What’s this? The architect of the 1994 crime bill who helped the Dems get elected on a platform further right than the GOP on policing and prisons is pro-police? Huh. TIL.

Ghostrunner 2 is 80% off for $17CAD and runs great on the deck. It looks like some of the best speed swordplay vibes from Cyberpunk and I’m stoked to play it.

Also picked up Rage for 5 bucks.

I’m not speaking in absolutes here obviously. But it’s pretty well established that a very small fraction of people who take drugs (prescription or otherwise) become what we term addicts. There are lots of affluent addicts and alcoholics (I know plenty personally) but just because they have access to medical and mental health care doesn’t mean every one of them will go there.

You don’t see a lot of upper middle class people end up on the streets with heavy addictions because they can usually get into rehab, get help processing whatever it is keeping them down, and move on with their lives. Lots of poorer people can do so as well (the poverty and “success” porn content out there is easy to find) but for every one of those success stories there are thousands who never make it. I don’t think it’s hard to parse that poorer people have less culturally acceptable means of getting help (if they don’t outright end up in prison for simple possession to begin with, which I’m guessing those peers you’re referring to seldom have to worry about).

The thing a lot of people get backwards (fuck the war on drugs actually) is that hardcore addiction is virtually always predated by some type of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issue. To say that another way, mental health issues are not caused by taking drugs. When someone is very unwell and often poor (i.e. low or no access to medical and mental health professionals) they often find a way to self-treat the affliction(s) with street drugs. Those same underlying causes for a more affluent person will be dealt with alongside medical supervision (and often with the same class of drugs) without falling into the trap of addiction (because supervised, and supported).

Nothing cool about being a drug user by choice, nor an addict trying to cope. It’s just reality.

‘facepalm.exe’

I don’t have any personal experiences with any of these crew finder sites but I know lots of people who’ve used them. The catamaran designer I *apprenticed under met his wife through one. She had no prior sailing experience but was willing to learn, and he needed crew to do a Caribbean crossing, and that’s how the story began for them like 25+ years ago. They still sail together all over the world.

The other advice is good too. Just walk the docks and ask around. People love talking about their boats.

Boom.

I can answer this. The stuff that nobody takes off the shelf eventually gets thrown out too. But if you put brown rice and rice pasta in a hamper for someone that won’t eat them, and white bread and white pasta in someone’s hamper that won’t eat them, 100% of those staples go to waste.

This is anecdotal so take it or leave it but some of the best dumpster diving I’ve ever done was behind food banks in some regions because things like quinoa and apple cider vinegar and brown rice pasta are the last to go while white bread and Kraft dinner and instant rice are hot sellers.

I’m happy to stock up on the stuff other people find too weird to eat. If those things end up in hampers they get chucked anyhow. Letting people choose is a far more efficient system.

Lots of banks for instance will give you more veggie options if you don’t eat meat. Or more eggs if you don’t want meat. Or more frozen foods if you don’t want canned or instant meals. Etc etc.

The hamper system tries to shoot the middle. Nobody “eats what they get” if they literally can’t stomach the stuff “they get” and frankly expecting poor people to choke down calories that someone else picks out for them and expecting them to be grateful for it is kinda a sick way to look at it. Beggars can’t be choosers and all this… In a culture that throws away roughly fifty percent of the food grown and processed on this continent in the name of profit? Idk. Why not let people take what they’ll use and leave the rest?

If you actually understand how much food goes into the landfill vs what gets diverted to food banks the entire concept of food scarcity falls apart anyhow.

Poor all my life prior till about three years ago. Like highschool dropout street addict poor. And still made it out to protests and food-not-bombs cookouts and other actions across the country. By the mid nineties when I was a late teen I could see what the Walmart and Starbucks were doing to my culture and I tried to do something about it.

Yeah. If spending my last dollar on ramen from the local corner store instead of 50 cents at the big box has ever been an option, I’ve taken it. Happily. I understand the economics of raising a family in suburbia is different than what I’ve experienced as a person but I also understand that if everyone swallows the capitalism pill without coughing on it we’re all fuckin doomed. And you don’t need to be a punk or a radical to have access to that information in this era. At all.

Sorry but this model of foodbank was roughly over 70% the norm in most places prior to covid because it cuts down on wasted food (i.e. the hamper box system distributes a lot of food people either don’t, or won’t eat). Post-covid most banks had to go back to the hamper model to limit exposure to the sorting and storage areas.

I’ve both volunteered and worked at, as well as drawn from, several food banks. Idk if sask is just decades behind or what’s going on with this article but, no.

Nobody had to shop at the place offering “the cheapest shit” while all the smaller businesses were forced out of the market. People literally had a choice to spend one extra dollar, or end up here.

If you fall for the rhetoric that money is everything then yeah alright… Nobody could do anything about it I guess.

1. Walmart as a better alternative to buy anything is just fucking sad
2. Any business that was around during Walmarts rise learned from it and perfected competition-crushing aspects that it missed
3. People have been screaming that this business model will destroy quality of life for everyone given a long enough timeline, and it is now here

Lots of people saw this coming and the vast majority of people didn’t want to acknowledge it. I don’t know what else to say.

I understand that. However logging is taking out fir forests and replanting with pine and spruce. I hazard a guess that if the biomass were left alone less issues would occur given those primary forests have thrived for a very long time on their own.

In my early twenties I was looking for a field of work that was semi environmentally friendly. I had grown up in southern Alberta where it’s all factory farming, mono culture crops, and O&G. For a minute (as a prairie kid) I thought tree planting might be a good way. Basic research even back then showed me that young women who expect to get pregnant within the next fifteen years should not be handling seedlings because the fungicides and pesticides dusted on the root balls are so toxic. Then there’s the GMO monoculture of the species of trees they’re replanting with.

End of the day I didn’t feel like contributing to the next wave of suburb and luxury condo developments. Rednecks always like to say “they grow back” when we talk about protecting old growth forests and it’s obvious that trees (individually) can be grown on a given plot of land (like wheat in a season on the plains)… But the conversation ends when we talk about how it takes millennia to grow the type of environmental diversity primal forests have established.

Oh no! Pine Beatles and drought and other things are affecting our crop of trees! Who could’ve predicted such a thing!?? Bailout please.

In Arizona and New Mexico if someone loses consciousness and hits the pavement awhile they get life threatening burns. It’s crazy.

I met an old drunk outside of Phoenix many years ago who passed out on top of a fire ant colony for a few hours and woke up covered head to toe in attacking angry ants. It’s an inhospitable place!

Who’s even still on Twitter at this point besides racists and transphobes and companies who have no tech department to help them divest to a better platform?

Shopify laid off a couple thousand people, then “chaos monkey’d” the entire company just over a year ago, and forced everyone to open an FB Workplace acct as though it was going to boost productivity somehow having us split our comms between slack (which already sucks) that we’ve been using for years and some half assed afterthought Zuck’s team came up with (at least the public facing piece) leading into their own layoff waves.

I left Shopify happily and voluntarily and I’m not gonna pour one out for FB Workplace, at all. Good riddance to bad garbage.

Worked at Shopify for over two years and left voluntarily ahead of wave three of mass layoffs. Watched dozens of great people get shafted for cost-cutting. And I am still close with someone who trains our overseas replacements. To be clear, I have zero bones to pick with our peers working overseas, they’re also great people. What I have a problem with is Shopify’s explosive growth over lockdowns necessitating over-hiring (in their words) and meanwhile the user base nearly tripled over the same period.

They didn’t lay people off because the workload eased up. They did it because they reached peak inflection enshittify status. They trimmed thousands of locals, contracted out for pennies on the dollar, and wall street and the enterprise clients now know they’re willing to spill blood to thrive. Shopify is now part of the tech cool kids club.

It’s not even ironic that they don’t want to chip in for the Canadian tax base. They don’t need Canada anymore. They’re only staying here on paper because our legal system is more forgiving than almost anywhere else. They’re laughing, heartily.

Colonizers gonna colonize, till they destroy the place.

He has a podcast too called Better Offline. Just started it up a few months ago.