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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Right, but we have ways to require all automakers to build safe vehicles, commonly known as “safety regulations” that apply to both foreign and domestic companies. The same minimum requirements apply to a Toyota built in Woodstock or a VinFast built in Vietnam. That has nothing to do with tariffs, which are just a tax on consumers on foreign imports. This has nothing to do with protecting Canadians and everything to do with protecting big business.



  • Cardiff, Wales. One of the few places in the world that felt like a Real City while also having its own distinct culture and feel. Every other city I’ve been to feels like the same sort of dull corpo-district monoculture.

    Old Montreal also has a bit of this, but only the central city areas, the outside periphery quickly devolves back into the “this could be anywhere in North America (version francaise)”







  • I think the most important change is to revert taxation to the way it was for thousands of years up until about 100 years ago.

    It used to be that all taxes were wealth taxes. A guy would come around, eyeball all of your stuff, guess how much it was worth, and then demand a cut of it for the emperor/pharaoh/ceasar/etc. If you didn’t have anything valuable, the guy would more or less leave you alone.

    That’s not how it works now. The main forms of taxation are on income and spending, with tax codes carefully written to avoid any “non-income” forms of revenue. There are very low capital gains taxes on stock dividends, zero on most home equity gains, and loads of ways to avoid those if you’re even remotely savvy. Basically, it’s specifically structured to extract wealth from the working and preserve the wealth of the rich. Personally, I paid nearly twenty thousand dollars in income tax alone while the richest guys in Canada paid practically nothing.

    We need to go back to a wealth tax, which worked for 99% of human civilization. It’s easier than ever, considering that every financial institution and government knows your exact net worth down to a few %. The burden needs to be taken off of the working class, and this is the easiest way to do it. No revolution, no eating of the rich – just some rich guys kicking in their fair share.

    Of course, we all know it’s not going to happen – the wealthy are far too powerful to threaten their own interests. Until then, we work the fields I guess.