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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I mean it’s the whole tolerant paradox right.

    When you view things in the context of a social agreement, there is no longer any paradox.

    If these people have broken the social agreement to be tolerant, they have then intentionally and explicitly removed themselves from that agreement, thereby opening themselves up to intolerance thanks to their intentional and explicit rejection of said tolerance.

    It’s much the same way as outlawing worked in the old days - in the absence of a police force, you willingly agreed to follow laws that had been laid down. If you openly broke those laws in clear defiance of them, you could be removed from their protections. Ergo, you became “outside the law”, allowing anyone to harm or even kill you without legal censure.

    Because if you clearly don’t want to be a part of an agreement, why should you have any right to benefit from it’s protections?



  • If you want truly bulletproof clothing appliances and live in America, look up Speed Queen. They’re built to commercial standards and are trivially repairable. Many last for decades with only minor maintenance and upkeep.

    Unfortunately, Speed Queen not available outside of America. 😭 Or, at least, absolutely not available in Western Canada.

    I went with LG, as Bosch didn’t have the capacity I was looking for. Pretty happy with LG for both washer and dryer, four years and counting without a single issue. Would be nice if the front-loading washer came with an automatic dehumidifier, tho, as we have to leave the door open to avoid funky smells developing.



  • Depends on when it was produced.

    My 1998 HP 4050DTN is still going strong, an absolutely bulletproof beast of a machine. Plus, I can get extra-stuffed cartridges for it that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage. Even after two degrees and a quarter century I am only on my third cartridge.

    My HP 5000DTN wide-format printer is much the same.

    Of course, this was years before the DRM enshittification path that HP started down, so there is that.













  • when it wasn’t actively sexually harrassing T’pol

    I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.



  • Nationalize healthcare, take it out of the control of the provinces, have its funding hard-set to population metrics and then insulate it completely from political meddling. Ensure that all upper-level execs in this crown corp have never nor will never be involved with a related free-market corp, in order to prevent corruption and service degradation in favour of Parasite-Class profit margins.

    Set up turnkey operations for GPs such that new doctors are incentivized to service communities at the grassroots level without driving themselves into poverty. Set up national unions for all healthcare workers that ensure wages remain appropriate for each region’s CoL. Set up a watchdog that ensures hospitals and other institutions are being run decently well in relation to the funding they receive, with the ability to seize underperformers (as in, shareholders lose everything) in order to bring them back up to minimum thresholds of service.

    Finally, make the government the only possible payer for any healthcare service for anything, from vision and dental to physio and anything science-based (too bad chiropracty, we don’t need your snake oil). As in, make it illegal for anyone to be charged anything out of pocket, including drugs. Use economies of scale to minimize costs to the taxpayer.

    That’s how you resolve the current conditions: you utterly eviscerate the profit motive when dealing with healthcare.


  • What is the difference between forced intervention and whatever Portugal did when it decriminalized hard drugs?

    Portugal treats it as a mental illness health issue, and provides counselling. Only large non-personal amounts are treated as distribution, and therefore, criminal.

    Only mental heath professionals can assign intervention, and typically only in cases where the user is a viable threat to themselves or others (imminent danger of harm through violence). This means that the vast majority of users are not coerced at all - they enter into counselling willingly, and with an intent to come clean.

    The reason why things have backslid in the last little while has been due to funding cuts, and nothing else. Which is the same as any public service – funding determines effectiveness.