For a rational person, absolutely not. For a sociopathic billionaire, absolutely. Elon probably doesn’t give a fuck about the USA, even if it sank into the ocean tomorrow he would still have enough money for thousands of lifetimes in any of his vacation homes around the world.

Many of those cases happened outside Russia in countries like Britain and Spain. Musk leaves the US on a regular basis too.

This is conjecture but there’s growing evidence that Trump was sharing US intelligence with Putin and would likely do the same again. If you can’t beat them, join them I guess.

I have a sneaking suspicion that when Elon got involved in the Ukraine war via Starlink, Putin reminded him that he might mysteriously fall off a balcony or catch a sudden case of polonium and Elon has become a lapdog for him ever since.

I find it ironic that the federal government sends out carbon tax rebate cheques and the majority of people hate it, but the provincial government sends out random cheques and the majority of people are going to eat it up.

I’d like to preemptively note that both cheques are in fact sourced from taxes. 🤷

Again, I’m no Elon stan. You don’t have to convince me he’s a dbag, and I wish some other competitor would come along with something better.

That’s what the government should do then, help create a Canadian competitor… 🤷

Yes, I agree those factors probably contribute to the fact that the US experiences far more school shootings than any other country in the world, but again while far more infrequent, there still have been school shootings in Canada, Australia, Europe, and many other places.

Keep in mind that I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but if we were to fix the things you mentioned: toxic masculinity is erased from the public consciousness and the government gives free mental health support to everyone, can you guarantee on your life that a school shooting would never ever happen again for any reason? Simple yes or no answer to satisfy Mr. Vance.

Are there ways to lower the number of school shootings? Yes, and you’ve already made some great points.

However, are there ways to prevent school shootings from ever happening again? Well, the answer is unfortunately no. Guns exist and even the strictest laws and bans could never change that. School shootings still sometimes happen in countries with far stricter laws too.

It’s one of the logical traps conservatives love to use though: They lean on the fact that it is impossible to completely fix a problem and thus also dismiss any attempts to improve things even slightly because they still see any imperfect solution as a failure.

The fair market wage is determined by the same market forces of supply and demand. If they can’t find local workers at the wage they are offering, raise the wage until they can. If they can’t afford the wages necessary to staff their business with local employees and still make a profit, then they have failed as a business. Simple as that.

Temporary foreign workers are supposed to fill skill gaps in the economy when not enough qualified workers exist, not to supply cheap labour when employers want to improve their bottom line.

I’d also like to point out that smaller local businesses don’t have the power and money to exploit temporary foreign workers in the way corporations such as Tim Hortons can, putting them at a severe disadvantage to compete with them. These businesses still manage to survive in most markets, but would grow and thrive if the playing field was leveled. Fuck corporations, support small local businesses.

It’s fair that maybe he felt like he could still insert a pro-labour message in the minds of working class Republican voters who were tuned in, but it’s confounding for him to not call out Trump who is representative of the exploitative capitalists he was talking about. That’s the silent endorsement to me, making it seem like the two are not completely at odds.

“This face eating leopard is good! It’s those other face eating leopards you should be worried about…”

I watched the speech live. I actually agree with a lot of what he said, but the dead silence in the crowd when he wasn’t kissing Trump’s ass was all I needed to hear. That speech wasn’t trying to convince Republicans to revolt against their leader, it was trying to soften moderates to vote for a dictator who will crush them at the first chance.

“Maybe if we become friends with the face eating leopards then they will stop eating our faces!”

Total class traitor.

I was one of those strategic voters and I was promised by the Liberals that they were going to have the “last election under first past the post”. That didn’t happen so I decided I am done being dragged into supporting a party that constantly fails to deliver the things I believe in. What I don’t understand is seeing how the Liberals are getting demolished at the polls, why isn’t the new strategic vote to go NDP to stop the Conservatives? They aren’t that far behind the Liberals. 🤷

If you think this is bad, look more into the Canadian temporary foreign worker program which a UN report recently called modern day slavery: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/un-special-rapporteur-migrant-worker-program-modern-form-of-slavery-1.6958592

I always find it funny that people make fun of Starbucks and their funny cup size names when I have to explain to my American friends what “regular” and “double double” mean.

I’ve started using Obsidian with a kanban plugin, though any sufficient kanban style solution would work. I have a to-do column (aka backlog), an in-progress column, and a finished column. I add notes to the cards about what I did and I never delete stuff from the finished column so I can review if I need to re-open or re-do a task in the future.

It’s frustratingly hypocritical that the defense of the pronoun and name rule is justified by “parental rights” when the rules banning medical interventions like puberty blockers actually take away the rights of parents who want to support their child’s gender identity.

There’s another podcast from CanadaLand called Commons (https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons/) that I enjoy a lot, they do mini series that dig a little deeper into topics that come up in current events.