know what did it for me? Actually being in a relationship, once upon a time. It was short, it was bad, the rose-coloured glasses came off. Socierty and media portray being in a relationship as a happy conclusion, but more more often than not, it isn’t. How many people have dated more than one boy/girlfriend before they married, and then how many of those marriages end in divorce? How many not-divorced marriages are miserable and unhappy? A lot. Being single is way, way better than being with the wrong person, and there are a lot of wrong people out there.

Now, wrong person doesn’t mean bad person, it can just mean incompatible because you want different things, have different values, etc. (Of course, there are actually bad people, too.)

I prefer to live my life embracing the freedoms of singleness. I can come and go whenever I want without having to account to anyone. I only have to consider me when making job and career choices. Finances and obligations are freer. I took a year off work and went away to work on my own self-development; I couldn’t have done that if I had a partner, and certainly not if I had kids. Maybe you would prefer to exchange the freedoms for a partner, and I acknowledge that. But I am saying appreciate and make the best of the situation you’re in now instead of spending the energy wishing for it to be different.

I’m also absolutely not against relationships or marriage in any way. I’m just being realistic about the fact it’s not all rainbows and roses, and there are rainbows and roses to singleness, to.