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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Here in Canada , fax is widely used in the medical field in the same way. One could not run a medical office or organization of any kind or size without a fax line. I have heard the legal sector is likewise reliant.

    In a functional way I don’t know it’s wrong to say email is less secure. It’s not that they don’t want to buy computers. Everyone has freaking computers; gimme a break. Email (1980s tech) is almost as antiquated as fax machines (1970s) and has many vulnerabilities. There is no way in hell your dermatologist is getting to a PGP party anytime soon. They probably use the same password for every account and that password is probably their name or something and have been using the same one for 20 years. The password is known by perhaps dozens of current and former employees. The email is downloaded onto devices which may not use encryption for storage. They don’t install windows patches but they do install random shit from the internet. And so on. OTOH, who is hacking fax machines?

    The solution isn’t to move to email, it’s to hop past email to use a natively encrypted technology with security enforced by a service provider. If the public funders would step up to support a Free Software solution this could have been done already. But instead they fund this and that proprietary system that doesn’t work out, then have to start from scratch in a few years. There hasn’t been incentive to create interoperability. Just a bunch of privately-held companies frothing at the mouth to make all the $$$ they see in the health care industries competing with each other.

    BTW I have heard that fax machines are still in wide use in the US medical field also, but it depends what system you are in. E.g “kaiser” system has it’s own internal comms system they use and so on. But inter-system, fax will always be the lowest common denominator.



  • There is a lot of focus on whether this child should or even could have been vaccinated against measles. It is impossible to know based on the information. They were due for 0, 1 or 2 doses or MMR vaccine.

    At any rate, I would suggest reading it in the other direction: no vaccinated child has died of the measles. Vaccination prevents this disaster. It is likely (but not certain) that many other children were in contact with the same situation which ultimately led to the death of this one. Many of them didn’t die because their parents took responsible steps.

    In another comment I posted the vaccine schedule for Ontatio. MMR is scheduled at 12 months of age, same as many other places. Your first dose (of the two children need) is only considered “valid” if given on or after the 1st birthday.

    However the vaccine is approved as safe and has short-term efficacy when given as young as 6 months. The immunity just doesn’t “last” as long when given earlier, which is why its scheduled for 12 months where risk is low. In those communities where anti-vax people congregate, diligent parents can consider giving their children an extra dose at 6 months to cut that risky time in half.


  • In Ontario, MMR is at 12 months and varicella (chickenpox) is separate at 15 months.

    Other provinces, territories and states in Canada/US have variations and some include MMRV instead of MMR followed by Varicella.

    MMRV is scheduled routinely at age 4-6.

    An overview of the routine childhood schedule can be seen here.

    The full ontario schedule can be found here, with the routine childhood schedule being on page 3.

    By the way for anyone wondering why bother vaccinate against chickenpox, it’s because chickenpox and shingles are the same thing. If you never get chickenpox you never get shingles. Shingles fucking sucks and causes blindness, untreatable pain and other miseries.








  • Its somewhat to make money. But it also forgoes the cost of caring for and raising children. Canada likes it when people arrive with the cost of the first 18-30 years of life already paid by another community. Then we benefit from and exploit that. Often wasting advanced education as people enter the job market vastly overqualified for where they end up. (A situation which is often misrepresented to people considering a move here.)

    As it stands, running universities and many other industries would be impossible without doing this massive brain drain on other communities. Because it would entail having a less shitty public education and social support system.

    I am happy for immigrants to come here. I just find the parasitism of Canadian public policy really gross.