I volunteer for both a food bank and community centre/drop-in. I'd say the past year or so I've seen a lot more homeless seniors, especially women, then ever before. Hell I've just seen more "regular" people in general then ever before. Homelessness in this country is 100% no longer something regulated to the mentally ill or addicts it's now affecting everyone. Majority of people I work with now you wouldn't think were homeless if you walked by them no the street or saw them having a coffee in tim hortons. At first I was shocked like "you're homeless? you don't look it" but now it's no surprise. You could have a clean cut person wearing clean and nice clothes looks like they work on king street come up to me and say their homeless and I wouldn't bat an eye.

The problem is the system as it exists now and as done for decades isn't built to deal with these people. It's not meant for people who are elderly or families or people who are simply broke. None of the resources we have can help these people because they've always been tailored to the addicts and the mentally ill. Shelters aren't going to help even if there were space available again because shelters are set up and staff trained to work with addicts and the mentally ill. I've had co-workers come up to me and say "I don't know how to help this person or these people because none of the resources or programs we have will help them".

We took a very narrow look at the homeless and instantly said that they're homeless because they're drug addicts or crazy. And that just simply isn't the case anymore. The fact of the matter is, based on my experience, Addicts and the mentally ill are quickly becoming a minority within the homeless population. I know that will be difficult to swallow but it's the truth. I work more with "regular" people now than I do with someone on drugs or someone that doesn't know where they are.

We need to rethink and rework how we deal with the homeless population in this country. We need to ditch the thinking that they're all addicts and finally accept that most are now just like you or me. Thus we need to start tailoring resources and programs to instead of focusing on rehab, mental health, and street health to focusing on housing, jobs, and food. Because I'm no longer being asked about safe injection sites or CAMH referrals now I'm being asked about Jobs and where to eat daily.

Mint is great, been using it for the past couple days and I've been able to get Elden Ring, FFXIV, WoW, Balatro, and FNV with a bunch of mods running on it very smoothly. all very easy to install. Steam games worked just like Windows for installing. WoW took a bit of extra steps but nothing difficult to do. Love Mint, it's so easy to use. It's like "hmm I wonder if I could customize or do this on it" and with Mint the answer 9 out of 10 times is yes.

I just want to follow up and say "thank you so much!" I took the dive and partioned out space for Linux Mint. played around with it for a bit and said "fuck it, I love this thing" and did a fresh install on my laptop deleting windows 11.

Holy crap this thing has improved my laptop so much. it's so damn fast, boots up quicklly and believe it or not my battery lasts longer now. I just spent hours customizing how it looks, it's fun, it's great.

Also I was easilly about to install steam, elden ring, Final Fantasy XIV and even World of Warcraft and they all work, and run, better on this machine now.

WoW was actually pretty easy to get going in all honesty. Instead of installing WoW directly on Litrus instead you install Battle.net via Litrus and it simply does the rest, EVEN going that route allowed me to install other blizzard games like Hearthstone without doing anything special.

My only beef right now is I'm having issues customizing the panel like I want. Tried installing polybar and got in a bit over my head with i3wm but I'm sure I'll figure that stuff out soon. Got a cool app launcher going that makes things so much easier, even changed the shell and got zsh going which is great.

I love it, absolutely love it and won't be going back to Windows ever. I imagine once I get a handle of Mint I might switch to a different distro like Arch (I love the look of that and how people have customized it) but for now this is perfect.

always has. If you're not researching or willing to be a feed to some tech company then you're not much good to that place.

"The beatings will continue until moral improves" Feels like we're in a domestic abusive relationship with these politicians...all of them. The cons are morons without an original thought in their head, they looked south, got jealous and said "we want some of that"

the NDP lost their spine when Layton died and their current leader is more concerned about optics then doing anything of actual meaning.

And then you go the liberals who have managed to piss off most of the country, then laugh about it, then wave their hand at the rest of the shitshow parties in this country and say "really? them? haha good luck with that."

we're fucked.

and more and more people will become homeless. hell it's already happening.

I was homeless years ago and thankfully got out of it. But when I was homeless, getting off the streets was an absolute cake walk compared to today. How much did it take me to save to do it? $1500 total. that's it. that was working a part time job and saving enough for first and last. that $1500 included first and last AND money for clothes to interview/work as well as food. And that was only 10 years ago. It took me all of maybe, MAYBE, 2 months once I decided to get my shit together.

Now I volunteer for a food bank and community centre/drop-in and weekly, almost daily, you see new faces. And I'm not talking mentally ill or addict faces, I'm talking regular sane sober scared men, women, and children who have fallen with absolutely zero nets to save them. MOST work too. It's the same stories over and over again. Landlord kept increasing the rent, Landlord decided to move in, Landlord decided to renovate in order to increase the rent for someone else, can't afford food, can't afford clothes, etc, etc, etc.

They all want help and we can only provide what we have which isn't much at all because the Canadian Government sure as shit ain't helping. The meals we provide the portions have gotten smaller simply because we don't have enough to cook for everyone. We don't have enough food to give out a few times a week cause the lineups will be around the block and we're hardly getting any donations in cause no one can afford to donate. We're running out of blankets, socks, hygiene stuff cause again no one can afford to donate that stuff. We've given up with shelter referrals cause they're all full where over 50% of the clients living in shelters are refugees leaving Canadians to rough it outside. We've started handing out tents to people when we get them in. I cried the other day because I handed a child sized tent to a kid with his family and I had NEVER done that before. I'm used to dealing with the Homeless mentally ill and addicts. I'm used to telling them how to survive outside in the winter. I'm NOT used to telling a 7 year old boy how to set up a tent, how to layer his sleeping bags, and how to stay warm IF he and his family isn't off the streets by this winter. It's sick, It's disgusting. It's absolutely infuriating and if it doesn't make your blood boil and demand change and demand it now then you're dead inside.

I've emailed politicians left right and center. I've emailed Ford, Trudeau even Chow and countless upon countless MPPs and I've challenged them all, dared them, to stop by my community centre and look that 7 year old boy dead in the eyes and tell him WHY he can't have his own bedroom, why he has to sleep outside, why the shelters are full, why his parents can't afford to provide for him, why there's no where affordable to live. these "leaders" are all cowards not a single one as responded and taken me up on my offer. They don't care, none of them care.

Heads on pikes, then they'll care.

has damaged the school’s reputation

yeah that was damaged well before this encampment but ok.

driven up administrative and operational costs for the university and depreciated the university’s property values.

Or "We're the UofW, we've never cared about students or what they believe in...like never. IF they refuse to be fed to the grinder of a US tech company or refuse to be a research zombie then we couldn't give two shits about them. We spend what little we can on facilities here and have done so for....well forever, I mean really have you ever been to Dana Porter Library? and we said the quiet thing out loud with property value cause....yeah. Fuck the students and fuck Waterloo and especially fuck those peasants living in Kitchener...just ew."

awesome, I'm familiar with Dalamud, I'll give Mint a shot when I have some time. thank you very much.

I'm a total Linux noob though so should I be fairly good to go with Mint?

AND NOW it's come out he was ALSO during the same period sexting a transgender sex worker for private cam shows in exchange for partner status on Twitch: https://x.com/iqkev/status/1806236733727555604 After receiving said cam shows, the Doc promptly blocked her.

If there's one thing this Province and City excel at it's putting off maintenance for future generations. You just listed a handful of examples but there are so many more. Trees in parks is another one, Garbage cans that need to be redesigned/replaced every few years due to lack of maintenance. There's a ton more.

I use Revi. fresh install then immediately install Revi, gets rid of all the bloatware, copilot, onedrive, edge, etc.

I'd switch to a linux install but I just don't have to time to figure out which is the right one for me, installing it, configuring it, etc. I wish I did, wish I had the time to play around with it but I simply don't. (I mean maybe someone smarter than me can tell me a linux distro that will work with world of warcraft, steam, final fantasy xiv, etc) so I have to settle with win 11+revi

Looks like something the Deacons of the Deep would be protecting right next to the massive empty tomb.

I kinda wish the OSC thing didn't go through. after the Greenbelt kerfuffle I would have loved to see what his "friends" would have done to ol' Dougie.

isn't this like the third time something like this as either happened or was suggest to someone? like "sorry we can't help you, hey...have you thought about dying as an option?"

The one that pops to mind was that military veteran that was asked if she had considered taking MAID for some issue and thankfully she out right refused.

Either things like this are going to become more common due to our severe lack of funding for healthcare and mental healthcare OR they do away with MAID completely and then....people take matters into their own hands. Regardless it's going to get worse. Wouldn't surprise me if people start applying to MAID simply because they can't afford rent. wouldn't surprise me if people have already tried that.

or just straight up give it to their mafia buddies.

Unless Dougie wants his kneecaps broken/thumbs cut off it ain't happening. He has a debt to pay to a family that's building across the street of the OSC.

WoW these days you can pretty much get through the game and into endgame stuff without being in a guild. It'll be more tough if you're looking to run mythics/heroics but if you honestly don't care about running heroic/mythic raids/dungeons then you 100% never need to talk to anyone.

then you have games like EVE Online where it's pretty much essential you get yourself into a corp/alliance or a solid Discord group. Sure you can solo but doing so makes an already tough game insanely harder or you've regulated yourself to the relative safety of empire space. Faction Warfare is a great noob friendly starting point to dip your toes into corps/alliances and the politics/meta involved with that stuff. But in many cases joining a corp/alliance in EVE is like applying for a job. background checks, interviews, mandatory monthly meetings and call to arms/operations, etc. EVE is like working on Wall Street but you don't get paid.

FFXIV is another one you really don't need to join a Free Company. And chances are if you do join one most of them aren't running the content anyways, you're just joining to talk and hang out.

FFXIV is an MMO where there's a strong community OUTSIDE of the provided content. Get into a queue for your dailies and you'll be waiting awhile (will change in a few days thank god) but if you're down with talking to people, going to "club nights", etc there's plenty to offer for that. If you're looking for an active FC that actually runs the content provided in the game? good luck.

stay out of Limsa.

There's still a mass group of people that are harping on him about vaccines. hell they were marching around the CBC and Eaton centre literally this past weekend STILL ranting about how Trudeau forced Canadians to take 2 vaccines. How many years PAST that are we now? these are the type of people that will ensure a conservative win and if THAT doesn't scare you then I don't know what will.