healthetank @ healthetank @lemmy.ca

Posts

6

Comments

164

Joined

2 yr. ago

If this is the link you're talking about, your numbers are way off - https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2023007-eng.htm

That shows that even for low income families (<83k/yr), they spend an average of 14,000$/yr on each child. That's way higher than your estimated 30,000/ages 0-7, so I'm curious where you got your data from.

I don't discount that there's a societal push for people to get older and make sure they're confident in wanting kids before they have them, and with low cost birth control we've reduced accidental pregnancies, but cost is still an enormous factor.

Housing is an easy example. One bedroom or bachelor's pads are, in my area, ~1200/month. Not the nicest ones at that price, but decent. You jump up to a two bed or a Ben+a den, and you're looking at 1800/month at least. At a three bed, it's close to 2500/month.

Even if you assume those are on the larger side for price jumps, if you're barely able to scrape by with two people in a bachelor's apartment or in a one bedroom, there's no way you can "afford" it solely by CCB benefits. Almost all the benefit is eaten up by housing increases alone! Then add on childcare, and CCB isn't enough to give those feeling like they're just hanging on wiggle room to raise a child.

Kids are an enormous financial burden early on, especially for the small things. Kids get sick a lot, so you need to have a job that will allow you flexibility, or else you'll lose money for unpaid days off for doctors appointments or to sit at home with them when they're puking.

Kids need daycare unless youre staying home, which is suuuuper expensive these days. They also have limited hours, which if you're stuck working a shitty job, you may not be able to make.

Even second hand, clothes are expensive, and with how fast kids grow, it's an expense worth noting.

All in all, if you're well off, yeah it may not be a big problem for you, but for the people that are already struggling, it's a large factor into why they're not having kids yet.

Bear wasn't tagged - GPS SOS signal is likely how they were alerted. That being said, if they found an aggressive bear in the area, I'd be inclined to trust them. There isn't really anything to gain by lying, especially if it leads to another hiker death from the actual bear.

Parks Canada received an alert indicating a bear attack from a GPS device in the Red Deer River Valley around 8 p.m. Friday. A grizzly bear displaying aggressive behaviour was found in the area and was euthanized by Parks Canada for public safety reasons. First aid kits and knowledge, bear spray and a GPS are all important tools in case of an attack, Titchener said.

Allegedly they were "experienced outdoors backpackers". Guessing the dog being there played a role in the attack - animals can make wildlife more aggressive, and if it wasn't on a leash, it could've attacked the grizzly, provoking it. Then again, its entirely possible the grizzly learned that humans have food from some past hikers, and tried to get at the food from these guys.

If Parks Canada found a grizzly in the area and stated it was acting aggressive, I'd be inclined to believe them. They know animal behaviour pretty well.

I can speak to this as I'm just going through it now.

I'm a young male in good health. I started having weird heart palpitations randomly starting last year. Had them four times, but they normally go away after 20ish mins. GP reviewed me, said it seemed fine, but to go in to ER if anything about them changed (ie more frequent, more intense, lasted longer).

Last friday they went on for an hour, so I went in. Entered at 11am.

Was triaged within 15mins, including an ECG. Once they confirmed it wasn't an active heart attack, I sat in the waiting room for two hours. I then saw a doctor, got a chest X-Ray, and bloodwork taken within 45mins. I proceeded to sit in the room hooked up to the vitals monitor for four hours while they ran my bloodwork, and the ER doc came back. He sent me a requisition for a cardiologist and told me to take aspirin until I saw the specialist.

I saw the Cardiologist on Wednesday, and he's explained he's not concerned given my lack of other risk factors. He's now sent me over for an ultrasound and 36hr halter monitor next Monday. He said unless something weird comes back or he wants another test, he won't see me again, and I should follow up with my GP 2 weeks after I finish the halter monitor.

So within 3 or 4 weeks I had a full range of tests done, and my biggest expense was $7.50 parking for the 30min cardiologist appointment, which I was actually unironically complaining about to my wife last night.

Did you read it? The barrel was reused, not the needle. The plastic part where the medicine goes before being injected.

Way more. I'm working on a road project now. Asphalt for a road (100mm thick) is being bid at approximately $35/sq.m. Granular are about an extra $30/sq.m.

For a standard residential size road (8.5m curb to curb) that puts you at $552/m of road length, or 33mil. The big costs on top of that number always come when you've got to remove the old asphalt and gravel ($75/cu.m), as well as all the fiddly little stuff like line painting, tying in grades to make sure you have drainage, sod restoration, tree plantings, etc.

Most of these exisiting systems are meant more to service commercial/industrial/agricultural customers, it is unfeaseable to deliver grey water to every home or business

I'm not sure what you mean here. Even if you limit the great water system to large scale operations that would use the grey water, you're still looking at billions of dollars to run the pipes plus all the pumps, sampling points, water valves, new water towers/resevoirs etc.

It would be incredibly dangerous to have the wastewater system directly hooked up to a potable water system. A variety of issues could disrupt the flow/treatment/monitoring of wastewater which could contaminate the drinking water system and its reservoirs/water towers and pose a serious threat to public health.

So can any surface treatment system that is currently used. Any city that uses rivers or lakes as their treatment centre already need to purify to a high standard and closely monitor quality of in and outflows. Additionally, most of those areas have their treated sewage outflow to the same body of water as they draw from. The whole point of designing a system is to build in backups and fail-safes to ensure those issues are identified and accounted for. It's significantly cheaper than creating a whole secondary great water utility system, not to mention the additional costs for all those businesses that need to add another internal plumbing system

Realistically, it's better and more cost effective to add additional treatment to that water, and bring it up to potable standards.

Hundreds of kilometers of extra water main pipes, plus pumping stations and home services would cost trillions of dollars.

If you're living in Ontario, email or call your MPP and ask why Ford is only imementing 14 of the 15 recommendations. It's very telling that the 15th is the ones that actually directly would impact his developer friends. And honestly, screw them. Screw them even more if they've started the development process already and would have to stop. Maybe then they'll learn to do things the right way, not push it through these back channels like we're some country without laws.

Something I never see mentioned in these articles/discussions is the design problems. I'm a civil engineer who works in infrastructure maintenance, including sanitary sewers up sizing/repairing. The minimum design guidine for slope is 0.5% for sanitary sewers, but there are many old neighborhoods where the slope is as low as 0.3%.

The way those pipes continue to operate is the large volume of water that is sent through those sewers regularly, flushing away the solid waste.

If, theoretically, every house swapped tomorrow to a grey water system, we'd seriously struggle with blocked sewers and backflows regularly.

Until someone solves that part of the issue, this system isn't practical for widespread adoption.

The article goes into a good amount of detail and information from both sides without arguing/favouring one. It focuses on the legal side rather than the vaccines themselves, which is nice.

All that said, I can't see them winning this one. In the article they talk about the provision in the NDA (sec 126) which makes it an offense to refuse a vaccination:

Every person who, on receiving an order to submit to inoculation, re-inoculation, vaccination, re-vaccination, other immunization procedures, immunity tests, blood examination or treatment against any infectious disease, wilfully and without reasonable excuse disobeys that order is guilty of an offence and on conviction is liable to imprisonment for less than two years or to less punishment.

This pretty clearly defines that it is an offense, so unless the lawsuit is able to successfully argue that this section of the NDA is a violation, they're sunk. Additionally, the fact that the CAF was able and willing to accommodate those who were 'unable' to get the vaccine and chose only to attack those who were 'unwilling' to is another mark against the lawsuit.

The problem is bigger than that.

The government has had lobbying for years from the private sector, and the O/G sector has had big money to throw around. They get pushback from these companies when they try to up the 'just in case' fund that is there to cover costs of rehab in case the company goes under. But since that isn't enough, they're often left unmanaged. In the article above they talk about the two easiest examples - mine rehabilitation and orphan well cleanup.

If a company ignores well decommissioning, they can cut costs, suck up as much oil as possible, then declare bankruptcy and walk away from the requirements to clean up, leaving the public to pay for it.

Why should they be responsible for cleanup?

This one is easy. You make the mess, you clean it up. Basic kindergarten levels of societal responsibility.

There’s no law or contract that compels this.

There is, actually, but they're avoiding it by a number of legal loopholes (as mentioned above). Socially/morally, they have the responsibility to do so, but they've managed to legally avoid it/ignore it. Hence the 'shirk'

The argument is that there should be a greater amount of laws and regulations surrounding the O/G or resource extraction sector and their impacts, but often you hear complaints from those employed in those sectors about government overreach and unnecessary bureaucracy/red tape hampering and smothering the free market.

This article is important as it highlights why we need more regulation and the danger of letting these companies continue to act they way they have for years.

Yeah but living in it for at least 2 yrs it is considered long term. From the article, the Town has been aware of it for at least that long, so who knows how long it's actually been

Battery heating makes an enormous difference. I live in Ontario and generally average about -15 to -20 during the winter. Bought a Hyundai Kona EV in 2020 and it's been great. Actual range in summer is about 450km cuz I drive like an old man, and it drops to about 350km with my high traction winter tires, battery heating, and cabin heating.

The Kona also won for the best actual range during winter a few years ago

https://yourtestdriver.com/electric-vehicle-winter-weather-test/

Yes and no.

RVs don't have to meet the building codes the same way that houses do. I'd be very skeptical of the covered porch the man built that houses a furnace - there's no comment in the article about that, but I'd be surprised if it met all the requirements for long term housing.

It's fair for the Town to enforce their bylaws and housing codes. We have building codes for a reason.

Additionally, from the article

"We're required to enforce our bylaws and I think that it's demonstrated that we do sympathize with the situation they're in, because we've been working with them for the last two years," Crowder said.

It sounds like it's taken quite a while for them to prepare building plans. They say they 'have them in hand and plan to start the building process soon', which means they haven't actually applied yet. I'm curious what their sewer, water, and power situation is, as those hookups and/or septic beds also require permits from the Town. Living somewhere without running water or sewage removal is a concern for the neighbors.

Two years for just rough plans without having got approval from the Town yet? That's a slow timeline. Especially if they're living on the site the whole time. They haven't started the process yet? Why doesn't the Town say 'start the process and we can discuss extending your time allowed in the trailer'?

This is an odd situation, but the article doesn't go into enough details for us to get outraged about the Town's role.

I don't disagree - not being able to meet the minimum amount agreed on is not sufficient as a country.

But reading the article, it seems those in the actual combined defense meetings between Canada and the US have not commented or raised to the Canadian side their lack of funding. Additionally, Canada is looking to expand the definition of military spending - not sure how much that would actually change our percentage though.

And to call our military a joke isn't really valid - we do spend a shit ton of money on military. Not anywhere near the US, but we can't compare ourselves to the worldwide military superpower with 10x our population and 11x our GDP. Canada still places in at 6th in the NATO countries on raw dollar spending.

One of the bigger problems is the failure of the construction industry as a whole. Compared to many other jobs, typical home builder trades (carpenter, roofer, brick layer) aren't competitive with white collar jobs.

-The hours through the summer are awful, with 16+ hour days being the norm. Then you hit the winter and are laid off and have to go on EI. If you're not good at budgeting, that swing can fuck up your finances.

-Work is physically demanding and often leaves you going home, eating, and sleeping to repeat the next day

-Pay is highly dependent on your company. Many only offer you an hourly rate while on site and working. Commuting (which can vary from a half hour to 2+hrs each way per day) is either on your own dime or at a discounted "travel" rate.

-Often people have a hard time starting an apprenticeship even if they're great workers with the education requirement done. The boss won't fill out the paperwork and actually teach the stuff they're supposed to, just using them as cheap/subsidized grunt labour.

-Bosses and the culture is awful. There are likely those who don't mind it, and there are companies which are better, but by and large my experience with various trades is highly misogynistic, dashes of racism, and lots or brash yelling instead of actual instruction. Communication is awful, and new workers are treated like shit to "earn their way in"/"do their time".

So it's hardly a surprise when there's less interest in trades/manual labour, especially when the pay is good, but not great.

I hate the "turn to the government"/why didn't anyone foresee this and subsidize the training that these articles often have. Sure, a portion of it is that. But a larger portion is the last 30 years of "Go to University to get a good job" that parents and schools have been pushing, plus a general unwillingness of the construction industry to improve their culture or increase wages to attract good workers/talent.

I feel like even if they had just prioritized the rail line growth in the early 2000s we'd be fine. Barrie is just starting to get their second line so there can be two way trains all day. All of the other Toronto suburbs need to have dedicated rail service accompanied by densification near those stations.

Did you read the article? Unless I'm missing something, this was always a temporary setup (4-6 wks) for them to get settled. It's now ending, which means we'll have to take fewer, or just use the federal 2wk program, which is less than ideal.