If all we cared about was saving the lives of the already-addicted, all we’d have to do is prescribe medical-grade opioids of known dosage to anyone who says they’re an addict, and the death rate would instantly plummet—not to zero, but to something around the much lower status quo from before the “epidemic” began, when prescription opioids were more easily available. Most of these people die because they’re taking adulterated drugs, or drugs of unknown concentration that they can’t dose properly. With a cheap, secure supply, they’d have more leeway to sort out other aspects of their lives, and some of them would eventually quit the drugs voluntarily.

Problem is, we’re more worried about people not becoming addicted in the first place, and everyone seems to think that the best way to do that is to restrict the legal supply. The two pull in opposite directions.

If we can find a better way of fixing the second problem, maybe we can fix the first one too, but I’m not holding my breath. In the meanwhile, governments will insist on grasping at straws in order to deal with the unintended consequences they themselves have created, and some of the straws they clutch at are going to be downright evil, like this one.

My question at that point would be, “So, did you sell a house in Vancouver, win the lottery, are you related to Galen Weston or someone with similar assets, or is artisan-made soap just that profitable?” Or, more likely, is the show financing them in return for permission to film?

Moose are technically deer (taxonomic family Cervidae, which also contains reindeer, red deer, roe deer, etc). And a big bull can weigh almost a (US conventional) ton. I don’t know whether that’s enough to trash a modern semi (based on an old memory of an apparently undamaged semi and a dead moose on the shoulder of an Ontario highway in the 1990s, I’d guess probably not, or at least not always), but I wouldn’t want to be the driver of the semi, either. Hitting them in an ordinary passenger vehicle—like any Tesla product—is something you really don’t want to do.

Yup, that’s exactly the one, thanks.

It’s one of those things that needs careful handling and is unlikely to get it. I can see it having some value in therapy, but only if there is, y’know, an actual therapist involved who can make an informed call as to whether their patient will be helped or harmed by talking to a digital fake of a loved one. Instead, we’re likely to see a ham-fisted “allow all” or “forbid all” call by regulators.

Aw, poor little Pierre is afraid he’s going to have to come up with some new rhetoric. I am too lazy to even bother to dig up the tardigrade-with-violin pic in response to this.

Non-geeky people will generally run things until they actually stop working completely.

Geeky people, on the other hand, may either adopt a new OS while it’s still half-baked, or jump through hoops to keep an old one running long past the point where a non-geeky person would have given up. Some of us do both, just for the lulz. Windows 11 on unsupported systems offers a new and exciting(?) way to scratch the same “can I make this work, just for the hell of it?” itch.

So, if, hypothetically, Trudeau were to bow out now, who would replace him? I’m not aware of any strong candidates, although that might be due to my ignorance rather than their absence.

Bad maintenance disabling the safety devices, or grandfathered equipment which didn’t have them, or inadequate employee training on safety. All of those put Walmart at fault to varying degrees. That looks to me like the most likely scenario in the absence of other data.

Or someone intentionally jammed any safety mechanisms, which would mean that person committed murder or manslaughter depending on the details.

It’s also possible that the deceased employee panicked when she realized what had happened and failed to operate a safety device she would have known full well was there if her rational brain hadn’t been overwhelmed by her lizard brain. That would be tragic, but not actionable.

We still don’t know enough.

The management might have preferred the store closure to having the bakery department marked off with crime scene tape in full view of any customers. And the cops probably appreciated not having a bunch of lookie-loos staring at them across the tape. Plus I imagine that the dead woman’s mother isn’t the only employee dealing with shock/mental health issues because of this. They may not have been able to get enough staff willing to come in to reopen the store immediately.

(TL;DR: There may well be something ugly going on here, but I don’t think the store being closed is enough evidence to prove that on its own.)

Kind of ironic that you’re excited about EVs, though.

“Excited” isn’t really the word. It’s more that I acknowledge the inevitable. Even if we ignore the damage done by burning it, the world supply of gasoline is finite, and the extraction and refining process is not only messy, polluting, and making many parts of the world beholden to countries with bad human rights records, but also has chokepoints—a relatively small number of large refineries—that are increasingly at risk as the climate gets worse. Better to get off it before we’re forced to do so one way or the other.

Nah, a converted electric milk float. 🤣

I happen to prefer not to always have my location tracked by a cell phone company or my transactions recorded by a credit card issuer. The ability to be anonymous is a vital component of freedom. Plus, you can still pay for things in cash if something has wiped out all local network connectivity. And yes, I have been known to pay for gas in cash—not always, but now and again (and an EV doesn’t need gas, anyway, so that question is increasingly irrelevant).

I do not require or expect other people to have the same priorities that I do.

What percentage of the children and youth receiving services at all were Indigenous? (I don’t doubt that there is a problem here—in fact, I think it’s probably worse these numbers suggest at first glance. Indigenous people account for just over 12% of the population of Alberta (2022 census data). Even if they’re a lot more likely to end up in the child welfare system, I doubt that Indigenous youth represent even 50% of that group.)

I didn’t mean disable it in software, I meant physically disable it by stuffing the phone in a Faraday cage (you can buy them for phones in the form of pouches with metal worked into them), which blocks electromagnetic radiation and therefore prevents the phone from contacting towers or satellites.

Or you can disable it from time to time at random when you’re doing something innocuous, and obscure the pattern that way. Which is probably easier for the average person than figuring out a second method of tampering with their phone.

Thus, for the time being, if you’re in the US or some other nation that has issues with women’s health, do not take your phone to the abortion clinic with you, or turn it off and stuff it in a Faraday cage until you’re at least a block away.

I suspect the news hasn’t spread outside the immediate area because it isn’t clear at this point whether her death was murder, manslaughter, misadventure, or a very ugly suicide. If the investigation shows it was murder, the story may get more widely distributed. (For those not interested in clicking through to the article: the deceased was found inside an oven in the bakery department; according to the article, the police have not yet reconstructed the chain of events that led to her being there.)

Even if the storage were strictly local, there would still be some privacy concerns. Hackers can’t steal data that isn’t there.

Sounds like the person you were talking to may have been the confused one. (In all fairness, if they have no great interest in wood, woodworking, or furniture, they don’t really need to know that engineered sheet goods don’t count as solid wood.)