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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • If all we cared about was saving the lives of the already-addicted, all we’d have to do is prescribe medical-grade opioids of known dosage to anyone who says they’re an addict, and the death rate would instantly plummet—not to zero, but to something around the much lower status quo from before the “epidemic” began, when prescription opioids were more easily available. Most of these people die because they’re taking adulterated drugs, or drugs of unknown concentration that they can’t dose properly. With a cheap, secure supply, they’d have more leeway to sort out other aspects of their lives, and some of them would eventually quit the drugs voluntarily.

    Problem is, we’re more worried about people not becoming addicted in the first place, and everyone seems to think that the best way to do that is to restrict the legal supply. The two pull in opposite directions.

    If we can find a better way of fixing the second problem, maybe we can fix the first one too, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meanwhile, governments will insist on grasping at straws in order to deal with the unintended consequences they themselves have created, and some of the straws they clutch at are going to be downright evil, like this one.






  • Bad maintenance disabling the safety devices, or grandfathered equipment which didn’t have them, or inadequate employee training on safety. All of those put Walmart at fault to varying degrees. That looks to me like the most likely scenario in the absence of other data.

    Or someone intentionally jammed any safety mechanisms, which would mean that person committed murder or manslaughter depending on the details.

    It’s also possible that the deceased employee panicked when she realized what had happened and failed to operate a safety device she would have known full well was there if her rational brain hadn’t been overwhelmed by her lizard brain. That would be tragic, but not actionable.

    We still don’t know enough.


  • The management might have preferred the store closure to having the bakery department marked off with crime scene tape in full view of any customers. And the cops probably appreciated not having a bunch of lookie-loos staring at them across the tape. Plus I imagine that the dead woman’s mother isn’t the only employee dealing with shock/mental health issues because of this. They may not have been able to get enough staff willing to come in to reopen the store immediately.

    (TL;DR: There may well be something ugly going on here, but I don’t think the store being closed is enough evidence to prove that on its own.)


  • Kind of ironic that you’re excited about EVs, though.

    “Excited” isn’t really the word. It’s more that I acknowledge the inevitable. Even if we ignore the damage done by burning it, the world supply of gasoline is finite, and the extraction and refining process is not only messy, polluting, and making many parts of the world beholden to countries with bad human rights records, but also has chokepoints—a relatively small number of large refineries—that are increasingly at risk as the climate gets worse. Better to get off it before we’re forced to do so one way or the other.





  • I suspect the news hasn’t spread outside the immediate area because it isn’t clear at this point whether her death was murder, manslaughter, misadventure, or a very ugly suicide. If the investigation shows it was murder, the story may get more widely distributed. (For those not interested in clicking through to the article: the deceased was found inside an oven in the bakery department; according to the article, the police have not yet reconstructed the chain of events that led to her being there.)



  • It’s Complicated. The short version is, acute care (hospitalization and such) is covered by the government. Chronic care is not covered. Traveling to another location for treatment that isn’t available locally effectively isn’t covered (Ontario has a joke of a reimbursement system that will give you back maybe 10% of what you spent if you’re lucky, not sure about other provinces). Medication is covered only for some segments of the population (now starting to expand to the entire population for certain types of drugs). Dental is now covered for some segments of the population, but not all. Vision care has never been covered, except for the elderly. Prosthetics and assistive devices are mostly not covered (some of the most basic things may be, but not, for instance, powered wheelchairs). And there’s some variation from province to province, because health care is a provincial responsibility.

    You can be bankrupted by needing to travel for care or needing expensive meds, in other words, but you won’t have to pay if you’re in a car accident and get taken to the local hospital.



  • Dude. Indiscriminate murder of, and depraved indifference to the survival of, civilians is a bad look no matter what word you use for it. It’s pretty clear at this point that the current government of Israel would like to see all Palestinians dead, and is willing to act on that desire whenever they think they can get away with it. That’s what makes it (attempted) genocide. The fact that they’re currently not attacking the West Bank and not making sure they get 100% kill count in Gaza is not the point and has more to do with plausible deniability than anything.



  • According to TFA, “a marine ecologist for Fisheries and Oceans Canada” said it “contains no biological material”, which would rule out the most usual globster suspects (rotting whale chunks), and presumably most foodstuffs (so it isn’t actually dough). Someone else tested it and discovered that it was not a congealed petroleum-based lubricant or fuel. That leaves a lot of possible suspects. My guess at this point would be a chemical product that was jettisoned by some dishonest corp as being contaminated or unfit for purpose, and broke up into chunks in the water. 🤔