Unless you live there, your visit to BC likely did not involve needing to use any of those systems or services. You saw the country through tourist eyes.

Add Canada to that list. 1 million immigrants a year and everything is collapsing - our housing, healthcare, education, nothing can keep up.

I wonder how easy it is to reconfigure floor plans in condos? Surely there will come a time where we just have so many small and undesirable units that the building owners need to consider making livable size units again. I don’t know a single person whose lived in one of these micro sized units and not talked about how horrible that living situation is for their mental health, yet in my city we just keep building thousands of these units every year now.

Sadly, some of the chaos is already spilling over. The guy slated to probably be our next PM is basically Trump Jr. and has done all he can to appeal to the far right here, who have gotten exponentially more vocal and empowered in recent years. My province is also working slowly toward privitized healthcare too. Canada is more and more just America Jr. these days.

And unless it’s name brand, most things that plug into the wall from amazon lack proper safety certifications too (power bars, extension cables, etc). Many will print the logos on them, but when you look them up they have zero certifications and aren’t recognized by those authorities at all.

I’ll back you up with a source since I just went down this rabbit hole on another comment https://www.dal.ca/news/2021/11/29/milk-jugs--cartons-or-plastic-bags---which-one-is-best-for-the-e.html

The cost to make and recycle carton cardboard polymers uses more resources than bags. Bags are found to be the most environmentally friendly. https://www.dal.ca/news/2021/11/29/milk-jugs--cartons-or-plastic-bags---which-one-is-best-for-the-e.html

There’s a dairy in my city that’s really taking off in recent years with the same glass approach too. A lot of restaurants, cafes, etc all using their stuff now and if their social media following is any indication then a fair bit of regular consumers too. I like to remain optimistic that stuff like this continues to inspire more sustainable, local food and beverage companies.

The damage done will last decades beyond the 4 years.

Salmonella - I put that shit on everything!

I hate how every retailer is starting to turn their online stores into these Chinese marketplaces. Best Buy, The Bay, Walmart, the list goes on. It’s just endless junk being peddled everywhere now in pursuit of endless profits. I feel bad for genuine quality manufacturers who just can’t (and aren’t willing to) compete because everyone is just buying throwaway garbage that ends up in the landfills in record time versus stuff with some semblance of quality.

As a guitarist, for example, never in a million years would I have found Chinese junk products when I played in bands less than 10 years ago. It’s was all brand name music gear from well known companies or small shops run by fellow musicians. Now it’s 90% noisy, poorly built Chinese junk that knocks off the big name gear, and well known outfits are closing up shop or consolidating.

A coworkers brother works for a big architectural firm in our city and said they’re absolutely slammed with office building conversion projects right now. A lot of office tower tenants have made it clear they aren’t renewing leases and the owners are all starting to plan new lives for the buildings in this new world. It’ll be interesting to watch things start to happen in the coming years!

Reddit has a lot more tracking and fingerprinting going on in their own app too that they obviously want you there for. Once you log into multiple accounts, it fingerprints you as the same user on all accounts. I had a few accounts; a work related one and a couple personal ones. Ended up with a temporary ban on one from a dick head mod, and ALL of them got banned together for 7 days because of that with a message (forget the exact wording so I’m paraphrasing) basically saying “don’t try to make another account to get around the ban because we’ll still know its you”. They’re mining the shit out of user data now, and also really starting to connect the dots on multiple account holders which I’m guessing will be to “deal with” people who detract from their IPO goals. Glad I left.

I’m not a public servant and my company uses Canada Life - hands down the absolute WORST company for benefits I’ve dealt with in my life. They regularly deny things we have coverage for, despite paying regularly for those things for many years. Email and support - forget about it. Every email I’ve ever sent them has an average response time of 6 WEEKS and it’s usually some bullshit response that requires another reply from my side, and another 6 week turnaround for a reply back. I know it’ll be several months to resolve any issue I need to email them about. It took us the better part of a full year to get thousands paid for fertility stuff that was fully covered under my plan - we literally did the treatment because the coverage was there and were stuck floating the money while they gave us the runaround. Everyone around our office has horror stories of these guys, HR even jokes about them.

Although I haven’t set mine up yet, I feel like RSS is the best way to go. There’s lots of news aggregation apps out there, but we need to keep in mind that those are all using some sort of algorithm to determine what surfaces to you, and that if you aren’t paying for the app that they need to make money somehow and keep pulling you back in - without knowing how the algorithms work, these could be favoring news that’s “engaging” which isn’t necessarily an even distribution of everything from the media outlets you like to follow. RSS gives you exactly what you put into it for feeds and you can determine what to read or skip over at least.

Having said that, even my 83 year old father can navigate his way to CBC, CTV and Toronto Star without issue, and he still gets a paper home delivered. He’s only ever gone to FB for family stuff, never news. I’m not sure how much effect Zuck’s hissy fit is going to have on most people.

I recently got a library card with comes with free access to PressReader. To be honest, I’ve found myself really enjoying reading digital copies of paper newspapers again through it. I can finally just read an article and not have to have it immediately followed by all the bullshit comments that social media and the direct news agency websites have. It felt so simple and fresh.

Something tells me Meta would be a-okay leaving the Canadian market if Trudeau tries to pull something like this.

Nature would finally heal itself. People would rejoice in the streets. I hope social media in it’s current form dies off in my lifetime.

Same. With our first kid almost here we’re starting to realize this isn’t going to be a place that has much of a prosperous future for him. Our politicians want us to be USA Jr. so bad, our polarization is stronger than ever, and most of our main industries are run by a few oligarchs that no parties care to break up. My wife works for an EU company so we’ve seen and talked first hand with many friends over there and despite their own problems (no country is problem free) it’s a region of the world that has a lot more to offer for social benefits and securities for families, and they have much less of a divide that all the far right nut jobs are sewing all over North America in recent years. Considering our options over the next 4 years.