Fine, but when will I be able to buy a BYD electric vehicle? Words are one thing, actual product availability is another.

Vive Quebec is all I can say! Well done, mes amis.

This in spades. Just like oligarchs’s plan for the inevitable collapse of the financialised global capitalism that has made them filthy rich, is to build billion dollar bunkers and plan to hide in them while everyone else starves and fights over the wreckage.

There are always two ways to deal with a general or public problem. One is to go out and do something, the other is to hide your head under the blankie and try to make sure it does not touch you personally, or your family. The US has been valorising and praising cowardice and selfishness for so long that they now genuinely accept them as virtues…

That’s like… that’s like an open admission that they plan to do corrupt things.

I mean imagine if your contractor said, “Well, I’d like to do this job for you but I want you to agree that you don’t need a quote and you won’t hire an inspector to check my work.” Or if your dealer at a casino said “Let me just deal the hands out behind this screen here where you can’t see what I’m doing, trust me bro.”

Transparency is the only thing that keeps politicians or business people honest.

When they openly say they don’t want transparency, they are telling us that they plan to be dishonest. It’s that simple.

Basically, the Likudnik government in Israel is a big welfare teat for the weapons industries. We the taxpayers see our money taken not to improve living conditions at home directly, but to subsidise selected harmful (weapons-making) industries by way of “aid to Israel”. Now, this helps the people who own those industries and are invested in them and work for them, but it doesn’t help the rest of us any — not like it would if it were invested in our health care system, or schools, libraries, public transit, carbon reduction.

Do we have no mechanism for suppressing duplicate posts? Because this one is in my feed 3x in rapid succession. I mean, the Tyee is great and I support them, and this is an important story, and white nationalists are a security threat everywhere. But I don’t need to see this same headline 3 times in a row…

If this is yet another attack on our public health system, I gotta say that you meet with some authoritarian doctors who minimize or dismiss (particularly female) patients’ concerns in any medical system. At least in the Canadian system you aren’t also dealing with some non credentialled bean counter at the insurance office preventing your doctor from prescribing the drugs or procedures you need. A system that is geared to maximizing profits for shareholders rather than maximizing best outcomes for patients is always gonna be more broken than one whose focus is on delivering health care for everyone.

Not that we couldn’t improve our Canadian health care system, but I have experienced both and believe me, unless you’re rich in the US you also experience long wait times. With the added fun of big co-payments and/or lifelong debt if anything major happens. I lived in the US for about 45 years and thankfully had no really major health issues — despite having a good job and reasonable insurance I would have had my savings pretty much torpedoed if I’d had any major operation requiring hospital stay.

In the US system when you visit a clinic because you’re in pain or have scary symptoms, basically the first paperwork you’re presented with is ‘how are you going to pay for this?” They want proof of ability to pay. The Canadian system felt like heaven by comparison. I’m sure if you’re filthy rich then the US system is more attractive because you can just buy your way to the front of the line and command the time of experts (even if you don’t really need the top tier medicos for your personal problem, you can still hire them). But if you’re just a regular person, you’re much better off in say BC. Alberta, I dunno what to say, y’all seem to be trying to become a satrapy of the US… what’s with that?

But most of the grotesquely wealthy people have been made so morally grotesque by their wealth (or only acquired it by being so) that they almost all seem to be on the other side, bankrolling climate denial and soothing media pabulum. Where are the multi billionaire good guys, the eccentric oligarchs who actually want everyone’s kids to have a decent future?

Whose word do we have that they are “drug” boats? It’s grossly irresponsible for the headline to be written with that presumption.

I often think of an alternative timeline in which the manufacturers of slide rules spent fortunes demonising and smearing the pocket calculator… or the barons of the great hemp, cordage, and sailmaking firms tried to hold back the incursion of internal combustion engines into the shipping business.

That is just how futile and stupid this seems to me.

I guess the difference is that no other industry has ever been so huge, so central, so heavily subsidized by governments, so deeply infiltrated into governments. The fossil fuel industry is unique in human history in its reach, power, and resistance to change.

Yeah, Reddit was getting pretty bad for attempted gamification — “congratulations, you’re on a 13 day posting streak! Keep it up!” And so on. Very insulting to the intelligence.

I did rather like awards until they were taken away. It was nice to be able to give something (even of only virtual value) to someone whose post or comment I really appreciated. And it was nice to get that kind of appreciation in return if I wrote something that was helpful or enlightening to someone else.

But the whole karma score thing… very leaderboardish.