I also like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltMPMz37VPk

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TIL Ralph Klein, the alcoholic randian superman who led Alberta into this horrible dystopian future, is dying in a nursing home.

Too bad I'm sure it's a private, extremely expensive nursing home, and not one of the public, Filipino-staffed, under-funded, filthy disasters that he spent his entire worthless life wiping his ass on, but at least he's dying.

You have something against Filipinos?

Maybe he's implying that Klein does, which would make it so much better if he were in one.

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Uh, no. I have a problem with a corrupt and horrible government wholesale importing the healthcare system of another country in order to drive down wages, leading to massive healthcare crises in both countries.

http://www.cwhn.ca/en/node/39594

I dunno. America owns Canada, so,...?

Foreign companies mine and export Canadian resources, using foreign migrant labour, paying Canadians a pittance in rent, propping up a client government which exists only to reduce Canada's take and relax environmental protection laws. Canada stopped existing as a country a long time ago.

For all the complaining Americans did on the internet about how environmentally harmful Albertan oil is, it sure didn't seem like many of them were interested in talking about the fact that Americans have a controlling stake in it.

Canada's just a big empty, icy wilderness where American corporations are free to pollute and bribe and hire Mexicans without having to answer a lot of questions.

Though I guess it doesn't really matter. The oil companies figured out how to extract bitumen from American shale, and it's much more efficient and cost-effective than the tarsands, so we'll go back to being a sovereign-but-destitute backwater soon enough.

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I learned there is a going to be a problem again with computers and dates in 2038

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Oh, so that will be the third of Y2K of the century?

No. What?

Y2K bug was at worst a display bug, affecting a few badly designed databases and bugging out the way dates are formatted for human readers. It didn't really affect computers because computers don't naturally operate using human-readable dates. Computers record dates in the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.

The UNIX epoch bug is very real, changing the underlying logic computers use to represent dates. We can fix the issue on single computers, but the problem is that we have a very, very large number of embedded computers that need to keep track of time. There are more faulty computers than we can fix before 2038, even if we hadn't sealed a bunch behind walls and forgotten about them.

It's probably not going to affect your finances, but it will affect a bunch of elevators and security systems and stuff like that. It also won't all hit at the same time. Some computers track dates in the future and will fail, while others just have incorrectly-set clocks.

Speaking of Canada, I want to visit Canada once in my life. Advice given to me told me that I should visit Vancouver, then leave.

Is this good advice?

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http://twitpic.com/cdg3yz

TIL I live in Harper Canada now, not Canadian Canada.

TIL Reid's primary method of thought is confirmation bias

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Oh, recently I also learned that in Canada, malpractice insurance and legal representation is a monopoly called the Canadian Medical Protective Association. They are an extremely well-funded, state-subsidized for-profit corporation, which aggressively litigates, employs medical experts with a history of perjury, and abuses the legal process in order to harass and intimidate the victims of malpractice.

Recently they have made efforts to rebrand themselves as a professional agency working to improve the standards of safety and medical care in Canada. There's just one problem: in addition to defending medical doctors against civil negligence cases, they also completely fund and manage criminal defenses, and have done so to protect criminal doctors from prosecution ranging from fraud, to sexual assault, to murder. Criminal defense has nothing to do with medical malpractice. It's clear to everybody that their mandate isn't to protect doctors against slander and unreasonable claims, but rather to keep criminally negligent doctors employed and to silence criticism of them, making healthcare worse in every way imaginable.

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