Really? I thought he was fine. Karina was better, yes.

Are you trying to make us vote Ford?

The funding includes removal of any ads and making the online streaming service completely free. I like it.

I don’t think this is true. I think there are multiple avenues for which Musk could be prosecuted if Trump wants him gone. All he has to do is say the word and Musk will be in jail on the same day.

That’s the sad part. They only get the first half right. 😂

A theoretical such ideal billionaire would realize their employees generate much more surplus value than they’re paying them in wages. They’d therefore increase the wages so much so that they’re not a billionaire anymore. Instead their employees would be millionaires or more.

“We’re all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive,” Trump said.

🫨

In the short run, yes. However in the long run, their profits have to shrink. They’ll try recovering that from labor. If labor responds with organizing, the oligarchs would see their profits shrink further. Further, the West won’t close up wholesale. Some parts would, others wouldn’t. If people in the insular parts see people having it better across the border, they might vote to have that too. Assuming such a change could happen somewhat democratically. I don’t think the West would be able to insulate long term. But that’s a bet based on a lot of assumptions that could turn out wrong.

While that isn’t going away, chief executives of large pharmaceutical companies are broadening their horizons. Why spend $10 billion acquiring a U.S. biotech with a mid-stage drug when a similar molecule can be licensed from China for a fraction of the price?

So these fuckers are going to run the research sector through the same outsourcing treatment they ran manufacturing won’t they.

I’m wondering what would happen if PRC doesn’t profit maximize their product in the long run. As standard of living increases the cost of labor in China would get close to the cost of labor in the West. If the difference in cost of labor isn’t a significant factor and Chinese product (manufacturing and IP like drugs) is sold close to the cost of labor and materials, wouldn’t that force the Western firms to operate as non-profits? If they can’t make significant profit on anything, won’t that significantly disrupt the current capitalist model?

Some Arab American supporters are distancing themselves, while others see it as a negotiating tactic.

Sunk costed themselves.

I hate playing the con leader slot machine. I wish cons could keep a weak leader over many years like the other parties do. I’d be much happier with Scheer still leading them. 😂

Skeptical because it’s EKOS again but girl do I wish it true…

Can you imagine the meltdown at CPC central if they lose following a 25 point lead?

Communist, Marxist, authoritarian, idiots, CCP (Chinese Community Party) puppets and other terms were trotted out with regular abandon. There was contempt for Starmer’s policies and worldview but most interestingly, there was a sense of pity for all the Britons they ran into.

These words they’re using, I don’t think they mean what they think they mean. 😂

Fill every hole the US leaves open. I’d do the same if I were Xi.

The value of what I proposed is 320K. If I signed up for the scheme, I will get 320K guaranteed by the government pension and I no longer care what my home is worth. If I don’t and the market crashes for whatever reason, I lose whatever the market shaves off from my property’s equity. I guess you wouldn’t like this deal. I would. ☺️

We have to pay for the speculation otherwise from the homeowner’s perspective, they have again just lost all that value, regardless of how it was acquired. That’s literally the whole issue.

I don’t believe this is true and I speculate there are good reasons enough homeowners (like me) will sign up for such a scheme. For example that this shields them from the risk of devaluation which can happen in number of unrelated ways. Another example is that many are worried and understand their children will not be able to afford a home unless prices fall. Ultimately the only way to know for sure is to see how people vote on a proposal like that. Homeownership is around 60% so you don’t even need most homeowners to go along with this for it to have broad support. I’m just speculating enough will. Could be wrong.

You can’t just hand wave and say there’s infinite money if we just raise wages or tax corporations more. We probably could tax corps more but there’s all sorts of secondary consequences to that.

I didn’t do that. I did a back-of-the-napkin feasibility calculaton like you did and I think it shows what I suggested is feasible. No more, no less. If other first world countries have such schemes and are doing alright, likely we could too.

One detail is that the drop in value that we’re replacing with pension is payment over time, not a one time hit, just like the home owner would draw from the equity till they pass away. So a 700K house would be eaten by 35K every year for 20 years or so.

But we don’t have to even consider that. You’re working from the inflated home values backwards. That way you’re making us pay for the speculation. We don’t have to. We’re trying to make the inflated prices irrelevant, not pay the speculators. With that, if you work from pensions forwards you get a different result.

Say we want to add $1500/mo to every person over 65’s income. Coupled with the existing government pension and supplements, this should total 2500-3000/mo. We have ~7800000 in this group (2023 numbers).

7800000 over 65 * 1500 * 12 = 140400000000 = 140.4B. Note we haven’t removed the 4.5M people with defined benefit pensions, or the 1.2M with defined contribution pensions. We can either subtract that and get to 37B or we could get employers to pay into the universal pension system instead, or we could free them from it and have wages rise proportionally or increase corporate taxes. With a universal scheme there is also 3-5% yearly compounded savings that would otherwise go through bank commissions, straight up to the 1%. If you ignore all that and divide 140.4B by the 20.7M working population, you get an additional cost of 6.7K/yr. This doesn’t look impossible and again, it will be lower since it’s double counting a lot of money that are already being contributed by DB/DC.

For cross reference - there are plenty western countries with sustainable universal pensions. We cannot be too out of the ordinary and if anything we’re in a better position to have it, given that we have better demographics and a boatload of natural resources.

If housing becomes affordable, everyone who owns loses some huge percentage of their life’s equity.

Yes but if we’re bold, there’s a known solution to this that isn’t obvious to us people who’ve been brought up in the neolib era. Introduce strong public pensions while building / devaluing housing. Most of those people count on this equity as their retirement. They have to sell and downsize or reverse mortgage to access it. A strong public pension would allow these folks to stay in place. Heck you could even offer government reverse mortgages that serve as / pad their pensions for people with housing equity. As they pass away, redevelop the properties into affordable housing. The prices of people’s homes going up only matter if they need to profit from them. I think for the vast majority of Canadian home owners this is only the case because they don’t have a decent pension. Remove that problem and people’s homes become places to live and their prices cease to matter. Just like the price of the microwave oven they have.

I can’t imagine some scheme like this wouldn’t be popular with enough people to get a broad majority support.

There are probably other bold schemes too.

Now do I think Carney would propose anything like this? Hell no. :D

Bold. Let’s see what these new ideas will be. If he focuses on strengthening labour and mass building public housing he may as well be right about winning the election. I highly doubt that’s the direction he’ll go though.

E: And I watched his speech and while most of it didn’t raise red flags, I did hear “far left” and “we can’t redistribute what we don’t have” which are generally neolib red flags. 😂 On the other hand he did say that wages are too low and have to go up.

He didn’t.