They’re super important. They close the loop on power in the district, so that the superintendent is accountable to the community.

Trustees have power to choose/replace the superintendent, who is the “CEO” who theoretically controls everything, but really just Directors and Principals. Directors manage principals and vice-principals. They in turn manage teachers, who manage students (who complain to parents) and communicate learning achievement to parents.

Parents, in turn, can go to trustees if they have a complaint that is not addressed by the district and they usually respond well (if it’s reasonable) since parents elect the trustees. (Trustees hardly get paid much, either. It’s not a role to pursue for wealth.)

This is going to be one of the biggest legacies of the current Republican administration’s Project 2025 agenda. Not only the direct cuts to research, but also the massive cuts to educating the next generation of researchers. Also related: banning/limiting whole swathes of research pathways, like stem cells and mRNA (as high profile examples).

Totally agreed, though; primary research is critical for solving most (all?l of the major problems we are facing. Healthcare, of course, but we’re on a knife edge of major Earth cycles breaking down, accelerating anthropogenic climate change. The collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is terrifying, as is runaway carbon escape from defrosting tundra. And the total spending on primary research trying to solve these existential crises is a budgetary rounding error.

I agree with virtually everything you said, and I still stand by my comment, too. This was Carney’s only politically-viable response.

We can still respect that anyone’s death is hard on their family. His children didn’t choose who their father was, and they’re going to grow up without him, now. I can empathize with their pain without supporting any of the (many) hateful things he’s said and done.

Similarly, condemning political violence is a pretty reasonable take, even if only for the chilling effect political violence has on democracy. Democracy only works with open sharing of ideas, including from those we disagree with. For example, identifying that Kirk was a closed-minded, hateful bigot is important when discussing his legacy, and I shouldn’t need to risk being lynched (or fired) for saying so.

It’s also fair that politicians may not want to come out openly “trash talking” someone right after their death, as that will just be used as ammunition by their political opponents to increase political polarization. Saying “our thoughts are with the family in this difficult time” isn’t taking a stance on anything, while also saying something so political opponents don’t spin silence into a manufacturer controversy.

Yeah, I installed Enterprise edition on my desktop, which allows you to cut out all the bloat and spyware. But it takes a long time to do, and I’m not sure I got everything since Windows Updates can change anything.

That love of tinkering is why I’ve landed on not using an immutable distro for my first time installing Linux since the 00s. CachyOS is what I landed on; now I just need to catch up on work so I can take a day to tinker with my setup.

For context, I semi-broke my current Windows 11 install by trying to manually edit the registry to remove all traces of a piece of invasive, uninstallable bloatware (that comes direct from ASRock… the bastards) I accidentally installed. Turns out my sound drivers are from the same company, so when I deleted all entries with that company in the search terms, I FUBARed my Bluetooth audio and 3.5mm microphone. And didn’t backup the registry.

I like to tinker, and if I need to reinstall my OS anyway, so now is the time to finally switch!

Do you need to tell them? I never did. I just assumed there’s some sort of government system to track which citizens are residents in each province, if nothing else to keep people from “double dipping” in two provinces’ healthcare systems.

Then again, BC charges health premiums to seniors, right? So maybe keeping an AB health card is a way seniors might try to dodge that, I guess? (I’m just here on vacation, really!)

Nah. You need to laminate it yourself, which is technically not allowed for some reason, apparently, but everyone does it anyway.

Dementia and Parkinson’s. That sucks.

My kiddos love listening to his self-narrated stories on Spotify. (“OK Google. Play Robert Munsch stories.”) His love for children is so clear in his interactions with them in those recordings.

I mean… What are Canadian MPs supposed to do about US corruption? It’s up to them to figure it out. It’s the host country’s choice where to host it; if the US administration chooses to line their own pockets, it’s up to US legislators/courts to hold them to account.

Or am I missing something?

I think most people learned that because of COVID, didn’t they? N95s (worn properly) block 95% of pm2.5, which takes a danger level of 400 μg/m³ (well into the hazardous range) down to 20 μg/m³ (about half the cutoff for “unhealthy”).

Yet only a handful of people locally were wearing N95s when the levels were that high, locally. People just don’t care about their health, I guess? Not sure how else to interpret it.

The Paradox of Tolerance

idk about these; I haven’t driven significantly in Toronto in over a decade, but Calgary has mobile speed cameras in unmarked cars, so they can be moved around. They just look like a car parked on the side of the road. And people slow down for school zones in Calgary.

I think they’re very effective. As soon as you cross the border to BC, where automated speeding cameras are illegal, people drive about 10km/h faster, it feels like. On Deerfoot (in Calgary), you’d occasionally have someone pass at +30. On the Island Highway, +40 isn’t atypical. (That’s 150 km/h… Crazy fast, especially knowing that kinetic energy is the square of velocity.) And people regularly blast through school zones in BC at +30, and +40 isn’t overly unusual (70 km/h in a 30 zone). (Comparatively, 50 in a 30 zone was the usual max I noticed in Alberta).

Or maybe it’s just that BC drivers are massive speeders, and the speed cameras thing isn’t the reason. Hard to know without data.

Nobody here has mentioned the elephant in the room: Corporations are being allowed to “legally” dodge $15 billion in taxes every year