• 36 Posts
  • 999 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • If you have sufficient battery storage and a good solar setup, it can work great for you especially in the summer.

    For the rest of us plebs, yet another “carbon footprint” gaslighting campaign where they promise something good but just end up shifting blame for electricity costs to you for running your AC on a hot day/heater on a cold day/oven at dinner time/dryer on the weekend, instead of owning their piss-poor management of BC Hydro et al. for the last few decades. Your time and convenience and lowered stress are worth more than any potential discount, plus you’ll probably still end up paying more because you use the most power when you need it, and that is when most other people need it too.





    • they have mobility needs that are incompatible with local transit and/or make typical cars more expensive.
    • they have family/other needs that mean they need a safer, more reliable car.
    • they will lose their job if they are ever late, so need to prioritize reliability.
    • they work multiple jobs, and/or have other requirements (child care, elder care, etc) that are incompatible with transit in their area and/or cannot be out off while a car is getting repaired.
    • they are unable to DIY repair older used cars, cannot accommodate potentially extreme repair bills, and can’t assess if an older car is reliable to buy in the first place.
    • the financing company will not give them a loan for something that doesn’t have enough value to avoid depreciating past the point of recouping losses over the life of the lease.
    • the insurance company will not insure older cars at a rate that is doable for the driver.
    • they don’t have the lump sum savings to buy a car outright, and loans are the only way to go to be able to continue to live and meet their life demands.


  • In Canada? Good luck. Unless you have something considered clinically relevant, it will be extremely hard to get this publically funded.

    Were you exposed to an industrial accident? Do you work in an industry where you’re likely to be exposed to heavy metals despite ppe? Are you showing symptoms of acute heavy metal exposure (and those symptoms couldn’t be explained by something else)? Unless you answer yes to any of these, odds are low. Why?

    Because if we don’t test, it isn’t real and no one needs to do anything about it. If they started testing folks (costly in and of itself) and found lots of people were high in lead, they would need to identify the source of the toxin. Finding the source of the lead would be extremely expensive, and we already know it’s probably from lots of sources that are expensive to clean up and damaging to industry. That would cause more costs. So in Canada, we just don’t look.

    This is how it has been for a long, long time. It took forever to get them to take lead out of gasoline, asbestos out of insulation, put warnings on fish for mercury, admit smoking was bad for you, etc.

    Maybe you can find a private clinic that can test for you, or a naturopath (often they do the same tests as an MD, at the same lab, just you pay out of pocket; backdoor private medicine). Maybe you can pool testing with a number of folks to get the food you eat tested, and source food from places less likely to be contaminated. While there has likely always been some heavy metal contamination in some types of food in some places, the industrial agriculture we use today has made it far worse, as had years of contamination from leaded gasoline, arsenic-based pesticide, etc. If you have the time and resources, maybe you can avoid it. Again, good luck.





  • Can’t renege on the part of the deal we’ve signed

    Well, that doesn’t seem to stop the US now does it?

    Laws and deals only work if both parties are trustworthy enough to honour their deals and follow the laws under an independent and impartial judiciary.

    Acting trustworthy with a party that is not trustworthy is insane. You need to make them understand that if they won’t keep their word, then no one else will keep theirs. Otherwise there is no incentive on the other party to behave. Do what the US does to others, and just don’t send the money.