In this economic climate, people cannot work for less than it costs to live. Nurses are voting with their feet and taking work that makes economic sense. Ergo, if they cannot keep rural ER’s staffed, then the pay is just too low.

The employment landscape is a free market as well. If you cannot pay the wages it demands, you cannot complain about the lack of applicants.

The homeless “problem” is a direct outgrowth of the housing crisis.

The housing crisis is a direct outgrowth of housing “investors” jacking up prices and rents for 25+ consecutive years without a clear market crash.

The housing crisis can only be resolved with a return to affordability.

A return to affordability would see a housing crash of about 68% Canada-wide, with some markets (Vancouver, Kelowna, etc.) seeing valuation drops of 85% or more.

Remember: the one-third rule states that median housing payments (rent or mortgage) should not be more than one-third of median monthly income, but it also states that median home values should not be more than 3× median annual income.

The second half of that rule indicates that current home values in Kelowna alone - where median home values are just shy of $1M but median incomes as of the 2021 Statistics Canada poll are $35K - means that housing here is 28× that of annual income, or 9× more expensive than it should be.

So for a city like Kelowna to return to a sane and healthy housing market, values would have to crash by a MINIMUM of 89%.

This is what parasitical “investors” - mostly Greatest Generation and Boomers, but as of late no small number of GenX’ers - have done to the housing market.

This is why we are seeing a homeless crisis.

1. Find a pair of vehicle radiators that are as close to a box fan in size as possible.
2. Zip tie them to either side of the box fan. As the fan blows: it will draw air in through the “second radiator” and blow it out through the “first radiator”.
3. Hook the out of the first radiator to the in of the second using flexible hoses. Cheap garden hoses might even fit.
4. Hook other hoses to the in of the first radiator and the out of the second.
5. Run water on through the first radiator, out of the second. This makes the most efficient heat transfer possible.

I mean it’s the whole tolerant paradox right.

When you view things in the context of a social agreement, there is no longer any paradox.

If these people have broken the social agreement to be tolerant, they have then intentionally and explicitly removed themselves from that agreement, thereby opening themselves up to intolerance thanks to their intentional and explicit rejection of said tolerance.

It’s much the same way as outlawing worked in the old days - in the absence of a police force, you willingly agreed to follow laws that had been laid down. If you openly broke those laws in clear defiance of them, you could be removed from their protections. Ergo, you became “outside the law”, allowing anyone to harm or even kill you without legal censure.

Because if you clearly don’t want to be a part of an agreement, why should you have any right to benefit from it’s protections?

8Tb optical disks don’t exist. Much cheaper to just do spinning-rust or cloud.

when it wasn’t actively sexually harrassing T’pol

I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.

Any drug made with even a penny of taxpayer money (grants, funding, etc.) should be priced to taxpayer-affordability levels, with any corporation making it beholden to production SLA’s that severely ding them (far more than they could ever make off of the drug) if they cannot meet 100% of market demand.

Plus, set up a government company whose sole purpose is to serve the public by producing drugs at cost for anything that isn’t meeting market demand. As in, massively undercut the Parasites.

Then make this retroactive to all drugs, all the way back, no matter when they were developed.

If a drug company wants to suckle at any teat other than 100% self-funded, they would have to put 100% of their own money towards developing that drug. As it is, there are ZERO DRUGS that haven’t been developed on the taxpayer dime, either in part or in whole.

Nationalize healthcare, take it out of the control of the provinces, have its funding hard-set to population metrics and then insulate it completely from political meddling. Ensure that all upper-level execs in this crown corp have never nor will never be involved with a related free-market corp, in order to prevent corruption and service degradation in favour of Parasite-Class profit margins.

Set up turnkey operations for GPs such that new doctors are incentivized to service communities at the grassroots level without driving themselves into poverty. Set up national unions for all healthcare workers that ensure wages remain appropriate for each region’s CoL. Set up a watchdog that ensures hospitals and other institutions are being run decently well in relation to the funding they receive, with the ability to seize underperformers (as in, shareholders lose everything) in order to bring them back up to minimum thresholds of service.

Finally, make the government the only possible payer for any healthcare service for anything, from vision and dental to physio and anything science-based (too bad chiropracty, we don’t need your snake oil). As in, make it illegal for anyone to be charged anything out of pocket, including drugs. Use economies of scale to minimize costs to the taxpayer.

That’s how you resolve the current conditions: you utterly eviscerate the profit motive when dealing with healthcare.

What is the difference between forced intervention and whatever Portugal did when it decriminalized hard drugs?

Portugal treats it as a mental illness health issue, and provides counselling. Only large non-personal amounts are treated as distribution, and therefore, criminal.

Only mental heath professionals can assign intervention, and typically only in cases where the user is a viable threat to themselves or others (imminent danger of harm through violence). This means that the vast majority of users are not coerced at all - they enter into counselling willingly, and with an intent to come clean.

The reason why things have backslid in the last little while has been due to funding cuts, and nothing else. Which is the same as any public service – funding determines effectiveness.

The Right wants forced intervention

Forced intervention has a near-100% failure rate. All it does is waste taxpayer’s money while making the wealthy (the owners of these “rehabilitation sites”) even wealthier.

It is quite literally another implementation of “trickle-up economics”, explicitly designed to make the rich richer by punishing the poor for their poverty and parasitizing off the incomes of hard-working working-class Americans.

And since forced intervention is no different than forced incarceration without any sort of a trial, I would argue that it is materially worse than doing nothing at all.

Crime is a result of desperation and lack of economic opportunities.

Chronic addictions are a result of untreated/untreatable trauma.

Homelessness arises from poverty and precarious economic conditions, and can trigger both of the prior two.

And yet, these people are voting for the parties that would seek to implement and perpetuate poverty, precariousness, trauma and economic inequality.

…the fuq?

NCS is a company that offers information communication and technology services.

Wait…

he used his laptop to gain unauthorised access to the system using the administrator login credentials.

Okay, what the guy did was immature and shitty, but holy hell this company is incompetent. How did their own internal IT not lock him out of anything even remotely sensitive the moment he was fired?

The real trick is in finding the genuine collector, and not just another Nazi in a collector’s Trenchcoat.

I would break out my violin, but my electron microscope is out for repairs.

Didn’t Red Dwarf have an episode that touched directly on this? I recall Lister having some very uncomfortable experiences

Unless you airgap the machine, Windows 7 is now becoming more and more insecure and out of date.

It’s like using Debian 9 or earlier in production… not something you want to do unless you enjoy being pwned.

I have always bought surplussed business hardware, which back in the day came with COA stickers still attached. My latest iron had two attached for some strange reason. So when Windows 10 came along with its “Upgrade Win 7 key to 10” plan, I fired up a VM (for this exact purpose) and went to work. Now (after moving them to 10 and then 11) I have a handful of Win11 Pro licenses for whatever machine I need to license.

Slowly moving away from Windows due to their AI and spyware shenanigans, but hey. Likely always will run at least one Windows rig, even if I have to spend the first day or two after install castrating it.

Exactly. Nationalized industries care nothing about profit margins, only with serving the public good to the maximum of their abilities.

It’s why nationalized institutions - such as Canada Post and the CBC - could actually break even if they were just free of conservative defunding and leg-breaking. But they continue to exist because they serve a public need that would otherwise be far too expensive for the average Canadian.

NDP

They have always been in the corner of the average Canadian, which is why they are so poorly funded - millionaires and billionaires don’t control them, and so won’t donate to them.

The Liberals, in contrast, are strongly influenced by them, which is why they are small-c conservative and only moderately to the right. The CPC and their racist little brother the PPC are all about suckling at the teat of millionaires and billionaires, which is why all their policies pay only vapour-thin lip service to the average Canadian, and so much of their rhetoric is spin and alternative facts to distract their non-wealthy electorate away from the fact that they are voting very much against their own best interests.

That might come to a head within the next decade.

I have already heard rumours of a list (American, I believe, but maybe International) being compiled through debates on who could be taken out to produce the greatest narrowing of the wealth gap. As in, maximum impact with minimum effort.

Because when you hoard so much wealth that you impoverish millions, the question needs to be asked if you still meet the minimum requirements of being human, or if you are truly a parasite fit only to be eliminated. I strongly suspect that the inherent sociopathy of billionaires such as our own Galen Weston, and their abysmal disregard of basic humanity in the pursuit of unbridled greed, makes many to most of them fail to meet this very important threshold.

I may not be among those in the crowd when the torches and pitchforks come out, but imma gonna be holding the door open for them and looking the other way.