Why Canada's economy is broken

 This is another of those posts were I was writing a response to something and just kept going. I need to clean this up before it's really presentable, but if I don't post a copy I'll forget parts : (oh and the prompt was "way are Canadian wages so low")

When our economy was strong, companies said they couldn't find people to work, and instead of allowing the inflationary pressure or rising wages, the government decided to allow an increase in the TFW program. ( To be clear it's not the workers fault, as they're getting fucked by the system too) 

It's political decisions. Inflation is bad when it means it costs capital more to hire labor, it's only a little bad when when it means workers pay more for essentials while companies make record profits.

And before you think this is about one party or another, there are differences between the parties, but they all know that elections are won through advertising, so they all respond to those who can contribute more to their campaigns.

Basically if they piss you off, you could maybe decide to vote for another party, but most likely you'll just not vote. So at worst they have to comeback with getting 2 votes elsewhere. So if it comes to voters vs donors, they choose donors interests. 

And then consider the "culture wars" and political parties can try to gain your vote entirely by how much or how little they say they want to further marginalize, marginalized groups. 

They all say they want to "create jobs" so what the voter gets to choose is based on social issues. And to be clear neither side cares much about the marginalized groups. We're just mascots in an advertising campaign. They care about as much as you care about the red M&M guy. 

There was a huge clearing out of the middle class that started around the Mulroney era. 

The classical Progressive Conservatives were cleared out after Brian brought in the GST.

So the Liberals became the go-to party for donations, making them even more focused only on the Monnied class. The new conservative movement was/is focused on removing any barriers to what any capital can do, and the Liberals only want to bolster their specific capital donors. The NDP has (probably  necessarily) decided they have to cater more to the center than the hard left they used to represent. But they have fallen for the culture war myth, and so are now focusing on those issues rather than actually being a voice for workers. 

Basically in Canada, the working class has no voice in politics. 

Canada economically speaking has always been a resource extraction country. We were an anomaly as in most of the world those countries are devastated. Think of most of the global South. 

But because of our being given a humungous territory that we didn't have to actually defend, and having basically no people, the massive amount of resources extracted from us meant that we had a high standard of living as those profits were being spread amongst a relatively small number of people. 

But since the mid Jean Chrétien years the rest of the world started realizing that we didn't need to be treated differently than the other extraction zones. And so the prices offered for our raw materials was put down to match the global South. During that time as our fisheries were becoming depleted removing one of our main products, we tried to focus on developing a higher manufacturing sector. The governments idea was to move from a raw goods economy, to  a "value add" one where the economic gains would come from labor put into the resources before we sold them rather than just the exact of extracting the goods from nature. 

Might have worked too, but then the USA decided to jump on globalization, meaning all the "value add" coming from labor was being done in places where that labor was dramatically lower than ours. 

Since then the only thing Canada has tried to do was slow the rate our wages fall. No actual plan form any party as to what a good Canadian economy would focus on. Just a constant stream of trying to slow how fast we crash. 

We can't compete in manufacturing because other places are willing to let people work for less with less safety laws, and now the knowledge of manufacturing has also been centered around South Asia and China. 

We have fossil fuels, but those are sold at a discounted rate because the USA is our only large customer, we have farmed goods, but commodities are always subject to the lower price of any good that can be easily substituted.

Our manufacturing is weak because anything we can make can be imported cheaper than we can make it paying Canadian wages. 

The idea of a "service economy" is so laughable. The service industries are dependent on the primary industries of extraction or manufacturing. We have to have exports to replace the money that we send off shore when we buy goods made elsewhere. With nothing really to export, we end up reducing the overall economy each time we buy an imported good. 

Harper and JT both relied on immigration as way to get around this. If we "export education" by collecting massive amounts of money from foreign students. And we collect huge sums of money from immigrants that we also import to make up for our negative birth rate. We can make it appear as though our economy is growing. 

But it hasn't. 

And once we collect the money from those immigrants, they become Canadians and we need to have some sort of industries for them to work in. Some system for them to be part of to make Canada profitable. 

And we don't. Once here we basically just drain their savings and any wealth they had in their country. 

They pay to come here they have to use their general wealth to buy homes and cars, after a decade or so once their pockets are empty they realize that they are now just as bad off as the rest of us.

Canadian wages don't ever increase more than inflation, meaning that each year your buying power goes down as you stay in any job. 

So what all of us do is try to get promotions to jump our individual earnings up over the inflation rate. But each job, is constantly getting paid less (in real buying power). 

This has the effect of making each job a lower and lower class job every year. 

If we assume those jobs need to be done, this system means that we are ever increasing the lower class at the expense of everyone else.

Only the true capital class who can move their capital around the world and so can increase it more than the inflation each year escapes this.

A good candidate for a branch in human evolutionary tree

 So I started a response and it kinda spiralled.

And I don't want to post this on social media as I'm sure some asshole will try and use this to argue for eugenic type bill shit. 

But Ii typed alot so I'm positing it here because there's some ideas in here that I want to play with again in the future: 

(For context the question was if creatures that live shorter lives evolve faster than others) 

Yes because evolution only happens at the moments of new generations. 

So we as humans can see so many generations of fruit flies in our 80 or so years of life, where we're likely only able to witness 3 or 4 generations of our own species. The fact that mutations have to randomly happen in a generation, and that mutation has to be non-detrimental to the survival of the newborn. And then the mutation has to also not be detrimental for the chance of that individual reproducing itself. And then for actual evolutionary steps, the environment has to trigger a situation where that mutation actually assists the individual in surviving and reproducing. 

We're never going to see evolutionary change in slower life forms like ourselves or horses or even dogs or cats. Like it only takes a year or so for a dog to reach reproduction age, and we've been able to create breads by selective breading. But we're still looking at dogs. 

This can show environmental selection. But we can't trigger random mutations in each generation. So we don't encounter the evolutionary steps. 

Smaller dogs that have the environmental advantage that people find them fashionable and feed and house them. They are well adapted to the environment.

But they are still dogs. If humans were snapped out of existence, for the most part the onset that survived after a few generations would probably trend back to the larger size that has a better advantage in the wilderness. Maybe one would develop a mutation that gave it a new advantage. And so a new species would branch off. 

Even with fruit flies that reproduce every 24 hours, and us manipulating and controlling every aspect of their environment haven't shown any major jumps yet in our tests. 

We see adaption. But again mutations are quite rare, and when they happen they are often disadvantageous. As they are born into environments that their parents generation were well suited to.

Like it doesn't happen in huge steps, but imagine if a baby was born the same year as you, but had mutated fully working gills. 

 This wouldn't have helped them as they went to the same school as you and sat next to you in every class. Like even if your school had a pool or is near an ocean they could turn it into an advantage in some ways, but ultimately we live in an environment where visual appearance is of utmost importance, so even if he could turn that evolution into a good job, his odds of reproduction would be almost nil. So even a macro mutation that would give advantages, would be a failed mutation, as it happens at a time where the environment leads it to fail.

Mutation happens typically when 2 of the molecules in the DNA sting get flipped. Most of the changes happen in areas of the DNA that don't play a role in our bodies actual development, and when it does happen to that area it's usually bad. Cancers are in part caused by the part of the DNA that tells the cell to stop reproducing is damaged and the cells continue creating tumors. And kill the host.

Or we can look at Downs syndrome. 

It's a relatively common mutation where we have an extra set of the 18th chromosomes (I think that's where it happens, it was years since I was learning about that) 

On the whole it's not a detrimental mutation. As people born that way can live full healthy lives. 

( I just realized I don't know if they often pass on the extra chromosome set to their children) 

Assuming they had a 1 in 4 chance of passing it on, they could represent a likely branch for the human evolutionary path. 

But where I live it was common practice to sterilize these people ( as horrible as that  sounds, the law wasn't changed until the early 70's). So again the environmental conditions were detrimental to the change being passed on. 

I want to be clear, Downs Syndrome in no way makes a person "not human". I'm saying that it's a genetic mutation that has the opportunity to lead to a branch in the evolutionary  tree. 

It's a hanger that doesn't threaten survival, and maybe possible on to their offspring ,(again I dont know that part but seems likely).

What would be required for them to start a new branch, would be for a change to our environment that would give them a comparative advantage. If obtaining food became harder for a few generations and it turned out that those people were able to better deal with that it could lead to them becoming its own community and survival in their own different way from the others. 

Carrying a different genetic makeup would leave the group with its own opportunities for further mutations and its own adaptations to stem from it. 

after a few hundred  generations, if we lived in separate environments and communities, we would be considered different animals.

Evolution doesn't have a goal. Its only a process of describing how changes and reproduction can lead to large changes.

Successful adoration and mutation are successful if they lead to the survival of the creatures carrying those genes. 

hay dad, meet my girlfriend, Rage

 

I don't feel shame for doing what a Uxe1 does when a Uxe1 is left alone.

Partially because shame relates to vicariously wearing someone else's closeted desire, and party because i like being a Uxe1, be that alone or otherwise.

 If im going to be nakedly honest, i have to say i feel like ive lost a little bit of my ability to channel rage into a force in the world. As in the last few years following the loss of my father most of that precision rage has been replaced by an understanding and a feeling that isn't pity, but its pity adjacent. (like without the condescending undertone, its an understanding, mixed with  a sorrow and if i was more invested in his life, it could be cutting, but the distance of our lives severs to now distance me from “owning” any memories of him in a vicarious way… i don't know if that makes sense, for your sake, reader, i hope that all sounds a bit nebulous. 

I don't want to be telling stories outside of class, nor exposing secrets, (nor to actually expose the absolutely unscientific way i experience reality before i filter it down through the callus filter of my 5 senses and logic) but to adequate express what im feeling tonight its going to take a lot of nakedness. Don't worry, its only me who will be exposing myself, but in out puritan infected culture, another's nakedness can trigger your own shame. But take comfort, we both know you're not the one exposed, in fact its likely no one even knows you are reading this, and no one needs to know you did. 

So as im going to take guilty pleasure in knowing this might be our secret moment alone. You get the even dirtier pleasure in knowing that only you know you are here with me. I am alone (like i mentioned earlier) and simply listening to some music with a guitar that can bend a note to an emotion. So we are even. I don't know who you are, and you can't know the sounds that are framing myself in our shared moment . 

Anyways im trying to be better about including others in my understandings, but this isn't about you, its about me… well a part of me.

Throughout my life i've spent may moments alone with music just slightly louder than my ability to think, just being lost in the sound.

( dont get old and deaf because you reach a point where your thoughts will refuse to be out done. And at that point anytime you mange to calm your thoughts you'll be left with tinnitus.)

This isnt ADHD rambling… this is my ADHD rambling as a defence mechanism. I promise you'll be disappointed, because as naked as i feel, this is going t feel like stumbling on Quentin Tarantino's porn collection only to realise it just decades of the socks section of Sears catalogue.

Anyways, RAGE. 

Its been my magic. Rage can overcome any emotion, which makes it handy when your brain neglects to produce seritones or any of the other “ happy chemicals” so the hardware of your body starts to advocate for a simple self shut down. 

Rage wont let you do anything as clean as “opting out of life” rage wont  let you give into another who wants to control you. RAGE Wont Let anyone or anything do anything to you. Rage demands the entire universe stops and responds to you at this moment. 

So i love rage, shes kept me alive, shes driven me past moments where people or physics have wanted me dead. 

And yes over 80% of my existence has been devoted to learning how to appease her. But id of died well over 80% of my life ago had she not been there to override the rest of me.

Im not not have i ever been an angry person. 

Ask any one who knows me an im sure theyll be able to tell you about the one time they saw me mad, and somehow how that was an important moment. But ask a bit more and even those who decide to hate me, will admit that over 99.9% of the time they known of me its not that rage but probably either a “stupid” or “joyus” indifference to reality and only able to focus on finding humour in the moment. This of course requires that they are able to even remember times outside of when rage controlled me.

I don't want to sound like I'm violent, in fact I'm almost pathologically non-violent (another post someday may delve into that) . however I’ve been subjected to “reviews” and “in depth explorations” when rage has simply announced “No” from my mouth. Much more scrutiny that those who had landed kicks and punches on me before i was reduced to allowing Rage control of my mouth. She wanted control of my body too, but shes never yet needed that.

Ok enough back story 

Recently i was alone and sad, and he sad started to set in deep, and so Rage noticed her cue and started to try and refine my experiences through her lens… and nothing. 

Its not like i think i actually hated my dad, but him being gone, and i dont know i have the ability to actively hate anything. 

I dont know if i could sent Rage to even cause someone a headache anymore let alone sending her to “allow” a house fire at their home. 

I dont think shed be absent should someone try and jump me, but i know her just bathing amongst the yeasts isn't enough to prevent all others from even considering jumping me. 

And all this leaves me feeling like i wish i could as my dad if rage ever demanded to be his girlfriend too, and if so, how he decided to live with her 

-this is one of those “ i had no idea it was going there” type of things. Im only posting because i feel like there is something here ill want to revisit some time tin the future 

also i feel like Rage got me talking about her rather than what i was going to say... strange

Some thoughts on ownership

 Well let's start with the easy ones. Ownership is it it's core the right to deny access to others. Our society is currently made up with the idea that the default is that everything is already owned. We never really consider that mabe ownership shouldn't be the natural state of the world. Yes we should have spheres and levels of what can be considered "owned". Like you should 100% own your body. Nobody should be allowed access without your permission. Then we have items that are for supporting and maintaining that body. We should have some basic right to exclude others (like your toothbrush, it seems inherent that I should be allowed to limit who can access and use that). But then we get a bit bigger and the idea of individual ownership seems absurd.

Like my home. Surely I should have the right to exclude strangers from entering into it. But should I be allowed to prevent my infant from coming inside? How about my partner? 

Like aside from situations of assult and safety, it seems absurd that I have ownership of my home above others who also use the space as their home. Our current laws start with ownership of the house and actually do very little to differentiate house from home. 

So it seems that one should have less ownership over their home than their body, and maybe even less than their toothbrush.

What about my garden, here's where a whole lot of other things come into play. My family garden to grow food to enter our bodies seems to have a lot of connection to toothbrush type things, but it's actual land and so has some resemblance to home type things. And that's before we get to the idea of what happens if that garden produces a surplus. Do I own that food that I can't or won't use? So that my right to exclude access includes letting it rot while others starve? 

Like maybe I shouldn't have to allow anyone to come into the garden and do as they please so that it'll prevent my crops from maturing and prevent me from collecting seeds to replant next season. But surely it's just plain wrong for me to let food rot rather than feeding someone starving on the other side of the fence. 

Also what if my gardening skills and system is grossly inadequate. Should I be allowed to deny my neighbor access to the soil when their growing techniques could produce enough for both families to eat and have surplus, and my techniques barley produce enough for my own families consumption. Surely my right to exclude others from that space should also incur some responsibility to all those others that I'm denying. 

If I own a large space if land. That simply means I have a right to exclude all others to that parcel of land. There are 8 billion other people who I'm saying can't use it. My personal wants is to make a golf course. For just me to use. But that land could provide food for some of those others who I am preventing from using it. Surely I have some basic obligations to those that have agreed to allow me exclusive control. 

Shouldn't my right to exclude some obligations as to what's done with it?

What I start to see is that the idea that ownership is part of an agreement starts to crumble. What starts to come through is that ownership is a result and function of force. I don't want to cede to Adam Smith here but, force does simplify the equation. 

Partly because we live in a world that has embraced many of Smith's ideas. But also because it means "agreement" is so much easier to reach when disagreements are settled with killing everyone who dissents until everyone alive agrees that staying alive is more personally important than continued disagreement. 

And that's the real burn for all Leftist ideas. As along as one person or group is willing to resort to force and killing, we will need to develop our own force to maintain any society. This is why "Communism within one nation" is flawed. We will need to use force as our ultimate decider with outsiders. And when that force exists, how do we possibly prevent its use on insiders as well? 

.... I noticed I'm off topic now... Sorry

solipsism taught me that I can chose whats in my world, and that time I exercised my bougie privilege to say if its not in my world its not my problem

 at the beginning of 2022 my fathers death forced me to confront what harboring anger had done to my life. and so the fist part of the year I wasn't allowing myself to carry any anger, without taking the time to evaluate if it was "worthy anger" or not. I simply didn't have the space for it at the moment. time has passed and I'm not running so close to empty. The last part of this year has also marked a decided upturn from the long descent I was in for the last few years. Correlation isn't Causation, But I'm going to keep putting effort into not carrying hate. The comfortable feeling of being right and righteous isn't worth it.

A little over a decade ago, I had made a choice to try and un-distance myself from everyone else. I thought  that if I tried I could stop feeling like an outsider. By simply becoming invested in my interactions I had hoped I could feel like I belonged in them. And its worked. So there is more than a little trepidation that my “cooling” could be the wrong plan. Not having time for the anger, not having space to carry it does seem to be quite closely linked with not having time or space for those that are causing it. I don't want to feel as alone as I did before. And the fact that that distance was probably a side effect of my misunderstood anger in my childhood also adds to the feeling that I'm wading into potentially unsafe water. I’m sure most others have learned the balance in grade school. But here I am. And I’m just now trying to find a way to balance the joy of being involved in the lives I interact with and the benefits of refusing to interact, or internalize with those who would sap my energy and make their deficiencies my focus. 

When I was learning to involve myself, my life had gone through a real upswing, and now as I’m learning to distance myself it appears I'm going through another upswing.
I'm too far distanced to know if when I first developed my distancing behavior if I was going through an up swing or not. But I do know that for the first time I’m making conscious decisions about who and when to allow it, and to put the effort into refusing to accept the burden of anger when it's hoisted on me.
I mean my brain is essentially an electrified bag of meat, and the universe may be predetermined or random, or an unsatisfying mix of the two, so all of this naval gazing is probably emotional masturbation at best. But that's how the end of 2022 feels to me right now. I hope 2023 will continue my feeling of coming back to living my life rather than surviving my existence. And I hope the same for you…. If you're not one of the people I’m relegating  to NPC status as a method to make my interaction with this world work for me.  ;)

the term "idpol" is a slur!

 When you come across the term “idpol” see it for what it really means. 

It's a portmanteau of “Identity” and “Politics”. But its a very particular Identity and Politics the term is condemning. Namely “The Personal Is Political”. A statement by Carol Hanisch (1970), writing about second wave feminism, and often considered the defining trait of 3rd wave. 

Politics as a term means nothing more than “Social Power”.

The users of the term “idpol” are expressly saying that they dont want some peoples identities in power. Even though they won't say it in mixed company, the Identities they want excluded is explicitly clear. By using that term they are saying that allowing power to consider any outsider, its taken away from the “right” purpose of politics. Politics is for Rich White Cis Hetro Men of a Select heritage, bloodline, cast, and family. The longer they are allowed to go the more they would like to exclude from their permitted list.
In politics, we call that thinking “fascism”, although its usually not openly called that until violence and force are used to support the ideas. 

If someone starts using that term in any group you’re in, I advise: Quickly and clearly have them define exactly who, exactly what identities they are saying is muddying up their pure white politics. Don’t let them try and say “it means politics of personal identity”, because, All politics is of personal identity. Which exactly are the Identities they think are not valid enough to be part of the political discussion. Because these people want to try and get you to agree with their bigotry and hate, but they know if they say it outright, most people will not even entertain their ideas, so they want to sneak it in they want to get you to agree with all their hate in broad “Other People” before they can then try and slowly introduce the identities they include in that group.
I won't allow any other topic to continue until the offender will openly retract their hate words. The same way I respond when someone drops any other slur into conversation. We now live in a time where you need to be Anti-racist. Just being “non-racist” isn't enough anymore. When you allow bigotry to go unchallenged, you are supporting those who use that racism to further harm others. The Personal Is Political, and personal attacks are political moves. The term “idpol” is a bigoted and racist slur hidden in conversational tones. But just like calling “liquorice kids” “N***er babies” is racist, and you should call out anyone who tries to act like its ok. Because letting people say it is agreeing that you don't care about how it makes black people feel, you're agreeing  they don't matter.

things that didn't happen; a 2022 barely-fiction horror.

 I wrote a short story I call: Dave Checks Up. 

Just remember this started with things that didn't happen.  Namely this post:

Later that day the police showed up to question her for injecting something into someone without their consent, the victim had told the police that after the initial assault, She and her son  were scared of what else the violent criminal would do. So she ate the almond as told even though she feared the reaction. It would be better that harm happen to her than her son. As soon as she was able to get them both away, she dug out her Epi-pen and injected herself. Then had her son help get her to the emergency room. Once the doctors had her stabilized, she called the police. And now as she sits under observation, waiting for the doctors to say she can be discharged, she weeps… as she tries to figure out a way to find $1300.00 for a replacement Epi-pen, she remembered The $100 she used to bribe the assailant to let her go, was almost her entire budget for this week's groceries. At hte time it made sece to do anything to distract the crazed woman from also injecting and force feeding the deadly nuts to her son. But now, now she had to still keep life going for her and him.

…maybe if she lied about her name she could double up on giving blood. She thought about the cost for a return trip to take a bus the next county over, would she even get enough to make it worthwhile? What if they could tell she'd already given and refused her? how would she pay to get back home?

"A mother must feed her child" she thought, as the guilt she’d been raised by attacked her still recovering mind and body. "What kind of a mother doesn't have an Epi-pen for her child's allergies?"

Frantically, through her tears, her eyes darted around the room looking for something, anything she could steal and sell to fund a replacement shot. But obviously the clinic knew better than to leave anything of value not bolted down. she looked in to the cold mirror bolted to the wall, should she prostitute herself? "Could I even? ... Who would ever pay anything for my ugl..." the door opening cut off her self talk.

"Good News,” a cheery, young, 20 something, nurse whos hairstyle looked to have cost at least a couple hundred dollars, chimed into the room, “the doctor said you can leave now. She smiled as though she had done something great and was awaiting approval, or even applause.

"GOOD FUCKING NEWS? What's good about it? Whats GOOD about Any-fucking-thing?!" she almost screamed, wanting only for this child to see her as an actual person. A real human who had real problems, someone who didn't know how she was going to keep her son fed until next Fridays paycheck. ... But no, that would only cause her to see a "crazy lady", and maybe even lead to a call and social services looking into her parenting. So instead, she squeaked out a small "Oh thank you, sweetie" hoping her voice sounded endearing and not like the old forest witch she felt like. No, even an old forest witch would be better. At least then she wouldn't be desperately in need of $1300.00 for an Epi-pen, and she could feed her child with food foraged from around her house.

It was almost exactly at this time, 13 hours after that evil woman injected her, that Dave, a rookie police officer, only 7 months on the job, finished typing up the file and checking the box that said "not enough evidence or likelihood of conviction to warrant further investigation."