jadero

I retired from our volunteer department one year ago. I encourage everyone to look into what's involved. Most people see firefighting as this dangerous activity. While it can be, the training is spectacular and reduces risks dramatically.

More importantly for the risk averse, there are many tasks that have very low or even negligible risk by nature. Communications, logistics, pump operations, driving, equipment and hall maintenance, extinguishing hot spots after the fire is over, traffic control, IT support. In a decade of service, I never once found myself on the front lines, because I focused on support roles that would have otherwise taken less risk averse people off the front lines.

And for the women out there, our department has had female members continuously since the mid-1980s, many of whom have served on the front lines.

The letter I'm sending to my MP:

I urge you to fight against this proposal on moral grounds. That might sound like an odd point of view, but hear me out.

One of the greatest challenges facing us with online activities is not what we or our children have access to, but how companies are handling critical permanent identification. Every day there is a new report of some entity that has lost control of information that has a major negative impact on those whose information was exposed.

There are ways to effectively manage such information and there are companies and government departments deploying those systems. However, there is currently no legal or regulatory framework making those systems and methods mandatory. Until that legal and regulatory environment exists, it is not just a bad idea to expand data collection requirements, but immoral.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the possibility that some person is exposed as a consumer of pornography. I'm talking about those whose incompetence and/or low standards of care allow criminals to gain access to the identifying data for use in criminal activity.

I don't know about you, but the porn industry is the last industry I would ever trust to properly secure and manage identifying information.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

This cannot work safely in the current legal and regulatory environment.

In principle, there seem to be ways to securely, anonymously, and privately handle age verification. To the best of my knowledge, no such system has been deployed or mandated.

Thus, we are left with only the requirement to hand over critical documents to those who have no "standards of care" that make it safe to do so.

Have none of these people ever heard of any company or government agency losing control of personal information? How about they put some effort into fixing that first.

Basically, the Saskatchewan playbook. We no longer have provincial liquor stores, and it shows in staff knowledge (lower), service levels (lower), and pricing (higher). To my eyes, selection has gone downhill, too, but that may actually be larger market forces. (I like a wide variety of beers, but detest the fruit-flavoured ones. It's getting harder to find variety packs and especially variety packs that don't include the fruit-flavoured ones.)

My biggest problem with this whole thing is the legal framing of his actions.

If the bus had instead been a car with a single, middle-aged occupant, I think everything would have gone quite a bit differently.

If that single occupant had not been killed, but made a full recovery, it definitely would have gone a lot differently.

If it had been merely a cop observing the infraction, he would have escaped with just a ticket. At worst, I suppose he might have got a temporary license suspension.

I have difficulty accepting that the identical behaviour should have such radically different punishments just because pure chance leads to radically different outcomes.

Note that I'm not saying that someone who kills someone else should be getting off scott free, regardless of the behaviour that led to the death. But maybe there is room to increase the penalties when dangerous behaviours have little or no consequence as well as room to move on how we handle behaviours that rarely have devastating consequences. Let's face it, the vast majority of those who even deliberately blow through rural stop signs will never even get a ticket, let alone kill someone.

Personally, I don't see this person as a threat to our society, so I see no reason to deport him.

I'm well aware. I wasn't explicit enough in my complaint.

Having been forced to use the abomination that Telus built to provide Saskatchewan residents with web access to personal health records, I stand by my claim that not being able to build (or manage the building of) a website is reason enough to exclude them from anything that can actually cause harm.

This is one of the sites I had in mind when commenting elsewhere that management doesn't seem to understand or care that modern software development requires teams made up of those who specialize in everything from security to user interface design, not a bunch of random "nerds" popped in and out following the quarterly staffing budget.

I can see it now: random doctors with random qualifications assigned randomly to whatever task is at hand.

Great. They can barely run a website and somebody wants them to do health care? Lunacy.

As long as there also appropriate laws and regulations on the use of biometric recognition and retention of recordings in which there is no complaint.

How about instead of being "not trained to do" neck kneelings, they be trained not to do neck kneelings.

Under $90k and over 87 years of age.

Thanks for the insight. Regulatory capture is a problem with everything, it seems.

CanCon isn't the answer until it pushes actual content instead of writers and production staff.

If Dick Wolf had done things differently, he could have made Law & Order in Canada without changing one thing in the scripts and had it labeled CanCon.

On the other hand, if he had decided to make a Law & Order actually that takes place in Canada without changing anything about the various writers and staff or production facilities, it couldn't have been labeled CanCon.

I'm all for trying to build the industry, but I think it's more important to reflect who we are.