I think the bizarre thing is that unions are negotiating 3% wage increases and it's like.... that's below inflation.

High cost of living, unsustainable gas prices, runaway climate change, housing crisis, stagnant wages.

I'm sure the right wingers will be the perfect solution to these problems.

In "theory" or "legally" I have 50-50 custody. In practice, it's nearly impossible to enforce visitation with older children. My kids were 15 and 9 when we split. Immediately, the courts said enforcement on the 15-year-old was impossible. I spent a few years battling enforcement on the 9-year-old but she soon also became unenforceable. At a certain point you can't win if the kids also don't want to see you or make your visit a nightmare by passively resisting.

I was in the middle of one of these court battles when my daughter became anorexic and told the medical staff she didn't want me to visit her in hospital. She was about 13 and that was the last I saw her.

Legally, I am a 50-50 parent but in reality the only thing I'm entitled to do is pay their mother $1,000 a month.

Oh I'm fine with him seeing his grandkids but he has no empathy for my situation, considering it a dispute between myself and my ex. He even shares details from his trips to see them, as though that wouldn't hurt me to hear about it. His lack of empathy is the problem.

My mother, on the other hand, criticized my ex for the situation and was "cut off." So, despite the fact I'm sad that my mother can't see her grandkids because she, unlike my dad, did take sides, I feel like she had the empathy to stick up for her son and point out it the situation isn't right.

I will also mention my brother was "cut off" because of his close associations with me.

I feel this is highly inaccurate because it would imply these faults are on the slave and not on the system. It's not about the job, it's about the slavery itself.

I found through personal experience that the prestigiousness of the job is highly irrelevant; it's the working that sucks. It's the mandatory devotion to literally anything that sucks one's soul from one's body. And yes, that does become repetitive, and leads to some of the symptoms described above.

But much of the above list are based on factors that are forced upon all of us:

• Working, for no explicable reason in a modern society where we are grotesquely wealthy and have a surfeit of everything
• Commuting, a pointless and punishing exercise, often in transportation systems that are lazily thought of and constructed, mostly for cars and not human beings
• Exhaustion, mental and physical, from the toil of slavery, preventing the inspiration of new activities and hobbies
• Having to fake one's personality at work in order to conform to a social order so that one can participate in a capitalistic society one doesn't even want any part of
• Uses substances to cope with trauma, such as coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs
• Is too tired on the weekends, using them to recover from the cycle of work
• Mental illness from trauma, unresolved because of a lack of health care funding for mental health, leads him to consider extreme options

It's about the system, not the slaves.

Interesting perspective. It would be really mind-blowing to see the other side of the gender, even though I have no interest in being trans.

One thing I will add to this article is that men are also viewed as little more than bank machines after divorce. People always have the utmost sympathy for any mother who is separated from her children, even if only for a few days. Movie plots can revolve around mothers finding their lost children and being reunited. But for men? We're only the providers, the ones who pay the child support.

I lost my kids (not legally, just boring old classic parental alienation) six years ago following the divorce. Nobody cares, because I'm just a man. Not even my own father cares. He happily continues to see his grandkids because he doesn't want to "take sides." None of my cousins or other parts of my family care either. So long as I'm paying my "support." And I can't complain about it on social media because I'm a man. I'm a stoic. Boys don't cry, remember?

The lack of emotional support for men mentioned in the article is another thing that really exacerbates divorces and leads to suicides. I do feel like if I were the type of person to contemplate suicide (I'm not), I would have definitely done it when my ex took my kids from me. And there would have been no male friends to pull me back from the edge. Those friendships are, to quote the author, superficial to a large degree, or even the ones that aren't are men who are now focused heavily on their own families and wives.

I mean, it's also true all the other stuff about the male privilege and feeling safe and the good things that come with being a man. But it's nice to see the perspective of how we lack emotional support and we're expected to grit our teeth and "walk it off."

Sorry, you misunderstand slightly.

I don't mean investors in the sense of speculative parasitic humans who are devaluing life by overvaluing housing.

I mean, people like me who have worked from the age of 15-49 and now own a very modest sized apartment that is grotesquely overpriced and has quite literally enslaved me to mortgage payments for years to come.

If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.

And this isn't the same argument as the "why should people get free school when I had to pay student loans" since one doesn't affect the other. In this situation, if the value of homes come down too significantly, it's literally devaluing my work.

I didn't create the horrible dystopian system we live in but I do unfortunately have to abide by its rules. And now that I have a tiny piece (on paper but owned by the bank) I am hoping (like most Canadians) to take that piece and cash out to retire on in 10-15 years time.

What I'd really like to see is some kind of national housing strategy that guaranteed people basic housing regardless of their income (even if it's "zero"). That housing wouldn't impact the market but it could slow down the unhealthy growth of the valuation of housing.

If we could totally slow housing valuation growth to the normal 2% inflation, while also creating affordable housing for lower income/no income earners, then the system could adjust and that could be a true win win.

Homes will never again be affordable because the system is completely broken (and not broken in the Millhouse expression, but rather in a normal definition). We made housing a commodity rather than a necessity of life and it ended with predictable results.

Now we have the unpleasant decision of diluting the investment of millions of Canadians or continuing to allow millions of Canadians to never own a home.

Sometimes the cashiers themselves are slow and scan items like they're regretting every life decision they ever made.

What I love about selfcheckout is I go at my pace, as fast or slow as I want to be.

I find cashier lines to be too slow because of the socialization so I always go to the self checkouts.

A lot of old ladies will go to cashiers and have ridiculous questions and requests and you're standing there with your 3 items dying inside.

Canadians are, more than ever before, influenced by American media and social media and that includes the dogmatic and polarizing rightwing anti-science narratives rooted in conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. We're being absorbed into the American weltanschauung since the advent of the Internet and our culture diluted. You can see it in our politics.

COVID-19 is now endemic, like influenza. However, we do have vaccines so every 6-12 months when we get a booster shot we can get a bivalent vaccine that contains some of the latest variant to help prevent serious illness. This allows us to recover much more easily, reduce transmission, and ultimately eliminate the clogging of hospitals.

The real danger is from people who refuse to vaccinate because they're going to be more susceptible to the endemic virus and its subvariants.