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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • From the article:

    The answer to how I became sick may lie in what’s called secondary vaccine failure, which happens when a vaccinated person’s immunity decreases over time until they are no longer protected. This can take place when an immune system doesn’t receive the “boost” it needs from encountering the virus.

    “There is evidence to suggest that in the absence of these boosts, the immune response that is induced by the vaccine isn’t lasting as long,” said Janna Shapiro, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases in Toronto. That means even those who were fully vaccinated as kids can lose their immunity.

    This was me. I was at the doctor and he was having me get some bloodwork done. I asked him to check my measles immunity status, too, because I’d previously seen online of the possibility mentinoed above. My parents did have me immunized when I was a child, but I thought why not check? The results: I had no immunity.

    It was free (to me, the patient) to get the shots. My doctor had to order them in. It’s two shots a month apart, and then another blood draw another month later to check. I’ll be honest, it was the second most painful vaccination I’ve ever had (the first was shingles), but totally worth it. Ask your doctor to check the next time you’re getting bloodwork done.



  • Why should Canada Post be “solvent”? It’s mandated to serve every Canadian address. Have you considered what that means? It means it has to send mail to the furthest reaches of Grise Fiord (look for it on Google Maps). A business would never deliver there, and they don’t because it’s not profitable. A non-discriminatory mail service is not a profit business, it’s a public service of the government. Firehalls ans library systems have budgets, but no one expects them to be solvent because they’re services supported by public funds (taxes), not businesses.




  • The baby absolutely didn’t deserve to die like that. The parents, on the other hand, are experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices, literally what their actions brought on and deserved. Nobody has to say, “I told you so”, but neither do they deserve anybody’s sympathy.

    This is no different than parents refusing to get a car seat for their child because they think seatbelts take away freedom, getting in a car accident, and the child dying in the accident. The child’s preventable death is the parent’s fault. They created the environment that was unsafe for the child because they were arrogant enough to believe they knew better than decades of evidence. In this car seat scenario, parents might even be charged with endangerment or negligence.

    Or the grandmother who didn’t believe her granddaughter’s coconut allergy was real, because she knew better than the baby’s doctors, and put coconut oil in the poor baby’s hair and killed her. That grandma doesn’t deserve sympathy for what she did.


  • The benefit is mostly in “Oh, this (show/movie I like) is Canadian? What else is Canadian?”

    Let’s take Netflix for a negative example. People know it’s reputation for cancelling shows after the third season, so viewers choose not to get invested in Netflix shows, so they do poorly, and then Netflix cancels them. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point.

    But what if the reputation around the world was “CBC (or Canada in general) produces great shows”? Then more people will look for them and it grows the international audience. It genuinely annoys me when people call great, original Canadian shows, like North of North, a Netflix show. No, it’s quality CBC, Canadian, Inuit content. But if people think North of North is Netflix, how many are expecting it to get cancelled after the third season, and therefore not bothering to get interested in it?

    Also, it’s important to counter right-wing populism everywhere. Poilievre and the Conservatives (in its current incarnation) needs to be shut down and not taken seriously in Canada and internationally. He needs to be seen as a joke by foreign nationals, and for people to see right wing populists in their own countries as jokes. The more he calls CBC state media, the more everyone needs to say WTF are you on about, you dingus?


  • Canada, CBC in particular, produces quality content. I feel that these shows and Gem need to be better promoted in Canada, and outside Canada they need to be better promoted as Canadian.

    One thing that needs to happen is the Conservative traitors to stop lying about and maligning the CBC. They directly undermine our productions and industry when they spew false and hateful garbage to frenzy up their base. Canada is already a relatively small market, and half the country is against the CBC because they believe the ridiculous lies that it’s a communist state media outlet. I wish there were consequences for slander and libel for defamation from politicians.










  • *Doug Ford. Rob Ford was his younger brother who was the mayor of Toronto, and who has since died.

    I’m not convinced Doug would want the job, maybe in the future. Right now he’s got a majority in Ontario and can do whatever he wants within provincial preview. He can, and I believe he will, cooperate with Carney and caucus to do what’s best for Canada and Ontario in the face of Trump, because that will also be what’s best for him, too. Fair’s fair, he did a not-bad job during Covid and had a rare moment of cooperating with federal and municipal governments, and it truly made him look like good leader for a while. (He became his normal self after emergency measures were lifted and started blaming everyone else again.)

    If he became federal leader now, he couldn’t do anything but blow hot air for a while. It’s a bigger stage, but lesser power, and it doesn’t really do anything to benefit him. Doug is after dollars, but I think he does not like the maple maga and has no interest in dealing with them. Cut them out of the CPC base, they’re not likely to win again anytime soon. Or he could just stay premier and have a lot of actual power.



  • I used Studio Tax for a few years and found it to be adequate. Last year I tried GenuTax and instead and I didn’t like it as much. Instead of presenting you with the forms and you fulling them (which StudioTax does) GenuTax asks you a million yes/no questions one at a time. If you select “yes”, then it shows you appropriate, corresponding form to fill out.

    I guess the good thing about this method is you are presented all the possibilities, the bad thing is you have to yes/no everything, including a million things that probably don’t apply to you.

    Also, its not always immediately clear what form a yes/no will lead to, meaning if you select something wrong, you have to back track to correct it. (The questionnaire is linear, you can’t just jump back and forth.) if you have a very basic return, that’s probably fine. But I had some small self-employed income and international tuition, and going back and forth trying to yes/no my way to the correct forms frustrated me enough to switch back to StudioTax and start again.