The baby absolutely didn't deserve to die like that. The parents, on the other hand, are experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices, literally what their actions brought on and deserved. Nobody has to say, "I told you so", but neither do they deserve anybody's sympathy.

This is no different than parents refusing to get a car seat for their child because they think seatbelts take away freedom, getting in a car accident, and the child dying in the accident. The child's preventable death is the parent's fault. They created the environment that was unsafe for the child because they were arrogant enough to believe they knew better than decades of evidence. In this car seat scenario, parents might even be charged with endangerment or negligence.

Or the grandmother who didn't believe her granddaughter's coconut allergy was real, because she knew better than the baby's doctors, and put coconut oil in the poor baby's hair and killed her. That grandma doesn't deserve sympathy for what she did.

I tried out a bunch, including Babbel, Busuu, Language Transfer, Mango, and Memrise. I didn't like them for one reason or another. I finally landed on Lingodeer. It's similar to Duolingo, but it is a paid app. (You can try level 1 of any language for free.)

The regular subscription price is definitely not worth it. It's okay (not great, but not awful) when they do their sales. But I felt okay about paying human workers.

This kind of learning is a great start, but will only get you so far. If your local library has access to Kanopy, look for the Great Courses series on Spanish. I thought that was an excellent series after a little bit of Duolingo.

Zarqa, the funniest thing I've ever watched. A spiteful, middle-aged, Pakistani Muslim divorcee in Regina tries to manage/rehab her reputation and ego... With disastrously hilarious results. It's a short mini-series that can be watched in about two hours.

I just stumbled upon Gangnam Project. It's about two biracial Korean-Canadian teens who go to S. Korea to connect with their roots and get all caught up in the K-Pop making machine. It's meant for the tween market, but it's just so different than anything I've seen (maybe I haven't seen much) that I find it interesting. Plus who doesn't live an eternally optimistic lead when the real world is crazy times? Obviously it's dramatized, but I am kind of peripherally aware that idol-culture is a very serious deal in Asia, esp Korea. (Last year some K-Pop star publicly apologized for having a boyfriend?!) I wonder how much of it is based in reality and how much is just made up.

DEI can still be achieved without using that terminology directly.

I agree that not longer having a policy or metrics around diversity doesn't mean that the people in a company won't still value it. I'm a part-time student and the school's director recently did an AMA. He said an upcoming event was renamed to avoid the threats that are being directed at "DEI", but the event itself is still about cultural diversity. I forget what the new name was, something about the stories of our people or something like that.

I absolutely agree that Internet should be a nationalized service, with the option of private players. Saskatchewan has (for cellphones) Sasktel by the government, and all prices are lower even from the for profit companies. We should have crown corps + private enterprise for everything that is an essential service. Mail has Canada Post + private couriers.

The nationwide Rogers outage... When was that, a year ago? Put all kinds of businesses, banking, local payment systems, etc. on hold. How is it acceptable to the nation that essential infrastructure is entirely private?

The thing that I can't understand about this product is why they didn't cover the function keys. They are literally functional.

goes by Robert

I'm sorry, I think you just short circuited my brain. JK Rowling, who has so publicly and venomously been anti-trans... has spent the last few years pretending to be a man?????? What in the hypocrisy is wrong with her??!?!

And now that you mention it, I'd read a long time ago, before she became public with her TERF-ness, that she went by "J K" on the HP books instead of Joanne because she or the publishers didn't want to discourage boys from picking up a book written by a woman. And now that I'm typing this, I realize the fact that she wrote her books from a boy's perspective, too. So in all these examples, she's inhabiting a male persona.

My brain... can list these facts, but cannot compute them together.

While there must certainly be some devout Muslims who try their best to keep the "rules", as I'd expect in any group, a lot of Muslims are not so different frombthe rest of us non-Muslims.

My coworker is a former Muslim who had to leave his home country due to persecution when he became a Christian. Here, he's made Muslim friends who regularly invite him over for dinner and they serve... Pork. They say because he is not a Muslim, they respect that and don't force him to eat halal. But why does not forcing him to eat halal equate to them eating pork?

They are genuinely his friends, but he is also their "excuse" to break halal.

I've found this to be true in general once I started working. I don't feel kinda this was a thing when I was and was integrating with other students. I had to readjust my "responsible" self who actually would follow up (to people's horror) and tell myself it's a polite saying that people don't mean. Like when people greet each other with "How are you?", they generally actually do not want to know how the other person is doing. You're expected to say "fine" or "good" and deviating from that is violating an unspoken social contract.

I'm a light fender-bender, there's not much danger. In a full-speed collision, an unsecured person becomes a blunt force projectile. An unsecured person can move with enough force to be thrown out of the car. Imagine that same force thrown at a passenger instead.

Mostly just Discovery and Picard is kind of halfway there.

SNW is a really fun watch once they've dealt with Pike's future (which they kind of really have to). Personally I like that they go for different genres, but I can see why some people might not like that if.

Lower Decks is a riot and a half and I think it's my favourite Star Trek, but it might be kind of cheating because it stands on the shoulders of all the other shows.

Prodigy is quite a bit different from the other shows, but it's full of optimism, hope, and friendship. It doesn't start out that way, they're all very suspicious of each other at first. They grow into it as they learn more about themselves and each other, and aspire to be part of the Federation and Starfleet.

I never watched Ghomeshi's program and never had a personal opinion about him one way or the other prior to the allegations, but I think it's important to be clear and accurate when making these statements (because inaccuracies weaken/discredit the whole). While it came out Ghomeshi is a misogynist who engaged in sexual harassment and enjoys violence against women, it also came out at trial that the women conspired together beforehand when they made the allegations of rape against them. Creep? Yes. Misogynist? Yes. Stay away from him? Definitely. Rapist? Not proven.