It never goes into detail about the jobs they can’t find… what is the barrier they are dealing with? Experience? Expectations too high?

Anecdotal i know but… my brother in law is on the job hunt and there’s loads of potential employers calling him back for construction work, entry level jobs in garages, hotels looking to staff up in the summer, etc. He’s working on getting his work permit sorted so he’s not able to take the job offers yet… certainly seeing a lot though.

LMIA? It’s one way to legally hire non-residents.

Higher interest rates are impacting Canadians in every corner of life. Food costs… mortgages… fuel… they all domino and collapse together. The lack of urgency is directly hurting the vulnerable portion of our society. There’s no easy fix. Drop interest rates too fast and you risk pushing inflation back up… don’t drop interest rates fast enough and you risk pushing a significant portion of the population into bankruptcy or homelessness (not just home owners… also renters who are forced to absorb that same interest rate hike in the form of higher rents). Within my circle of friends. several have been forced to close businesses because of the impact of the rapid increase in interest rates. It’s not the base rate itself, so much as the speed with which it was increased which was faster than their businesses could absorb.

As for mortgage renewals themselves… the insanity of the Canadian system of the typical 5-year renewable mortgages is just plain vanilla stupid. It makes everyone incredibly susceptible to microeconomics instead of averaging out the risk on a macro scale like most other countries do.

No urgency

Meanwhile people are facing financial struggles with stupid high food prices and out of budget mortgage renewals.

Let them eat cake…

The whole “run a business” thing is bonkers. No wonder so many family doctors give up and go do something else.

With that change in the CBC article that you linked… there’s hope. My family doctor told us that she’s going to retire this year… hopefully there’s a replacement or 10 at the clinic so people can start getting that initial care they need and relieve the pressure on the ER :-(

I’m in BC, and technically have a family doctor… and it sucks. My doctor is only seeing patients a couple of days per week, so appointments are currently booking out around 4 months. There’s ONE walk-in clinic where I live (Nanaimo), and they take a limited number of patients per day - they put out signs on a Saturday morning like “Only accepting 10 patients today” (I have a photo of this one to prove it). TThe ER is backup up so bad, you could die before they even triage you (18h or longer wait is normal). The staff at the Critical Care unit in the neighboring Parksville yells at you and tells you to go back to Nanaimo (it’s happened to both my wife and I at different times… and we both actually needed medical care). We’ve ended up driving to Port Alberni or Courtenay for medical care… or in my case, I’m travelling for business and have booked a doctor visit in another damn country to get some checkup work done because I can’t get it done locally… OK, I can get it, but the local wait times are so fucking long that I can book a flight, fly overseas and see a doctor, get my results and be back home a month before I’d even start the process with my family doctor.

Talkign with the parents at the local school… many are afraid that their kids will catch something… and thehy won’t be able to see a doctor to get the help they need

So yeah… there’s widespread frustration :-P

You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.

Have you been playing on Reddit again?

estimate age based on a webcam scan of a user’s face.

Ummm… right… VPNs are going to have a LOT of business in Canada.

Well… to be fair, I lived a good life from my mid-20s to my mid-40s. I traveled the world. I have worked in various parts of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I’ve done a solo motorcycle trip from Nairobi to Cape Town… just as one example. The problem is… while I had money during these years, I didn’t save much. What I did save was used up in the in-between-jobs times after I was laid off… and this happened more than once over the years. Before I got married, I had a plan to retire at 50, and I was actually well on my way to achieving it. Then life happened… and kids arrived… and money disappeared faster than it came in.

Now that retirement is closer… and I’m thinking about it, the reality of it not happening. I look at the stupidly broken medical system in Canada… and think “shit, I’m screwed”. I can’t see a doctor for example… just to do some preventative body maintenance and checkups. The local walk-in medical clinics are overwhelmed. I have a family doctor, but she’s retiring this year… and she’s currently booking in-person appointments 3 to 4 months out and every day the gap for appointment availability gets bigger. The only other option is the ER… and if you show up at the ER saying “I am almost 55, I need a physical just to check on things” they show you the door and say “come back when you’re sick”. I’m literally booking a flight to Europe to go see a doctor for a checkup.

So yeah… wheeee…

My kids use Linux. They are 5 and 7. They do just fine. They are “normal”… as in just beginner users.

The 5 year old only cares where Steam is, and where the games are in the menu.

The 7 year old is a master at it all already. He’s installing Minecraft mods all the time… downloading, unzipping the mods… running java -jar XYZ from the terminal… yeah I had to show him the first time, but TBH, I didn’t show it all to him. He read up on how it works and watched YouTube videos on it.

It’s all about what you’re used to and if you’re actually interested in learning the bits. Normal is what? Someone who treats the computer as an appliance? Yeah… with those users as long as the machine actually works… they don’t care what the underlying OS is… OSX? Windows 11? some Linux distro? It’s all the same to them. The computer is a magic machine that does things and they have no clue how or why.

Can I join your club? I’m in my 50s. I have worked since I was 14 years old… full time since I was 17. I worked most of my adult life outside of Canada, so I do have some state pension saved up outside of Canada, but it’s nowhere near enough to live on in Canada. I moved back to Canada a few years ago with a “seemed like a good idea at the time” decision. In total, I have worked less than 10 years of my life in Canada… so my CPP is basically zero. I look at what Canada has to offer me and think… what the hell am I doing here? It’s fucking expensive to live here… I have nothing to retire on… and only homelessness ad starvation to look forward to.

So… while I’m still employable, fit, and healthy, I’m planning on getting back out… this year actually if all goes to plan.

Every Value Village I’ve been to is either over priced or just picked over junk. There’s never anything worth buying. The overpriced stuff is all originally from Walmart or one of the Dollar stores and always priced well over the new retail price.

The same thing happens at Once Upon a Child. Kids clothes are all George (Walmart brand) and price at least 2x new.

I can afford my house even at 5% because I intentionally bought WAY under what I was approved for. I knew the lower interest rates wouldn’t hold… and there was no way I was willing to buy into a multi-million dollar home at 1%. Rates go up and down over time. I bought based on the assumption that a renewal would be in the 6-8% range. At 5% I can afford it just fine… question is, do I want to?

A LOT of people I know bought right at the max they were approved for, and at 1-ish percent interest. Renewals are coming up within the next 12 months or so, and they are already panicking. That $2M home is going to suddenly become VERY expensive… well beyond their ability to pay for it.

I plan to sell this year… and take that equity, whatever we get, and set ourselves up elsewhere outside of Canada.

“marriage is between a man and a woman before God!

Ummm… but what about all the men in the bible with many wives. There was no one man one wife thing in almost the entire Bible. Almost all of the people who are touted to be amazing examples of God’s peopel… were polygamists… and since that wasn’t enough, they would have the concubines on the side. Point that out and they run away.

Drink bottle water and consume plastic particles… drink tap water and get all the other contaminants (places I travel for work outside of Canada have highly contaminated and unsafe water… so water with bits of plastic are the lesser evil).

Yup. I really regret letting my EU number go when I moved (back) to Canada. My EU number was about 25 Eur per month (a few years ago) including international roaming calls and data in Canada.

I though naaah, I’ll get a local number because it makes sense right? No not really… 98% of the calls I get on my local Canadian number are scam calls (someone threatening me in Chinese with deportation over unpaid taxes etc.) so it’s not like I would have been inconveniencing anyone local calling me… most of the remaining 2% call me on WhatsApp or Signal…

Hmmm… Infineon has been doing work with graphene semiconductors for years. Something seems a bit off with this article.

Double-check that you have Nvidia Prime configured/selected. It’s been a while since I’ve used Mint, but… try this…

1. Open the App menu (bottom left, same as in Windows)
2. Type "nvidia’ and this should show you the NVIDIA X Server Settings app. Click on it to launch.
3. Double-check that you see all the drive info, including the driver version. Close out the app of all looks “right”.
4. In the Mint system tray (lower right), click on the Nvidia icon (if you don’t see it, open the app menu, type “startup” and make sure “Support for NVIDIA Prime” is enabled) 5. Set the profile to “Active profile” (it’s hard on battery life in this mode). This forces everything to run on the Nvidia card only…
5. Test your games. Do they work better? If yes, you’ve found the root cause of the performance issue… if not… Hmmm, I’m not sure, then it’s time to try other things.

My experience with this is that Nvidia Prime was not being enabled/selected when I was trying to game. If this (forcing everything to launch on Prime) works and your games are working at a more acceptable performance level, you can leave it in “Active profile” at the expense of battery life… or you can set up the On-Demand profile… or explicitly switch between Intel and Nvidia, using Intel for all non-gaming things and pop it into Nvidia when you want to game… lots of possibilities depending on how you want to use the computer. :-)

BTW, an alternative to the systray method is simply setting the profiles right within the NVIDIA X Server Settings app (the last menu item on the left nav menu within the NVIDIA app). I just find that the systray icon is a quick/easy way, and it’s worth knowing about.

Yeah once you fly with other non-Canadian airlines you realize just how awful flying domestic and international on Air Canada really is (and the discount airlines like Swoop were even worse). I travel a lot for personal and work, and I try my best to book Qatar, Emirates, Turkish, etc. Hell, even KLM is better and they aren’t amazing. Same with Ethiopian Air… not amazing or even good but better than Air Canada.

They manufacture and sell the buses in Canada… There are BYD buses in operation in at least Toronto, Victoria, Longeuil, St. Albert and Grand Prairie (and probably more by now). https://en.byd.com/news/byd-opens-first-canadian-bus-assembly-plant/ If you’re in Montreal, there’s a decent chance you’ll see BYD E6 taxis.

There’s been rumors of the cars being prepped for general sale in Canada… but I can’t find any proof of that right now.