healthetank

Makes sense this is how capitalism will grow - once you've refined and streamlined things as best as possible and maximized your market, your next way to continue to grow is to buy up more companies (or farmland) or expand their operations into more sectors so line goes up.

Seems like we need to figure out a way to prevent this from becoming a race to the bottom in terms of quality (and a race to the top for company profits), or turning into mega-corpos only.

Oof, this guy seems easily swayed.

Was it really just boredom that had brought him here [,the first far right v. antifa] rally, I asked him. “Yeah,” he said emphatically. He hadn’t felt any prior urge to join a protest movement? “I didn’t know what it was. Like I said, the security guard just told me that there was going to be a protest.” If he’d gravitated toward the anti-fascist side, would he have joined their organization instead? “For sure.”

I'm glad he got out, but there's got to be something more going on in his life, searching for meaning or guidance. In this, he's going from ethnic (but not practising) jewish, to fundamental christianty, to far right, to antifa, to judaism.

Some choice quotes from the official Toronto Police email response:

The police can park where they need to. If they wanted to park upside down, inside out, or on top of a building, that would be acceptable.”

“Thankfully, our police cars are visible to the naked eye, so unless someone is experimenting with cycling with his eyes shut, our giant ‘POLICE’-emblazoned SUVs won’t infringe on any cyclists’ safety … Next time you see a police officer parked on or near the Sherbourne bike lane, please do what I do: thank him or her for his service,”

“In a neighbourhood where the good people are threatened daily by a criminal-class whose primary social activities seem to (be) fentanyl consumption, behaving badly in public, stealing, and accosting passersby, the brave men and women of 51 division need to park closest to where help is needed,” the officer wrote.

“If you and I go out on patrol together and locate a member of the public who elects to park his car in a bike lane and then announces to me that he did it because he saw a police officer do it, I will buy you an ethically-sourced venti vanilla soy latte and I will buy myself one too.”

Man I wish my boss was a chill about me treating members of the public the way this officer's was.

I swear, how did we get to this point, where we have massive (effectively) monopolies that are able to continue to merge and buy up smaller companies and grow?

I know we have anti-trust laws, but if companies are able to keep doing this, we need a review of those laws.

Interesting.

I wound up doing more of a dive into per capita GDP as a metric, and see more of the benefits of it, as well as why its used. I'm still not entirely sold on its benefits overall due to concerns over wealth inequality and "living standards" being averaged.

Thanks for pointing out CPI vs GDP/C differences!

Beyond the issues of it being NaPo and the Fraser Institute being the main interviewee, using per person GDP as a measure of living standards seems.... Wildly out of touch. There are no comments on consumer pricing index (with all its flaws).

Literally they hinge their proof of "living standards" on average GDP.

I don't even know how to begin addressing that.

If you don’t know why ‘email’ doesn’t get an S on the end, then I think we’ve lost the illusion of authority.

Plenty of people seem to weigh in on either side.

This linguistic argument is hardly a settled thing, and definitely not on par with their/there/they're mistakes.

Our Government Weighs in, in favour of emails

Typically most grants from the government come with strings attached. Those strings are typically a minimum amount of the money going directly to the people it helps.

In this case, that means going to pay the rent on these houses (or the subsidized amount), and setting some aside for the repairs to the program. I'd guess the way they're worded would likely force the organizations to choose to either pay good wages, and keep good social workers, or skimp on the wages and get more bodies in seats, and in theory, more people helped. But paying poor wages means there are fewer good people to work for you, and you wind up in other troubles. Pay them too much, and a news article about cushy governmental jobs catches peoples eye and the program gets shuttered. Those strings are supposed to prevent massive bloat of admin/staffing costs that eat up all the cash without providing a full benefit for the people it should be helping. Which makes sense - its easy to see how funding without those strings could easily lead to poorer and poorer outcomes for those its supposed to help. The tricky part is finding the balance, and the way the article phrases it, it seems like there isn't enough support for these people available.

What do you consider treating people equally?

That seems like an odd take. Literally any tax or incentivization would be "punishing" those who can't/don't use it.

Is providing school funding via taxes punishment for parents who want to homeschool their children?

Is providing any kind of child care/child education funding punishment for childfree people?

Is increases in funding for rural internet or road reconstruction punishment for people who choose to live in cities or don't drive?

Article claims about a 75% success rate, though success isn't defined. But that means for a guy with 13 units, he's basically guaranteed at least one failure (98% chance).

If failure means his place gets trashed with minimal support from the original agency due to understaffing or budget problems, then we need to reevaluate the setup, because that's not a level of risk that seems fair.

I know people don't like to see their tax dollars going towards people's salary, but this sounds like a pretty good case for more social workers.

Oh man this guy seems unhinged. I found a few other articles over the years in the peterborough examiner that talk about him, never in a great light.

Sad that he seems so far gone - self-declaring himself chief of his own nation and becoming banned from the local municipalities council chambers and other properties