• 3 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • That’s a fair question. The Consumer Price Index only provides data in aggregate form from a basket of retailers. The Statistics Act protects against the disclosure of specific data points. The consumer price index is important to track inflation affecting Canadians at large, but it isn’t very useful for analyzing specific pricing trends.

    I believe the organizer of this effort is specifically looking to find instances in which grocers and players within the grocery sector increase prices for non branded goods at the same time, which implies collusion. Think for example, bread price fixing and when they break the promise of not raising prices for x number of months. They wrote down a few analysis ideas to that effect.



  • I sometimes wonder why we don’t just establish a foreign legion like France, or at least permit foreigners to join as enlisted (not officer ranks) like other countries as a pathway to Canadian citizenship. The risk in active service is a far greater display of commitment to Canada than the average study permit holder, and expanding our recruitment pool to Francophone nations in Africa, and states in the Caribbean would at least help greatly in finding non-specialized enlisted.

    I don’t see the security risk considering that the vast majority of CF recruits are never assessed for loyalty in their background checks, so long as they don’t serve in their countries of origin. I’ve completed the reference check for CF recruit background checks - I really don’t think they’re that rigorous if they’re essentially being outsourced to third party companies.

    The fact that having any kind of university degree automatically puts you into the officer cadre, in a country with an extremely high post-secondary education rate like Canada and low tuition fees/generous student funding (versus the US where the opposite is true and the Army is a pathway to post-secondary education), is only furthering a ridiculous ratio of officers to the enlisted. I see more value in starting to recruit from countries where pathways to move up on the social ladder are deeply stifled, and building a base of those who are willing to make meaningful sacrifices to become Canadians (versus yet another MBA student from University Canada West that’s only in it for themselves).


  • I remember a period of time where I was being prescribed three medications (all pretty minor) and they insisted I do a medication review. They get to bill the province $70 for those and they have a quota to hit.

    I learned later on that medication reviews aren’t just checking boxes off the list, but intended to ensure that patients are using their prescriptions safely and effectively, helping to identify any potential drug interactions/side effects, and consider alternative drug regimens. This never happened in my medication reviews, they were just 2 minute checkbox exercises.




  • My guilty pleasure is watching those YouTube videos of people vacationing at absurdly cheap caravan parks, and the general vibe I get is that these places are pretty run down but are surprisingly adequate if all you’re looking to do is get away from town. Low-cost European carriers have definitely done a number on a lot of domestic UK resorts though - they simply aren’t competitive for the reasons you’ve stated.



  • I liked getting the Sendai Area Pass and just taking the Loopie bus. It was a pretty good value and in many of the smaller attractions, I was the only tourist there that day (like the Sankyozawa 100-Year Electric History Center).

    It made it pretty easy to see Sendai in two days. The only thing that was closed in the winter that I would’ve liked to see were the University of Tohoku’s botanical gardens (not that there aren’t other botanical gardens I couldn’t have gone to).

    I really enjoyed Gyutan too (beef tongue) too. I don’t know if I got to try high-quality beef but I definitely enjoyed the food.









  • Highly recommend it, especially between the edges of off-season and shoulder season. I went to Fukushima and was basically one of two tourists in town (the other being a Rwandan artist-in-residence). When I was in Sendai in January, the most touristed attraction (Sendai Castle ruins) couldn’t have had more than 40 visitors, and I remember taking a $10 airport limo bus to the hotel meant for 55 travelers, and I was the only one on it. I’ve made it a goal to visit Akita and Aomori in the future.


  • I remember visiting a youth summit here in Canada, and the Indonesian ambassador to Canada was present. I remember he got pretty exasperated that the only thing people in attendance knew about Indonesia was Bali (and thought it was Indonesia’s capital), despite being the world’s fourth largest country in population. He gave us all Indomie and ginger chews though - nice guy, but he got me hooked on Indomie for much of university.