jadero

This is the closest thing to a solution they will find. It’s too late to switch leaders. That might have worked a few months after the last election, especially if it had been coupled with a bit quicker action on the expansion of Medicare.

Now it’s their turn to take one for the team. We’ve been voting liberal instead of our true preference in order to keep the Conservatives from destroying our country. Now they have to go hat in hand to the NDP and hammer out a different voting system and put it in place before the next election. If they don’t, the Conservatives will take power and it will be their fault.

My wife and I watched this last night. Our conclusion was that there a whole lot of really dumb-ass investors out there.

The main thesis is that small, basically useless units are built to satisfy the requirements of people hoping to either flip directly or to rent to cover the difference between finance cost and eventual market value. That is they are built to the demands of the investors, both institutional and private.

How bad of an investor do you have to be to be sinking money into a dwelling that nobody actually wants to live in? And how did we get so many of them that it’s impacting housing to this degree?

My opinion is that someone, somewhere has been running a con. A scheme where your market is not people who want a place to live, but people who are looking to make a profit by selling to others looking to make a profit.

Now the scheme has run its course and the most recent owners can’t get out because, surprise!, nobody actually wants to mortgage their very lives for a glorified closet.

I have always been suspicious of any “rights” movement among those with power. Whether it’s “White rights,” the “rights” of corporations, the rights of the property class and wealthy, or Men’s Rights. It is not that such rights do not exist or that there are no grievances deserving of redress, it’s that they too often are self-serving attempts to retain or increase power.

I am of the opinion that the vast majority of legitimate male grievance against society would be better addressed by bringing to heel the corporations, the wealthy, and those who seek political power for personal gain.

Here’s the way I think about:

The real objective is, or should be, equality in all things that are not explicitly biological in nature and equitable treatment even in those. Thus, none of us should be excluded from the halls of power or anywhere else based on our biology even as things like health care are tailored to our biology.

That would seem to argue against a place called “men’s liberation.” The reality, however, is that we have only nicely begun the journey. Both men and women have much baggage to discard by virtue of both historical and current cultural and legal norms.

Those cultural and legal norms have imposed different behaviours, thought patterns, and roles. Men and women have different sets of baggage to deal with, so it only makes sense to find our allies in our journeys among those who share a common burden.

I am a male. I have rarely been excluded from women’s liberation groups when I try to learn and have occasionally found that my perspective was appreciated. I would hope that the same thing is happening here.

I hope that we are all working toward a more equitable and more egalitarian society, but we won’t get there by ignoring the real differences between men and women that have been imposed by culture and law. We cannot fix what we do not acknowledge.

I cannot know your experience and won’t pretend to.

Unless your objective is to be even more disliked and disrespected than you are now, being deliberately annoying will not get you far.

If you just want respect as a thinking, feeling human, you’re going to have to be respectful of other thinking, feeling humans, ignoring and blocking those who are too immature to have respect for others.

There are people out there who think that power is the source of respect. They are, of course, wrong. The only path to respect is through the elimination of power structures, so that respect can be mutually sought through understanding, not obedience.

I don’t like assholes, so I don’t seek them out. I try to give the assholes who engage with me the respectful engagement they crave but don’t deserve, then block the ones who stay assholes. If I feel surrounded by assholes, I disengage completely until I’ve figured out whether I’m actually the asshole or I’ve stumbled into a snakepit. (And everybody is sometimes an asshole. The secret is to not make it part of your identity or to assume that it’s part of theirs.)

Life is so much more pleasant when disagreements are respectful engagements with learning opportunities instead of just screaming matches.

Good luck on your journey.

Ingesting gasoline is deadly in far smaller doses due to something called hydrocarbon pneumonia. My dad very nearly died as a result of having a tiny amount get past his throat while siphoning gas to a small engine’s tank.

If you must siphon gas, go buy a cheap “pump siphon” from Canadian Tire.

As a former hunter, I was intrigued, so I did a bit of searching. Most of the articles suggested that the testing had been done and that hot pink might actually be superior to blaze orange. It’s supposedly more visible to humans and less visible to the main big game animals.

Like this?. We just need more people and governments on board.

… more consistency with our competitors…

They don’t sound like competitors, but partners; collusion, no competition.

What happened to “competition lowers prices”?