Yeah, China’s bad for this sort of thing.

Then again, the US is explicitly saying they’re going to meddle in EU politics to break up that union, they provide bombs to genocide civilians in the middle east / prop up a government there, they’re essentially trying to scavenge Ukraine while preventing Ukraine from using weapons against Russia, they’re trying to annex Canada via economic warfare and applying tariffs to the same under false pretenses of Fent/drugs, they’re overtly saying they’ll take greenland one way or another (more hostile intentions overtly directed at historic allies) and they’re blowing up fishing boats in Venezuela while calling for a regime change and stealing oil tankers. And that’s not even an exhaustive list of the international shit that the US has done this year alone

So idk. I know there’s nothin sayin they can’t both be shitty imperialist cunts. And yeah, China’s bad for trying to extend their censorship. But in the grand scheme of things I can’t really get all that angry about it given what we’ve seen from the self proclaimed “leaders of the free world” that most democracies still look to as a bellwether / guide and for military and technology dependence.

The orange man likely shouldn’t have been broadcasting out that he’d sell sub-standard equipment to allies, because “maybe they won’t be our allies for long” then.

I know, if America wants to convince the rest of the western world that its arms are top notch, they should provide gear to Ukraine and allow Ukraine to use it without restriction – seeing those arms actually defeat the Russian arms, would be a convincing case that US arms are high quality. Cause right now, that conflict isn’t exactly a winning endorsement of being a US Ally, or buying US kit.

Instead, all we see is the states vulture-circling its client while handicapping their ability to defend themselves with seemingly sub standard weaponry. We see countries like India shifting to Russian arms deals, likely in part because of this sort of thing. Why buy American, if American arms are not allowed to be used against an aggressor nation? Why buy American, if owning those weapons means that Russia can still steamroll you due to America siding with Russia and salivating over your resources?

Put effort into finding someone as a romantic / life long partner while you’re young. Be critical and aggressive in the search (ie. don’t just “be open and let things happen if they happen!”).

Most of the systems and life goals of society are tied to having two people or more in the family unit. Ideally aim for a partner that has similar economic outcomes as yourself, or at least positive ones overall, and who’s personality is tolerable / you can see yourselves staying friends indefinitely. If you’re a reclusive sort, find someone else who also values their space but is still willing to comingle finances/lives. Doing this young is important as there are more options and it’ll generally be easier to find people that ‘fit’ with your lifestyle. Finding someone close to you in age also helps to keep your life-events (such as whether to have kids, when to retire, etc) better aligned.

Everything from paying off mortgage debt, to income tax breaks, to even just having a secondary “fail safe” income stream from your partner, are really significant. Heck, with the right partner you even cut down the costs of things like Groceries (can buy in bulk = savings), chore-times, etc.

The younger you get that leverage, the better the results later on. Consider something like the time crunch many adults feel, between work, chores, sleeping, etc. If you have a solid partner, you can do something like alternate chores and workouts, so that you both maintain better overall health as you age. Eg. one partner does a workout while the other buys groceries/cooks, then the first partner does the cleanup and some light cleaning around the house while the other hits the gym. Having that sort of balance in your 20s / early 30s, will give you a better chance of maintaining your health into your 40s and 50s. There’re good reasons why single people die younger.

I don’t see anything wrong with that second note, translating the position into one about race instead of gender.

Equity-type programs often get started based off of aggregate differences in statistical data based on demographic slices, with good intentions. But I’ve yet to see any cases where they build in a process for removing equity support programs once a ‘goal’ is reached / more parity is visible in the data.

So as an example from Canada, equity employment programs were introduced in the mid/late 1980s to address the imbalance between men and women in the workforce. You can see how this played out in the public workforce data. In 1990, shortly after the leg came in, it was at about 54% men, 46% women. By 2000, it had flipped in favour of women, at 48% men, 52% women. By 2010, 45% men, 55% women – a greater imbalance than in the 1990s, the imbalance which had triggered supports to get put in place for women. That roughly 10% gap persisted through to 2020 at least. No legislation has been introduced to remove preferential hiring for women in the public sector, no legislation has come in to promote hiring men due to the shift in the gender imbalance.

On a racial basis, the same pattern can be seen in our post secondary education grants, bursaries and scholarships. Funding for these sorts of initiatives in Canada allows for them to screen for specific equity groups – what some term visible minorities. The roots of that being based on reasonable equity goals – ie. there’s a statistical gap in education levels for a minority group, so they allow people to target funding to minority groups. However, while these policies have been enforced, white men have become one of the least educated groups in Canada, with about 24% of white men attaining a degree, compared to 40% of asian guys (with the highest rate of attainment amongst chinese/korean guys, at ~60%). White men are still not considered an equity group, and so cannot have funding specifically targeted to them to try and address this equity issue. And we haven’t ‘removed’ the ‘disadvantaged’ minority groups from receiving systemic advantage, even though they are out performing the supposedly privileged majority group. The system quite literally has race-based controls working against white men, with a justification of correcting an imbalance that not only doesn’t exist in the data, but where the data shows white men as significantly worse off. The system is basically designed to kick them when they’re down.

I can highlight that education item a bit more using a personal example. A coworker of mine has a kid going to BCIT, one of our western province’s “leading” tech-type schools. They’re Canadian citizens, recent immigrants from eastern Europe, not wealthy by any stretch. They tried to get financial assistance for the kid through the school, but the advisor bluntly told him there were no grants/bursaries etc that he could apply for, since the kid was a white guy – all the available funding was targeted to different racial sub groups. He would have more charitable funding options available from the system we’ve setup here, had he been a third generation millionaire visible minority.

Dedicating time and effort to focus on a special category of murder and implementing harsher punishments for perpetrators based on the demographic membership of the victim, feels counter to the equitable application of justice for a country at large.

Intentionally murdering a woman because she’s a woman, is in my view little different from murdering a person for any of the other reasons that get lumped together under things like ‘first degree’ and ‘second degree’ murders. This legislation change isn’t about making murder illegal – it’s always been illegal. It’s about making the punishment more significant if the victim is a woman and the prosecution can prove the murderer had any anti-woman comments/viewpoints.

There are examples of women killing men because they’re men – there are a few famous, and more less-famous, cases where escorts, for example, kill their johns because they’re easy targets. There are examples of minority groups killing majority groups because of clearly racist/hateful motives, that get excused because of the demographics of the perp and the victim. The legislation change noted, basically says killing people is bad, but killing women is somehow worse – ie. that the genders aren’t equally treated, and women are worth more / require more protection. To apply harsher punishments unevenly based on demographics is not what I’d consider a fair and impartial system – it’s one that’s been engineered to preference the protected group’s interests over the interests of the broader whole.

Besides, men get killed 2-5x more frequently than women in many western countries – why are we trying to protect the gender that has far better overall results? This is sorta a gender equivalent to giving tax breaks to the rich – they already have it better than others, why give them even more privilege? Add more supports to the demographic that has terrible stats in this area.

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Feminism has a place, but it is explicitly about promoting women’s interests – something which if allowed to continue unchecked, leads to significant disadvantages for men. It leads to the sorts of toxic masculinity backlashes that you see in the states, especially because moderates who question women’s privilege in advanced western economies start to support more extreme anti-woman positions, because there’s a perception that left wing feminist leaning ideologies work against their interests. And they’re right.

An egalitarian approach is better, once you’ve gotten to near parity. Most western countries have been at near parity for generations at this point.

Your note about disproportionate targets is misleading and inaccurate. Femicide is specifically about murders as far as I know. In the vast majority of countries, men are victims of murder more often than women (in Italy, men are victims about twice as often). They have higher rates of being assaulted/maimed at pretty much every age category in most western countries.

What you’re likely trying to gloss, is the oft repeated “victim of domestic violence” stats, which is a niche area of violence that gets used by feminist movements to ignore the arguably greater violence that men face on the regular. This sub-division is even more biased, given that men generally don’t report spousal abuse / are less likely to get injured to the point that they get hospitalized by it. Even after the victims of ‘violence’ includes pretty well all categories, in many western countries the ‘results’ are roughly even between genders – Canada for example is at about 48% of all violent offences being committed against men, and 52% against women. But again, not all those crimes are really equal – men are over represented in fatal / serious violent assaults causing injury far more often than women. They both experience violence at the same ‘general’ frequency, but men are more likely to be left maimed/dead.

Murder’s murder, in the eyes of many. It’s strange to provide additional protections for just one demographic, especially when that demographic is far less frequently the victim of murder.

For years I used to do Soylent for a bunch of meals per week. I stopped when there was a postal strike / delivery issues for it in Canada, and with the US’s recent trends I haven’t really tried to renew subscriptions to it on “fuck you for saying 51st state” grounds, but it was a pretty good product.

The powder option is about $60 for 35 meals, about $2 per meal. Broadly provides about 1/4 daily nutrition per meal, 1/4 daily calories per meal (they assume 4 meals per day if I remember right). It’s also delivered to your door, so no fussing/time spent with grocery shopping. And practically no dishes/cleanup or prep time.

It’s not too ‘fun’, in that all meals basically taste the same. But it’s simple, consistent, scientifically nutritionally balanced.

The current liberal government is far more conservative leaning than the previous one. They’re pushing very authoritarian bills, and effectively going along with much of the US’s ‘stuff’, while attempting to spin a pro-Canada message for public support – like the gov and our media lauding the push to diversify our energy supply by building small nuclear reactors… but glossing over that they require US-provided fuel to run (so we’re literally increasing reliance on US stuff, while the US is busy using that dependence to attack us economically). On the authoritarian bills, there’s stuff like making it so that law enforcement doesn’t need a warrant to get customer information from private companies, and making display of certain symbols/flags a crime. The folks I know who follow this stuff, basically agree that it’s all a bit tepid at the moment, but that it’s still better than it would’ve been under our ‘official’ conservative party, as those guys wanted to straight up do a DOGE-north (and likely still do).

I’d frame it as Canada is still moving along with the Tech-bro agenda from the US at present, though we’re less in to the Christian Nationalist / overtly racist stuff. For example, the coming budget is expected to have items related to OpenBanking/Digital Currencies, which are ideas primarily pushed by tech kleptocrats (there’re obvious reasons they fumble to name specific, quantifiable benefits of those systems for consumers – and it’s because the benefit is pretty much all for big tech).

The party that had a more progressive slant last time around, the NDP, got trounced – deservedly, as they hadn’t really put out anything to persuade voters, and essentially told people to vote liberal if it meant defeating the cons. Our green party, who were even more progressive in policies (and often had big, interesting policy ideas), committed suicide years ago due to their adherence to their party-negative approach to DEI – they literally elected a black lesbian jewish pro-palestinian lawyer lady as their leader, and she destroyed what little support the party had. Eg. she spent all the campaign finances trying to win a liberal-stronghold riding for herself in Toronto; she demanded full control of all social media accounts for the party, which she was given, but then she proceeded to go to news agencies and comment about how the party wasn’t publicly supporting her on social media… the media she controlled… because the party was racist. That sort of thing.

So, as to what they’re thinking, I don’t think they view the US as a potential threat to the same extent as the public. And I don’t think they’re progressive in the old sense of the world, but they’re still progressive relative to our southern neighbours. But I mean, that’s a really low bar at the moment.

Well, it means that profits earned by the Trump supporting business, will support Trump’s agenda, which includes annexing / doing harm to Canada. As it’s a US corp, it also likely means many of the high paying corporate backend jobs go south, removing high income earners from the tax pool. It’s amazing to me that the gov is whining at Canadians about productivity, and grandstanding with ‘elbows up’ rhetoric, but they greenlight sending jobs to the states.

And if it’s taking a more active role in supporting Trump, given that its such a large market slice, they could manipulate prices to gouge Canadians / do harm to Canada in a more direct fashion.

So Trump’d seen the ad three days prior to his supposed late night melt down. And he’s again making large, market disruptive comments on a Friday, which will likely get toned down by Monday/Tuesday.

This just smells like more market manipulation on behalf of wealthy backers that want to fleece people further.

So to the OPs broader point, you’re still participating in the broader financial system/market – the financial system doesn’t “just” refer to items placed on the stock market, it includes any money stored in a financial institution, and ultimately even ‘money’ itself. The OPs position sounds a lot more like a libertarian / anarchist take, stating that all ‘money’ is essentially a bubble with imaginary value. I imagine this sort of mindset is increasingly on the minds of people, Americans in particular, as international trade starts to flounder – the value of the US dollar is, in some circles, starting to cause concern. I think there was a news piece from one of their central bankers a couple days ago, commenting that the value of the American dollar is down 10% against other currencies this year, so if your net worth hasn’t gone up by 11% you’ve taken a loss. Currency values are arguably based on difficult to quantify things – it can be viewed as bubble-like at a fairly fundamental level.

For the RRSP item, typically banks/CUs provide parent accounts and sub accounts, in my experience. So, for example, you can have an RRSP account at a CU which has just cash sitting in it, or that RRSP can have a sub-account Term deposit where the cash is locked in for 5 years and earns 2-4% per annum in interest (essentially just keeping up with inflation) – or an RRSP parent account with a trading sub account. Terms have lower return than the market, in general, but less risk. I’ve personally tended to split my savings between longer Terms in the RRSP for long term retirement needs, shorter more numerous Term Deposits in non-RRSPs that I can cash in for emergencies (taking a small hit if I break the term early), and a Market investment account I handle through my TFSA for now – not really sure if that’s a good approach, but it spreads the risk profiles around, and ensures that I have a baseline of emergency funds available.

In terms of interest rates / fees, if money is locked in for a longer period FIs generally don’t charge fees, and instead you earn a higher interest rate. The BMO Investonline example, I would guess, is a result of that money getting booked differently in terms of their ability to leverage it for lending, and/or it’s shunted over to a BMO subsidiary entity setup to specifically handle market actions, which is subject to different standards/fee structures. I’ve worked at banks/CUs that did that sort of thing for departments like their auto-leasing programs – which was fascinating, as the CU actually had policies in place not to lease cars to their regular financial members, because they were totally fleecing the auto side and knew it (which was deemed ‘ok’, so long as those people aren’t members/can’t vote in elections). There were also likely larger regulatory hurdles if they were to try and cross sell that sort of product.

But the long and short of all this, is basically just … if you’re storing a pile of money in a bank/CU, stick it in a term deposit so that it at least keeps up with inflation / earns you interest, rather than costs you in fees. As an added benefit, moving those funds into a non-demand account makes them a lot more difficult for scammers to get at – because the money isn’t available “on demand”.

Though again, if I’ve interpreted the Ops sentiment correctly, none of this matters from their POV, as it’s all just a house of cards.

Eh? Term deposits/GIC savings vehicles generally just generate interest for the depositor, without fees involved. Demand accounts like chequing accounts / payment oriented accounts, will sometimes have a fee, which will typically get waived if the amount in that account exceeds a certain value (typically around $1000-1500). Been that way forever at CUs. It’s generally because they can use that capital to fund loans, more confidently, if the money’s locked in to a term deposit for a set period – in a simple small CU setup, they’re essentially taking all those deposits, pooling them together to help people buy homes, and charging the borrowers enough to pay both the deposit interest and the CUs operating costs. There’s very little ‘risk’, given that any loan is secured by property, with a loan to value ratio of around 75-80% at the high end – something regulators seem oblivious to at times in Canada, as many cripple industry without cause. They’re actively working to kill small CUs, while also whining federally about a lack of financial industry competition.

But back on topic, I think the posters comment is more trying to imply that all assets/money is a bubble. I’m not really sure why. But whether you have money in property/assets, or money sitting in an account, it’s part of “the entire financial system” that the poster says is a giant bubble.

Eh, I agree and disagree with the image text. There are similarities, yes, but I wouldn’t view it quite as closely connected as the post implies. Main reason being that there’s a difference between using verbal abuse to control someone’s actions – like what it implies an abusive boyfriend would do to control his gf – and using generally third party reference points to construct an admittedly grim world view for a broad demographic group. The manosphere approach is closer, I’d say, to the marketing done by the women’s beauty industry in this regard.

Ie. there are certain trends / norms that women tend to cycle through, and certain beauty standards that people generally seem to expect from women (without digging in to that!). The beauty industry leverages that and puts out products re-enforcing those norms / helping ppl align to those norms. There are lots of people that find alternative body types attractive, and/or that have more realistic expectations. But if you’re a woman who’s obsessed with beauty trends, it can become an unhealthy obsession leading to potential issues like anorexia.

In that it’s toxic when taken to an extreme, and in that its fundamentals are based in “reality”, the beauty industry’s similar to manosphere rhetoric. The manosphere’s “short guys get no girls” mentality is backed by many short guys experiences with dating (especially online, where they’re pre-filtered!); similarly, a fat girl with lopsided facial features will have difficulty, making the beauty industries products/message more enticing/convincing. They both leverage the generally negative real world experiences of their target audiences to ‘ground’ their message. Both movements also have equatable super stars – “Supermodels”/OnlyFans girls/Twitch Streamers/Whatever who are deemed the most beautiful women, and “Tech bros” who are fathering armies of children and touting right wing eugenics-like ideals.

Mostly pointing this alternative comparison out, because I think there’s a bit of grey on the manosphere stuff. An obsession with beauty standards/industry stuff is unhealthy, but in moderation its ok/beneficial; an obsession with “men’s rights”/“men’s issues” is unhealthy, but in moderation it’s likely a good thing. More guys being more conscious about their health, and getting more exercise, isn’t a bad thing after all – and that’s one of the themes in that manosphere clusterfuck.

The meals and ingredients weren’t as good as other services, but it was generally ok. Fresh Prep I found to be a bit more consistent, and the meals tastier.

Yeah, it’s not just that number of people who’d be insurgents, it’s that Canada’s a bit more advanced tech-wise than the Taliban, and the US’s defense infrastructure has predominantly NOT been engineered for decades to repel any sort of land invasions. We also look, and outside of those crazy newfies, we sound like most generic Americans, making identifying potential threats that much more difficult.

Personally, assuming its the local language, I’m fine with the idea.

People who are multilingual don’t always seem to get how it looks/feels for monolingual people – but it’s a way of excluding them from participating in whatever the conversation is. I think back to a camping trip described by an X with her friends, where in most of the group spoke english and chinese – except my X, who only spoke english. Because one or two in the group were more fluent in Chinese, for most of the weekend the vast majority of conversation was in Chinese, which really drove home how isolating / alienating it can be to be the person left out. You’re basically being pre-excluded from a conversation, just to make it easier for communication with someone else – your basic participation is less important than the other person’s ease of communication. My X had no concern about them “talkin bout her behind her back” or anything, they were all friends, but she finally understood how it comes across.

While the majority of the work force may speak another language, the “main” language in a country is to me, meant to serve as a default for business. If I were multilingual, working in a foreign non-english country, I’d expect any business I worked for to require me to use their local language. Even more, when it comes to supervisors/team leads, hearing the conversations can also help you target potential issues – like if you overhear a team member teaching something incorrectly. So there’s a potential business liability type reason to make sure that all team members, especially oversight, can understand what’s getting said if it pertains to the business.

As a foreigner/westerner, I don’t get why Iran would do this at this point. There are western powers in that region that don’t comply with international treaties related to Nuclear weapons/capabilities. Israel being the obvious one, where “no ones totally sure” how many nukes or what capabilities they have. The west also seems to use the IAEA to help it find good targets/sort out logistics for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, be they civilian/compliant with international norms or not.

They’ve been screwed fairly regularly when trying to comply / align with the IAEA and various political agreements on development. I don’t see why they don’t just go strengthen ties with Russia, NK and China, and say “screw you” to the traditional USA-oriented international rules. Not even the USA bothers to follow those rules anymore.

True, and Israel’s hunt for german nazi’s in foreign jurisdictions sets some precedent in handling that sort of thing.