i'm not exaggerating. $5/day. that's what i spend on food...

my food budget is $200/month, but it includes stuff like soap and i inevitably waste some money on junk food, here and there.

i spend roughly $150/month on my actual diet. $150/30d = $5/day.

this buys me one of the following two meal plans:

1) one banana, one kiwi, 5 strawberries, 2 scoops of cherry ice cream, a very large glass of soy milk, a glass of orange juice, a tomato, a half a green pepper, a bowl of fettuccine, a quarter brick of cheese, eight slices of genoa salami & a large serving of salad dressing.

or

2) one banana, one kiwi, 5 strawberries, 2 scoops of cherry ice cream, a very large glass of soy milk, a glass of orange juice, a toasted and buttered bagel, four eggs (fried), eight slices of genoa salami & eight slices of cheese.

both of those meals cost around $5.00. i guess if you're old, it might make more sense to remove the cheese altogether, and use that savings to upgrade the salami to chicken.

so, how are these old folks getting stuck with frozen beans and packaged casserole at $8.00? the answer is corporate subsidies. the money goes from the government to the food manufacturers, and through the old folks home as a conduit.

the best thing to do would be to give the money to the seniors directly and have them make their own meals. but, of course, that's not always feasible.

i don't know exactly how you deal with this, but i know that it's possible to eat very well on a lot less than they're complaining about, and the problem is clearly in the corporate welfare in the contracts.

my budget is more like $5.00/day and is composed primarily of fresh fruit, eggs and pasta.

and, my cholesterol is 66 mg/dl; i'm absurdly healthy.

honestly: if i were to increase my food budget to $9.00/day, i'd just be gaining weight and probably eating a lot of junk food. and, the meal in the picture is probably worth less than $2.00.

they don't need to spend more, they need to spend more intelligently. i know: my budget is tiny, but i eat spectacularly.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/03/10/ontario-nursing-homes-feed-seniors-on-833-a-day.html

people still think i'm just being silly when i say i don't want kids.

but, i told you that when i was 15, and i told you that when i was 20, and i told you that when i was 25 and i told you that when i was 30, and i told you that when i was 35, too...

still. supposedly, i'll "grow up" one day and recognize the value of enslaving myself to something i don't remotely care about for the rest of my fucking life. it will just suddenly make sense, this complete loss of autonomy, this embrace of a remaining existence of endless, thankless labour.

do you know what would have happened had i managed to fuck up badly enough to actually have kids? honestly? truly? i'd almost certainly be in jail right now, either for trying to duck out of paying child support or for flat out child abandonment. again: did you think i was just being ironic when i told you over and over and over again, or what? and, is it starting to sink in yet?

i mean, it's not like i told you when i was younger that i wanted kids one day. this is a decision that i made when i was like 12, and have never had a second thought about. there was never any time where i wavered on this.

so, no - i'm not going to bother freezing sperm before i get the orchiectomy, because i'm absolutely certain that i'm never going to want to raise them.

just about the only thing that's likely to ever change my mind about this is the abolition of mortality. if we could find a way to get real immortality - and i don't mean the retarded kind of thing that you hear idiot christians talk about, i mean actual, legit immortality - then wasting a couple of years raising kids wouldn't be throwing your life away to benefit your capitalist slavemasters.

until that point happens, i'm sorry - having kids is just about the dumbest, most irrational thing you could possibly subject yourself to.

this bill is actually largely symbolic, as very few canadians have or want private health insurance. and, i've scolded the ndp for standing up for a bill that only affects upper class canadians - not because i'm opposed to it, but because it's a wrong-headed priority and a waste of valuable house time. i know that it's easy to look in from outside the country and want to support a bill that reins in insurance companies, and it's easy to build the narrative that trudeau is acting in the interests of the insurance companies (and you'd even be right....), but you're missing the point that the only people that have private insurance plans in this country are high level executives of multinational corporations. again: my irritation was that the ndp were wasting their time on this. i didn't really offer a position, because it's not a relevant issue for 99% of us.

some of the provinces in canada even ban private health insurance as illegal.

what i'm more interested in is the caucus revolt. i've been talking about this as something that is necessary for a while: as much as the rest of the world is in love with justin trudeau, he has demonstrated himself as being on the right-wing neo-liberal fringe of a party with a history of leaning strongly towards democratic socialism, operating in the interests of questionable benefactors and with a clear tactical prerogative of trying to appeal to conservative voters.

will it expand further, or will it contain itself?

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/liberal-backbenchers-vote-against-trudeau-pass-law-banning-genetic-discrimination

"No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil and just leave it in the ground,"

that may have been true fifty years ago, but what this comment exposes is a type of backwards thinking that is very much in line with the views of stephen harper. as much as trudeau would like to pretend that he's looking forward, he's much very stuck in twentieth century style thinking.

there was a time when coal was widely used, but today we are actively phasing coal out permanently, despite there existing ample reserves for a long time. likewise, uranium has no future, despite the existence of centuries of reserves in the ground. oil - like uranium and coal - is a dirty product, and must be eliminated altogether.

canada has billions of dollars of remaining reserves of asbestos, which are now being left in the ground.

technology changes. the choice we have is to move with technology, or be overcome by it. one does not survive in the 21st century by using 20th century logic. and, we will face certain collapse if we insist on building an economy around a product that the world is cutting demand for.

reality check: that oil is going to have to stay in the ground, and canadians are going to have to force the prime minister to understand it, or remove him if he won't.

the country needs political leadership that looks forwards towards economic diversification, not backwards towards the dirty oil of the twentieth century.

he's not harper-lite. he's harper on steroids.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-houston-harper-pierre-ceraweek-1.4018746