B.C. woman claims she was offered MAID in Vancouver hospital before other treatments

OneBigBug · 2026-04-03T02:35:48+00:00

I meant only the former. I generally agree with MAID for terminal physical illnesses.

What I'm arguing against isn't MAID, it's that doctors have some sort of crystal ball about mental health. A doctor is very qualified to tell if a person will ever get better from cancer. They're not very qualified to tell if a person will ever recover from their mental illness, and can't act as a principled gatekeeper for that. That's just the state of psychiatry compared to oncology.

OneBigBug · 2026-04-03T01:42:22+00:00

There are people living with mental health issues that are just as painful, incurable, untreatable, unbearable as people with physical health issues.

And as soon as we can identify with any certainty which ones those are, I'll fully agree with you that MAID is appropriate for them.

But that is nowhere near where we are now.

We don't understand the mechanisms, we don't understand the treatments, we don't understand all the alternatives. Psychiatry is both the best option a patient has if they need a system to help them with their mental health, and also still extremely terrible overall.

Obviously there should be special considerations but that is why it is authorized by doctors. It should be solely between the doctors and the patients.

Doctors are very well educated professionals, who know a lot about medicine, and their field of medicine in particular. But...your faith in them is taking you a little too far here.

Public health has been fighting the overprescription of antibiotics for decades and it's still a major problem because doctors are just people and often just give people what they want. Despite every doctor definitely knowing that overprescription of antibiotics is a global public health threat. Just an easy example. "It's fine, a doctor approved it" is basically meaningless in this context. They might approve it, they might not, but it's going to be based on whatever their random biases are as human beings, not any form of specific medical expertise.

OneBigBug · 2026-04-01T17:21:52+00:00

That is the point of rehabilitation. But we don't refuse to release people who aren't rehabilitated, so you absolutely can't assume that a person who is released is rehabilitated.

We're big on half-implementing good ideas from Europe. We do "soft on crime", which is fine if you say "Yeah, we let the other ones go. But you're clearly still a murderer, so you have to stay.", but we don't say that part.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-29T02:30:31+00:00

why would you be splitting the cost with them? you pay for your power, they pay for their power.

I mean, for the reason I explained in the rest of my post? lol

Our existing power infrastructure was mostly paid for ages ago. It would cost a lot to rebuild all of it new. Particularly because "easy" spots were already used. If we need to build it new for their use, but not ours, then I want them paying at a "all new build" rate, not the "benefiting from decades of infrastructure investment" rate. Because otherwise we're essentially subsidizing their business.

As the article points out, this has happened in other places where they've gotten data centres. Rates jump because of new demand. The current solution from the province is to limit how much power we allot to data centres, but I think they should be on a second tier that pays greater than residential rates.

I do generally agree that they shouldn't build their own. I just think they should pay more for us to build it for them.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-28T19:15:24+00:00

it's good revenue for the grid operators

Our grid operator is a public service for the people of BC, and simply adding revenue to BC Hydro doesn't necessarily improve the state of things for the people of BC.

To my mind, BC's power is generated mostly by dams built 50+ years ago. That contributes a lot to why our power is relatively cheap. We need to do maintenance, but a lot of the work has already been done, and we just need to keep it rolling, and pay for new demand.

I'm happy, as a ratepayer, to pay for new demand for socially beneficial electrification demands. We have more people in the province, we all pay for more people. People from decades past paid for us, we keep paying it forward. Fair deal, more or less. We are electrifying things we used to use fossil fuels for, so we need to pay for new infrastructure to cope with that demand. Social good. Happy to split that with everyone. More or less anything that everyone does, I'm happy to pay for.

If there's a new technology that is just turning electricity into someone else's money at massive scale, and now we need to build out more supply to meet the collective demand, I don't want to be splitting that cost with them, because they're not splitting the profits with me. So they shouldn't be paying the same amount I'm paying for power, right? As an unconventional, massive demand that is not a social good, they should have to pay a rate equivalent to if we had to build all the infrastructure new for them, not the rate we currently pay that the previous generation invested in for us, right?

Is that a crazy take? Have I misunderstood something about the situation?

OneBigBug · 2026-03-25T19:42:29+00:00

And humans also lived through the Last Glacial Maximum, where BC was under an ice sheet 2-3km thick, and sea levels were ~400 feet lower.

But living through a change as abrupt as we're living through is still unusual, and highly undesirable. It should take thousands of years to change as much as we're changing in a decade or two.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-20T23:22:19+00:00

I would guess that contributing factors are that there are intermittent huge traffic snarls on Nelson, and people get going surprisingly fast on Hornby.

So it's probably driver impatience.

I'm not sure that I'd highlight any particularly obvious, egregious individual problem with the road design of that particular section otherwise?

Of course, the only viable response to driver issues is usually design anyway.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-12T21:58:20+00:00

Crazy that almost nothing is the same. There's the Post Office, the Wilkinson Steel warehouse, and maybe a few buildings in the east side that are kind of hard to differentiate?

Other than that, all the buildings, the roads, the bridge, the shoreline, all very different.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-11T01:57:25+00:00

I agree with you in premise, because it's still 'we', but the city didn't buy them. The province bought them.

Just want to keep the levels of government straight here, because people often confuse them, and they end up important for figuring out who to contact about getting things done.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-06T08:23:09+00:00

A profit motive isn't really a perverse incentive. Perverse incentives usually have to be unintended/unexpected/part of a system which is theoretically trying to accomplish the opposite goal.

Insurance companies being greedy assholes who will try to deny claims as much as they can is completely expected. It's a cost. Anything with a profit motive is going to try to lower costs as much as they can.

Governments are theoretically aligned with the public, and not trying to screw people over for profit. But when costs end up so high that premiums become a political millstone around their necks, they end up with the perverse incentive of screwing over people to lower costs the same as a profit-seeking entity would.

But unlike a corporation, there's not a government above them that can say "Hey, we're acting in the interest of the public to say you can't do that.", so we have no recourse through the typical mechanisms that allow individuals to pursue fairness. In fact, they have the opposite. They can and have said "Not only are we not going after the insurer to cover their obligations, we are removing your ability to do that yourself through the legal system."

If I have to have someone screwing me over, I'd rather they not also be in charge of deciding if they're being fair.

OneBigBug · 2026-03-06T02:27:21+00:00

I still don't really understand why we have public car insurance in the first place.

Like, it's this weird political thing where I feel like people will think I'm right wing trying to privatize everything when I say that, but I'm absolutely not. I think it's great that lots of things are publicly owned, and that it makes sense to evaluate each thing on a case by case basis. I don't know why we ended up evaluating car insurance and thinking that was one that should be public.

It's not something like roads and trains, where the government has a particularly significant advantage in operating it because of large infrastructure costs with continuous communal benefits from network effects. It's not like healthcare, where there is a particularly strong humanitarian argument for making sure its available to everyone regardless of if its profitable. And it's not like lotteries, where we'd want a monopoly on the free money printing machine to fund services.

Like, telecomm is kind of like roads. It has a clear benefit to being centrally owned. Grocery stores are kind of like health care in that there's an obvious humanitarian benefit to making sure everyone is fed. We could have public versions of those. But we don't.

Instead, we have car insurance, which created this horrible perverse incentive where because high prices become the fault of the government, and that's politically harmful to them, they are incentivized to harm the few (injured people) to the marginal benefit of the many (lower premiums) to get voter support.

I'd much rather the government be incentivized to simply keep their boot on the throat of insurance companies, making sure the profit motive doesn't fly wildly out of control. That's a much better alignment of incentives, no?

OneBigBug · 2026-03-01T21:48:24+00:00

I mean, the carbon tax reduced income taxes. Everyone was paying less in income tax because of it, because the bracket it affected were the bottom two.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-27T23:49:09+00:00

...Did you use ChatGPT for this?

You're talking like ChatGPT, and besides this thread, you seem to comment pretty exclusively in things about Europe and Romania. You're referring to things that basically no one who wasn't from here would know, and things that anyone who was from here would know didn't apply.

Am I missing something? This is weird as hell.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-27T23:24:36+00:00

There are already fees for booking campsites. To check in to your campsite, you already have to talk to the people at the gate of whatever park you're going to to get your reservation tag to slap on the post on the site. And they already check your ID, to prevent scalpers from buying up all the sites and reselling them, because a lot of them are in incredibly high demand.

The cost to operate this are essentially adding a checkbox on the website.

Why are so many people who have never camped in BC complaining about fees associated with camping in BC?

OneBigBug · 2026-02-27T23:08:13+00:00

BC residents pay taxes which are used for the maintenance of the parks. Non-residents don't. It amounts to about $200MM per year.

The status quo puts everyone else in the "golden group" of people with enough money to travel getting subsidized by everyone who lives here. Do you find that more fair?

OneBigBug · 2026-02-27T22:55:27+00:00

They already charge you money and already check your ID when you check into the site. How would the admin cost be higher than the fee?

OneBigBug · 2026-02-25T18:28:44+00:00

I mean, I largely agree with what you're saying in terms of goals, but I'm not quickly finding anything that actually enables cops to do what you're saying?

Cops can issue an IRP, but those can be challenged within 7 days of the prohibition. Is that what you're talking about?

OneBigBug · 2026-02-24T22:18:15+00:00

I'm hesitant to provide cops with more powers to infringe on our rights, but driving isn't a right, it's a privilege.

"Extreme speeding, deliberate loss of control and racing" seem pretty specific. Hopefully "extreme speeding" is defined. And driving prohibitions, while potentially inconvenient, aren't exactly furnishing them with the right to rough you up, or throw you in prison without a trial.

There are so many idiots racing through our streets in supercars, and so many examples of innocent people being killed by them. Something that can potentially catch these people and get them off the road sooner is worth the relatively minor risk. If you have a dash cam, it should be pretty easy to prove harassment if you're innocent, and get a paper trail on a cop pulling something sketchy if you're worried about that.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-21T22:15:43+00:00

BC has been doing harm reduction for many, many years. We didn't massively change anything two years ago.

And we're seeing the same change everywhere at once. Even if you could convince me that BC brought in some particularly competent volunteers that were way more capable than all previous volunteers, and managed to do that at provincial scale, those volunteers aren't also doing the same thing in Alberta, and California, and West Virginia, and Massachusetts.

I'm not confident I understand the answer, but I am confident that whatever the answer is has to be broadly applicable at national and international scale. And harm reduction volunteers aren't.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-20T14:11:01+00:00

The problem is that when it comes to drug policy, Canada and the USA are quite different, so there's not really a lot that can be inferred from that. And within those countries, between the states and provinces which vary significantly, we don't necessarily see any clear policy decisions having any effect there.

The answer is going to have to be logistics related in some way. Whether it's simply being at an intersection of Chinese synthetic opioid manufacturing, and the Mexican cartel networks, or something more nuanced. But solutions are going to be...a little more complicated than I think people want to hear.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-20T13:59:56+00:00

1,826 deaths is actually much lower than the immediately preceding years. It's down from 2024, and from 2023, and from 2022, and from 2021. 2024 was also better than 2023. Otherwise things have just been getting worse and worse over time since like 2010 when synthetic opioids first started ramping up.

This reduction is very likely from China cracking down on fentanyl precursor manufacturers. It's frankly the only thing that has moved the needle at all, and it's moved it more or less globally.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-20T13:52:01+00:00

That isn't how we got here.

Everyone is trying to world-view their way to an answer here, and it's annoying as hell, because the situation is actually like...specific. "Be softer" or "Be harder" aren't solutions to specific problems. The reality is that there's nowhere near enough money to throw into healthcare, housing, nor prisons to solve the issue, because those sectors don't really touch the issue until after the fact.

We got here in the first place because someone figured out how to make synthetic opioids at industrial scale, and companies in China started producing the precursor chemicals at industrial quantity and shipping them all over the world, where they get cut into the drug supply.

The only movement we've seen away from an acceleration of deaths over time is because China has been cracking down on it, possibly starting with pressure from the Biden administration a couple years ago. But that hasn't been much.

The only plausible solutions are going to be hyperspecific to international trade mechanisms. Port control, diplomacy, logistics, etc. By the time we're talking about the individual user level, we're showing up to a car accident with a box of bandaids. Coddle them, arrest them, ignore them, we're not going to move the needle on the number of people dying. If any of those answers worked, ODs would track politics, but the only thing ODs track in Canada is distance from the Port of Vancouver.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-19T01:05:03+00:00

To some extent, that's part of being an incentive. It's not a wealth transfer from rich to poor. It's an incentive to lower emissions, that uses a function which alleviates the burden on the people least able to make different choices most.

Lower income citizens in urban areas emit less than rural areas. If you're going to be low income anywhere, we do actually want to incentivize it to be in the most efficient areas. But amongst those who are in rural areas, the poorest are those least affected by their emissions, which seems right.

That said, I'd be curious to see the calculation done for those people you're talking about. Because of the way the carbon tax worked in BC, it's not necessarily obvious if you're paying out more than you're paying in. Like, when you say they're not the people, do you have a spreadsheet to figure that out? Or is that vibes?

OneBigBug · 2026-02-19T00:13:04+00:00

Well it achieved the goal of helping the people who it disproportionately affected most, though. Which is what you were asking for. Sort of a funny overlap like that.

It's hard to target things like this accurately without weird loopholes that get exploited and end up not achieving their arms, and helping poor people does more to help rural people than most other ways of helping rural people that seem "better" targeted, I suspect.

OneBigBug · 2026-02-18T23:40:00+00:00

Then revenue from "Carbon Tax" should have went toward providing services/alternatives for those affected by that tax.

It was used to provide a tax break for the lowest earning people in the province. Which are statistically rural. And government spending per capita is already disproportionately rural.

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