How the Liberals have masked a recession : r/canadian - "Note that without immigration GDP would be negative for 5 straight quarters. The overall economy may be growing (mildly at best). But on average, we are all getting poorer. Note that in addition to increasing taxes, the Liberals have never balanced the budget. Economists have estimated that 2.25% of the central bank rate is due to governmental fiscal policy (ie deficit budgets). This has contributed to inflation and is a hidden tax. Read the quote below: “Firstly, how (can) anybody can define a soft landing when on a real per capita basis, the economy here has been contracting for five straight quarters and is running negative 2.4 per cent year over year,” he said. “So, if that’s your definition of a soft landing… You redefine what a soft landing is.”"
California to ban ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ labels - "The legislation signed by Newsom over the weekend aims at reducing both food waste and the state's climate-warming emissions. There are more than 50 different date labels on packaged food sold in stores, but the information is largely unregulated and does not relate to food safety. “Sell by” dates, for example, often act as a guide for stores to pull products from the shelf and not as an indicator of whether the product is still safe to consume. With no federal regulations dictating what information these labels should include, the stamps have led to consumer confusion — and nearly 20% of the nation's food waste, according to the Food and Drug Administration. In California, that's about 6 million tons of unexpired food that's tossed in the trash each year... The law is set to take effect in July 2026, establishing a new standard for food labeling in California. It will require the use of “Best if Used By” label to signal peak quality and “Use By” label for product safety, an approach recommended by federal agencies. The law provides exemption for eggs, beer and other malt beverages."
Farmer explains why food expiration dates aren’t always useful in viral TikTok - "A farmer has called out the food industry and expiration dates, explaining that both are a huge cause of food waste. Hayden Fox, a 23-year-old farmer with more than 551,000 followers on TikTok, recently discussed the topic of expiration dates in a TikTok that has since gone viral. In the video, Fox began by showing a clip from another person’s TikTok, in which the man said that if a food item has an expiration date, he would not eat the food if it is past the date printed on the product. The TikTok then transitioned to a video of Fox, who said: “As a farmer, I don’t appreciate you throwing the food out.” In the clip, Fox then claimed that people are being “lied to by the food companies,” which in turn is making the companies “billions of dollars each year” by adhering to the expiration dates printed on products. Fox then went on to state that expiration dates “just indicate peak freshness” and that eating the food after is typically fine to do. “Expiration dates on your package just indicate peak freshness - meaning if you eat the food before this date, sure you’ll get the best taste...but you do know that when you go to farmer’s markets, you buy the seconds,” Fox said. “Meaning the seconds are better. And these food processors shorten the expiry date so you throw it in the garbage and buy more.” During the TikTok, which has since been viewed more than 1.6m times, Fox also said that expiration dates are a large reason for food waste, with the farmer telling viewers: “I literally work all year long for 60 per cent of this food to be thrown in the garbage.”... On its website, the US Department of Agriculture, USDA, also states that food is typically okay to eat if the date printed on the package has passed, as long as there is no “spoilage evident”. “If the date passes during home storage, a product should still be safe and wholesome if handled properly until the time spoilage is evident,” the USDA states. Previous studies have also found that confusing labelling leads to unnecessary food waste, with one study finding that “making date labels easier to understand would avoid 398,000 tons of wasted food every year,” while another 2009 study on food waste found that “up to 40 per cent of the US food supply goes uneaten every year”... “As a farmer, we spend countless days laboring away growing the food. Seeing it wasted not only diminishes our work, but is downright wasteful. I studied food and agricultural business at the University of Guelph and almost every problem that could be attributed to food insecurity stemmed from consumers being misinformed,” he said, adding that he also experienced the waste firsthand when his roommate used to throw out food that had passed its expiration date. According to the USDA, determining whether food is spoiled is easy, as it will typically “develop an off odour, flavour or texture due to naturally occurring spoilage bacteria”... “Consumers are being tricked into throwing out perfectly good food and it is having negative effects on not only the farmers, but the world as a whole,” he said. “People need to know that expiration dates have become a marketing tactic.”"
Don’t Buy This: Bogus Food Expiration Dates Make You Waste Food - "“Most consumers think you shouldn’t eat food past the expiration date,” said Michael Hansen, a senior scientist with Consumers Union. “But that’s not true because the best by dates just address food taste or quality, not safety.” While you should never eat mold, illnesses caused by e.coli, Listeria, and Salmonella are typically a result of improper food handling, improper hand washing or eating undercooked meat. Most food is safe for a lot longer than you think. Shelf-stable and frozen foods can last indefinitely so tossing that frozen pizza from last year is a huge waste. Same for dry foods like pasta, crackers and nuts. When in doubt, use your sense of sight, smell and texture to determine if your food is still good, Jessica Crandall, a registered dietary nutritionist in Denver, Colorado, suggests."
Is there more or less sex on screen? - "Stephen Follows, a film-data analyst, has examined the 250 highest-grossing movies in America every year since 2000. By parsing data from film-rating bodies as well as information from movie databases—in which a title’s “sex and nudity” is ranked on a scale from “none” to “severe”—he has found that the level of sexual content in films has fallen by almost 40%. Abstinence, in other words, is in vogue. In 2000 less than 20% of the highest-grossing movies had no sexual content at all. Today almost half lack it (see chart). There may be fewer sex scenes, but those that make the cut are more graphic than ever before. In 1992 a flash of genitals in “Basic Instinct” sent audiences and critics into a tailspin; in 2023 full-frontal female nudity featured in the films “Joy Ride” and “No Hard Feelings” without prompting a furore. Both “Fair Play” and “Saltburn”, also released last year, even had characters performing oral sex on their lovers while they were menstruating. Erect penises—once strictly verboten, now filmed using a prosthesis—have popped up in films such as “May December”. “Mary & George”, a historical drama series about King James I of England, strives for naked realism: in one scene George, the king’s favourite, licks his hand to lubricate his penis. D.C. Moore, the screenwriter, says that it is a story about a monarch “whose desire pulls him apart. So you need to see his desire.” Some viewers may desire not to have seen it. Intimacy co-ordinators play an important role... Some actors, including Jennifer Aniston and Sean Bean, have said that intimacy co-ordinators are unnecessary, or that they stifle the spontaneity of sex scenes. That they have become almost ubiquitous on film sets in the wake of #MeToo, detractors argue, suggests that they are a symptom of a more censorious age... The fate of the sex scene rests with the next generation. That does not bode well: Generation Z is notoriously chaste. Not only are youngsters having less sex than their elders did, but they also want to see less of it on screen, according to a poll conducted last year by the Centre for Scholars and Storytellers at University of California, Los Angeles. Asked to rank 19 topics they enjoyed watching in TV shows and movies, adolescents put “romance and/or sex” 13th; seventh was “content that doesn’t include sex or romance”. The future, it seems, may be PG-13"
Thomas Sowell Quotes on X - ""Much of what are called 'social problems' consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing.""
Meme - *Partners as fitting shapes comic*
Father to son with crazy complicated shape: "Still haven't found a Goth Thick 6'0 Gf that loves you unconditionally and gives you support and backup that Also plays videogames but not too much so she also has time to be your mom, Huh?"
Meme - "24 homemade butter tarts, comes with a piano (L 57", H 42", W 23.5") and WI... $10
Selling 24 buttertarts, comes with a piano and dollar store container (will not separate). Pet friendly, people tolerant home. Pick up in Grimsby from main floor. Will not help load but will guide through doorway. Serious inquiries only PLEASE. weight is 500-800 lbs (piano)"
Women's height, reproductive success and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in modern humans - "Recent studies have shown that, in contemporary populations, tall men have greater reproductive success than shorter men. This appears to be due to their greater ability to attract mates. To our knowledge, no comparable results have yet been reported for women. This study used data from Britain's National Child Development Study to examine the life histories of a nationally representative group of women. Height was weakly but significantly related to reproductive success. The relationship was U-shaped, with deficits at the extremes of height. This pattern was largely due to poor health among extremely tall and extremely short women. However, the maximum reproductive success was found below the mean height for women. Thus, selection appears to be sexually disruptive in this population, favouring tall men and short women. Over evolutionary time, such a situation tends to maintain sexual dimorphism. Men do not use stature as a positive mate-choice criterion as women do. It is argued that there is good evolutionary reason for this, because men are orientated towards cues of fertility, and female height, being positively related to age of sexual maturity, is not such a cue."
Meme - "POOR GIRLS VIDEO
Naughty Jade's iFUCK MY FANS VOLUME 3
Below Average Guys!
Featuring MALAA *busty woman*"
I don't get it
Meme - Sage Actual @SageDynamics: "At no point in this sentence did I know what was going to happen next."
"Death defying neuroscientist turned OnlyFans model confronts life with memory loss - after brutal bike accident caused by a pigeon"
Two High School Girls Charged After Falsely Claiming Teacher Sent Inappropriate Messages - "Two high school girls in Louisiana were charged with lying to police after they attempted to frame a male teacher they claimed was sending inappropriate messages to a student... Detectives were able to prove that the male teacher had not sent any of the messages or photos the girls claimed he sent, and one of the girls eventually confessed to the crime. The sheriff’s office declared the teacher to be the “crime victim” and stated that he “has been cleared of all allegations,” something rare when it comes to false accusations."
Believe Victims, Believe All Women
Meme - "IN-cOUNTRY PET
Woman: 'Billy, stay away from that man'
Billy: 'But why's he's shaking so much? Is he having a seizure?'
Vietnam Pet baseball cap wearing man grasping money and milkshake and shaking: 'Holy fuck, I've been a naughty kitten'
*Hand grasping phone manipulating wave curve*"
Smuggled Marcus Aurelius statue to return to Türkiye after decades in US museum - "A bronze statue of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, smuggled out of Türkiye in the 1960s through illegal excavations, has been officially returned to Türkiye, a Turkish official announced. “After nearly 65 years of scientific, legal, and diplomatic efforts, the statue of Marcus Aurelius is finally returning to the lands of Anatolia where it belongs,” Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Gokhan Yazgi said in a post on X. Yazgi said that the unique bronze statue, which depicts Marcus Aurelius in his philosopher persona, was illegally taken abroad from the ancient city of Boubon in southwestern Türkiye during the 1960s. Before its return, the statue will remain on display at the Cleveland Museum for three months as part of a special exhibition. It is expected to arrive in Türkiye in July. “In July, it will come to life again in our country, within its own cultural context. Thus, Marcus Aurelius’ long journey will finally come to an end in the land to which he belongs,” Yazgi added."
Italy needs to invade Turkey now, since Marcus Aurelius belongs there
Meme - kira @kirawontmiss: "i'm actually speechless.. why is there no community note?"
Crime Reports India @AsianDigest: "Poop War in India"
"The Pidakala War (also known as the Pidakala Samaram or Peddanuggulata) is an annual cow poo fight held in the village of Kairuppala, Aspari, in the Kurnool district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. They would often try catch it in their mouth for more luck. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidakala War"
TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale - "Americans should welcome the disappearance of TikTok because the company is causing harm to children, adolescents, and young adults at an industrial scale. Our evidence comes mostly from research done by those 14 Attorneys General. Some of their briefs have been posted online for the world to see. The briefs include hundreds of quotations from internal reports, memos, Slack conversations, and public statements in which executives and employees of TikTok acknowledge and discuss the harms that their company is causing to children. We organize the evidence into five clusters of harms:
1. Addictive, compulsive, and problematic use
2. Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide
3. Porn, violence, and drugs
4. Sextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitation
5. TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action
We show that company insiders were aware of multiple widespread and serious harms, and that they were often acting under the orders of company leadership to maximize engagement regardless of the harm to children... An internal study found that the “leakage rate” (of bad stuff getting past moderators) is as follows: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content; 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation” content; 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse” content; 30.36% of “leading minors off platform”; 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault”; and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors.”...
Many Young People Would Welcome the End of TikTok"
Trump War Room on X - "🚨 US Federal Housing Finance Agency Director @pulte has referred NY AG Letitia James to the DOJ for alleged mortgage fraud."
Chadwick Moore on X - "According to her own rules, should each mortgage payment be a separate felony count?"
Meme - Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson: "This aged horribly."
NY AG James @NewyYorkStateAG: "Donald Trump lied about his net worth on his statements of financial condition to get loans for much better terms than he should have."
Inevitable West on X - "🇮🇹 Italian PM Giorgia Meloni: “They said I would destroy Italy, but they were wrong. Employment is at a Record High, our Economy is Growing, Illegal Immigration has decreased by 60%, and we are expanding freedom in every aspect of Italians’ lives.”"
Variety on X - ""American Psycho" director Mary Harron is baffled by "Wall Street bros" still idolizing Patrick Bateman when the movie is “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” "That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian Bale’s very clearly making fun of them… But, people read the Bible and decide that they should go and kill a lot of people. People read ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and decide to shoot the president... there’s [Patrick] being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power. But at the same time, he’s played as somebody dorky and ridiculous. When he’s in a nightclub and he’s trying to speak to somebody about hip hop—it’s so embarrassing when he’s trying to be cool.”"
tantum on X - "She didn’t understand American Psycho. She misunderstood American Psycho so badly that her attempted hit job became iconic. She failed at her assignment so badly that despite making a cult hit, Hollywood has never let her anywhere near a real film again"
Meme - Ellen Pasternack @pastasnack_e: "The worst thing about antisocial behaviour is how it discourages pro social behaviour in others. There comes a point, if you are one of the only ones paying to use the tube, or to have your rubbish taken away, when abiding by the rules becomes simply irrational."
Dan Evans @dai_alectic: "paying 20 quid to the council to get a mattress collected like a sucker when this is the alley right next to my house. 3 more round the corner. What’s the point"
Meme - "Age distribution of hospital visits due to punching walls *mostly teens and young adults with 1 6 year old and 1 69 year old*"
Meme - Alexander @datepsych: "Apropos of few conservatives in academia and the reasons for that: why do you believe that ratio is so much more skewed for a discipline like anthropology than it is for a more cognitively demanding discipline like mathematics or engineering?"
"D:R ratio by field at elite colleges and universities, N>5000. No registered Republicans - Anthropology, Communications"
Alexander on X - "Remember, if only 2% of Harvard academics are conservative it’s because conservatives are less intelligent. No discrimination! Explained entirely by IQ. However, if there is an unequal representation of women, ethnic minority groups, or social classes in academia - even just a little bit - it’s due to discrimination. There are no differences in IQ between any other group except for liberals and conservatives! Here are some facts:
1. Liberals do score higher than conservatives in cognitive measures, but only by a modest amount.
2. More cognitively demanding fields have less of a lib/con skew, not more, meaning IQ probably isn’t a very good explanation. We would expect the effect to go in the opposite direction.
3. We already know ideological discrimination occurs in academia. The bipartisan free-speech org FIRE gave Harvard the lowest ranking of all universities. When they ran a national survey of university professors and students, about half of the faculty said that they were afraid to express political opinions because they would face repercussions. About a third of liberal professors said they should actively discriminate against conservatives in admissions. Admissions criteria for most universities counts left-wing political activism among extracurriculars, but not right-wing activities - remember the teen who got admitted to Stanford for writing “BLM” 100 times on his application?
4. Liberals being a supermajority in academia is a recent phenomenon: only about 60 years ago there was close to a 50/50 split and 100 years ago universities were considered socially conservative institutions.
5. If using only grades, SAT scores, or other tests for college admissions - which correlate with measures of cognitive ability around .8 - we would have a very different landscape in academia, because we don’t see much of a difference between conservative HS grads and liberal HS grades. But we do see a big difference between ethnic groups! (Would you say, “Oh no the whites are conspiring!”)"
Meme - Noah "Abolish ICE" McScoots @PeopleGoSquish: "My date: Ahhh damn baby that was great. Now are you gonna swallow for me?
Me, fleeing with his nut so I can plant his DNA at the scene of a murder"
Meme - "When the drapes match the carpet *woman with roast beef on head*"
ADHD, an excuse to medicate the masses - "A startling report in New York Times Magazine has brought to light how the scientific consensus on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has changed. According to one of the scientists interviewed for the piece, the concept of ADHD is facing an “empirical crisis.”... In my view, biological and brain-based explanations are frequently used to prop up erroneous narratives. Recent examples include the use of brain scans to justify the nightmare known as gender ideology, and the claim that polyamory is a sexual orientation. Although scientists and academic institutions today lean more toward dismissing biology in favor of social constructionism, when biological explanations are overextended, this is equally unhelpful. In the realm of mental health, it can lead individuals to embrace an overly deterministic outlook, believing their decisions are outside of their control, or that their conditions will forever define them. Society has a history of pathologizing and medicalizing behavior to justify medicating people. Remember when shyness was upgraded to the mental illness we now know as “social anxiety disorder”?... Some may argue that the popularity of short-form content on social media, and constant interruption from smartphones, has attenuated everybody’s attention spans. I would agree, but if everyone is experiencing the same problem, it isn’t a mental illness — because this reflects a population norm. In this case, it’s not that everyone has a pathological inability to filter out distractions, but that we could all benefit from being on our phones less often. Instead of taking pride in possessing signs of a mental illness, should we not be encouraging each other to be healthy? This doesn’t require going backward and re-stigmatizing conversations about mental health. It is, instead, a form of strength and self-awareness."
Wilfred Reilly on X - ""ADHD" is boredom among high-IQ, aggressive people. That's literally it."
Comrade Stump on X - "Stephen Miller is a rare kind of Jew. The totally assimilated, patriotic Jew whose ruthless neuroticism is targeted towards America's enemies. They're the best weapon a RW administration can have. Roy Cohn and Henry Kissinger are other examples of this."
I thought all Jews were trying to undermine the West
Meme - Paul Sherman @PaulMShe...: "It is physically impossible to exceed the 70-pound domestic weight limit for a small flat rate box. The interior dimensions (8 x 5 xX are ~75.333 in'*3. If you filled the box with pure osmium, the densest substance known to man, it would weigh ~61.48 Ibs."
Thread by @JeanPFournier on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Little anecdote about Canadian “internal trade barriers” from my time in Quebec’s ministry of Finance. 🧵
At one point the minister asked us to look into low hanging fruit to liberalize and improve free trade between Qc and other provinces. The cost of these apparent barriers, we were told, were so high that even some quick wins should surely give at least a bit of a boost, no? Well, turns out not really. Other than the very stupid rules on alcohol, the so-called interprovincial trade barriers are all *regulatory* in nature. In other words, they’re the result of 10 provinces introducing rules and regulations for all sorts of things and slowly diverging. And these rules don’t ever target other provinces directly. They’re just rules that kinda touch every aspect of our lives but were made without taking into account what other provinces were doing. Diverging regulatory creep.
Here’s an example: We had a situation where the rules for the stuffing of car seats - their filling - was different in Qc vs Ontario. This means Qc couldn’t use the car seats made or used by the main car producing province in Canada. You see the issue here. And the regulated difference made kind of sense - Qc allowed only synthetic stuffing to go into car seats padding, whereas Ontario accepted whatever. At one point though Qc realized that this stricter regulation didn’t actually matter and we ended up removing it. But wouldn’t you know, some people were pissed! Some businesses had specialized to conform to Qc’s regulatory reality! They probably ended up adapting, but it shows that even the most random regulatory change can face interest group ire. It probably cost them a pretty penny too
And when we looked at other regulatory dragons to slay, it turned out that we weren’t ready to pay the political price. We ended up not doing anything else because we were afraid of the push back. Even though most changes just required harmonization, it would create local losers And we didn’t even start to look at the worst offenders: labour mobility and professional orders playing gatekeepers. Anyone who knows anything about Canada understands how powerful the doctor lobby can be, for example. Even thinking about touching this would amount to nuclear public affairs war. And these interest groups usually think they’re actually defending the public interest somehow. For example I once had a doctor from the Qc order of doctors tell me with a straight face we had to keep Albertan doctors out cause their training sucked. It’s complete lunacy. Now imagine this but across the entire economy. Millions of businesses and individuals claiming to be protecting Canadians. Hundreds or thousands of lobbys and interests groups protecting themselves and fighting for their survival. Whether its protected economic fiefdoms, artificially created regulatory power or economic benefits, turns out that for the economy as a whole each change to barriers can be microscopic - but it can mean hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in costs for others. To succeed it will require a Total War effort from the feds and ALL provinces. People and provinces WILL be pissed and yell. Quite frankly, it means that provinces will have to reduce their autonomy on some things. Are we ready to have that discussion? Will provinces agree when push comes to shove and their back is against the wall with lobbyists breathing down their neck? Historically the answer has been a resounding and hard No. Until we get people to realize that this will amount to pulling teeth from provincial mouths, and that it might unfortunately have to be forced on some provinces, we will get useless interprovincial trade treaties. And then, we will need to figure out to keep the harmonized regs harmonized in the future. I hope we find a way, but this will likely be harder than building the first trans-canadian railway. But it will probably be even more worth it in the long run."