Big banks having shitty investment approaches shouldn’t be/isn’t a surprise, I’d be surprised if anyone thought they were going to be following some sort of ethical code on it.

Community credit unions exist(ed). Community based credit unions tended to invest more locally, in smaller businesses. Even their partnerships were with smaller businesses. Big Banks and Big CUs like Vancity just outsource everything to large international companies (like Vancity’s online banking is hosted in Microsoft’s cloud, and its run by an Indian firm called Intellect Design, which has most of its development work done in the UAE/Middle East). Banking with any of them, there’s absolutely zero chance of having ‘privacy’ from foreign snooping/pressure. The US has backend access to/the ability to control all our bigger financial institutions, it’s one reason their claims of Canada being totally dependent on the US is quite legit. There’s been no talk from regulators to try and address the situation – in fact, BC’s regulators want CUs to chase scale/merge together, which puts them all more and more into US clouds – which is cool with our regulator, seeing as our provincial financial regulator, even, is run via Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem.

Those smaller, locally focused, and generally more ‘ethical’ smaller organisations are basically all toast though – like I think there’s only 1 small, open to the public, non-ethnic based community credit union left in Vancouver. Cause no one cares how a bank invests/partners, all they care about is getting the best rate. And if you get that rate by going with an organization that supports ICE, so be it.

It’s funny seeing the various negative posts/stories in the news about him. Like I’m still scratching my head wondering whether this editorial I saw claiming to be from a liberal, going on about why it was a bad move to go with Avi, because policies like “sanction Israel for conducting an ongoing genocide” won’t play to the masses.

Like, do the libs really think Canadians are as blindly pro-Israel as America, just because Israel gives a ton of money to American politicians, and is friends with Donald Trump? They think siding with a genocidal regime that’s bombing school children, threatening to blow up things like water desalination plants, enabling ‘legal’ death sentences for just a persecuted minority, and so on… is going to get them votes? They don’t think having a leader with a sense of morality will win over a chunk of Canadians? I… I mean maybe they’re right, but I sure as hell hope not.

Honestly, we need a new option, other than the obviously corrupt and captured PP/conservative northern trump party, and “the other guys”. Especially when, so far, most of what the other guys have done seems to be to enrich their friends, cut services, enact bills and policies that go along with the American authoritarian agenda, and deliver very little to regular every day Canadians. As an undecided voter who’s voted the whole range of the political spectrum (excluding the most extreme sides, like the people’s party hah), I’m glad to see him in the race and look forward to what they might bring to the next election.

Best of luck to the NDP and Avi.

I dunno, with the AI surveillance state “improving” the kill chain in US wars (you all can bomb school children super effectively now, since AI tells you to! Can’t hold AI accountable!), and the arrest chain of “terrorist” protestors, I imagine that the cell phone location data from these protests could lead directly to certain changes in the USA. Certain changes that will help to populate all those new concentration camps with cheap prisoner labour to replace all the immigrants on the farms etc.

I agree to some extent – I kind of look at the socialist democracies that’re around and think of them as a step in the direction of having a ‘functional’ version of a “libertarian socialist” setup. However we’re also witnessing these fail almost in real time as a result of the global turmoil currently on-going, with rights erosion and increase in authoritarian tendencies on both the political left and right.

I do think there’s a fundamental issue that is a nearly impossible hurdle for ‘proper’ anarchist states of any meaningful size to arise, which is somewhat exemplified in that Spain example. In order for a ‘state’ to exist, it basically needs to have a “force” component. People don’t always want to accept it, and it’s often an open debate on what level of force and how that force is structured in democratic setups. In Anarchist setups, it’s nearly impossible to implement, as there’ll always be dissenters from any use of force, which pretty well blocks that whole function of the government in a consensus based decision model. There also needs to be a method to incentivize/organize large groups of people to complete increasingly complex tasks the larger and more complicated/advanced the tech level of the country may be. Anarchism, from what I’ve read at least, tends to work better in smaller community setups, because there’s less need for either of these things, based on those small community goals. Sorta like the old (and horribly flawed) Marxist refrain of apple farmers and orange farmers swapping produce in a system without capital, it doesn’t really translate to something like making computer chips for advanced tech, or trading direct unskilled labour for something like a surgeon’s services.

Like for the force thing – take something like minority rights. Say some minorities decide to protest in a way that shuts down major streets in a city, demanding special treatment. In a democracy, they get given some media attention, can schedule marches etc, but they can’t illegally shut down businesses / regular day to day life, without running the risk of having the state apply force for their illegal behaviour – cops should show up and force a resolution. If those cops could only show up after a consensus is reached by all parties, including the protesting minorities, then a group like MAGA could basically sit there not compromising on their demands, and inflicting pain on their neighbors/others without a care in the world. Spain’s inability to mount a defense against fascists in the 1930s, was basically the result of them not being able to get a consensus in this sort of regard – you couldn’t get them to all agree to defend the country against franco/hitlers invading force, because some were in favour of it, so no action was taken (except by Durruti’s militia). (and yes, that sort of thing clearly happens in failed democracies like the USA still to some extent, so it’s a problem that goes beyond ‘just’ anarchist decision models – but it’s yet to hit them in an existential way)

No quarter for fascists. Enjoy your American paycheque for selling out Canada, working for a fascist US organisation. But don’t expect other Canadians to tolerate you, or to give a shit about your examples/thoughts regarding working for a fascist state’s pin up organisations.

CANADA’s banks are run differently. As evidenced by the lack of bank failures/bailouts that you didn’t bother to stipulate initially were AMERICAN failures, and are the product of a FAILED fascist states implementation of stuff that’s totally different than what we have in Canada. Don’t drag an entire Canadian industry just because you’re a fascist supporting traitor.

Yeah – though in all fairness, we haven’t seen too many larger implementations of its principles. Some other guy was whining that I’d missed some regional sub-states/failed revolution attempts for example, but that’s the best he could find to counter my ‘only spain so far has tried it’ note. The sample size is stupid small, so it’s a bit dicey to draw definitive conclusions.

I guess you could argue that things like Durruti’s struggle to get support qualifies as an internal problem – like a government/large group, making decisions on consensus, is much more difficult to motivate in any particular direction even when existentially threatened by an outside force. But ultimately, without that outside force, the CNT likely would’ve continued to meet the basic needs of people in the country in line with the anarchist principles it was based on. Bit of a mixed bag.

Afaik, Ukraine was a failed attempt to setup an Anarchist government. Rojava and Chiapas are not realistically established enough to qualify as a case study so much, they’re also not countries, but general regions/states within countries. As sub-regions protected within and by a state, they benefit from the state while putting on airs of being anti-state: much like a parents-basement dwelling neckbeard sort, who rants online against capitalism, while enjoying the benefits provided by their parents participating in that system, and who’s lifestyle is wholly dependent on the system they oppose. Anarchist principles often function ‘ok’ for smaller communities, but they struggle/fail once attempted as a full government of a country – Spains the only example I know of in that regard.

Spains attempt lasted ‘roughly’ 30 years, with the movement starting in the 1870s, the CNT coming in sometime around 1905 or so, and Franco fucking it all up around 1936-1939, give or take?

I worked in an anarchist bookstore for a few years after uni, where I read books about anarchist history, and the Spanish attempt. That’s what I base my comments on. And, yea, Rojava and Chiapas are so ‘new’ that no one had bothered to write about them at that time. So really, they don’t seem like examples worth mentioning, other than to be a little shite online.

Read up on Spain pre-Franco, which was the only time that an Anarcho-state was seriously attempted. It basically coagulated into an Anarcho-syndicate, but failed miserably at getting many traditional ‘state’ responsibilities covered. When Franco rolled in with the backing of Hitler, Durruti was the only guy that tried to mount a defense, because the “government” couldn’t come to a consensus on whether to defend themselves or not. Durruti had to literally raid government weapons stocks to arm a militia to try and fight back, but that totally failed and then they ended up as a fascist steel production center feeding arms to Nazi germany.

So that’s about how it goes in practice. It’s a style of government that’s good in theory, but it fails when implemented, generally due to ever present outside influences. It’s on the same sort of pedestal as communism really, in that lots of folks look at it on paper and think it sounds great, but reality’s a bitch.

My post didn’t talk about running the government like a business. The business you compared our government to, was American bullshit. What you put forward was essentially “We shouldn’t run the government based on providing social services, because in failed communist states in the past that’s lead to horrible results!”: “We shouldn’t think about good governance/stability/order, because America’s banks are capitalist shitholes that I worked for and supported as an American shill!”. Canada’s government is based on peace order and good governance, and running a government which is massively overburdened/unable to meet the needs of Canadians is antithetical to that core Canadian value.

So fuck off with your america-centric viewpoint.

And frankly, if you’re working for an American company, while America has become a fascist state? You’re supporting American genocides and war crimes. You’re supporting an America that wants to destroy Canada. You are tolerating things that no moral person would tolerate, and you deserve vitriol for your acquiescence.

Nah. Fuck that. We aren’t America, and if he’s working for an American company/supporting a fascist regime that’s intent on annexing/destroying Canada, he can fuck off too. And he can fuck all the way off if he’s busy trying to say anything about Canadian stuff, by using American failures as an example, because we aren’t America, despite what some shitheads in Alberta seem to want.

So a strange anecdote related to this story – I’ve worked for a small company before where there was a husband/wife employee couple, which had DV issues. The female-dominant senior managers, very quietly, would send the man on leave while looking for excuses to fire him each time there was an event. The wife refused to press charges, because she was seemingly the one starting the physical fights, she just lost cause she was weaker – the guy wasn’t a big dude though, so it’s not like he could easily just ‘restrain’ her, hence some visible physical injuries. So the company couldn’t use something like a criminal record to justify dismissal. But they still tried to find ways to fire the man, without really caring about who was instigating / innocent until proven guilty, or anything. It’s just “Man hits a woman for any reason? Women band together to cast out the man”.

These two people stayed together for decades like this, with mgmt periodically going through those motions apparently. Think they’re still together. Had like 3 or 4 kids.

And you’re posting in a thread about Canada. We ain’t the USA’s 51st state, so kindly fuck off.

The way I look at it is that cryptocurrency is basically a security with no real use, but it can store ‘value’ in the same way those NFT things stored value for a while. There are more bullshitters for crypto, so they’ll keep that hype train going longer, and you can semi work it to get some profit by buying the security low, and selling it high.

There was a post a while ago about how around something like 2020 or whatever, with billions invested in it, and with huge amounts of power/electricity going towards it, bitcoin had something like less than 10 transactions per minute globally. Like it’s absolute dogshit when ti comes to transactions, in part because it’s not a currency despite its name.

Currencies need to depreciate in value via inflation – crypto tends to just store value and go up / down solely on its isolated demand as a nebulous concept. In fact, one of the bragging points from cryptobros is often this misguided notion that crypto is a hedge against inflation – as that ‘benefit’ basically disqualifies it as a proper currency. If you get $1000, and that $1000 is able to buy you some quantity of goods, you need that money to be able to buy less of those goods in the future in order to encourage people to actually use the fucking thing. If you had $1000, but were almost assured that it would be able to buy twice as many goods in the future if you just held on to it for a bit under your mattress, you wouldn’t spend the money… ever. Sorta like those crazy early crypto experiments where uni students were given like 25 bitcoin to see how they’d spend it – and a bunch did exactly what you said in your opening bit, bought pizzas (you could at the time). Bet they would’ve preferred to buy a bunch of houses and sports cars later on, if they’d realised how popular the fad would get. Bitcoin only tends to go ‘down’ in value when people completely exit the currency, so it’s not a valid currency.

I think you’re generally right in your note about it needing to be exchanged. The whole point of currencies is that you don’t want them to sit idle under someone’s bed. Banks/Credit Unions provide savings accounts that pay interest, though typically slightly less than inflation. This is basically a function where because of inflation, you don’t want to have your money just sit under your bed, you want to invest it in at least a savings account/term deposit – but what’s actually happening there, is that you’re committing your money to the financial institution for a fixed period, and they’re subsequently loaning that out to someone so that person can buy a house (typically) – and then their payments on that house, is what generates your interest earnings (and the banks profits). The house itself is a security, with a general stable/safe valuation, so if that person can’t make their payments on the house, the bank can foreclose, sell it, and still pay you your interest. So your savings are generally very safe – especially, frankly, with simple/smaller financial institutions that aren’t trying to do fancy bullshit / aren’t doing any higher risk wealth management type back end tricks. Main point being though, that because of inflation, even people who have ‘too much’ capital, put it into the market, and it generates economic activity as a result.

Crypto, being a security, doesn’t behave too well in this situation either – in that you can’t realistically hold a security and pay interest on it based on being able to use that security to fund other economic activity. Sorta like if someone hands you 10 shares of a stock (which has a variable price), and you’ve gotta figure out a way to pay that person back 12 shares of stock in a year, buy giving those 10 shares to someone else. What if they don’t want shares of that stock? What if the stock price goes down, or up, significantly? There’s just an absurd amount of risk, that would be considered wildly untenable for something like a person’s core savings vehicle. There are some “interest paying” crypto type accounts these days, but that’s a whole shitload of financial shenanigans and cryptobro bullshit. Cryptocurrencies are basically an economic blackhole.

And speaking of governments, anyone saying that crypto is useful because you can send money globally, is a moron. Banks/Financial institutions have the ability to do global money transfers with ease. The reason they can’t/don’t, is because of LEGAL reasons and regulatory restrictions from governments - it’s not some technical restriction that crypto magically solves. Laws like “You can’t let people fund terrorist groups”. Crypto being able to do those sorts of things quickly is just a matter of them not obeying any of the laws or regulations from governments. That’s not a ‘good’ thing in general. Many of the recent pushes from crypto sorts to get places like the States to recognize them, are basically resulting in banks getting less restrictions – which really isn’t a win. Crypto shows up and is like “We like sending money to north korea, so you gotta remove or neuter that whole know your customer thing for fintechs. Here Mr USA administration, we can pay you by buying millions of dollars of your personal ‘crypto currency’ to help with signing the bill. See, isn’t it so much better to have no regulations/oversight on transactions?! It’s win win!”

And the last negative I’ll note, from my pov at least, is that the core mechanics of most crypto currencies is obfuscated and controlled by cryptobros. Financial industry people make money, but they don’t make the sort of explosive, concentrated wealth that you see occur in crypto for the people who maintain those systems. That’s partly because the financial industry is larger, and involves government components – while crypto currencies are often just some techbro goin “let’s fork bitcoin and stick a dog face on it and sell it to morons for big $$$$ then we can FTX it up fuckin in the bahamas with uggos!”. It’s the sort of obvious conflict of interest that they all try and bullshit their way out of – one that typically doesn’t exist in fiat setups, due to the multiple layers, and the role most govs fill in regulating things.

At a personal level, there’s going to be shitty situations all around. As noted, I personally have relatives who’ve been on waiting lists for years for things like basic mobility issues, which is significantly lowering their quality of life (like, they can’t really go out at all, they’re just stuck waiting). That’s largely the result of the health care system being overwhelmed by the surge in population. So not cutting off immigration surges, and not curtailing this sort of thing, is putting local/Canadian lives at risk.

Again, shitty to hear about your friend – and I know looking at aggregates doesn’t really make that any less shitty on a personal level. Best of luck, hopefully they can stay.

What banks in Canada received bailouts, exactly? Even during the 2008 collapse, no bailouts, no small FIs (credit unions) went under.

I think you’re thinking of America.

And in this case, my comment wasn’t about op ex or efficiencies specifically. It’s just a blunt statement that the canadian government can’t handle all the immigration, nor can canadian systems or infrastructure. It’s all crumbling as a result of stupid levels of immigration – which accounts for practically 100% of our population gains for the past however many years. Housing prices fluctuate based on immigration levels – housing costs have been going down since 2024 (before trump and the recent nonsense), the same time that they put harder caps on immigration. If you look at a comparison between the real housing price index and our immigration levels over the past two decades, the spikes and dips match up pretty well.

People unquestionably in favour of immigration don’t look at what it does to the sustainability and stability of existing infrastructure/ecosystems. Introduce an influx of hundreds of thousands of wolves to a pasture, and it doesn’t matter how efficient the 2000 worker sheep may be, they’re all fucked. You can’t instantly create hundreds of thousands of sheep to meet the new demand for sheep from the hundreds of thousand of wolves. Our government can’t manage to do basic checks on even the reported abuses, so it really isn’t any surprise that we have shit like international gang extortion rings in BC these days.

Yeah, those darn conservatives and their meddling during covid. It’s like they didn’t even realise the liberals were in power.

The number of new refugee claims Canada receives each year has surged in the last decade from about 16,000 to 190,000 in 2024, though it dropped significantly to 107,800 last year.

I know a lot of people are lamenting the change, but I can’t help but read this line above from the article, and think about the findings from the recent auditor general’s report related to Student Visa Frauds. The AG report noted that Canada’s government had capacity to investigate 2000 fraud cases per year – but that it received around 75000 such allegations per year.

A huge gap between how people ‘wish’ the country worked/functioned on that front, and the reality.

With a surge of more than 10x in a short period, our government is overwhelmed on this front. Just like our healthcare system is overwhelmed – I’ve had relatives on wait lists for specialists for years at this point. Pretty much all of Canada’s gov functions seem incapable of keeping up, even with bloated public servant numbers (under Trudeau, they hit a record of like 22% of working people working for public sector, iirc).

We need immigration of all sorts, but it needs to be managed at a level we can handle as a country. If our government can’t even come close to processing their basic paperwork in a timely manner, it’d be crazy to think our other systems that require a whole lot more than pushing a button/admin paperwork, such as healthcare and housing, would be able to keep up with the increased demand. Putting in stricter conditions for refugee claims, given that the system is likely overwhelmed by the volume, makes practical sense.

The note at the end of the article doesn’t get enough discussion: a cnn poll showing 100% of MAGA people polled approve of Trump. Including people outside of MAGA, he’s got the worst approval rating ever. But MAGA is all that matters to the administration, they view the rest as terrorists/enemies anyhow – just like how they view other western democracies as enemies these days. CNN may as well say that his approval rating is negative in the IRGC, for all the administration cares.

The benefits of immigration are easy to see on a personal level, the right-wings negatives are discussed more broadly on an aggregate level – and some of those points have some merit, though they can often be addressed by having managed immigration and are mostly negatives in terms of unchecked/unlimited migration flows.

I can’t help think that posting this sort of thing in a neoliberal thread, where the post’s implying it wants some discussion, is just an overt and silly trap for any actual discussions on the topic though.

Also jacking up the value of their recently pirated venezuelan oil win – blowing up those fishermen is a lot more profitable when you throw a couple extra foreigners on the fire.