You misunderstand me. I don’t think I know better than doctors. Far from it. What I want from a doctor is information and informed choice, not a gatekeeper who makes decisions for me. As a group, physicians have been slow to adopt the patient-centered informed choice mentality that, for example, nurse practitioners and midwives have more thoroughly adopted.

The fact that you’ve doubled down here on calling patients idiots for being somewhat distrustful of the typical arrogant physician attitude confirms what I’m saying.

If I was going under anesthesia for a planned procedure, I would not drink or use drugs beforehand. If it was an unplanned emergency, I guess it would depend on the circumstances, but you are citing an extreme circumstance. If someone is actively high at the time they end up in the emergency department, well, that’s bad luck and it might be wise to disclose since the staff will figure it out pretty darn quick anyway. Same if you are a severe alcoholic or opiate addict. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about when doctors or nurses ask you about it as a lifestyle question.

You know as well as I do that the health care system classifies people in terms of their risk factors and then use that profile to make decisions about you. Once classified as a “drug user” in your chart, many doctors and nurses will treat you differently. They may or may not “care” from a moral perspective, and we know that they won’t tell family or police, but that won’t necessarily stop them from denying you necessary pain relief or deprioritizing you in triage. That’s the actual concern.

There is absolutely no reason to tell a doctor if you use cannabis or engage in moderate alcohol use or occasionally use cocaine, LSD, or psylocibin. If you are prescribed a medication that has an interaction with a recreational drug, the doctor can simply tell you that. They don’t need to know if you use that drug from time to time. Only you, the patient, need to know that so you can avoid the interaction. More extreme forms of drug use are a different story, of course.

Edit: Let me add one other overarching point. I think people are sick and tired of having doctors make decisions for them. I don’t need a nanny. I need information about risks and benefits in order to make an informed choice. Doctors rarely do that. Instead, they decide what should be prescribed, or not prescribed, regardless of the patient’s wishes. I know the reason is fear of liability, but here we are nonetheless.

I used to trust HCPs, but I know many of them now and have heard them shit-talk and judge their patients for mental health issues and drug use (among other things). I would NEVER, EVER tell a doctor or nurse about any form of drug or alcohol use now, or any kind of anger issues that could possibly be interpreted as aggressive. Especially not in a hospital where everything gets recorded in an electronic chart and may be used against you in the future. Fuck that.

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The Middle East is strategically important, so the West can’t just ignore it. But it doesn’t make sense to get emotionally involved in what happens there. The protests against Israel do not make sense to me given the wider context in the region.

I know it isn’t a popular position right now, but I believe the Israelis are correct in their assessment that Hamas needs to be thoroughly crushed. True, it is only a short-term remedy because Iran will simply fund another generation of jihadis, but it may give Israel another decade or two of relative peace. Hamas only wants one thing and that is to destroy Israel. Hezbollah is similar and also needs to be crushed and Lebanon liberated, but that is a more difficult job that’ll have to wait. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are so thoroughly entrenched in their ideology and, more importantly, in a black market economy, that they will never become legitimate state actors.

So, how does the situation with Iran and their proxies get resolved? Peace processes have been tried for decades only to be scuttled by extremists. The West has sanctioned the hell out of Iran and yet they are still able to supply their proxies with tens of thousands of rockets. Protesters say that Israel needs to give the Palestinians their own state and then the hostilities will end. Yes, that’s a nice goal, but I don’t believe for a second that Iran will stop fomenting violence against Israel no matter how many concessions the Israelis make to the Palestinians. Does anyone, in their heart of hearts, truly believe that Iran will ever stop funding terrorism against Israel and the West as long as the Ayatollahs are in charge? Will any amount of justice for Palslestine appease the Ayatollahs? I don’t think so.

I hate to say it because war is the worst way to solve conflicts, but I suspect that the Middle East will remain a violent stalemate until the Ayatollahs are removed from power.

To be fair, it’s because US politics at the moment is a train-wreck in progress and its hard to look away. Or, more accurately, the US news portrays US politics as a train-wreck in progress, with civil war and right-wing dictatorship just over the horizon. Both political parties and the whole media establishment are literally spending billions of dollars to attract eyeballs, so the drama of US presidential politics is off-the-scale and the whole world is watching, not just Canada.

Canadian politics at the moment is a snooze-fest by comparison. However, when crazy US-style drama does go down in Canada, like when our COVID trucker convoy noisily occupied Ottawa for a few weeks, we were glued to that instead.

For Americans, you can think of Canada as being like Minnesota. Sure, we get a dramatic event every once in a while, but mostly it’s boringly reasonable, center-left, earnest, and low-drama.

I’ve got a 2015 T540p with integrated graphics. It’s fine for low-spec gaming. I only run Linux-native games and haven’t managed to get any Windows games running in compatibility mode yet. Here are the games that have “just worked” for me so far.

Dwarf Fortress

Cataclysm: Dark Day Ahead

Darkest Dungeon

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2

Caves of Qud

Unity of Command

Stardew Valley

Planescape: Torment

Shovel Knight

If that’s the kind of retro gaming that floats your boat, an old Thinkpad is just fine.

Trudeau is our Biden. He’s an old news incumbent and he’s got to go if we want any chance of beating snide Skippy. Trudeau cannot possibly have missed the way Biden bowed out and made way for new blood, and how that has energized the left and moved the needle with swing voters.

The same thing could happen with the NDP, if Singh would bow out. Of course, if they both pull a Biden, it might split the vote even worse. So, I guess we’d better hope that the NDP ditches Singh, but that Trudeau, unable to bear the thought of living in an empty house without Sophie and the kids, desperately clings to power like a madman.

Two things:

1. I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was “fine”, by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
2. About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS “upgrades”. I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.

Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I’m a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That’s right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.

And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I’m addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don’t think about high-spec AAA games much.

I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.

Oh man, reading your comment just gave me 90s vibes. That was the peak when atheism was quite controversial. Nowadays, it is a bit weird if someone does practice a religion. Religious beliefs are not an innate trait, but a choice, at least in the West. We should be actively discouraging people from being religious in the same way we discourage misogyny, racism, etc. I’m very uncomfortable with some of the comments in this thread that suggest that discouraging the wearing of religious symbols is some form of crypto-racism. Religion is a completely different category and we need to be able to criticize it harshly and relentlessly without the suggestion that it is a type of racism.

No job, no credit, no references, and a backed up landlord-tenant board, meaning that the landlord can’t evict for at least a year if they don’t pay the rent… no surprise that they had to put cash up front.

The bigger issue, though, is why stay in downtown Toronto? It’s the second most expensive real estate market in Canada and an extremely competitive job market. There are a hundreds other less expensive places of live that would greatly value an influx of people with skills. Where I live (not Toronto), half of our IT department are newcomers from India and Africa who were smart enough to realize that there is more to Canada than Toronto.

Simply put: he’s an asshole-alo-alo-alo-alo.

And they are helping the Aussies develop nuclear-powered subs, notably with UK reactors, though.

Yes, agreed, electoral reform is definitely a sore point.

This is true of most politicians. They know that getting elected is not really about policy, but rather about capturing the sentiments of the population. When Trudeau was elected, the country was sick of the dour Harper et al brand and wanted a younger, hipper PM with a hope-and-change message. Now that Trudeau has run through his idea list, and Canadians are unhappy with the economy, Poilievre just needs to reflect that sentiment. You hardly ever hear him talk about actual policy because he knows that concrete ideas can be attacked. Riding the wave of resentment is the successful strategy for him, so he rarely says anything beyond criticizing Trudea. I’m pretty sure that the Liberals are resigned to losing at this point, and one gets the sense that Trudeau is just tired. And Freeland is smart enough to keep her powder dry and wait until we get sick of Poilievre in turn.

I still have a Windows 10 or 11 PC that I only use for gaming so I don’t really “use” Windows anymore. I basically use that computer like a really kick-ass game console. Which is why I neither know nor care what version of Windows is on that PC. All my other computers run Linux now.

I had played around with Linux back in the day, but it never stuck. It was the “upgrade” from Windows 7 to 10 that pushed me to commit to Linux permanently. Now my daily driver is EndeavourOS on the laptop and Proxmox on my servers.

What was so bad going from Win7 to Win10? Win10 is painfully slow and shockingly bloated on older hardware, and doesn’t provide any new benefits that I care about. I would have had to replace my laptop for no good reason to stay with Win10. Anyway, once I installed Linux and KDE, I saw how awesome the Linux desktop experience has become and that was that. I will never go back to Windows now, even when I get a new laptop. Windows just isn’t a good operating system anymore while Linux has improved tremendously in terms of user experience.

To be fair, one person’s “politics” is another person’s life. When you say “politics” in the sense and context we have here, what does it really mean? It probably means something like “controversial topics related to gender, race, or sexual preference”. When you think of it that way, it is easy to see that excluding discussion of these topics could be seen as excluding or devaluing people with non-mainstream characteristics. An example of that would be the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida, or the US military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy whereby they would allow homosexuals in the military as long as they kept quiet about it.

However, those conversations can be delicate and fraught, so I can see why many people want to keep them to a minimum in certain communities. I have a lot of sympathy for mods that have to moderate such conversations. In general, though, I don’t think it makes sense to remove comments or people unless they are clearly malicious. There are plenty of people for whom topics related to identity are alien or controversial or too painful and personal. Simply calling people “sealions” or “concern trolls” or “transphobic” or whatever and removing them from the conversation is not only wrong, but counter-productive, in my humble opinion. I think the vast majority of people come to conversations with good intentions, but different levels of knowledge, conflict tolerance, and interest in perceived off-topic digressions.

That’s a thought-provoking article you linked. Thanks. Unfortunately, ideological purity testing is a major problem across all sectors and spans the political spectrum. I was particularly struck by the part of the article that discussed whether “marginalized” status should be considered permanent or temporary.

I’ve worked in social services for a long time. Social activism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, marginalized groups need activists to push their agenda. On the other, activists often adopt that social activism as their primary identity and sometimes even their career. This sets up an incentive structure whereby they don’t actually want to solve the problem of marginalization. Instead, they focus on ideological purity rather than pragmatically solving whatever problems they face.

Sexual orientation, indigenous rights, trans rights, disability rights, race, gender, even recreational drug use, are all marginalization issues that have all received a reasonable degree of social acknowledgement and formal protection.

In all the years I’ve worked in social services, the one issue that never goes away and is never solved or even seriously tackled is the intersection of poverty and mental illness. We are getting better as a society with treatable mental illness like depression and anxiety. However, major mental illness or untreatable/undiagnosed conditions like lack of impulse control that make it hard or impossible to work lead almost inexorably to poverty, addiction, and involvement with the criminal justice system. The activism on that front is itself marginalized because the “fix” isn’t a matter of changing language or mind set, but rather a massive investment of resources. It is easier to sit behind a keyboard and advocate online for nebulous issues like representation than to get out there and make people care about issues that cost real money.

As someone who works with seriously impoverished and mentally ill people, I find the sometimes extreme drama associated with identity politics, representation, pronouns, etc. rather ridiculous. A lot of it is just people trying to externalize their personal issues and force others to acknowledge them, which is unfortunate when it poisons a project or community. It is a form of narcissism, essentially. People who do that should go down to the tent cities, homeless shelters, and jails to get some perspective on just how “marginalized” they actually are and whether publicly exorcising their personal demons is worth destroying the enjoyment of others in a project or community. Their energy could almost certainly be better spent in less narcissistic pursuits.

No, I didn’t know that was an option. Cool idea, though. No pun intended, but I’ll take it.

I just had to buy a new gas furnace and air conditioner, so, with my mind on global warming, I asked the furnace guy what it would cost to put in a heat pump. He said he has put in quite a few, but the costs have gone way up. He also said that in our climate I would need an electric back-up furnace for winter because a heat pump loses efficiency quickly at temps below -15C. The cost was going to be around $30,000, compared to $15,000 for the new gas furnace and AC. Also, electricity in Ontario is an incredibly expensive way to heat, so that would be a big extra monthly cost in the winter. An in-ground geothermal system would be about $65,000, he said.

It isn’t hard to see why gas is still popular, and that it will continue to be far into the future unless we undertake some kind of national project to replace our fossil fuel infrastructure with nuclear for the needed electricity and then convert our cars and homes over to full electric.