kbal

joined 2 years ago
[–] kbal@fedia.io -3 points 2 months ago

Saying we care about climate change, attending conferences, giving billions of dollars to oil companies for carbon capture, bribing people to buy electric cars, promoting natural gas, studying high-speed rail for twenty years, adding and then removing a small tax on carbon — those poor politicians tried everything they could think of.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Interesting to compare that to the longer-term data that's available: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240725/cg-b002-eng.htm

Apparently the numbers don't match because they expanded the definition of "violent crime" — so I guess whatever new offenses were added to it must account for most of whatever that huge decline circa 2014 was about.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 17 points 2 months ago

Sure, sure, great ideas there. National security being of utmost importance, let's also burn down all the trees within 50km of the border, replace them with poison ivy, and pre-emptively nuke the tar sands to remove one incentive to invade and show we're not afraid to use the power of the bomb.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 26 points 2 months ago (3 children)

It's really amazing how much creativity they put into sculpting all the bottles to make them look deceptively large.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago

Clearly we made a wrong turn and should start heading back towards 1999 as quickly as possible.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It certainly would be nice if the NDP could learn to speak convincingly about economics, that's for sure. Understanding how things work is a prerequisite to making the right changes.

The Green party sometimes finds itself in the general area of what I had in mind. Take a look at their plan for housing for example. In my view though, broader changes are required to break the stranglehold that entrenched oligopolies have on most of the Canadian economy. Concentration of market power is reaching new extremes, and it's going to take serious changes to correct that. Keep in mind that "using money" and "having markets" do not necessarily mean capitalism at all, let alone capitalism as we know it.

There's a whole world of ideas about how to run things differently that get talked about elsewhere and get no play in mainstream Canadian politics. All the usual social democratic stuff but also wilder things like MMT or variants of Georgism for instance. There are many possibilities and I don't claim to know exactly which ones are best, but I wish the Overton window wasn't quite so absurdly narrow as it is when it comes to this stuff. Maybe a competent manager of the status quo is the best we can hope for out of electoral politics for now, but sooner or later we're going to need someone with big new ideas.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 5 points 2 months ago (11 children)

Mostly agreed but I would say that there's plenty of room in all kinds of ways for a more unconventional approach to economics than what Mr. Carney proposes without going all the way to "reject markets entirely."

[–] kbal@fedia.io 38 points 2 months ago (38 children)

If you're a fan of the established order of capitalism Carney's your guy for sure, but I don't think it's necessary to invent a conspiracy theory to explain why markets understand that Trump actually going through with it and imposing massive tariffs on all trade with America would be very bad news for the US dollar and Treasuries.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, running non-steam games with steam proton works well. One way to do it is bottles.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

I'll be surprised if experimenting with ways to capture and contain the modders in order to extract money isn't one of the main goals of the project.

[–] kbal@fedia.io 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I had imagined that it had to be a specific B vitamin that Health Canada was worried about for an actual reason, but no. Apparently you're just not allowed to add vitamins or minerals to foods in Canada unless they're on a very specific list of exceptions for particular foodstuffs. For instance if you sell dehydrated potatoes the only thing you're allowed to add is vitamin C.

So the question becomes WTF does Canada have against adding vitamins to things in general? How did that regulation come to be? Do other countries do it that way as well? Does Australia specify exactly which vitamins are allowed to be in vegemite when it's sold there? Is there a reason why the Canadians wouldn't simply add vegemite to the list when it's pointed out that they haven't got a category there that covers it? Eh well, whatever.

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