jadero

Which I guess would mean that a whole lot of people would go hungry if we stopped doing that.

I'm not suggesting that there is something inherently evil about artificial fertilizers, but the scale of use is likely a problem.

And Scott Moe.

Here's an idea. Get the two of them a little love nest. Maybe it'll keep them away from the rest of us.

Edit: okay, that turned into a bit of a ramble :)

TLDR: at some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that Earth has not got infinite space or an infinity of resources. The sooner we start acting on that knowledge, the better for everyone.

Why would we ever want even more people when we struggle to properly serve the current population? And we've struggled for many years. Immigration is critically important, not for population, but for diversity. Monoculture in all forms is weakness.

I have no problem with urban lifestyles and actually miss some aspects of it. But we are rapidly losing our ability to support alternative lifestyles. Small cities that once thrived now struggle. Towns and villages are becoming less viable. Yet campgrounds are collapsing under the weight of demand.

I've lived my whole life, 67 years, in Saskatchewan. Our population grew by 10-20 percent during the time that Canada's population grew by 50 percent or more. In the 1960s an 70s it was rare to not be able to find openings at any campground on the spur of the moment. That started changing in the 80s and 90s when popular places would fill up on long weekends. By 2000, we had to start making reservations. Today, all but the most out of the way campgrounds require weeks or even months of planning and, often, all but the earliest of birds are shut completely out.

It may seem strange to focus on campgrounds, but I think that this demand is at least partly driven by the loss of non-urban choices in lifestyle. To a first approximation, it was never the villagers and farmers and ranchers who were driving campground demand, but the residents of cities. If everything is to be urbanised, what is left for those for who would choose something different? If we cannot serve the variety of human needs or even such a simple and basic human need to occasionally escape, what hope is there for anything else?

At some point, whether in 50 years or 500, we are going to have to find ways to deal with steady or even falling populations. Nothing about this little rock is infinite. The sooner we recognize that and start building our economies, societies, and institutions accordingly, the less aggressively we need to act. And the less aggressively we need to act, the easier it will be on people, businesses, and nature.

Fair point, and I don't disagree, exactly, but lots of people miss out as a result of similar kinds of rules without the flexibility to just work around it.

Based on this comment, I suspect that your real intention was to argue for the appropriate supports rather than applying sufficient effort. Fair enough, but let's more closely examine what you actually said:

... with some effort they could...

You did not say "with the right supports..." you said "with some effort..."

Further, "with some effort" implies that there had been no effort to date.

I appreciate that none of us perfectly express our true thoughts when speaking or writing off the cuff as we do here. If you are now saying that you meant "with the right support", I accept that without question. But if you actually meant that a suffering person must be expected to make efforts that would challenge the strongest of us, then I stand by my contention that you called them lazy.

I thought the idea behind high salaries was to attract the best talent. Turns out that it just floods the applicant pool with grifters and it's almost impossible to sort them out.

Also, did anyone notice that the "fixed" election date has been quietly put off for a week? I don't suppose that this has anything to do with the fact that the previous date would have left a bunch of MPs a week short of their 6-year pension eligibility? (Just a little tidbit dropped in the latest Sandy and Nora podcast.)

No problem. Next time, you can get me. :)

Some of this is going to come across nasty, but it's not, it's an honest exploration of something worthy of deep analysis and discussion.

Who put you in charge? Who puts anyone in charge? Why should anyone get to decide the arc of someone else's life? Why should someone else get to dictate the terms of anyone's life and death?

Whenever I hear someone expressing sentiments like "... with some effort they could live along and fulfilling life", it puts me in mind of all those busybodies who lament or even disapprove of my choosing labour over post-secondary education because I wasn't meeting my potential. No, I was meeting my potential just fine, even excelling. I've had a very fulfilling life, I just wasn't doing what others thought I should be doing. I was not being lazy by not putting in "some effort." I was making choices based on who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live.

What is within us that leads us to demand that others live up to our standards? What is within us that makes it so difficult to see that what is a reasonable effort for one may be an insurmountable obstacle to others?

To get mundane, I find it just about as easy to swim 5k as 2k and 10k isn't much harder, yet I get the impression that most people think of even 2k as beyond their capacity. Would it not be an insult to their very personhood to just call them lazy, the way you imply that this poor soul is just lazy?

We all have different capabilities and capacities. What is within us that insists that we are the standard by which others must be judged?

Some people cannot find the internal resources to continue. What makes the beating of their hearts so important to us that we ignore their own desires? That insist they fight, even after they have no fight left?

I don't know if you missed it in the article or simply didn't read it.

The case being discussed is one in which a family moved from BC to AB. As a result, they were able to leave behind an open investigation into child abuse.

There is no formal process of warning (alerting) other jurisdictions, so they got to start with a clean slate in AB.

The judge thinks that having these warnings cross boundaries might save lives.

So literally nothing to do with the emergency alert system.

It feels like Canadian governments have forgotten how to plan.

In a sense, they have. The civil service has been gutted to the point at which we're hiring consulting firms who delegate the actual work to the least expensive employees and subcontractors they can find.

And jobs shouldn't count as public benefit. It doesn't matter who built the pipeline, the workers were and are necessary.

If jobs were the primary benefit, they could have been created in renewable energy industries as easily as in climate and ecosystem destroying ones.

We should be counting up the number of schools, hospitals, and publicly owned renewable energy projects that are funded by pipeline revenues.

LeBlanc said allowing voters to cast their ballot at any polling station in their riding would require Elections Canada to adopt new technology so that a person would be removed from the voter list across the district once their ballot is cast.

Alternatively, they could trust but punish:

Don't worry about the very small fraction of people who abuse this to cast multiple ballots. Without a fairly large scale, organized effort, it's extremely unlikely for multiple votes to change an outcome under any electoral system.

Use the records collected at polling stations to identify cheaters then to throw every one of the offenders and organizers in prison and permanently prohibit any future participation in the process at all: no voting, no running, no party membership, no volunteering, no working on campaigns either directly or indirectly. Nothing, not even working as the night cleaner for an advertising agency that has political clients or a media outlet that covers or reports politics and elections in any way.

In the unlikely case that the multiple ballots are in a high enough volume to require rerunning the election, charge it to the offenders. They won't be able to pay, of course, but they'll be on the edge of poverty for the rest of their lives.