And the truly horrific part is that their advice further guts the civil service. That leaves us in a position where we have to hire fake experts as a substitute for the actual experts we used employ.

Sears is the one that really gets me. In addition to full stores in big enough centres, they had depots everywhere and their own trucking network. And I mean everywhere. Suburbs, towns, villages: if there wasn't enough business to support a standalone depot, anyone could apply to set up a depot as part of another business. I even saw one once that was basically run out of someone's house. They moved into the top floors of an old boarding house and set up the main floor with a small museum, craft and thrift store, a bit of a cafe, and a Sears depot. I think they were also the bus depot. Any gaps in the trucking network were filled by sending stuff out on the train or bus, in the post, or with a small trucking company.

The logistics were handled and a very large fraction of their business was already mail order. All they needed was the online presence, and it's not like they didn't have customers practically begging them to do it.

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.

Morons is being too nice.

Our annual rebate for a rural household of 2 adults is about $1000. That doesn't sound like much, but that represents 4% of our total pre-tax income from all sources.

Edit: we're retired, BTW.

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.

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.

People make bad decisions all the time. Far worse than maybe adopting instead of procreating. Where were the babysitters when I was doing actual stupid stuff?

It should be the other way round, with "Indigenous first" policies.

Determine what sustainability means. Set limits in a way that allows for an actual livelihood without any individual or corporation being able to monopolize the fishery while allowing for a certain amount of noncommercial use, including for subsistence. If there's anything left over, open it up to non-indingenous people using similar guidelines.

They say it takes around 1.5 acres to sustain a person. Farmland rents for around $300 per acre here, so $450 for the year to access the land you need for food. The food itself just kind of grows from that ground and sinks carbon to boot, so that's cool. A human emits carbon, so that's not exactly great for the climate, but you're probably going to do that regardless so we'll consider that a wash.

I don't know when you last tried growing a balanced diet, but I can tell you that growing anything as a crop is quite a way off "just kind of growing itself."

Is there a way to follow what's going on so that I can plan to be at counter protests when this stuff happens? I need to travel anywhere from 150 to 300 km (one way), so I can't just show up on a whim.

I'm working on a travel and accommodation budget for this kind of thing, but just because I'm retired doesn't mean I can be 1.5-3 hours away from home without some kind of planning.

What I find frustrating is that Saskatchewan funded the development of some world class energy efficient housing back in, I think, the 1980s, and then did nothing about making it standard.

That's true, it is, but you need to check your definitions. A pandemic is an emergency when something dangerous and new spreads rapidly, threatening to overwhelm health care systems. Now that we have vaccines, treatments, and are working on health care capacity, the emergency is over.

That doesn't mean the danger has passed or that our "death from disease" rate has fallen to pre-COVID levels. In fact, it looks like the new normal will be to have about twice as many COVID deaths each year as flu deaths. All of those COVID deaths are new deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of COVID.

That death rate will continue until the vulnerable populations have been nearly wiped out, forever changing our demographics and life expectancy. By that time, we'll start seeing whether long COVID is as disastrous as it looks like it might be. If it goes the way many reasonable people think, we'll still need all the long term care programs that aren't being used by the elderly and infirm who got wiped out by the immediate effects of COVID infection, because we'll have a new class of infirmity requiring care.

On the plus side, all those 50- and 60-year old people forced out of the workforce will open up a lot of good jobs and promotions for the youth. On the downside, it'll still be demographically difficult, with too many in care, not enough working.

So, yeah, pandemic is over, but the endemic isn't going to be all that much fun for millions of people.