jadero

Everything I've read makes me think that a scam is obvious only to those not taken in and those who get the benefit of reading a news story.

This particular scam is a relatively minor variation on the "bank examiner" scam that has been successfully operating pretty much since the invention of banking. With the right play, even people familiar with the scam can be taken in.

In the 1980s, I was listening to a news broadcast that contained 3 stories of note:

• national economy is doing fine
• Saskatchewan provincial economy is doing great
• Saskatoon gets its first food bank

From that, I concluded that there are two economies that are either completely separate or only very loosely connected: the lived economy of the vast majority of the workforce and the financial economy of trading in stocks, commodities, and financial instruments.

Over the next few years, it became obvious to me that reporters, journalists, politicians, pundits, think tanks, and business groups care only for the economy of the financial sector. I've seen nothing since to make me change my mind.

And the community name gets a new meaning 😛

I've never heard of it. At home, we watched "Chez Hélène" (heh. I still remember the correct accents because they remind me of a surprised face). Anyway Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne

Thanks for calming me down. At one of my jobs I was known as "that safety nazi," which I wore as a badge of honour.

It makes sense to make sure police officers aren't forced into bankruptcy while charges are pending but ideally we'd rely on EI and social insurance for that.

Better yet, would be to leave it up to the union to provide suspension pay in the same way that many unions have strike funds to help their members survive strikes and lockouts.

I bet it wouldn't take long for the unions to drop their support of these criminals. That, in turn, would make it easier to fire them.

While it's not only you, it is a very small number of very vocal, very politically involved people who care much about that.

I'm neither of those things. I just wanted for once in my life to see the ruling class do something simple, obvious, and right. In fact, it's so simple, obvious, and right, that it boggles my mind that it didn't happen.

I've been disillusioned to varying degrees by political machinations over the last 50 years, but failure to act on this makes me feel like just giving up on the whole system. I've never been overly cynical, but now it seems that's all I have left.

I have no idea how difficult it is to run a country and no idea how the government deals with all the complexity and uncertainty. Choosing a voting system is one of the very few things I feel I am able to get my head around. It is so patently obvious that everyone involved deliberately chose to not do the right thing, even though it was simple and obvious.

Okay, sorry for the rant.

Based on the article, it sounds like the inverse of a "phone tree". Instead of a coordinated system of people calling others to quickly spread word of something, it's a coordinated effort to get lots of people calling one recipient.

Humankind may have to abandon the praries, later this century, exactly as most of California, most of Texas, most of the Middle East, & most of India are going to be unusable.

I live near the tip of the Palliser Triangle in Saskatchewan. My guess, and it's only a guess, is that having Lake Diefenbaker isn't going to make enough of a difference to matter.

The people in charge already have trouble keeping it full because of overall flow reductions. Agreements or not, Alberta still gets first crack at the South Saskatchewan River and overall flow is likely going to keep going down. Irrigation projects are rapidly becoming a boondoggle, not a solution.

Yes, getting rid of FPTP was the main reason that I voted for something other than NDP in ages. This issue is important enough to me that I might even risk voting (choke) Conservative (gag) if I honestly thought we'd get a better voting system out of it.

I will always remember him for the purchase of a pipeline to hell, if that counts.

Also for not making a stronger effort to replace our first past the post voting system during what looks to have been a narrow window of opportunity, but that might just be me.

There are no words...