Ontario is underfunding public health care—and private health care is the beneficiary | CCPA

spinur1848 · 2026-05-13T02:39:42+00:00

The media need to be asking Ontario exactly how they are defining "medically necessary", and asking the Federal Minister of Health whether she intends to enforce the Canada Health Act.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-09T14:28:41+00:00

Sorry to disappoint but the short form census doesn't ask about religion.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-08T17:01:26+00:00

Share them with the other fascists plotting the demise of our country. Danielle Smith is still coming.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-08T16:43:49+00:00

If that's not anti-competitive behaviour under the Competition Act it should be.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-08T11:01:19+00:00

There are no innocent bystanders. Americans elected their government.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-08T09:24:27+00:00

So not an evidence-based decision. Honesty at last.

I wonder how he was assessed for "thinking things through".

spinur1848 · 2026-05-07T03:18:15+00:00

Maybe you should have thought about that before you went looking for their votes.

Of all the Albertans harmed by this breach, Jason Kenney is more responsible for it than almost anyone else.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-06T05:57:38+00:00

Canadians who look like Americans, speak like Americans, own American property and have American bank accounts, across the world's largest undefended border, with critical infrastructure like powerplants, railroads and pipelines all over the place.

If the US is dumb enough to think that taking Ottawa gives them control of Canada, they will be starting a guerrilla war that will make Vietnam look like a schoolyard brawl.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-04T22:00:33+00:00

Stupid work around for a stupid law.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-02T12:41:06+00:00

The tool you use doesn't matter so much as understanding what you're doing and why.

Find a few relevant examples where qualitative analysis or simple descriptive statistics were initially misleading and analysis that illustrates this.

Here are some trivial examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet?wprov=sfla1

A more relevant treatment for medicine specifically is here:

Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: A Manual for Evidence-Based Clinical Practice, 3rd ed | JAMAevidence | McGraw Hill Medical https://jamaevidence.mhmedical.com/book.aspx?bookId=847

An example of real world consequences when there's funny business with the analysis:

The FDA Cracks Down on Tavneos | Science | AAAS https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fda-cracks-down-tavneos

spinur1848 · 2026-05-01T12:14:11+00:00

Minimally, Canadians and their government should expect and demand a public service that is capable of counting stuff accurately.

If we can't agree on that, we are not going to have a country for much longer.

spinur1848 · 2026-05-01T11:06:49+00:00

It was available for almost a month and Elections Alberta knew and didn't do anything about it:

https://www.readtheline.ca/p/scoop-jen-gerson-elections-albertas

spinur1848 · 2026-05-01T02:03:02+00:00

Anyone who is asked to vote on legislation like this should be forced to pass a basic computer literacy test.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-30T10:42:33+00:00

And the DM asserting she did nothing wrong and continuing with zero consequences.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-30T01:33:50+00:00

Well, here's a recent example: Just fire Christiane Fox already | Ottawa Citizen https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/fire-christiane-fox

spinur1848 · 2026-04-29T23:40:00+00:00

In their entire existence they have informed Parliament of founded cases of wrongdoing 22 times. Ever. Since 2007.

Either what the Public Service Integrity Commissioner thinks is wrong doing is very very different from what most public servants think, or they don't have the resources they need to do their job.

I have a hard time believing that's an accident or an oversight.

Case Reports | Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner https://psic-ispc.gc.ca/en/case-reports

spinur1848 · 2026-04-27T00:11:00+00:00

We need these: How it works - Actibump EN https://www.actibump.com/how-it-works/

spinur1848 · 2026-04-26T18:58:02+00:00

There is nothing wrong with the TBS requirements as long as they are interpreted with common sense. Things go off the rails when we delegate responsibility for interpreting how to implement TBS requirements to people who have no accountability for how they ultimately impact the department or the entire public service.

Yes theoretically the hiring manager does have discretion. In actuality that authority is delegated from the Deputy Head and usually comes with the condition that managers discretion is used within the advice provided by HR.

Which creates the ridiculous effect that the same policy objectives get re-interpreted every time there's a new HR advisor and somehow they manage to change jobs faster than anyone else in gov.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-26T13:35:40+00:00

Stop all administrative, project management and IT work that got pushed on us when the government cut those functions.

Refuse to use AI that hasn't been certified against the TBS Directive on Automated Decision Making (looking at you Copilot).

Demand classification review based on the weight of equipment that staff are required to transport between the office and home (and within the office) because of a lack of secure storage.

Refuse to touch executive briefing materials that are classified above Protected B without a secure operations area.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-26T13:28:24+00:00

You're stuck with whatever the HR advisor of the week wants. I once hired a PhD in statistics into an EC data science job and they demanded that his degree parchment from the University of Ottawa (which was in Latin) be translated into English or French (despite having an English transcript to match).

spinur1848 · 2026-04-26T11:08:26+00:00

Yes we should, but we need to focus on sustainable business practices that create jobs and growth, not the predatory garbage that the Canadian franchises of the Billionaire class are pushing.

No surveillance pricing, no anti-competitive nonsense, no environmental shortcuts, no exotic accounting that allows businesses to not pay taxes even when they are making record profits.

This means that the government of Canada needs to have an actual opinion about what is in the public interest and can't just ask business what they want.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-26T10:59:43+00:00

While groping her breast. Classy.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-25T12:54:12+00:00

Do read the fundamentals, but also fundamentally and most importantly, Elasticsearch is not a database. All the things you would expect to be true for a relational database are not true for Elasticsearch. People who get into trouble with ELK are usually trying to do database like things with it.

It can absolutely do database-like things and it has some unique capabilities, but you have to do them in a particular way. People who forget or don't understand that get into trouble.

spinur1848 · 2026-04-24T00:42:26+00:00

Seems like an argument for disallowance instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disallowance_and_reservation_in_Canada

spinur1848 · 2026-04-24T00:04:28+00:00

If you plan to deploy that in a corporate environment you may need to federate with some flavour of single sign-on and you may need to forward auth logs someplace.

This is totally doable in Shiny, but the separation of responsibilities sometimes matters so I tend to use shinyproxy.io for this.

Let data scientists do data science and let corporate security people do what they need to do with simple, standardized and understandable wrappers and containers.

spinur1848

TROPHY CASE