prodigalsorcerer @ prodigalsorcerer @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

My mother was born in Singapore and we've been to visit many times. There are a lot of taxis, and they are quite cheap. As a tourist it was cheaper to take a taxi than public transit when we were a group of 3 or 4 people. 2 people was pretty close either way. I'm sure public transit is cheaper when you're a full time resident, but my grandparents just use taxis all the time due to their mobility issues.

The Dolphin is a $30k USD vehicle, though I'd love to see it come to Canada. I'm not very familiar with the Seagull, but it looks like it's not available outside of China, which is probably an indication of its likely safety rating. If it's safe, I'm not sure why it's not available in the Western countries where they already have a presence.

Those $10,000 EVs all have one or more of the following issues:

1. Don't meet Canadian safety standards
2. Have a top speed around 60-80 km/h
3. Are just an electric bike/trike with a box around it

(3) isn't inherently an issue - I've seen some vehicles like that around - but it does limit the potential audience significantly.

This has been happening since the invention of fire. People will cut corners and use cheaper flammable material where they shouldn't (e.g. Grenfell 2017) or some stupid with a flare gun will set it off inside (e.g. Montreux 1971).

Fire codes and building standards improve with time, but human stupidity is forever.

Doesn't matter how it works in the technical sense. Many people will vote or not vote for a party based on their leader.

Now you're just describing the mandate of the CBC. They also have opinion pieces, but those are well labeled and avoidable.

I'm sorry, I'm really trying to wrap my head around what you're describing, but it seems to me like the thing you want probably already exists.

Isn't that just a list of digital news organizations?

Not sure why it needs to be government funded or controlled.

If you're looking for a list of all articles from each of those websites, you may be alone in that desire (though something could probably be put together with RSS). If you are looking for a curated list of articles from those websites, there's always going to be some sort of bias in the curation, but that's pretty much what Lenny and Reddit do in various communities/subreddits (like this one).

It's only a public asset as long as it's untouched (i.e. not paved or developed). The Greenbelt laws keep it that way.

Think of the Rocky Mountains as a public asset. I don't know who owns them, but that doesn't matter. They are a public asset as long as they exist, but if someone is allowed to flatten them, or carve the faces of dead prime ministers into them, they are no longer an asset to the public. Both of those are much more difficult to do than it is to build a house or a parking lot, so I'm not terribly worried about that scenario unfolding, but it's the same idea, just bigger.

Who owns it doesn't matter. What matters is that it isn't paved or developed. Pavement and digging basements reduce the land's ability to absorb water, which can cause flooding and reduce groundwater availability in surrounding areas.

Not really. Land being removed from the Greenbelt would allow it to be developed and paved over, minimizing it's worth in all of those aspects.

It's a public asset in the sense that its existence helps the rest of the province with things like groundwater, flood control, and air quality. It's also a potential source of food/agriculture for the province, though that part is just private enterprise and not guaranteed.

There's also a big link between lack of sleep and both obesity and cancer (and dozens of other health problems).

Western society has glorified not getting enough sleep as though it makes you manlier or better in some way. It doesn't. It just makes you die sooner.

We've moved to an "always on" society with the proliferation of the internet. With this comes disrupted circadian rhythms and even more reasons/excuses to not follow a regular or beneficial sleep schedule.

Instead of promising to “balance the budget”, have them produce a budget plan

Many parties do produce a vague budget going into the election, but it still doesn't account for unexpected events like the pandemic. And even though "balance the budget for 4 years" is a somewhat reasonable promise, creating a budget 4 years in advance is a terrible idea for so many reasons. Even just through the normal course of an uneventful term, things will change that the government has no control over, and if they can't react by modifying their budget that they made several years ago, then that will cause a lot of problems.

And if their promise is something vague like "balance the budget" and there are legal consequences to not balancing the budget, then the government would be encouraged to sell of infrastructure in order to make up any deficit they may have accrued. That's also bad.

Then you just get parties who don't promise anything.

Look at Doug Ford's 2018 election platform. Buck a beer and... nothing else. Look at the platforms for everyone who ran in your municipal election. I don't know where you live, but if it's anywhere like the cities I've lived in, the candidates don't really have a platform, but occasionally make vague statements like "I'm would like to address issues with housing" or "we should do something about the homelessness problem".

If every politician is given the choice between "vague statements that don't mean anything" or "legal consequences if you promise to do this thing that you actually want to do but circumstances change and you can't do it", they're going to go with "vague statements" every time.

Sometimes circumstances change and you can't always follow through on your election promises. Imagine if someone had promised to run a balanced budget just before COVID. If they couldn't spend money due to their promise, we wouldn't get things like CERB, which would be much worse than breaking that promise.

In an ideal world, breaking an election promise would be political suicide so it just wouldn't happen, but we've already seen that voters don't care enough, and 4-5 years is a long time to run wild without any repercussions.

We need a way to hold politicians responsible, but making it illegal to break an election promise is probably not a good idea.

In Ontario, you have to be separated (defined as living apart) for a year before you can get a divorce. There are exceptions for abuse and adultery, but this is the first legal step on the road to divorce. Whenever possible, it's best to keep it as amicable as possible when children are involved. That can still include going on vacations together.

Yes. I think this is less a tantrum, and more of a "fuck you" from Smirnova to Kharlan, but your interpretation is fine.

The rules state that the competitors must shake hands at the end of a bout, and that the penalty for refusing to shake hands is a black card. At the beginning of the pandemic, this rule was suspended, and was replaced with saluting and tapping blades. It is not clear whether the handshake rule is back in effect at the international level (which in itself is a huge problem - if athletes can't look up the rules, it's hard to follow them).

As an online observer, these are the facts I was able to gather. At the end of this bout, Kharlan offered her blade for the blade tap, and instead of reciprocating, Smirnova offered her hand for a handshake. Kharlan then left the piste without tapping blades or shaking hands, and Smirnova launched her complaint which (per the rules) required her to remain on piste until the issue was resolved. The officials decided the complaint was legitimate, and black carded Kharlan.

All that follows is my own speculation. Kharlan offered the blade tap but was refused. Depending on whether the handshake rule is officially reinstated (and it seems that many athletes at this particular competition were just tapping blades without a handshake) she may have been able to lodge her own complaint that Smirnova was unwilling to tap blades. They could have just had an old fashioned stand-off, with one fencer extending their blade for the tap and the other extending their hand for the handshake, neither willing to compromise, and it would (probably) have resulted in the referee clarifying the rules without penalty to either fencer. But because Kharlan left the piste without tapping blades and without shaking hands, it left an opening for Smirnova to exploit.

I do wish that the FIE would go on record saying whether the handshake rule is fully back in effect. I'm actually a fan of tapping blades, because too many fencers show up to tournaments sick, and shaking hands with everyone is a good way to spread disease. Even beyond that, people often have very sweaty hands, and it's just kinda gross.

To be clear, if she is contesting a ruling by the referee, she is not allowed to leave the piste (strip) until the situation is resolved by the head official(s). As soon as she leaves the piste, she gives up all rights to contest a ruling.

This happened publicly before with Shin A-lam at the 2012 Olympics, where she had to stay on piste for an hour while the officials discussed the ruling.

The 40% statistic came from two studies in 1991 [PDF] and 1992 [PDF] from self reported data.The general take is that since it's self-reported that it is likely much higher (since people tend to lie about things like this). However, that data is also over 30 years old, and things could have changed since then. There's no direct data on whether it's getting better or worse, but if I may speculate a little here, I would suggest there's probably a correlation between private domestic abuse and public incidents of police violence, brutality, and killings over time.

The only data I could find on domestic abuse and the nursing profession is actually about abuse against the nurses. Notably, it was still self-reported data, from a single hospital in India (where the baseline for domestic violence is higher than in North America or Western Europe).

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a lot of good data out there. It's an inherently difficult topic to study, and even though it's important, it's unlikely that any study will produce actionable results. The limited amount of funding tends to go towards studies that can improve the world (and/or someone's pocketbook), rather than report on how it is.