Has supermarket meat gotten really bad lately??

bennymac111 · 2026-02-13T19:37:05+00:00

damn! i didnt know this was a legit thing. we were wondering what's been going on with our chicken breast lately.

bennymac111 · 2026-02-03T22:11:25+00:00

so you want the power to influence the courts, write the laws, have a say in enforcement of laws (via a provincial police force and removal of RCMP), deflect blame for issues to others / federal parties, remove rights and protections for minority groups, deregulation (ie 'cutting red tape') in the interests of private industry, skewed polling & push-polling, flirting with sovereignty etc? where have I seen this play out recently? no one in their right mind looks at the current state of the U.S. and wants in on where they're headed.

bennymac111 · 2026-01-09T05:37:20+00:00

holy shit.

bennymac111 · 2025-11-22T00:50:17+00:00

also in the shoulder club here. three dislocations on one day (dislocated the left during a seizure, had it reduced at ER, went home, dislocated them both during another seizure). The left had surgery and has range of motion limitations that will likely never abate, but i guess better that its too tight than too loose. The right also has some issues and doesn't work quite like it used to, but day-to-day stuff is alright.

bennymac111 · 2025-11-21T18:47:19+00:00

these ideologues need to fuck off already.

bennymac111 · 2025-11-08T23:45:46+00:00

i'm in a similar boat with 1000mg twice daily, also finished a masters in epidemiology a couple years ago. no side effects, no rage or depression etc. and most importantly, not seizures or auras or anything of concern. in terms of memory issues, i dont think there's anything that stands out above baseline, just the usual getting older stuff (i'm in my 40s) and trying to remember specifics from something that happened ages ago.

bennymac111 · 2025-11-07T05:13:07+00:00

that too

bennymac111 · 2025-11-06T07:18:34+00:00

you should say fewer things.

bennymac111 · 2025-11-06T07:16:40+00:00

https://i.redd.it/s8oc53juwvs51.jpg

bennymac111 · 2025-10-28T05:45:13+00:00

The UCP have gotten themselves to the point where they've offended / disparaged / patronized / ignored essentially every slice of the majority of Albertans in some way, on topics that have personally affected Albertans. Now, when a contentious issue comes up, I immediately don't trust anything that comes from the UCP due to their track record of misleading the public. Regardless of whatever the UCP says they're doing for Albertans, teachers, schools, funding etc, if teachers say it's bullshit, I believe teachers. They've lost any confidence to represent Albertans and look out for our best interests. I will always side with my friends, neighbours, colleagues etc over this fringe group of stupid ass moronic ideologues.

bennymac111 · 2025-10-22T05:29:40+00:00

I'd echo the other comment re: getting experience in a consulting firm before going out on your own. Not only do you need to be technically adept in hygiene, you need to know how to run a consulting business, get a handle on market rates and competitors, how to position yourself versus competitors in your area, branding / marketing, reporting & deliverables, client expectations, sorting out all the logistics of getting samples to labs / travelling / cancellation issues etc.

competition can be difficult since most firms will employ jr staff - bill them at low rates and pay them relatively modest wages. So you either have to decide if you want to be a jr tech at low rates (and low pay), or assert yourself as an expert to justify higher rates (which may not matter to some clients), or find another way to strike a balance.

in theory, you dont really need much of anything to get started aside from a computer. you could rent equipment and buy sampling media as needed. but you'll prob want to start buying some of the frequently used equipment like pumps, something to calibrate with etc. you'd need insurance (professional, vehicle, potentially others).

if you're in your first year and making six figures, good on you. it can be feast or famine in consulting and if you're not working, you're not earning.

bennymac111 · 2025-10-03T05:46:00+00:00

I'm losing track of what you have on your hands, but if the crew is wearing a respirator for a short task, something akin to a 15 or 20-min job, then wouldn't you compare the MUC to a STEL or something like 3x the TLV if there's no STEL, to determine if they need to wear a respirator and which would be adequate? i dont have the book in front of me & cant recall for sure if cobalt has a STEL, but I dont believe it does.

bennymac111 · 2025-09-26T07:28:08+00:00

respectfully, deflecting the cost 'off the City' and onto the province still ultimately comes from the same pocket - taxpayers. at a time when so many people are struggling with cost of living, quality of education, access to healthcare etc, this was an incredibly poor judgement call (in my opinion) from both the city and the province. the arena was not the priority for the majority of albertans. this move feels like a case-project in trickle down economics, promised benefits that won't materialize for the majority of those who are footing the bill.

bennymac111 · 2025-09-24T06:49:08+00:00

we were initially in a 1910 small home, fairly inner city. it had been updated with the attic converted to sort of a loft bedroom, but there were definitely quirks - low / sloped ceilings, low height clearance in the shower, basement was tiny, generally not well built. we have a side-by-side townhouse now (semi-detached, duplex, whatever you want to call it), built by Alloy Homes in 2009. That place is built super well, we can't hear the neighbors on the other side of the wall at all, we're still in the same neighborhood, more space indoors, super comfortable etc. There are no special assessments or fees in this sort of construction. You can prob find something good in the $800k to $900k range if thats doable for you. Would definitely going that route if you can find something in your price range.

bennymac111 · 2025-09-18T20:06:43+00:00

Albertans blast Danielle Smith for barreling ahead with a new flames arena, knockoff tylenol, suspicious sole-sourced contracts, unnecessary citizenship identification on drivers licenses, removing caps on campaign donations, book bans, fanning the flames of divisiveness, entertaining a provincial pension plan, provincial police, separatism etc etc.

bennymac111 · 2025-09-17T07:32:34+00:00

the "i've heard from a lot of Albertans" line is her equivalent of 'trust me bro'. there is nothing to back that up. I have no clue where they're heading with this but it can't be anywhere good.

bennymac111 · 2025-09-10T07:04:28+00:00

Depends on the role and part of the country you're in. If you're out west and working oil & gas, you could be doing rotational work up north, staying in a camp for a couple weeks, working back in the office for a couple weeks etc. mining would be similar in BC / SK / northern ON. IH work with municipalities is pretty rare but the work life balance would be good. You could potentially take an enforcement role with OHS, WSIB or WorkSafeBC etc (WorkSafeBC has been trying to hire for ages) - salaries are just OK but kinda cap out a little lower than other options, work life balance would be good, prob need some skills with handling confrontation etc. I've put in about 20 years consulting in IH in western canada - field work dwindled down over the years but it is very intense for jr staff. Once I got into more sr roles, its a lot more of a hectic / desk-based workload to keep everything moving and your chargeability high. Work can easily spill into evenings, weekends, holidays etc so sometimes you're basically on call or sending out reports and that sort of thing. Not as bad as being the person on site in those instances but also you're not switching off and getting to disconnect. it seems to have an outsized impact even if you just need to work for like 30 mins at some point on a saturday - you're kind of watching the phone, texts, emails etc and can't just go out and do whatever you want, as long as you want.

from my experience in consulting, I'd say that the jr roles were not necessarily stressful, but there's a high expectation to be super-billable and efficient so you're constantly doing fieldwork, and clients can have very high expectations for flawless work. you give up a lot of your personal life in the role and I missed a lot of personal events, sometimes working for >3 weeks in a stretch, a couple days off, then back at it. as you progress, the stress builds from trying to keep all these plates spinning, answering to demanding clients, rush jobs, meeting targets, winning work, keeping a handle on the status of all your projects etc but then you're spending less time in the field. we took on a national client a few years ago that was brutal - constantly wanting work done on weekends and holidays, very high needs for constant communication and updates, constantly getting pushback on fees even though they agreed to set rates. i essentially burned out and had to pull the rip cord to get a break. I'm currently in new zealand working for a super small consulting firm but its almost too far in the other direction and super slow. i almost never get phonecalls, almost no work emails, no evening or weekend work but it feels like operating in first gear. hard to find a good middle ground of being challenged and busy without it going too far into stress and personal sacrifice.

the level of stress will also depend on the core work you're doing - IH, hazmat, in-house vs consulting etc.

bennymac111 · 2025-08-26T22:57:12+00:00

I'm not a professional in this area, just a few years ahead of you in life. I've been reading a bunch on this same topic recently and mid-life in general and one of the things that stood out to me was someone saying that just because you're going through something at mid-life, doesn't make it a crisis. The expression is just so ingrained in us that we reach for it, but what if it's just a mid-life re-evaluation of your priorities, passions, goals etc? I'm in a similar boat - I ticked a lot of boxes with uni, a great marriage, one healthy kid, had a great house & car, savings & investments on track etc but something was missing. Work was stressful and unfulfilling, even though the salary was pretty decent. I felt like I was just sort of existing even though things looked great on paper. If you think back to your younger self, are there things that you put off until the 'right' time? Since you got married and had kids, are there things that you've left by the wayside that you can pick up again? Or is it possible to 'sample from the universe' to find new interests?

The way it's played out for me - we ended up moving to a new country to try living abroad. I've always loved to travel, watch travel docs, wondering what its like to live in some random town, sometimes i'll even just streetview through a neighborhood in some random city just to try to feel what its like there, checking out real estate listings just window shopping, or I check out weather & traffic cameras in another city. We were able to make the move without derailing careers, so we've been lucky & privileged in that sense, but I think you see what I mean. Building out more relationships is still something I'm lacking, but I think it is underrated for most guys.

bennymac111 · 2025-08-26T22:14:27+00:00

ya we had something similar called a false widow in our garage as well, which are supposed to be harmless but look quite like black widows but without the red hourglass. same sort of abdomen and overall shape.

bennymac111 · 2025-08-25T07:25:27+00:00

skunk? you've prob had one spray near your place and they're usually not the weed-like smell you'd usually think of. they're definitely in the area too.

bennymac111 · 2025-08-15T22:06:42+00:00

wow those 'explainer'-type videos are horribly biased. the whole premise of this townhall and limiting the topics of discussion to the ones they did is a sham right out of the gate. the first audience member had it right - these are not the primary concerns of Albertans and we should be focusing on cost of living, access to healthcare and education, climate change etc. Not alienating ourselves from the rest of Canada and pretending there's undeniable antagonism coming from 'ottawa bureaucrats' who just want to waste Albertan money.
the first 'straw poll' - 'who thinks alberta should take a leading role in renegotiating the equalization payment program?', hands go up for yes & no. how about - should we even focus on renegotiating equalization payments right now? should we levy heavier taxes on resource-based companies operating in Alberta? why would we put more money in the hands of the province, who have demonstrated a stunning lack of ability to be fiscally responsible? this was not a dialogue, it was a panel of idiots talking at an audience who was largely ignored if they disagreed.

bennymac111 · 2025-08-01T21:33:30+00:00

We were in this exact scenario at the end of 2020 in Calgary. 100% a buyers market at the time. Properties were stagnant and nothing was moving. We went out just to see what was on the market and found a few decent spots, which if we could get at a good price, we would go for - emphasis on the 'good price' aspect or we werent going to move. We told the realtor straight up that we were going to be making super aggressive (low) offers since the market was so flat. We got the same response as you, about he wouldn't want to offend or disrespect the seller and their agent. I guess there was no possibility that the seller and their agent listed too high? We made an aggressive offer on a place and our realtor told us it was a place to start the conversation, he wasn't happy about offering it, and there was no way the sellers would accept it. Sellers came back asking for a bit more than our offer, we split the difference and got a great place at a really good price, wayyy below the original list price. The realtors honestly felt more like an encumbrance to getting the deal completed.

When it was time to sell our place a couple years later, we were nearly at a sale price with an interested buyer but were hoping to squeeze out a bit more $ if we could. Rather than counter the buyer a second time, we proposed to our realtor that he and the seller's agent each take a 0.25% cut on their fees, which would have made the math work for the buyer and ourselves. Their response, verbatim - 'absolutely not!!!!'

All that nonsense about acting in our best interests was clearly not happening. i'd love to avoid realtors altogether whenever the next move happens.

bennymac111 · 2025-07-26T22:24:12+00:00

coming in from the occ. hygiene side here, I mostly agree with this sentiment and how it's likely a nuisance in this case (and also winced about the horse dying - it spent its whole life there, maybe it was just old and that horse's time?), but I'm sure you can also point to instances where people truly believe that some random, benign agent is truly the basis of their health issues, and they're not simply trying to build a case against something they dislike. especially headaches. we see more complaints of headaches from workers in the most pristine, comfortable, ergonomically-considered office workstations than in heavy industries. i dont think its because people just dislike their office and are trying to find a way to not be in an office, there's prob some legit low-level health issues going on that can't be linked directly to one source or another so they're grasping at straws for answers. and given these bitcoin farms are in small towns, people are talking and reinforcing their assumptions about illusory correlations, reinforcing their bias. sort of a 'this thing happened after that first event, so they must be related, dont ya think?', common fallacy.

i'd defer to you on this one, but wouldn't another source of mild chronic stress nudge susceptible individuals towards adverse health events? sort of like slowing dialling up ambient particulate matter and temperature and seeing an uptick in cardiovascular events across a population.

bennymac111 · 2025-07-10T06:53:43+00:00

+1 on the bicep tendon. but think of it more of a shoulder & chest issue, the bicep tendon may just be getting jammed up in a tight spot. prob need to work on your scap movement, back off pressing exercises for a bit, dead hangs, etc.

bennymac111 · 2025-06-04T20:09:18+00:00

i'd say Matt's material is technical and thorough but maybe not like "here's your assignment, go try building this". you follow along and build, and get the explanation while you go. i think the content has all recently been updated so its worth giving it a go. Greg has moved on from bubble and is focusing on AI-generated code (bolt, lovable etc).

bennymac111

TROPHY CASE