SpankyMcFarland

I suspect Trump would have benefited from sentencing before the election. It would have fed into the martyrdom narrative and given a boost to the followers.

Did he not appoint three justices? Those advising him had a very clear idea of their judicial philosophy as we saw with abortion.

In one way it isn’t a win. AFAIK delaying sentencing means the Supreme Court cannot become involved again with this case until after the election.

I don’t recall him ever saying he lost before by any yardstick so that is progress.

One theory favoured by Nick Lane is that life may have arisen in a particular type of ocean floor vent with an alkaline pH that would have favoured the development of chemical and electric gradients seen in cells. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292978084_The_Origin_of_Life_in_Alkaline_Hydrothermal_Vents

Well, enough bad news. There’s always somebody doing good work to lessen the queues. I mentioned in another post that in Ontario an orthopaedic surgeon performed 14 hip replacements in one day, the sort of thing they manage in Belgium of all places. Each one takes only 35 minutes. The surgeon spends his day moving back and forth between two ORs. When one procedure is finished, the cleaning team come in and get the room ready before the surgeon is finished with the other case. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.7054389 https://hospitalnews.com/hyper-throughput-operating-rooms-increase-efficiency/ https://deo.care/professor-corten-belgium-efficiency-for-direct-anterior-hip-surgery/ There is a catch to such extraordinary productivity. OHIP won’t pay for that number so they have to fund the excess through donations at the moment. In my local hospital the surgeons would be lucky to be allowed 2 hips on a list. At the moment the province is trying to move the orthopaedic surgeons to other more remote hospitals now and then where there is available OR time. You’d have to wonder whether one centre could do a large proportion of Canada’s hips and knees more efficiently and with fewer complications than hundreds of independent institutions? Maybe one centre in each region, however defined, run by one national group? Quality control would be a much simpler issue then. Yes, there would be endless arguments about the money but it might be worth a try. Whatever happens, there’s no question that Humber Valley have just set the bar a lot higher.

The good thing about this is that it illustrates the creative destruction in our political system. Parties should come and go as they fail to satisfy the demands of voters. Pity the poor Americans who seem stuck with the same two parties for the foreseeable future. That’s better than one party but it’s not ideal.

For a change, I’d like to highlight a good news story from a hospital in Toronto. Drawing on the success of a similar Belgian project and on work in the US, Humber Valley now does hip replacements in 35 minutes. One surgeon managed to do 14 hips in one day, a feat also achieved in Belgium. https://hospitalnews.com/hyper-throughput-operating-rooms-increase-efficiency/#:~:text=“Hyper-Throughput Operating Rooms break,result in big time savings. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.7054389 https://deo.care/professor-corten-dr-vanbiervliet-belgium-blueprint-for-a-hyperefficient-or-for-total-hip-surgery/ One snag which I presume will be remedied - the hospital is exceeding the number of hip replacements OHIP is willing to pay for and has to get the extra funding from donations!

I can’t see why public and private systems cannot co-exist. We need both.

Lovely. That reminds me of South Africa where the electricity company doesn’t have power cuts or failures. No no, it’s ’load shedding’, like something excessive is being dealt with for your benefit.

In my town we’re rapidly heading for a fully foreign-trained group of family practitioners. The locals can do just as well money-wise doing shifts in walk-in clinics and ERs where they don’t shoulder the full-time burden of caring for a practice load of patients. In addition most of them want to live in the big city, something that they and the medical school aren’t exactly anxious to advertise to the general public. The incentives to work as a small town GP are grossly inadequate here. I think the future of community care outside the city will be nurse practitioners and Zoom. Hell, ultimately, private NPs by Zoom. We’ll just need to palpate your credit card first.

If we really need a monarch why not choose one that actually likes being here? Our traditional model has broken down in recent years with no visits from our head of state at all. Surely, we can find a person related to Charles who would want to live in Canada full-time? It’s not that awful.

For years, I could get absolutely nobody to help me in my garden until I mentioned the problem to my Filipina cleaning lady. Next thing she starts a gardening business and my place never looked so good. Those jobs would not exist without her.

In my town, we would have hardly any fast food outlets open if it weren’t for Filipino and South Asian immigrants. Our young people are either in the cities or their basements. They won’t do that work here.

Scientific claims are falsifiable. They must make a statement that can be proven either true or false. All swans are white is such a statement - it was correct until black swans were found. By contrast, a statement like all swans are magical is not scientific. The extraordinary success of science in building our modern world rests on this constant effort to correct and improve our knowledge. Scientists expect to be proven wrong eventually even as they edge closer to the truth. It’s in the nature of their wonderful and perpetually unfinished business.