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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.

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.

Playing devil’s advocate only makes you look like an asshole if the person you’re talking to has a closed mind. The entire purpose is to bridge the gap between two sides in an argument by acknowledging the positives of something they disagree with.

In essence, if someone has to play devil’s advocate with you, you’re probably the asshole. Otherwise you would be able to relate to and understand people who disagree with you without treating them like a monster.

A good example of where this can help is in politics. Political discussion is full of people talking past each other instead of trying to understand each other. If you could understand each other, it would be much easier to find compromise, which would make everyone feel heard and lead to the most reasonable outcomes when you consider the voice of all parties. But it’s much easier to label your opponent an idiot or a devil than to grapple with their actual problems.

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.

I understand 90% of the science behind what I do as a medical diagnostic technologist. It’s still fucking magic as far as I’m concerned.

CTs and MRIs? Atom spin/relax releasing detectable energy waves that are somehow able to be read and aggregated by algorithms into a high detail image of the inside of a human body? Tell me that isn’t magic and I’ll call you a liar.

I’m not sure any province can. That’s one of the reasons rational people think the proposed numbers are insane. But immigrants will be bought and paid for voters, and they will supposedly help offset the tax-load needed to fund programs that provide for the aging boomer population.

Nevermind the houses/units we will need. Nevermind the aging parents those people may bring with them. Nevermind the wage stagnation, cultural conflicts, or lack of infrastructure.

Let’s keep this ponzi scheme going as long as possible. Screw sustainability.

Are there people who aren’t okay with both? Even my straight friends like playing burly men.

Conan the Barbarian was a big hit, all he had was a loincloth.

You think you don’t have to get a job under communism? My man, if you don’t want to work, capitalism is the much better system to bet on. Your labor can be overvalued under capitalism, letting you retire early. Under communism your value is equalized throughout the system regardless of your job. You work until you can’t work. If you can work and you choose not to, the government stops giving you food and water, and reappropriates your house.

What you’re thinking of is a Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. There’s a reason it only exists in fiction.

Nothing us stopping you from putting together a commune right now. You could go and form a communist society with some of your friends. Let me know how it goes when you all want to sit on your ass doing nothing and the food doesn’t just magically appear in front of you.

Okay, sounds good. But then I don’t want to see you begging for food, shelter, healthcare, transportation, cell phones, internet, or anything else provided by people who work. If you don’t want to engage in this system of commerce, by all means, you do you. But if you aren’t trading your labor to buy goods from other people who are laboring, you don’t just get to have all your needs met for free.

Go live off the land, build your own shelter, grow/hunt your own food, and treat your own wounds. I wish you luck. I’d rather keep working and paying for a much better range of goods than you could ever scavenge or build on your own.

They’re right to an extent. I think we should have a lot of systems in place to help break generational poverty, like foster homes, public schooling, scholarships, etc. But if people don’t take advantage of those systems to escape that cycle, how far do we intervene to try to fix it?

I came from a lower class background and now I’m solidly middle class in earnings. I went to a trades college, got a diploma in an in-demand job, and here I am. One of my coworkers came from severe poverty and an abusive home, and she did the same thing.

There’s only so much you can do for people to help them change. The most important aspect required in that process is the will power of the person in question, and that’s usually what’s lacking.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Life is hard. It’s arguably as easy as it has ever been to provide for yourself in the history of the human race (I know it was easier 50 years ago, I’m talking about modern society in general). People need to appreciate that they don’t have to hunt and forage for food, they don’t really have to worry about rival tribes sneaking into their camp and slitting their throats while they sleep. Again, that doesn’t mean life is easy now, but in comparison it could be a hell of a lot worse.

A certain percentage of a species will naturally fail to thrive. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s the reason evolution was able to take place. I don’t want excess suffering to take place. I specifically went into medicine because I want to curb suffering. But we will never be able to save everyone. We save as many as we can. This is a truth in medicine, but it’s also applicable to society as a whole. No matter how small we manage to get that percentage, some people will always have too much stacked against them.

I mean, you’ve got to pay off the house. That takes a while. You’ve got to put in labor to trade for food. You’ve got to put in labor to trade for the beer and wings at the pub. The pub staff have to keep working to serve you. The plumbers, electricians, etc. have to keep working to maintain your home, your streets, the businesses you want to shop at. People need to labor to create the goods you want to buy. Farmers work very long hours to bring food to your grocer so you can trade your labor for it. Doctors, nurses, technologists, etc, work long hours so you can get healthcare when you need it.

If you aren’t working one of the aforementioned jobs and you have enough money to pay for everything already, why should a doctor have to work any more than you are willing to work? They generally don’t need the money. But if they have the same attitude towards work as you do, you could come in to the hospital after a bad car accident to find no surgeons on site.

I work 60 hours a week on average as a diagnostic technologist. If I wanted even just the typical 40 hour work week, that means if you have a car accident after 430 pm, you don’t get xrays, fluoroscopy, or CT. No head trauma scans, no stroke alert scans to decide on TPA administration, no scans to diagnose abdominal aortic dissection or pulmonary embolism or appendix rupture. All conditions that happen every day and could easily kill you.

But maybe I should just take a load off and have a seat. After all, I’ve got a house and a pub.

I think the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion is progressive nonsense, but I agree with pretty much everything else. I don’t care what your race or gender is. I care that you’re the most qualified for the job. A black, gay doctor can do my prostate exam - I don’t care at all - I just want them to be good at their job.

DEI is just racial discrimination in reverse. We discriminate against white people as a group to help minorities. The problem is that loads of white people need help just as much as minorities. Saying that minorities need it more because other white people have been successful in the past is still you racially discriminating against a new prospective student/employee because they happen to share the same race as those previous people. It has nothing to do with that person’s level of need versus a minority individual’s level of need.

I think we need to stop being so focused on the past. I was born in Canada, and instead of complaining and trying to change the world to suit my needs, I accepted the way the world is now, and used it to my advantage as well as I could.

Do I have all the same cultural elements of my ancestors from 500 years ago? No. Do I still own the land my ancestors did 500 years ago? Nope. But I’ve got a career, a home, a car, and a smartphone. It’s more than a lot of people have.

Sometimes you have to accept that this is the world you were born into. You can either choose to complain and be miserable, or make it work for yourself.

We all use labor to meet our survival needs. Humans were just smart enough to specialize in different tasks, and we had to find a way to quantify our labor so we could trade it for different goods.

We don’t all need to be farmers, so a doctor will pay a farmer for food, and a farmer will pay a doctor for healthcare. It’s a much more efficient way to aggregate expertise in different areas, which means more services are available for your labor without you having to be capable of all of those different kinds of work.

A chimp may be able to feed themselves with their labor, but they aren’t making themselves smart phones or performing advanced healthcare. Indigenous societies in North America pre-British are a good example of what humans are capable of without a complex market system to trade skilled labor.

Imo Genshin is a decent game at its core. The problem is that the gacha elements make it really hard to enjoy.

There are plenty of valid criticisms of capitalism. Especially the current state of capitalism in the west. It doesn’t mean I want to go full communist, far from it. But I’m a mixed economy man. I think certain things should be highly regulated or even owned by the government (and, by extension, the people).

Healthcare is one good example to me. I think private is fine to an extent, but I would never want a fully private system. I think the model in Canada is a good place to start, where public is the go-to option, but private exists if you want to skip the queue and can afford it. The dynamic between insurance and private healthcare in the states makes for a toxic experience for patients, and that serves as one of the primary reasons why I would never want to go fully private. Doctors shouldn’t have to fight tooth and nail to get your medication or diagnostic procedure approved when it’s medically necessary, assuming the system can reasonably absorb the cost.

Mixed economies are the way.

That’s not an entirely accurate perspective, but you’re not far off. The problem is that fixing this requires hard decisions, and it requires people in power to act against their own interests.

You want wealth inequality to get better? You need to increase the value of labor. You do that by eliminating free trade deals, bringing production back to the west, increasing prices on goods, and severely limiting immigration. Do that, and the value of labor will soar.

You should also severely limit the ability for the wealthy to own properties to rent. One of the main reasons the middle class existed was that the family home was simultaneously shelter, and an investment vehicle.

The whole structure of investment and shareholding has to be rethought as well. Its built of the concept of infinite growth, something that isn’t possible, and ends with businesses destroying themselves while trying to meet this impossible demand.