Missed those. My bad. What led me to my error?
(Searching for announcement...)
Ok, I see where I went wrong. That was about low interest loans for those looking to improve the actual building process to reduce costs and accelerate construction.
Mea culpa.
E: and thanks for the correction.
Here's the way I think about:
The real objective is, or should be, equality in all things that are not explicitly biological in nature and equitable treatment even in those. Thus, none of us should be excluded from the halls of power or anywhere else based on our biology even as things like health care are tailored to our biology.
That would seem to argue against a place called "men's liberation." The reality, however, is that we have only nicely begun the journey. Both men and women have much baggage to discard by virtue of both historical and current cultural and legal norms.
Those cultural and legal norms have imposed different behaviours, thought patterns, and roles. Men and women have different sets of baggage to deal with, so it only makes sense to find our allies in our journeys among those who share a common burden.
I am a male. I have rarely been excluded from women's liberation groups when I try to learn and have occasionally found that my perspective was appreciated. I would hope that the same thing is happening here.
I hope that we are all working toward a more equitable and more egalitarian society, but we won't get there by ignoring the real differences between men and women that have been imposed by culture and law. We cannot fix what we do not acknowledge.
That's 3 times what is being put into a federal housing program and AI already has people falling all over themselves to invest.
Dentists joining or not joining wouldn't even be an issue if the program was properly constructed in the first place.
All the government had to do was plug into a long established system. I enroll, I get a provider number and plan number and I'm good to go.
When I had dental coverage through my employer, I gave my provider and plan numbers to the dentist and everything just worked.
That, of course, is for you to decide. But (you knew it was coming!) I think it's counterproductive to expect perfection and making much of this issue just strikes me as petty.
While there is a part of me that agrees with you, I also try to cut some slack. She is as human as the rest of us and there aren't many of us who are comfortable talking about our unsavory relatives.
Ideally, she would have whatever it takes to be both open and dismissive of this fact, but of everything that I consider disqualifying, this relatively minor personal failing doesn't even make the list. Let's face it, the only people making this an issue are busybodies and dirt-diggers, hardly the people she should be paying attention to.
On that note, I guess I don't understand why a Nazi grandfather has any meaning whatsoever. I think her response to someone pointing that out should be "Yup, can't pick our relatives," shrug, and move on.
Being descended from a villain or hero doesn't tell us enough about a person to have any meaning.
There is more to spreading out than urban sprawl. Our towns and even villages used to largely self-contained. Now you're lucky to find a bank, a bakery, a grocery store, and a hardware store in the same place outside of something big enough to be called a city.
People talk about walkable cities, by which they mean that people can walk to most of their normal goods and services. What is that but a town/village model for communities?
This is why aid needs to be delivered by military forces under the direction of aid agencies. Nobody really cares if a few civilians get killed, but when soldiers get killed, shit happens.
170k and still living paycheque to paycheque? That truly sucks. Honestly, I can't even imagine it. My heart goes out to you.
We live in rural Saskatchewan in a self-renovated 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. That is the single best decision we've ever made. If we had stayed in Saskatoon, we'd be either still be working, maybe full-time, or destitute. As it is, our annual rent and taxes is about the same as the monthly rent is in our old apartment. Some careful budgeting, a garden, and plenty of fish from the nearby lake means that we actually have a pretty decent lifestyle on <40k (combined income).
Maybe it's because all the younger generations really are smarter than mine (boomer). For most of my 50 years in the workforce, I was told:
For most of my working life, I took my father's advice to demand both my legal rights and my human dignity at great cost to my employment success. The 15 years I tried it "the right way" just left me exploited and burned out.
If falling productivity is a result of people finally demanding that laws and human dignity be not just respected but honoured and advanced, then I say let it fall.
I've heard people say that maybe it's time to reset productivity expectations or even redefine what is meant by productivity.
I think they make good cases for those things, but maybe it's time for, I don't know, something so radical as to be unthinkable. Like maybe it's time for the business community to look inward for the problem.
750 million. How many public servants would that hire so we don't have to always be siphoning public funds into profiteering on this and other programs?