Pop rep wouldn’t have changed much for NDP/Con numbers.

STV, though, would have been an absolute gamechanger

Unless you’re going to tell me that Itch has a dynamic library filtering setting, family-sharing, the ability to have local machines on the network speed up my downloads, and the ability to dynamically remap controller profiles per-game, then yeah, steam is more user-friendly.

I don’t understand the point of making a coin that has ~$3500 worth of gold in it, and then giving it an official face value of $50.

If the error is hidden well, yes. Close-reading a text and cross referencing everything it says takes MUCH longer than writing a piece you know is accurate to begin with

The next update will fix everything, just need this one hotfix and everything will be solved, just wait.

Just one more update, okay? Just one more. One update. Just one.

And in fact, increasing the tax on profits makes it much, much more valuable to reinvest in the business.

Like, lets say your business is expecting a net profit of $200K after a year. You can either choose to reinvest that into the business to buy new equipment and hire new staff, or you can record that as profit, pay the taxes, and then put the after tax dollars money directly into your and your investors pockets.

With our current corporate tax rate of 15%, it’s really tempting to just pay the 30K in taxes and personally keep $170k as take-home, which gets taxed at a MUCH lower rate than regular income, rather than keep it in the business. $30K as a fee to keep $170K in personal income is pretty cheap.

However, if taking money our of the business was much more expensive, say 45% or something comparable to the marginal personal income tax rate for a working professional, then maybe as a business owner you might think that paying $90K to keep $110K is not as good a deal, and so you will think about whether there are other opportunities WITHIN the business you could invest in, putting those profits towards new equipment or training, rather than losing 45% of it to taxes just to add a small amount to your own pocket.

Mercedes was the name of Emil Jellinek’s daughter, Emil has the idea to develop sports cars, he designed and commissioned cars from an engineering company and named the model-line after her.

You, an average person? Probably homeless after you offended the wrong rich person.

If you’re rich though, you are immune to consequences.

Cars are also REALLY not that convenient. I’m a dad to a four-month-old, and getting to appointments by bus/metro is SO much easier than using the car.

Car:

• Have to get the fucking car seat in the back seat
• Pack stroller in as well
• Drive with potentially screaming kid who feels isolated and lonely, feel like I’m gonna crash at any moment
• Parking lots SUCK to walk around in with a stroller,have to push kid out into the open before I can see around these tall cars and just hope nobody is speeding

Transit:

• Push stroller right on to kneeling bus/level-boarding platform
• can attend to my baby the whole time, no fussing.
• don’t have to worry about parking AT ALL

Yeah, the definition of “Productive” is all sorts of wacky when you consider that, by the numbers, the people doing high-frequency stock trading are some of the most “productive” people on the planet, because they manage to hoard so much money to themselves.

Meanwhile, the people actually providing goods and services that make people’s lives better and create new things, those people are “unproductive”, because they don’t get filthy rich off their honest work.

The real reason we are not “productive” is that foreign investors are paying us to do the hard work of extracting resources (lumber, ore), or generating new research (we have MANY top universities), but then demanding that the money made from refining those resources or selling those idea goes to them, in other nations (typically the US or China)

I don’t understand how the custom that a married couple adopt a single last name affects this at all, this issue would be caused by the last-naming of the KIDS, not the adults.

Another emulator. Iirc some of the code running Nintendo’s own retro gaming products was pirated FROM Ryiujinx

But then how will congress give taxpayer dollars to a private company to do a terrible job?

I mean, we COULD have a government run agency that retains skilled engineers and keeps a good talent and knowledge pool of people specialized at delivering services that hundreds of millions of people rely on OR we could give money to the lowest bidder and blame “government inefficiency” for the contractor’s fuckups.

This is a classic case of the Patriarchy / Toxic Masculinity hurting men too.

For the government officials to fund a Men’s shelter would mean admitting that men can have moments of weakness, which the men in power do not like.

Actually, in most cases having fewer police on the streets leads to LESS petty crime.

This is because cops tend to spook people, so everyone (including the innocent, law abiding citizens) will leave areas that are patrolled.

This creates the ideal scenario for crime: there are few/no witnesses around for a while after the cops come by.

In pretty much every case I am aware of where cops go on strike and stop doing regular beat patrols, crime goes DOWN.

Yep. The goal of all of this this is to force people into straight marriages because that’s all that matters to religious zealots.

They know that if kids practice safe sex they won’t get pregnant and ‘shot gun marriage’ rates will go down.

They know that if kids discover their gender or sexual identity is non-cis, non-het, or non-monogamous that they might not wind up having a traditional marriage.

The know that people who only have 1 partner in their lifetime are much, much less likely to successfully leave an abusive partner, meaning there’s a higher rate of divorce if people learn that having multiple partners in your life is normal and okay.

They know that kids who are educated about healthy sex and consent in relationships are less likely to go along with a child marriage or an assigned marriage.

They know that removing sex ed means more teen pregnancy, more intimate partner abuse, and more child-rape. For religious people whose only goal is to get young women into marriages, those are good things.

Example: An actual elected official in the state of Missouri defending his stance that “Parents Rights” includes the ability to marry off their kids to adults at age 12, because “Do you know any kids that have been married at age 12, I do, and guess what, they’re still married”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H6UJ-uCrgc

These people legitimately believe that it’s morally correct to kidnap a 12 year old girl and force her to be entirely subserviant to, and dependent on, some pedophile husband who controls everything they do, because them being trapped in that awful situation means that there’s one more marriage in the world.

Nah, no way, you’re getting free XP out of the cutting.

This is just the neoliberal way, we’re decades deep into the idea that all solutions to any problem must involve directing public funds into private hands, usually those of the wealthy.

At this point, the concept of allowing public-sector employees to use publicly-owned equipment to take publicly-owned materials and provide necessary services for the public who vote for and fund the government is tantamount to heresy. In their minds, money should only go one way, from the government, to a select few private hands. We have at least three generations of bureaucrats and politicians whose minds are so warped by this practice that they cannot conceive of any way to help people or really implement any policy without giving some private business a chance to run a profit off of it.

Think about it, try to come up with anything government has directly built since 1990. Not talking about subcontracted, or with “funding provided as a private/public partnership”, that the government has directly built and run. Used to be that the government would actually employ people to do things like GO Transit, or Ontario Place, or the LCBO, but that era is long, long passed.

Now do the reverse, think about all the things that used to be publicly owned but have now been given away to some billionaire. Air Canada, Petro Canada, Potash Corp, Highway 407, Telus, Hydro One. The list is huge, and a lot of these are very profitable. Imagine if we still owned them? Imagine what we could do re: climate change if we still owned Petro Canada and Hydro One? Or what our internet services might look like if we owned Telus? We gave away billions of dollars of value and significant strategic assets, mortgaging our future.

In addition to the direct costs of all the money that could have been put back into the budget (or the cost savings provided to the average taxpayer by not requiring that these companies take massive profit margins), we are also losing government capabilities: think about all the people, all the equipment, all the buildings and services that used to be directly delivered but now are parasitized by rent-seeking private companies looking to extract as much value as they can from us before we die. Think about old-age homes, hospital services, corporate landlords that hold the lease on former government buildings, contractors paid instead of municipal works departments.

The government won’t act because it would mean admitting that the neoliberal ideology that’s made a small number of people very rich was wrong.

This video covers the UK, but it’s all similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58t-YH7DURk

Actually, because the highly paid people tend to be REALLY highly paid, a LOT more than 50% of people earn less.

Absolutely ridiculous. Why are we punishing people who are trying hard to conserve their resources and use less energy? The carbon tax is revenue neutral, if you burn less than the average person you are BETTER OFF with a higher tax. This is a GOOD tax for the poor, and the cons are using this wedge to hurt them