Metaneos

Not too much to comment. Business in the USA and by extension Canada is bad right now. Probably for a generation. We really do need a generational plan to get us out of this mess. A ten to twenty year program, unfortunately. Placing pieces onto the board and moving them where they need to be to make things work again. By pieces, I mean people. We need good strong policies to implement as well. There's a lot to think about.

Dunno how else it can be explained other than capitulation. Carney, you weren't elected to kowtow to Trump. You were elected to stand up to him. Canadians may even start to get buyers remorse for ditching Trudeau for you when he showed far more backbone than this. At least he cared more about Canadian sovereignty than this act. What exactly have you extracted for this? What benefit did this provide for Canadians compared to the billions in revenue Canada stood to gain from the Digital Services Tax as well as protecting Canada's ability to create its own taxes?

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If Trudeau has brought in Mark Carney as a kind of special advisory role, then it's likely the upcoming budget will resemble the budget the Labour government in the UK unveiled just recently. It'll likely be a large stimulus bill aimed at getting cash into hands and raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. If the howls for Trudeau's resignation are any indication, he's probably placed a lot of confidence into Carney, and why wouldn't he? Carney's well-respected and liked by the Canadian public and seen as someone who's able to stand up to bullies such as Harper and Poilievre. The work in policy Carney has done recently inspires me quite a bit, and I'm quite a bit of a radical, standing considerably to the left of the federal NDP. From the results of the Cabinet shuffle, Trudeau seems to be keeping Carney at arms length away from  the Cabinet, but I wouldn't be surprised if Carney is on speed dial for both him and the entirety of Cabinet. But it...

Trump promises 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, extra 10% tariff on China  I've written prior on my belief we should return to a tariff system and do away with current trade agreements. I don't agree with a lot pundits out there calling tariffs "regressive" or whatever else. It's an economic system that benefits financial corporations at the expense of national industry and to protect Canadian labor, we never should've into the "Free" Trade agreements we had unilaterally imposed upon us by successive Liberal and Conservative governments. Anyway, the reality of Trump Tariffs is they're coming in. Canada will need to match these tariffs, because Trump is going to unilaterally impose them. Trudeau can't appear weak, so he'll have to match each tariff. And to offset the costs of tariffs, Canada will have to kill the GST/HST, which they're actually already doing, albeit temporarily for other reasons. But GST/HST were imposed upon Canadians...

 Welp, the Democrats lost big-time. Harris lost to Trump and it wasn't even close enough to bother with contesting it. Why? Who knows. There'll probably be any number of reasons developed: third parties, racism, and so on, and some of those reasons may even be relatively close to the truth. But what is true is Joe Biden didn't really do Harris any favors with his lack of action on combating inflation. He left it all up to the central bankers and they have exactly one tool for targeting inflation —raising interest rates— and this tool really isn't the best tool available for bringing inflation down in a hurry (it's taxes. Taxes are the best tool for combating inflation but no politicians ever speak about this). It basically took Biden's entire term for interest rates to finally go below 3%, and with that, Biden also probably would've lost the election, because average people are feeling the effects of the cost of living. It's basically a crisis out there ...

The BC NDP will possibly hold onto power in the province of BC. With a Confidence and Supply Agreement with the Greens, they should aim for four years of stable government. However, they should also look inward. They should take good lessons from this near-loss of power. The BC NDP wanted to take a "centrist" position —that they were "safe for business"— but have no idea that the further right the party tacks, the more this plays into the right's strengths giving parties like the BC Conseratives headwinds to go even further right. Rather than safe, the BC NDP needed to announce policies that would've been like swinging haymakers at certain business interests especially for rentals; businesses taking advantage of low wages for international workers; and universities taking advantage of international students. For current rent prices, this plays twofold against the NDP. Rent prices as they are now depress voter turnout for the NDP. People see the NDP as ineffe...

CTV News: Full B.C. NDP platform includes speculation tax hike, some free transit for seniors A quick analysis of this announcement doesn't move the needle much in my opinion of Elby. He's safe and largely ineffectual. I say ineffectual because his efforts at taking on the rich landlords and speculators that have driven up the costs of housing and renting have largely fallen flat. The prices haven't dropped nearly enough for the average voter to be able to afford anything. Prices have dropped from the AirBnB regulation and the data is too incomplete when it comes to the Vacancy Tax to draw any conclusion to measure it's impact. But the AirBnB price drop has only made a small dent in the affordability of the average unit price. When the newspapers declare that prices have dropped by 2% overall (around $50) and $150 from the AirBnB regulations, the average renter's just going to be left feeling frustrated because the average rent in Vancouver is still $2,600/month an...

 It seems inevitable now. What was propping up Canadian housing prices even through the worst of housing market crashes elsewhere were banking rules forcing Canadian banks to keep 100% coverage and investors fleeing into Canadian housing when all else was failing. The latter however now is ready to give. Canadian banks will likely be fine due to well-enforced banking rules, but the housing investors are done for. They've driven up prices so high in Vancouver and other Canadian cities that once the homes begin losing value, that'll be that. Value will sink like a stone into water and trillions of dollars will vanish overnight. Three quarters of the economy, at least. And that's probably the conservative estimate. There is exposure everywhere by a great many players of this financial game. All interconnected with a great many of these companies playing at being investment companies the same way Mom and Pop investors play at the game: without clue and context that they're ...

I cannot reiterate enough: Covid-19 is a killer virus. Its uncontrolled and unmitigated spread throughout the world is a mistake we'll regret for generations. Its insidiousness is in its ability to be asymptomatic or merely "mild" in its acute phase. However, it is a virus with terrible consequences over the short and long-term for the many who will catch it despite its seemingly asymptomatic or mild effects. Its ability to disable (https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/covid-autoimmune-virus-rogue-antibodies-cytokine-storm-severe-disease/) and dysregulate (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9568269/) the immune system is its greatest strength. It is a virus that shares much in common with measles, Hepatitis, and even HIV. Catching it once can and will likely wreck one's defence against other illnesses. Have you been sick more than once in the past few years? That is far out the ordinary. Prior to Covid, the average for people catching ill was once every fo...

We are living in Neo-Antebellum times where the wealthy and powerful have divided society into strict class regiments so entirely there is no semblance of solidarity anymore. People have been so alienated from each other we are even divided from ourselves, our sense of self-preservation heightened to both extreme highs and dulled to the point we care not for own health any longer. We are each of us walking contradictions fleeing from imaginary dangers and sleep-walking into apocalypse. Edgar Allan Poe in his prose, specifically "The Masque of the Red Death" and the poem "The Raven" wrote of death. Both stories present an opposing perspective of death: the former is of death whilst revelling in company, ignoring it entirely; and the latter is of death whilst wallowing in it, seeking only solitude and nothing more. This dichotomy must have haunted Poe, that people would either pretend death was not at their doorstop, and that if they let it in would merely lament its ...

Anthony Rota brought a Nazi into parliament, and encouraged a standing ovation. Perhaps some few will likely go to bat for the former Nazi soldier, Yaroslav Hunka, using the same old tired arguments: it was such a long time ago; he couldn't have known what was happening; he was just following orders; and so on. He's well-within his own lifetime still. He hasn't died. Many of his victim's died back then but some survived, and likely to this day, they haven't been made full for reparations for the loss of life and property of their antecendents. Furthermore, crimes against humanity never expire. He was a former SS volunteer. The absolute scummiest of scum. He was a snitch and likely thug for Himmler's gangs, which were under the direct rule of Hitler, which by 1941-42 had disposed of all pretext and were fully into their systemic murder operations in Ukraine. The simplest rule for intent would've been, what did he know and when did he know it? By 1941, there w...

Meh, we've been through this story before. Anti-government party wants to shut down the government. Minimal governance party does as little as possible to dissuade the anti-government party. Governance by Committee as the US does is mainly about the optics. The day to day stuff will probably just keep on doing by itself but big budgets, which need Congressional approval will probably just halt in place. Sometimes, they'll probably have to be restarted at a later date. Competent government could just bypass this sort of stunt but Democrats think it makes good political theatre and have no interest in stopping. Republicans think their voters just eat this sort of stuff up. However, it's all just theatre. But parties have their leaders mainly interested in the same things but it's all about the optics for them.

We're fucked. There should be no uncertainty or ambiguity. We're hooped. We're over a barrel. We're fucked, six ways to sundown. The evidence is both in the numbers and should be clear anecdotally as well. Just in case you don't know the numbers, a Covid infection has a 1% minimum death rate in the acute phase and 15% disability rate in the long-term. It takes 2-years to recover from a long Covid infection but Covid infections can infect an entire population's worth of people over the course of a year, if not faster, which means the likelihood is people will become sicker before they get better if we're doing nothing to mitigate transmission. Oh, Covid can also mutate faster than we can build immunity to it. What this means is over the course of five years, if not faster, we'll have at least 50% of the population disabled. (I think we're already there.) Moreover, since Covid's introduction into the population, other diseases have grown in numbers...

It is very often important to use correct words in arguing/debating with political opponents. However, it is also very important to protect the words we do use from co-optation by our opponents who would attempt to render them meaningless. Take the word, Woke, as an example. Woke, in its terminology, when used by Black activists was used as a shorthand for knowing about Institutionalized Racism. That government service agencies were often built with anti-Blackness right into their foundation. That someone was woke meant they knew things were wrong at a foundational level for Black people and other minorities. Extreme right-wingers though have been working to co-opt this term, wanting to render it meaningless, using it to describe some "woke" army of people who'd tear apart the whole of society with "wokeness" to appease some special interest groups that are themselves anti-society. To be honest, it is laughable how far these extremists are going to use this form...

Yanis Varoufakis has described a state of affairs which should have us all worried: capitalism has been replaced but not by socialism but instead techno-feudalism (Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism (ISBN: 9781847927279)). That instead of moving forward, Western economies have instead retreated back into a neo-feudalism. That non-wealthy people have been transformed from free people to renters, and owners of corporations into rentiers: "(People) will own nothing, and be happy", as European technocrat had put it some time ago. There is much to what Varoufakis has argued: the things we buy have turned into boxes that can hold licences. Computers programs have transformed into apps which require yearly rental fees instead of being programs that we buy once and can use forever so long as the disc lasts. We can no longer buy movies, music albums, and games but instead licenses to play the movies, music, and games, which can be revoked at any time by the license issuers. We c...

Honestly, I can't quite wrap my head around the fact governments allowed spread of misinformation that gave them cover to allow spread of this virus unchecked. Covid-19's not going to go away at this rate. Any and all mitigation efforts are left to the individual, and nary a care about society as a whole. Then again, I can believe what has happened. It's happened before, historically. Cholera was allowed to spread unchecked for decades before governments ever bothered to do anything about sanitation. TB was basically controlled on the private level and ignored on the social. Any and every virus/bacteria that could spread was allowed to spread unchecked without much effort to thwart spread from government officials. Edgar Allan Poe didn't write "The Masque of the Red Death" out of a sense of hope for what the rich and powerful were doing in regards to illness in the early 19th century, after all. No, I can believe what has happened, and quite easily. I come fro...

 I've caught it as of at least a week ago. It's been awful since. My chest is getting better and worse, better and worse. Today's it's worse. It felt as though it was getting better as of yesterday but this morning I didn't feel so confident. Tested. Positive for Covid again. I feel a stubborn mucus in my chest that won't be dislodged with coughing. Then again, that could just be Covid at work in my heart and lungs. There's a weird taste in the back of my throat sometimes. The "taste" of Covid, I guess. Knowing what I know of Covid-19, I'm fairly morose. All I can really do is hope there's no long-term complications from this bout.

There's a disconnect in BC provincial politics between the problems and solutions of society. On the one hand, the province is stating it'll build 2,000 living units over ten years: " Province announces 'historic' agreement with Metro Vancouver, B.C. Housing to build 2,000 affordable homes ". However, on the other hand homelessness in BC is above 8,000: "Data collected from 25 counts conducted across B.C. in 2020 and 2021 showed 8,665 people identified as homeless, including 222 children under the age of 19 who were accompanied by a parent or guardian", B.C.'s homeless population expected to show increase when counts return in March . Just as importantly, even with an additional 2,000 public housing homes being built over ten years, there yet remains a significant amount of people earning below the recommended amount people need to earn to afford even the rent of lower-cost privately owned housing units. According to the BC Non-Profit Housing Ass...

The long tail of Covid-19 continues to coil around the throat of Western civilization, growing ever tighter, compressing the chest and stomach of society, inducing ever more and more death from heart attacks and strokes. We are witness to a spectacle observed very rarely in human history, that of the beginning of near-total collapse of civilization brought upon by novel virus. Once upon a time, smallpox spread across the continents of North and South America, bringing to the ground where the bodies were conveniently buried over in shallow graves the cultures and civilizations of North and South America. The colonizers were free to run roughshod over the ever decreasing survivors as though what had happened and what was still happening was not just inevitable but just in some form. The people of the West were anointed to spread across the landmass. It was destiny manifest. The lands were cleared with very little war and hardly any risk for the invaders. The greatest risk was encroaching...