Dentists joining or not joining wouldn't even be an issue if the program was properly constructed in the first place.
All the government had to do was plug into a long established system. I enroll, I get a provider number and plan number and I'm good to go.
When I had dental coverage through my employer, I gave my provider and plan numbers to the dentist and everything just worked.
That, of course, is for you to decide. But (you knew it was coming!) I think it's counterproductive to expect perfection and making much of this issue just strikes me as petty.
While there is a part of me that agrees with you, I also try to cut some slack. She is as human as the rest of us and there aren't many of us who are comfortable talking about our unsavory relatives.
Ideally, she would have whatever it takes to be both open and dismissive of this fact, but of everything that I consider disqualifying, this relatively minor personal failing doesn't even make the list. Let's face it, the only people making this an issue are busybodies and dirt-diggers, hardly the people she should be paying attention to.
On that note, I guess I don't understand why a Nazi grandfather has any meaning whatsoever. I think her response to someone pointing that out should be "Yup, can't pick our relatives," shrug, and move on.
Being descended from a villain or hero doesn't tell us enough about a person to have any meaning.
There is more to spreading out than urban sprawl. Our towns and even villages used to largely self-contained. Now you're lucky to find a bank, a bakery, a grocery store, and a hardware store in the same place outside of something big enough to be called a city.
People talk about walkable cities, by which they mean that people can walk to most of their normal goods and services. What is that but a town/village model for communities?
This is why aid needs to be delivered by military forces under the direction of aid agencies. Nobody really cares if a few civilians get killed, but when soldiers get killed, shit happens.
170k and still living paycheque to paycheque? That truly sucks. Honestly, I can't even imagine it. My heart goes out to you.
We live in rural Saskatchewan in a self-renovated 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. That is the single best decision we've ever made. If we had stayed in Saskatoon, we'd be either still be working, maybe full-time, or destitute. As it is, our annual rent and taxes is about the same as the monthly rent is in our old apartment. Some careful budgeting, a garden, and plenty of fish from the nearby lake means that we actually have a pretty decent lifestyle on <40k (combined income).
Maybe it's because all the younger generations really are smarter than mine (boomer). For most of my 50 years in the workforce, I was told:
For most of my working life, I took my father's advice to demand both my legal rights and my human dignity at great cost to my employment success. The 15 years I tried it "the right way" just left me exploited and burned out.
If falling productivity is a result of people finally demanding that laws and human dignity be not just respected but honoured and advanced, then I say let it fall.
I've heard people say that maybe it's time to reset productivity expectations or even redefine what is meant by productivity.
I think they make good cases for those things, but maybe it's time for, I don't know, something so radical as to be unthinkable. Like maybe it's time for the business community to look inward for the problem.
Sears is the one that really gets me. In addition to full stores in big enough centres, they had depots everywhere and their own trucking network. And I mean everywhere. Suburbs, towns, villages: if there wasn't enough business to support a standalone depot, anyone could apply to set up a depot as part of another business. I even saw one once that was basically run out of someone's house. They moved into the top floors of an old boarding house and set up the main floor with a small museum, craft and thrift store, a bit of a cafe, and a Sears depot. I think they were also the bus depot. Any gaps in the trucking network were filled by sending stuff out on the train or bus, in the post, or with a small trucking company.
The logistics were handled and a very large fraction of their business was already mail order. All they needed was the online presence, and it's not like they didn't have customers practically begging them to do it.
Which I guess would mean that a whole lot of people would go hungry if we stopped doing that.
I'm not suggesting that there is something inherently evil about artificial fertilizers, but the scale of use is likely a problem.
And Scott Moe.
Here's an idea. Get the two of them a little love nest. Maybe it'll keep them away from the rest of us.
That's 3 times what is being put into a federal housing program and AI already has people falling all over themselves to invest.