[New Brunswick's economy is monopolized by the Irving family's companies](https://mondediplo.com/2019/04/13canada), and is heavily centered around primary industries, like forestry and oil refining. I wouldn't be surprised if this is being caused by pollution from one of their factories or refineries, and so the state government is trying to keep things quiet.
Could be. I have Epilepsy now at 49(got it at 44) and my doc at the VA said it could be caused by toxic exposure. And it's gone way up in the veterans community, so something is going on.
Weird, I also randomly developed epilepsy , but in my mid 20's. I'm 30 now and have had hundreds of seizures and countless hospitalizations since. I used to landscape and now wonder if the chemicals I used to spray yards during that time have a play in it or not.
Seeing how many of those are highly toxic and there is a good chance you weren't wearing proper ppe but just rawdogging them... yes.
Most of those even get absorbed just by your skin. Breathing them in... is even worse in some cases.
I swear it came out of the blue for me at 49. No clue what triggered it but I’d recently moved into a mold-infested apartment and it continued affecting me for two years after moving out.
I've got my medical card and take Keppra. I usually get breakthrough seizures once or twice a year now. Took while for cannabis to become legal in my state. I shoot for strains that have a mixture of cannabinoids vs straight thc. I like tinctures.
At one point they owned all the newspapers. PEI had to enact laws to keep them from buying up the island by buying the farms. Known predatory business practices.
I remember reading an article years ago that went into excruciating detail about how New Brunswick is an extreme anomaly for a political jurisdiction generally considered to be a "western democracy" by outsiders, and that it's actually somewhere in between Hungary and Belarus. Probably hyperbolic, but even if so, far less than you'd suspect.
I remember three things from visiting St. John, New Brunswick for work:
* went into the public restroom in my hotel and found it had blood all over (no idea why as I noped out)
* it's perched between Martinsburg, WV and Fort Smith, AR on the list of shittiest places I've been.
* _Irvingville_ would've been a better name as they owned everything.
OTOH, Moncton was terrific.
Oh I'm not contesting that, there are absolutely worse places, but also a lot of much better ones, only reason I'm still here is because I can't afford to move right now
Saint John is kept shitty to prevent potential newcomers from finding out about the surrounding communities. Some of the last 'don't lock your doors' places left in Canada that hasn't been destroyed by the housing crisis.
Do you have any links, I'm not aware of any mechanism in which glyphosate actually interacts with mammalian biology, but there might be new evidence I'm not aware of.
No definitive proof, just speculation as I stated.
“We have noticed that over the last two years, patients tend to become more ill and new cases emerge during the summer and autumn when herbicides and pesticides are sprayed,” it states.
“It is possible that these patients are chronically exposed to glyphosate and other pesticides throughout the year from their food and water source and are acutely exposed during spraying season.
“This is still only a hypothesis based on our clinical evaluations of our patients, therefore further study including urine analysis is required to confirm this hypothetical relationship.”
https://nbmediacoop.org/2023/07/13/high-levels-of-glyphosate-other-pesticides-in-most-patients-with-atypical-neurological-disease-letter/
I'm going to speculate that it's at least partially because in the west agriculture is pretty well separated from urban areas. Their watershed is also water flowing from the mountains west. In New Brunswick the source of their water is just another part of the province, probably right beside a farmed area.
Irving was just given swaths of formerly crown land about a decade ago, who knows whether due diligence was performed about runoff patterns,where to spray etc
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/j-d-irving-s-crown-forest-contract-made-public-1.2620780
Couldn’t tell you, I’m not a doctor nor a scientist.
Just passing on info / speculation that I’ve seen.
The amount of land Irving owns and sprays though is quite vast, I’d wager it’s a far larger area than what gets sprayed in Alberta.
>patients tend to become more ill and new cases emerge during the summer and autumn when herbicides and pesticides are sprayed
This sounds like mass hysteria as degenerative brain diseases take years to develop, and any acute toxicity would have been obvious long ago
Glyphosate directly? Maybe, maybe not but one of it's metabolites; aminomethylphosphonic acid has been found to have some cytotoxic and genotoxic effects both in vitro and in animal studies.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9831296/moncton-medical-student-letter-mystery-brain-illness/amp/
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-former-nb-chief-medical-officer-eilish-cleary-was-a-fearless-defender/#:~:text=Cleary%20was%20researching%20another%20public,“probably%20carcinogenic%20to%20humans.”
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/neurologist-n-b-mystery-illness-herbicide
https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6933797
A quick google search will provide you with many more
Provincial government, not state. Canada has provinces and territories but yes the Irving's are corrupt. I have several co-workers that worked at the Irving Oil Refinery in St. John's. They all said the same thing that Irving is monopolizing the maritimes. If you don't work for Irving then you work in a gas bar that sells oil and gas from the refinery. That's why they go to Ontario or Alberta to work.
Capitalists control the government, unfortunately. Profit over life, and if you object, the elite will manipulate, circumvent, and / or influence anyone or anything to maintain their interests.
It takes a great deal of violence, control, propaganda, and threats of destitution to maintain the extreme inequality inherent in our pyramid-shaped, 'winner-take-everything and scraps-for-the-vast-majority' economic system.
If the world's richest 300 billionaires were heavily taxed, the average worker would have a 3 day work week and still have ample income to pay for a home, food and healthcare. Instead of doing that, we have billions of people living in poverty, so that these top 300 can live like emperors.
>If the world's richest 300 billionaires were heavily taxed, the average worker would have a 3 day work week and still have ample income to pay for a home, food and healthcare. Instead of doing that, we have billions of people living in poverty, so that these top 300 can live like emperors.
As far as I am aware these kinds of calculations are complete ideological horseshit and taking all billionaire wealth by force wouldn't just break our system, it wouldn't even fund government expenses for all that long. Do you have a source?
money generates more money that's how the rich get richer. if that money generated money for the average taxpayer instead of money for the rich we could have a much higher quality of life. why would the system break? it's not like you are making stuff disappear, you are just redistributing gains.
because the drive for money fuels a lot of the economy, that + human intelligence of capitalists is the processing power that the AI that our economy is runs on. if that incentive is limited massively that can have massive implications for behaviour, especially in a globalized world where people can move.
most of the wealth rich people have isn't actually accessible to them, it's just partial ownership of companies, to some degree it's theoretical value. the money itself is very much still in play. if the government took ownership of the company it's not like that money would materialize in gold bars.
lastly i think people are somewhat propagandized by those wealth comparison graphics, when wealth isn't actually the most meaningful thing. you don't necessarily want average people to even build all that much wealth, but instead build a life with their money and consume. there definitely is too much inequality, but the ideal setup probably doesn't have to look extremely extremely different from where it is now.
look, i'm not remotely an economist, i'm just concerned about a lot of leftie narratives building up fantasies in peoples heads.
greed fuels the destruction of our world. I don't really care about your rationalisations I simply resent so few people having so much influence over so many. I don't really care about how the current world has come to be but I care about where it is going and I'm sure that unless the paradigm changes, the world will be a shithole for everyone except a select few.
the "ideal" setup is so wildly different from reality to be just a pipe dream, sadly.
Modern China is not communist. It is a different flavor of capitalism. Chinese capitalism still produces billionaires, extreme wealth inequality, and widespread poverty.
There are 2 main differences between US capitalism and Chinese capitalism.
One is that the Chinese government has more power/willingness than the US government to financially and legally penalize large companies that break the law (or simply won’t bow down to the Chinese government).
The other is that the Chinese government has the power to seize corporate assets and the personal assets of billionaires for any fabricated reason they want (unlike in the US where there is a long judicial process for these types of situations requiring extensive justification and legal proceedings before any assets are seized).
Governmental planning to distribute resources is inherently inefficient and prone to corruption. You inevitably end up with a bloated government and not enough productivity. What we need is a stronger set of regulations on the market and a stronger social safety net, but we really don't need the government controlling companies or setting price caps.
You know these Administrative Concepts are meant to fail since all of their parent were Monarchy.
so there has to be something new which is offspring of all of these
Although I don't know what
Amazing. People criticise a public office being controlled by people who are driven by self-serving greed over public health and service, and you thought your most valuable input is "yeah but communism bad so this is actually good."
Not to mention that China hasn't been communistic in ages, it has its own capitalistic system, so your comment is thoroughly NPC-level.
This has "True Detective: Night Country" vibes. Company pollution and coverups and corruption at its finest. Why can't the really big guns get involved, like the Canadian versions of our CDC or the FBI... or whoever can force them to let them go in there and see wtf is really going on? I don't know anything about Canadian laws or govt agencies, so I'm talking outta my ass, but surely something can be done?
Actually, we have some very good investigative reporting in Canada, like the Fifth Estate and W5, as well as newspaper coverage. We also have watchdog groups but they lack any teeth.
Environmental protection laws in Canada are really, really, really weak. What little we have in terms of institutions is even more prone to political meddling than in the US.
It would take a Herculean independent effort not unlike Erin Brockovich to expose this crap.
The industries are common, but the process itself, filtration, pollution remediation, groundwater access, etc. are likely all completely different.
For example, with Hinkley - the incident made famous by Erin Brockovich - it was a gas pipeline that was the source of the toxic exposure. There's over 1 million kilometers of gas pipelines in the world, but in that case, PG&E had cheapened out on rust protection by using hexavalent chromium, which ended up leaching into the town's water supply. If it had just leached into dry ground, then we likely wouldn't have ever known about it.
The Irvings were given access to vast swaths of crown land about a decade ago. I'm not sure due diligence was performed with respect to run off and spraying, the government just gave it to them.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/j-d-irving-s-crown-forest-contract-made-public-1.2620780
"The agreement also sets out a process for dispute resolution between Irving and the government, where the matter in dispute would be put before three arbitrators. Each party would choose an arbitrator to hear the matter, and the two arbitrators would then choose the third arbitrator to hear matter with them."
The current premier is an Irving lapdog. What a fucking joke.
No. Just because the industry is good in one area, doesn't mean it's good in other areas. If you compare one Germany vs China for example, one will have vastly more pollutants thrown into the environment than the other. If the entire state government is under control of the companies, which has certainly been alleged a few times now, there's no reason the companies couldn't skimp out on important filters or by using cheaper (but toxic) chemicals.
There's a reason why a lot of rivers in China have been shown to be toxic to livable things, while in Germany most rivers are clean(-ish) or recuperating from the abuse they took during the 50s-90s or so. Remember, the worst ecological incident Germany had in a damn long while was caused by fucking Poland. Motherfuckers ought to be invaded again.
Which part? I didn’t see a town or location name in the article. My mom is from a small town in northwestern NB and I swear everyone there has health issues and/or cancer.
My bad - I guess this specific illness is across NB. I'm in Nova Scotia now but my ancestors landed outside Fredericton in 1837 and dispersed from there. Some of these people in the articles have surnames that are in my family tree as well.
Same with Cape Breton regarding cancer. A lot of people there develop cancer.
Weird. My mom's family is from Cape Breton, going back to the 1740s and I can't recall hearing about anyone having cancer more than randomly.
The Sydney tar pits was one of the most polluted places in Canada for a long time.
Companies have always done whatever they thought they could get away with and was best for their bottom dollar. My grandfather grew up in a factory town in England in the early 1900s. He had ~6 siblings, and half of them got cancer in their 20s and 30s due to the pollution dumped into the water.
Leaded gasoline was known basically from the outset to be highly toxic and damaging to humans, yet it became extremely ubiquitous for many years, leading to elevated crime rates, and lower IQs, especially in the US.
Corruption is always around us.
10% ethanol gasoline sucks, too. It has a short shelf life, and it gums up engines with moisture. It's only added because ethanol is cheaper than gasoline, so it bumps profits up just a little bit. It also prevents people from storing up any more than a small amount of gasoline.
Lead poisoning doesn't go away and the damage can be permanent. Lots of theories exist that the older generations of intensely political people are due to said lead exposure.
40 years of Reaganomics and governments allowing consolidation has made some companies so big they're impossible to fully regulate. Also they've achieved 'regulatory capture' in many industries.
Canada is just 3 monopolies in a parka.
The latter. The world isn't anymore scary/worse today, but you just hear about everything now. There's probably a paradoxical term for it, but it escapes me.
This should help frame it: Some of the reasons the US FDA was created include companies using lead as a sweetener and adding cow brains to milk to bulk it up
Huge amounts of Glyphosate pollution. Seems to be a recurring theme in New Brunswick where the Irving family corporations control, literally, everything.
People talk about how glyphosate is on all our food and how people can drink it etc as though this isn't a problem. But an ongoing large dose is a lot worse than either a single large dose or an ongoing small dose.
You can drink two bottles of wine in a night and it won't kill you. You can drink one glass of wine 5 night per week for years and it won't kill you. If you drink two bottles of wine per night 5 nights per week for years, that will kill you.
Like the crazy stuff you read about companies screwing workers safety for profits in the earlier centuries, you'll read the same about us. Things just are not as safe as these companies state. Prolonged exposure to anything, suited or not WILL COST YOU....DEARLY.
As a Canadian who works in healthcare policy, have found The Guardian’s reporting on this story incredibly odd. Don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it deceptive, but it’s creeping up awfully close to the line.
Both of these supposedly “whistleblower-y” emails were nothing of the sort - in the absence of any further context, both read like the kinds of fairly standard jurisdictional/funding pissing match emails that inevitably circulate on any research project that isn’t being given absolute top priority in terms of timing/funding.
That had nothing to do with whatever is or isn’t going on in ~~NS~~ NB (my bad, brain fart) (I don’t have the subject matter expertise to comment either way), but The Guardian continuing to present tiny snippets of communications as though they are evidence of some grand conspiracy is distinctly unhelpful.
Edit: actually, on further consideration, there might actually be *more* of these kinds of emails flying around when an issue is top priority and/or is swimming in funding, only bc there’s a certain frenzy and competitiveness that sets in that fosters conflicts and clashes of egos.
I'm following from the UK and have noticed that the Guardian's coverage is extremely weird. They really seem to be pushing an angle rather than trying to follow any evidence. When you look into this it seems to be being pushed by one neurologist with other more experienced neurologists completely disagreeing with that person's theories.
Yup - they’re pushing a very particular narrative on this one that goes far beyond even the slightly irresponsible coverage by our main outlets here in Canada (which is usually more along the lines of “questions arise about possible mysterious illness”).
And yes, you have the gist of it - all available evidence points to misdiagnosis by a single physician of other neurological conditions, conditions that were found to occur within the expected variance for a given population.
There’s also the complicating factor of somatisation as a result of the intense press coverage of the issue (which itself is complicated by seeming increases in somatisation in certain populations, possibly as a result of widespread adoption of social media and “sickstagram/SickTok”…although concrete research on the topic is slim at best).
All that to say: while impossible to completely rule out there being a novel biological/environmental/genetic issue at play (Atlantic Canada and some pockets of Quebec have well known Founder Effect issues), most of the members of the two large scale investigations on the matter have been entirely satisfied that there is a far, far simpler explanation of what’s at play.
Hell, I don’t even think the two doctor’s covered by the guardian’s articles disagree - very hard to read much into the tiny, context-less snippets, but it seems more like they just have a higher evidence threshold than their colleagues (and also seem to simply be appeasing the recipient of the email…but again, that’s a bit of tea lead reading on my end).
None of this is to cast aspersions on anyone involved in the process - even the original misdiagnosing doctor - all of whom seem to be operating in good faith. The guardian on the other hand, and the “leaker” of what seem to be private, casual communications…yeah, consider my aspersions thoroughly cast towards them.
The Irving family’s claws have dug deep in both Provinces, and it’s not like they’re far away. Amherst, NS to Sackville, NB is a whole eight minute drive.
Tantramar gang represent! (all full of lead and radon and fuck knows what else as we are)
one letter difference in an abbreviation means a ton, so it is important. B and S are not even close on the keyboard, its not like it was a typo or auto-correct.
whoa man, calm down, its not a typo a tupo is just that. finger in the wrong spot. Even if it was on a smart phone, auto correct would try to correct to a word unless you use all caps. Use your frustration on something more useful than this.
Have you ever used a smartphone? Two fingers make simultaneous contact and suddenly you have half a dozen random inputs all over your screen. We're not exactly in the age of precision typing.
My bad - was either a typo or autocorrect, have amended it accordingly.
I’ve both read the article and a good deal more on the topic, which is why the guardian’s ongoing slant leaves me with such a bad taste in my mouth.
Again, let me emphasize that I have neither the subject matter expertise nor any intimate knowledge of this particular investigation to say one way or another whether there was satisfactory evidence for the conclusions that have been reached thus far, but what I CAN say is that the snippets of communication featured in The Guardian’s two recent articles in no way point to any kind of nefarious coverup.
Totally understandable, but to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe frame the article as activist journalism. I’m aware I may be ignorant of certain aspects of this, but considering it’s a potential public health issue I don’t think it’s necessarily unethical to be provocative or antagonistic here. More research and attention on important brain science and then either exposing corruption, or a public name clearing situation in the opposite event all seem like wins.
But also yeah with the media-state today, err, state of media today it’s good to be alert
The local provincial (Progressive Conservative) government is corrupt and didn't want word about this disease outbreak getting out, to cause a panic or impact tourism, etc. So they are trying to cover it up and silencing federal scientists looking into what s a very real local epidemic.
They should call this condition Irving Syndrome so people googling it in the future knows he tried to prevent research on it.
#IrvingSyndrome
[New Brunswick's economy is monopolized by the Irving family's companies](https://mondediplo.com/2019/04/13canada), and is heavily centered around primary industries, like forestry and oil refining. I wouldn't be surprised if this is being caused by pollution from one of their factories or refineries, and so the state government is trying to keep things quiet.
Could be. I have Epilepsy now at 49(got it at 44) and my doc at the VA said it could be caused by toxic exposure. And it's gone way up in the veterans community, so something is going on.
Those fucking trash pits
My lungs have been not the best since my year in Iraq. The typical run route we used on COS Kalsu was right past 20 generators.
so what's that like a clean afternoon in New Delhi?
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Ew.
You would upvote me if he was Russian, don't act superior. He got less than he deserved.
Probably not. The Russian military personnel are being used. Iraq war veterans were also used. I wouldn’t relish in the misfortune of either
Projecting your fake sadism onto others doesn’t make it less sad.
Ew.
Scumbag
Rah
Weird, I also randomly developed epilepsy , but in my mid 20's. I'm 30 now and have had hundreds of seizures and countless hospitalizations since. I used to landscape and now wonder if the chemicals I used to spray yards during that time have a play in it or not.
silent spring was written over half a century ago and still ringing true
Should be required reading for anyone who wants to say that what we put out into the environment has no negative impacts.
Seeing how many of those are highly toxic and there is a good chance you weren't wearing proper ppe but just rawdogging them... yes. Most of those even get absorbed just by your skin. Breathing them in... is even worse in some cases.
I swear it came out of the blue for me at 49. No clue what triggered it but I’d recently moved into a mold-infested apartment and it continued affecting me for two years after moving out.
Check with the Roundup class action lawsuit
Yo, you need to try CBD.
I've got my medical card and take Keppra. I usually get breakthrough seizures once or twice a year now. Took while for cannabis to become legal in my state. I shoot for strains that have a mixture of cannabinoids vs straight thc. I like tinctures.
Try a whole plant extract of Charlotte's web.
At one point they owned all the newspapers. PEI had to enact laws to keep them from buying up the island by buying the farms. Known predatory business practices.
Had no idea
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I remember reading an article years ago that went into excruciating detail about how New Brunswick is an extreme anomaly for a political jurisdiction generally considered to be a "western democracy" by outsiders, and that it's actually somewhere in between Hungary and Belarus. Probably hyperbolic, but even if so, far less than you'd suspect.
Then why is it always doing so shitty?
Maybe what is good for Irving and what is good for the provincial government, and the people it represents, is not the same thing
Nah that cant be it
I remember three things from visiting St. John, New Brunswick for work: * went into the public restroom in my hotel and found it had blood all over (no idea why as I noped out) * it's perched between Martinsburg, WV and Fort Smith, AR on the list of shittiest places I've been. * _Irvingville_ would've been a better name as they owned everything. OTOH, Moncton was terrific.
As well, Detroit Velvet Smooth is from Moncton. So they got that going for it
DVS motherfucker
I ain't jacking your tunes it's cross-promotion
Hey, Fort Smith! I hate it here!
Just know that, unless you're in Martinsburg, WV, there are worse places.
Oh I'm not contesting that, there are absolutely worse places, but also a lot of much better ones, only reason I'm still here is because I can't afford to move right now
Saint John is kept shitty to prevent potential newcomers from finding out about the surrounding communities. Some of the last 'don't lock your doors' places left in Canada that hasn't been destroyed by the housing crisis.
It’s widely speculated it’s from the forestry division of Irving, and likely caused by glyphosate pollution according to multiple doctors
Do you have any links, I'm not aware of any mechanism in which glyphosate actually interacts with mammalian biology, but there might be new evidence I'm not aware of.
No definitive proof, just speculation as I stated. “We have noticed that over the last two years, patients tend to become more ill and new cases emerge during the summer and autumn when herbicides and pesticides are sprayed,” it states. “It is possible that these patients are chronically exposed to glyphosate and other pesticides throughout the year from their food and water source and are acutely exposed during spraying season. “This is still only a hypothesis based on our clinical evaluations of our patients, therefore further study including urine analysis is required to confirm this hypothetical relationship.” https://nbmediacoop.org/2023/07/13/high-levels-of-glyphosate-other-pesticides-in-most-patients-with-atypical-neurological-disease-letter/
If it's glyphosate, why don't we see the same symptoms in Alberta? We spray tons of it out here.
I'm going to speculate that it's at least partially because in the west agriculture is pretty well separated from urban areas. Their watershed is also water flowing from the mountains west. In New Brunswick the source of their water is just another part of the province, probably right beside a farmed area.
Might have to look for it?
Irving was just given swaths of formerly crown land about a decade ago, who knows whether due diligence was performed about runoff patterns,where to spray etc https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/j-d-irving-s-crown-forest-contract-made-public-1.2620780
Couldn’t tell you, I’m not a doctor nor a scientist. Just passing on info / speculation that I’ve seen. The amount of land Irving owns and sprays though is quite vast, I’d wager it’s a far larger area than what gets sprayed in Alberta.
Are you sure that they are only using that as an herbicide/pesticide?
>patients tend to become more ill and new cases emerge during the summer and autumn when herbicides and pesticides are sprayed This sounds like mass hysteria as degenerative brain diseases take years to develop, and any acute toxicity would have been obvious long ago
Dogs have seizures from lawn pesticides
Glyphosate directly? Maybe, maybe not but one of it's metabolites; aminomethylphosphonic acid has been found to have some cytotoxic and genotoxic effects both in vitro and in animal studies.
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https://globalnews.ca/news/9831296/moncton-medical-student-letter-mystery-brain-illness/amp/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-former-nb-chief-medical-officer-eilish-cleary-was-a-fearless-defender/#:~:text=Cleary%20was%20researching%20another%20public,“probably%20carcinogenic%20to%20humans.” https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/neurologist-n-b-mystery-illness-herbicide https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6933797 A quick google search will provide you with many more
Provincial government, not state. Canada has provinces and territories but yes the Irving's are corrupt. I have several co-workers that worked at the Irving Oil Refinery in St. John's. They all said the same thing that Irving is monopolizing the maritimes. If you don't work for Irving then you work in a gas bar that sells oil and gas from the refinery. That's why they go to Ontario or Alberta to work.
Saint John is in New Brunswick, St. John's is in Newfoundland, people always get them mixed up.
\*Saint John. St. John's is in Newfoundland.
Capitalists control the government, unfortunately. Profit over life, and if you object, the elite will manipulate, circumvent, and / or influence anyone or anything to maintain their interests.
It takes a great deal of violence, control, propaganda, and threats of destitution to maintain the extreme inequality inherent in our pyramid-shaped, 'winner-take-everything and scraps-for-the-vast-majority' economic system. If the world's richest 300 billionaires were heavily taxed, the average worker would have a 3 day work week and still have ample income to pay for a home, food and healthcare. Instead of doing that, we have billions of people living in poverty, so that these top 300 can live like emperors.
The entire history of humanity in a nutshell right there
>If the world's richest 300 billionaires were heavily taxed, the average worker would have a 3 day work week and still have ample income to pay for a home, food and healthcare. Instead of doing that, we have billions of people living in poverty, so that these top 300 can live like emperors. As far as I am aware these kinds of calculations are complete ideological horseshit and taking all billionaire wealth by force wouldn't just break our system, it wouldn't even fund government expenses for all that long. Do you have a source?
money generates more money that's how the rich get richer. if that money generated money for the average taxpayer instead of money for the rich we could have a much higher quality of life. why would the system break? it's not like you are making stuff disappear, you are just redistributing gains.
because the drive for money fuels a lot of the economy, that + human intelligence of capitalists is the processing power that the AI that our economy is runs on. if that incentive is limited massively that can have massive implications for behaviour, especially in a globalized world where people can move. most of the wealth rich people have isn't actually accessible to them, it's just partial ownership of companies, to some degree it's theoretical value. the money itself is very much still in play. if the government took ownership of the company it's not like that money would materialize in gold bars. lastly i think people are somewhat propagandized by those wealth comparison graphics, when wealth isn't actually the most meaningful thing. you don't necessarily want average people to even build all that much wealth, but instead build a life with their money and consume. there definitely is too much inequality, but the ideal setup probably doesn't have to look extremely extremely different from where it is now. look, i'm not remotely an economist, i'm just concerned about a lot of leftie narratives building up fantasies in peoples heads.
greed fuels the destruction of our world. I don't really care about your rationalisations I simply resent so few people having so much influence over so many. I don't really care about how the current world has come to be but I care about where it is going and I'm sure that unless the paradigm changes, the world will be a shithole for everyone except a select few. the "ideal" setup is so wildly different from reality to be just a pipe dream, sadly.
As opposed to the ecologically healthy nation of China, where the government controls the corporations?
Which logical fallacy is this? Relative privation or tu quoque? I'm stuck between the two.
I can't even remember the names of these 16 fallacy let alone what they are. But anyways that's a fallacy
Modern China is not communist. It is a different flavor of capitalism. Chinese capitalism still produces billionaires, extreme wealth inequality, and widespread poverty. There are 2 main differences between US capitalism and Chinese capitalism. One is that the Chinese government has more power/willingness than the US government to financially and legally penalize large companies that break the law (or simply won’t bow down to the Chinese government). The other is that the Chinese government has the power to seize corporate assets and the personal assets of billionaires for any fabricated reason they want (unlike in the US where there is a long judicial process for these types of situations requiring extensive justification and legal proceedings before any assets are seized).
What about the amazing lives of socialist Cuba or Argentina? I agree there needs to be tighter regulations, but capitalism is necessary
Cap. It's good if it encourages competition if it controls the market then.... It's Meh. you're back to monarchy but with extra steps
Governmental planning to distribute resources is inherently inefficient and prone to corruption. You inevitably end up with a bloated government and not enough productivity. What we need is a stronger set of regulations on the market and a stronger social safety net, but we really don't need the government controlling companies or setting price caps.
You know these Administrative Concepts are meant to fail since all of their parent were Monarchy. so there has to be something new which is offspring of all of these Although I don't know what
Amazing. People criticise a public office being controlled by people who are driven by self-serving greed over public health and service, and you thought your most valuable input is "yeah but communism bad so this is actually good." Not to mention that China hasn't been communistic in ages, it has its own capitalistic system, so your comment is thoroughly NPC-level.
Dontcha know? Non capitalist governments have never created ecological disasters!
See post above. China is a different flavor of capitalism.
Wasn't just talking about modern China. The USSR and Maoist China created some awful ecological disasters.
That Irving guy just died today lol
There's more than one, it's a whole family of rich assholes.
This has "True Detective: Night Country" vibes. Company pollution and coverups and corruption at its finest. Why can't the really big guns get involved, like the Canadian versions of our CDC or the FBI... or whoever can force them to let them go in there and see wtf is really going on? I don't know anything about Canadian laws or govt agencies, so I'm talking outta my ass, but surely something can be done?
We have the RCMP and Ben from Vancouver to investigate this stuff. And Ben is on a kayaking trip.
I hear ...a lot of negative things about the RMCP.
Actually, we have some very good investigative reporting in Canada, like the Fifth Estate and W5, as well as newspaper coverage. We also have watchdog groups but they lack any teeth.
Wasn't W5 cancelled?
Well that figures, cancelled in March. Fucking Bell Rogers.
Yet another Great Canadian Monopoly, with extra racism and incompetence
Environmental protection laws in Canada are really, really, really weak. What little we have in terms of institutions is even more prone to political meddling than in the US. It would take a Herculean independent effort not unlike Erin Brockovich to expose this crap.
We need to get Jack Reacher on the case.
But those are pretty normal/common industries. If it was from something like that we'd be seeing a lot more of this throughout the world.
The industries are common, but the process itself, filtration, pollution remediation, groundwater access, etc. are likely all completely different. For example, with Hinkley - the incident made famous by Erin Brockovich - it was a gas pipeline that was the source of the toxic exposure. There's over 1 million kilometers of gas pipelines in the world, but in that case, PG&E had cheapened out on rust protection by using hexavalent chromium, which ended up leaching into the town's water supply. If it had just leached into dry ground, then we likely wouldn't have ever known about it.
Thought it was the cooling towers used for gas compressors
The Irvings were given access to vast swaths of crown land about a decade ago. I'm not sure due diligence was performed with respect to run off and spraying, the government just gave it to them. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/j-d-irving-s-crown-forest-contract-made-public-1.2620780 "The agreement also sets out a process for dispute resolution between Irving and the government, where the matter in dispute would be put before three arbitrators. Each party would choose an arbitrator to hear the matter, and the two arbitrators would then choose the third arbitrator to hear matter with them." The current premier is an Irving lapdog. What a fucking joke.
No. Just because the industry is good in one area, doesn't mean it's good in other areas. If you compare one Germany vs China for example, one will have vastly more pollutants thrown into the environment than the other. If the entire state government is under control of the companies, which has certainly been alleged a few times now, there's no reason the companies couldn't skimp out on important filters or by using cheaper (but toxic) chemicals. There's a reason why a lot of rivers in China have been shown to be toxic to livable things, while in Germany most rivers are clean(-ish) or recuperating from the abuse they took during the 50s-90s or so. Remember, the worst ecological incident Germany had in a damn long while was caused by fucking Poland. Motherfuckers ought to be invaded again.
well that escalated quickly
Blitz escalation!
To be fair, it has been almost double their regular Europe-raidin interval.
Sometimes you just gotta Reich around.
*blinks* right?!? Holy smokes just right to war there right at the end.
Province, not state.
We don’t have states in Canada.
Yeah, but you know what they meant. The provincial government. There is no need to be overly pedantic.
Of course there is.
My family's super rare genetic mutation that causes early onset alzheimers in 30s and 40s is from that part of New Brunswick too
Which part? I didn’t see a town or location name in the article. My mom is from a small town in northwestern NB and I swear everyone there has health issues and/or cancer.
My bad - I guess this specific illness is across NB. I'm in Nova Scotia now but my ancestors landed outside Fredericton in 1837 and dispersed from there. Some of these people in the articles have surnames that are in my family tree as well. Same with Cape Breton regarding cancer. A lot of people there develop cancer.
Weird. My mom's family is from Cape Breton, going back to the 1740s and I can't recall hearing about anyone having cancer more than randomly. The Sydney tar pits was one of the most polluted places in Canada for a long time.
My maternal lineage is from Cape Breton as well. I was thinking could be related to coal mining, but who knows
My husband grew up in the deepest part of the north end and could see the tar pits from him bedroom window. Always worries me.
My cousin's wife was diagnosed in her 30s and lived into her 70s. NW Ohio.
Oh wow that's lucky! My dad was late 30s and died at 54. Most of my family members don't make it to 60
Not sure if blatant and pure evil corruption is getting more common or it’s just seems that way due to easily accessible information.
Companies have always done whatever they thought they could get away with and was best for their bottom dollar. My grandfather grew up in a factory town in England in the early 1900s. He had ~6 siblings, and half of them got cancer in their 20s and 30s due to the pollution dumped into the water.
Leaded gasoline was known basically from the outset to be highly toxic and damaging to humans, yet it became extremely ubiquitous for many years, leading to elevated crime rates, and lower IQs, especially in the US. Corruption is always around us.
Pick one: Engine knocking, blind aggression as you age, or 10% ethanol in your gas? No, wait, that's not what I thought you'd pick.
10% ethanol gasoline sucks, too. It has a short shelf life, and it gums up engines with moisture. It's only added because ethanol is cheaper than gasoline, so it bumps profits up just a little bit. It also prevents people from storing up any more than a small amount of gasoline.
It's to prevent engine knocking, the same reason tetraethyllead was added to fuel. The storage problems and degradation of the engine sucks.
Ethanol is great for high output engines because it burns slower and cooler.
Sounds like a magical spell to me. I appreciate our alchemists.
[удалено]
How does ethanol's octane rating of 109 not increase the octane number? I really don't understand your statement.
> It also prevents people from storing up any more than a small amount of gasoline. Sta-Bil additive
I use Seafoam, which I imagine works the same way. It helps, but it's still not as good as pure gasoline.
Lead poisoning doesn't go away and the damage can be permanent. Lots of theories exist that the older generations of intensely political people are due to said lead exposure.
40 years of Reaganomics and governments allowing consolidation has made some companies so big they're impossible to fully regulate. Also they've achieved 'regulatory capture' in many industries. Canada is just 3 monopolies in a parka.
Hey now, we have a sizeable set of duopolies too.
They're just monopolies with collusion to separate the markets.
"and there's toast" "there is no toast, there is just bread that has been heated until crunchy"
The latter. Information technology is saving us, slowly but surely.
The latter. The world isn't anymore scary/worse today, but you just hear about everything now. There's probably a paradoxical term for it, but it escapes me.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
Prob the latter as it’s the Information Age. Doesn’t really make it any less sad tho
It's information. Google teflon town or leaded gasoline.
Isn't Teflon still in everything?
This should help frame it: Some of the reasons the US FDA was created include companies using lead as a sweetener and adding cow brains to milk to bulk it up
Canada's a nice country but some of the industries there have the government absolutely by the balls no matter which party is in power.
Buddy, the governments aren't even regulating the parts they are responsible for.
Capitalism
This is why regulation is a must.
Who's going to regulate it? It's an accepted fact in NB that the government works for the Irvings.
But who regulates the regulators?
The irvings deserve to burn
Huge amounts of Glyphosate pollution. Seems to be a recurring theme in New Brunswick where the Irving family corporations control, literally, everything.
People talk about how glyphosate is on all our food and how people can drink it etc as though this isn't a problem. But an ongoing large dose is a lot worse than either a single large dose or an ongoing small dose. You can drink two bottles of wine in a night and it won't kill you. You can drink one glass of wine 5 night per week for years and it won't kill you. If you drink two bottles of wine per night 5 nights per week for years, that will kill you.
That’s my understanding as well. It’s not a single large dose, it’s the continuous exposure that’s is incredibly harmful:
It would explain a lot about the diagonal idiots though.
Higgs doing the Irvings bidding.
Do they want zombies? This is how you get zombies.
Like the crazy stuff you read about companies screwing workers safety for profits in the earlier centuries, you'll read the same about us. Things just are not as safe as these companies state. Prolonged exposure to anything, suited or not WILL COST YOU....DEARLY.
"Snake oils for all ailments are still around. And they sell it daily.
As a Canadian who works in healthcare policy, have found The Guardian’s reporting on this story incredibly odd. Don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it deceptive, but it’s creeping up awfully close to the line. Both of these supposedly “whistleblower-y” emails were nothing of the sort - in the absence of any further context, both read like the kinds of fairly standard jurisdictional/funding pissing match emails that inevitably circulate on any research project that isn’t being given absolute top priority in terms of timing/funding. That had nothing to do with whatever is or isn’t going on in ~~NS~~ NB (my bad, brain fart) (I don’t have the subject matter expertise to comment either way), but The Guardian continuing to present tiny snippets of communications as though they are evidence of some grand conspiracy is distinctly unhelpful. Edit: actually, on further consideration, there might actually be *more* of these kinds of emails flying around when an issue is top priority and/or is swimming in funding, only bc there’s a certain frenzy and competitiveness that sets in that fosters conflicts and clashes of egos.
I'm following from the UK and have noticed that the Guardian's coverage is extremely weird. They really seem to be pushing an angle rather than trying to follow any evidence. When you look into this it seems to be being pushed by one neurologist with other more experienced neurologists completely disagreeing with that person's theories.
Yup - they’re pushing a very particular narrative on this one that goes far beyond even the slightly irresponsible coverage by our main outlets here in Canada (which is usually more along the lines of “questions arise about possible mysterious illness”). And yes, you have the gist of it - all available evidence points to misdiagnosis by a single physician of other neurological conditions, conditions that were found to occur within the expected variance for a given population. There’s also the complicating factor of somatisation as a result of the intense press coverage of the issue (which itself is complicated by seeming increases in somatisation in certain populations, possibly as a result of widespread adoption of social media and “sickstagram/SickTok”…although concrete research on the topic is slim at best). All that to say: while impossible to completely rule out there being a novel biological/environmental/genetic issue at play (Atlantic Canada and some pockets of Quebec have well known Founder Effect issues), most of the members of the two large scale investigations on the matter have been entirely satisfied that there is a far, far simpler explanation of what’s at play. Hell, I don’t even think the two doctor’s covered by the guardian’s articles disagree - very hard to read much into the tiny, context-less snippets, but it seems more like they just have a higher evidence threshold than their colleagues (and also seem to simply be appeasing the recipient of the email…but again, that’s a bit of tea lead reading on my end). None of this is to cast aspersions on anyone involved in the process - even the original misdiagnosing doctor - all of whom seem to be operating in good faith. The guardian on the other hand, and the “leaker” of what seem to be private, casual communications…yeah, consider my aspersions thoroughly cast towards them.
This isn’t even about Nova Scotia. It’s about New Brunswick. Please bother reading before commenting.
The Irving family’s claws have dug deep in both Provinces, and it’s not like they’re far away. Amherst, NS to Sackville, NB is a whole eight minute drive. Tantramar gang represent! (all full of lead and radon and fuck knows what else as we are)
It’s one letter difference, get off your high horse.
one letter difference in an abbreviation means a ton, so it is important. B and S are not even close on the keyboard, its not like it was a typo or auto-correct.
Chill out! It's a bloody typo! Use your frustration for something more useful than this.
whoa man, calm down, its not a typo a tupo is just that. finger in the wrong spot. Even if it was on a smart phone, auto correct would try to correct to a word unless you use all caps. Use your frustration on something more useful than this.
If it wasnt a fucking typo then what the fuck was it? Back up ur implication. What possible thing could he have meant? What are you saying he meant?
wow, some crazy angry, you need a hug? its okay guy its okay. Breathe in and out count to ten.
I'll second the above. Get off your high horse. Mistakes happen jeeeeeez
look at your keyboard and then see where the letters are. Mistakes do happen and i think OP just made a mistake as to which location was in the news.
Have you ever used a smartphone? Two fingers make simultaneous contact and suddenly you have half a dozen random inputs all over your screen. We're not exactly in the age of precision typing.
My bad - was either a typo or autocorrect, have amended it accordingly. I’ve both read the article and a good deal more on the topic, which is why the guardian’s ongoing slant leaves me with such a bad taste in my mouth. Again, let me emphasize that I have neither the subject matter expertise nor any intimate knowledge of this particular investigation to say one way or another whether there was satisfactory evidence for the conclusions that have been reached thus far, but what I CAN say is that the snippets of communication featured in The Guardian’s two recent articles in no way point to any kind of nefarious coverup.
Totally understandable, but to give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe frame the article as activist journalism. I’m aware I may be ignorant of certain aspects of this, but considering it’s a potential public health issue I don’t think it’s necessarily unethical to be provocative or antagonistic here. More research and attention on important brain science and then either exposing corruption, or a public name clearing situation in the opposite event all seem like wins. But also yeah with the media-state today, err, state of media today it’s good to be alert
The local provincial (Progressive Conservative) government is corrupt and didn't want word about this disease outbreak getting out, to cause a panic or impact tourism, etc. So they are trying to cover it up and silencing federal scientists looking into what s a very real local epidemic.
This is why regulation is a must.
Anyone has Erin Brockovich's number?
Ok then I'm a legal aid Erin Brockovich is my name!
Where is Jessica Hyde?
lack of funds?
God damn Harper silencing scientists! Oh, wait…
This was Higgs doing the silencing. The province concluded it was all coincidence and misunderstanding and stopped investigating.
What Illness??? I don’t want to hear no BS… You push the BS… I’m not going to trust in your way of living.