I can see normie memes sprinkled into this community doing well. Satire does well and people are often not super serious in the comments.

This… is not a normie meme. Weirdly well animated, though.

This is true every year, but this year is especially bad because it’s been warm and dry for most of the winter. There’s usually a few holdovers, not dozens, and especially not so many that actually need some type of response.

Dr. Marlaina Smith, I didn’t see no parental consent to change her name.

If voting NDP had any more effect than pissing in the wind in my area I would. Unfortunately, they rarely get a significant percentage of the vote and when they do we go conservative. So it’s either hold my nose and vote lib or help a conservative who doesn’t even live in the city get in.

If polling changes to show the NDP beating the libs here I’m 100% changing my vote. Until then, the system sucks so sometimes voting sucks.

ABC. Anything but conservative. FPTP is winner takes all, so vote for Liberal or NDP depending on who’s more likely to get in in your area. And pray to whatever force may be that someone puts in a sensible voting system at some point.

I mean, yeah? Basically everyone who could work from home in April 2020 was forced to do so, regardless of whether they or their employer wanted them to. Now there’s more of a mix.

Still some interesting nuggets in the report and article, though:

StatCan found that dual-income couples who make among the most money in the country were nine times more likely to work from home between April 2020 and June 2021 than couples who both work and who are in the bottom 10 per cent of Canada’s earnings distributions.

It’s one of those situations where it seems obvious that a lot of lower-paying jobs require manual labour that can’t be done remotely, but the discrepancy still feels really large.

Yeah, I’ve lived in Alberta my whole life, have lived and have had family and friends in both cities. Edmonton is absolutely more progressive.

That said, if you remove the party names and people vote based on policy (i.e. how our municipal elections work) both cities lean fairly progressive. It’s when oil gets involved at higher levels of government that Calgary tends to vote conservative, and that sometimes bleeds into other attitudes as party politics tends to do.

Front Burner definitely has ups and downs depending on the topic, host, and guest, but I struggle to find a way of getting the news closer to what I want. It’s about 20 minutes on one topic which gives me enough of an overview to figure out if I really need to care or engage further while still keeping up with contemporary events. There are lots of ways to get inundated with topics without enough context to know whether to care or worry, and there are lots of deep dives for things I know I care about, but Front Burner sits in a middle ground I haven’t found the right way to replace even if it hasn’t been as strong lately.

It’s unlikely 2024 will be worse than this year simply because this year was so exceptionally bad across the whole country. It’s not common for us to see problems coast to coast, if only because there are multiple factors that need to be bad for serious fire behaviour and it’s hard to get those to line up everywhere at once. When we talk about bad fire years, it’s usually due to a few provinces being bad, not every province.

That said, it will probably be bad, and 2023 probably won’t be the worst year in the next decade. Climate change is getting worse, forest management is slow to fix, and we already have so many communities in the trees that interface fires are practically a given.

Yeah, my wife worked for Costco for a few years and it was… fine. It wasn’t exceptional in any way, but it was decent. But for a retail chain, “decent” is a pretty significant improvement over the competition.

I’ve noticed that, at least historically, a lot of the buzz around Costco being a great employer comes from the States. Which makes sense, as the bar is even lower down there, so the same policies are much more impressive.