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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Maybe I’m just a piece of shit, but I’m really tired of seeing so much money being spent outside of Canada, and to try to put women to work regardless of their individual preferences. I think women should be able to work, don’t get me wrong. But my wife wants to be a stay at home mom. She can’t afford to be. A big contributor to this reality is that the doubling of the labor force has been an enormous factor in stagnating wages. We went from mothers being able to raise their kids, and families being able to be financially stable on a single income, to the state subsidizing daycare so someone else can raise your kid while you provide labor.

    Another issue I have here is the concern about tuberculosis rates. This is a huge can of worms, but the reserve system doesn’t work. I understand why it exists. I think the goals are understandable. But you can’t choose to live separately from Canadian society and then complain that we don’t provide you with good enough homes and healthcare. We all trade cultural cohesion to be a part of Canadian society. In return, we get better access to important resources and technology.

    If you want Canadian healthcare and good housing, assimilate, get a job, live in a reasonably sized population center, and you’ll have those things. You don’t have to live in Toronto or Vancouver, but you do need to participate in the system that creates that value in the first place. You can’t just stay on your reserve, spending all your money on alcohol and drugs, and expect necessities to be provided to you based on white guilt. And yes, this is what life is like on a lot of reserves. They live in horrendous conditions. That’s why TB is so prevalent.

    I am empathetic to the fact that these people are born into a world that is not stacked to help them succeed. I don’t think we help them by trying to enable the existence of reserves. One of my close colleagues came from one of these reserves, and she always says the best decision she ever made was to come to a city, get educated, and start a career. The rest of her family are back on the reserve, and they’re all alcoholics. Whereas she lives in a small town, has a house and car, and still gets to celebrate her culture with other indigenous people who live here.

    We provide the most benefit to the most people by consolidating resources, not by reinforcing the fantasy that we can live in tiny communities on the fringe of society and still get all the benefits of modern society. Live together, or suffer alone.


  • I’m always amazed at how rarely the “go to uni and get a good job” angle is brought up in relation to our failing foundational industries in the west. We’ve been incentivizing people to focus on “escaping” the working class, rather than trying to find ways to make those jobs more appealing.

    I work in healthcare. Treating student practitioners badly is the norm in a ton of places in this field. 60 hour work weeks are normalized, and wanting a good work-life balance gets you ostracized.

    The worst part is that I had to compete to get into this job that treats me badly. My program only takes the top 20 applicants out of hundreds per year. The schooling is brutal, with midterm or final exams 2-3 times a week. This is possible because you are blowing through courses consecutively rather than in a semesterized system. Once you get to practical placement, you are treated like the workplace bitch, and you’re expected to do 2-3x the work of a paid worker for free. Actually, you’re paying tuition to be there, so it’s even worse.

    Don’t get me wrong, some of the brutality is necessary. The rapid pace of learning makes it hard to forget anything. It’s a great way to pack knowledge into the brain. But I would never recommend my program to anyone. It was a horrible experience overall. My job is pretty great minus the ridiculous hours, so I’m glad I went. But if I could go back and tell my younger self to do something else, I would.


  • Did you actually do your research on that “deworming drug”? It’s been used to treat a hell of a lot more than parasites. That is just its most common use.

    This has always been funny to me as someone who actually works in healthcare and regularly reads scientific studies. Of all the things you could choose to hate Trump over, the example you give is one that plenty of people in the scientific community considered to be a treatment avenue worth researching.

    Damn, the media propaganda machine is effective. Trump could run into a burning building to save a litter of puppies and they’d still find a way to make everyone hate the guy. It’s impressive.


  • PortableHotpocket@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlLosing the argument because DDOS
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    1 year ago

    They probably would have just called you names instead of openly engaging with your ideas. That’s the norm in my experience. I sometimes wonder why I bother posting at all.

    Then again, I do get some traction, and some representation of ideas outside the common narratives is better than none. But it does seem like if you aren’t in lockstep with the popular narratives, you get a cascade of downvotes just for entertaining unpopular ideas.

    People don’t want you to think for yourself. They just want you to parrot their beliefs back to them and give them affirmation.





  • We should be afraid of China. China is a superpower that doesn’t believe in our way of life. That doesn’t mean we should be afraid of Chinese Canadians, but we should still be wary. China is absolutely invested in swaying our political environment to their favor, and they’re willing to promote their interests by using migrants.

    It’s an unfortunate reality that Chinese Canadians who are just going about their lives will see some collateral damage from our reactions to China’s meddling. We need to minimize this collateral as much as possible, but we are under genuine threat.

    One thing we need to keep in mind is that Caucasian politicians can be bought just as easily, if not more so, as installing Chinese assets in our institutions.




  • I want politics to be less polarized too, but the train is off the tracks. The majority of people don’t believe in compromise anymore. They believe they are right, and everyone else are communists/nazis who must be destroyed.

    I’m a healthcare professional who believes in trans rights. I also think hormone treatments and gender affirming surgery should be illegal to give to minors. The left will say I’m transphobic. The right will say I shouldn’t support these interventions at any age.

    The reality is that both sides are blinded by ideology. The left has become just as intolerant and aggressive as the right used to be. They believe gender affirmation is more important than allowing a patient’s body to develop in a healthy way with natural hormone levels. They believe hormone blockers or replacement therapy given to young people have no lasting side effects. They seem to be under the impression that it isn’t abnormal to fast-track patients to gender affirming care rather than trying to reduce dysphoria through therapy. But if you bring this up, even as an educated professional, you’re an evil bigot conspiracy theorist who hates trans people.

    You can’t find a middle ground with people like this. They aren’t open to discussion, and they certainly don’t care to understand where you’re coming from. It’s their way or the highway.


  • How is what he said in any way racist or anti-semitic? He said studies exist that show the discrepancy in immunity, and that it’s unknown if it’s deliberate. That’s the most non-commital you could be without saying nothing at all.

    Saying something along the lines of, “Of course the dirty Jews manufactured this virus to kill people off, we all know how corrupt and evil they are!” would be antisemitic. But since people don’t say things like that anymore, the only way to get righteous virtue signaling points and smear your opponents is to set the bar so low that you can’t say anything at all without being racist. Just quoting stats is enough these days.


  • I can empathize, I’m in a shitty debt situation myself. But when people make the decision to go to university/college, they need to make that decision with the knowledge of whether or not it will be worthwhile. I say that as someone who has $100k in student debt due to some unfortunate circumstances I ran into while attending.

    I make over 100k a year in return for my education. I will pay off my loans within a few years. I went to school for a job that desperately needs workers, that I knew would pay well enough to justify a large debt. There are too many people going to school for their “dream job” that pays $15 an hour, if they can even get a job after graduation.

    If you didn’t do the cost/benefit analysis and you didn’t do your research, why should the rest of us have to cover for your mistake?

    I definitely understand that there has been a lot of predatory behavior by these schools to lure students in. It’s a problem. But it really doesn’t take a lot of effort to find out how good the job prospects are, and what you’re likely to earn. That’s basic information you could gather with a handful of searches online or by talking to some people in that field. There would be a lot fewer people with student debt if they had done these preliminary investigations and made rational decisions about what they were signing up for.


  • This is a bit of a misconception. Wealthy people don’t get that way by not working, and they tend not to stay that way if they don’t continue to do so. The difference is that the work they do isn’t the physically laborious kind.

    Wealthy people often work 60+ hours a week. They are constantly traveling, making deals, finding new investments, researching, etc. That’s how they get wealthy in the first place, and that attitude doesn’t go away just because they hit a certain level of income. They are self-motivated to keep pushing.

    The issue is not so much that wealthy people don’t do any work as it is that the value of hard labor has been devalued, while the benefits of labor have been siphoned to the top 1% for too long. Those benefits have to be redistributed throughout the system in a way that continues to encourage necessary production, without discouraging high performance individuals from creating value through high level trade and investment. Finding a better balance while taking that all into consideration is not an easy task.


  • I think one of the main reasons your theory isn’t commonplace is the variance in tolerance people have for vigilance. Some people have a lot less tolerance, and appear lazy. Other people have an extremely strong tolerance, and to them, everyone else appears lazy.

    I have adhd. My ability to motivate myself to do necessary tasks is very limited. But external pressures can improve my productivity by giving me less choice in the matter. By comparison, too much freedom can reduce my productivity by normalizing a reduced workload, making me intolerant of a workload I was previously capable of.

    Laziness does exist. It can be fostered. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get improved productivity from a healthier balance in your workplace. Just as pressure has a range where it goes from motivating people to crippling them with stress, so too do healthy adjustments to workflow go from rejuvenating to lethargic.


  • This is a semantic argument made to ignore the issue. The reality is that social media platforms effectively have become the “town square” where ideas are shared. Stifling legal speech in that environment is very effective censorship of ideas.

    You can argue that corporations have that right because they own the network. I disagree. Curation of what can be said on their platform turns them into a publisher, not a communications provider. Any lawyer active in that space could tell you how insanely detrimental it would be for that distinction to be made, at least in the U.S.

    Imagine your phone company deciding you can’t say certain words to other people using their service without facing dropped calls, suspensions of service, or being banned. All because your legal speech goes against the morality of the majority.

    That’s essentially what social media does at the moment. They are legally defined as, and receive the benefits of, a communications service. But they are acting like a publisher, deciding what is and is not allowed to be said. It’s a serious problem.


  • Do you believe they should receive immediate massive military aid? Because we’re basically in a Mexican stand off with Russia and China right now. As soon as we pass a line for what intervention Russia is willing to tolerate, we will start a cascade of events that will lead to WW3, and possible nuclear war. Most of us don’t want to see the planet nuked into extinction over a small war on the other side of the planet.

    Granted, I think war is inevitable. But that doesn’t mean we should rush into it. The bloodshed will get exponentially worse the minute this war becomes bigger than Russia v Ukraine, and we’re already very close to the tipping point in my estimation.


  • Why should a creator be responsible for the voiced opinions of their fans? That standard makes no sense no matter how you slice it. A creator’s job isn’t to police their audience, it’s to provide information/entertainment.

    Just because he has the power to censor people you don’t like doesn’t mean he should, or that it’s a reasonable ask. Instead of passively alienating you by not acting, censoring those people would actively alienate them. He’s much better off letting individuals take responsibility for their own comments, rather than joining any given side’s thought-police.

    As soon as you create the standard that you are responsible for what your fans say and do, you’ve lost. You can immediately be held accountable for the speech of the worst of them, and good luck regulating that.


  • We’re always finding ways to interact with the world and perceive it from a different dimension/angle. This comic isn’t so much inaccurate as it is exaggerated.

    I’m pretty sure this is exactly how scientists felt the first time they developed microscopes, electron microscopes, and other technology that lets us experience the world in a different way. A mixture of “woah” and “mind-blown”.