they should rather remind everybody that the united states is a functioning democracy, in case some people need reminding.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
i appear to have had a post disappear around 13:17 this afternoon. weird. if that's the case, i don't remember what it was about. i was responding to emails and housing ads at the time.
(actually, i think t was an unwritten post about trump getting charged with criminal contempt. yeah. ok. i opened it but got distracted and didn't write it. the point i wanted to make was in determining responsibility, and it wouldn't be assigned to trump at all.)
this is another example of real world data completely debunking the religion of market theory, but it won't deter the faithful.
the religion says that if you cut consumption taxes the businesses will pass on the savings to the consumer. you take that on faith. in fact, they seem to have just increased prices and pocketed the difference, which actually makes far more sense and is far more rational and should have been predicted with a moment's though. it turns out it was a tax cut for businesses, not for consumers.
i actually don't blame them. it would have been a pain in the ass to change everything for a few weeks and the liberals seemed to be clueless about it.
at
22:52
i could get a lump sum soon.
i had an extremely solid legal argument to overhaul the landlord and tenant board, but they threw a right-wing libertarian judge at me, and her order is entirely incoherent. she ignored my legal argument entirely, speciously claimed i was arguing about facts, inserted demonstrably wrong "facts" from the initial order that are being disputed on review and then used a judicial review argument to quash an appeal, which is all wrong. i did everything right; she even told me my presentation was outstanding, but she wasn't responding to the argument, but trying to generate a predetermined outcome, and i don't know if there was money involved. the judge actually openly admitted to conversing with the lawyer over twitter, which is not allowed and demonstrates the point. so i have to appeal it to a panel of three judges in london, ontario and am trying to schedule it for april. there's no other way to appeal it faster or better (i tried and got blocked by the court of appeal in a case i'd probably win on appeal but don't have the self-interest to push. the rules say i can do what i tried to do, but there's apparently a convention not to. fuck conventions. the court of appeal is supposed to be a creature of statute. if the convention contradicts the statute, you do away with the convention, but you have to get the supreme court to do it and the point is i wanted a faster appeal path not 15 years fighting a supreme court case). in the mean time, i'm fighting off an imminent eviction on april 1st and preparing for a major hearing on april 3rd where i should be awarded major damages for the harassment i've suffered through over the last two years. i'm trying to get an urgent injunction of the bullshit order in place on the grounds that the facts it relies on are demonstrably false, but the court staff appears to have been instructed to send everything to the gatekeeper, and she's just shutting me right down. i'm not being allowed to win this case. i don't know the extent of it.
now, there's a new gatekeeper. i need to try to get some things to him this morning.
if i can get a large enough award on april 3rd, looking for a cheap bungalow or small house in windsor for under 200K might be the most affordable and smartest option. i went over this a few months ago; it's actually cheaper to buy a house right now than it is to rent an apartment because the hike in interest rates got shifted to renters. as a renter, i'm being forced to pay the interest rate hike on the apartment i'm looking to rent, and i can't. it makes more sense to try to cut the middleman out if you're on the very bottom of the market. if you can sign a 40 year mortgage with enough of a downpayment. your mortgage will be less than market rent, on the same or comparable properties. but i need enough to put down.
i don't think the analysis gets it right, and i think the tariffs are only a part of it. i do agree that the tariffs are contributing to and may extend and deepen the downturn. however, i was expecting this and planned around it before the tariffs were announced. it's partly due to gravity - there's a vicious bubble in canada's housing market that just won't burst and prices have to come down - but partly due to the changes in immigration policy. a lot of these sales, especially in student markets, are indian or chinese or arab investors selling houses they can't rent to students. they will cram 30 kids into one house, and they get here and don't understand how awful that is; to them, it's just like home. if you can't own this old rickety mouldy house in downtown wherever at 0% interest and rent it out at 5000% profit to failing immigrant students anymore, what's the point? you sell it at whatever price you can, just to get rid of it, so somebody else can do maintenance on it. and that's good - these are the kinds of properties we needed back on the market to create more low income housing and the outcome that the shift in immigration policy was intended to create. when doug ford or justin trudeau talks about building housing, they mean building mansions in suburbia, and that's not what we need right now at all, we need more basement apartments, more apartment buildings, etc.
at
11:13
this is why the bankers and investors and capitalist class always wins, they get us fighting each other, and repeatedly brainwash and trick us into choosing nationalism over worker solidarity.
it's divide and conquer.
read the constitutional papers. it's baked into the system to get the black slaves and the white servants fighting each other instead of the landholding class, which, if you look into it, were largely literally european aristocrats. divide and conquer of the working class is the actual foundational principle america is founded on, not democracy or freedom or even property rights. if you want a secondary source, read howard zinn (or listen to a youtube video of chomsky paraphrasing zinn for you).
not only should the auto workers in canada and the united states be standing in solidarity with each other to fight the capitalists, but they should be trying to build solidarity with auto workers in mexico and china, too. the actual solution to the issues trump brings up, to the extent they are valid, lies in unionizing the workforce in china to eliminate their absolute advantage in labour costs, which will of course also benefit chinese workers, which american workers should see as a primary policy goal. stop competing. it's stupid. when we compete against each other, only the bankers win.
at
10:49
why is shopper's drug mart, now owned by loblaws, being allowed to charge a fee to get a pharmacist to extend a prescription? of course they're cramming that down our throats and trying to position their pharmacists as replacements for doctors, as it converts the process of prescribing medication to a for-profit service on the market. if you give capital a foot in the door like this, it will exploit and abuse it, which is why they lobbied for it.
no, i don't want to pay a pharmacist to renew my prescription. shut the fuck up and call my doctor, you fucking vampire.
marketing access to pharmacists as a paid service outside of the structure of ohip should be against the law and punishable with jail time. if this is allowed to continue, it's going to eat away at and dissolve the existing system until there's nothing left of it, as successive services that we assign to doctors in the monopolized insurance structure get taken over by less qualified people that can be paid less to provide it on the market and largely sell it in department stores as a commodity. the universality clause in our healthcare system gets converted to a McHealthCare run by multinational corporations for profit.
the progressive conservatives and liberals are collaborating on a race to the bottom to get to a market failure in healthcare delivery.
at
07:45
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