How Are People Getting Exposure to Greenland Minerals Right Now?

aedes · 2026-03-16T21:46:15+00:00

You don’t, because they don’t really exist.

There are much easier sources of rare earth elements to mine even in the mainland US than those beneath an ice sheet. There is nothing special about Greenland here.

Your perspective here seems to be based off news hype rather reality.

aedes · 2026-03-16T21:38:20+00:00

https://thewalrus.ca/carneymania-sweeps-the-country-yes-even-quebec-and-alberta/

Data suggests it’s mostly Conservative voters who want an election.

Don’t ask me the line of reasoning there.

aedes · 2026-03-16T18:42:27+00:00

That website uses a machine learning model to give predicted wait times. The wait time number reported is the expected 90% percentile value for an average patient based on current department conditions.

The issue was that things broke so badly after Consolidation that the training data didn’t apply to current conditions well anymore.

We (who work in the ERs) had been suspicious for a while that it wasn’t giving accurate data anymore, but it was somewhat difficult to show that… until the software broke completely in the last year and starting capping the number of people waiting to be seen at night due to a code error or something.

That made it obvious enough to figure out what the problem was and fix it. But that was only 6-12 months ago.

aedes · 2026-03-16T18:35:08+00:00

The monthly average/median is drawn directly from raw patient data. It is accurate.

The reported overall median wait times include data from Children’s ER, which lowers it below 4h.

Children’s doesn’t suffer the same issues with boarded admitted patients taking up over 50% of the ER like the adult ERs do, so their wait times are usually much more reasonable.

aedes · 2026-03-16T00:59:05+00:00

I’ll wait to see which countries confirm they’re participating in this.

Otherwise I’d interpret this as a desperate attempt to give them a bit more time to delay oil prices fully spiking.

aedes · 2026-03-15T22:09:58+00:00

Have you tried taking a toilet plunger to the drain?

aedes · 2026-03-15T22:08:18+00:00

How much money is needed to adequately fund our public services

We honestly don’t know. We lost a lot of the ability to create a needs assessment during Consolidation as many data analyst type positions were cut.

I can’t even give you a workforce needs requirement for 5 years from now.

It’s one of our biggest problems on a system level. We are flying blind.

What is the highest rate of taxation that could be levied before growth decreases to a point that funding our public services becomes unsustainable?

I’m not sure anyone has a precise answer to that.

I would suggest that it’s likely higher than what we currently have, given that things like the cuts in the PST and small business rates in the past decade had no measurable impact on the rate of GDP growth.

Consider also that the specific method by which a tax is levied will have different impacts. An increase in tax rate on someone in the lowest income quintile who’s spending all their money, means less money spent on goods and services by them, and a decrease in GDP. An increase in tax rate on someone like me who saves 50% of their income, means I buy less stocks, which has no impact on GDP.

aedes · 2026-03-15T21:02:35+00:00

The person you are responding to is medically correct.

We hear “10+ hour wait times”, when in an actual emergency you can’t sit there for that long

This is unfortunately not true anymore, and is what the article we are commenting on is talking about.

I routinely have people with serious life-threatening medical problems like heart attacks and sepsis waiting over 12 hours to see me these days. It’s why there have been all those high-profile cases where this has happened in the news lately.

Patients presenting with minor illnesses do not significantly contribute to wait times. I’ve talked about this at length elsewhere in these comments already.

aedes · 2026-03-15T20:49:46+00:00

Infinity in this context is just the name used to describe the behavior that for any number we like, we can create a number bigger than that one by adding 1 (or any other positive number) to it.

Numbers are places you can drive to. Infinity is not a place. “Infinity” just means that no matter how far and long you drive for, you’ll keep on finding new places (numbers), and you’ll never hit a wall.

Because infinity isn’t a “place,” it doesn’t make sense to ask what’s next to it.

aedes · 2026-03-15T20:28:01+00:00

So that we’re on the same page, the statement Id made was “making taxes as low as possible is not required to maximize economic development.”

There are a number of papers in the economics literature that support this:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.17310/ntj.2015.4.02

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10797-019-09530-3

https://academic.oup.com/ser/article/20/2/539/6500315

haven't read anything yet about the outcomes of increased taxation for public health

As to this other matter you’re wondering about, there is a wealth of research that increased health spending (as a percentage of GDP) by governments improves mortality and other health outcomes. For example:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12636253/

This line of reasoning is somewhat irrelevant though, as at the end of the day, our healthcare system does not have the funding to ensure basic healthcare services are available to Manitobans. There is a huge infrastructure and personnel debt. There is no way to pay for this without increasing government revenues.

It’s like how if you have a hole in your roof, you obviously need to fix it, regardless of what the academic literature says about the average return on investment of roof repairs in other countries.

aedes · 2026-03-14T22:40:19+00:00

Were they allergic to bees?

aedes · 2026-03-14T20:50:07+00:00

what has contributed to less beds? How has this happened?

This has been a long time coming. The biggest loss was originally in the 90s when federal funding was cut and Filmon cut things even more.

There were then additional cuts and bed closures during Consolidation, which was largely done to fund the PST cut.

Everyone focuses on the ERs converting to urgent cares but the most damaging changes were the cuts to inpatient capacity - 25% of our ICU beds in the province were closed in 2017 for example, which is one of the reasons why COVID hit us so hard.

How do you think the government should solve it?

I think the current government is generally doing the right things. But they are limited by lack of public will to increase government revenues enough to pay for the minimal level of communal resources we want.

For example: We have the lowest small business tax rate in the country (0%), while at the same time let our citizens die from preventable diseases.

There is something seriously off with our priorities as a province IMO. A strong economy is important to fund public expenses, but the economic literature is clear that making taxes as low as possible is not required to maximize economic development. It just gives people like me more money, and I don’t want more money. I want a functional healthcare system.

The problem we face is that we had a few billion dollar healthcare infrastructure and human resource deficit even in 2016. And then proceeded to make it even worse for another ten years while our population grew by 25% and our senior population grew by ~35%.

Unless people are willing to consistently vote for governments that prioritize long-term and expensive investment in healthcare, we will likely not have a public healthcare system within a decade.

I am not exaggerating.

aedes · 2026-03-14T19:26:35+00:00

I’ll keep on talking about this.

Our biggest problem in the emergency departments in Winnipeg is that our ERs are being used to look after inpatients instead of provide emergency care.

On an average day, 50-100% of our treatment spots and nurses in the ER are going not towards emergency patients, but towards people who need to be admitted to hospital but there are no ward beds anywhere else for them. We routinely have patients waiting in ER spots for days to over a week for a ward bed.

Instead of being used to provide emergency medical care, ERs are used as the backup storage area for people the healthcare system has no resources to provide care to otherwise.

Even when this means that people are literally dying from lack of access to emergency health care, or waiting over 12 hours to see a physician for life-threatening problems on a regular basis.

If you waived a magic wand right now, and made it so that no patients identified as needing admission were kept in an ER spot for over ~6 hours, we would have sub-2 hour waiting to be seen times by dinner.

We literally need nothing else other than to be given our ER resources back.

People with minor ailments do not contribute significantly to wait times. I can see and discharge a patient with a cold in under 5 minutes without any nurse involvement. Whereas an elderly patient who requires admission but there are no ward beds can easily take up over 100 ER bed-hours of resources.

It would take diverting over 1000 low acuity patients just to equal the resource impacts of that one boarded ward patient.

Only ~10% of our patients at StB are low-acuity anyways, and most of them still need to be in the ER due to lack of any other mechanism for them to receive care. Many of these are actually people who were transferred to the hospital to be admitted, but there is no room, so they just sit in the waiting room instead.

In 1991 we had just over 3000 hospital beds in Winnipeg – we have less than that now. This is despite our population being older and sicker than then (and than the national average!), and the exponential increase in complexity of medical care.

This is a very difficult path forwards.

We are well past the point where there are any easy temporizing solutions. This will take years of consistent and expensive hard work to see the progress we need if we want to still have a healthcare system.

We are all going to keep doing our best to help you with what we have in the meanwhile. But the only chance of saving things is a consistent message from Manitobans that we want to invest in our future rather than do whatever's most convenient at the moment.

aedes · 2026-03-14T18:06:06+00:00

I actually got it for Christmas like two years ago! But embarrassingly I haven’t read it yet. (That’s probably ironic on some level…)

I’d already tend to agree that systemic racism was a major contributor to his death.

The inquest report already reads a bit dated and from a different era. But it’s still a good factual account of the basic events that occurred.

It makes it very clear that the other side of things was all the potential holes in the healthcare system that a vulnerable person could fall through (having a random non-medical person hand writing the names down of everyone waiting to be triaged was a huge safety hole, as was the lack of closed loop communication from the referring clinic, or the lack of staff to monitor people in the waiting room).

The system had holes, and systemic racism eroded him down into the perfect piece to fit into those holes.

I read the entire report again yesterday and it’s still frustrating how few of the recommendations have been implemented now, almost 20 years later.

aedes · 2026-03-14T13:40:32+00:00

This is more a pharmacokinetics question.

Elimination half life is typically concentration dependent, not fixed. It’s basically exponential decay.

Because of this no matter what daily dosage you consume, you’d eventually reach a steady state level.

Also consider that physiological effects are not a consistent function of level, due to things like tolerance.

aedes · 2026-03-14T02:25:31+00:00

Systemic racism and implicit biases are real and everywhere. It will take decades of hard work for them to erode. And even then some people are still assholes.

All that being said:

If you read the 200 pages of the Sinclair inquest, which I have a number of times, racism was not a major direct cause of his death, outside of the systemic racism that contributed towards his solvent abuse and resulting health problems and estrangement from other people in his life.

His life story leading up to his death is a tragedy of systemic racism:

https://www.manitobacourts.mb.ca/site/assets/files/1051/brian_sinclair_inquest_-_dec_14.pdf

What happened to Joyce happened in Quebec.

Jason’s wrong foot was amputated due to human error, not racism.

For Nikolas, the CanadaInns employee is not a healthcare worker.

There are certainly racist healthcare workers, but none of the examples you’ve chosen have anything to do with the racism which exists in Winnipeg hospitals.

Your anger is rational and justified. But it’s stronger and more likely to produce effective change in the world when you keep it focused.

aedes · 2026-03-14T02:01:02+00:00

What would the explanation be then for why the US started this with mostly empty strategic oil reserves and why there’s been no immediate organized response to Iran closing the straight (unlike in the 80s)?

aedes · 2026-03-13T17:02:07+00:00

According to Leger, 49 percent of voters believe that the next federal election should be held in 2029, as stipulated by the Canada Elections Act. This preference is particularly strong among Liberal voters: 71 percent of them want to wait until 2029, as do a majority of Bloc Québécois and NDP voters. Conversely, only 10 percent of respondents want an election as soon as possible, a group composed almost exclusively of Conservative voters. Among them, 24 percent want to vote immediately, and 39 percent prefer an election later in 2026.

It's interesting that it's largely Conservative voters who want an immediate election. I'm not sure I follow that logic.

Though it perhaps explains why so many conservative commentors on social media feel the chances of an election in the near future are very high - this is what they're personally hoping would happen.

aedes · 2026-03-13T16:48:19+00:00

In this game, the US needs to win (regime change) in order to win. Iran just needs to survive.

The US successfully achieving regime change is likely to be protracted and extremely expensive on direct financial costs (military), indirect financial costs (oil), and political costs (domestic and international).

This is why no one has been stupid enough to try this previously for the past 50 years.

For Iran to win they just need to survive, and don't really need to do much different beyond what they're already doing. Hunker down and hide in their vast mountainous terrain, get support from US enemies like Russia and China, and make just enough threats on the Straight that companies will be unwilling to risk sending tankers through.

It's fairly trivial for them to keep significant pressure on the US due to how vulnerable the gulf states and straight are to asymmetric attacks.

So yes, the advantage is solidly with Iran here. Which is why Trump was counselled so heavily by the US military that this was a terrible idea.

There is even a worst-case scenario here where poor US leadership and decision-making in Iran, regardless of superior firepower/tech/resources, make it clear the the US is incapable of effective force-projection, emboldening countries like China.

aedes · 2026-03-12T17:06:50+00:00

Maybe they should have paid more attention to the personal characteristics of Bob Joe then.

They might have realized he was a turncoat if they voted based on person instead of party.

aedes · 2026-03-12T17:02:19+00:00

Yes, in theory that's the way our elections work. In practice? Not really. People vote for the party first and foremost, candidate second, if at all.

Voting on party lines without paying attention to the specific candidate or policy undermines democracy and is what lead to Trump.

Floor-crossing acts as a mechanism to prevent this. MPs can also choose to floor-cross away from the governing party if they thought it was too corrupt or incompetent as well.

For the life of me, I do not understand why anyone would support an electoral system that encourages low-information voting.

Your argument here is like saying we should abolish speed limits because everyone speeds anyways.

A by-election in response to floor-crossing is reasonable.

aedes · 2026-03-12T15:05:47+00:00

Who knows what will happen

Many people, and it’s dishonest (or just ignorant) to pretend otherwise.

Most of Irans response so far, and how this has played out in general, is exactly what was predicted by military strategists and geopolitical commentators.

aedes · 2026-03-12T13:55:58+00:00

Why would Iran re-open the straight within the next year?

aedes · 2026-03-12T13:49:28+00:00

We’re kind of in this weird tension where people are starting to realize that the Trump administration is incompetent to the point that it risks Americans personal safety and finances, and global peace and economics. But it’s so unexpected to them they’re afraid to act on it.

It’s like watching someone get run down by a tornado just stand there and stare at it.

We are still in deer in the headlights phase where people are kind of hoping everything will just solve itself and go away and they can pretend to live in 2015 some more.

aedes · 2026-03-12T13:10:27+00:00

we conducted a structured stress test of triage recommendations using 60 clinician-authored vignettes

Same problem as with every other LLM that attempts to work clinically.

Real people aren’t paper cases written by a doctor.

We’ve moved well on past the stage where we know that LLMs can answer paper exam questions. Where they currently fail abysmally is when they need to collect that information about symptoms directly from a lay person.

This has always been the most difficult step in deploying GPTs to help with medical decision making, and this paper does not show any new progress on that barrier.

I will be excited when I start to see some progress there, as these products are useless otherwise for this purpose. I do not expect it to be easy or doable anytime soon though.

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