sailingbythelee @ sailingbythelee @lemmy.world

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9

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684

Joined

2 yr. ago

HRTO certainly has a large backlog. The backlog has doubled in the last 6 years to 9,527 cases according to the latest HRTO annual report. To put that backlog number in context, only 40 cases received a substantive final decision in 2023/24, and that was actually a large percentage increase in decisions compared to the previous few years. Prior to the pandemic, though, the HRTO was making about 100 decisions per year, so one wonders if the backlog itself has slowed down the ability to make substantive decisions because staff are too busy managing the backlog and trying to clarify a massive number of low quality claims.

Many COVIDiots filed human rights cases that clogged up the system a few years ago, though I'm not sure if those cases are still in the system or if the HRTO disposed of them en masse at some point. The annual report showed that dismissals without hearing have also doubled. Regardless, human rights complaints about mask mandates and vaccination were well-publicized and made people realize that the HRTO could be a vehicle for all kinds of new complaints.

Unlike a civil law suit, making a human rights complaint is free and does not expose the complainant to civil liability for costs. Nor do most complainants need or avail themselves of legal representation because the HRTO provides a lot of free assistance to complainants. (That said, the amount of support provided has also decreased recently due to the backlog, so the number of abandoned claims has also increased.) In any case, it is easy to make frivolous and vexatious claims with no legal advice because there is no cost and no risk in doing so. At the same time, the backlog and pressures in the system make it equally difficult to get legitimate claims adjudicated in a timely fashion. While we obviously need a barrier-free system for making legitimate human rights complaints, such systems are easily abused. With no costs or risks, the current system is the perfect vehicle for making unfounded accusations to intimidate defendants, cast aspersions, and entangle them in legal proceedings.

As I said above, we need barrier-free (or at least low-barrier) systems for human rights claims, but barrier-free systems always break down when they are gamed in large numbers. Backlogs create serious problems for legitimate claimants as they block access to timely justice and create administrative barriers for unsophisticated and unrepresented claimants. I'm not sure what the solution is, but the current system isn't working for anyone.

I just started playing Caves of Qud. It has two modes: rogue mode with perma-death and rpg mode where it saves at a checkpoint you can set. Having both options is nice.

I like this style of game, so I'll definitely be trying Moonring, too.

Yup. I had no problem with snaps or Ubuntu until I saw that underhanded bullshit.

Yes, you are right. I had never put it together that Dutch and Deutch are so close, but it's obvious now that you pointed it out. Thanks for the info.

Dutch is the English name for the dominant language of the Netherlands, and in English we often name people after their language. The Netherlands is also called Holland in English, even though Holland is just the most economically-dominant sub-region of the Netherlands, and the location of its main trading ports, rather than the whole country. Which makes sense if you are an English sailor who only knows the Netherlands through its trading ports and has little need to go inland.

I want to do the same, but I'm on the fence between Nobara and Bazzite.

The act of transmitting a digital file does not directly cause harm to anyone, but by creating a demand for it, you are in turn driving an industry that violates the rights of people in order to keep supplying it.

We already know that people are killed in order to feed the black market for transplantable organs, so why would we allow an industry with all of the same risks to exist purely for the sake of art?

I think you may be making a logical error here. Wanting or needing a transplant, or buying sneakers, or any other consumer product for which there is a legitimate and legal supply chain, does not make you responsible for any parallel illegal/unethical/immoral supply chain. There are black market supply chains for everything from food and basic necessities to luxury goods. There is no fool-proof way to ensure that ANY product you purchase didn't derive at least partially from an immoral supply chain. It is impossible to track all products that closely. The fault is not with the consumer but rather with the immoral supply chain participants. Don't take away the agency of those who participate in such things.

Sometimes the manager/foreman/supervisor is just the team member who is willing to be that interface between the frontline workers and senior management. The best middle managers are those who can thread that needle to the satisfaction of both groups.

I agree with you thst managers shouldn't consider themselves smarter than anyone else. Quite the opposite. Particularly when managing professionals or others with extensive knowledge, I'm a big believer in the concept of servant leadership. That's where you lead by inspiring the group to come up with ideas and then shaping, coordinating, and supporting those ideas through to a successful outcome.

I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I've been to one such event and I was shocked. What's worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you'd hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can't tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?

We humans have these things called "boats" that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.

I agree that AI is just a tool, and it excels in areas where an algorithmic approach can yield good results. A human still has to give it the goal and the parameters.

What's fascinating about AI, though, is how far we can push the algorithmic approach in the real world. Fighter pilots will say that a machine can never replace a highly-trained human pilot, and it is true that humans do some things better right now. However, AI opens up new tactics. For example, it is virtually certain that AI-controlled drone swarms will become a favored tactic in many circumstances where we currently use human pilots. We still need a human in the loop to set the goal and the parameters. However, even much of that may become automated and abstracted as humans come to rely on AI for target search and acquisition. The pace of battle will also accelerate and the electronic warfare environment will become more saturated, meaning that we will probably also have to turn over a significant amount of decision-making to semi-autonomous AI that humans do not directly control at all times.

In other words, I think that the line between dumb tool and autonomous machine is very blurry, but the trend is toward more autonomous AI combined with robotics. In the car design example you give, I think that eventually AI will be able to design a better car on its own using an algorithmic approach. Once it can test 4 million hood ornament variations, it can also model body aerodynamics, fuel efficiency, and any other trait that we tell it is desirable. A sufficiently powerful AI will be able to take those initial parameters and automate the process of optimizing them until it eventually spits out an objectively better design. Yes, a human is in the loop initially to design the experiment and provide parameters, but AI uses the output of each experiment to train itself and automate the design of the next experiment, and the next, ad infinitum. Right now we are in the very early stages of AI, and each AI experiment is discrete. We still have to check its output to make sure it is sensible and combine it with other output or tools to yield useable results. We are the mind guiding our discrete AI tools. But over a few more decades, a slow transition to more autonomy is inevitable.

A few decades ago, if you had asked which tasks an AI would NOT be able to perform well in the future, the answers almost certainly would have been human creative endeavors like writing, painting, and music. And yet, those are the very areas where AI is making incredible progress. Already, AI can draw better, write better, and compose better music than the vast, vast majority of people, and we are just at the beginning of this revolution.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is a membership-based non-profit that has been around since 1936. They are funded by membership dues, donations, and some corporate partnerships (mostly for research projects, I think). Their mission is to create unbiased reviews.

They do well reviewing large purchases like appliances. They also review consumer electronics and some software, though not in the highly technical way of a site like Tom's Hardware.

Anyway, Consumer Reports isn't perfect or entirely comprehensive, but the $40 per year membership pays for itself if you are a homeowner. Just in the last couple of months, they saved me $500 by directing me to a less expensive dishwasher than I otherwise would have bought.

This article is bullshit. There have always been good landlords and bad landlords, good tenants and bad tenants. Renting is supposed to be mutually beneficial and it usually is, but sometimes it isn't and that's why we have laws and a tribunal: to protect both parties to the rental agreement.

Recent media stories about landlords and tenants are driven by two things: a MASSIVELY UNREASONABLE housing shortage and a MASSIVELY UNREASONABLE backlog at the landlord-tenant board. The housing shortage certainly favors the landlord, and the backlog at the LTB favors the tenant.

If the LTB is there to arbitrate all kinds of disputes in a fair manner, why does the backlog at the LTB favour the tenant? Well, the nuclear option for landlords is eviction, which they cannot do without the LTB. Whereas the nuclear option for tenants is not paying the rent, which is grounds for an eviction the landlord cannot obtain. That means the tenant can live rent-free for one to two years, if they do not mind being evicted in the end. And if the tenant is poor, it hardly matters that the LTB eventually orders the tenant to pay back-rent they do not have.

So, why have some recent stories been about the tenants-from-hell? Because it is the flip side of the large number of other stories about house prices and rents becoming unreasonable. There are news stories everyday about high house prices, high rents, low rental availability, increasing population, and the collective burden all of this places on younger generations. There are thousands of articles about this, and the media needs grist for the mill, so naturally they want to cover a different angle. Nobody cares about faceless corporate landlords, so they run stories about landlords or tenants with a human face. We, the public, lap up these human interest stories because we are programmed by evolution to find human drama at the individual amd small group level engaging. Thus, ragebait draws clicks.

And that is ehat this article is as well. It does nothing but push an oppressor-oppressed narrative to make people mad. It's ragebait masquerading as media analysis. The fact is that renting is as old as civilization itself and will always be with us. It is necessary because many people cannot or do not want to own a home. In a balanced market with a reasonable arbitration mechanism, the interests of landlords and tenants are also approximately balanced. But right now we have neither a balanced market nor a reasonable arbitration mechanism. In this context, stories about rapacious landlords and scumbag tenants are just stories about the range of human nature when the rules of fair conduct are not enforced. We can't change human nature, but we can shape the market and the dispute resolution mechanism.

Flying the national maritime ensign upside down is an internationally recognized distress signal. A UK-flagged boat wouldn't fly the Union Jack upside down (which would be rather ineffective), but rather the Red Ensign (for civilian vessels).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Ensign

Change "user" to your actual user name.

My brother, I didn't say it was "nothing", I said it was middle class. I worked a second job in the evenings to save up enough to afford the first boat. Then I sold the first boat for the same amount I paid for it and used that plus some savings and a small loan to afford the second boat, which I just paid off. And I drove a rust bucket for an extra five years so I could afford to save for the second boat. I didn't just have a spare $45k laying around. And even if I did manage to save $45k over a decade, that's still not rich by any means.

Middle class is not rich. Fundamentally, it means you have to work for a living and make more than the bare minimum needed to get by. Middle class means you can save a little and be able to afford a little nicer house over time, a decent car, and a few luxuries. If you only make enough money to scrape by with no ability to save, then you aren't middle class, you are poor. Being middle class also means you need that pay cheque every two weeks and that you are vulnerable to becoming poor if you lose your job.

Not at all. Fire suppression on a small yacht is a hand-held fire extinguisher or two, which is $30. In fact, I don't know anyone who has more than that for fire suppression. Satnav is not necessary, but most boats over 30ft will have a chart plotter already because manual charting is a lot of work. Every sailboat over 30 feet has a depth sounder already. A decent chartplotter-depth sounder combo is about $1200, like a laptop, if you need or want to replace it for some reason, but they'll last 20 years no problem. Small sailboats don't require much paperwork and don't require annual licensing in many jurisdictions, just a small one-time registration fee when you buy it. Permits for international travel are cheap. If I recall correctly, the permit to sail to the US, for example, is under $100.

You definitely don't have to be a rich asshole to own a sailboat and it is weird that this perception persists. My first sailboat was a 1983 30-footer that I got for $18,000 about 10 years ago. My slightly newer 36-footer was $45,000 and it is big enough for a coastal cruising couple to live on pretty comfortably. The vast majority of boats are designed to be sailed by a cruising couple, and most sailors are stinky, sunburned, slightly stressed, somewhat impaired, and bruised from doing their own maintenance and being tossed around in rough conditions.

The average sailboat is basically a trailer on the water, except you don't need a big truck to haul it. You can spend as much or as little as you want to, of course, but the majority of boats in an average marina (ie, not a rich Florida asshole marina) are 1980s-era fiberglass boats in the 30-40 ft range. The engines are typically 3-cylinder marinized small diesel tractor engines in the 25-50 horsepower range that'll push the boat at about 6 knots (about 11 km/h). This is not the description of a rich asshole toy. This is a solid, middle-class hobby similar to trailer camping.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that developers serve no purpose. Maybe there is a definitional problem here. Maybe you are thinking of planners rather than developers. Developers organize, design, finance, and gain approvals for housing projects. Often they are also the general contractor for the building phase. Planners, on the other hand, ensure that projects meet the requirements of municipal Official Plans and the Planning Act (in Ontario).

It is true, though, that a lot of developers submit shitty plans that municipal planners have to fix. That's because the average developer doesn't give a single shit about the public good and only seeks to maximize personal profit. So, they treat the Planning Act as an obstacle to work around rather than making a good faith effort to follow the principles of good city planning.

Yeah, midwifery is a very tough job and should be better compensated. The call schedule is nuts!

The acceptance rate at Canadian med schools is about 1 in a 1000, and most of those 1000 applicants are qualified in the sense of having decent grades and passing the MCAT. There is no shortage of qualified applicants for med school. This issue is that there is a shortage of funded positions in med schools.

In addition, we admit many trained physicians via our immigration system. We have a system for training these physicians to work in the Canadian health care system, but it is woefully inadequate. I'm sure my numbers are out of date, but about a decade ago there were 5000 physician applicants to that training system with only 5 slots available. And, if you were not among the lucky 5 after 3 years on the list, you were no longer eligible. As a result, we have tens of thousands of trained physicians who gave up on medicine and now work in other fields.

So, the logical next question is, why? The answer is that there is a convergence of interests between the government and the physicians associations. Physicians don't want their profession flooded with additional members because it weakens their bargaining position with the government. And the government does not particularly want to license a whole bunch more physicians because each new physician they add represents a long-term expense to the health care system.

Health care consumer demand in a system like ours with no point-of-service fees is effectively bottomless. You could triple the number of physicians and they would all be busy. The only curb on consumer demand is rationing, which is done by limiting the number of licensed physicians.

Nurse practitioners could definitely fill the primary care gap independently, but that's not what physicians want. Physicians want nurse practitioners to work under them so that they can get a cut for every patient the NP sees.

All of that is to say that it is always about money. Always. It is no accident that there is a primary care shortage, and no mystery as to why either. Cost containment by the government and turf-protection by physician groups are the main reasons.

Fortunately, there has been some movement on alternatives. There are a few more NP-led clinics being approved. Midwifery was legalized in the 90s, and midwives and pharmacists in Ontario have had their scope expanded in recent years to include the ability to diagnose and treat a range of minor ailments. All of this helps, though hopefully it is only the thin edge of the wedge in terms of broadening the base of primary care.