Since the war began in 2022, the population has shrunk by more than 10 million, or around a quarter.

The country now has one of the world’s lowest birth rates and one of the highest death rates - 18.6 deaths per 1,000 people, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The birth rate has simultaneously fallen to about 0.9 children per woman, down from 1.16 before 2022, according to a government official.

This is another one of those posts that’s getting downvotes without an explanation.

Did I hit a nerve bashing Carney’s housing strategy? Does Gregor Robertson browse c/canada and not appreciate my trolling? Do Lemmites dislike the content of the article?

I’ll never know.

Climate change, and how we’re doing fuck all about it.

There are news stories about wildfires, droughts, water shortages, hurricanes, changing weather patterns, etc. But the climate change part is usually mentioned as an “oh by the way” and it’s rarely tied to stuff we need to do.

Depending how far we push it, climate change is either “just” going to cause mass starvation and novel weather patterns; or it’s going to make the Earth uninhabitable for humans.

Either way is fucking bad.

There’s virtually no mainstream news coverage of what we need to do. People say to buy EVs, but that’s not enough. We need to either radically limit the amount of energy we consume, or dramatically change how we generate energy. Probably both.

But there’s no coverage. Just tRuMp HaTeS wInDmIlLs.

There is no guarantee that any of this is affordable or geared-to-income housing.

That is a huge part of the problem. The housing affordability crisis is one of the causes of the homelessness and addiction.

Nice!

I enjoyed reading your blog. It’s been a while since I looked at an honest to goodness enthusiast blog. Thanks for writing it!

they need bolder policies, a bigger comprehensive vision, and to avoid getting mired in divisive identity politics

Exactly this. It feels like they’ve fallen into the trap of trying to appeal to a bunch of small demographics with targeted policies and actions. The Liberals and Conservatives can make that work because they just want to win, and they have a brand.

The NDP seems to be more about moving the Overton window. If they want to do that, they need to speak to a much wider swath of the Canadian population.

Cratered is relative.

They’ve stayed pretty low since 2015. The end of the Layton legacy. Their fundraising in the 2025 federal election was $3,736k, while the 2021 election had $3,994. Similarly, their Q1 and Q2 total fundraising going back five years is growing slightly.

But the following tracks with my biases:

McGrane said Canada’s National Observer’s analysis indicates the NDPs base is stagnant and it hasn’t been able to grow or expand that base since the Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair years.

“There’s a solid base of Canadians that, basically, come hell or high water, is always going to give to the federal NDP,” McGrane said. “It’s part of their identity. It’s part of how the federal NDP has become entrenched in Canadian politics. And this is, I think, part of the reason why the federal NDP isn’t going anywhere.”

Pretty wild that the author didn’t set up app notifications. Getting specific notifications from specific people on my wrist is a big part of the reason I use a smartwatch. But to each their own.

It’d be pretty cool to get a significant use case of my pricey pricey Garmin for ~CAD$40.

I’d summarize the article differently:

1. Europe has established pathways for heroin. Those weren’t supplanted by fentanyl.

2. European docs are less likely to prescribe painkillers (seems pretty wild to refer to a few dozen healthcare systems like this, but ok). More supports are available to people suffering pain.

3. Europeans were more skeptical of Oxycontin overall and docs were less likely to prescribe it.

4. European countries have more effective law enforcement, who arrest and prosecute people more effectively, but “Studies have shown that criminal penalties for drug use have been ineffective in reducing substance reliance or overdose deaths”.

5. European countries offer more treatment options for people trying to end their addictions.

6. Harm reduction sites in Europe are better integrated into the surrounding community: He pointed to countries like Spain and the Netherlands, where local stakeholders – such as police, health authorities and neighbourhood groups – work together to integrate drug consumption spaces into communities. These services, which he noted are also adequately funded, then become “part of the city fabric.”

Again, Europe is a bunch of countries. This article seems to paint with a broad brush, but my takeaway is that European countries generally have more comprehensive healthcare, and didn’t jump on the oxy bandwagon. And they did harm reduction better.

I suspect that existing drug distribution networks staying on heroin is pretty significant too, but the article doesn’t give numbers.

The list of products includes Dubai brand Pistachio & Knafeh Milk Chocolate, which was distributed in Quebec but is also available for purchase online.

…

The Public Health Agency of Canada said the outbreak strains of salmonella that made people sick were found in samples of the recalled Habibi brand pistachios.

That’s awesome! I’m not sure if/when I’ll go back to Linux as a daily driver, but I that I have your experience.

I didn’t even try Bluetooth. That would have been too frustrating.

When I was running a Linux distro regularly (1995-2015), audio output would break every couple of upgrades.

It was frustrating, because I was pretty happy with the rest of the OS.

A text post would be great.

I should, but the corp is pretty tiny, so it doesn’t come up very often.

In Cyberpunk RED, I wanted an NPC to sound uneducated, so she told the PCs about someone doing “dinographics”. I expected the players to ask about it, at which point it’d be clear she was talking about someone doing a demographic survey.

But they misheard.

So now there’s a tiny corp called DynoGraphics that does demographics and forecasting. The PCs had to do a lil data extraction heist because of it.

🤗

I used to work with a person who did. They didn’t want the bike stolen, so they’d fold it up and stick it under their desk.

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Recognizing from history the possibilities of where this all might lead, the prospect of any serious economic downturn being met with a widespread push of mass automation—paired with a regime overwhelmingly friendly to the tech and business class, and executing a campaign of oppression and prosecution of precarious manual and skilled laborers—well, it should make us all sit up and pay attention.