Apple doesn't actually make it at all difficult to use a Mac or iOS device without an Apple account. You're asked once during setup and that's it. At most there'll be a red dot in Settings>iCloud.
"Mandatory national service". Sure, and I'm certain that the same Conservative governments that famously underfund everything in the military will surely fund this adequately.
After all, nothing's going to make you love your country like being conscripted and having to take a year off when you're on the verge of incurring massive amounts of debt, with no chance of owning a home and no employment prospects. Does this "Mandatory national service" include paying conscripts? Because I'll bet it doesn't.
Tell you what, let's conscript the Boomers. After all, they've already made out like bandits, have a fuck-on of equity and significantly less debt and a ton of time on their hands. Hell, it'd even free up jobs that Boomers are clinging to like fucking limpets to a rock. Let's see how much they "Love Canada" then when they have to take an unpaid year off for it.
What a load of faux-centrist bullshit. One party has been captured by a grifting demagogue and his protofascist enablers, while the other's run by milquetoast technocrats that have been Lucy-footballed since 2008.
By "devils" he means property investors, bankers and in general the kinds of people that donate to parties and give board seats and reciprocal business arrangements to politicians.
This is what the rich are really afraid of: that support for Palestine acts as a catalyst for left-wing radicalism in general.
The wealthy know they've pushed it too far, that people are sick and tired of being exploited, from the jobless recoveries of the mid 90s, to the dotcom crash where we bailed out the wealthy, to the '08 crisis where we bailed them out even more only to have them piss it away on their own compensation, to the '10s where we rolled out the red carpet for them and let them party on cheap money for decade, to the pandemic where we shovelled money at them only to have them whine and cry about how we wouldn't work hard enough and how dare get off of our knees and ask, maybe, not to be ground so hard.
They know that this is a flashpoint, and they're scared, but despite that fear, they can't help themselves and despite ebing able to fix things by just not being so egregiously greedy, they're going to try to flex more and take more because, well, they've been able to since at least 1980. They think that because they escaped OWS, they're get off scott-free here.
So yeah, this is significant. If organized labour is getting off it's knees, and if the message sticks, there's a real cascade that could happen. We haven't seen labour do this since the mid-90s, if not the late 60s. It could, with momentum, result in some serious change.
This had better not be a “well, we waited to fill these until the election year so that we can use it to mobilize the base”.
One, because it’s terribly cynical and self serving.
Two, because it doesn’t work on progressives nearly as well as they think. It runs the risk of alienating voters because they don’t feel respected for 3.5 years out of 4.
They shoot people who point things at them. They'll simply say they "feared for their life” when someone tries to take a picture of them at a distance.
Not their problem. They, and especially their backers, expect to be well out of it by that point. The rich don't really think about the future; they think about how things were in the past, and how to keep it going, but they don't really plan or fret about the future because they don't have to.
If you want this problem to be fixed sooner, the government and their backers need to start being afraid enough for their bank accounts, if not their lives, to do something now.
That's how we got the modern welfare state: the rich and their pets in government were afraid they'd get Russia-in-1917'ed and begrudgingly put in the supports needed to prevent people from being that pissed off. After all, we'd just had a world war and there were millions of vets returning with PTSD and training and an informal support network, and they weren't going to put up with a repeat of the 1930s.
Every action since then is the rich trying to claw back the New Deal and it's equivalents in other countries.
Since LTC was privatized, the cost of care has skyrocketed, and the LTC industry and it's hangers-on are salivating at the idea of soaking Boomers for every cent their house equity is worth.
This isn't poetic license on my part, either. I've been in board meetings with executives who say exactly this: their five- and ten-year plans amount to "suck the Boomers dry". The former premier of Ontario, for example...
Trudeau and his government are just the latest in a long line of neoliberal tools that started with Mulroney: killing unions, watching as companies' pension funds were underfunded, destroying bonds as a viable savings mechanism, allowing the stock market to become a lottery of quarterly price-inflation: all of it because the market values next quarter over next-quarter century, and each government was convinced that somehow, some way, it'd all work out, or at least that by the time it crashes they'll be out.
Because by that point, the Boomers will have been soaked for trillions by the LTC industry. The investors will have already be rich and will have moved on to the next victim.
Win general elections; vote blue no matter who.
2 Primary out the corporatist candidates every chance there is, right down to the level of school trustee.
This actually works, as we've seen with the GOP and their turn to rabid fascism. It can also work for good.
That would be true of landlords didn't also know that and, in turn, redline rent to the maximum tenants can possibly pay.
I don't know about the US specifically, but In Canada, investors big and small have bought up all the rental stock and rents are now maxed out beyond what many people can pay.
Microsoft would like to introduce you to EntraID.
That's the enterprise version of this.