It’s good to see that most of us have a realistic assesment. The US is an obviously bigger threat to us than Russia, economically, militarily, interference, etc.

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Excluding Yves Engler was a mistake.

That’s a pretty good assesment. I’m tired so I can’t write in kind but here’s something to your effort.

Going through with reforming the party as a bottom-up movement is extremely importantfor the long term success. Both Rob and Avi understand this from slightly diff perspective. Rob understands this from union organizing which is similar, where locals have a similar function. Avi on the other hand has the ideology - he’s a democratic socialist. The principles, the why and the how of organizing real, bottom up democratic structures is baked into it. So I think both would be able to do the work but Avi probably has a more encompassing understanding of the domain. He also knows the socialist history of the NDP - he cites the CCF and Tommy Douglas explicitly. He never said “I” when referring to his leadership effort, he always said we and our. All of which speak to his commitment to the bottom-up approach.

Tony made a critical related point about this - that mass media is never going to convey the message we need conveyed to our members. The CBC might try but will fail. Corporate media would actively mislead as the NDP doesn’t further its interest. So we need our party to convey the messages to its members through the EDAs, so then the members can tell it to their neighbours as they understand it best. Just one of the extremely coherent points from the 74-year-old geezer on the stage.

Why we haven’t explored public options for groceries and such? Cause we got on the Thatcherite-Reaganite neolib ideological train. We sold off a shit ton of important pub corporations and we decided we ain’t using that economic model to do new things. But that’s just me ranting, I’m sure you knew that. 😊

Well at least we knew that’s the bargain. It was never gonna be a win for working Canadians over Canadian corporations. It was always gonna be a fight between Canadian and US corporations, and hopefully having ours come on top a bit more than usual.

Good point. Still important who’s first. How do you feel about the candidates?

Unless you believe in zero immigration which you absolutely have the right to, the material reasons for when immigration is bad for workers are the lesser workers rights they have and the shortage of housing and transit. Workers rights because unionized workplaces mean corpos can’t pay a migrant less than a Canadian, therefore have little incentive to bring them in. And if they do so in a non-unionized workplace, the migrant worker has the economic means to switch jobs, which means the corpo has to pay them similar to Canadian labour. And housing and transit are about the only limited resources standing in the way from scaling up any Canadian town or city from its current size to virtually any size. If we get housing and transit building so that we don’t have those constraints, and new people entering the economy aren’t at permanent worker rights disadvantage, like new Canadian grownups aren’t, then the economic effects should be more or less equivalent to natural increase in the population, which tends to be economically positive. Better yet, the economy should benefit more than natural pop growth because Canada didn’t spend the resources raising and educating this new population, while we’d get the surplus it produces as it enters the workforce.

If immigrant labour does not have the same rights (including recognition of experience, education through some process, etc) as non-immigrants, then the only way to not have corpos use them to lower wages is to not let them in at all - or zero immigration. But new workers constantly enter the workforce in a growing population as kids grow up so the mere entry of new workers into the economy doesn’t appear to be bad for wages. The baby boom along with strong workers rights (much weakened later) produced a pretty great economy for working people.

I gotta say, Avi is doing a great job even if I’m still debating between him and Rob.

Uncle Rob might have you covered:

“Climate [change] is a class war, because big polluters profit and their friends run away with a pocket full of money. When it’s the working class that at the end of the day that pay the ultimate price in their communities.”

Class war mentioned 20 minutes in!

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uy6_gTsUH4A

It is, we’re registered and ready to vote!

And here I was hoping I’d be able to buy some CXMT RAM as they scale production… 😔

~ $ sfc /scannow
No command sfc found

I don’t think I expressed the right intent with this meme. I’m 💯 with you. 😄

So if we start taxing the rich now then I’m gonna get taxed when I get rich. At least some people do, hence taxing the rich on itself is going to cause a divide. Not just that taxing or not taxing the rich usually comes with package deal with other issues which some one might be inclined to.

Oh got it now.

If rich people control the government, then rich people would never be taxed. Unless there is an amount that can be allowed to tax, and for the reason above people will divide themselves into two clubs and fight between each other worse than British football fans to the point that one club’s fan won’t recognize fan of other club as equals. Neither intellectually, nor as a member of the same species. This will ensure that nothing will ever happen to the status quo as in a decade or two, each club’s identity will be solely about hating the other club and their fans or whoever is even slightly pleasant to member of the rival club, and that is what all the fans from both sides will spend all their time doing. The only time both fans seem merely united will be when someone says the game sucks or it’s called soccer, but only for a fleeting moment.

Yeah. That’s where things are now. The government is full of rich people and often these rich people are working for even richer people. The workers are already divided along the one-day-I’ll-be-rich line. What you’re describing is what’s been happening for decades now. Unfortunately this state doesn’t reach a stable equilibrium. Capital always looks for higher returns. Decreasing taxes is one way to increase returns. Depressing wages is another. Unfortunately for capital, at one point higher returns come at the expense of decreasing standard of living for workers. Through crumbling infrastructure, removal of safety nets, decreased purchase power (increased cost of living). The division among the workers protects capital’s ability to increase returns over time. But that only works to a point. As more and more workers hit new standard of living lows, fewer and fewer buy the narrative that they will one day be rich. These same people begin seeing the correlation between their falling standard of living, and the capitalist class having it better than ever. At some point so many have crossed into the we’re-getting-fucked-today side of the one-day-I’ll-be-rich line that there’s too few left to prevent change from happening. The we’re-getting-fucked-today side has multiple options to force change. One’s voting, which may or may not work, depending on how taken over the system is. The other is more or less foolproof - collective labour action - stop working - company strikes, or general strikes if all else fails. If no one is working, there are no profits made, bribes stop flowing, security stops protecting, drinks aren’t being served at Mar-a-Lago and Davos. Then we make significant demands.

So yeah, you’re right, but that’s a transient state that eventually leads to a pre-revolutionary environment. The election of people like Mamdani when NYC capital spend enormous amounts of money to defeat him is an example of a time and place where enough people have gone beyond the tipping point.

some users reported that devices with malfunctioning or disconnected fingerprint sensors became stuck on the boot animation and could not complete startup.

Some context. Also this happened last year.

Can’t come soon enough. Bought a Bangle.js to bridge the gap after my last Fitbit died.