• 4 Posts
  • 388 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Vitamin D supplementation is recommended for all Canadians, not just vegans. And Omega 3, D, and B12 are common supplement recommendations (actually backed by strong evidence) for the general population. (Although the benefits of Omega 3 supplementation for heart health has come under scrutiny, I think its anti-inflammatory effects are still pretty widely supported.)

    Anyway, no need for the vitriol. Nobody is forcing you to go vegan. If it works for them, then great! It’s definitely better for the planet to eat less meat, so power to them. (I eat way too many eggs to ever consider going vegan, personally.)


  • Yeah, the new Canada’s Food Guide is actually really good. (The one below is modeled after it, but changed to vegan foods).

    Like, it seems like a reasonable, evidence-based, practical guide to healthy eating habits. (Unlike every single previous version going back to the 50s that might as well have been propaganda from the Canadian Wheat Board.) The latest revision is from 2019, iirc, and it’s the first time I’ve felt comfortable using it as the basis of classroom instruction.



  • To be fair to Loblaws, I’ve never seen them change prices with these mid-day, so they’re not engaged in “surge pricing” that I’ve heard of. (I haven’t been to Loblaws since the start of the boycott, but I don’t expect it’s changed.)

    But I do wonder about the legality of that; right now, if the price at the till doesn’t match the item price, you get the first one free and the rest at the marked price (up to $10 items; above that it’s $10 off the marked price for the first item). But my impression is that policy is from Loblaws signing some sort of grocery code ages ago when scanners came in, essentially to assure consumers that they wouldn’t be scammed by scanners ringing up items at higher prices than advertised. I don’t think that is legally mandated.

    So, then, what happens if the price changes between when you put it in your cart and when you arrive at the till? Anyone engaging in surge pricing where the timing isn’t clearly marked in advance is going to get into a lot of trouble with consumer backlash, at the very least, but I hope it’s illegal, too.



  • This seems like it might work really well. We’ve evolved to be social creatures, and internalizing the emotions of others is literally baked into our DNA (mirror neurons), so filtering out the emotional “noise” from customers seems, to me, like a brilliant way to improve the working conditions for call centre workers.

    It’s not like you can’t also tell the emotional tone of the caller based on the words they’re saying, and the call centre employees will know that voices are being changed.

    Also, I’m not so sure about reporting on anonymous Redditor comments as the basis for journalism. I know why it’s done, but I’d rather hear what a trained psychologist has to say about this, y’know?



  • Well said, and you touched on one of the things I like most about Behhaw, that people are actually willing to put effort into writing with sufficient depth to address complex topics authentically, and others are willing to read everything and respond in good faith, even when they disagree.

    I browse Beehaw’s somewhat-curated-by-defederation /everything quite frequently, too, and I rarely ever have any snarky replies to my comments. It’s lovely. Granted, conversation threads are generally quite small, but I don’t need an endless firehose of content, so that’s not a problem.

    I don’t have any other Lemmy accounts to compare, but I didn’t enjoy reading /everything from a Lemmy app that pulls from it’s own feed instead of your logged-in instance feed. On Reddit, I mostly enjoyed smaller niche subs, and very few of the popular ones.


  • That’s terrible, but so are the treatments this article is suggesting. ABA is abuse.

    Behaviorism, in general, has lots of research supporting its efficacy in changing behavior, but completely ignores the mental health effects of the trauma from the behaviorist interventions.

    This might be made more clear with a thought experiment from Dr Becky Kennedy’s mostly-unrelated parenting book, The Good Inside. (Great book, btw. Highly recommended for all parents.) I know a 100% effective treatment for any childhood behavior: when the child engages in the behaviour, lock them outside in a cage overnight. It will take at most 3 treatments and they’ll never exhibit that behavior again, guaranteed!

    Aside from the hypothetical example obviously not passing ethics review, that’s literally how behaviorism research is conducted: the only thing they measure is efficacy in altering behaviour. That’s a really low bar.

    ABA is “effective” because children are being conditioned to avoid being abused.


  • I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, and I’m still not sure why a 100% inclusion rate is a problem. (With various exemptions for primary residence sales and small business sales, maybe with a $1MM lifetime maximum? idk, just making up a number.)

    Are they concerned that people just… aren’t going to invest their capital to earn more money if they’ll be taxed on the profits? Or is this just a global “race to the bottom” that they won’t invest in Canada because they can earn more if they invest elsewhere?

    Maybe something like: 50% inclusion up to $100K, 75% inclusion up to $1MM, then 100% inclusion thereafter, and add a mechanism to spread capital gains over several years so people making single-lifetime large capital gains aren’t treated the same as people earning millions every year.

    That would still incentivize small-business creation and startups without letting multimillionaires off the hook.


  • Very good video overall, except I don’t think he made it clear initially that there’s a primary residence exception on capital gains tax, so people might be confused that this tax will affect them when it won’t. Similarly, the 1¼ million lifetime small business sale exemption should have been introduced earlier, imho.

    Like, the example could have been a $2.6 million small business sale instead, then it would actually compare the old $1 million exemption with the new $1.25 exemption, and the old 50% incision rate with the new 50->66% inclusion rate to get a more accurate “apples-to-apples” comparison.

    Napkin math:

    Old capital gains tax: about 1 million is exempt, so paying 50% capital gains on remaining 1.6 million is 800K income, at 53% is about 424K tax.

    New capital gains tax: 1.25M is exempt, so include 50% capital gains on next 250K, then 66% on the remaining 1.1M. Total capital gains income is 851K. 53% tax on 851K is only $27K more, for $452K, which is a 6.6% increase.

    Vs. getting increased services over your entire lifetime from the ultra wealthy paying closer to their fair share? Even a small business owner selling a $2.6MM business comes out way ahead.

    Also, do we really want to give doctors a pass for incorporating to shelter their income against income tax for their entire lives then say that’s a problem when they’re asked to pay closer to their actual fair share income tax when they retire? Really?

    And we’re worried about people selling their multimillion dollar vacation properties paying more tax?

    Anyway, I get the video is trying to be “balanced”, and it’s close, but it’s still biased toward the ultra wealthy.



  • The new rules aren’t even strong enough; the CRA calculates the mileage rate every year, yet BC is letting companies get away with paying about half the CRA rate. Why? Tips should be just that—a tip, not required so they can cover their vehicle costs.

    If people can’t afford to pay minimum wage + mileage, then they shouldn’t get service. Go pick it up yourself, or make a frozen pizza or something. Or take public transit or a (regulated) taxi.

    I have some sympathy for those with disabilities who can’t drive and need to deal with abysmal public transit wait times, but their disability doesn’t trump gig workers’ rights to the minimum wage.