Stone Mason, Canadian ExPat living in the UK, Hobbyist musician.

  • 12 Posts
  • 1.5K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 7th, 2023
  • Sturgist@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Vancouver police responses to deaths of young Indigenous women, girl under investigation
    2·
    11 hours ago

    My mum was at a party a few months before Pickton started being investigated, he was there and invited her to an after party at his. Luckily one of her friends knew his reputation for having Native women disappear from his property and warned her not to go.

    When people say that the FN community feels hostile or standoffish to them, suspicious of them…they never seem to remember that we’re still actively being oppressed in a lot of ways. There’s almost never an admission to the wrongs still being committed against the First Nations people in Canada and the US.

  • Sturgist@lemmy.catoCanadaPolitics@lemmy.ca•CAUT advises academics against non-essential travel to the U.S.
    1·
    1 day ago

    Canadian Association of University Teachers for the curious. Full text is below, emphasis and bracketed commentary is mine.

    Given the rapidly evolving political landscape in the United States and reports of individuals encountering difficulties crossing the border, CAUT strongly recommends that academic staff travel to the U.S. only if essential and necessary.
    In addition, CAUT recommends that academics who fall into the following categories exercise particular caution:

    • Citizens or residents of a country identified in media reports as likely to be subject to a travel ban.
    • Citizens or residents of a country where there are diplomatic tensions with the U.S. (so everyone)
    • Travellers with passport stamps evidencing recent travel to countries that may be subject to a travel ban or where there are diplomatic tensions with the U.S.
    • Those who have expressed negative opinions about the current U.S. administration or its policies
    • Those whose research could be seen as being at odds with the position of the current U.S. administration.
    • Travellers who identify as transgender or whose travel documents indicate a sex other than their sex assigned at birth.

    Academics should carefully consider what information they have, or need to have, on their electronic devices when crossing borders and take actions to protect sensitive information where necessary.

  • Sturgist@lemmy.catoNew Brunswick / Nouveau-Brunswick@lemmy.ca•12 Neighbours founder wants to build 'rapidly deployable' transitional housing
    2·
    1 day ago

    @HonoredMule@lemmy.ca

    From what I could see in the video I disagree with HonoredMule. They look sturdy, and built at least to code, and likely much better judging from the few segments where you get a half decent look at the window and door frames.

    I do wonder why they’re not made like “strip malls” or designed to connect with an enclosed cavity between.

    It’s cheap sound proofing, and maybe it’s easier to adjust to the site?

    There’s a few reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

    • sharing a wall, even if only slightly connected like with an “enclosed cavity” does in fact let sound travel much easier
    • easy rearrangement is also likely a factor
    • having an enclosed cavity creates a space for debris and vermin to gather
    • also makes access for any regular inspections and maintenance very difficult
    • fire loves enclosed cavities

    $7,500 is probably six months rent in most Canadian cities. If they last a few months longer than that, it’s probably a win.

    Without physically being there to look at the quality of work, or seeing video/extensive photos of the construction it’s really impossible to say how long these would last unmaintained without anything like a massive catastrophic weather event or a fire or whatever. I’d say that barring the aforementioned disaster scenarios, and absolutely no maintenance whatsoever? These structures would easily be habitable and safe for minimum 5 years.
    I doubt that they’ll go longer than 6 months without an inspection and routine maintenance considering the project seems to have broad approval and support from the community and several levels of government.

  • Sturgist@lemmy.catoCanada@lemmy.ca•Liberal government's high immigration policy created housing crisis: report
    4·
    2 days ago

    suspicious coming from Conservative owned media

    Postmedia, of which the Toronto Sun is a subsidiary, is majority owned by Chatham Asset Management. The founder of CAM is a well known GOP supporter. Postmedia group articles should be considered, at best, pro-American interest propaganda…if not outright election interference.
    We have Stephen Harper to thank for opening the loopholes that allowed Postmedia group to be wholly owned by American VCs.

    The Total Fertility Rate(TFR) of Canada hit a historic low of 1.33 national average in 2022.
    Here’s a Kurzgasagt video on why TFR below 2.1 is actually really bad. There needs to be more support for immigrants, and don’t fool yourself that Canada, or even most “1st world countries”, will be fine without immigrants. In 30 years Canada, without a regular injection of people, would be top heavy on the age demographic graph. 100 years and the US wouldn’t have to try hard to annex us, there’d be almost no one left young enough to actually put up an effective resistance.
    I live in Scotland, the TFR here is even lower, with a lower base population, and more people buy the Tory and Reform propaganda about armies of illegal Muslims outbreeding law abiding white folk.
    I hate to agree, even tangentially, with the Elongated Muskrat…as a whole, humans do need to figure out how to at least maintain our current population. A great way to do that is for people in high population countries to move to lower population countries. Are there going to be problematic people? Sure, I guess. There’s already people who are problematic born in Canada, or the UK.

    I know this is a bit of a rant, sorry for unloading. Built up frustration with people willingly sticking their face in the leopard’s mouth…

  • Sturgist@lemmy.catoLondon, Ontario@lemmy.ca•Why London's supervised drug-use site can't serve clients who smoke illegal drugs | CBCEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    While on the one hand this is ridiculous… If someone has smoked something dirty, or too high a dose, being in an enclosed space with the exhaled drugs could easily be harmful to staff. There’s easy and obvious ways to mitigate the risks. The easiest would be a booth with a negative pressure filtration system…so a high power extractor fan with HEPA filters. The real question is if that would be sufficient to clean the exhaust. You’re not going to be getting neighbours or pedestrians high if a client is shooting up, but if exhaust from a smoking booth isn’t cleaned properly you could end up with massive liability, worker’s comp cases, and just a general nightmare of a situation.
    Still think they’re leaving people in need hung out to die…

  • Sturgist@lemmy.catoBuy Canadian@lemmy.ca•An Open Letter to Canadians: Your Anti-Trump Boycott Is Crushing MAGA And It's Inspiring The World
    2·
    2 days ago

    I’ve not used Jerboa for a while. After a quick look, seems like markdown has been partially broken for a while now. I stopped using it because it doesn’t seem to get quite as much attention as other apps. I did quite enjoy it, but got tired of every other update seemingly breaking things. Having spent a year flagging bugs and interacting with the Devs, it just felt like I should try something else. I’m using Voyager now. It’s…fine. Similar issues but different. Has some nice QoL stuff that keeps me using it. The big one, for me, is the ability to tag users. So if someone is being particularly unhinged, or has “followed” me (intentionally or just happened to be commenting on the same posts) and being really nice or seemingly intentionally contrarian, I can slap a tag on them with a custom coloured banner with a short description. Handy for when you run into people repeatedly, and you want to know to read their whole thread because they usually have something interesting/wildly inappropriate to say…but they’re not so bad you want to outright block em.