Yep. I’ve middle aged coworkers who are saying quite emphatically that they can’t imagine retiring in tech – they know they’ll need to move to another industry well before retirement, in part because of AI reducing the need for certain skillsets. They also know they’re too old to be considered a ‘good hire’ due to ageism in tech. Most seem to have made plans to try and move on to something relatively low skill for the last part of their working lives. I know one of their plans is to do a food truck.

Yeah, China’s bad for this sort of thing.

Then again, the US is explicitly saying they’re going to meddle in EU politics to break up that union, they provide bombs to genocide civilians in the middle east / prop up a government there, they’re essentially trying to scavenge Ukraine while preventing Ukraine from using weapons against Russia, they’re trying to annex Canada via economic warfare and applying tariffs to the same under false pretenses of Fent/drugs, they’re overtly saying they’ll take greenland one way or another (more hostile intentions overtly directed at historic allies) and they’re blowing up fishing boats in Venezuela while calling for a regime change and stealing oil tankers. And that’s not even an exhaustive list of the international shit that the US has done this year alone

So idk. I know there’s nothin sayin they can’t both be shitty imperialist cunts. And yeah, China’s bad for trying to extend their censorship. But in the grand scheme of things I can’t really get all that angry about it given what we’ve seen from the self proclaimed “leaders of the free world” that most democracies still look to as a bellwether / guide and for military and technology dependence.

Quebec’s used it for decades. Provinces could use it to ‘notwithstanding’ PP anti-trans legislation at a federal level if the conservatives get in next time around.

I don’t think your issue is with the mechanism, you’re just not in favour of how Alberta’s using it on this particular social issue.

Not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? “In theory” you can contact the CB if there are erroneous entries under your name, though to see those you need to get periodic CB reports to see what all is listed there… which can be a pain in the arse to fetch. I admit I’ve never personally had to cancel/dispute anything though, so I’m not sure how easy that process is first hand.

My personal pet peeve about credit scores in Canada, is that they’re all maintained by companies with ties to US parent companies. Equifax is a good example, where tons of sensitive information gets submitted, and it’s potentially within reach of the US govt. As an anecdote to clarify why this bothers me – I recently worked for an org that submits regular data extracts to equifax for credit bureau purposes. There was an error on a submission that required fixing. They told us they were going to charge us ~$20k to correct the error (which is crazy, as the org was a small business). We pushed back, basically pointing to Canada’s privacy legislation that states we as an org have an obligation to inform other orgs of issues/mistakes, and that they have an obligation to fix it. As part of that, we asked them to confirm they were in compliance with Canadian privacy legislation.

Instead of answering, they dropped the $20k bill and fixed the mistake.

Relatively minor breach, honestly. Name, address, phone number – all things that were historically available in a phone book, and are difficult to use to steal an ID (ie. no CC’s, no SINs, nothin like that).

You can ask orgs to delete your personal data, and they ‘should’ so long as its not retained for legal reasons (eg. tax stuff). That said it doesn’t really matter, as once the data’s out, it’s out. Most people I know in Canada just assume that their basic details are leaked, period, due to the volume of leaks reported in Canada annually.

The ones to watch for are CCs and SINs, really. CCs as they can directly impact your wallet, SINs as they can get used in ID fraud / setting up things like loans in other cities.

For CC breaches, you just call in and cancel the CC and get a new one. For SIN breaches, I think there’s a process to replace a SIN, but Im not sure, and I imagine its got a hefty wait with the govt / lots of bureaucracy. You can mitigate the ID theft risks by getting Credit Reports periodically, and/or signing up for regular ones with Equifax or whoever. When getting a credit report, I’d suggest checking how its getting run, as if you go through a third party it could translate to ‘hits’ on your credit score.

This is an absolutely stupid take, especially considering the rough evidence we can literally see with our own eyes at this point.

Vancouver’s housing prices are down ~4% this year, and have been edging down since ~2022. Rents have also been coming down, ever since the liberals reversed their policy on immigration.

“It’s the banks!”… bullshit. It was the immigration situation, with 99% of our population growth from immigration, housing supply couldn’t keep up, and locals got priced out. House prices and Rent prices have reversed course ever since they massively clipped immigration. We need immigration, of course, but not at the levels that the Liberals had jacked it up to for so long.

I don’t think I’ve made any passive aggressive comments – most/all of my replies are briefly noting the other posters aggressiveness, and then expanding on points I’d made to try and clarify, in hopes that the other poster would grow up, or to allow them to continue to lob personal attacks to highlight just how baseless their position is/was. After recognising the other persons a .ml, and the reputation .ml has, I realise there’s likely not much point to it though.

All of your responses to me have just been thinly veilled passive aggressive insults that don’t refute anything that I’ve said.

You seem overly triggered that I found the teaser off-putting, so much so that you’re conflating what I’d initially stated and what I’d used later as an explanation of how teasers work.

I basically noted that the person is padding in useless words, and that they were referencing highly contested concepts as though they’re pre-defined/determined (twisting). It’s the kind of stuff I used to see in first year student papers back in uni. Like even in the title, there’s no real purpose for using “reality of” when you can just say “Contemporary Canadian Imperialism”, the attempt to expand that out and tether what’s fairly likely a subjective article to what most people consider ‘objective’ (reality) is just academic obfuscation. If this person had an editor, they should’ve been underlining stuff all over the place.

Even more, it’s a piece published by a US University that seems pretty clearly to try and foster animosity amongst Canadian demographic subsets and to paint Canada in a negative light. Funding for this sort of article, its publication and distribution, at a time when the US is aggressively targeting Canada with economic warfare and making statements about annexing the territory, is at the very least questionable.

Aw, are you hurt that I don’t think your linked article is worth reading, based on having gone through and read the initial intro/‘teaser’ for that article? What did you think that initial teaser is meant to be used for, if not to gauge whether or not the whole article is worth a read?

It’s like providing a free sample of some food product in a store, and the person goes “yuck”, and now you’re getting all pissed off and saying “well you didn’t eat a whole serving size before going yuck, so you clearly have no taste!”.

If you’re involved in peer reviewed work, you should have thicker skin to criticism.

Man, even just the intro to that reads like the author’s straining to sound theoretical/padding, like first year students who think adding as many big words as possible equals a “smart” paper. The base premises are so convoluted, and twist so many terms in weird ways, that I have absolutely zero interest in reading the rest.

The orange man likely shouldn’t have been broadcasting out that he’d sell sub-standard equipment to allies, because “maybe they won’t be our allies for long” then.

I know, if America wants to convince the rest of the western world that its arms are top notch, they should provide gear to Ukraine and allow Ukraine to use it without restriction – seeing those arms actually defeat the Russian arms, would be a convincing case that US arms are high quality. Cause right now, that conflict isn’t exactly a winning endorsement of being a US Ally, or buying US kit.

Instead, all we see is the states vulture-circling its client while handicapping their ability to defend themselves with seemingly sub standard weaponry. We see countries like India shifting to Russian arms deals, likely in part because of this sort of thing. Why buy American, if American arms are not allowed to be used against an aggressor nation? Why buy American, if owning those weapons means that Russia can still steamroll you due to America siding with Russia and salivating over your resources?

So, human rights stuff aside, how/why the fuck do we need a genderised solitaire?

who the heck is marlaina?

I like some of what he’s saying, hopefully he can reclaim some of the vote for the ndp if elected. I’m not sure who the other contenders are though, and itll most likely end up as a demographic politics type party again just pandering to different niche minority group interests.

I’m not totally sure what the postal banking system he references is, specifically. I’ve never lived in a remote area, which it seems is where it was more commonly used. But like, 99% of what you need to do with a FI you can do online these days, hell many options are online only with no physical retail locations. I get a feeling that postal banking is basically just an old person “I dont wanna use that internet thing!” type of issue, in which case I wouldn’t support it. The oldest generations who are most opposed to updating their skills are also the ones that pulled up ladders/profited from the younger generations current gong show – they’ve had enough charity from the public purse.

Besides, feds always seem to forget that many small communities have credit unions, or that credit unions are already there as an alternative to the big banks for most financial service needs. If this guys really about smaller communities/local financial options, he should be bolstering the CUs as an alternative to the banks (though cus are under prov jurisdiction).

I don’t see anything wrong with that second note, translating the position into one about race instead of gender.

Equity-type programs often get started based off of aggregate differences in statistical data based on demographic slices, with good intentions. But I’ve yet to see any cases where they build in a process for removing equity support programs once a ‘goal’ is reached / more parity is visible in the data.

So as an example from Canada, equity employment programs were introduced in the mid/late 1980s to address the imbalance between men and women in the workforce. You can see how this played out in the public workforce data. In 1990, shortly after the leg came in, it was at about 54% men, 46% women. By 2000, it had flipped in favour of women, at 48% men, 52% women. By 2010, 45% men, 55% women – a greater imbalance than in the 1990s, the imbalance which had triggered supports to get put in place for women. That roughly 10% gap persisted through to 2020 at least. No legislation has been introduced to remove preferential hiring for women in the public sector, no legislation has come in to promote hiring men due to the shift in the gender imbalance.

On a racial basis, the same pattern can be seen in our post secondary education grants, bursaries and scholarships. Funding for these sorts of initiatives in Canada allows for them to screen for specific equity groups – what some term visible minorities. The roots of that being based on reasonable equity goals – ie. there’s a statistical gap in education levels for a minority group, so they allow people to target funding to minority groups. However, while these policies have been enforced, white men have become one of the least educated groups in Canada, with about 24% of white men attaining a degree, compared to 40% of asian guys (with the highest rate of attainment amongst chinese/korean guys, at ~60%). White men are still not considered an equity group, and so cannot have funding specifically targeted to them to try and address this equity issue. And we haven’t ‘removed’ the ‘disadvantaged’ minority groups from receiving systemic advantage, even though they are out performing the supposedly privileged majority group. The system quite literally has race-based controls working against white men, with a justification of correcting an imbalance that not only doesn’t exist in the data, but where the data shows white men as significantly worse off. The system is basically designed to kick them when they’re down.

I can highlight that education item a bit more using a personal example. A coworker of mine has a kid going to BCIT, one of our western province’s “leading” tech-type schools. They’re Canadian citizens, recent immigrants from eastern Europe, not wealthy by any stretch. They tried to get financial assistance for the kid through the school, but the advisor bluntly told him there were no grants/bursaries etc that he could apply for, since the kid was a white guy – all the available funding was targeted to different racial sub groups. He would have more charitable funding options available from the system we’ve setup here, had he been a third generation millionaire visible minority.

Dedicating time and effort to focus on a special category of murder and implementing harsher punishments for perpetrators based on the demographic membership of the victim, feels counter to the equitable application of justice for a country at large.

Intentionally murdering a woman because she’s a woman, is in my view little different from murdering a person for any of the other reasons that get lumped together under things like ‘first degree’ and ‘second degree’ murders. This legislation change isn’t about making murder illegal – it’s always been illegal. It’s about making the punishment more significant if the victim is a woman and the prosecution can prove the murderer had any anti-woman comments/viewpoints.

There are examples of women killing men because they’re men – there are a few famous, and more less-famous, cases where escorts, for example, kill their johns because they’re easy targets. There are examples of minority groups killing majority groups because of clearly racist/hateful motives, that get excused because of the demographics of the perp and the victim. The legislation change noted, basically says killing people is bad, but killing women is somehow worse – ie. that the genders aren’t equally treated, and women are worth more / require more protection. To apply harsher punishments unevenly based on demographics is not what I’d consider a fair and impartial system – it’s one that’s been engineered to preference the protected group’s interests over the interests of the broader whole.

Besides, men get killed 2-5x more frequently than women in many western countries – why are we trying to protect the gender that has far better overall results? This is sorta a gender equivalent to giving tax breaks to the rich – they already have it better than others, why give them even more privilege? Add more supports to the demographic that has terrible stats in this area.

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Feminism has a place, but it is explicitly about promoting women’s interests – something which if allowed to continue unchecked, leads to significant disadvantages for men. It leads to the sorts of toxic masculinity backlashes that you see in the states, especially because moderates who question women’s privilege in advanced western economies start to support more extreme anti-woman positions, because there’s a perception that left wing feminist leaning ideologies work against their interests. And they’re right.

An egalitarian approach is better, once you’ve gotten to near parity. Most western countries have been at near parity for generations at this point.

Your note about disproportionate targets is misleading and inaccurate. Femicide is specifically about murders as far as I know. In the vast majority of countries, men are victims of murder more often than women (in Italy, men are victims about twice as often). They have higher rates of being assaulted/maimed at pretty much every age category in most western countries.

What you’re likely trying to gloss, is the oft repeated “victim of domestic violence” stats, which is a niche area of violence that gets used by feminist movements to ignore the arguably greater violence that men face on the regular. This sub-division is even more biased, given that men generally don’t report spousal abuse / are less likely to get injured to the point that they get hospitalized by it. Even after the victims of ‘violence’ includes pretty well all categories, in many western countries the ‘results’ are roughly even between genders – Canada for example is at about 48% of all violent offences being committed against men, and 52% against women. But again, not all those crimes are really equal – men are over represented in fatal / serious violent assaults causing injury far more often than women. They both experience violence at the same ‘general’ frequency, but men are more likely to be left maimed/dead.

Murder’s murder, in the eyes of many. It’s strange to provide additional protections for just one demographic, especially when that demographic is far less frequently the victim of murder.