Jason2357 @ Jason2357 @lemmy.ca

Posts

1

Comments

232

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think you mean the advent of car culture.

Our current system relies on the economic externality of relying on private vehicles and private transportation on local infrastructure to artificially lower the transportation costs for grocery logistics. It's much cheaper to run an 18-wheeler to a large grocery store on the edge of suburbia than running box trucks all over town. It doesn't actually lower food costs, because people pay a large fraction of their income to that private transportation so that they can access that super-grocer, and then the grocer seems to jack up the price of food anyway.

They also like to pretend they care about balanced budgets and monetary supply. Guess what? Taxes both balance the budget AND they evaporate money from circulation, reducing actual inflation. They ignore that because taxes are the ONLY lever that is progressive; where we can spread the pain equitably, asking the wealthy individuals and corporations to pay the largest share. That's a terrible idea /s

Every time CBC gets budgets cut, it hits CBC radio first and hardest. It's an extremely small portion of the Federal Government's budget. This has nothing to do with fiscal restraint, and is purely about neocons who don't like there being a public owned media source existing at all. They want 100% corporate media and nothing less.

My job getting a new CEO? Getting a new useless figurehead is supposed to scare me? Why? Youtube is going to block me? Why should I care? They either moderate hateful content, or they lose me and a great many others -voluntarily.

Like most people, I avoid companies that platform hate, and am perfectly contented being banned from them if they go that far. That's not a power they ever didn't have.

And like several things Douggie has put through, it will ultimately be deemed illegal. That bill is a clear violation of charter rights.

Rural and remote residents already get a slightly larger rebate, and as a city dweller, I think their share should be higher for exactly the reason you state. Also, keep in mind that at night time, which will typically be the only time people end up using resistive heat while on a heat pump, electricity is cheaper. Ontario's ultra-low off-peak option is even more extreme. It's probably cheaper to run resistive heat at night, than running the heat pump during peak times.

And if people are suffering, the solution is to increase the rebate (or increase it's frequency). If it ends up being revenue deficit temporarily, fine, still better than vanity exemptions like this. This breaks the whole model. It removes the incentive to switch for people already looking replace old equipment, it removes the reward for those who did change, and it creates a whole inefficiency of administration for figuring out which fossil fuel burning is "free" and which is taxed. That bureaucracy is just going to burn money that could have went into the rebates.

Almost ALL brand new furnaces being installed even the most heatpump friendly places in Canada are NG or propane right now, and will continue to be for years to come. Even new home builds are virtually exclusively gas. This is taking away event he slightest incentive to change that.

Agreed. The central example is a NDP member being censured by the party for her views. THAT IS WHAT A POLITICAL PARTY IS. She would have also been removed if she started arguing for tax cuts to the wealthy and restrictions on union activity. Even perfectly legitimate political opinions can make you totally unfit to be a representative of a political party. Words have consequences and political parties are social structures with social rules. Cry me a river, this isn't a free-speech issue.

Agreed. Fuck off with this "we have no free speech" bullshit, substack (and it's freedom of conscience in Canada in the first place, not free speech). All of the things listed are social consequences, not criminal prosecution or some other government persecution. Sarah was booted by her party, not the government, and the rest are employers and universities. If there is fault, it lies with those organizations.

It's also not protected speech, so if there is fault, those organizations will have to suffer social consequences themselves, as it doesn't seem that they broke any laws.

And PP is trying to line things up so the big "cost of living" debate of the next election will be the carbon tax. Out of all the costs of daily living, they will spend their time bickering over the only one that gets rebated.

I used stunnel years ago to tunnel both openVPN and SSH traffic and it worked flawlessly. Looks just like https web traffic to dpi software. Beware though, that long open connections can also set off flags, so don't keep connection's open permanently.

It's not about how much it generated, but about nudging people who are already looking at doing something, to chose the lower carbon option. If people are suffering, the rebate should be increased.

Now that the Liberals have done this once, our next conservative government will be able to butcher it with vanity exemptions all over the place, just like Harper loved the vanity tax credits to buy various voter segments. It will be useless before long, and just a bunch of unnecessary administrative baggage. They won't even need to cancel it, because handing out exemptions will be so politically profitable.

The whole point with a carbon tax and rebate is that it doesn't come with all the administration and inefficiencies of picking and choosing things to subsidize and things to penalize. As soon as you start exempting this and that, you blow that out of the water.

The correct response is increasing the rebate to rural households, who statistically, rely more on oil heating, or increase the rebate across the board temporarily.

All this does is take away a very solid incentive for people who are currently looking at upgrading their home heating to chose a lower carbon option. It's also not fair to people who recently did upgrade their heating systems, based on the expected costs.

I actually think we should just start an old-school crown corp that directly competes with the grocery stores. That's what crown corps used to do -push the private sector to do better through competition aimed at serving an important public need.

The crown corp could sell basic foods; produce, bread, simple meats and dairy products, and at a very low margin. The private grocers would have to compete either by tapping into that mysterious private-sector-efficiency to beat those prices, or via luxury grocery products that draw in customers. The crown corp could either build it's own supply chain, or rely on auctions, as needed.

Good news. The consensus seems to be that we can solve all this with EVEN MORE!

Your political choices are "do very little" and "give the capitalists everything they ask for" and we are all done trying the first.

Yep. Profits, dividends, executive salaries, even the companies themselves are acquiring a nice stock portfolio of themselves: https://www.canadaland.com/loblaw-metro-empire-stock-buybacks/

mediabiasfactcheck.com is useful for it's "factual" measure of sources, but the right-left spectrum is based on what Americans consider "right" and "left" -so what they consider "far left," outside America is probably just "left." They label a lot of international centrist media sources as "left" too. What they consider "least biased" is going to be straight up capitalist.

Go ahead. Vent away.