Unless you somehow think sex between consenting adults becomes abuse once they take the $4000?

No its just soul crushing and degrading that’s all. $40 or $4000 doesnt matter, its still giving up one’s dignity and autonomy and allowing oneself to be used for money. If its so rewarding why aren’t those call girls advertising their great life to the world? Because they’re not proud of what they do, and neither are their parents, that’s why. Yes, it matters.

Find me the pre teen girl that woke up one morning and said, ‘Id really love to be a call girl when I grow up’. They dont. But I would bet you that you WOULD find about 99% of them have been used and abused before they got into that lifestyle. I have literally had a young prostitute say to me, “Well, I’m going to be used anyway, I may as well get paid for it” Does that sound like someone who’s happy in their ‘chosen profession’?

I just wrote that. If five sentences is too ‘dense’ for you, you can always put it into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize lol

You cant regulate into ‘safety’ something that is abusive by nature. There’s no such thing and the state can’t legitimize something thats illegitimate. The only people who think thats a good idea are those who haven’t seen the dark side of prostitution. Painting over it with nice ideas doesn’t make it any less seedy, manipulative and soul destroying. NO girl ever woke up one day and said, ‘Id really love to be a prostitute when I grow up’ But they do. Because they’re out of options. So the solution is not to find ‘cures’ its to continue to make it illegal and embarrassing as hell for the men who use those services. Its amazing how shining a spotlight on their activity suddenly makes them go home. I wonder why.

There’s no positive way to legalize “work” that is based on one person using another. Sex work by its very nature is not only manipulative, its bribing one person to do something they would prefer not to do, for money.

I worked with quite a few prostitutes (its not ‘sex work’, its prostitution - giving it a prettier name doesn’t do justice to how degrading it really is) years ago and without exception they were doing it because they didnt have any other skills or options and quite a few of them had addictions they needed to feed. It feeds the cycle.

The one organization in town that was highly successful in getting them out of it, gave them a safe place to live and then trained them in things like receptionist skills or basic accounting. Once they had workplace marketable skills NO ONE ever said, ‘oh I missed being used by shady and abusive men’. Ever.

It always astounds me when we’ve known the harmful effects of a vice for a HUNDRED YEARS and have banned it because we knew those effects would bankrupt people, destroy marriages, cause thefts and suicides… but NO, let’s forget everything that we know because there’s money to be made! Woohoo!

Just insane to make it legal and THIS easy to do online.

But as a thought experiment: AI images are usually derivative, even faces dont look exactly like the original, they take it and alter it a bit. So if someone takes an image and alters it, and then displays it publicly is it AI generated porn or is it art? Because obviously not all nudes are porn and some erotic art is still art. So a lawyer would have to prove that a) the original person is recognizable enough and therefore an offense has been committed and b) that the image is pornographic and not erotic art. That could be one heck of a challenge.

Just read a long post about many shop spaces in a shopping center in Kona, Hawaii being empty. Rents have gone up, parking has gone astronomical ($14/hr!) when it used to be free, and now tourist numbers are dropping.

Really sucks for Hawaii cause there isn’t a lot of other industry besides tourism and I’m sure they’d love to go back to being a self governing sovereign country if they could.

Course that was back when New York was on ‘his side’. Not so sure that would still be true with the new mayor.

Condensation is not “pollution” thus the quotes.

Well, that picture is a power plant and almost everything coming out of those stacks is water vapor.

If you’re going to write an article about ‘carbon emissions’ at least get the picture right. Just because its visible doesnt mean its “pollution”.

These changes are long overdue and despite the description as a “gift” to corporate landlords they will be hugely helpful to ‘mom and pop’ landlords and to fix the very broken Landlord Tenant Board.

The proposed law shortens the rent arrears eviction notice period from 14 days to 7 days and limits tenants’ legal defenses against eviction in these cases.

If they’re not paying rent, why does a tenant need 14 days for an eviction notice? In AB, we can give notice the day after rent is due, although they still have 14 days to pay after that.

LTB adjudicators will no longer be permitted to allow tenants to raise disrepair issues at eviction hearings unless tenants have notified the LTB in advance and only if they have paid off 50 per cent of the rent monies the landlord claims they owe before the day of the hearing.

Good. Because raising “repair issues” AFTER notice for non payment of rent has just been used as a delaying tactic in ON. If they have been raised BEFORE the notice they are likely legit complaints. And paying 50% of rent owing shows they are trying to catch up. Its fair.

Another one of the new measures proposes to explicitly define the circumstances under which landlords can evict tenants for persistent late rent payments.

The article doesnt state what those circumstances are but it definitely needs clarification. Being late once or twice on rent is generally not cause for eviction, but if its constant it definitely presents a problem.

Beyond countering tenant organizing, the legislation’s most drastic proposal was to open the door to eliminating security of tenure altogether. In Ontario, tenancy agreements automatically renew at the end of their term — landlords can’t increase unit turnover rates by signing tenants to expiring leases.

That one is a bit more controversial. In AB, a fixed term lease just ends on the last day of the lease, there is no tenure. If both sides are happy with the last lease, they usually make an arrangement a month or two ahead of the end date and just sign a new lease. If either party is unhappy, the lease expires and its done, no eviction needed its just over. Tenure works fine when everything is going well, but it also locks in the lease rate to whatever the gov allows.

These changes do seem to be more in favor of landlords but that’s not a bad thing when the ON Landlord Tenant Board is extremely broken - tenants in ON have dragged out evictions for months and months knowing that there are several ways to game the system and ultimately no one wants to build more rental housing if they cant at least get rents paid so it ultimately hurts tenants by decreasing supply.

I agree with only allowing national and provincial flags in front of government buildings. We dont have a flag put up for every cause, not sure why the pride flag deserves more recognition than an indigenous flag or Metis flags, or the Israeli or Palestinian flag or the Human Rights flag or the Ukrainian flag or any other minority group. Its Canada. If we dont want to show prejudice for or against just fly the national or provincial flag, thats it.

Its not just casual tourists staying home. I follow real estate prices like condos in the touristy parts of Florida and the market is flooded with sellers and prices are dropping significantly. Realtors are saying they have had condos on the market for four months without a single inquiry because the market is saturated with sellers and no one’s coming down to buy. Canadians are fleeing their vacation homes.

The point is focus. It is futile to point the firehose at the weeds on fire in the flower bed when the entire house is going up in flames.

And right now to put out the fire the focus should be on the countries that can actually make a difference, primarily China, the US, India and EU next.

But those also happen to be our biggest trading partners. So in a capitalist country like Canada no one, including the government, wants to damage the bottom line, so instead of having a policy with some teeth like “we will cut our trade with those countries by half until they lower their emissions” what is the message you hear? You hear, “Buy an EV, save the planet” “Get solar panels, save the planet” as if that’s going to actually a dent in emissions in Canada.

It will make an imperceptible dent but the resounding message is please continue to buy buy buy more products and DONT stop spending money on our trading partners. That doesnt make sense and its why I know that our gov’s are not actually serious about climate change.

You’ll notice in these latest talks about pipelines that the gov often mentions indigenous groups as they are the primary protesters for any new pipeline. But it really didnt make sense for them to protest (and do massive vandalism of heavy equipment at one location) when the TransMountain was just a twinning of a pipeline that was already there since 1953. There will always be some bands that protest, but the majority are in favor because they also gain employment and royalties.

It was fascinating to listen to a CBC Special a few years back when they traveled across western Canada to ask people how they felt about the pipeline that was running under their property. The majority of people they spoke to, rural or urban, had NO idea there was even a pipeline underneath them. If they dont even know it, it obviously is not impacting their lives in any negative way. But people gotta protest anyway.

We’re actually polluting more than the US per capita.

The planet does not care about PER CAPITA emissions which is exactly why this is a GLOBAL problem and not a Canadian problem. If there was ONE person in Canada emitting 1.5% of the world’s emissions, 98.5% of it would still not be coming from Canada so that per capita argument is moot. The climate only care about totals.

until we’re left as one of the biggest emitters

Mathematically impossible. China could score a MASSIVE feat and cut their emissions by 1/3 and they would STILL emit fifteen times more than Canada. We will NEVER be one of the biggest emitters because we are such a tiny emitter to begin with.

Going back to my initial analogy, the climate is not going to notice if we give up our teaspoon and start using a thimble when China is still using a 3.5 gallon pail instead of a 5 gallon pail to sink the boat.

Im not using feelings, Im using reason and math. 1/3 less of China’s 33% emissions is an 11% reduction. 1/3 less of Canada’s 1.5% emissions is 0.5% which is a margin of error in the science that is based on a computer calculated formula with inexact inputs.

I said its ‘half real’ as in I believe its the only half the cause for climate change.

As for reason lets try a little reason here: Lets say Canada were to drop into the ocean. The entire country ceases to exist. Now that we’ve removed that 1.5% of global emissions, the change in the climate is now what? Almost nothing. Because 98.5% of emissions weren’t even coming from us, and the globe did not even notice when it was 1.5% less. The world still continues to warm, the climate continues to change. CANADA. DOESNT. MATTER. on the global scale.

Even less logical is the people who just want to kill the entire Canadian Oil and Gas industry. So that would reduce global emissions by 0.5% at MOST. Lovely. Now the world still has 99.5% of the same emissions, but we also have thousands and thousands of people out of work. We are now IMPORTING oil and gas because we still need it, even if we didnt use it for gas/diesel which means production increases elsewhere, likely Saudi Arabia where there are less environmental controls. The gov’s now have to raise billions more in taxes because oil revenues are gone, so everyone is now facing major tax hikes on top of crazy high inflation. Seems like a lovely scenario - especially since NO ONE in the world is going to notice or be better off because emissions have only minutely changed. It makes NO sense.

Who is the “we” that didn’t want the Trans Mountain pipeline? Would that be the Gov of Canada that gets about 1.25 billion in revenue this year from the pipeline? Would that be the 15,000 well paid employees that built and run the pipeline? Would that be the AB and BC gov’s who gain a lot of income tax from those employees? Would that be the people in China, South Korea, Japan, and India who buy most of that oil so they don’t have to burn coal to power their industries and don’t have to rely on shady countries like Russia? Or is it Quebecers who benefit from 14 BILLION a year in transfer payments, the vast majority of which comes from Alberta’s oil revenues? Which “we” are we referring to?

Glad you warned ‘everyone’ about my ‘doomerist propaganda’.

Or maybe I just think for myself, look at the facts as best as they can be determined, and don’t buy into the ‘doom and gloom’ propaganda that says we’re all going to be dead from climate change in the next few years.

I didnt say ANY emissions policy in Canada is pointless. REASONABLE and moderate policy is fine, but things like requiring all cars sold in Canada to be EVs by 2035 are just ridiculous and wrong headed, especially in Canada (and I even drive one).

Your first comment is outlandish and not anything close to the opinion I presented.

And yes, you’re saying exactly the same thing I did when you agree that we’re responsible for moving our production elsewhere. Thats my point. We still buy everything from China and THAT’S the world’s primary polluter not the oil and gas industry.