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Arcsquad12 posted:Interesting mood in Ottawa today. Obviously it's nowhere near as busy as previous years but there was a definite tension in the air. Lots of orange and black out there but also lots of red and white. Way I see it there's only three reasons to be wearing red and white today and those are out of ignorance, knowing and not caring, or to intentionally spite protesters. There were a number of trash wannabes marching around waving Canada flags who were just spoiling for a fight. We were down at Parliament Hill with our orange shirts earlier today and yeah the mood was pretty strange. It was very sparsely attended by normal Canada Day standards, or even compared to the BLM marches last summer, and the various coloured shirt factions weren't particularly organized. It was strange to see so many people wearing red and white around though. A lot of them didn't seem particularly antagonistic, it almost looked like they just didn't get the memo. But there was nothing happening down town, so why even show up if you're not trying to make some kind of statement? We did see one local chud try to debate a group of younger women carrying "No pride in genocide" signs, and there is something chaotic about seeing far right assholes defending the government. A good time was had by no one, and I think that's a mission accomplished for Canada Day.
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Jul 1, 2021 20:27
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kaom posted:“How old are you now” happened all the time for me, but only in French (I did not know there was an English version at all until this very moment). French immersion in BC (northern and coastal), the kids in the program would sing this at non-immersion kids’ parties too. Ahh my grade four French teacher would sing that when a kid had a birthday. For the last 25 years I wondered what it was.
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Oct 22, 2021 10:27
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Count Roland posted:Yes, absolutely. My personal life has become very busy for the next few days so I won't be able to post much until next week. Those effects actually look better than I'd have guessed. I think we'll have to wait and see whether the overall cost to society was worth the increase in vaccine uptake, especially when you factor in the age demographics of people who were stimulated into getting the vaccine by the mandate. When it comes to burdens on healthcare, getting a hundred 75 years olds vaccinated is much more valuable than getting a hundred 25 year olds, and so if the mandates mostly affected behaviour in those younger and less at-risk demographics, the overall benefit may not be huge. I think it'll take a while yet to crunch the numbers on that one. On the other hand, I think that mandating vaccination for COVID may have done a lot of damage to vaccines and public health in general. We've basically handed anti-vaxxers a rhetorical tool kit that will serve them for years to come. In part, this is because being pro-vaccine now puts you in the position of having to defend big-pharma, its impunity, vast profits, and close ties to government and regulatory agencies. You're also now in a position of having to carefully demarcate the forms of bodily autonomy and personal choice that are and aren't acceptable. As a leftist this is a horrible corner to be painted into, since while there are good answers to all those questions, the neoliberal mindset that takes marketized healthcare and the right to individual selfishness as immutable facts of nature makes it impossible to deprogram people in any reasonable amount of time. What's more, I think there's a good chance that opponents to vaccination will eventually find a legal case with respect to the mandates/passports/real or imagined vaccine side-effects somewhere that gives them an entry point into a supreme court challenge that might do considerable damage to public health in the future. This will take years to shake out, but I think it's clear that this vaccination program, while unambiguously good for public health, has unleashed some very ugly forces. I don't think that we'd have seen this level of rage if people had not felt railroaded into getting the vaccine, and it remains to be seen whether the long-term effects are worth the cost.
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Feb 11, 2022 20:44
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I think the bivalent Moderna vaccine has been submitted for approval to Health Can, and there’s essentially no chance that it won’t receive approval. So provided they have enough doses in the fall, I think it’s worth the wait. This is especially true since summer affords so many more opportunities for outdoor, low risk activities. But I am also a bit skeptical that they’ll be able to pull together a mass bivalent booster program by the fall. There just doesn’t seem to be any preparation for it from PHAC. It’s an open question how successful such a campaign would even be. Booster uptake is not great, especially for the fourth shot, but polls indicate that a decent percent of Canadians would consider a booster if it were variant-specific. Also they’re probably going to try to ditch the term “booster” as it’s not popular among the general public.
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Jul 9, 2022 19:25
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PT6A posted:I'd say it also fuels vaccine conspiracy theories, since there's absolutely no rational reason not to open it up if the vaccine is in fact fully safe. I think you’re probably damned both ways on this one. The very existence of boosters fuels conspiracy theories by contributing to the perception that the vaccines don’t work. What’s more, the fact that endless boosters provide a guaranteed revenue stream for the drug companies has not escaped people’s attention. Acting as though there’s some pretense behind limiting who can get boosted and when lends legitimacy to the regulatory process. I’m not even sure what the regulatory process looks like for COVID treatments, except that it seems like a foregone conclusion that we’ll follow the US FDA with a couple weeks delay. I think there’s quite a moral hazard arriving at any independent conclusions, because that could undermine the whole thing as well. People don’t pay attention to us in general, but if we did something that suited a certain contrarian narrative, say rejecting the under-5 vaccine, we would suddenly become a focus within the contrarian space. This is similar to how Sweden became an icon early on for its lack of a serious public health response.
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Jul 12, 2022 04:01
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pokeyman posted:Just seems like another precautionary own goal. When we know many diseases require 3+ doses for good effectiveness and we're still early days with the new disease, why did we decide 2 was the full answer? But you could be right that the positive effect outweighed future confusion. I have no idea how to test either way. It was a big mistake to ever imply that the vaccine could create lasting immunity against infection. The vaccine had incredible performance out of the gate - far in excess of any flu vaccine - and maybe that lead people astray. But the quest to develop a viable vaccine against respiratory viruses didn’t start in 2020, it has been ongoing for decades and it was widely acknowledged to be extremely difficult. An Omicron-specific booster will have a similar outcome in the longer term, so the only viable model is annual boosters like we do with the flu to try to blunt transmission early on and reduce hospitalizations during the worst of the season. Implied in this is that we’ll probably never crack 50% uptake again, but if uptake is concentrated among people with the highest risk then the public health benefits will be quite high. Again, there is no hope for a vaccine that provides long lasting protection against infection or transmission, so vaccine policy can not be based on that premise.
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Jul 13, 2022 00:55
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There’s a general sense on the part of Public Health that it’s better to keep our powder dry in expectation of more asks coming in the fall. I don’t know if this will work. Some new polling from Angus Reid shows that support for reintroduction of public health measures like masks and vaccine passports is only around 50% and dropping rapidly. This will only get worse, however, because the current wave will crest soon and end on its own with virtually no PHMs in place. Once this happens, there will be no way to credibly ask for PHMs to be reinstated even if you can prove that they would help. If PHMs are politically impossible, they won’t happen.
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Jul 22, 2022 16:36
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Kraftwerk posted:CTV has been posting some polls saying PP would win a slim minority government if an election were held today. The media really really wants a horse race or at least seems to be strongly in favour of voting blue no matter who. The race is his to lose, I’m afraid. I don’t think Trudeau’s Liberals have another win in them. To the extent that COVID was a social disruption on the level of a war, it’s worth noting that wartime leaders in democracies are at higher risk of being tossed out after the war is over. This, combined with the inevitable itch to see change of any sort after several terms of the same government, and the growing reactionary sentiment that PP has attached himself to, suggests that we’ll probably have a conservative government next time around.
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Oct 7, 2022 21:16
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DrBox posted:And what specifically in a four year BA in, let's say, Classics would have provided this "more training"? I think it’s more the idea that a four-year degree doesn’t fundamentally change the person, but the requirement to have one selects for a different kind of person altogether. This is probably why libs love it.
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Apr 27, 2023 02:42
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The trucker protest was the most effective protest I’ve seen in my lifetime. We’re living in the world the truckers wanted. Masks, mandates, and public health measures are nowhere to be found. More importantly, government would never dare bring them back for anything to do with COVID, and a strong public health response to any new is probably crippled for a generation.
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Aug 28, 2023 02:06
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Jordan7hm posted:This was going to happen regardless, nobody wanted restrictions. People actually did, and politicians and policy makers perceived this. It’s why the level of restrictions varied across countries/states/provinces according to their political climates. Canadian governments did public opinion research obsessively during COVID and their perception of what people would tolerate, and what people wanted, had a huge amount to do with what they tried to implement. Vaccine mandates, for example, were widely supported, if not demanded by the public, at least for a time. So even governments that swore against them ended up using them. No one in power wants the embarrassment of pulling a lever and finding out it’s not connected to anything, or worse that it spurs a public backlash. That’s the current state of public health thinking now, and I would argue that the trucker protest was a big part of what got us here. This isn’t the same as saying the truckers single-handedly ended restrictions. I do think those were on the way out no matter what. But as I said, the more important point is that public health is thoroughly spooked and operating from a defensive posture even in domains that have nothing to do with the pandemic. Not good! funny song about politics fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Aug 28, 2023 |
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Aug 28, 2023 05:34
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I’ve been trying to prune our Costco runs to the bare minimum. I find that the prices are better in nominal terms, but there are so many behavioural traps that can erase your savings. Even bringing home one thing you didn’t know you needed can do it.
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Jan 17, 2024 14:51
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I’ve enjoyed using ChatGPT to automate certain aspects of my job, mostly summarizing PDFs and converting bullet point notes to paragraphs. It’s also pretty handy for answering random questions that come out of statistical analyses. I do think that the dumber your job is, the more AI can do for it. The downside is that this will ultimately just create more dumb bullshit for workers, to deal with.
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Apr 8, 2024 22:38
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PT6A posted:
The CWB is essentially a Canadian version of the US Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). A Clinton-era policy innovation, if that’s at all surprising.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:14
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