Ya anyone with an ounce of brain cells predicted that theft would be an issue with self-checkputs but stores were blindsided by the savings they saw with getting rid of cashiers.
Also sometimes the machines a super finicky. It hasn’t happened very recently for me, but the amount of times you need an employee to reset the machine or enter a code is too damn high.
Always making a big deal out of theft for pennies or dollars from individual customers … but seldom highlighting the theft of thousands and millions by corporate heads at the top
I've seen some pretty callous attitudes towards the victims based on the fact that they were wealthy. And while there is plenty to be said about the ethics of hoarding money, I would almost never advocate for the death of another regardless of their crimes.
Stockton Rush was the truly reckless person here, and there is certainly humor to be found in his disregard for safety bringing about his own demise. Especially considering how much it seems to echo the story of the mass grave he built the Titan to visit. He swindled people into taking a ride on his budget deep-submergence vehicle. If anyone "got what they were asking for", it was him.
Who I feel bad for are the friends and families of the victims. Rush and everyone else never even had time to process the fact that something was wrong before getting compressed down to the size of a tin can. But their spouses, children, friends, and relatives didn't make the decision to take this risk. They woke up Monday to learn that their loved one went missing, and learned of their death on Thursday. No amount of money in your bank account really changes the math here, this is a truly horrifying ongoing experience for them just as much as it would be for you or me.
None of this will stop me from enjoying some good old fashioned gallows humor. There has certainly been a lot of amusement to be had dissecting Rush's recklessness, his scary comments about regulations impeding innovation, and the questionable design of the Titan. But I choose to leave his victims out of it.
I don't have much sympathy for the father who took his 19yo son down with him. Fine to risk your own life, but what kind of minimal research did he do before putting his kid at risk? I'd be furious if my brother did that to his son.
The thing is Rush was by all accounts a smart guy and not a swindler. Obviously, he really believed his thing was safe, what with being on it and all. I suspect this will be a case of an elite expert that thinks knowing his field in and out means he knows everything. I usually call it “Ben Carson syndrome”, haha.
But the thing is, he wasn't a smart guy and was a swindler.
His background is in aeronautics, not marine engineering, so he was trying to apply knowledge meant for 0-1 atm of pressure to engineering a vessel to withstand 400 atm of pressure.
Just like everyone in the submersible world is coming out of the woodwork saying they all knew about his designs and told him not to do it, he was also known in the oceanography world (my field of research) - he (or others from oceangate) would show up at the conferences and be on the tech expo floors, especially in his early years, and try to convince us all that we should be using his subs to do our research. He wasn't pitching for us to do anything new or innovative with our research, just that he could attach our tech to his sub and go out there with it instead of towing it behind a boat, taking measurements remotely, using an ROV/AUV, etc. A) we already have tried and true methods of collecting or data, and in order to publish our data it needs to be reproducible in order to be peer reviewed, so why would we collect data with a method that would be best impossible for anyone else to do, B) why would we go through that risk of an untested method when the method isn't our research, C) there wasn't a chance that our research grants would cover the cost, D) there wasn't a chance that our research institutions would insure us or our research for it. He really wanted to be part of the research world to show this was an important part of research and prove the legitimacy of his creation, but he was barking up the wrong tree. He was coming to those of us that were doing acoustic data collection of the seafloor and saying we could be in the sub while the data is being recorded - but there's no benefit to that, or teams that take measurements that are taken regularly over a period of time which would require multiple deployments instead of planning a sensor that is checked remotely regularly. He really tried selling it hard though. Maybe if he went to the animal behaviorists that always say "I wish I could just see when they do ______" whatever behavior it is that has never been seen by humans because it's underwater and too far to dive - but chances are the appearance of a strange bubbling metal vessel with a light will scare it off.... This is what ROVs are for.
Anyway, since he couldn't get anywhere with the research angle, he started hawking it to his rich acquaintances and friends of friends. He still claimed to them that the overall goal was to have it be used as a research tool, so I don't know if the Titanic dives were a means to an end or a detour that would continue, but either way, he knew he had these acquaintances that had the will and the means to pay massive amounts of money for limited access adventure experiences and exploited the Titanic.
I feel like you didn’t contradict me there. His field was aerospace engineering, and he seemed to think being good at it made him a submarine expert, too.\
Edit: He never designed planes professionally, it seems, he only did various adjacent jobs.
Doesn't that make him not a smart guy? If he's not willing to listen to the people who are experts in the field he's trying to transition into and instead think that his knowledge of a completely different field not only makes him an expert in it, but able to completely "change the game"
That’s a matter of semantics. I’d say it doesn’t nullify being an aerospace golden boy, and it’s actually really common among specialists, especially engineers for whatever reason, so yeah he was still smart. Just maybe not wise.
Nobody is questioning his aeronautics skills - he may have done well, he may not have. Considering he didn't go into that field and choose to do adventure tourism in space or research in space, I'm betting he couldn't hack it in that field either. But we don't have anything to go on because he chose not to showcase those skills.
What he did choose to showcase was his ability to translate those skills to the ocean environment - which he failed at, significantly (ie, not smart). And when experts in the field offered their sincere advice, he showed arrogance, a classic sign of "not smart". His own team tried to recommend different tests and different materials and he fired them instead of listening to them, not smart.
He had every opportunity to make smart decisions. People who are specialists and are very smart definitely work on projects in other fields, but they know they are specialists and know when they've hit their limit of translating their skill set and when to take the advice of others. Yes, there is a difference between smart and wise, but this guy was not smart.
Considering he didn’t go into that field and choose to do adventure tourism in space or research in space, I’m betting he couldn’t hack it in that field either.
Hmm, I remembered it slightly wrong. He had a career as a pilot and flight-test engineer, and set records for being certified on certain planes the earliest of anyone, but it looks like you’re right, he wasn’t ever a design engineer. He went into the business end of aeronautics after that.
The submarine thing came out of a midlife crisis, which is another disturbing part of it.
I’m not going to bother arguing over the definition of “smart”. Natural language is fundamentally imprecise. How about we just agree that he made bad decisions and call it a day?
I don’t use self-checkouts in retail stores, and I hate that some stores, like Shoppers, will try so hard to direct me to one when I’m in the queue for the cashier. I have put down merch and walked out of stores over this stance, and I no longer visit some stores (like Shoppers).
I’m not entirely against automated purchase systems. A completely touchless system would get a pass from me. I am against retailers forcing their customers to manually scan and check-out their products though, all while treating them as untrustworthy by dictating where they can place their scanned merch, weighing the merch as it’s scanned, and checking the receipts after doing so.
Obviously, none of this addresses the question of whether fully-automated retail spaces are actually good for the working class as a whole.
Yeah I agree. It’s a tough question, are trains good for horse stable workers? Like they might lose their jobs if people stop using horses.
What’s good for the working class as a whole is the end of bullshit work. You don’t argue to prop it up just because the system is shit, you argue to change the system.
What’s good for the working class as a whole is the end of bullshit work. You don’t argue to prop it up just because the system is shit, you argue to change the system.
I don’t disagree with automation, which is why I mentioned checkout-free systems. Still, you must recognize that this technology could eliminate hundreds of thousands (millions?) of jobs within a very short period of time and would have significant ramifications on society.
Right, but only because we organize things in such a way that all of the gains from automation go to the owners only. If we restructured things so that enough of that value went to the workers that they still made enough money to live but worked less, no one would fight automation. We would universally see it as a blessing.
I agree. My comments made no arguments for or against automation. I only pointed out that the broader debate about its long-term impact on society is beyond the context of OP’s post.
If we restructured things so that enough of that value went to the workers that they still made enough money to live but worked less, no one would fight automation.
Many of those workers would no longer be employed by the company, as they would now be surplus to requirements.
Between AI and robotics, millions will likely be surplused within the decade. Where will they go? Will the 55-year old cashier retrain to work in robotics? Will we mandate companies to find alternative positions? Will we finally tax the rich appropriately? Will we expand welfare? These are the kinds of questions I was alluding to in my original comment.
These don’t end bullshit work though. They just mean that I am doing it myself, but still paying the same price for my groceries.
If I got a discount for doing the self checkout, since the company isn’t paying a cashier, maybe it would be another story, but what they’re actually doing is saving money on labour and passing those savings onto themselves.
My local No Frills has shut down their express lane and directs people to their newly built self checkout. It’s basically the express lane except instead of the cashier scanning my items and taking the payment. I scan the items and give payment while a cashier hovers over my shoulder to make sure I’m not stealing anything
I hope he went into it knowing the risks as well, at least. Like I said, I’m sorry they died, even if it was kinda their fault a bit. (The active lava field guy was last years Darwin Award winner for self-selecting out, if nobody gets the reference)
The father’s sister (the 19 y/o’s aunt) said that he was terrified to go and was only doing it because his dad was obsessed with the Titanic and it was near father’s day. I feel bad for him.
Kids die all the time (like the migrant kids) and at least this kid got to live a 1%er lifestyle for 19 years. Not much of a consolation prize for an early death, though…
Pulling out of the pension plan is a bad idea. They know this. But by ludicrously inflating the amount they claim they’re due, when the feds inevitably checks their figures and gives them a fraction of that amount, the UCP can then blame the failure of the whole endeavour on the feds “cheating” them out of the whole amount.
The goal is to generate a new engine for endless outrage against the federal government, because this is literally the only thing that motivates Albertan voters at this point. The UCP has no solutions to offer beyond being performatively angry at someone else.
Yeah, it’s the Facebook model of politics; when Outrage is the single emotion that generates the most engagement, Outrage becomes the first Go-To in the playbook for anything they want to do. It’s an awful methodology but as long as voters keep buying into the Outrage cycle they’re going to keep using it
Rather than the most engagement, it’s starting to become the emotion that creates any engagement at all.
Political apathy has gotten pretty ingrained in the democratic world, let alone here in Canada. And frankly, I can’t blame anybody when it feels like even going out to the polls is a lose-lose situation. Not a single viable candidate you really want to back means that why should you even bother to show up to vote? No matter who gets in the seat, they’ll screw over the majority of the population and hold back any of the real change that’s needed to actually fix any of the prevalent problems that hurt not only the regular folk, but the economy, health, safety, and any number of other things that make a good and prosperous country.
This isn’t China, yet why does it sometimes feel like the upper echelons are growing to more and more resemble the CCP? Or the oligarchy of Russia?
There is a consistent pattern of people that are exceedingly stretching the social fabric on what is acceptable behaviour.
I won’t say these people are on the right of the political spectrum, or members of the conservative party.
What I will say is that when you find these people I can almost guarantee you they are on the right or vote conservative.
A growing segment of the population have turned into generally insufferable shitheads and because the rest of us are generally the type to not want to rock a boat, we end up having to work with these shitheads.
They’re using the system against us and it’s frustrating.
Indeed. It seems the reason people are becoming vulnerable to such manipulation is because civil discourse has deteriorated. Manipulative politicians, concentrated media perspective, outdated educational models, lack of information sharing from academia to the general public, increasing isolation and segregation within communities, all of these factors (and probably more) play a role in cultivating and weaponizing ignorance among a population.
All of us need to talk about the real reasons why more and more politicians are corrupted; why we only get a limited-range, highly-curated point of view and overly-simplified bullet points (which all make it easy to mislead people), instead of actual policy debate in the media; and why when there IS a specific policy discussion, increasing numbers of people lack so much context that they can be flat out lied to and manipulated, just like that. These people aren’t losing intelligence (though they might be shutting it off for a while so it looks like it). Their reality is being disconnected from everyone else’s outside of their perspective, to an extent that makes it self-reinforcing (but not necessarily impossible to deconstruct).
I don’t think anybody overtly did it in this topic, but I keep seeing and hearing people blaming individuals for succumbing to society-wide problems that might need society-wide interventions. Recently, I can’t remember where, but I saw someone make an interesting case that left or moderate people shunning or cutting off right-wing family members and friends is fuelling this as well. (Note: they just meant people who frustrate or annoy you a lot and not those who also would actively harm your mental health-- such people absolutely should be avoided for health reasons.)
We need some individualism and some collectivism for a society to work, much like there should be within a functional family. An extreme of either one without the other would be intolerable for the vast majority. Obviously even with a mix, there can be disagreements on where we should be more individualistic/collectivist and what the overall balance should be (or if it even needs to stay the same).
Part of society’s implicit notion that LGBTQ is inherently sexual in a way that heterosexuality (or being cis) isn’t. Telling kids that some kids have A mommy and a daddy is fine, two daddies is a kink that shouldn’t be mentioned. Ok well it’s either all inherently sexual or none of it is.
This problem comes from gay men too. I have read a couple of times how gay men dont “announce” that they are gay, because whatever happenea in their bedroom is their business, as if being gay meant only getting dick in the bed. That’s a mentality that is taught in our world.
The legal reason for hearing it at all was whistleblower protections. That was what the committee was hearing about, were whistleblower protections actually violated? Watch AOC's line of questioning, it's extremely telling.
The committee exists to oversee exactly that law because the people who would violate it are government employees. The reality of his claims are irrelevant, and the validity of his claims is also irrelevant.
The questions are "did her feel he had a valid concern to report", yes, and "did he report it through the appropriate channels" (we don't really know, this was exactly the topic of AOC's questions, and this made Grusch visibly nervous), and finally, "did he suffer duress from superiors for having made those duly obligated reports?". The answer to the last one depends entirely on what those proper channels are. You do not have protections by simply going to the public. You have to inform superiors up the chain of command.
It all feels incredibly tailored to make Congress a media side show while carefully dodging culpability for doing so. The entire point of "well I didn't see anything, people told me and I believed them" is just far too conveniently placed, the stories he has all fall in line with what the alien sub culture already had well established in their lore. Too too convenient. I believe AOC was on to that because while she's smart, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out.
Theft is one thing and who knows what the numbers actually are for self checkout. Even with theft and us making a mistake or two, they don’t have to pay cashiers, I’m sure they’re coming out wayyyyy ahead.
I doubt they’re coming out way ahead considering these cashier’s usually get paid minimum wage, £10 and hour to not have people steal is probably more profitable.
At my grocery store, they added in a ton of self checkout, but they didn’t give you enough room to bag your groceries. So you have a cart of food, but a mini-shelf to store them on. And yes, they are no limit. They typically now only have two manned lanes open during peak shopping times. I’m sure some theft is part of it, I’m also convinced most of the “theft” is from the stupid setup and the scales on the mini-shelves. Only place I stop for a receipt check is at membership places like Costco. Everywhere else is a firm, “No thank you,” and I keep walking. Go ahead, call the cops. I have a receipt.
This 1000%. You can't just be shaken down without probable cause in any random public place. If you want to do a check, make it a membership and put it in the contract. Otherwise, fuck you, I'm walking out the door with the stuff I paid for already.
My buddy was chased into the parking lot when he said No Thanks. It was an exciting experience where cops were called on a ginger kid for …
Well, that’s what the cop wanted to know.
BestBuy Stalin was given a quick lesson on when you don’t call the cops, and my buddy got to reassure the cop enthusiastically that he and his friends wouldn’t be seen in the store ever again because this was hitting social media So Fast.
Our interaction is done once I pay for my items. Don't like it? Call the cops I guess I'm done dealing with the store for the day. Don't trust me? Hire a cashier, not really my problem.
I'm still pissed all these self-checkouts haven't lowered any prices. Seems like if you got rid of 30 cashiers the price of my bread should've gone down a little.
@norbert I make sure I shove the receipt in the bottom of a bag. I will stop but they gotta hunt for it. I will remind them I do not work for them. That being said, I do not try antagonize the workers. It's not their fault or policy...
Costco also has actual cashiers working, and an extra person to bag your groceries on top of that typically. And they pay better than the typical grocery store.
"Hey, remember those general rules we set to help you make sure you were financially secure?! Well they're not obtainable now so just forget we said anything."
Stepping into the issue slightly, it becomes interesting. Ignoring the trans element, for now.
There’s an interested debate here about parent’s rights to choose how to parent. Now we as a civilization have decided that there are red lines that parents cannot cross. An extreme example: parents cannot beat their children as punishment. And there’s a lot of not-quite-illegal things the government does a lot of education around, like drinking during pregnancy, in order to improve the quality of parenting and the quality of life for children. So government intervention in parenting is already, largely established – at least when it comes to certain topics.
The government, however, does not intervene as parents take their kids to “Sunday School” and indoctrinate them (oops, my own experiences and biases are showing). And generally, parents are allowed full control over their children’s lives unless they cross that red line. Few parents exhibit full control, micromanaging every aspect of their child’s life, but they probably could and be in the clear, legally – at least when the child is in their physical proximity.
Abstractly: schools, and specifically public schools, are not parents. They have to follow a set of rules set by society at large. And largely, aside from educating the students, they serve as a means to prepare students to become functioning members of that same society. This means that schools need to enforce some sort of public normalization on the students – the exact form of which should reflect the society the students will enter, more or less. Optimally, they’re preparing students for a society that will exist in the future, not the one that exists today, or one that existed in the past, but it’s hard sometimes to know what that future will look like. You take some best guesses about this future society.
So now we have the conflict between the individual and the society. A parent yields some control when sending their kid to a public school, in the hopes that they will become a productive member of society. And this debate is about exactly how much control is yielded. And this debate is in many ways a core debate for our whole country - one of which can encompass residential schools, multiculturalism, religion, and more. Sometimes the guesses made about future society are off the mark, and what is intended to be a policy for good turns into a policy that was retrospectively harmful. We won’t know until the future arrives.
But then the discussion gets completely overwhelmed by transphobic dogwhistling, and the resulting backlash, hiding the core of it.
Great post. I would add that it’s also a debate on the nature of what it means to be a parent, of the relationship of a child to their parent, and minors’ status as a legal person. The conservative view sees children as the property of their parents whose will overrides any preferences of the child, whereas the left is increasingly moving towards the idea that children are an autonomous person with agency and rights that supersede the wishes of the parent. It seems that a lot of parents take issue with that fact, as I’m sure many do with the fact that they are no longer “allowed” to beat their children.
Yes, there’s definitely a core of this element here. At one point in time, women were legally the chattel property of their husbands. Do you own a child like you own a pet? Is sending your kid to school like sending your dog to doggie daycare?
Quoting one of my favourite sci fi writers, Becky Chambers (in: A Closed and Common Orbit) – an alien reflecting on humanity:
“At the core, you’ve got to get university certification for parenting, just as you do for, say, being a doctor or an engineer. No offence to you or your species, but going into the business of creating life without any sort of formal prep is . . .’ He laughed. ‘It’s baffling. But then, I’m biased.”
Becky Chambers! Now that’s a crossover I didn’t expect here. Love her work.
To push the analogy to its breaking point, it was also used to justify slavery and is still used to justify mistreatment of animals.
I think this ultimately all stems from a lack of empathy, which I consider a foundation of conservatism – the indifference to the fact that one’s desires may not align with the preferences of the person to whom they are directed.
Sample bias, probably. We nerds are the early adopters. ;)
A couple of communities on server that might be interesting to you, one of them of my own creation: Futurism@lemmy.ca, PrintSF
a lack of empathy, which I consider a foundation of conservatism
It’s probably at least one vector. Religion is another one. The ironic thing, of course, is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. But it’s hard to teach empathy through rote memorization of a text that hasn’t been updated in nearly 2000 years. Knowing the words, and living the words, are two different things. And even then, many of the words are out of date (pork is delicious!).
The ironic thing, of course, is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
Not that ironic if the parents’ views genuinely differ from their child’s. The parent can be homophobic and genuinely see it as an abhorrent thing that should be remedied.
This is the scary thing about conservatism/religion. It gives people the tools, through an absolutist and precsriptivist system of beliefs, to otherize people, and rationalize away the empathy that they do feel. Or perhaps use their empathy to justify doing horrible things to someone “for their own good”, like the parent trying to remedy their child’s “abhorrent behaviour” for example.
TBH, I try to give my pets as much autonomy as is safe for them. E.g., they're going to the vet whether they want to or not if they're sick. But I try to let them decide when they want attention, and what kind of attention and interaction they want, rather than forcing them. They seem to be happier that way.
I also don't worry about training them, because they're all cats.
You’re missing the point by focusing on function of the players involved. Policies that protect trans students are ultimately rooted in risk assessment. There are risks to personal safety if someone is outed facing an unsafe environment at home. And to wellbeing and, ultimately, personal safety again if someone is forced to live as a gender they don’t identify with. These risks, on both sides, are drastically reduced by offering a safe space and support in being who you are. The delineation of responsibility between parents and schools in preparing kids for their lives is separate from how to best offer support for the safety and well being of queer kids.
People keep saying “protect trans students” but what does that functionally mean? They get higher care/priority over other students getting bullied? Can you explain what it means exactly? It all seems very vague and needlessly divisive if you ask me.
These aren’t vague points at all. I mean, it’s understandable if you aren’t aware of the elevated suicide rates among trans people and the impact of gender affirmation in suicide prevention in that regard, the body of literature supporting that isn’t all that accessible to lay people, but surely you’re not ignorant to the fact that someone else brought up in this very thread, that parents can abuse kids for being trans (or just queer in general), and if someone doesn’t feel safe being out at home, there’s usually a reason… right?
No one is saying that trans kids should take priority over other kids who are “getting bullied”, that’s missing the point by a wide mark. Maybe you didn’t intend it, but you’re sealioning here, the answers you’re asking for are already available to you in this very discussion. Creating a safe environment for kids isn’t some zero sum game. Advocating for trans students isn’t about making them a “higher priority” over other kids. Frankly, approaching issues like that is what creates division, not advocacy and acceptance.
Why would a kid come out to a teacher when they didn’t tell their parent?
Only reason I can think of is because the kid is afraid of their parents. Why would that be?
So this is all about parents wanting to beat the trans out of their kids. This is about enabling child abuse.
Of course kids aren’t that stupid. They’ll know that they now have to keep these kinds of things from their teachers the same as they’re keeping it from their parents.
It’ll just make kids not trust school staff anymore. Child abuse will be under reported. Child molestation will be under reported. Kids will be less willing to talk to guidance counsellors. Teenage suicide rates will increase.
Blaine Higgs is the biggest enabler of child abuse, child molestation, child suicide in all of Canada right now.
Why would a kid come out to a teacher when they didn’t tell their parent?
Only reason I can think of is because the kid is afraid of their parents
Seen this second hand via my partner who’s a teacher. The parents eventually found out and suddenly the kid wasn’t trans anymore. Can’t imagine why that would be.
Maybe it’s time for the Canadian government to now focus on what’s actually causing inflation, instead of jacking up interest rates quarter over quarter. Maybe go after the grocery and gasoline retailers for their quite clearly collusive behaviour. Because putting my mortgage up another $1,000 a month isn’t going to fix that.
Pretty much. Interest rates are a blunt tool. I’m worried we’re drifting into stagflation.
Taking your example of housing, raising interest rates just makes it more expensive to own homes and to build homes. People have to live somewhere, and there isn’t really any surplus housing. This makes it harder to downsize to reduce housing costs.
So much of what’s driving inflation is outside of our control, but not necessarily beyond our influence.
Lowering rates was the start of the housing market taking off though. And if you think you have it bad, imagine those rates but on twice the mortgage. RIP first time home buyers.
In some ways it will because now your disposable income will be reduced thereby crimping your ability to spend on consumer goods. You have to remember that the last time housing pricing went through the roof decades ago, BOC jacked up interest rates in order to bring prices back to earth and yes home owners who bought at the wrong time did suffer. These historically low interest rates are as much to blame for the housing price increases as the lack of new builds supply due to restrictive regulations and zoning policies. If we are to solve the affordability problem, housing prices will have to decline. Housing as the main wealth creation tool for the upper middle class of Canada and as a big driver of the economic growth has undesirable consequences that we are facing now.
I think treating housing as an investment, not a necessity has guided so many policy decisions over the decades leading to this. For sure, housing is only one component of inflation, but it is a component that is directly within the Federal governments ability to strongly influence.
This is one of those cases where average inflation has decelerated, but consumers' experience of inflation remains unchanged - cost on stuff that the average consumer isn't using has gone back down, while cost on stuff we're buying remains inflated.
True, and the Bank of Canada is doing what it said it would do. It’s just well beyond the ability of the BoC to solve inflation on it’s own. The best it can do is raise rates until we end up in stagflation, which I believe we are dangerously close to.
I also have to admit that many of the underlying causes of inflation are out of Canada’s control, this is without doubt an international problem. Having said that, there is a great deal Canada still can do to influence inflation and the cost of living.
As an example, wrt housing, raising the interest rate slows demand, by making it harder for people to afford house, but it also slows building by reducing access to capital to actually build more houses (hence stagflation). This is why the BoC and interest rates are insufficient. However, the Federal government could get back into the business of building public housing. That right there would go a long way to reducing the cost of living. Would it solve everything? No. But it would help one aspect.
You aren’t wrong. The problem with making the economic decisions they make, is they are taking data for time already passed and making based decisions on how they think the economy will react in the future, knowing what they know. It’s also an international problem for sure, really the core of it is that debts been too free for far too long, and then COVID hit, meaning all the major world economies had to print their way out of it, worrying about the consequences later. And I think that the data shows that was still the right decision at the time. But now we are in the dealing with the fallout stage, and I mean the major central banks have so far done fairly well. The problem is now, there’s also been some rogue actors taking advantage of the situation, and reaping larger and larger profits, without recourse. If you look at the major telecoms (government protected), the major banks (government protected), the major airlines (largely government protected, and free to act without retribution due to the lack of government interest in doing so). The automakers (who are de facto government protected), the groceriers (government protected by way of no competition and a clear government aversion to act on what’s pretty clearly collusion and anti-competitive behavior). Basically there’s a common theme here, Canadian consumers are getting hosed. And that’s also driving inflation, and its only the government that can interfere and regulate, the central bank has no jurisdiction here.
cbc.ca
Hot