I do agree that red scare rhetoric is increasing but buy in large it’s directed at China and Xi. Anti-communist tropes do show up in popular discourse on Russia but in my experience it’s less so in discussions on influence campaigns but in talk of Russia’s territorial ambitions (understandable considering the place of Soviet symbolism in Russian nationalism and war propaganda).

Russians are not ethnically communist

Echinoderms:

How things work in BC:

When a practitioner changes for a service, they can’t bill any more than what the Payment Schedule says that procedure costs. So if the Medical Services Plan isn’t being billed (eg the doctor or patient opted out of MSP, the patient is a non-resident, the service is in the Payment Schedule but the Payment Schedule requirements consider it unnecessary) or MSP isn’t covering the full cost (some stuff like a second or third biopsy will only be covered 50 %), then the doctor can’t bill the patient any more than they would’ve billed MSP. This means practitioners have no incentive to not bill MSP.

The Payment Schedule (and thus allocation of the MSP budget) is set out by the Medical Services Commission which is composed of three representatives from the government, three from the Doctors of BC (the professional association which promotes the interests of member doctors) and three members of the public. So even if the government pushes for more stringent coverage requirements and budget surplus, the doctors are there to push for higher fees and less billing paperwork (besides exceptional circumstances like out-of-country care, patients can’t submit claims directly; everything is on the practitioner’s end), and the public is there to push for more coverage.

In practice this means that for the vast vast majority of services, the only justification that the practitioner needs to give MSP for coverage is the International Classification of Diseases diagnostic code for the condition being treated.

1 degree, 2 degrees. 1 kelvin, 2 kelvins

Honestly as long as literals are properly converted, I don’t see any other way to do this in an entirely encoding agnostic way

Raw meat carries infectious disease

I should call her…

Serbian

Map of Siberia

then spell bóbr right 😤

But she’s speaking Ukrainian or Slovene.

WHERE I COME FROM THEY’RE CALLED FREEZIES

THE DIVERSITY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS A BEAUTIFUL THING BROTHER!

evolutionary biologist attempts to understand the loss of the baculum in humans

nah biology discoveries are always like “we thought this lesser spotted derpy pig didn’t have big enough spots. turns out it’s a new species” or “this protein turns out to be less curly and more squiggly when the fruit flies are having a lot of sex”

increasing Canada’s defence spending to two per cent of its gross domestic product, reforming immigration through “better gatekeepers,” making life more affordable by “dismantling protectionism” and increasing competition in the airline, telecommunications and agricultural sectors

the party will have a strict vetting system to fend off potential foreign interference

strict vetting against foreign interference is rich coming from a party that agrees with the US state department at every opportunity

The angel has a wikipedia page and the demon does not

Columbia, from Columbus, has always been a common poetic name for the US and it’s this that the ship is named after. The name of BC is one of many on the continent that ultimately derives from Columbus

Though indirectly, it’s named after Columbus… as in Christopher Columbus

A lot of regular bus services around the province are contracted out to private companies too. Translink runs their buses (Coast Mountain Bus Company) and BC Transit runs the buses in Victoria but all the other BC Transit branded buses are either run by municipalities (eg Nanaimo), regional districts (eg Cowichan Valley), or are privately run (eg First Transit in the Fraser Valley). Of course drivers in privately run areas usually get shafted, see the First Transit strike last year