I previously worked at an insurance company some years ago. Back then the company was complaining that flood maps were something like decades out of date, and that was irresponsible to let developers build and sell homes to unsuspecting homeowners who had no reason, or even a way, to know they were in a flood plain.

I suspect nothing has changed in the intervening years.

Did you not see the part directly after that said he started blaming everyone else?

Duolingo got me enough vocabulary in Spanish to put the simplest sentences together, and then follow more robust lessons. I still think it was a good starting point, but I won’t use it anymore on principle.

*Doug Ford. Rob Ford was his younger brother who was the mayor of Toronto, and who has since died.

I’m not convinced Doug would want the job, maybe in the future. Right now he’s got a majority in Ontario and can do whatever he wants within provincial preview. He can, and I believe he will, cooperate with Carney and caucus to do what’s best for Canada and Ontario in the face of Trump, because that will also be what’s best for him, too. Fair’s fair, he did a not-bad job during Covid and had a rare moment of cooperating with federal and municipal governments, and it truly made him look like good leader for a while. (He became his normal self after emergency measures were lifted and started blaming everyone else again.)

If he became federal leader now, he couldn’t do anything but blow hot air for a while. It’s a bigger stage, but lesser power, and it doesn’t really do anything to benefit him. Doug is after dollars, but I think he does not like the maple maga and has no interest in dealing with them. Cut them out of the CPC base, they’re not likely to win again anytime soon. Or he could just stay premier and have a lot of actual power.

When Liberals rob everyday people to give to the rich, they do it while smiling at you. When Conservatives rob everyday people to give to the tich, they do it while simultaneously robbing you of rights and yelling slurs at you.

So yes, Liberals are better. It doesn’t mean they’re the best, or even good, but they are certainly less bad.

So credit card issuers are bad now?

There’s too much to keep track of these days.

Bloodletting is therapeutic… for some very specific conditions. For example, hemochromatosis, where the body has too much iron, and there has been some preliminary study that blood donations are a way to reduce the amount of PFAS in blood.

But everyone has PFAS in their blood; not every male has (beyond normal) phimosis.

I had one interviewer specially say she was committed to getting back to each candidate, no matter the outcome. I expressed genuine appreciation for that, saying that most places just ghost people.

She ghosted me.

I used Studio Tax for a few years and found it to be adequate. Last year I tried GenuTax and instead and I didn’t like it as much. Instead of presenting you with the forms and you fulling them (which StudioTax does) GenuTax asks you a million yes/no questions one at a time. If you select “yes”, then it shows you appropriate, corresponding form to fill out.

I guess the good thing about this method is you are presented all the possibilities, the bad thing is you have to yes/no everything, including a million things that probably don’t apply to you.

Also, its not always immediately clear what form a yes/no will lead to, meaning if you select something wrong, you have to back track to correct it. (The questionnaire is linear, you can’t just jump back and forth.) if you have a very basic return, that’s probably fine. But I had some small self-employed income and international tuition, and going back and forth trying to yes/no my way to the correct forms frustrated me enough to switch back to StudioTax and start again.

A little over a year ago, a guy tried to ask me out and I’m the process said a few dumb things in an attempt to impress me. The dumbest of them all was that he was planning to buy a Cybertruck as his next vehicle. By the time he’d said this, I’d already long made up my mind about this guy. Mind, this was the period of time when Elon was just an asshole and hadn’t gone full Nazi yet, but even then, this dude’s choice of vehicle told me I’d made the right choice.

Theseadays I wonder if that guy ever got his idiot truck, and, whether he did or not, if he’s changed his mind about it.

Librarians go to school to learn how to manage information, whether it is in book format or otherwise. (We tend to think of libraries as places with books because, for so much of human history, that’s how information was stored.)

They are not supposed to have more information in their heads, they are supposed to know how to find (source) information, catalogue and categorize it, identify good information from bad information, good information sources from bad ones, and teach others how to do so as well.

I had to tell a bunch of librarians that LLMs are literally language models made to mimic language patterns, and are not made to be factually correct. They understood it when I put it that way, but librarians are supposed to be “information professionals”. If they, as a slightly better trained subset of the general public, don’t know that, the general public has no hope of knowing that.

The Walrus, an independent magazine with long forum journalistic stories. https://thewalrus.ca/

Canadian news is in danger. Our sources are primarily owned by right-wing Americans. We need to protect CBC and publications like the Walrus.