Yaztromo

joined 2 years ago
[–] Yaztromo 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

BC significantly reduced Provincial Income Tax, and it was all offset by the Carbon Levy. We now have one of the lowest Provincial Income Taxes in Canada thanks to the Carbon Levy.

[–] Yaztromo 4 points 11 months ago

This will become, for me, one of those very, very, very rare shows where I’ll bring it up once every few years and binge watch it all over again. I don’t think I could ever get tired of rewatching it on a yearly basis.

[–] Yaztromo 3 points 11 months ago

To be clear — Mom’s “Depression Dinner” was in fact just greasy fried ground beef poured over mashed potatoes. No spices. I don’t even think she used any salt or pepper. Oily Gerbers would be a perfectly apt description!

[–] Yaztromo 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Oh certainly changing the presentation, texture, and separation of the ingredients can make a big difference in a dish! I’d say the difference between “depression dinner” and Shepard’s pie is like the difference between cake batter and cake — they’re both made up of the exact same stuff, but one is a gloopy mess you’d probably not want to eat a whole bowl of, and the other is delicious cake you’ll want a second serving of.

[–] Yaztromo 4 points 11 months ago

I pretty specifically called out striving to create things like family or helping improve your community through volunteer works — which isn’t “capitalism” at all.

Each of us can always be someone better and do something more. That isn’t a bad thing.

You end by trying to put words in my mouth. I never said anything about the worth of anyone over anyone else. Striving for the betterment of oneself, one’s loved ones, and one’s community is a good thing — but the antithesis of that isn’t that doing none of those things makes you worthless. That’s something you came up with, not me.

[–] Yaztromo 29 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Growing up my mother would occasionally make a dish my father enjoyed that she called “Depression Dinner”. It was mashed potatoes covered in fried ground beef with beef gravy poured on top of it.

I like mashed potatoes. I like using ground beef in a variety of dishes. And who can say anything bad about gravy? But mix those three together — ugh, no thanks. It was like baby food for adults. There was a reason why my brother and I took to calling it Depressing Dinner growing up.

[–] Yaztromo 18 points 11 months ago (4 children)

The ability to “strive” is a learned skill that needs to be honed over years. It’s not really natural to most people — it’s easy to fall into a low-energy state and want to stay there because it’s comfortable. It takes practice and energy putting yourself out there and putting an effort into making more of your life.

If you’re happy with who you are and what you’re doing, then I’m not going to neg on your life. But are you going to spend the next ~50 years just gliding along, and not creating or building any value for yourself in this world (and that doesn’t have to be monetary value — building a family, and building up your community through volunteer works build value as well)? When you’re in the twilight of your life, do you want to look back and find you did nothing of significance with your life?

Maybe that doesn’t bother you. That’s fine. Just so long as 15 years from now you’re not some bitter middle-aged person complaining about people in the upper-middle class who get to do things you don’t get to do and who have more money and nice things that you do.

But none of that would be for me. So I put in the work, learned how to strive for the life I wanted, and got a graduate degree, built a beautiful family, got that management job (and the pay that goes with it), and spend my spare time volunteering (currently) with three different organizations. It’s a busy life and take a lot of time and energy — but it allows me to have people around me who love me, with the money to do and own nice things together, and to give back to my community to make it a better place. And when my time eventually comes, I’ll have hopefully left this world a little better off for the effort.

[–] Yaztromo 36 points 11 months ago

Don’t know where you are in Canada (which I’m assuming based on “Social Insurance Number” and “Prov.” fields in the form), but at least here in BC much of what they’re asking for here is illegal to even request in the first place.

Your Drivers License, and banking info are all personal private information which are covered by the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). This guidance document from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of BC outlines what a perspective landlord can ask for, and what they can’t.

This is either a scam, or a really shitty landlord. Either way, don’t deal with them. You can open a complaint with the OIPC if you want (probably most useful if you’re sure they’re legit; not too useful if it’s a scam).

[–] Yaztromo 2 points 11 months ago

You can learn a ton installing your own OS, even if you don’t get things working in the end. Especially back in the 90’s when things weren’t quite as plug-and-play and hardware auto-detection was immature. So even if your RedHat experiment failed, good on you for attempting it anyway!

[–] Yaztromo 3 points 11 months ago

Canning can be zen — with a bit of practice it’s not that difficult, and it’s often easy to find someone who is willing to help out. I’m often canning with friends or family — and it’s often as easy as throwing the right ingredients into a pot, bringing them to a boil, ladling it into prepared jars, and letting them sit in the pot.

As we built up the community, dealing with the “tide of crap” did get easier for us as moderators — we had a good core community of regular users who would quickly flag things that were dangerous, and with an automod rule to auto-remove posts with 5 such reports meant that we were often able to moderate posts of concern while they were private. But it took work to build up the community to the point where it was self-policing. I’m hoping that resiliency we tried to build up has continued to keep the community safe.

Glad to be here on Lemmy as well. Online discussion boards have been my bread and butter since the grand old BBS days of the mid-80s.

[–] Yaztromo 2 points 11 months ago

I’m glad people think so — we really wanted to help build an online community of people who could share their joy of home canning, where safety and adhering to the best scientific principles was respected. The most gratifying results were when we would hear from some new canner who were able to get over some fears they had around safety and completed their first successful canning project.

I haven’t been back to check on the situation since we got the boot, but I hope for the sake of the community there are still people there keeping to this credo. A jar of food just isn’t something worth getting sick (or worse!) over.

[–] Yaztromo 2 points 11 months ago
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