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

STV, though, would have been an absolute gamechanger

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

My dude, everything is politics. Especially things like “I want a free internet” or “I don’t want to be drowning in ads” which is a huge part of the appeal of Lemmy are both DEEPLY political stances.

Given how many politicians have advanced law or business degrees, it’s not crazy that they could earn more by turning to private industry.

Hell, one of the fastest ways to qualify for a six-figure job is to run for political office, fail, and use that experience to get a job with a lobbying or PR firm.

Exactly, articles like this are just confusing the meaning of class.

What makes you a member of “the working class” is that you are forced to sell your labour to survive. Fullstop. A tradesperson, and a lawyer, and a burgerflipper are all in the same class from that point of view.

As soon as your accumulated capital becomes large enough that you earn your income only as a result of your capital, then you are no longer working class, and that’s when your interests diverge from the average worker and average homebuyer or renter.

A landlord with no other job, the major shareholders of a profitable business, a wealthy heir, those people make their money by siphoning value off of other people’s work without actually needing to spend their time on work.

Long story short: I have no problem with a 50 year old plumber with a large family who legitimately uses that 4500 sqft house.

My issue is with Karen who used dad’s money to buy 8 properties to airBnB them and insists she get special treatment because her business risks didn’t pan out.

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

Exactly, and because of the revenue-neutral nature of the Carbon pricing, this hurts all Canadians, and especially hurts the Canadians that are poor and/or care about being efficient and conserving resources.

Ehh. This is an issue of a whitelist vs blacklist approach, it’s not that nuts that the government would want to allow newer tech to be used by work devices as a default.

The military is very different and much more strict about this, the average civil servant is less sensitive.

Exactly. It’s not “Leftist”, it’s just NOT fully of Nazis, and that’s how far our standards have slipped.

See, that’s the thing. The 10 factors in the ranking include 1) Entrepreneurship, 2) “Open for Business”, 3) “Movers”, 4) Power, and 5) “Agility”, or a place that is ‘efficient in its actions, adopt and accept modern solutions’

So, like, half the factors are “how badly do you screw the environment and average non-capital-class citizen”

And in case you think I might be wrong about what they mean by “Movers”, the top 5 are the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, and India.

Of COURSE our country, which is composed a bunch of oil, gas, and mining corps in a trenchcoat shaking hands with a couple of oligipolistic banks and telecoms will score well.

For a basement with a 5-inch slab and exterior walls are 8 inches, 8ft high and also concrete… Then 45 cubic meters is about what you’d need.

Of course, your basement walls are about as electrically grounded as it gets, so I doubt you’d be able to store power in them. One leak and you’re discharging all that power into the groundwater.

If society does not provide for you, then you have no moral obligation to prop it up.

If prayer and visiting church were to be made illegal tomorrow, would you stop?

My first thought was this was a punk thing, like, if you want to think of yourself as a bit rebellious you can buy the American phone instead of the phone made by the company that owns your nation.