I’m seeing people dropping like flies around me and the cause isn’t as concrete as "bosses/managers are being shit" but something more diffuse.

I’m sure someone has written on the topic somewhere but I can’t find it right now.

ecn at CoHost asked;

Where to next?

Back home to Canada to hopefully get some work done on my spine. The chronic back pain of spinal stenosis and sciatica is why I'm leaving the job to begin with. I can't be fun and informative while battling a pain-fogged mind at the same time.

But I'm not so confident. Let me explain Canada below the cut... Assuming I can get a markdown cut to work...

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The Liberal Party and the Conservative Party are the two main parties of Canada. From the local to the federal level they've swapped control back and forth since the country was founded. They both hate the social safety net and socialized healthcare. They only let it pass in the first place because it polled well.

You see, "liberal" in the Liberal Party's name means economic liberal and not "leftist" like Americans use it. And the Conservatives want to be Americans. Both parties are corporate ass-kissers in love with corporate welfare and as a result they're spent decades undermining and mismanaging the healthcare system at all levels. Death by a thousand cuts.

The hope is to establish a for-profit healthcare system and scale back the government's involvement. Two tier healthcare. Private and Public. Supporters of this idea point to nations in Europe and Asia where this system is in place and works well. What they purposefully ignore is the above mentioned corporate ass-kissing.

Canada suffers badly from monopolies and oligopolies. Price-fixing is always a problem and increased costs for worse service continues to drain the pockets of the public. Nova Scotia Power, a utility no one can live without, is a government supported monopoly. Since they've taken over control of Nova Scotian's ability to keep the lights on things have gotten so bad that the grid will go down on sunny fucking day.

Now apply that sort of thing to you trying to not die of a heart attack. There's no way a private system will work in Canada because the two main parties have no interest in reining in the excesses of corporations.

We do have a third party, the NDP. They're the lefties who support a strong social safety net. But they rarely have experience in governing and the leader of the party is Sikh. And if there's one bit of bigotry Canadians can't help but indulge in, it's bigotry against Asians. Especially South Asians.

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Due to all of that Canada's healthcare system is collapsing. I would get things done here in South Korea. It's ridiculously affordable. But the sort of surgery I need done is the sort that makes it impossible to work. I'm a guest worker. Can't work? Can't stay. Back home it is.

Photo: Foggy morning in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia. 2013. Pentax MX. If I can't get better at least I can go die somewhere moody.

So my disk usage is always high (this is bad), so I looked up a potential fix. It didn't work. So I think maybe there's something wrong with my pagefile, because those can cause problems sometimes (so I've heard). So I've got task manager open, and I open up Everything (that's the name of the program) so that I can try to find and look at the pagefile to see if it's huge or something and

My disk usage drops down to nearly 0%.

I close Everything, and it goes back up to 100%.

I open it again, it drops.

I close it again, and it doesn't go back up, but I can still see the process running so I end the process, AND THEN IT GOES BACK UP!

If anyone knows what the actual frick I'm dealing with (right now I'm assuming some kind of ghost or curse), help me out ;=; (windows 10 btw)

While I'm definitely against the idea that mass is everything for a platform, something I definitely miss was the viability of "local" and/or "regional" stuff on Twitter due to the absurd mass it had.

Over the past few years my life has become more "local" and less "generally online" lately (somehow despite the pandemic), and I've been hesitant to bring that to my new platforms of choice because it feels unlikely to be relevant to anyone who'd see it.