There’s exceptions for sure. I should have said it’s a tendency.

Exactly right. Dare I say the very right for working people to vote was won by organized labour, so even popular democracy is downstream from labour power. That’s the only real power we have against corporations.

Corporations do not stand up to the government. Remember this. Drop any expectation that the coporate world would save you from a bad government.

I agree with almost everything you said. I’m not saying immigration is the cause or is a primary driver to the material shortages people observe. I’m saying there are real shortages, in healthcare capacity, in transportation capacity, housing probably less an actual shortage but that too. And then people read about immigration numbers, see the new people around them, waiting in the ER, on the barely crawling highway, in the packed subway, etc. They see those new people and they make the obvious, surface level conclusion that they’re suffering because there’s more people using these resources. I’m saying this is an easy conclusion to make, not that it’s the right one. It’s also easy to make because it’s valid if one freezes all other variables, like the ones you mentioned. Worse, to my mom, those variables just don’t exist. They’ve never been in her consciousness. And then there’s PP and Trump assuring her that the simple explanation is the right one. They’re Occam’s-razoring her. I’m just explaining the process of anti-immigrant sentiment surge. I think given how easily it emerges from our material conditions, it can’t be waived away by the people who believe immigration is a net positive and especially by such politicians. It has to be taken into account and the root causes solved, like doing most of what you suggested. Otherwise I think we’re going down the same path the US and Europe is going down, no matter how nice and immigration-friendly we’ve been so far. I think fixing the shortages would halt and even reverse that, calling people bigots (not saying you’re doing that) would work for some but probably not most.

Good to know. I will make sure not to update as mine isn’t doing it yet.

they could build world class research labs that would put the old bell labs to shame

Knowing Bell Labs’ contributions… this is fucking radicalizing.

I’m not saying Zitron’s right but one easy way that his predictions could be wrong at this point but could emerge as correct in the future is basically the principle “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” In other words things could have been crazy 2 years ago but they maybe crazier now, and they may have yet more room to get astronomically crazy.

True.

Here’s what it looks like since 2015:

Thanks! Username checks out.

E: Fixed.

For sure but isn’t an anti-immigrant sentiment surge inevitable until we’ve built out our material base to support the larger population? In my mind, we have a material base shortage. That makes people’s lives worse. They connect the dots, want less immigration till the problem is fixed. I think that also neatly gives the solution to the anti-immigration sentiment - fixing the material problem as you suggested. Fix that and people would welcome immigration again.

For the NDP aficionados among us:

Today’s Results

2025 Results

NDP Comparison

Not a bad showing in a bit over a year since the last election.

Unsurprising given the state of things.

The commies make a few good points there.

Doesn’t have to make sense or be true. All it has to do is get firms moving capital out of Canada. Well not that statement by itself, but the threats to relevant firms’ bottom lines. The mfker needs a win for the midterms, some win.

Copy-pasta from another thread in regards to thinking this is just dementia talk:

Lots wrong with him but I don’t think this move isn’t crazy or wrong from the perspective of his material interest. He’s sending a message to parts of capital that aren’t under his thumb / he isn’t under theirs, that he’ll hit their bottom line unless they materially pledge allegiance. He’s trying to engineer capital flight from Canada that could hurt us enough to get us to fall in line and allow resource and market access to his side of capital to exploit and profit from our labour and natural resources. Would it work? I hope not but I wouldn’t disregard the possibility.

If he’s serious about this, we might see him manufacture some terrorism or drugs excuse to slap massive tariffs, perhaps even sanctions on us. As his chances of losing the senate and the house in 2 months keep growing, this shit is getting more and more about his survival, so I think the chance that this is not hot air is growing.

And it’s already happening according to KPMG:

The survey of 275 manufacturers finds that 57 per cent say they have paused, reduced or cancelled capital expenditure projects due to economic uncertainty and trade and tariff threats, while 42 per cent have scaled back or paused research and development spending. More than half (52 per cent) say they are currently operating in “endurance mode.” … 42 per cent say they have already moved production to the U.S. or are considering doing so

• 29 per cent have moved some or all production
• 13 per cent have not yet moved production but plan to move some or all; of those considering relocation, 77 per cent expect to move within two years

I’m a bit bothered by “supply their own power” because that means gas turbines in practice. I’d much rather they “get permitted power” from the provincial/territorial power generating admin. Not only that but also get permitted water hookup. That way the province controls these resources and it can ask for money to build them out where needed. Not paying the electricity bills isn’t much of a win for people if they have to pay the asthma bill instead.

stabilizing democracy bloc

I was wondering if the pro-US propagandists are gonna be smart enough to stay silent this close to us hearing the layoffs rumbles at our workplaces but no. Dumb as bricks.

Just conceptually, agents pull data from the web via search engines. There isn’t currently a mechanism that makes one piece of information on the web trusted while another is untrusted. There’s new websites popping up that put up technical information every day. It’s pretty easy to imagine an agent getting code from a well optimized site that injects a backdoor in whatever the agent is building. Even before code hits any repo, the agents regularly execute stuff from the web while they figure out what to put down.

and told CBC News chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton there’s currently no ‘open channels’ to get both sides back to the negotiating table.

Good. A bad deal is worse than no deal.

Although he’s probably lying given his record.

For real, this is the perfect application for torrent. If I were building a registry that had to have sustainable cost for an open source community it would use torrents as a file transfer backend. If I were building something that I was planning to sell to a monopoly firm that has monopoly money… HTTP and cloud storage all thw way! 😄