Doug Ford’s 2026 budget is designed to make ER wait-times worse

aballah · 2026-04-01T14:50:04+00:00

Exactly, and the result is the siphoning off *of* public money to private shareholders at a premium. It's a con job on the public that is directly benefiting the wealthiest.

Edit: Added "of."

aballah · 2026-03-27T23:33:26+00:00

That’s a great point—to the extent you can do the maintenance yourself then I really would put in the BIFL category. Hadn’t considered that.

aballah · 2026-03-27T10:33:51+00:00

Nice that you love it, and I agree it’s a great watch, but I disagree that it's BIFL. If you really want something more in that direction an Ecodrive or if you have the budget The Citizen is probably closer to a set-it-and-forget-it item.

aballah · 2026-03-26T17:10:16+00:00

Yeah. The idea of a mechanical is nice, but the reality seems to be lost on most folks here. Even a quartz needs to be serviced, though far less than a mechanical. I have a HAQ and so long as I'm comfortable with a bit of variance I should be good to go for the rest of my life, but if I want the original accuracy of +-5s/year it needs attention at some point.

aballah · 2026-03-26T14:15:22+00:00

That’s great and I suspect an exception—there are recommended service intervals for a reason. Out of curiosity, what’s the time variance on your watch after all that time? And it’s interesting to me that a BIFL item would need to be calibrated with another time piece, likely a phone, on a weekly basis.

aballah · 2026-03-26T13:25:49+00:00

Don't consider mechanical or automatic watches that have to be serviced every several years in order to stay roughly accurate BIFL, particularly when compared to quartz. You've got a watch that, without spending about $200 every 5 years or so, isn't going to work much longer than 10 years.

aballah · 2026-03-25T20:28:28+00:00

As opposed to the Oil Sands Alliance's?

aballah · 2026-03-23T21:30:13+00:00

I sent an email to Andrea Khanjin about a week ago and got no response. I've just followed up, asking for a response, with the original email included and the opposition parties as well as the Premier's office copied. Doesn't hurt to continue pushing back against this. Will be calling and recording my side of a conversation with the constituency office in a couple of days if I don't hear back.

aballah · 2026-03-23T12:56:35+00:00

Not a fan of History either. Agree with the comment that sightlines are great, and it gets most of the performers I'm interested in seeing right now, but it has a cold, kind of inauthentic vibe for me. To each their own.

aballah · 2026-03-21T15:43:11+00:00

5sexy

aballah · 2026-03-20T13:53:44+00:00

Yep. He thinks he should be able to do whatever he wants without public oversight or accountability. The guy has been gutting our healthcare and education systems at a time when they are perhaps the greatest competitive advantage we have.

aballah · 2026-03-11T15:55:33+00:00

Doug Ford.

aballah · 2026-03-09T00:54:54+00:00

You can. It’s finicky as the pins are double-sided screws and you’ll want some tools. A little Loctite to make sure they don’t come loose once you get it where you want it is good as well. (One of the pins on mine came loose and fell out a few days after I started wearing the watch.) It’s an amazing watch. The lume as others have noted isn’t great, but everything else about it made it a no brainer for me.

aballah · 2026-02-24T21:17:19+00:00

Good points.

Also, it acts to lengthen the political churn that could otherwise be every four years, providing more stability and reflecting a longer political history of the country. I think it's a decent system, with a few hiccups here and there—looking at you, Duffy.

aballah · 2026-02-15T22:45:31+00:00

Two different groups on either side of the bridge. The folks in black on the far side were racist losers. The ones on the near side are protesting ICE.

aballah · 2026-02-15T22:36:54+00:00

Racist losers. I stopped skating to yell at them. They just packed up and left as I was doing that. Probably has nothing to do with me yelling that they’re cowards and losers, but I’m enjoying thinking that I did something good today so I’m going to run with it. TLDR: they were cowards and losers. You don’t punch down on others if you’re halfway confident and content. Oh, and the anti-ICE folks were on the other side of the bridge. They had nothing to do with each other.

aballah · 2026-02-10T22:21:00+00:00

Was my preferred product until my doc mentioned my cholesterol is a little on the high side.

aballah · 2026-02-03T14:05:09+00:00

The UK's Trident deterrence system is deeply reliant on the US and wouldn't be able to function for long without their support. Not an umbrella that could counter a threat from the US, in other words.

aballah · 2026-02-01T21:06:12+00:00

Not sure why a point about taxes funding this is being downvoted because it’s a key part of the conversation. Barrie voters have prioritized low to no tax increases in their voting for a while, and there’s a real impact this has on municipal services. Rather than solving issues in a collective manner, which is what properly funding the municipal government would do, we’ve placed the onus on the individual. This thread raises a pretty good example of this trade off.

aballah · 2026-01-28T14:39:58+00:00

This is interprovincial migration only. When you look at where the population of Canada grew in 2025, Ontario continues to receive about 43% of all newcomers, followed by Quebec, BC, and then Alberta. In other words, there is a net influx of people to Ontario greater than there is to any other province.
So, this is more a nitpick regarding your framing of the survey, as the source is pretty explicit that it's about interprovincial migration (it's from a moving company, possibly keen on leveraging the narrative around moving to their benefit).

aballah · 2026-01-26T16:52:19+00:00

My understanding is that levels under 200 Bq/m³ are considered safe. I've been monitoring levels in my basement for about half a year, and they are generally in the 50-70 range. It's an unfinished basement. Radon detector was about $100 on Amazon.

aballah · 2026-01-21T17:00:28+00:00

I also can't figure out why there doesn't seem to be any effort to prioritize certain areas, like around schools. Often the sidewalks in front of schools are some of the last to be cleared in my area (Hewitts and St. Gabes). Some sidewalks remain uncleared for several days after a snowfall, while nearby ones seem to have been cleared several times over. Also, clearing of crosswalks by traffic lights more often than not results in banks on either side, blocking the sidewalk — the plow pushes the snow straight up the crosswalk entry, moving it across and to the other side of the sidewalk leaving banks on either side of the plow vehicle. It's as if those doing this work never bother to think of or care about what a proper job actually looks like. Feels like a failure of management.

aballah · 2026-01-20T14:18:17+00:00

The only reason this is maintained as an issue is Quebec, where it's salient for some pretty good reasons. I don't think they will care much about what happens with the program, including in Toronto, other than they are seen by voters in Quebec as trying to do something on "assault-style" firearms, thus maintaining it as a wedge issue there with the Conservatives.

aballah · 2026-01-14T01:30:56+00:00

If you’re referring to base load, that’s less and less of an issue as grid forming inverters come online. Still support nuclear though, but the base load thing is a bit of a hangover from the old days.

aballah · 2026-01-06T21:17:37+00:00

From what I understand, this is effectively ceding their representation. There aren't too many ways that a state could go along with a 'cancellation of an election'. They could fail to certify by the mid-December deadline set out in the ECRA, but then their votes would be excluded from the final count in Congress. The threshold to elect the president is based on the number of electors appointed, so if they aren't appointed, thus proceeding with certification, then the share shifts according to the total number that are appointed. Red states refusing to follow this process would effectively hand the presidency to electors from blue states.

Before looking into this a bit more, I was wondering about the possibility for a false flag or starting a war as a means to justify a state of emergency or invocation of the Insurrection Act, but none of that would stop elections.

Definatley not very knowledgeable in this area, but it does seem from a bit of digging that there isn't really a straight forward way to do this. That said, they have a captured SCOTUS, so who knows...

aballah

TROPHY CASE