If all we cared about was saving the lives of the already-addicted, all we’d have to do is prescribe medical-grade opioids of known dosage to anyone who says they’re an addict, and the death rate would instantly plummet—not to zero, but to something around the much lower status quo from before the “epidemic” began, when prescription opioids were more easily available. Most of these people die because they’re taking adulterated drugs, or drugs of unknown concentration that they can’t dose properly. With a cheap, secure supply, they’d have more leeway to sort out other aspects of their lives, and some of them would eventually quit the drugs voluntarily.

Problem is, we’re more worried about people not becoming addicted in the first place, and everyone seems to think that the best way to do that is to restrict the legal supply. The two pull in opposite directions.

If we can find a better way of fixing the second problem, maybe we can fix the first one too, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meanwhile, governments will insist on grasping at straws in order to deal with the unintended consequences they themselves have created, and some of the straws they clutch at are going to be downright evil, like this one.

Yup, that’s exactly the one, thanks.

Aw, poor little Pierre is afraid he’s going to have to come up with some new rhetoric. I am too lazy to even bother to dig up the tardigrade-with-violin pic in response to this.

So, if, hypothetically, Trudeau were to bow out now, who would replace him? I’m not aware of any strong candidates, although that might be due to my ignorance rather than their absence.

Bad maintenance disabling the safety devices, or grandfathered equipment which didn’t have them, or inadequate employee training on safety. All of those put Walmart at fault to varying degrees. That looks to me like the most likely scenario in the absence of other data.

Or someone intentionally jammed any safety mechanisms, which would mean that person committed murder or manslaughter depending on the details.

It’s also possible that the deceased employee panicked when she realized what had happened and failed to operate a safety device she would have known full well was there if her rational brain hadn’t been overwhelmed by her lizard brain. That would be tragic, but not actionable.

We still don’t know enough.

The management might have preferred the store closure to having the bakery department marked off with crime scene tape in full view of any customers. And the cops probably appreciated not having a bunch of lookie-loos staring at them across the tape. Plus I imagine that the dead woman’s mother isn’t the only employee dealing with shock/mental health issues because of this. They may not have been able to get enough staff willing to come in to reopen the store immediately.

(TL;DR: There may well be something ugly going on here, but I don’t think the store being closed is enough evidence to prove that on its own.)

Kind of ironic that you’re excited about EVs, though.

“Excited” isn’t really the word. It’s more that I acknowledge the inevitable. Even if we ignore the damage done by burning it, the world supply of gasoline is finite, and the extraction and refining process is not only messy, polluting, and making many parts of the world beholden to countries with bad human rights records, but also has chokepoints—a relatively small number of large refineries—that are increasingly at risk as the climate gets worse. Better to get off it before we’re forced to do so one way or the other.

I happen to prefer not to always have my location tracked by a cell phone company or my transactions recorded by a credit card issuer. The ability to be anonymous is a vital component of freedom. Plus, you can still pay for things in cash if something has wiped out all local network connectivity. And yes, I have been known to pay for gas in cash—not always, but now and again (and an EV doesn’t need gas, anyway, so that question is increasingly irrelevant).

I do not require or expect other people to have the same priorities that I do.

What percentage of the children and youth receiving services at all were Indigenous? (I don’t doubt that there is a problem here—in fact, I think it’s probably worse these numbers suggest at first glance. Indigenous people account for just over 12% of the population of Alberta (2022 census data). Even if they’re a lot more likely to end up in the child welfare system, I doubt that Indigenous youth represent even 50% of that group.)

I suspect the news hasn’t spread outside the immediate area because it isn’t clear at this point whether her death was murder, manslaughter, misadventure, or a very ugly suicide. If the investigation shows it was murder, the story may get more widely distributed. (For those not interested in clicking through to the article: the deceased was found inside an oven in the bakery department; according to the article, the police have not yet reconstructed the chain of events that led to her being there.)

That won’t be happening for a while yet, if it ever does. Things have to get really, really bad before the average person will agree that a justified conflict is better for them than an unjust peace. We’re not at that point yet—most people in Canada are still mostly squeaking by (although the current economic situation isn’t really sustainable), and a given citizen’s chances of dying by random violence are still pretty low. Maybe 5-10 years from now, if wages don’t rise enough to ease the strain on food banks and other charities, we might see a general strike.

Well, congradulations. You’re now getting more media coverage anyway, and it makes you look worse than apologizing ever would have.

It’s Complicated. The short version is, acute care (hospitalization and such) is covered by the government. Chronic care is not covered. Traveling to another location for treatment that isn’t available locally effectively isn’t covered (Ontario has a joke of a reimbursement system that will give you back maybe 10% of what you spent if you’re lucky, not sure about other provinces). Medication is covered only for some segments of the population (now starting to expand to the entire population for certain types of drugs). Dental is now covered for some segments of the population, but not all. Vision care has never been covered, except for the elderly. Prosthetics and assistive devices are mostly not covered (some of the most basic things may be, but not, for instance, powered wheelchairs). And there’s some variation from province to province, because health care is a provincial responsibility.

You can be bankrupted by needing to travel for care or needing expensive meds, in other words, but you won’t have to pay if you’re in a car accident and get taken to the local hospital.

So your excuse is, “War crimes committed in the past in other places like Afghanistan and Korea were not called ‘genocide’ or properly prosecuted, so we should ignore these ones too and not call a spade a spade?” That’s . . . pretty sad. Some of us would actually like the international community to learn from mistakes made in other conflicts.

Dude. Indiscriminate murder of, and depraved indifference to the survival of, civilians is a bad look no matter what word you use for it. It’s pretty clear at this point that the current government of Israel would like to see all Palestinians dead, and is willing to act on that desire whenever they think they can get away with it. That’s what makes it (attempted) genocide. The fact that they’re currently not attacking the West Bank and not making sure they get 100% kill count in Gaza is not the point and has more to do with plausible deniability than anything.

Whether never being born is or is not better than a brief and miserable life is the kind of thing philosophers like to argue about—a question to which there is no generally accepted answer.

According to TFA, “a marine ecologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada” said it “contains no biological material”, which would rule out the most usual globster suspects (rotting whale chunks), and presumably most foodstuffs (so it isn’t actually dough). Someone else tested it and discovered that it was not a congealed petroleum-based lubricant or fuel. That leaves a lot of possible suspects. My guess at this point would be a chemical product that was jettisoned by some dishonest corp as being contaminated or unfit for purpose, and broke up into chunks in the water. 🤔

The issue is that the animals there may not have the leisure to wait for the completion of a proper probe. The balance between due diligence and alleviating the suffering of these animals may be tilted in the wrong direction in this particular case.

Experiencing a bit of plane envy here, since the only one I inherited was trash and yours looks very nice indeed.

Bet that by “average” they mean “mean”, when the median would really be a more useful measure in this case (as it often is with anything to do with wealth).