jadero @ jadero @lemmy.ca

Just a Southern Saskatchewan retiree looking for a place to keep up with st

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2 yr. ago

I've read a number of articles claiming to demonstrate how many of the negative things our governments and corporations foist upon us were first used in prisons. They were then rolled out to the general public, starting with disadvantaged and marginalized communities.

It's time for organizations like the John Howard Society to get more support so that they can be more vocal and more active.

It was never sustainable right from the beginning. Food banks are supported and funded mostly by those just a paycheque or two from being a client themselves. If the actually well-off were doing their part, food banks would mostly disappear because wages and social assistance would be up to the task of making sure people can afford to eat.

There is a really easy fix for that. A proper training program instead of just expecting that people are born with the necessary skills. Having worked IT in a variety of capacities, including training and end-user support, I'm pretty sure cluelessness is a function of training and experience, not age.

I haven't really followed that closely in recent years, but pretty much everything to do with guns is handled so badly, no matter who is in power. This is just one more in long line of screw ups.

The last few decades have been just a mess. Way too many emotions on every side. Way too many people with little grasp of guns and their legitimate, harmless uses. Way too many people who think that guns are some god-given totem of freedom as opposed to a tool or recreational skill. Way too many people who see a path to power by inflaming the passions of one side or the other.

Nobody seems interested in conducting actual research into what actually works for the safety of individuals and society. It's all intuition, gut feelings, different versions of "common sense", "just so" stories, and emotional attachment to an immovable opinion.

Government sources say they're puzzled by Canada Post's refusal to receive the weapons, since the corporation already delivers guns that are sold online.

Are those online sales from just random people or from shops that can be mostly trusted to ensure that the gun is safe to ship?

We've been trying to go EV for 20 years. The first obstacle was lack of workspace to convert our little Japanese mini-truck (apartment dwellers).

The next obstacle was cost. We moved to where we had workspace, but then we couldn't afford either the conversion or an equivalently price used Leaf. It's also still a charging desert, with the nearest charger 150 km away and it's not even on the way to anywhere we go often enough to matter.

Then time became an obstacle. Our current vehicles will likely see us to an age where we have to stop driving. Does it make sense to live several years of our retirement as paupers to pay for a decent used EV? We've decided that it doesn't. For our current driving patterns, getting 100km of winter range would cover 50-70 percent of our driving. 50km of winter range would cut that to 20-30 percent. I keep my eye out for something under CA$10k, but haven't seen anything yet.

What does multiculturalism have to do with anything? Multiculturalism is about acknowledging, accommodating, celebrating, and even drawing strength from the diversity of those who live here, no matter their heritage.

Immigration is about who gets to come here and how many. If we're actually letting too many in, then that is something to deal with, but it's completely separate from whether we celebrate what we have to offer each other.

Anything too big to fail is also too big to care. If they don't care, why should we? Provide proper supports and retraining for everyone below the c-suite and let 'er rip.

Okay, everyone who actually cares about what's going on and hasn't listened to it yet need to put this on your playlist instead of that next musician or audio book.

Even if it's shown to be a one-sided exaggeration, there can be no denying that there are deep, systemic problems with hockey culture and inside hockey organizations.

How many people are there working shit jobs, gig jobs, multiple jobs, and scrambling for shifts because they are desperate to get enough for food and shelter? How many of those would drop it all in favour of a proper full-time job in construction (or any other actually productive job) that gave them enough money and time to live a proper life that included families, hobbies, retirement plans/savings, and vacations?

Most of that kind of employment only exists because someone has found a way to exploit the desperate even as they keep them on the breadlines (the old name for food banks). Those kinds of jobs shouldn't even be counted as employment, because they are artifacts of disastrously few real jobs. In fact, I'd like to see a new statistic: a person is counted as fully employed if they are in school full time, retired, or employed full time at a single employer. If the business community insists on aggregating partial employment into "full time equivalent" for their statistics, then we can aggregate partial employment into "unemployment equivalent" for inclusion in our statistics.

How many of those in our ever expanding homeless camps are there (and, lord help me, not even counted as unemployed) because nobody will pay them an actual living wage?

Nobody will ever convince me that workers are demanding to use their own cars to deliver food or to put together a simulation of full employment by juggling shifts at multiple employers.

Nobody will ever convince me that there is an actual demand for the numbers of fast food and fast fashion outlets that exist. Most of them would disappear overnight, never to be missed, if someone decided to start building the housing and public transit and green energy systems we need at the pace they need to be built.

It's obvious to anyone who cares to look that there is plenty of money available, but it's being extracted from the system by the business and billionaire classes instead of allowed to circulate.

Which economy? The lived economy of the general public or the artificial economy of finance?

Everything I've read makes me think that a scam is obvious only to those not taken in and those who get the benefit of reading a news story.

This particular scam is a relatively minor variation on the "bank examiner" scam that has been successfully operating pretty much since the invention of banking. With the right play, even people familiar with the scam can be taken in.

In the 1980s, I was listening to a news broadcast that contained 3 stories of note:

• national economy is doing fine
• Saskatchewan provincial economy is doing great
• Saskatoon gets its first food bank

From that, I concluded that there are two economies that are either completely separate or only very loosely connected: the lived economy of the vast majority of the workforce and the financial economy of trading in stocks, commodities, and financial instruments.

Over the next few years, it became obvious to me that reporters, journalists, politicians, pundits, think tanks, and business groups care only for the economy of the financial sector. I've seen nothing since to make me change my mind.

It makes sense to make sure police officers aren't forced into bankruptcy while charges are pending but ideally we'd rely on EI and social insurance for that.

Better yet, would be to leave it up to the union to provide suspension pay in the same way that many unions have strike funds to help their members survive strikes and lockouts.

I bet it wouldn't take long for the unions to drop their support of these criminals. That, in turn, would make it easier to fire them.

While it's not only you, it is a very small number of very vocal, very politically involved people who care much about that.

I'm neither of those things. I just wanted for once in my life to see the ruling class do something simple, obvious, and right. In fact, it's so simple, obvious, and right, that it boggles my mind that it didn't happen.

I've been disillusioned to varying degrees by political machinations over the last 50 years, but failure to act on this makes me feel like just giving up on the whole system. I've never been overly cynical, but now it seems that's all I have left.

I have no idea how difficult it is to run a country and no idea how the government deals with all the complexity and uncertainty. Choosing a voting system is one of the very few things I feel I am able to get my head around. It is so patently obvious that everyone involved deliberately chose to not do the right thing, even though it was simple and obvious.

Okay, sorry for the rant.

Humankind may have to abandon the praries, later this century, exactly as most of California, most of Texas, most of the Middle East, & most of India are going to be unusable.

I live near the tip of the Palliser Triangle in Saskatchewan. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that having Lake Diefenbaker isn't going to make enough of a difference to matter.

The people in charge already have trouble keeping it full because of overall flow reductions. Agreements or not, Alberta still gets first crack at the South Saskatchewan River and overall flow is likely going to keep going down. Irrigation projects are rapidly becoming a boondoggle, not a solution.

Yes, getting rid of FPTP was the main reason that I voted for something other than NDP in ages. This issue is important enough to me that I might even risk voting (choke) Conservative (gag) if I honestly thought we'd get a better voting system out of it.

I will always remember him for the purchase of a pipeline to hell, if that counts.

Also for not making a stronger effort to replace our first past the post voting system during what looks to have been a narrow window of opportunity, but that might just be me.

There are no words...

750 million. How many public servants would that hire so we don't have to always be siphoning public funds into profiteering on this and other programs?