A “Groceries and Essentials Benefit” is basically a wage subsidy, and you can bet the grocery chains would raise prices by just a little less than the benefit, and if it’s like food stamps in the US, it’ll be chipped away at and rendered humiliating and useless.
We’ve seen this play out with gas tax reductions: resellers know a lot about price elasticity, and any savings from a tax cut gets quickly eaten up by price increases.
Here’s what we could do:
Tax the rich until we can afford to pay for services again
Raise marginal and corporate rates, forcing companies to re-invest instead of hoarding profits
Make stock buybacks illegal
Significantly raise capital gains taxes
(this is tricky) find a way to tax net worth as income
In seriousness, this is the problem: capital won’t take a haircut because line must go up, and labour is absolutely tapped out. There’s no more easy debt to leverage, and thanks to inflation, and more thanks to rampant profiteering and an immigration policy designed to suppress wages and strip-mine new Canadians, no new wealth generated.
The game of musical chairs that is the real estate market was always going to stop, it was only a question of who was going to be left standing at the end. What will be interesting is, is this the first domino in the chain, as the dearth of condo-to-home buyers in the pipeline blows up everything else?
My hope is that this whipsaws through the economy and hurts so many people so badly that a) we learn to never let it happen again, and b) that it emboldens governments to finally tax the shit out of the rich.
Have they tried building average, affordable condos instead of luxury condos?
They don’t want to, because that would mean less money. If they slap some cheap faux marble and an extra sink in the bathroom, they can charge tens of thousands of dollars more for the same space.
The rich will not accept making the same or less money for a year or so. They have to have more. A lot more.
Marathon, via Aleph One, has been free for at least a two decades at this point, hasn’t it? Bungie open sourced it before 2000 and Aleph has been a thing since at least 2004, I think.
Ah, got it. I was confused because Aleph has been a thing for a very long time. I didn’t click that it was “…on Steam” that’s the important part.
I loved Marathon back in the day; played the hell out of it on an LC475, and it was a key reason why a) I stuck with Macs in my post-Amiga era, b) made me a fan of Bungie in general, c) broke my heart when Halo became an XBox exclusive, and c) resulted in my buying an XBox anyway because Halo is/was basically Marathon 4.
Students and academics at the University of Alberta reacted with outrage on Saturday after Edmonton police dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus, describing the operation as violent and contesting assertions that demonstrators were breaking the law....
This undercover warranty investigation is a one-year follow-up from our series that investigated ASUS for motherboards incinerating AMD CPUs, at the end of which ASUS promised a number of improvements to its then-anti-consumer warranty processes. Spoiler alert: They’re still anti-consumer. We sent our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme...
Nurse practitioners could help fill the void, advocates for the profession say, if more provinces would adopt policies to integrate them into primary care and pay them fairly for their work. Some physicians’ organizations have pushed back against that approach, arguing that NPs don’t have as much training or education as...
Could nurse practitioners fill the primary care gap?
Oh look, another way to avoid funding the healthcare system!
I don’t mean to demean NPs, but this is like saying “Can EAs fill the teaching gap?”. Sure, they could, in theory, but they won’t because the government doesn’t see NPs as a solution per se; instead, they’re a way to avoid spending money and create a two-tiered system where if you want to see a doctor you have to pay, but if you want to try and see an overworked, undercompensated NP you might be able to, if we actually had any.
Conservative politicians want to be elected. And the way they want to do this is by stoking meaningless (and mean) culture war issues to keep their base a)angry and b) not focused on economic inequality caused by their donors.
In Ontario, the average wait time for the thousands of prospective patients on the province’s list looking to be connected to a family doctor is, according to the government, around 90 days....
In Ontario, the average wait time for the thousands of prospective patients on the province’s list looking to be connected to a family doctor is, according to the government, around 90 days.
Wow, so I must be much younger than I think, because it’s been eight fucking years since I’ve had a GP, in a city (not a town, a city) with no walk-in clinics and no NPs taking patients.
This was terrible under McGuinty & Wynne, and Ford’s response was basically “hold my (buck a) beer!”
I bet if the kind of things happening in the US happened in China, I wouldn’t be able to stop hearing about it. I mean, people are still criticizing the Tiananmen Square massacre, and hasn’t anything happened since then? It’s like still making conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination or 9/11, those are old news.
China being authoritarian is a “Dog bites man” story. It’s expected.
Same with police misconduct in the US: it’s also dog-bites-man.
Trump and his team realized that outrage fatigue is a thing: fuck up daily and with such magnitude that being a corrupt fuckup becomes a non-story and then you can get away with anything.
Steve Bannon even had a term for it: “flood the zone”.
If I were leading the NDP, I would be banging this drum constantly. Instead, we have the fucking Conservatives acting as the party of the working class, which is insane.
It seems to work for Sanders in the US, but the NDP parties in Canada seem afraid to be called socialists, having been stung during the Rae era in Ontario.
The one social media network the amplified left-wing radicalism–Twitter–got bought and tanked by a billionaire.
I can barely recall the last time I saw real left-wing content on Youtube, and the others (Facebook, Reddit) are fine with overt Naziism, but say “eat the rich and pass the ketchup!” and you’re looking at suspension.
So you’re all on-board with funding Ukraine, right? Right?
I wasn’t aware Israel was an American state. I mean, the US acts like it is, and I suspect, in my darker moments, that Republicans would be more upset at an attack on Israel than of, eg, San Francisco was bombed.
I mean, if they didn’t actively cheer a bombing of SF.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that across all political and social groups in the United States, there is a strong preference against living near AR-15 rifle owners and neighbors who store guns outside of locked safes. This surprising consensus suggests that when it comes...
So you just want to educate the rich kids and leave all the poor kids behind? That’s a great way to make us less competitive
Yes.
That is exactly what they want.
Because in their craven hearts they think we’re poor because we’re a worse class of people, and that if we were a better person it’d just shine through without any thought to the environment. After all, they’re doing well because they’re just superior, and not because they won the vagina lottery and were lucky enough to be born to rich parents in a time of opportunity. Nope, not that. It was all their own hard work. They built their business by combining the various component atoms of it, powering nuclear fusion by sheer willpower.
There’s a statistically significant number of these people who masturbate to copies of Atlas Shrugged.
The BC United party is in such a “precarious position” that it could cease to exist after the next provincial election, says the public opinion researcher who worked on former premier Christy Clark’s winning 2013 campaign....
The number of times I’ve seen “BC housing strategy working out” and “BC actually slowing the trend of doctor loss” posts confuses me, because as a resident of a province ruled by a Conservative government I can’t imagine why you’d want to switch from a government that’s trying to do something for the electorate to one that’ll sell everything that’s not nailed down, and then sell the nails.
Growing food bank lines are a sign that society has lost its way, a Groceries and Essentials Benefit would help the most vulnerable citizens (www.thestar.com)
Nine million Canadians worry about where their next meal will come from.
Toronto developers are getting desperate as no one is buying condos anymore (www.blogto.com)
Condo sales numbers in and around Toronto have taken a drastic tumble so far this year, and now that the market is starting to lean towards buyers …
Bungie's first big hit, Marathon, is now free on Steam thanks to a fan revival that has Bungie's blessing (www.pcgamer.com)
Police crackdown on Gaza protest encampments [at the University of Alberta] campus sparks outcry (montrealgazette.com)
Students and academics at the University of Alberta reacted with outrage on Saturday after Edmonton police dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus, describing the operation as violent and contesting assertions that demonstrators were breaking the law....
ASUS Scammed Us (www.youtube.com)
This undercover warranty investigation is a one-year follow-up from our series that investigated ASUS for motherboards incinerating AMD CPUs, at the end of which ASUS promised a number of improvements to its then-anti-consumer warranty processes. Spoiler alert: They’re still anti-consumer. We sent our ASUS ROG Ally Z1 Extreme...
Could nurse practitioners fill the primary care gap? (www.theglobeandmail.com)
Nurse practitioners could help fill the void, advocates for the profession say, if more provinces would adopt policies to integrate them into primary care and pay them fairly for their work. Some physicians’ organizations have pushed back against that approach, arguing that NPs don’t have as much training or education as...
Conservatives want to bring back the smoking rooms in Tim Hortons ultimately, and fuck the planet. (lemmy.world)
Thousands of Canadians are on doctor wait-lists. Are they effective? (www.cbc.ca)
In Ontario, the average wait time for the thousands of prospective patients on the province’s list looking to be connected to a family doctor is, according to the government, around 90 days....
Jack Dorsey says he quit Bluesky because it was becoming another Twitter (www.businessinsider.com)
I'm so tired of hearing about US police brutality and China being authoritarian. Why does it feel like everyone is a hypocrite here? Where are the posts about Chinese protests and police brutality?
I bet if the kind of things happening in the US happened in China, I wouldn’t be able to stop hearing about it. I mean, people are still criticizing the Tiananmen Square massacre, and hasn’t anything happened since then? It’s like still making conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination or 9/11, those are old news.
Rex Murphy, the sharp-witted intellectual who loved Canada, dies at 77 (nationalpost.com)
As he battled cancer, Murphy continued to file, writing about Hamas and Christmas and interviewing Pierre Poilievre with his usual panache
Israel's far-right lashes out at Biden over Gaza war stance as Netanyahu vows Rafah offensive will happen (www.cbsnews.com)
Grocery giants paid for friendly Liberal, Tory policy with decades of donations (breachmedia.ca)
Republicans Funded by Arms Industry Fume Over Biden Threat to Withhold Bombs From Israel (www.commondreams.org)
“What did we do after we were attacked in Pearl Harbor?” asked Sen. Lindsey Graham. “We dropped two nuclear weapons on two Japanese cities.”
Canada's foreign student push 'mismatched' job market, data shows (www.cbc.ca)
Study reveals "widespread, bipartisan aversion" to neighbors owning AR-15 rifles (www.psypost.org)
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that across all political and social groups in the United States, there is a strong preference against living near AR-15 rifle owners and neighbors who store guns outside of locked safes. This surprising consensus suggests that when it comes...
Blinken Says Israeli Units Accused of Serious Violations Have Done Enough to Avoid Sanctions. Experts and Insiders Disagree. — ProPublica (www.propublica.org)
ALLISON: Schools shouldn’t sacrifice student performance to vague notions of ‘equity’ (torontosun.com)
Indeed, highly equitable and inclusive schools do a disservice to students and society at large.
Poll Finds Surging Conservatives and NDP in a Dead Heat (thetyee.ca)
The BC United party is in such a “precarious position” that it could cease to exist after the next provincial election, says the public opinion researcher who worked on former premier Christy Clark’s winning 2013 campaign....
TD May Face US$2 Billion Money Laundering Fine, Third-Largest Ever: Analysts - Better Dwelling (betterdwelling.com)