wampus

joined 9 months ago
[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 hours ago

Meh, as this is still being discussed/debated between gov and FN, and the courts have stuck their foot in too, I think it's misleading to make statements with any certainty as to what the end result will be -- the article implying the owners are totally fine, because the writer can't imagine them being forced to leave their homes, doesn't really do the situation justice.

What defenders of this process who bang the drum of "no no! Private property's fine! Don't blame FN, private property owners will be totally fine!" don't seem to be factoring, is that the uncertainty itself is enough to wipe out house values, cause sales/developments to fall through, and so on. And that damage can be done beyond just "instantly losing your home" (which I don't think many people thought would be happening anyhow, so it's sorta a straw man in the article).

Because sure, there may be a 'settlement' where the private property owner keeps their title as is. There may be a requirement that they need to sell it to the FN when it comes time to sell, and that'd be at a discounted price (essentially shifting it to a 99 year lease like other FN properties that gets sold to non-FN). There could be some government buy outs, transferring the property at 'fair' market values as of just prior the ruling, which could make any development of that land at this point, pointless. No one knows. I can't imagine many private businesses/owners wanting to take that sort of gamble on these properties. Especially when it's a risk that's entirely outside of your control as an owner.

That uncertainty is what tanks the prices. Those owners are basically screwed, at the very least, until there's clarity on how the situation is going to get resolved -- and likely longer.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago

Quebec's used it for decades. Provinces could use it to 'notwithstanding' PP anti-trans legislation at a federal level if the conservatives get in next time around.

I don't think your issue is with the mechanism, you're just not in favour of how Alberta's using it on this particular social issue.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? "In theory" you can contact the CB if there are erroneous entries under your name, though to see those you need to get periodic CB reports to see what all is listed there... which can be a pain in the arse to fetch. I admit I've never personally had to cancel/dispute anything though, so I'm not sure how easy that process is first hand.

My personal pet peeve about credit scores in Canada, is that they're all maintained by companies with ties to US parent companies. Equifax is a good example, where tons of sensitive information gets submitted, and it's potentially within reach of the US govt. As an anecdote to clarify why this bothers me -- I recently worked for an org that submits regular data extracts to equifax for credit bureau purposes. There was an error on a submission that required fixing. They told us they were going to charge us ~$20k to correct the error (which is crazy, as the org was a small business). We pushed back, basically pointing to Canada's privacy legislation that states we as an org have an obligation to inform other orgs of issues/mistakes, and that they have an obligation to fix it. As part of that, we asked them to confirm they were in compliance with Canadian privacy legislation.

Instead of answering, they dropped the $20k bill and fixed the mistake.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Relatively minor breach, honestly. Name, address, phone number -- all things that were historically available in a phone book, and are difficult to use to steal an ID (ie. no CC's, no SINs, nothin like that).

You can ask orgs to delete your personal data, and they 'should' so long as its not retained for legal reasons (eg. tax stuff). That said it doesn't really matter, as once the data's out, it's out. Most people I know in Canada just assume that their basic details are leaked, period, due to the volume of leaks reported in Canada annually.

The ones to watch for are CCs and SINs, really. CCs as they can directly impact your wallet, SINs as they can get used in ID fraud / setting up things like loans in other cities.

For CC breaches, you just call in and cancel the CC and get a new one. For SIN breaches, I think there's a process to replace a SIN, but Im not sure, and I imagine its got a hefty wait with the govt / lots of bureaucracy. You can mitigate the ID theft risks by getting Credit Reports periodically, and/or signing up for regular ones with Equifax or whoever. When getting a credit report, I'd suggest checking how its getting run, as if you go through a third party it could translate to 'hits' on your credit score.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

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?

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 week ago (6 children)

So, human rights stuff aside, how/why the fuck do we need a genderised solitaire?

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

who the heck is marlaina?

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago

I like some of what he's saying, hopefully he can reclaim some of the vote for the ndp if elected. I'm not sure who the other contenders are though, and itll most likely end up as a demographic politics type party again just pandering to different niche minority group interests.

I'm not totally sure what the postal banking system he references is, specifically. I've never lived in a remote area, which it seems is where it was more commonly used. But like, 99% of what you need to do with a FI you can do online these days, hell many options are online only with no physical retail locations. I get a feeling that postal banking is basically just an old person "I dont wanna use that internet thing!" type of issue, in which case I wouldn't support it. The oldest generations who are most opposed to updating their skills are also the ones that pulled up ladders/profited from the younger generations current gong show -- they've had enough charity from the public purse.

Besides, feds always seem to forget that many small communities have credit unions, or that credit unions are already there as an alternative to the big banks for most financial service needs. If this guys really about smaller communities/local financial options, he should be bolstering the CUs as an alternative to the banks (though cus are under prov jurisdiction).

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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.

[–] wampus@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

view more: next ›