"I just wanted to share my story here in Reddit because I kinda kept this story to myself and if I tell this to my friends, they probably wouldn't believe me anyway. But I just wanted to tell someone who's having the same problem that I had before. It's kind of a long story so don't read it if you don't wanna read long stories. I needed to tell a back story first so it's easy to understand what I'm going to tell.
So, I'm from Winnipeg. So here's how it all started. I ran away from my parents with only $2500 on TFSA and $800 on my Chequing account Also like ($1000 worth of bitcoins I think??? or like a year later I don't remember the timeline anymore) when I was 18, 5 years ago. Life was more or less great. I was working 30-38 hours a week at Walmart with barely above minimum wage salary. For some reason, I still managed to save money with low salary, renting a room and owning a car and paying all my bills at the same tome. I even brought myself to college and got a Legal Assistant Degree while still working after school and weekends to pay my bills. But, after my internship. The place I did my internship didn't want to take me because I kinda fell asleep in the court room on the hearing beside the judge (Cos I was tired from working and going to school every time). It kinda got hard for me to get a job in that field cos I didn't have any work experience in that field, but I didn't want to do internship cos I didn't want to work for free.
Around 19-20 years of age, I just decided to find any job to make more money. I got into a production company as a general labourer. Working two jobs and with lots of money. I just didn't know what to do with all that money. It was so easy for me to make money that I thought I could just outspend what I wanted to spend my money on. So, I just started to spend my money playing in Casinos. Coincidentally, 1 month after I was working two jobs. I won $1250 on a $50 sidebet on Pai Gow Poker and then won another $2500 on $50 side bet the week after. That's when I started to ruin my finances. I would go into Casinos like almost every week. I was making like $1200 biweekly after taxes and would spend all my salary, go through all my savings, borrow from friends, and maxing out my credit cards. Hell, I even started talking to my parents again just to borrow money from them so I can just gamble more when I spend all my salary from gambling.
I even started working 3 jobs. Working 60-70 hours but I would spend all that money from gambling. Sometimes, my gas would almost run out or I wouldn't even eat sometimes cos I already gambled all my money in Casino. So basically I was gambling for a 2-4 years. I lost like around $40k in total. I was even paying more on NSFs, Credit card interest than necessities sometimes cos I'd actually go to the casinos right after I get my paycheques. I was always stressed that time. I wouldn't know what to do. Couldn't sleep properly at night sometimes, being paranoid, thinking how can I pay my debts, when to eat next time, and all other things. Tough times.
Then, Covid happened last year. I quit on my full time job like a month before covid got serious (bad timing I know) because I was always late and I got laid off at my part time job because of lack of customers due to Covid Scare. Luckily, the Casinos closed down too. Then, I got a job at a pork processing company as a SliceMachine Operator. So, I started to save a lot of money which allowed me to start paying off my credit card debts , student loans, late payments, debts to friends.
Unfortunately, Casinos opened again for like almost a month and I gambled and lost around $3000 which like my savings at the time. Thankfully, they closed down again. But now, most of my debts are paid off except for like a couple hundreds in Credit card, student loans, and car loan which are low interest so I'm not in a rush to pay them anymore.
Now, I've learned my lesson and I started investing my saved money and trying to be financially responsible once again. To be honest, If I can take anything back from the past. I wouldn't even want to get the money that I've lost in the Casinos. I would just want to get back the time when I was at (19-22) where I could've use those time to spend it with my friends and/or travel and vacations. Instead of wasting my time chasing my losses."
P.S. sorry, I'm new in reddit. My first post actually, don't know how to format these things properly lol

Disgraced fashion mogul Peter Nygard's own SON is helping police investigate his alleged sex crimes By Guy Adams Investigates For The Daily Mail
15 Jan 2021
Link to article
'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.'
Kai Bickle's world came tumbling down one night in May 2019, when he attended a dinner party at a lavishly decorated mansion overlooking the golden sands of Venice Beach in Los Angeles.
The host was his father, Peter Nygard, a Canadian fashion tycoon famed for the hedonistic lifestyle he pursued at a global portfolio of high-end properties, including vast residences in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, as well as New York, and, most notoriously, a Mayan-themed 'private luxury resort' in the Bahamas.
Modelling himself on Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the flamboyant Nygard, now 79, kept a revolving harem of girlfriends. Those caught up (often completely unwittingly) in this web had included actresses Susan Anton and Jennifer O'Neill, stripper-turned-reality star Anna Nicole Smith, and a former Wheel Of Fortune card turner by the name of Vanna White.
His Caribbean parties, meanwhile, tended to attract a better class of A-lister. Past visitors to the island property had ranged from Jane Seymour and Bo Derek to Robert De Niro, , Michael Jackson and Joan Collins, not to mention and , who were photographed there in the early 2000s on an innocuous family holiday.
The 2019 bash, during one of Peter's occasional business trips to LA, was to be a more down-to-earth affair. Roughly 20 guests, including Kai, 38, and his younger brother Jessar (one of roughly ten offspring Nygard has fathered via more than seven women) had been invited for food and drinks, followed by a late-night poker game.
That was the plan, at least. But Kai never made it to the card- table. Instead, he fled the lavish premises in a state of distress, shortly after dinner, believing that he had just witnessed his father attempting to sexually assault an eight-year-old girl.
Details of this ugly development are (it should be stressed) strongly disputed, and we shall examine them later. But the incident would kick-start an extraordinary chain of events that culminated just before Christmas, with the arrest of Peter Nygard on nine charges of sex trafficking and racketeering.
Currently behind bars, with his $900 million (£660 million) business empire in tatters and the FBI poring over his computer hard-drives, the fallen tycoon has now been accused of rape or sexual assault by at least 57 women. Several of Nygard's accusers were children when the alleged crimes took place, and many claim they were drugged.
At least 57 women have accused him.
He will appear in court in Canada next week, seeking bail as he fights extradition to the USA.
It is, perhaps, the most high-profile and shocking sex case since handcuffs were slapped on Jeffrey Epstein. And in a remarkable twist, it turns out that a leading figure in the increasingly public campaign to prosecute Mr Nygard is his aforementioned son, Kai.
Upcoming documentary: ‘Unseamly’ Canadian Designer Peter Nygård True Crime Documentary
Behind the scenes, I can reveal that Kai has spent the past 18 months secretly helping both the U.S. and Canadian authorities investigate his own father's alleged crimes. Keeping his role hidden from Nygard and his associates for several months, he has worked tirelessly to assist victims, and their legal teams.
On the personal front, he has changed his name (taking up his mother's surname to become Kai Zen Bickle) and used his influence over various Nygard companies to block efforts to move his assets offshore, fearing that would allow him to flee. 'We have been engaged in a brutal battle against my father and his enablers,' is how Kai summed things up when we spoke this week.
'He has become my arch-nemesis. I no longer regard him as my father . . . He is a monster. I am now here to serve in any way I can, to support survivors and the justice process and also to help expose the people who covered up his crimes.'
Perhaps most remarkably of all, Kai recently helped two of his younger siblings, one of whom remains a minor, to sue Peter Nygard over claims he 'engineered' the rape of his own sons. In an extraordinary lawsuit filed in August, the boys claimed that their leathery, multi-millionaire father instructed one of his long-standing girlfriends (who was also a sex worker) to 'make a man' out of them.
The first of these alleged attacks (which, again, are vehemently denied by Nygard) took place in the Bahamas 2004, when the son was 15 and the woman was in her mid-20s. The second occurred in Winnipeg in 2018, when the younger child was 14 and the woman was in her 40s. Court papers filed by the boys stated that the unnamed girlfriend was instructed to seduce Nygard's son by showering in his bathroom so that he 'could see her naked'. Then she raped him.
Afterwards, she allegedly told the boy he 'wasn't bad' for a 'baby.' The next morning, Nygard's girlfriend brought him breakfast in bed, kissing him on the lips and announcing: 'Mommy's got you.' Kai says he first became aware of this appalling incident last spring, and was 'sickened' to hear his brothers' claims.
He would often yell and scream at his staff.
'We all spoke and decided the best course of action was to file a lawsuit publicly in the hope that other survivors would feel safe to come forward and also file criminally against Nygard,' he says. 'We were originally going to have me in the suit as my young brother's guardian, but in the end decided not to because it would reveal to Nygard that I was working against him . . . At the time I was [secretly] doing everything I could to improve the odds that he would get arrested.'
To appreciate the extraordinary journey taken by Kai, we must wind the clock back to the mid-1980s, when his father was one of Canada's most talked-about self-made millionaires.
The son of penniless immigrants from Finland, Peter Nygard had launched his empire in the late 1960s, with an $8,000 (£6,000) investment in a struggling fashion firm. By the time he was 30, the company had become one of North America's most successful suppliers of leisure and sportswear, while his flamboyant eccentricities, which included keeping parrots in his office and filling the lobby of Nygard HQ with bronze busts of himself, turned him into an object of public fascination.
In 1987, the party-loving entrepreneur purchased a 4.5-acre patch of the island of New Providence in the Bahamas and set about turning it into a 'dream home' where he could indulge his champagne lifestyle. Over the ensuing years, he built 150,000 sq ft of Mayan-themed buildings, stretching over a dozen 'cabana-style' residences. The buildings at Nygard Cay eventually included a casino, a disco hut (with cameras beneath the dance floor, reportedly to shoot images of revellers from below), and the world's largest sauna, a 6,000 sq ft lodge made from 2ft-thick Canadian pine logs.
In the grounds were fake volcanoes that belched dry ice, a flock of peacocks, stone cobras which hissed steam at sunset, 60 ft towers festooned with hundreds of flaming torches (lit nightly by staff) and giant statues of nude women, purportedly modelled on some of Nygard's favourite girlfriends.
At weekends, he would host lavish parties, which appeared on various TV documentaries, including Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.
The place became a magnet for freeloading celebrities and, while Kai believes they generally had the most fleeting and brief relationship with Nygard, photos of their visits were then plastered across company literature and websites.
Prince Andrew, to cite one example, was recorded for posterity wandering with the long-haired fashion magnate on the beach, wearing blue shorts and boat shoes.
Born in the 1980s, Kai spent the first three years of his life in the Bahamas until his mother, Patricia, left Nygard, with whom she'd had three children but never married.
They moved first to California and then to the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. Over subsequent years, he had almost no regular contact with the fashion tycoon aside from occasional visits during school holidays, where he met various half-siblings.
'He would have one family weekend per year at his lake cottage, and a few days set aside for Christmas,' says Kai of the somewhat unorthodox arrangement. 'During those times, the days were filled with activities like horseback riding or mini golf.
'He could be a very charismatic person when he wanted to be and the family weekends were very light and brief.'
In the very limited time he spent with his father during childhood, Kai saw nothing that gave him reason to suspect that Peter Nygard was guilty of criminality, though he did have a highly volatile personality.
'He would yell and scream at his staff often, and that always was upsetting to everyone around it, but he would describe his yelling as 'passion' because of his 'high standards',' Kai says.
Nygard's children were further told that he 'lived a consensual, non-monogamous lifestyle,' Kai says. 'He made speeches at dinner to family when we were together to talk about how he hoped everyone got a wonderful partner and wished that he could find that special someone, but that it wasn't the life for him.
'He also had girlfriends that were persistently with him, always two or three, and often they were around for years. He wasn't embarrassed about it. He flaunted it on TV, it was part of his brand, something he showed the whole world. He was proud of it.'
Be that as it may, rumours of predatory behaviour by Nygard —and worse — had occasionally reared their ugly head, only to be quickly suppressed: a relatively easy task before the internet.
In 1980, for example, he was charged with the rape of an 18-year-old, but the charge was dropped when the complainant refused to testify. In 1996, three female employees meanwhile filed sexual harassment complaints in the Canadian province of Manitoba.
It looked like his hand was on her thigh, rubbing.
One, a 39-year-old communications manager, said that, when called into Nygard's office, she would 'find him in a state of undress . . . with his hands down the front of his pants, fondling himself.' He settled by giving the women $18,500 (£13,600) and denied any wrongdoing.
Then, in 2010, a Canadian TV network put out a Panorama-style documentary about Nygard, focusing on alleged sex abuse and harassment of former employees.
It quoted a former stewardess on his private plane who alleged that on one journey — during which Nygard was accompanied by a troupe of topless women — he lost his temper with staff, shouting: 'You are nothing! You are garbage! I am God!'
The programme also alleged that Nygard had engaged in 'inappropriate sexual contact' with a young woman who had been brought to his home in 2003 from the Dominican Republic. Nygard denied that either incident had happened, and sued to stop the documentary being broadcast.
Fast forward to May 2019, however, and those ugly incidents were largely forgotten. Kai, who was by then in his late 30s, had worked for his father's companies for just over two years after leaving college, but quit to pursue a career in activism and health science.
Nygard's trip to Los Angeles afforded them a rare opportunity to catch up, so he attended the aforementioned dinner party in Venice Beach.
As the night wore on, he recalls becoming uncomfortable about his father's behaviour towards an eight-year-old girl, who was attending with her mother, one of Nygard's old girlfriends.
'He's got her sitting right next to him at dinner, which is usually his girlfriend chair. And he's a creature of routine. So I'm already thinking this is weird.
'He's trying to act like the Papa. It was just weird . . . I'm noticing things. I'm noticing that he's telling her little secrets at dinner. Putting his hand close to her ear and going all hush-hush.' At the end of dinner, most of the other 20-odd guests got up to adjourn to the card table. However, Kai adds: 'I'm still watching him. Her chair gets pushed back. He brings her round to him.
'She was on his right side. He brings her to his left side, with his arm around her waist, and I see his elbow change and start moving as if — it looked to me, I couldn't see, but it looked like his hand was on her upper thigh, and rubbing. That's what it looked like to me . . . Everything in my body told me he was doing something terrible.'
'I had a huge adrenaline rush and I immediately told the mother to get her daughter away from him,' he adds. 'I stood up next to him and looked in his eyes. At that moment, for me, it was like all the walls were crashing down around him . . . And I realised that, yeah, he's probably trying to groom that girl.'
Nygard vigorously denied wrongdoing, and even called Kai 'sick' for thinking as much. But Kai was unconvinced.
Then, in February last year, ten women filed a bombshell lawsuit in New York claiming that the fashion magnate had used wealth and status to 'entice underage girls' from 'young, impressionable and often impoverished backgrounds' into his home, where they would be 'plied with alcohol' and (some allege) date-rape drugs, before being taken to Nygard's private quarters, where he would 'assault, rape and sodomise' them. Court papers claimed they were then coerced into joining a globe-trotting harem of sex workers paid thousands of dollars from Nygard's company funds and trafficked around the world on his company's private jet, which reportedly boasts a stripper pole.
One alleged victim, who was just 14 at the time, claimed Nygard raped her and paid her $5,000 (£3,700).
Another said her encounter with Nygard began with him showing her pornography after which he raped her, 'causing her extraordinary trauma and pain', the suit states.
Three of his existing ten accusers were 14 at the time. Three more were 15.
Within days, dozens more alleged victims had come forward. By the summer, some 57 survivors were pursuing legal action — and the number of alleged victims had reached 100.
Kai again confronted his father, only to be told it was all 'lies' and asked to speak out publicly in his father's support. But days later a friend texted Kai to complain about a recent visit to Nygard's house in Los Angeles.
'He said he'd brought a female friend with him, who had one or two drinks and had started to feel very high. Nygard took her up to his room and aggressively had sex with her, not using a condom.
'When I heard that, I knew he was not only as bad as people said he was, but was a dangerous criminal and had to be stopped.' He duly alerted the authorities about the friend's message. In a podcast called Live To Walk Again, released this week, he revealed that he began helping both the police and the alleged victims' lawyers, who he regards as 'heroes'.
Over the summer, Kai also used official positions held in Nygard firms to block two apparent efforts to move assets overseas, amid concerns that the tycoon might flee to evade justice.
PODCAST EPISODE: Peter Nygard Discusses His Father
'Through the course of ten months I also helped several survivors to file criminally against him, and spent countless hours on the phone with survivors, lawyers and authorities,' he says. Last month Nygard was arrested on U.S. charges at a home in the Royalwood area of Winnipeg. He spent Christmas behind bars and has consistently denied any wrongdoing, saying he 'expects to be vindicated' in court.
Kai has renounced his inheritance and is working on 'making the world a better place' by campaigning to close legal loopholes exploited by sex offenders.
'I'm very happy earning my own money, as I have all my life. We've never had a trust fund or an allowance, and since his money has been made through pain and suffering, I won't accept a potential inheritance,' he says.
His father's cash, he says, should instead go towards compensating victims. 'My focus now is to help the healing process.'

NOTE: This is FAKE HOCKEY. To talk about actual hockey, go to the latest Daily Discussion thread
Trade Deadline Tonight will continue TONIGHT!
The /hockey Trade Deadline Game is back for day 2! Starting today at 8:00 AM MT trading is officially open again. Trading will run until Thursday, January 30th at 6:00 PM MT.
You are not late! You can still sign up at http://www.tdgdb.com
When you are traded, change your flair on hockey-related subreddits and spend the week from January 31st through February 7th cheering for your new team.
Here are this year's reporters, the people who will make things up break news of trade negotiations:

• DeathToHeretics
• WMino

But remember

NO TRADE IS OFFICIAL UNTIL POSTED IN THIS THREAD!

It's not too late to sign up to be a player The sign-up form is still active and will remain open until Wednesday night. You can find that here
For TDG-related shenanigans, go here [WARNING: some NSFW Language]
Happy trading!
coloradoavalanche receives xelrano from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives illwill18 from coloradoavalanche
Detroit receives a 3 of the Rocky Mountains, Breckenridge Brewery.
Colorado receives Windsor Ontario.
coloradoavalanche receives Muckerofbin from edmontonoilers
coloradoavalanche receives SCwinningJultz from edmontonoilers
edmontonoilers receives asswaffle420 from coloradoavalanche
edmontonoilers receives CloutWaffle from coloradoavalanche
coloradoavalanche receive a used oil derrick, straight from the prairies.
canucks receives TheOlDickTwister from detroitredwings
canucks receives SevenStringGod from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives JordanTheLobster from canucks
detroitredwings receives BlueLegs32 from canucks
Detroit receives Storm Brewery.
Vancouver receives the naming rights to Lake Superior
predators receives tonuch4963 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives TRed7894 from predators
Detroit receives Yazoo Brewery, and a choked on peanut.
Nashville receives the helmet from Robocop.
penguins receives thewinterzodiac from edmontonoilers
penguins receives nextfanatic from edmontonoilers
edmontonoilers receives DontPanic_4242 from penguins
edmontonoilers receives shirleyxx from penguins
penguins receive a barrel of the finest Albertan oil.
penguins receives StonedArcticPenguin from rangers
rangers receives ArchaicTriad from penguins
Pittsburgh Cheesesteak has been removed from the menu from Parmanti Bro's
anaheimducks receives Efficient-Sentence from winnipegjets
anaheimducks receives ItsaMe_Fish from winnipegjets
winnipegjets receives dunkan799 from anaheimducks
anaheimducks Front Office will have food delivered to the Front Office of Winnipegjets
stlouisblues receives otterHooligan from flyers
stlouisblues receives DelcoScum from flyers
stlouisblues receives agswanlek from flyers
flyers receives OtterInAustin from stlouisblues
flyers receives lawnicus18 from stlouisblues
flyers receives Rhymes_withOrange from stlouisblues
stlouisblues receives The Jacks NYB from Philadelphia in exchange for one hour alone with the Stanley Cup for Gritty.
rangers receives Asscheese124 from floridapanthers
rangers receives BearHands00 from floridapanthers
rangers receives MiamiDolphinsFan13 from floridapanthers
floridapanthers receives MentalCorruption from rangers
The New York Rangers also receive naming rights to the city of Miami, renaming it New Brooklyn, and naming rights to the Florida Keys, renaming them the Brooklyn Keys
flyers receives leadorlead from bluejackets
bluejackets receives puckcrisis11 from flyers
To bluejackets - a supply of Scrapple
To flyers - a gift card to La Crema in Hamilton
bluejackets receives NorthHighBears from coloradoavalanche
bluejackets receives RaiderGoalie from coloradoavalanche
bluejackets receives FuzzyTheKiller from coloradoavalanche
coloradoavalanche receives Highlander253 from bluejackets
coloradoavalanche receives HockeyHydralisk from bluejackets
Columbus Blue Jackets to receive a case of Marylands finest rot gut, DuClaw Brewery's Sweet Baby Jesus Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter.
Colorado Avalanche to receive assurances that HockeyHydralisk will shitpost memes at least twice, spending more than ten minutes in GIMP and not just making text on a white background.
detroitredwings receives docksmur from bluejackets
detroitredwings receives Demonox01 from bluejackets
bluejackets receives TheFlanderer from detroitredwings
bluejackets receives InSwedenWeTrust from detroitredwings
bluejackets may dress the Spirit of Detroit in a Blue Jackets jersey for one week
detroitredwings receives the Columbus Brewing Company
flyers receives Sulfoniclol from coloradoavalanche
flyers receives doodlescout from coloradoavalanche
coloradoavalanche receives TheGlaceon78 from flyers
coloradoavalanche receives wh1zzer from flyers
Colorado Avalanche to receive the township of Cherry Hill, NJ.
canes receives sneakytinkerspirits from canes
VGK receives a single In-n-Out fry. Not even animal style. Plain.
devils receives OhneBremse_OhneLicht from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives woodbot96 from devils
sanjosesharks receives SnowyPuzzle from devils
sanjosesharks receives HopelessEsq from devils
sanjosesharks receives CTLepore from devils
hawks receives themagicman1343 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives Xenofon713 from hawks
detroitredwings receives Goose Island Brewery, but will still distribute to Chicago. hawks gets to rename 8 mile, 88 mile and a picture of Patrick Kane will be put on the sign.
hawks receives hockeyenthusiast from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives NimihseeL from hawks
Chicago will send some cold weather to the Bay Area. The Sharks will use this to host the Blackhawks in the Winter Classic.
canes receives StephDoesntCamp from flyers
flyers receives SheepLovesFinns from canes
flyers receives SarahCiv from canes
flyers receives IAMA_Dumba55_Fan from canes
canes receives the Rocky statue and promises to teach Steph how to properly appreciate Rod the Bod
dallasstars receives kethryvis from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives talkinmyface from dallasstars
sanjosesharks receives doihavetowearabra from dallasstars
Sharks receive three bags of hockey pucks.
detroitredwings receives OcelotWolf from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives swim846 from detroitredwings
sanjosesharks receives GreatCanadian_ from detroitredwings
sanjosesharks receives ts1234666 from detroitredwings
Detroit receives ownership of the Hapas Brewing Company.
newyorkislanders receives Dildo_Baggins_6969 from hawks
newyorkislanders receives bwhyte1123 from hawks
hawks receives Deathwing_Dragonlord from newyorkislanders
hawks receives commsmatt from newyorkislanders
Isles to provide Hawks with Brooklyn pie.
Hawks to provide Isles with deep dish pizza.
detroitredwings receives CutLinkOfficial from rangers
rangers receives nik_mkay from detroitredwings
/detroitredwings get Genesee Brewing Company.
/rangers get to rename Dayton, MI to New New York, MI
devils receives osoblanco234 from goldenknights
devils receives Bigcheecho from goldenknights
devils receives rubix08 from goldenknights
devils receives mmowry98 from goldenknights
devils receives CapHillFlash from goldenknights
goldenknights receives JSav7 from devils
goldenknights receives timotomat0 from devils
goldenknights receives Pastatrees from devils
goldenknights receives Palmsfan21 from devils
goldenknights receives faze_chair from devils
New Jersey Devils acquire Bryce Harper's tears
Vegas Golden Knights acquire a Nikita Gusev Jersey
devils receives Hobpobkibblebob from tampabaylightning
tampabaylightning receives HeadHighSauce26 from devils
tampabaylightning receives diego-fuego from devils
TB receives: Louis Domingue NJ receives: some real Florida beach sand and a 12 pack of a Tampa Bay beer to be named later
canes receives Awab25 from hawks
hawks receives shadownet97 from canes
Canes will receive 1 pie from Pequod's.
leafs receives Cynova055 from bluejackets
bluejackets receives haIifax from leafs
To leafs - a signed LeBron James poster
To bluejackets - a Stan Rogers vinyl
coloradoavalanche receives ksheiny from newyorkislanders
coloradoavalanche receives zxpzflik from newyorkislanders
coloradoavalanche receives QuantumDrake from newyorkislanders
newyorkislanders receives littleneerd from coloradoavalanche
newyorkislanders receives bluestooge from coloradoavalanche
newyorkislanders receives usiakcameron from coloradoavalanche
/ColoradoAvalanche receive a cup holder stolen from the Barclays center
both teams sign a joint statement saying the Barclays Center sucks for hockey
rangers receives _RocketGrunt_ from coloradoavalanche
rangers receives stormylullabye from coloradoavalanche
rangers receives Thebush121 from coloradoavalanche
rangers receives taylorrae33 from coloradoavalanche
rangers receives camco105 from coloradoavalanche
coloradoavalanche receives MEGAMATTEOMAN from rangers
coloradoavalanche receives Robtachi from rangers
New York Rangers to receive New Mountain York.
detroitredwings receives guccigatana from newyorkislanders
newyorkislanders receives DeadWithMyFriends from detroitredwings
/NewYorkIslanders receive a girder from the old Joe Louis Arena
/DetroitRedWings receive the Southern Tier Brewing Company
tampabaylightning receives MooseKingdom from leafs
stlouisblues receives Ezflow from tampabaylightning
stlouisblues receives Bryce_Dead19 from tampabaylightning
stlouisblues receives Euroranger from stlouisblues
leafs receives Jimmers1231 from stlouisblues
leafs receives Bcakd5 from stlouisblues
bluejackets receives dylanr18 from bluejackets
bluejackets receives TheDanAplan from bluejackets
stlouisblues receives thecbjfan from bluejackets
leafs receives an official expression of gratitude from stlouisblues for Toronto's release of Tyler Bozak
hawks receives OleMissGoalie37 from coloradoavalanche
hawks receives HeelJopy from coloradoavalanche
hawks receives silentrenegade8 from coloradoavalanche
coloradoavalanche receives Bragisson from hawks
Chicago to receive Rhein Haus.
stlouisblues receives wingsfan64 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives ContrastingWords from stlouisblues
/detroitredwings receive 2 clydesdales
/stlouisblues receive 2 Fiats.
flyers receives WhoaItsAFactorial from losangeleskings
losangeleskings receives SplendaMan from flyers
losangeleskings receives crafbicycle from flyers
flyers receives a bag of Mike Richards finest nose candy
losangeleskings receives Gritty's dealer's phone number
losangeleskings receives kenlane from newyorkislanders
losangeleskings receives auniqueusername1001 from newyorkislanders
newyorkislanders receives Branzilla91 from losangeleskings
newyorkislanders receives WhyAreYouGey from losangeleskings
newyorkislanders receives trippy2219 from losangeleskings
/NewYorkIslanders receive a Pau Gasol jersey
/LosAngelesKings receive a jug of that good Brooklyn Water
flyers receives RealmoftheRedWiings from detroitredwings
flyers receives RedWingFan5 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives carp_boy from flyers
detroitredwings receives KFC_Gaming from flyers
/detroitredwings receive Yuengling Brewery
/flyers receive otters Kalee and Sparky from the Detroit Zoo
coyotes receives JimmyRadRad from tampabaylightning
coyotes receives sdubz11 from tampabaylightning
coyotes receives vinnyv91 from tampabaylightning
coyotes receives PinHill from tampabaylightning
tampabaylightning receives bonzaijoe from coyotes
TB receives: Some desert sand from Arizona + 1 live coyote
ARI receives: Some beach sand from Florida
predators receives m4xdc from coloradoavalanche
coloradoavalanche receives Forny008 from predators
Colorado Avalanche to receive Carrie "Carrie Underwood" Fisher at one home game.
Nashville Predators to receive two free Chevrolet Avalanches to smash as they see fit during the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
stlouisblues receives christinaann6 from penguins
penguins receives a promise that u/professorwhat won't make another edgy joke on stream
losangeleskings receives PhelpsTheory from canes
losangeleskings receives AStelthyNinja from canes
canes receives LABoston from losangeleskings
In addition, CAR receives a dozen Randy's donuts and a taco truck. LAK receives one storm surge wavier.
coloradoavalanche receives YouGot2BeKiddingMe from tampabaylightning
tampabaylightning receives feedfatso1607 from coloradoavalanche
tampabaylightning receives Leumas_lheir from coloradoavalanche
tampabaylightning receives putinsukraine from coloradoavalanche
tampabaylightning receives stubborn11 from coloradoavalanche
COL receives: A jar of lightning that can be controlled and used to kill enemies
TB receives: An avalanche machine that trigger an avalanche wherever I want, once
bluejackets receives Something_319 from stlouisblues
bluejackets receives Euroranger from stlouisblues
stlouisblues receives TheDanAplan from bluejackets
stlouisblues receives dylanr18 from bluejackets
stlouisblues receives the entire The Drew Carey Show on Blu-Ray.
bluejackets receive the body of General William T. Sherman. At last reunited with Grant, acquired in an earlier trade, Ohio's great God-Kings shall be reinterred beneath Nationwide Arena, henceforth to watch over this city, this state, and this hockey team in eternal glory.
sabres receives TheConeOfShame805 from penguins
penguins receives NumberJ5 from sabres
sabres receives the Monongahela River and a grilled cheese sandwhich that the Penguins promise is actually a Philly cheesesteak
penguins also gives NumberJ5 his own personal bidet
goldenknights receives needuhlife19 from detroitredwings
goldenknights receives D3troiit from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives cookbacondrunknaked from goldenknights
/detroitredwings receive Ellis Island Hotel Casino & Brewery.
/goldenknights receive Tom Selleck's mustache
bluejackets receives Sh1eldbearer from detroitredwings
goldenknights receives RCX42 from bluejackets
Vegas acquires some Lake Effect from Columbus to help pond hockey in the desert
tampabaylightning receives bay_sports from sanjosesharks
tampabaylightning receives DontSayNoToPills from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives bonzaijoe from tampabaylightning
sanjosesharks receives XanoJester from tampabaylightning
devils receives Troub313 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives Flowseidon9 from devils
detroitredwings receives corso923 from devils
/detroitredwings receive the Anheuser-Busch facility located in Newark.
sanjosesharks receives adam3vergreen from bluejackets
bluejackets receives sjs48 from sanjosesharks
bluejackets receives eggs-dee123 from sanjosesharks
caps receives brycer16 from flyers
caps receives AgelessWonder67 from flyers
caps receives FlackBox from flyers
flyers receives koalabear9301 from caps
flyers receives NotShibs from caps
flyers receives _Ghost8_ from caps
Philadelphia sends Jeff Francoeur to DC.
habs receives MOLightningBro from tampabaylightning
habs receives RandomBoltsFan from tampabaylightning
tampabaylightning receives Davel_Patsyuk from habs
tampabaylightning receives christiv7 from habs
tampabaylightning receives Lander-V from habs
MTL receives: A meeting with the Yakuza
TB receives: The best poutine Quebec has to offer
habs receives spyingformontreal from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives Notopdelta from habs
/detroitredwings receive Molson Coors Brewing Company.
/Habs receive an unreleased Eminem mixtape
devils receives hnglmkrnglbrry from bluejackets
bluejackets receives summervacationtoHoth from devils
bluejackets receives Danny_Devitos_Bitch from devils
bluejackets receives kingofthediamond from devils
bluejackets receives 4Bars_BlackFlag from devils
bluejackets receives Cyrus_Voltaire from devils
bluejackets receives Future Considerations and Snookie from devils
bluejackets acknowledges and endorses the Devils' famous Christmas Whites as the best in the Tri-State Area.
habs receives Angry_Walnut from goldenknights
goldenknights receives Instantcurry from habs
goldenknights receives killerb54 from habs
Vegas acquires Paccioretty's C
Montreal acquires Paccioretty's A
flyers receives JakeTheSnake0709 from edmontonoilers
edmontonoilers receives NippleDickPussyBhole from flyers
flyers receives the Walterdale Bridge EdmontonOilers receive the opportunity to lick the Liberty Bell
caps receives Xenofon713 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives NKilmer6 from caps
/detroitredwings receive a bag of prison booze from The Central Detention Facility
sanjosesharks receives Softestpoop from edmontonoilers
edmontonoilers receives infamousgenitals from sanjosesharks
edmontonoilers receives thegreatmomo14 from sanjosesharks
penguins receives ProjectPsion from bluejackets
penguins receives TheStigofKentucky from bluejackets
penguins receives Zebra_dan from bluejackets
bluejackets receives PenguinPride87 from penguins
bluejackets receives knucklepuck17 from penguins
bluejackets admits the Pirates will win another title before the Browns will
caps receives thatgoodmojo from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives Xenofon713 from caps
/detroitredwings will be holding a press conference soon to honor Xenofon713 for coming back home...for good this time.
flyers receives safetide from losangeleskings
losangeleskings receives cdl5060 from flyers
flyers also receives a meeting with Snoop Dogg to explain what otters are to him
sanjosesharks receives plantedgreenfern from caps
sanjosesharks receives Roust_McGoust from caps
sanjosesharks receives SaxIsMyAxe1_ from caps
sanjosesharks receives Fireball827 from caps
sanjosesharks receives hokierange from caps
caps receives Sainthops from sanjosesharks
caps receives pachicola from sanjosesharks
caps receives bunnymcfoo from sanjosesharks
caps receives SurprisedCarlos from sanjosesharks
winnipegjets receives NarcoticTurkey from habs
habs receives finnishjetter from winnipegjets
Habs receive protection from finnishjetter sabotaging our hockey survivor plans for 2020
winnipegjets receives Spitfyre434 from sanjosesharks
winnipegjets receives lackingspoon from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives TrueNorthStrong1898 from winnipegjets
The Winnipeg Jets officially acknowledge that Northern California is better than Southern California.
winnipegjets receives Fixmy59bug from goldenknights
winnipegjets receives Hektorpascal from goldenknights
goldenknights receives biga204 from winnipegjets
goldenknights receives Kudgar from winnipegjets
stlouisblues receives Whydoesthisexist15 from canes
stlouisblues receives gene_scallop from canes
stlouisblues receives waltstrika from canes
stlouisblues receives canesfan556 from canes
stlouisblues receives fogger794 from canes
canes receives PM_Me_Things_Yo_Like from stlouisblues
canes receives TechDawg20 from stlouisblues
canes receives JazzPolice13 from stlouisblues
canes receives M_Shepard_89 from stlouisblues
canes receives jsmu2016 from stlouisblues
canes receives a buffet tray of T-Ravs, stlouisblues receives the Section 328 Podcast.
canucks receives DeathToHeretics from caps
hawks receives ainzooalg0wn from caps
caps receives thelaineranger from canucks
hawks receives jlennox__ from canucks
caps receives younggun92 from hawks
caps receives jamaicancovfefe from hawks
To Chicago: A pizza from We The Pizza (Toppings to be decided at a later date)
To DeathToHeretics: A Chicago Dog and Chicago Deep Dish Pizza to be taken with him to Vancouver
canucks receives ChronicBitRot from hawks
canucks receives ThirdTimesAnAlt from hawks
canucks receives SpeedyDolphin42 from hawks
hawks receives mephnick from canucks
winnipegjets receives darnfox from detroitredwings
winnipegjets receives akschreibs from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives PuckTheFreds from winnipegjets
/detroitredwings receive Half Pints Brewing Co.
/winnipegjets receive lockers from Joe Louis Arena, to be used as the overhead compartments
canucks receives jmorga33 from bluejackets
bluejackets receives offline_dude19 from canucks
canucks receives a bag of pucks from bluejackets , and promises to take them down to Seattle and use them to break Starbucks windows
losangeleskings receives sweetstrife from bluejackets
bluejackets receives Mootux from losangeleskings
bluejackets receives im_turning_into_moss from losangeleskings
bluejackets receives Bhelliom from losangeleskings
bluejackets receives Boii1209 from losangeleskings
bluejackets receives WorldRallyBlues from losangeleskings
The Rainbow Bar and Grill moved to Columbus. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame moved to Los Angeles. Harvey Weinstein lifetime banned from entering Ohio.
/sabres receives Mercpool87 from /penguins
/sabres receives DL757 from /penguins
/sabres receives armagev17 from /penguins
/penguins receives shadowzeak from /sabres
/penguins receives Uncle_Gazpacho from /sabres
penguins receives the city of Buffalo, and the Buffalo Bisons u/armagev17 receives a full NTC
hawks receives spicy-succ from newyorkislanders
hawks receives PracticallyCanadian7 from newyorkislanders
newyorkislanders receives IAmQueensBlvd31 from hawks
/NewYorkIslanders receive courtiebabe420's old Jay Cutler jersey
/Hawks receive TheBossJarhead's old John Tavares jersey
penguins receives cgreen727 from coyotes
coyotes receives BoBandy35 from penguins
coyotes receives TheStigofKentucky from penguins
coyotes receives brendan0305 from penguins
coyotes get Phil Kessel's old house for u/bonzaijoe
penguins get an old Phil Kessel hotdog wrapper for u/armagev17
coloradoavalanche receives Freaaak55 from sanjosesharks
sanjosesharks receives SlipperyInNet from coloradoavalanche
goldenknights receives AnAngryAnimal from wildhockey
goldenknights receives CommanderCorndog from wildhockey
wildhockey receives moosepile from goldenknights
Minnesota sends Mild hot sauce to Vegas. Vegas issues a written apology for having done it to GMCF so hard in the expansion draft
flyers receives pelliffe11 from devils
devils receives MrMeSeeds from flyers
Flyers also receive Apple Watch to log "fitness"
canucks receives thronelol from caps
canucks receives mataleon07 from caps
canucks receives camelCaseNoob from caps
caps receives IGotThisFromEbay from canucks
caps receives Crazymoney74 from canucks
caps receives spacppl from canucks
caps receives flyingsub from canucks
caps receives BraqAttack from canucks
bluejackets receives FewWatermelonlesson7 from wildhockey
wildhockey receives AntiPrince from bluejackets
Minnesota admits that they are not, in fact, Canadian. The Blue Jackets admit that the Cleveland Indians ownership is dumb and stupid.
goldenknights receives svartkonst from dallasstars
goldenknights receives scoutcjustice from dallasstars
goldenknights receives FuckItHaveAnUpvote from dallasstars
dallasstars receives Sumdood88 from goldenknights
And a promise to get Drokeep out of Philly
detroitredwings receives quantumking_ from wildhockey
detroitredwings receives Zushenko from wildhockey
wildhockey receives Detonation from detroitredwings
DET acquires: Burning Brothers Brewery
MIN acquires: 5 lbs of mackinac fudge
sabres receives TurtleWithATail from canucks
sabres receives MirandaGemini from canucks
canucks receives KEWLCactus from sabres
Vancouver receives both the American and Canadian sides of Niagara Falls.
Buffalo receives 2000 lbs of salmon (wild) and the rights to Seattle as a rival.
losangeleskings receives wyattgbert from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives Arelfel from losangeleskings
/detroitredwings receive Angel City Brewery
/losangeleskings receive a random parking lot attendant
penguins receives Dragarien from detroitredwings
penguins receives drock21023 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives byfugWIN from penguins
/detroitredwings receive Croakers Brewing
/penguins receive an old concession stand from Joe Louis Arena
detroitredwings receives Gamogi from edmontonoilers
detroitredwings receives LLbnjt99 from edmontonoilers
detroitredwings receives rdayrien from edmontonoilers
detroitredwings receives saltydingus from edmontonoilers
edmontonoilers receives Ohgodwhatisthisidont from detroitredwings
edmontonoilers receives iFuktUrMom from detroitredwings
edmontonoilers receives BylerTertuzzi from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives the Alley Kat Brewing Company.
habs receives NontransferableApe from bluejackets
bluejackets receives Toaster_Coaster from habs
bluejackets receives gryff_ from habs
hawks receives BoltsGoalieGirl from tampabaylightning
hawks receives DoinWhale from tampabaylightning
hawks receives xW52 from tampabaylightning
hawks receives KatWantsToBattle from tampabaylightning
hawks receives J_Mark13 from tampabaylightning
tampabaylightning receives GRAIN_DIV_20 from hawks
tampabaylightning receives drmatt19 from hawks
tampabaylightning receives freezend from hawks
tampabaylightning receives burtsreynoldswrap from hawks
tampabaylightning receives keister_TM from hawks
TB receives: The best Chicago deep dish pizza for the staff + a shipment of Old Style
CHI receives: The best Cuban subs for the staff + a shipment of Yuengling
dallasstars receives Drokeep from flyers
flyers receives Sumdood88 from dallasstars
goldenknights agrees to renounce all present and future claims to Bryce Harper
dallasstars recieves Chance the Gila Monster from Vegas
tampabaylightning receives CluelessNuggetOfGold from detroitredwings
tampabaylightning receives canbehazardous from detroitredwings
tampabaylightning receives DarkRitNighthawk from detroitredwings
tampabaylightning receives SlenderSpenser from detroitredwings
tampabaylightning receives Datsyuk1998 from detroitredwings
detroitredwings receives westofvenus from tampabaylightning
detroitredwings receives SuperSniper4 from tampabaylightning
detroitredwings receives deeyaz from tampabaylightning
/detroitredwings receives Cigar City Brewing
/tampabaylightning receies a C8 Corvette in blue and a case of Vernors
goldenknights receives obelisk29 from tampabaylightning
goldenknights receives cm17cm17 from tampabaylightning
goldenknights receives MrTubzy from tampabaylightning
goldenknights receives justincase_2008 from tampabaylightning
goldenknights receives lorenzovonmaterhorn from tampabaylightning
tampabaylightning receives GhostlyPixel from goldenknights
tampabaylightning receives Hollywood_Zro from goldenknights
tampabaylightning receives WoomyNgyes from goldenknights
tampabaylightning receives Byers346 from goldenknights
tampabaylightning receives KelaSaar from goldenknights
TB receives: Tickets to a Vegas show to be named later
VGK receives: Future Considerations

😷 Just wear a !)#$@( mask. I'm posting these with a historical intent. Links where possible, and let me know if your local is missing.
NOTE: MOST AGENCIES ARE ASKING FOR ESSENTIAL TRAVEL ONLY -- MEDICAL AND SUPPLY RUNS, JOB TRANSIT FOR THOSE WHO PROVIDE THOSE SERVICES. STAY HOME! EXPECT DELAYS AS THEY RUN CRITICALLY LOW ON STAFF.
Many agencies are requiring you wear a mask. Most ask you board from the back, and are putting limits on passenger boarding. Mask requirements are marked with "⚠️" and are because of state orders.
If the agency has a pass app, please pay for the ride through it -- it helps the agency!
(I have also taken the time to clean up and organize the list a bit)

Country-wide

AMTRAK: Covid-19 info
Note: All overnight trains (except Auto Train) will switch to Flexible Dining menus. Some Cafe service is suspended.
Reduced: NEC, Hartford Line, Thruway Buses, Capitol Corridor, Empire Service, Ethan Allen Express, Illini/Saluki, Illinos ZephyCarl Sanburg, Lincoln Service, Missouri River Runner, Pacific Surfliner, Piedmont, San Joaquins, Valley Flyer, Vermonter (no service north of New Haven M-Sat, no service Sun), Wolverine
Split Service: California Zephyr (no service Reno to Denver), Palmetto (NY to DC only April 3-5)
Terminated before Canada, Reduced service: Maple Leaf (terminates Niagra Falls), Adirondack (terminates Albany, NY), Cascades (terminates Seattle).
Canceled: Keystone, Pennsylvanian, Winter Park Express, Pere Marquette, Carolinian, Downeaster
Replaced w/bus (Thruway): Hiawatha (4/24-5/25)
Returning: Limited Acela starting June 1st
VIA RAIL (CANADA): Covid-19 advisory
Meal service is reduced to snacks and drinks. IA Rail will refuse passengers who are sick w/o doctors note.
Canceled until further notice: Toronto-Niagara Falls
Canceled until June 1st: JaspePrince George/Prince Rupert
Suspended until Nov 1st: The Canadian (Toronto to Vancouver), The Ocean (Montreal to Halifax)
Limited schedule service: Montreal-Jonquiere/Senneterre (Friday/Sunday departures), Sudbury-White River (Weekend only), Quebec City/Winsor corridor (All-stop service, round trips on each line only)
No sleeper: Winnipeg-Churchill route (until Nov 1)

State/Provence and City

Shut down/demand ride only

Michigan:

• KMetro (Kalamazoo)
• STARS (Saginaw) - M-F Only
• Bay Metro (Bay City)
• Lake Erie Transit

Reduced Service - Canada - Improving

• MiWay Mississauga, Ontario: 8 buses resuming regular schedule, 1 express improving, 8 reduced, 19 canceled

Reduced Service - Canada

• Toronto Metrolinx GO Transit: Trains -- very limited service. West Harbor, St. Catharines, Niagra Falls stations closed. Buses -- Futher reduced. UP service -- 30 minutes
• Toronto TTC: 1 Bus and almost all Express buses canceled. Streetcars -- 503 truncated, 508 canceled.
• York Regional Transit (Toronto): 12 buses suspended. Revised schedules elsewhere.
• Calgary Transit: CTrain 7-16 minute headways depending on time of day; buses adjusted for limited service. May 25th reduction: 25 buses to be suspended,
• Saskatoon Transit No University/High School runs. M-F 15 High-freq/30 min rest frequencies before 7pm, 30/60 after. Sat 30/60 (regular 30min 11a-7p). Sun 30/60.
• Regina, Saskatchewan: Sat service M-F, Sun service on Sat.
• Quebec RTC: (In French, no English available) Reduced service. No school, late night service. Handicap service only via paratransit.
• Montreal Transport Society: Bus -- Reduced schedules, some lines to closed schools, parks, casinos closed. Rail -- Reduced frequency of Orange/Green lines.
• Translink Vancouver: SeaBus 30-min frequency, Reduced frequencies on low-ridership lines, SkyTrain reduced frequencies, West Coast Express 2 trains canceled. 24 bus routes suspended.
• Edmonton Transit: Saturday-plus-rush-extras, Light Rail ends at 10pm, OWL service midnight. Late-nite on-demand medic-only service started. 40' buses being used, some routes detoured to accomidate. 747 bus line for job travel only (no travelers/shoppers). No seasonal bus service.
• Medicine Hat Transit (Alberta): M-F on Saturday schedule, Sa-Su on Sunday schedule.

Reduced Service - USA - Improving

East Coast

• SEPTA Philadelphia, PA: STARTING MAY 17 Most bus, trolley, subway, Norristown HSL returns to regular schedule. 204, 310, 311, LUCY Gold/Green reduced. 91, 102 suspended. Some stations closed. Board & pay at front, exit rear. Regional Rail: Lifeline schedule on Lansdale (trunc Landsdale), Paoli (trunc Malvern), Trenton lines. Southwest connection project mods: Airport bus sub'ed; Wilmington between Wilmington and 30th (board Amtrak level); Media/Elwyn line suspended, Fox Chase and Warminster service altered.

Mid-Country

• Columbus Ohio COTA: ⚠️ 17 lines, plus AirConnect, CBUS, and Night Owl, canceled. Early morning service on 6 lines resuming. Modded service on other lines.
• Cincinnati Go*Metro: Streetcar service canceled where bus service exists. Express buses canceled. Saturday service everywhere else. 4 routes increased service.

West Coast

• San Jose VTA: ⚠️ Light Rail back operational 6a-6p M-F. No school trip service. Reduced bus service, some suspended, ends 9pm.
• San Francisco Muni MTA: ⚠️ 20 buses running (some altered), additional 4 rail lines replaced by buses (L/M/N/T). Owl service starts 10p, 2 owl lines discontinued.

Michigan

• CATA (Lansing): ⚠️ Saturday service M-F. No Shopping Bus.
• The Rapid (Grand Rapids): ⚠️ Service hours 7a-7p. No DASH/May Mobility service. 5 routes 30 min headways M-F, hourly Sa/Su. 8 routes hourly everyday. Silver Line 30 min headways everyday. Route 50 on 50 min headways, 85 on 25 min headways.

Reduced Service - USA

East Coast

• Boston MBTA: ⚠️ Commuter Rail reduced schedule. No ferry service. Saturday schedule everywhere else with some bus exceptions. Saturday-plus-extra on Blue and Green E lines.
• New York City MTA/Metro-North/LIRR: Reduced service. Subway closed 1a-5a. No B, C, W, Z, 42nd street shuttle, or express 4/5/6/7. J is Local. No extra L service. Some lines run local in areas. 5 is cut down. Buses down to 75% service. Staten Island Railway hourly service. LIRR 30/60 min-plus-rush schedule. Metro North East-of-Hudson on hourly-with-rush-extras, Waterbury branch bus substituted (Wassaic branch suspended on weekends), West-of-Hudson see NJ Transit.
• NJ Transit: ⚠️ Commuter rail - President's Day schedules until further notice. Gladstone branch on weekday service only. 7600 series trains canceled. Atlantic City Rail Line regular service. Bus -- Saturday service w/exceptions (and cancelations). Light Rail -- HBLR, Newark lines Saturday schedule. River Line Sunday schedule.
• SEPTA Philadelphia, PA: Regional Rail -- Limited service on Airport, Fox Chase, Lansdale (no extensions), Media/Elwyn, Paoli (no service to Malvern), and Trenton; all others canceled. Subway -- Some stations closed. Saturday service between 4:30am and 1am. No overnight OWL. Trolley -- Headway based Saturday schedule. 102, 34 lines canceled, 101 bus subsitution. Everything else -- Headway-based Saturday service.
• PATCO Philadelpha, PA & New Jersey: 4 stations closed. Limited service. Headways M-F: 12a-4a hourly, 4a-5a 30 min, 6am-midnight 20 minute. Sa: 12a-5a hourly, 5a-12a 30 minute. Su: Hourly all day.
• Pittsburgh Port Authority: ⚠️ Reduced bus and light rail service.
• Maryland MTA: ⚠️ MARC Commuter rail -- Reduced-from-"R" service. Light Rail, Metro subway -- M-F runs Saturday schedule. 1 station limited access. Commuter Bus -- 1 route suspended, 13 S-service, remaining limited service. Bus -- No Express service. 2 Local buses canceled. Saturday-plus-rush-extra service.
• Washington DC WMATA: Bus -- Sunday-plus-extras schedule, 27 line "lifeline" weekend service w/30 min headways. No service after 11pm. Subway -- 19 stations closed. 9 limited access. 15-20 minute headways, 5a-9p M-F, 20-30 min headways 8a-9p Sa/Su.
• Altanta, GA MARTA: Rail -- 20 min headways on Sunday service. Red/Gold to airport, Green terminates at King Memorial. No service at Arena station. Streetcar -- Sunday schedule. Bus -- 41 bus lines operating, remaining suspended.

Mid-country

• Chicago RTA (Metra/CTA/Pace): Metra Rail -- Reduced service except Heritage corridor. Adjusted PACE schedules to accommodate.
• Minneapolis/St. Paul Metro Transit: Overnight service suspended 11pm-4:30am except airport shuttle. Reduced bus service, based on Saturday. Light rail suspended 9p-6a.
• St. Louis Metro: ⚠️ Weekend-with-extras service on weekdays. 9 buses, Missouri Express routes suspended.
• New Orleans RTA: ⚠️ Saturday schedule Mon-Fri. 10 bus lines suspended. Streetcar 32-36 min frequency, 2 lines shut down. No service 10p to 4a.
• DFW TRE: Changed schedules.
• Dallas DART: Light Rail -- 20 min headways. Bus -- 2 routes canceled.
• Kansas City RideKC: KCMO/KCK service on Saturday schedule ending 9pm. Johnson County service 60 min, reduced express. Some buses canceled.
• Albuquerque ABQ Ride Transit: Saturday service. ART service suspended entirely. ABQ Ride letting students ride free for Grab & Go meals. ABQ Ride to Rail Runner routes suspended.
• Rio Metro/Rail Runner New Mexico: Rail Runner is suspended until May 15th. 3 buses suspended. Some buses limited.
• Phoenix, AZ Valley Metro: Service hours 5a-11p M-F, Sa/Su 6a-11p. Orbit, Express Bus, RAPID bus routes reduced. No POGO service. Scottsdale trolley service suspended. Light rail limited.
• Salt Lake City/UTA: Commuter rail "FrontRunner" smaller trains, hourly service. TRAX service every 30 minutes. Bus service curtailed, some commuter bus routes canceled.
• Cascades East Transit (Bend, Oregon): ⚠️ Saturday service, demand ride available. In Bend: no service Saturday, no demand ride Saturday/Sunday.

West Coast

• Seattle Sound Transit: Link Light Rail -- 30 min headways. Sounder service reduced. Most buses reduced. 10 buses suspended.
• Portland TriMet: MAX trains 15 minute service, weekends Sunday service. WES 45 min service. Reduced bus service.
• San Francisco BART: ⚠️ System closes early at 9pm. 30 min service. Limited access at many stations. Early Bird Express -- limited trips, 2 lines suspended (more April 27).
• CalTrain (California): ⚠️ Local service between San Francisco and San Jose 30-60 minute frequency, 4 trains to Gilroy peak commute. Limited/Baby Bullet service suspended.
• Los Angeles MTA: ⚠️ Rail service ends at Midnight. M-F 12 min headways 6a-6p, 20 min remaining times on A,B,D,E,L lines. C line 12 min 4a-9a, 15 min 9a-3p, 12min 3p-6p, 20 min 6p-midnight. G/J bus subsituted. B/D stations limited access. Bus service: Most lines Sunday schedule. 23 lines hourly service. 15 Rapid lines on modified weekday schedule. 14 lines suspended.

Michigan

• SMART (Detroit suburbs) ⚠️ is running with vastly reduced schedules and 13 suspended commuter lines. Nightime service vastly reduced.
• DDOT (City of Detroit) is running Saturday schedules Mon-Sat with free fares and rear boarding. 8 bus lines suspended.
• TheRide (Ann ArboYpsilanti): ⚠️ Sunday reduced schedules with tweaks. 12 buses shut down.
• BATA (Traverse City): ⚠️ Village Loop shut down. Village Link demand ride service replaces it. Reduced schedules other buses.

Hat-Tips

u/alitales u/NixillUmbreon u/Steaks_on_a_Plane u/voxadam u/cincy_transit_guy u/mohaas06 u/taxorenxuan u/earlyenrichment u/SojuCondo u/TTC_Tokens u/TC1827 u/InfiNorth u/Bombpants u/sebileis u/Pwheatstraw2000 u/Vectrex452 u/blorgcumber

😷 Wear a mask as you're coming back. I'm posting these with a historical intent. Links where possible, and let me know if your local is missing.
NOTE: MOST AGENCIES ARE ASKING FOR ESSENTIAL TRAVEL ONLY -- MEDICAL AND SUPPLY RUNS, JOB TRANSIT FOR THOSE WHO PROVIDE THOSE SERVICES. STAY HOME! EXPECT DELAYS AS THEY RUN CRITICALLY LOW ON STAFF.
Many agencies are requiring you wear a mask. Most ask you board from the back, and are putting limits on passenger boarding. Mask requirements are marked with "⚠️" and are because of state orders.
If the agency has a pass app, please pay for the ride through it -- it helps the agency!
(I have also taken the time to clean up and organize the list a bit)

Country-wide

AMTRAK: Covid-19 info 05-13
Note: All overnight trains (except Auto Train) will switch to Flexible Dining menus. Some Cafe service is suspended.
Reduced: NEC, Hartford Line, Thruway Buses, Capitol Corridor, Empire Service, Ethan Allen Express, Illini/Saluki, Illinos ZephyCarl Sanburg, Lincoln Service, Missouri River Runner, Pacific Surfliner, Piedmont, San Joaquins, Valley Flyer, Vermonter (no service north of New Haven M-Sat, no service Sun), Wolverine
Split Service: California Zephyr (no service Reno to Denver), Palmetto (NY to DC only April 3-5)
Terminated before Canada, Reduced service: Maple Leaf (terminates Niagra Falls), Adirondack (terminates Albany, NY), Cascades (terminates Seattle).
Canceled: Keystone, Pennsylvanian, Winter Park Express, Pere Marquette, Carolinian, Downeaster
Replaced w/bus (Thruway): Hiawatha (4/24-5/25)
Returning: Limited Acela starting June 1st
VIA RAIL (CANADA): Covid-19 advisory 05-06
Meal service is reduced to snacks and drinks. IA Rail will refuse passengers who are sick w/o doctors note.
Canceled until further notice: Toronto-Niagara Falls
Canceled until June 1st: JaspePrince George/Prince Rupert
Suspended until Nov 1st: The Canadian (Toronto to Vancouver), The Ocean (Montreal to Halifax)
Limited schedule service: Montreal-Jonquiere/Senneterre (Friday/Sunday departures), Sudbury-White River (Weekend only), Quebec City/Winsor corridor (All-stop service, round trips on each line only)
No sleeper: Winnipeg-Churchill route (until Nov 1)

State/Provence and City

Shut down/demand ride only

Michigan:

• STARS (Saginaw) - M-F Only
• Bay Metro (Bay City)
• Lake Erie Transit

Reduced Service - Canada - Improving

• MiWay Mississauga, Ontario: 8 buses resuming regular schedule, 1 express improving, 8 reduced, 19 suspended
• Montreal Transport Society: Bus -- Summer schedule resumed, some lines to closed schools, parks, casinos closed. Rail -- All lines regular service.
• Translink Vancouver: All routes Sat schedule M-F, Sun schedule weekends, with exceptions. Most routes start later.

Reduced Service - Canada

• Toronto Metrolinx GO Transit: Trains -- very limited service. West Harbor, St. Catharines, Niagra Falls stations closed. Buses -- Futher reduced. UP service -- 30 minutes
• Toronto TTC: 1 Bus and almost all Express buses canceled. Streetcars -- 503 truncated, 508 canceled.
• York Regional Transit (Toronto): 12 buses suspended. Revised schedules elsewhere.
• Calgary Transit: CTrain 7-16 minute headways depending on time of day; buses adjusted for limited service. May 25th reduction: 25 buses to be suspended,
• Saskatoon Transit No University/High School runs. M-F 15 High-freq/30 min rest frequencies before 7pm, 30/60 after. Sat 30/60 (regular 30min 11a-7p). Sun 30/60.
• Regina, Saskatchewan: Sat service M-F, Sun service on Sat.
• Quebec RTC: (In French, no English available) Reduced service. No school, late night service. Handicap service only via paratransit.
• Edmonton Transit: Saturday-plus-rush-extras, Light Rail ends at 10pm, OWL service midnight. Late-nite on-demand medic-only service started. 40' buses being used, some routes detoured to accomidate. 747 bus line for job travel only (no travelers/shoppers). No seasonal bus service.
• Medicine Hat Transit (Alberta): M-F on Saturday schedule, Sa-Su on Sunday schedule.

Reduced Service - USA - Improving

East Coast

• SEPTA Philadelphia, PA: Most bus, trolley, subway, Norristown HSL returns to regular schedule. 204, 310, 311, LUCY Gold/Green reduced. 91, 102 suspended. Some stations closed. Board & pay at front, exit rear. Regional Rail: Lifeline schedule on Lansdale (trunc Landsdale), Paoli (trunc Malvern), Trenton lines. Southwest connection project mods: Airport bus sub'ed; Wilmington between Wilmington and 30th (board Amtrak level); Media/Elwyn line suspended, Fox Chase and Warminster service altered.
• Pittsburgh Port Authority: ⚠️ Reduced light rail, 28 routes reduced, rest regular service.

Mid-Country

• Columbus Ohio COTA: ⚠️ 17 lines, plus AirConnect, CBUS, and Night Owl, canceled. Early morning service on 6 lines resuming. Modded service on other lines.
• Cincinnati Go*Metro: Streetcar service canceled where bus service exists. Express buses canceled. Saturday service everywhere else. 4 routes increased service.
• New Orleans RTA: ⚠️ Saturday schedule Mon-Fri. All suspensions (inc overnight service) lifted.

West Coast

• San Jose VTA: ⚠️ Light Rail back operational 6a-6p M-F. No school trip service. Reduced bus service, some suspended, ends 9pm.
• San Francisco Muni MTA: ⚠️ 20 buses running (some altered), additional 4 rail lines replaced by buses (L/M/N/T). Owl service starts 10p, 2 owl lines discontinued.

Michigan

• CATA (Lansing): ⚠️ Saturday service M-F. No Shopping Bus.
• The Rapid (Grand Rapids): ⚠️ Service hours 7a-7p. No DASH/May Mobility service. 5 routes 30 min headways M-F, hourly Sa/Su. 8 routes hourly everyday. Silver Line 30 min headways everyday. Route 50 on 50 min headways, 85 on 25 min headways. (New Schedule May 26th)
• KMetro (Kalamazoo): ⚠️ 17 routes resuming limited schedule. Metro Connect demand ride available. 2 routes suspended.
• BATA (Traverse City): ⚠️ City Loop 4/5 weekend service resumes 23rd. Village Loop 10/12/13/14 limited service (4 runs daily). Village Link demand ride service still open. Reduced schedules other buses.

Reduced Service - USA

East Coast

• Boston MBTA: ⚠️ Commuter Rail reduced schedule. No ferry service. Saturday schedule everywhere else with some bus exceptions. Saturday-plus-extra on Blue and Green E lines.
• New York City MTA/Metro-North/LIRR: ⚠️ Reduced service. Subway closed 1a-5a. No B, C, W, Z, 42nd street shuttle, or express 4/5/6/7. J is Local. No extra L service. Some lines run local in areas. 5 is cut down. Buses down to 75% service. Staten Island Railway hourly service. LIRR 30/60 min-plus-rush schedule. Metro North East-of-Hudson on hourly-with-rush-extras, Waterbury branch bus substituted (Wassaic branch suspended on weekends), West-of-Hudson see NJ Transit.
• NJ Transit: ⚠️ Commuter rail - President's Day schedules until further notice. Gladstone branch on weekday service only. 7600 series trains canceled. Atlantic City Rail Line regular service. Bus -- Saturday service w/exceptions (and cancelations). Light Rail -- HBLR, Newark lines Saturday schedule. River Line Sunday schedule.
• PATCO Philadelpha, PA & New Jersey: 4 stations closed. Limited service. Headways M-F: 12a-4a hourly, 4a-5a 30 min, 6am-midnight 20 minute. Sa: 12a-5a hourly, 5a-12a 30 minute. Su: Hourly all day.
• Maryland MTA: ⚠️ MARC Commuter rail -- Reduced-from-"R" service. Light Rail, Metro subway -- M-F runs Saturday schedule. 1 station limited access. Commuter Bus -- 1 route suspended, 13 S-service, remaining limited service. Bus -- No Express service. 2 Local buses canceled. Saturday-plus-rush-extra service.
• Washington DC WMATA: Bus -- Sunday-plus-extras schedule, 27 line "lifeline" weekend service w/30 min headways. No service after 11pm. Subway -- 19 stations closed. 9 limited access. 15-20 minute headways, 5a-9p M-F, 20-30 min headways 8a-9p Sa/Su.
• Altanta, GA MARTA: Rail -- 20 min headways on Sunday service. Red/Gold to airport, Green terminates at King Memorial. No service at Arena station. Streetcar -- Sunday schedule. Bus -- 41 bus lines operating, remaining suspended.

Mid-country

• Chicago RTA (Metra/CTA/Pace): Metra Rail -- Reduced service except Heritage corridor. Adjusted PACE schedules to accommodate.
• Minneapolis/St. Paul Metro Transit: Overnight service suspended 11pm-4:30am except airport shuttle. Reduced bus service, based on Saturday. Light rail suspended 9p-6a.
• St. Louis Metro: ⚠️ Weekend-with-extras service on weekdays. 9 buses, Missouri Express routes suspended.
• DFW TRE: Changed schedules.
• Dallas DART: Light Rail -- 20 min headways. Bus -- 2 routes canceled.
• Kansas City RideKC: KCMO/KCK service on Saturday schedule ending 9pm. Johnson County service 60 min, reduced express. Some buses canceled.
• Albuquerque ABQ Ride Transit: Saturday service. ART service suspended entirely. ABQ Ride letting students ride free for Grab & Go meals. ABQ Ride to Rail Runner routes suspended.
• Rio Metro/Rail Runner New Mexico: Rail Runner is suspended until May 15th. 3 buses suspended. Some buses limited.
• Phoenix, AZ Valley Metro: Service hours 5a-11p M-F, Sa/Su 6a-11p. Some bus trips canceled early/late/weekend. Orbit, Express Bus, RAPID bus routes reduced. No POGO service. Scottsdale trolley service suspended. Light rail limited.
• Salt Lake City/UTA: Commuter rail "FrontRunner" smaller trains, hourly service. TRAX service every 30 minutes. Bus service curtailed, some commuter bus routes canceled.
• Cascades East Transit (Bend, Oregon): ⚠️ Saturday service, demand ride available. In Bend: no service Saturday, no demand ride Saturday/Sunday.

West Coast

• Seattle Sound Transit: Link Light Rail -- 30 min headways. Sounder service reduced. Most buses reduced. 10 buses suspended.
• Portland TriMet: ⚠️ MAX trains 15 minute service, weekends Sunday service. WES 45 min service. Reduced bus service.
• San Francisco BART: ⚠️ System closes early at 9pm. 30 min service. Limited access at many stations. Early Bird Express -- limited trips, 2 lines suspended (more April 27).
• CalTrain (California): ⚠️ Local service between San Francisco and San Jose 30-60 minute frequency, 4 trains to Gilroy peak commute. Limited/Baby Bullet service suspended.
• Los Angeles MTA: ⚠️ Rail service ends at Midnight. M-F 12 min headways 6a-6p, 20 min remaining times on A,B,D,E,L lines. C line 12 min 4a-9a, 15 min 9a-3p, 12min 3p-6p, 20 min 6p-midnight. G/J bus subsituted. B/D stations limited access. Bus service: Most lines Sunday schedule. 23 lines hourly service. 15 Rapid lines on modified weekday schedule. 14 lines suspended.

Michigan

• SMART (Detroit suburbs) ⚠️ is running with vastly reduced schedules and 13 suspended commuter lines. Nightime service vastly reduced.
• DDOT (City of Detroit) is running Saturday schedules Mon-Sat with free fares and rear boarding. 8 bus lines suspended.
• TheRide (Ann ArboYpsilanti): ⚠️ Sunday reduced schedules with tweaks. 12 buses shut down.

Hat-Tips

u/alitales u/NixillUmbreon u/Steaks_on_a_Plane u/voxadam u/cincy_transit_guy u/mohaas06 u/taxorenxuan u/earlyenrichment u/SojuCondo u/TTC_Tokens u/TC1827 u/InfiNorth u/Bombpants u/sebileis u/Pwheatstraw2000 u/Vectrex452

I am from Halifax and I am working in your fine city Nov 18-28. I have been there before and been to every museum except for the human rights one(CMHR) which I will goto this time. I have four questions:
-Anyone been to the Friday night opening of the CMHR? Any good or should I just go during the regular daytime hours?
-Is the aquarium tunnel (I love that thing) still at the Regent Casino?
-In Halifax we have lots of bars with exposed brick, dark wood, vintage lighting and so on. I am interested instead in hitting up smaller restaurant chains like Fatburger and Denny's which we do not have out here. Are there any 2nd tier chain restaurants you like in Winnipeg?
-Man I love food. Any good meal deals in your city?

The North Stars, you all know what happened, Norm Green moves the team to Dallas, because he was a pervert. Well there was a lot more that went into them moving, than simply just “Norm’s wife told him to move the team or else”.
March 11, 1965, NHL President Clarence Campbell announces the NHL will expand to twelve teams, from six. With that the era of the Original Six, the “Original Six” weren’t even that, they were just six teams that managed to survive throughout a chaotic league. A group led by, Walter Bush, Jr., Robert Ridder, and John Driscoll, sought to bring the NHL to the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. The NHL awarded this group one of the six new franchises, with the other five going to Oakland(Seals), Pittsburgh(Penguins), St Louis(Blues), Philadelphia(Flyers) and Los Angeles(Kings). The as of yet unnamed franchise held a naming contest, as you typically do with a new team and the name “North Stars” was selected, which was derived from the states motto "L'Étoile du Nord" or Star of the North. Work quickly began on their new arena in Bloomington, with the arena eventually being named “The Metropolitan Sports Center.”
Honestly? There’s not much chaotic about the early North Stars, unlike the Blues who had to deal with the NHL’s bullshit(Norris Jr and his merry band of fools), or the Seals who were a mess to begin with, the North Stars were...stable. Game 1 of their first season was an entertaining one, playing against fellow expansion team, the St Louis Blues, they tied in their first game, with Bill Masterson scoring the first goal in franchise history. It was an exciting time to be a hockey fan. All was not well though, on January 13, 1968, the North Stars faced the California Seals, in what would be Masterson’s final game.

• The incident:

Masterson was skating the puck across the Blue Line, his skates got tangled in the stick of Larry Cahan or Ron Harris(it’s unknown as to which, but they were both close to him), Masterson lost his balance, pitching forward, he didn’t see the defendor coming up on him, who delivered a clean check to him, knocking him backwards. Masterson was not wearing a helmet(as was normal), as he smacked his head on the ice, going unconscious instantly. Masterson never recovered, he died a few days later. Teammate André Boudrias described the hit "It sounded like a baseball bat hitting a ball.” Boudrias helped the team trainer onto the ice, the team doctor joining them soon after. They carried Masterson off on a stretcher and into an ambulance to Fairview Southdale hospital, seven miles away. "His eyes were gray at the time -- it was like a horror picture," Boudrias says. "I knew he was done." Doctors did what they could, treating him with steroids and diuretics, but the swelling in his brain was too swift and severe. His Wife and Parents, who had flown in from Winnipeg to watch him play, had made the decision to remove Bill from life support.
Hours later, at 1:55AM, Bill Masterton was pronounced dead at the age of 29, he was survived by his wife Carol. Unfortunately this didn’t do much to make the NHL decide to make helmets mandatory, not for another decade when they finally made helmets mandatory. However this did spark a change among players, as more began to adopt helmets. Players before this had worn helmets, but most chose not to for “Vanity Reasons”(To quote Brett Hull). Bruins player Ted Green had become the first Bruin to wear a helmet, since Eddie Shore. Shore had suffered major head injuries as a result of a massive hit he laid onto Ace Bailey, Shore in turn had his head hit the ice in retaliation. Doctors described Masterton’s death as the result of “a massive brain injury”. After news of Masterton’s death spread to the team, the North Stars lost their next six, but also retired his Jersey. Masterson’s death opened many eyes to the realization that helmets were needed in a fast moving game such a hockey. Following his death, hockey writers announced the creation of the “Bill Masterton Trophy”, to be given annually to the player who best exemplifies the qualities of perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication to hockey. Basically the player who best overcame adversity for that season, such as Bobby Clarke, who overcame Diabetes to play in the NHL.

• I cannot state this enough as to how awful the NHL has been about head injuries, their official position is to deny concussions are an issue, I get why, but it’s annoying as hell. Their official stance with head injuries has always been to shrug and pretend it’s not an issue. I fully believe Masterson would have survived, had he had a helmet.

The North Stars finished fourth in the West Division(the one with all the expansion teams), in their first playoff run, they beat the Kings, advancing to the West Finals, where they lost to the Blues in a Game 7, in double overtime. The Blues proceeded to get swept by the Canadiens, in what becomes a recurring theme for the next 2 finals, Original Six sweeping the expansion Blues. This is by no means because the Blues were awful, it was because the odds were stacked against them and the rest of the “New Six”. They weren’t given great players and the GMs had no idea what they were doing, not to mention they were given their own division so the Original Six had a punching bag. Even in a “new era” the NHL was awful. The next few years were mostly uneventful for the North Stars, missing the playoffs once, but only posting one winning season in their first four seasons, it wasn’t looking great. They were better than their WHA Rivals, who folded four seasons in, but not by much. By ‘78 attendance had fallen so sharply that there were fears that they would fold due to how bad things were, they’d posted 2 whole winning seasons and out of the last six seasons, making the playoffs only once, it didn’t look good. But there was a worse team, the Cleveland Barons, formerly the Oakland / California Seals, who relocated to Cleveland due to a new arena being out of the question and the minority owners(George and Gordon Gund) convincing the majority owner Melvin Swig(wanted to move them to San Francisco, more on this at the end) to move the team to Cleveland. The Barons weren’t much better and then this happened.

• The Merger:

Essentially the wealthy owners of the Barons, George(III) and Gordon Gund, would become the new owners of the North Stars, merging them with the Barons. The Barons would in turn merge with the North Stars, giving them the good parts of the team. The North Stars would not relocate, they would keep their name, logo, color, everything, but would be moved to the Adams Division, since now that division would be down to three teams. Most notable of the players the North Stars would get were Goaltender Gilles Meloche and forwards Al MacAdam and Mike Fidler. During the draft that year they had drafted future Calder winner, Bobby Smith, who helped to bolster an actually decent looking team now. They weren’t cup favorites, but they were an improved team, this merger is what saved the North Stars from folding and making the NHL’s expansion look like even worse of a joke. The season that followed was nothing short of incredible, suddenly the North Stars looked like a real team, everyone looked to be firing on all cylinders, leading to a historic game:

• January 7th, 1980, the North Stars Hosted the Philadelphia Flyers who were on a historic streak, 35 games UNDEFEATED in that span they won 25 out of 35 games, tying 10 of them. The fans at the Met Center had come in droves, over 15,962 fans showed up to see this monumental game, a new record for Minnesota Hockey. The North Stars shelled the Flyers non-stop, one goal after another came, eventually two hat tricks came, finally the buzzer had sounded, the North Stars had won it. The Flyers lost 7-1, ending the longest win streak in sports, effectively showing that these new North Stars were something serious and much less disorganized. That same year during the playoffs, they went in against the reigning champions, The Canadiens and beat them in 7, before falling to the Flyers in 4 games to 1, effectively a gentleman’s sweep. Nonetheless, this season had been one of their best, even if it ended far too early.

The following season proved to be an improvement over the last, with them finishing only a point lower than the previous year, but their playoff run was magical. The North Stars got through the Bruins, Sabres and finally the Flames, to reach the Cup Final. ...Where they promptly got beat 4-1, but it didn’t matter, because by all accounts the North Stars were doing much better now, people paid attention to them, the building was usually full. The next few seasons were the same, despite one early round exit, they made it to the Conference Finals, once more with two Round 1 exits and Round 2 exit. That was it for the Cinderella story of the North Stars though, 85-86 was the final time the North Stars would have a winning season. The 80’s were almost over and attendance was..dropping, despite everything, the North Stars were in trouble. They finished 87-88, just barely out of the playoffs, but allowed them to draft one of the greatest American-Born Players, of all time. Mike Modano.
Drafting Modano was great, but ownership kept threatening to move the team to San Francisco, the Gunds' didn’t exactly like Minnesota and with the fans not showing up, relocation become a threat, here you have a team that was close to folding just a decade ago, back to having trouble and it doesn’t look good on the NHL, despite them vetoing any attempts by the Gund’s to move the team. The NHL eventually gave into the Gund’s threats to move the team to San Francisco. This is where it becomes complicated.

• The Gunds' wanted a team in San Francisco, but former Whalers owner Howard Baldwin, former Penguins owner Morris Belzberg and former Flames(minority) owner Norm Green led a group to get an expansion team in San Jose. So the NHL proposed a compromise: The Gund’s would sell their stake in the North Stars to Baldwin’s group and in exchange they would be awarded an expansion team in San Jose. A successor to the Golden Seals in many ways, since they played their first two seasons at the Cow Palace, in Daly, which was just outside of San Francisco. In addition, the new Sharks would be formed with a dispersal draft, first taking players from the North Stars and then the rest of the League.

Enter Norm Greed: Norm Green, former minority owner of the Flames, had joined Baldwin’s ownership group and purchased a 51% stake in the team. Green then purchased Baldwin’s stake in the team, gaining more than 75% control of the North Stars. He then went and bought Belzberg's share in October of 1990, giving him all the power he wanted, making him the owner of the team.

• The Norm Green Era:

The 91 season was...odd for the North Stars. They finished with a losing record(as was the norm at this point), but had barely made the playoffs. This is where it gets weirder, they went on a cup run, beating two of the NHL’s best teams in the Blackhawks and Blues, steamrolling through the defending champions in the Oilers, finally facing off against Lemieux’s Penguins, who had just acquired Ron Francis, not too long ago. This Final didn’t go their way, just like the last one, but they fought hard in it, losing 4 games to 2. That was all she wrote for the North Stars though.
It was a strange offseason, in what could be called foreshadowing the North Stars got new uniforms. Gone were the Green uniforms and Stars on the pants, replaced with a simple Black and Green jersey, the new logo ditching the “North Stars” for just “Stars” The uniforms would literally just be the one’s later used in Dallas for most of the 90’s with minor changes. New uniforms weren’t it though, behind the scenes it was chaos. Green was trying to move the team to LA, to play in the still being built Honda Center(Yes, that one), where they would become the “L.A. Stars”. As Disney was in the middle of negotiations(the 90’s were fucking weird) to place a team there(they also owned the Angels), the North Stars would instead move to Dallas, Texas.

• The relocation and everything that went into it:

Dallas, Texas. In 1992 Greed announced the North Stars would move to Reunion Arena, in the heart of Dallas, Texas, becoming the Dallas Stars. Why did this happen? Variety of reasons really. Green was a massive pervert and couldn’t keep his hands to himself, or his junk in pants, so he faced a sexual harassment lawsuit, with his wife threatening to leave him, if he didn’t move the team. Why couldn’t they just play at Target Center, with the Timberwolves? Target was Coca-Cola, while the Stars advertised with Pepsi, which created issue. Issue I’m sure could have been solved, but hey, what do I know? Another reason was the dwindling attendance, it has been an issue for the past few years(minus the cup run), combine that with a team who can’t put together a winning season and people just weren’t having it. The on-ice product wasn’t good and they had no interest.
Another factor involved the Gunds’. Yes, they were out of the picture, but their stink still lingered. The Gunds’ had tried to build a shopping near the Met Center, after demolishing Met Stadium(Twins and Vikings played there), well it was looking like they would get their wish...until they didn’t. Instead the Ghermezian brothers, got the land and built The Mall of America. The Gunds’ had felt the Metro Sports Commission had cheated them over this and in turn demanded the MSC renovate the Met Center to the tune of $15 Million, adding close to 40 suites and expanding the concourse. None of that happened, the MSC laughed in their faces and told them to go away. However, North Stars GM Lou Nanne had been the one to actually do something. He persuaded the MSC to instead spend $3.5 Million and add only 20 suites.
The Gunds’ were incredibly frustrated with their situation in Minnesota. And fans were too. Years of failed drafts, trades, no talent and bad seasons, left many fans thinking ownership only cared about money. ...Which they did. Some even called them “No Stars”, because of how true it was, the North Stars had no stars, for most of the Gund era. With the Target Center being built, the Gunds’ took this as a sign, it was time to demand the MSC renovate the Met again, asking for money to do so, with the MSC again, laughing in their faces. It just so happened, Art Savage(friend of the Gunds’) was trying to get a team in San Francisco, so they decided to join forces and move the North Stars to San Francisco.
It wasn’t that easy though. GM Lou Nanne(voice of reason somehow) warned them the NHL wouldn’t allow it, but they went to the Board of Governors to get permission to move. Bill Wirtz was head of the BoG and pretty much denied them on the spot, but granted them a team in San Jose on the condition they sell the North Stars, to an owner who would keep them in Minnesota(Ahahaha). This left the Gunds’ split as George was fine with selling, but Gordon felt that they worked too hard to just sell now(what work did they do? The world may never know!). Eventually they did sell to the aforementioned group involving Norm Green however and they got their team in San Jose.

• Could they have stayed in Minnesota despite everything? Probably, but the Timberwolves ownership didn’t help things either. At the time, the Timberwolves were sponsored by Coke and Burger-King, while the North Stars were sponsored by Pepsi and Mcdonald’s. This led to the question “who will advertise on our boards?”, well Harvey Ratner(part-owner) okayed the proposition of the North Stars playing at Target and felt the advertising issue could be worked out. Marv Wolfenson however, disagreed and that killed the idea of the North Stars moving there. It’s hard to place the full blame on them in the long run though, because let’s face it, the Gunds’ wanted any excuse to leave Minnesota.

Norm and the sexual harassment allegations against him. Norm was being sued by some of his former secretaries for sexual harassment, he’d look down their blouses, and demand they kiss him, he was a creep in every way possible. His wife demanded he * move the team, to get rid of mounting media pressure on them, due to the aforementioned lawsuit. Norm made attempts to keep the North Stars in Minnesota, but as the MSC had just finished building the Target Center, they weren’t about to build another arena. The Target Center deal fell through, as did a deal that would link the Met Center to the Mall of America, via Skyway and would include a casino that Green would own. That proposal was shot down because it was almost the same cost as a new arena, that the MSC refused to pay for. He renovated the Met with his own money during his short tenure as North Stars Owner, but that was about it. Apparently it was thanks to former Cowboys Quarterback Roger Staubach that the Stars moved to Dallas, as he had convinced Green, Dallas was the perfect market for hockey.
The fans were as you can imagine angry. Bringing “Norm Sucks” signs and chanting that during games, even calling him “Norm Greed”(Accurate really). It was a horrible time to be a North Stars fan, hell a sports fan in Minnesota in general. Their final season was again, normalcy, sure they made the playoffs, but it was another losing season and this was it for them. They lost to Detroit in 7 games, playing their final game in Detroit, losing 1-0 in Overtime. It was also the first time the NHL tested video replay. The legendary Al Schaer final call goes as follows:

• “It’s Ludwig, giving it to Dahlen … 4, 3, 2, 1 … and it’s all over. The Stars lose it here, 5-3, and now it’s pack-’em up time and on to Dallas. We wish them good luck. And to all the North Stars over the past 26 years, we say thank you, all of you, for so much fine entertainment. It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Minnesota’s loss is definitely a gain for Dallas – and a big one. We thank you, though, from the bottoms of our hearts, for all the wonderful nights at Met Center, when you’ve given us so much entertainment and you’ve been such a credit to the community in which you played. We will still remember you as the Minnesota North Stars. Good night, everybody. And goodbye.” (This was for their final regular season game, where they lost to the Blackhawks 5-3. Unfortunately I can only find a transcript of the call, not the call itself. So have Pat Foley and Dale Tallon discussing the pending move instead.)

In many ways the Stars were what the NHL wanted, an experiment in the Southern US, to see if Hockey could work. Dallas, Miami, Tampa were experimental, the NHL wanted to expand into an untapped market, but in doing so alienated fans in Minnesota. They quelled this by announcing “The Twin Cities would get a new expansion team in the near future” the Minnesota Wild.

• Norm Greed owned the team for about 2 more seasons before having to sell, to Tom Hicks, at the time the owner of the Texas Rangers(MLB), Mesquite Rodeo and later 50% owner of Liverpool FC. He sold all of these in 2010, to satisfy creditors, sending the Stars into Bankruptcy, forcing him to sell to current owner Tom Gaglardi, thanks to Bankruptcy Court.
  
• The Wild joined the league in 2000 and have sadly been mediocre for most of their existence. I’m not sure why they didn’t play at the Target Center, since it can support Ice Hockey(It currently has Disney on Ice)
  
• Greed wrote an article about his time an owner for DMagazine.
  
• The North Stars ‘91 Cup final, had arguably some of Lemieux's best goals of his career, while cementing his place as one of the greatest of all time.
  
• Al Shaver went on to call Minnesota Golden Gopher(NCAA), eventually returning to hockey, for the Wild’s first season. He retired for good after that, with the XL Center Press Box being named after him.
  

In the end, the North Stars were unstable for most of their existence, due to horrible ownership. The fans deserved better, but instead got people who didn’t want to spend much, instead. Even in the early years, things weren't good, the merger is what saved them, but in a way also killed them. The fans have every right to still despise Green, but I believe they should despise the Gunds' as well.

I've been diagnosed with clinical depression and have been wrangling with it for almost seven years now. I've never been into economics or politics but this bit gave me some hope as a young college student feeling stuck in life, unable to see a happy future, and at odds with society. I wasn't expecting UBI to pop up in a self help book and I'm not even sure if posts like this are allowed, but I couldn't sleep last night and it was 4am and I only read two chapters of this book on a whim yet it really stuck with me.
"In the middle of the 1970s, a group of Canadian government officials chose 1 —apparently at random—a small town called Dauphin in the rural province of Manitoba. It was, they knew, nothing special to look at. The nearest city, Winnipeg, was a four-hour drive away. It lay in the middle of the prairies, and most of the people living there were farmers growing a crop called canola. Its seventeen thousand people worked as hard as they could, but they were still struggling. When the canola crop was good, everyone did well—the local car dealership sold cars, and the bar sold booze. When the canola crop was bad, everyone suffered.
And then one day the people of Dauphin were told they had been chosen to be part of an experiment, due to a bold decision by the country’s Liberal government. For a long time, Canadians had been wondering if the welfare state they had been developing, in fits and starts over the years, was too clunky and inefficient and didn’t cover enough people. The point of a welfare state is to establish a safety net below which nobody should ever be allowed to fall: a baseline of security that would prevent people from becoming poor and prevent anxiety. But it turned out there was still a lot of poverty, and a lot of insecurity, in Canada. Something wasn’t working. So somebody had what seemed like an almost stupidly simple idea. Up to now, the welfare state had worked by trying to plug gaps—by catching the people who fell below a certain level and nudging them back up. But if insecurity is about not having enough money to live on, they wondered, what would happen if we just gave everyone enough, with no strings attached? What if we simply mailed every single Canadian citizen—young, old, all of them—a check every year that was enough for them to live on?
It would be set at a carefully chosen rate. You’d get enough to survive, but not enough to have luxuries. They called it a universal basic income. Instead of using a net to catch people when they fall, they proposed to raise the floor on which everyone stands. This idea had even been mooted by right-wing politicians like Richard Nixon, but it had never been tried before. So the Canadians decided to do it, in one place. That’s how for several years, the people of Dauphin were given a guarantee: Each of you will be unconditionally given the equivalent of $19,000 U.S. (in today’s money) by the government. You don’t have to worry. There’s nothing you can do that will take away this basic income.
At that time, over in Toronto, there was a young economics student named Evelyn Forget, and one day, one of her professors told the class about this experiment. She was fascinated. But then, three years into the experiment, power in Canada was transferred to a Conservative government, and the program was abruptly shut down. The guaranteed income vanished. To everyone except the people who got the checks—and one other person—it was quickly forgotten. Thirty years later, that young economics student, Evelyn, had become a professor at the medical school of the University of Manitoba, and she kept bumping up against some disturbing evidence. It is a well-established fact that the poorer you are, the more likely you are to become depressed or anxious—and the more likely you are to become sick in almost every way. In the United States, if you have an income below $20,000, 2 you are more than twice as likely to become depressed as somebody who makes $70,000 or more. And if you receive a regular income from property you own, you are ten times less likely to develop an anxiety disorder than if you don’t get any income from property.
“One of the things I find just astonishing,” she told me, “is the direct relationship between poverty and the number of moodaltering drugs that people take—the antidepressants they take just to get through the day.” If you want to really treat these problems, Evelyn believed, you need to deal with these questions. And so Evelyn found herself wondering about that old experiment that had taken place decades earlier. What were the results? Did the people who were given that guaranteed income get healthier? What else might have changed in their lives? She began to search for academic studies written back then. She found nothing. So she began to write letters and make calls. She knew that the experiment was being studied carefully at the time—that mountains of data were gathered. That was the whole point: it was a study. Where did it go? After a lot of detective work, stretching over five years, she finally got an answer. She was told that the data gathered during the experiment was hidden away in the National Archives, on the verge of being thrown in the trash. “I got there—and found most of it in paper. It was actually sitting in boxes,” she told me. “There were eighteen hundred cubic feet. That’s eighteen hundred bankers’ boxes, full of paper.”
Nobody had ever added up the results. When the Conservatives came to power, they didn’t want anyone to look further— they believed the experiment was a waste of time and contrary to their moral values. So Evelyn and a team of researchers began the long task of figuring out what the basic income experiment had actually achieved, all those years before. At the same time, they started to track down the people who had lived through it, to discover the long-term effects. The first thing that struck Evelyn, as she spoke to the people who’d been through the program, was how vividly they remembered it. Everyone had a story about how it had affected their lives. They told her that, primarily, “the money acted as an insurance policy. It just sort of removed the stress of worrying about whether or not you can afford to keep your kids in school for another year, whether or not you could afford to pay for the things that you had to pay for.”
This had been a conservative farming community, and one of the biggest changes was how women saw themselves. Evelyn met with one woman who had taken her check and used it to become the first female in her family to get a postsecondary education. She trained to be a librarian and rose to be one of the most respected people in the community. She showed Evelyn pictures of her two daughters graduating, and she talked about how proud she was she had been able to become a role model for them. Other people talked about how it lifted their heads above constant insecurity for the first time in their lives. One woman had a disabled husband and six kids, and she made a living by cutting people’s hair in her front room. She explained that the universal income meant for the first time the family had “some cream in the coffee”—small things that made life a little better.
These were moving stories—but the hard facts lay in the number crunching. After years of compiling the data, here are some of the key effects Evelyn discovered. Students stayed at school longer, and performed better there. The number of low-birth-weight babies declined, as more women delayed having children until they were ready. Parents with newborn babies stayed at home longer to care for them, and didn’t hurry back to work. Overall work hours fell modestly, as people spent more time with their kids, or learning.
But there was one result that struck me as particularly important. Evelyn went through the medical records of the people taking part—and she found that, as she explained to me, there were “fewer people showing up at their doctor’s [office] complaining about mood disorders.” Depression and anxiety in the community fell significantly. When it came to severe depression and other mental health disorders that were so bad the patient had to be hospitalized, there was a drop of 9 percent in just three years. Why was that? “It just removed the stress—or reduced the stress—that people dealt with in their everyday lives,” Evelyn concludes. You knew you’d have a secure income next month, and next year, so you could create a picture of yourself in the future that was stable. It had another unanticipated effect, she told me. If you know you have enough money to live on securely, no matter what happens, you can turn down a job that treats you badly, or that you find humiliating. “It makes you less of a hostage to the job you have, and some of the jobs that people work just in order to survive are terrible, demeaning jobs,” she says. It gave you “that little bit of power to say—I don’t need to stay here.” That meant that employers had to make work more appealing. And over time, it was poised to reduce inequality in the town—which we would expect to reduce the depression caused by extreme status differences.
For Evelyn, all this tells us something fundamental about the nature of depression. “If it were just a brain disorder,” she told me, “if it was just a physical ailment, you wouldn’t expect to see such a strong correlation with poverty,” and you wouldn’t see such a significant reduction from granting a guaranteed basic income. “Certainly,” she said, “it makes the lives of individuals who receive it more comfortable—which works as an antidepressant.” As Evelyn looks out over the world today, and how it has changed from the Dauphin of the mid-1970s, she thinks the need for a program like this— across all societies—has only grown.
Back then, “people still expected to graduate from high school and to go get a job and work at the same company [or] at least in the same industry until they’d be sixty-five, and then they’d be retired with a nice gold watch and a nice pension.” But “people are struggling to find that kind of stability in labor today … I don’t think those days are ever coming back. We live in a globalized world. The world has changed, fundamentally.” We won’t regain security by going backward, especially as robots and technology render more and more jobs obsolete—but we can go forward, to a basic income for everyone.
As Barack Obama suggested in an interview late in his presidency, a universal income may be the best tool we have for recreating security, not with bogus promises to rebuild a lost world, but by doing something distinctively new. Buried in those dusty boxes of data in the Canadian national archives, Evelyn might have found one of the most important antidepressants for the twenty-first century. I wanted to understand the implications of this more, and to explore my own concerns and questions about it, so I went to see a brilliant Dutch economic historian named Rutger Bregman. He is the leading European champion of the idea of a universal basic income. 4 We ate burgers and inhaled caffeinated drinks and ended up talking late into the night, discussing the implications of all this. “Time and again,” he said, “we blame a collective problem on the individual. So you’re depressed? You should get a pill. You don’t have a job? Go to a job coach—we’ll teach you how to write a résumé or [to join] LinkedIn. But obviously, that doesn’t go to the root of the problem … Not many people are thinking about what’s actually happened to our labor market, and our society, that these [forms of despair] are popping up everywhere.” Even middle-class people are living with a chronic “lack of certainty” about what their lives will be like in even a few months’ time, he says.
The alternative approach—a guaranteed income—is partly about removing this humiliation and replacing it with security. It has now been tried in many places on a small scale, as he documents in his book Utopia for Realists. There’s always a pattern, he shows. When it’s first proposed, people say— what, just give out money? That will destroy the work ethic. People will just spend it on alcohol and drugs and watching TV. And then the results come in. For example, in the Great Smoky Mountains, there’s a Native American tribal group of eight thousand people who decided to open a casino. But they did it a little differently. They decided they were going to split the profits equally among everyone in the group—they’d all get a check for (as it turned out) $6,000 a year, rising to $9,000 later. It was, in effect, a universal basic income for everyone. Outsiders told them they were crazy. But when the program was studied in detail by social scientists, it turned out that this guaranteed income triggered one big change. Parents chose to spend a lot more time with their children, and because they were less stressed, they were more able to be present with their kids. The result? Behavioral problems like ADHD and childhood depression fell by 40 percent. 5 I couldn’t find any other instance of a reduction in psychiatric problems in children by that amount in a comparable period of time. They did it by freeing up the space for parents to connect with their kids. All over the world—from Brazil to India—these experiments keep finding the same result. Rutger told me: “When I ask people—‘What would you [personally] do with a basic income?’ about 99 percent of people say—‘I have dreams, I have ambitions, I’m going to do something ambitious and useful.’ ” But when he asks them what they think other people would do with a basic income, they say—oh, they’ll become lifeless zombies, they’ll bingewatch Netflix all day.
This program does trigger a big change, he says—but not the one most people imagine. The biggest change, Rutger believes, will be in how people think about work. When Rutger asks people what they actually do at work, and whether they think it is worthwhile, he is amazed by how many people readily volunteer that the work they do is pointless and adds nothing to the world. The key to a guaranteed income, 7 Rutger says, is that it empowers people to say no. For the first time, they will be able to leave jobs that are degrading, or humiliating, or excruciating. Obviously, some boring things will still have to be done. That means those employers will have to offer either better wages, or better working conditions. In one swoop, the worst jobs, the ones that cause the most depression and anxiety, will have to radically improve, to attract workers. People will be free to create businesses based on things they believe in, to run Kotti-style projects to improve their community, to look after their kids and their elderly relatives. Those are all real work—but much of the time, the market doesn’t reward this kind of work. When people are free to say no, Rutger says, “I think the definition of work would [become] to add something of value—to make the world a little more interesting, or a bit more beautiful.”
This is, we have to be candid, an expensive proposal—a real guaranteed income would take a big slice of the national wealth of any developed country. At the moment, it’s a distant goal. But every civilizing proposal started off as a utopian dream—from the welfare state, to women’s rights, to gay equality. President Obama said it could happen in the next twenty years. 8 If we start to argue and campaign for it now—as an antidepressant; as a way of dealing with the pervasive stress that is dragging so many of us down—it will, over time, also help us to see one of the factors that are causing all this despair in the first place. It’s a way, Rutger explained to me, of restoring a secure future to people who are losing the ability to see one for themselves; a way of restoring to all of us the breathing space to change our lives, and our culture. I was conscious, as I thought back over these seven provisional hints at solutions to our depression and anxiety, that they require huge changes—in our selves, and in our societies. When I felt that way, a niggling voice would come into my head. It said—nothing will ever change. The forms of social change you’re arguing for are just a fantasy. We’re stuck here. Have you watched the news? You think positive changes are a-coming? When these thoughts came to me, I always thought of one of my closest friends.
In 1993, the journalist Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed as HIV-positive. It was the height of the AIDS crisis. Gay men were dying all over the world. There was no treatment in sight. Andrew’s first thought was: I deserve this. I brought it on myself. He had been raised in a Catholic family in a homophobic culture 9 in which, as a child, he thought he was the only gay person in the whole world, because he never saw anyone like him on TV, or on the streets, or in books. He lived in a world where if you were lucky, being gay was a punchline, and if you were unlucky, it got you a punch in the face. So now he thought—I had it coming. This fatal disease is the punishment I deserve. For Andrew, being told he was going to die of AIDS made him think of an image. He had once gone to see a movie and something went wrong with the projector, and the picture went all wrong—it displayed at a weird, unwatchable angle. It stayed like that for a few minutes. His life now, he realized, was like sitting in that cinema, except this picture would never be right again.
Not long after, he left his job as editor of one of the leading magazines in the United States, the New Republic. His closest friend, Patrick, was dying of AIDS—the fate Andrew was now sure awaited him. So Andrew went to Provincetown, the gay enclave at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachussetts, to die. That summer, in a small house near the beach, he began to write a book. He knew it would be the last thing he ever did, so he decided to write something advocating a crazy, preposterous idea—one so outlandish that nobody had ever written a book about it before. He was going to propose that gay people should be allowed to get married, just like straight people. He thought this would be the only way to free gay people from the self-hatred and shame that had trapped Andrew himself. It’s too late for me, he thought, but maybe it will help the people who come after me. When the book—Virtually Normal—came out a year later, Patrick died when it had only been in the bookstores for a few days, and Andrew was widely ridiculed for suggesting something so absurd as gay marriage. Andrew was attacked not just by right-wingers, but by many gay leftwingers, who said he was a sellout, a wannabe heterosexual, a freak, for believing in marriage. A group called the Lesbian Avengers turned up to protest at his events with his face in the crosshairs of a gun. Andrew looked out at the crowd and despaired. This mad idea—his last gesture before dying —was clearly going to come to nothing.
When I hear people saying that the changes we need to make in order to deal with depression and anxiety can’t happen, I imagine going back in time, to the summer of 1993, to that beach house in Provincetown, and telling Andrew something: Okay, Andrew, you’re not going to believe me, but this is what’s going to happen next. Twenty-five years from now, you’ll be alive. I know; it’s amazing; but wait—that’s not the best part. This book you’ve written—it’s going to spark a movement. And this book—it’s going to be quoted in a key Supreme Court ruling declaring marriage equality for gay people. And I’m going to be with you and your future husband the day after you receive a letter from the president of the United States telling you that this fight for gay marriage that you started has succeeded in part because of you. He’s going to light up the White House like the rainbow flag that day. He’s going to invite you to have dinner there, to thank you for what you’ve done. Oh, and by the way—that president? He’s going to be black.
It would have seemed like science fiction. But it happened. It’s not a small thing to overturn two thousand years of gay people being jailed and scorned and beaten and burned. It happened for one reason only. Because enough brave people banded together and demanded it. Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them. Are you a woman? My grandmothers weren’t even allowed to have their own bank accounts until they were in their forties, by law. Are you a worker? The weekend was mocked as a utopian idea when labor unions first began to fight for it. Are you black, or Asian, or disabled? You don’t need me to fill in this list. So I told myself: if you hear a thought in your head telling you that we can’t deal with the social causes of depression and anxiety, you should stop and realize—that’s a symptom of the depression and anxiety itself.
Yes, the changes we need now are huge. They’re about the size of the revolution in how gay people were treated. But that revolution happened. There’s a huge fight ahead of us to really deal with these problems. But that’s because it’s a huge crisis. We can deny that—but then we’ll stay trapped in the problem. Andrew taught me: The response to a huge crisis isn’t to go home and weep. It’s to go big. It’s to demand something that seems impossible—and not rest until you’ve achieved it. Every now and then, Rutger—the leading European campaigner for a universal basic income—will read a news story about somebody who has made a radical career choice. A fifty-year-old man realizes he’s unfulfilled as a manager so he quits, and becomes an opera singer. A forty-five-year-old woman quits Goldman Sachs and goes to work for a charity. “It is always framed as something heroic,” Rutger told me, as we drank our tenth Diet Coke between us. People ask them, in awe: “Are you really going to do what you want to do?” Are you really going to change your life, so you are doing something that fulfills you? It’s a sign, Rutger says, of how badly off track we’ve gone, that having fulfilling work is seen as a freakish exception, like winning the lottery, instead of how we should all be living. Giving everyone a guaranteed basic income, he says “is actually all about making [it so we tell everyone]—‘Of course you’re going to do what you want to do. You’re a human being. You only live once. What would you want to do [instead]—something you don’t want to do?’ ”"
TLDR: Economic insecurity/poverty is a leading cause of depression and anxiety and a main detractor towards having a fulfilling life. UBI could be an answer, and we need to make it happen. (Again, I'm not really into politics- I usually only occasionally prod at news about the hellfire state of the world with a ten foot pole to keep some semblance of sanity- so I'm sorry if I come off as a bit ignorant.)