Recent Comments

1. 3 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   AI graphics (I won’t call it art) are the worst, especially when it arrives unsolicited. I suspect the Bookstore Lady knows a local illustrator who would be happy to receive a commission for a lovely poster for the shop.♥ (AI graphics does have its uses, like when you don’t have any graphic skills and are trying to communicate the sort of thing you have in mind to an artist you are going to pay to create something for. But it’s still so very problematic because AIs are trained on stolen images. Turns out the one thing AI is REALLY good for is science, specifically in combating antibiotic drug-resistant bacteria.)

2. 3 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   But she comes by those extra fingers naturally; she didn’t steal them from another cat.♥

3. 4 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   The visual vantage point is exceptionally adorable.♥

4. 5 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   I dislike the label, too. It is certainly not the behaviour of the overwhelming majority of fathers who are divorced. But men who do behave like this get a lot of attention, probably because irritants and outliers draw our attention. But there are also enough men in the world (for a host of reasons) who are like this—or exude this kind of energy in public —that it’s a recognizable trope.

5. 5 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   *Starting second families.

6. 5 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   I was going to say, like the health care reform act “RomneyCare”.♥

7. 6 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   It’s insane! There’s also a huge hypocrisy on Facebook, because Canadian news sites themselves are permitted to advertise and link to stories in those ads.

8. 6 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   It’s an allusion to stereotypical and desperate-looking male “mid-life crisis”-type behaviour of fast cars, dressing flashy, dating younger women, started second families. While demographics have changed a lot in the past 20 years, it’s still the case that when straight parents separate, the financial situations of fathers tends to improve, while that of mothers—who still are more likely to end up with physical custody of the children—deteriorates. Consequently, divorced dads typically have more disposable income and more leisure time than divorced moms.

   Musk has serious divorced dad energy: Dressing like a 20-year-old, using his younger children as props while not really being involved in their care, hoping desperately that people will think he’s cool.

9. 6 days ago on Breaking Cat News

   I’m 51, and I understand the “lingo” of “divorced dad energy”.

10. 6 days ago on Breaking Cat News

    Just a note on the ACA and Obamacare: They’re one and the same. There’s no such thing as “Obamacare” in the sense that there’s no insurance program that Obama set up; the GOP just nicknamed the ACA “Obamacare” in order to turn it into a slur; the same GOP who invented “death panels” out of whole cloth. (Lots of people who want Obamacare canceled are very much in favour of the ACA.) The law they passed is the Affordable Care Act, which is a set of regulations that tell private, for-profit health insurance companies that they actually have to provide some real coverage to the people giving them their money. Public health insurance would work better and cost less, but the for-profit health insurance industry has SO MUCH money that they can afford to buy politicians and to wage PR campaigns that convince Americans that “socialized medicine” is evil communism and anti-American. Of course, socialized medicine—publicly-funded heath insurance—exists in the U.S., and when it’s properly funded, it works quite well (the VA, Medicaid, Medicare, benefits for Federal employees and Federal Legislators), although because there’s no regulations around what doctors can charge, they’re permitted to refuse to see patients on Medicaid and Medicare.

    I’ve lived my whole life in a country that decided long before I was born that health insurance should be funded publicly through taxes and premiums, and that it would cost less than a for-profit health insurance scheme, because the revenue would all go into the public provision and administration of health care, rather than allowing private insurers to extract money out of a system to which they add zero value. It’s the reason Canadians don’t go bankrupt because of medical debt.♥