Thanks, appreciated.

Sure, I get that not all lawyers are scum – though I do know a few that fit the very description I gave. But the point is more that you can find less ‘noble’ examples of people in massive debt, which may alter opinions on the subject. The article chooses to use a specific outlier to make the case more persuasive/concerning.

Like another thing I’d be curious about is the variance in debt levels between professionals who train at “regular” schools/colleges, and ones who train at “elite” schools like Harvard or MIT or whatever’s good down there these days. The impression I get as an outsider to the US system, is that the costs vary wildly between different tiers of schools – and that it’s entirely possible to get a decent career (middle class) even without a top tier school education. I’d suspect then that there’s a tranche of people who are going in to massive debt attempting to go to these more expensive options, without good reason for doing so – but it’s the individuals choice, at the end of the day.

And contrary to what some folks seem to think on here, an 18 year old is an adult in most countries, as far as I know. They’re old enough to be accountable for their actions. They can vote and all that. And these folks are often mid 20s by the time they get out / have fully accumulated their debt – so even more ‘old enough’. As long as they have ‘options’ to choose from, I find it questionable that people choosing the highest/most expensive options should be given the biggest break.

It’d make more sense to me to regulate the hell out of your schools, and have government enforce things like tuition caps for American citizen under grads etc – rather than have a kind of manic approach to debt forgiveness that flips every four years, which turns education affordability into a lottery. University endowment funds are a fairly clear argument for clipping those institutions wings a bit, and forcing them to give a break to the students. Heck, even here in Canada where we cap tuition, some of our universities have absurd amounts of money stockpiled.

Silly question perhaps, but I haven’t tripped across it on the site for Revolt – is there a relatively straight forward server version for self-hosting, or is it just that the source is on github and you can compile it in theory if you feel like goin through that process… ?

Your optimism as to how the American people would react is cute, but likely not realistic. There’s a huge chunk of Americans who voted for this, there’s another huge chunk that didn’t care to even bother voting. The thought that someone who couldn’t be arsed to spend an hour popping in to vote, would get organized and take up arms – especially on behalf of other people / principles / morals – is a bit of a stretch.

I’ve been negative on what’s going on in Israel for a long time, but I admit I’m not overly motivated to go into the streets and clutch my pearls in dismay.

The Canadian govt and organisations in general, to my understanding, aren’t really giving a ton of weapons for use in this crap. And clearly, our government’s stance has basically zero weight with other countries at this point – especially with the USA trying to annex us / starting preparations to conduct a Russian style invasion (they’re listing ‘fentanyl’ as a WMD next, so that they can use the tiny amount that crosses their border as an excuse to invade their neighbours it seems).

The issue of the USA falling apart, given its historic central role in most western/democratic pushes, is a bigger issue for most of us, than the deterioration of an area that lacks democracy. I mean, the USA’s authoritarian trend is what’s enabling Israel to do these things in some ways. The states falling apart is also a lot more ‘directly’ impactful for citizens in western countries – we notice when the USA decides to wage an economic war against us, more than we notice the atrocities occurring on the other side of the world.

There’s also only so much time you can dedicate to ‘protesting’, in between working a regular job to provide for your basic necessities. People’re tired man, and focusing on the protests that mean the most to them.

True, though Debit cards offer some protections as well. I mean, interac cards do fully cover fraudulent charges already under their zero liability policy, so I’m guessing your main point is that it’s “easier” to challenge bogus cc payments.

But in general, while I agree it’s a feature of the cards, I don’t think it’s a ‘main’ thing that drives their usage. Sorta like, in the interac card agreements, there’s usually a clause that says buying something with a warranty on debit, adds a year to the warranty period, up to a max of something like 5 years - so the default 1y warranty turns into 2y. It’s a nice feature, if you take advantage of it. But that’s not something that most people know/care/take advantage of, and it’s not a ‘driving’ feature for people adopting/using interac cards.

Yeah, I don’t really see a reason to engage with your posts either, at least not with any real conviction. It’s not a sign that you’re approaching a topic / other person in good faith if you’re defaulting to insults. Insulting people isn’t very persuasive, and just serves to further alienate moderates – it makes you seem like an unreasonable extremist with the personality of sandpaper underwear.

Sure, but you’re framing that in a way to be as positive as possible about it. How about, “the 18 year old that wanted to defend criminals and get them out of violent crime offenses for huge profits”, and went into debt to pursue what they thought was going to be a hugely profitable career? Do you really think regular people, who go into debt just ~40k based on what the article states, should also be comp’ing that other case with perks/debt forgiveness? The article is specifically using an outlier case, who went into debt for a profession that’s respectable, to skew opinions…

Student debt is an issue in the states, I don’t disagree on that as far as I understand it at least. It’s just that a lot of the articles around the subject seem very heavily skewed by political bias, which is annoying. And me being annoyed by that, and wanting more neutral discussion, I don’t think of as bootlicking.

This seems… misleading, in a weird way. Even some of the comments are confusing, though I may be just clueless as I’m not American (I’m Canadian, so don’t know any people directly impacted by this to question in person).

There are comments here saying it’s really tough because low interest private loans are less available. People noting huge increases in their monthly payments (by percent, but often not noting the actual dollar value from what I can see?).

The article notes that the average student loan debt is around $38k. Even with a terrible interest rate of like 12%, which is what my local Credit Union offers for personal loans, that’s a monthly payment of $500 for ~10 years. The guy in the article is an outlier it seems, in that he has a 6.3% interest rate and payments around $5000 – so while the average person is out 38k, this guys in the hole by like $400k+?? The reason it costs them as much as a mortgage payment, is cause they spent as much as a house getting his education. I doubt education costs ‘skyrocketed’ partway through his education, so he would’ve seen that bill coming. And for the price of that education, I’m guessing he could run the numbers with more accuracy ahead of time, and make an informed/educated decision on whether to take out those loans.

So in regards to payment cards etc… the CC’s basically have three primary benefits to them: 1. They can do ‘quick’ settlements for in person POS services. 2. They are generally accepted for online payments far more than other methods. 3. They provide access to credit / funds that the customer/user may not normally have access to, in exchange for a high interest rate on amounts owing each month. This also allows people to make larger purchases periodically, and pay off the purchase price over a slightly longer period.

For item 1, the physical cards are not that different than the regular debit cards that get used. There’s nothing ‘technically’ stopping a debit card from being mapped to a line of credit account on a banking system – such a card would be able to get used anywhere debit cards can get used, so pretty good market penetration off the bat. Only thing potentially stopping the tech side would be ‘paper’ agreements with interac etc… but those are ‘easy’ to change with enough demand. So you’d potentially need some adjustments from industry to accommodate this, across the payment switch providers and back end orgs.

For item 3, the availability of credit on those cards / accounts is entirely do-able through a small FI – historically, they offered lines of credit based on ‘signatures’ / ‘a promise to pay’ and good general payment standing at a credit bureau. Canada’s regulators changed much of that, forcing industry to heavily preference real estate backed loans – debt servicing risks for cc ‘personal’ locs are generally offloaded onto the credit card company directly. So the govt would likely need to relax their regulations on this front, otherwise its untenable for a small FI to provide credit based on signatures. In some ways this would likely be better for the end user, in terms of rates and limits, as a smaller FI, especially one that’s cooperative in nature, is less likely to push exploitative rates/conditions.

To clarify how that’s controlled by regulators: in BC as an example, the BC FSA regulates Credit Unions, and it also oversees the Credit Union Deposit Insurance Corporation – the thing that insures the CU’s deposits. Credit Unions pay premiums to CUDIC based on the “risk assessment” of the FSA. The FSA rates you very risky if you do signature loans / stuff not backed by RE or other ‘fully funded’ types of securities (eg. a $5k line of credit, ‘secured’ by a $5k term deposit). The annual cost difference can eat up like 30% of the small FI’s profit, if they’re deemed risky. Unless there was some way to ‘make up’ that loss via the ‘risky loans’, it’s not a viable business decision for CUs to take – especially when you add in the need for slightly increased monitoring for more ‘fluid’ payment accounts. Best to keep the regulators happy, to keep your insurance costs as low as possible. So you’d need govt to change its approach.

For item 2, there are lots of viable options for online payments already – the issue is mostly user adoption and business standardization / app availability. For purchases that aren’t ‘in person’, having a slightly longer settlement time isn’t a big issue – if you’re buying a thing online, in general, who cares if the payment is ‘instant’, or if it takes 15 mins to clear. Things like the interac e-transfers are able to route payments to people in this fashion, and are heavily used in some areas currently – paying trades, paying rent, paying kids extracurricular, and anything where ‘cheques’ use to be a norm. AFTs are also still used for many ‘bigger’ bills/companies, but they’re decreasing in popularity – there are fewer millenials/genZ who are using AFTs for payments, and fewer businesses that go through the process of getting it setup on their end to allow for it. That last parts a similar impediment to adoption of etransfers more broadly – you see CC payment options for most online purchases, but you almost never see e-transfer options… even though they’re functional for regular person to person payments. Having a business email setup with an auto deposit isn’t too difficult – as noted, many small contractors go this route – but its not common at larger businesses… for no particular reason.

All that on item 2, is basically to say you need to get most businesses to adopt a ‘standard’ method for online payments. If every shop you went to had a different ‘payment app’ you had to download, create an account, transfer money to the account, to use the account… it wouldn’t have general end user appeal due to its burden. Credit cards have a simple, ubiquitous standard that’s got a ton of apps and plugins to accommodate – we’d need similar embracing of a, general industry/economy/nation wide approach.

All of these things are do-able, if there’s political will. But only if there’s political will. If you look at the financial industry, they’re generally in bed with US/foreign tech companies these days. Even our govt is run on Microsoft. Getting people to move away from American options would require clear messaging from regulators of “critical infrastructure” industries (like banking), and potentially options for government support as part of those tech migrations (tax breaks to hire specialists/retrain people/develop different apps). Like a positive step would be seeing the BC FSA charge huge “insurance” premiums for Credit Unions which are almost entirely in Microsoft’s cloud / US controlled infrastructure. We don’t see any of that currently – instead, we see regulators like the BC FSA shrugging as the industry debates whether online banking portals should be outsourced to a company in Portugal, one in India, or one in the USA (the Canadian CU Trade association, central1, recently walked away from this service area – with their CEO even getting a bloody business in vancouver award for abandoning it). We likely won’t see anything ‘material’ on this front until after the next election at the very earliest, is my guess. But even then, I doubt they’ll put the kind of urgency on it to avoid this sort of thing becoming a potential issue in trade talks.

Should pivot into being Amazon like, with the current dept stores shrunk in number and converted into primarily distribution / fulfillment centres. Block/tax Amazon to allow local options to compete/enter the market.

Ride the pro Canada / anti American wave.

Again, the OPs posted video literally admits that its an issue on all sides of the political spectrum at present.

As for why I use American politics as a foil, its because people in Canada are clearly aware of what’s going on down south. It’s an easy reference point. Plus, we have discussion quelling hate speech laws that make even openly questioning certain topics potentially a crime… a very ‘egalitarian’ and non authoritarian thing, yes? But people won’t care as much if you reference foreign situations.

Like you want some Canadian ones? Sure. Trudeau’s many ethics violations, which he was found guilty of and suffered basically no consequences because he’s of a privileged class. Trudeau dancing around in brown-face, and everyone excusing it. Rules for thee, but not for me! Catherine McKenna’s “If you repeat it, if you say it louder, that is your talking point, people will totally believe it” slip, which exposed the party’s approach – but she got clipped for saying the quiet part loud and on camera. How about the liberal’s approach to ‘consultations’, wherein they invite groups to participate, only to ignore their findings – causing many experts / climate scientists to quit things like pipeline reviews on moral grounds. They ‘consult’ for the optics, but still push ahead with authoritarian methods – its just more insidious how they do it.

Trudeau and the Liberals enacting heavy handed hate speech laws, that result in moderate questioning of certain narratives a potential crime: can’t discuss some topics openly, sounds a bit authoritarian. Reports/narratives requiring us to accept them as truth and enact recommendations without question, and without evidence, while being written by biased individuals and encouraging racial segregation / privileged systems. BC’s conservatives kicked one of their MLAs out just recently for broaching that subject – because her tone became increasingly disrespectful to the topic the more she was blasted for simply stating the facts. But to get back to the Liberals, that sort of ‘narrative’ is also how the Liberals suppressed the potential blow back about Harjit Sajjjan, a Sikh and then Minister of Defense, using Canadian Spec Ops to rescue non-Canadian Sikhs during the pullout from Kabul – the only group he targeted for rescuing / streamlined immigration to Canada was his own. He defends this action by claiming there was an approved govt policy to help minority groups, though the Sikhs (his own) was the only he directed spec ops to aid. The Liberals effectively shut down further coverage of this, by declaring it Racist to call out a Sikh Minister using Govt resources to singularly help Sikhs – because “you wouldn’t think it an issue if he wasn’t a Sikh”. Well duh, but so what. That lame ass excuse would also then shield all white supremacists – its an “acceptable” excuse for one, and not the other, by authoritarian decree. Continuing to report on it risked running afoul of hate speech laws, as our government decreed it racist to call minorities racist when they’re acting like racists – so the story disappeared from the cbc practically overnight. That was one where our intelligence agency had flagged it as a conflict/concern – but Trudeau, just like Trump down south, ‘knew better’.

The CBC also aligns very heavily with govt policy agendas – there are numerous ‘news’ stories that are heavily biased, like only interviewing one party in a dispute. For example, there was an alleged anti-trans hate crime at a kids track meet in BC’s interior, and the CBC only interviewed the parents of the victim – parents who had a history of showing up whenever there was a clash on trans rights / are pretty clearly politically driven in their actions, if you dug into them at all. The CBC didn’t bother to get any other witness reports from the event… as if there’d be no phone footage or objective third party witnesses, at an event with tons of parents recording their kids. They instead interviewed a bunch of government people, and university profs, who all went on about how trans rights are human rights, and people need to do better etc – but none of these experts were privy to what had happened, and were just being used to push the govts talking points through a supposedly ‘neutral’ news agency. Such heavily biased pieces are essentially government policy masquerading as journalism, and is one reason there are calls to defund the CBC. A captured news media is another one of those “hmm, sorta authoritarian, eh?” things.

The NDP treatment of Erin Weir – especially in comparison to their treatment of someone like Christine Moore (the leader’s selective application of ‘rules’ so that it disadvantages people they don’t like, and supports people they do, is pretty authoritarian). The provincial NDP here in BC, sending out letters that have tracking components, so that they can catch/punish leakers (one I saw, had replaced the character for “.” with a tiny number). A previous mayor here in BC, Kennedy Stewart, a former federal NDP MP, using the federal NDP’s database / private information to help target voters for his mayoral debut – or more broadly, how all the political parties exempt themselves from having to follow the privacy regulations that the government makes the rest of us abide by. For both NDP and Liberal – the maintenance of “equity employment group” privileges in almost all areas, despite data showing that white men (the only group that doesn’t count as an equity employment group) are doing poorly in many areas (third bottom demo for education, like 30% off from the top groups, for example). Questioning the narrative on that front, is not allowed… even though the current approach can lead to a severe backlash, as we’re seeing in the states with DEI programs. My NDP MP has indicated that broad preferential treatment of women/minorities, must continue until there is equity in all areas, including the boardrooms – doesn’t matter if women’ve been the majority in the public service since 2000, nor that its now more skewed in women’s favour than it was previously in favour of men when the legislation first came in, they still maintain anti-male policies draped in the verbiage of ‘pro equity employment’. So they move the goal posts, and continue to maintain discriminatory practices, even if those policies are disproportionately impacting the ‘poor/middle class’ people in one demographic group, a group shown in stats to be near the bottom by many metrics.

A whole lot of the censorship tools on sites like Reddit, were built for ‘left-leaning’ censorship; now they’re being used for ‘right-leaning’ censorship, so they’re ‘bad’. Both like censorship/authoritarian methods, they just disagree on who to target.

Tankies… what utterly moronic slang.

It isn’t disingenuous to call out authoritarian practices, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they’re on. What’s disingenuous is the left/progressive failure to recognise/take action on their own failings in this regard, as failing to do so calls into question the legitimacy of their convictions and the validity of their arguments, and ultimately alienates some moderates. It makes it easier to poke holes and demonstrate that the left isn’t serious about the issue being a ‘problem’, because the left engages in the same behaviour – just to a lesser extent, or in a different format, arguably. Even in the clip linked by the Op – it’s all “BOO CONS SO BAD FOR THIS!” and then the admission “Yeah, everyone does this”, subverts the message. How can people be annoyed at the cons for doing X, if the analysts openly admit (once you’re past the click bait), that everyone does X?

In some ways, what the ‘left’ does is more insidious. They present themselves as the alternative to the republicans, but then people like Pelosi abuse the system to acquire giant fortunes, while maintaining laws and tax systems that benefit themselves / their rich benefactors. They pit the poors against one another by pushing demographic conflicts, to keep the commoners ire away from their bank accounts. Both sides of the political spectrum are moving increasingly towards authoritarian ideals – turning a blind eye to the faults of the ‘left’, just because you feel the ‘right’ is more egregious, doesn’t make it any better - it just green lights the moral decay on the left. The heavy-handed/forced tactics of the DNC in the states, would be hard to call anything other than a dangerous “authoritarian” trend, which arguably cost them two recent elections. Excusing that sort of ‘trend towards authoritarianism’ just because the right-wing is going harder towards the same steaming pile of feces, doesn’t make things any better. So yes, I’ll “both sides” things all I want in this context. The freedom for an individual to call out bs on both sides is egalitarian at its core, I’d argue: I can hate all politicians equally.

Trying to rail road me into a single, left/progressive approved, narrative… using the tired old cry of “both sidesing!”, is a very authoritarian thing to do.

Not entirely opposed to it, though it needs transparency and some ‘post implementation’ checks imo. Emergency responses, especially to international things, are usually better organised at the federal level too… I’m not too keen on provincial leaders acting with an international scope. That sort of thing leads to situations like Alberta licking Republican taint, with people accepting it as normal for provincial leaders to do that sort of international “diplomatic” blowie.

In some ways, the more concerning bit is hearing that they get 50% of their electricity via the columbia river treaty. So BC isn’t ‘sovereign’ in its power generation, despite generally presenting that image to the public for a long time. You’re not really in control, if a ton of your stuff requires the Americans to follow through on paper agreements.

We likely ought to also diversify our power generation methods, given climate change can potentially hoop hydro. Nuclear power takes years to get built, so they ought to start talking to the prairies about gettin some reactors goin in BC – I think it was like Ontario, Man and Sask that were working on mini reactor options, which’d make sense for us to position in areas further away from the border. There are also micro power generators that can be setup on smaller rivers fairly easily, with less impact than the current massive hydroelectric dams we’ve built – those likely have a far shorter lead time to get built, and would be “Canada”-centric in nature, so also worth exploring.

So… at about 9m16s, he admits that it’s not just the conservatives that do this sort of thing / have authoritarian undertones. And he’s right… but it’s a point that’s downplayed. Most political parties are marching to an authoritarian drum at this point.

I disagree, especially when focusing on Public Sector Unions. Making arguments about the cost of a service compared to the wage, is nonsensical when discussing public sector employment – 80-90% of the cost is the wage, and the ‘value add’ is nebulous and undefined, removed from regular market pressures. Trying to equate the job security provided by public sector unions to private sector business realities is also not convincing – in private sector, if business is stagnant/declining due to a recession, you fire people – doing so may allow you to increase wages for those who remain, though they may also need to increase efficiency/productivity. The OPs article is basically about unions wanting to ignore market realities… something that public sector unions do all the time, as they don’t need to look at the ‘cost’ side from a market perspective. They just yell at the government to tax us private sector workers more.

Unions have a purpose and a function, yes. But in public sector they are detached from market realities, and have skewed public sector employees into a position where they are the subject of private sector anger. It sets the stage for Republican style/Musk style cuts to gain support amongst the voting electorate – so regardless of whatever high horse pro-union people want to perch themselves on, its folly if they don’t take this disparity as a serious risk.

Even the Ops article belies that unions are no longer about ‘regular’ working class people – the letter is specifically saying that the unions are petitioning to provide better Employment Insurance options for “high earners”. So these salaries, that are well above the Canadian average need our government to increase the payouts to help protect those unionized workers from potential job losses? If their high pay is justified by high demand, they should be able to get other employment quickly in their field… but that whole letter sure isn’t about protecting the ‘regular’ common workers, and its the sort of statement that’s just going to antagonize private sector workers who earn “regular” wages. Why should even more of a waiters paycheque go to paying taxes, so that an Airplane Pilot can have an easier time if they lose their top 5% salary job?

pot -> kettle

That was the brits. People always say it was Canada, but it wasn’t. The guys in charge of that raid were in Canada for less then a year, and died later on in the same year they burned the WH - the leaders had spent most of their time on campaigns in EU / northern africa. The troops were all trained in the uk. Canada wasn’t even a ‘country’ for decades after that event – there’s no way we had our own trained army/generals involved. Hell, the (great?) granddaughter of one of the two generals who did it, is Olivia Wilde – from her scottish roots (Cockburn). So not even the guys kids/descendants were Canadian – they became US people in Hollywood.

Lotta Canadians like to take credit for it though, but realistically it wasn’t us.

It’s starting to seem like Canada should issue a travel advisory against going to the USA.

In some ways I hope it doesn’t come to that. In others … I mean, I’d win a friendly bet if it happened, so there’s that.

Maybe the US should like… return Guantanamo to Cuba, since as far as I know Cuba never agreed to the US setting it up on occupied land. The US just cuts cheques to pretend they’re paying, but Cuba ain’t accepting. The states even blocks trade with Cuba, so it seems really implausible that Cuba’s cool with the US having a torture site in their back yard.

It’s like the cops surround your house to prevent you from leaving / talking to your neighbours. Then they sometimes just break in and rape your wife, then leave $5 on the nightstand and claim she was a prostitute. Plus waterboarding.