Amazon Defies ‘Economic Blackout’ As Sales Climb During Boycott - "Despite calls for an "economic blackout" targeting major retailers on Feb. 28, early data reveals Amazon sales actually increased during the boycott period. According to analytics from Momentum Commerce, Amazon's transactions rose 1% compared to typical Friday patterns, suggesting the boycott had limited impact on the e-commerce giant."
Meme - "Person A makes $25,000
Person B makes $50,000
INCOME GAP = $25,000
The economy grows. Now:
Person A makes $50,000
Person B makes $100,000
INCOME GAP = $50,000
Capitalist: Yay! We're all enjoying a higher standard of living together!
Socialist: Egads! The income gap has DOUBLED! We need to fix this!"
Fraser Institute News Release: The average Canadian family paid more in 2023 on taxes than it did on housing, food and clothing combined - "The average Canadian family spent 43.0 per cent of its income on taxes in 2023—more than housing, food and clothing costs combined, finds a new study published by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank."
The "rich" must pay more in taxes, so they pay their "fair share"
AT&T Is Stopping Its 5G Internet Air Service in NY Because of New Broadband Law - "A new broadband law is going into effect this week in New York state requiring internet provider to offer low-income residents access to monthly broadband rates of $15 for 25Mbps or $20 for 200Mbps. As a response, AT&T has decided that it no longer plans to offer its 5G home internet in the Empire State... The new broadband law comes into effect after the federal Affordable Connectivity Program ran out of funds last year"
Clearly, the solution is to force them to sell the product
Meme - Jacobin @jacobin: "Infamous for its starvation wages, Walmart just posted staggering first- quarter profits. The surge is a result of its strategic shift toward catering to affluent shoppers while its full-time workers continue to rely on Medicaid and food stamps."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Walmart non-corporate Associates' average hourly wage is $17.50/hour with full-time benefits. Jacobin pays writers $0.07/word, so a Jacobin writer would have to write 250 words an hour continuously to make the same wage as a Walmart Associate, but without benefits."
KLEIN: Canada is digging its own grave: First stop, economic ruin - "Canada is at a breaking point, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We have chased away industry, stifled our economy with reckless policies, and let ideology take priority over common sense. Now, we stand on the edge of a decision that will either set us on a path to recovery or push us further into economic decline. The choice is clear: We either reverse course or collapse under the weight of bad policy and political fantasy. We have allowed our leaders to dictate an energy and economic agenda that cripples our own industries while the biggest polluters in the world — China, India, and Russia — continue full steam ahead, laughing at our self-imposed restrictions. We have killed pipeline projects that could have provided secure, affordable energy to our own citizens and trading partners. We have burdened businesses with regulations and taxes that make it impossible to invest in our own country. We have turned our back on the resource wealth that built this nation. Now, we are expected to believe that more of the same will somehow fix the problem? It won’t. Since 2015, Canada has lost more than $225 billion in capital investment — money that could have created jobs, built infrastructure, and secured our future. Instead of addressing why businesses are leaving, our leaders have doubled down on anti-growth policies, making it harder for companies to operate. We’ve seen massive investments in the energy sector go elsewhere, not because Canada lacks resources but because we have made it clear that investment here isn’t welcome. Take our oil and gas industry — one of the cleanest and most ethical in the world. It has been vilified and squeezed, while foreign oil from dictatorships with no environmental standards continues to flow into our ports. It’s insanity. Natural gas, one of the cleanest and most efficient energy sources, is being demonized by activists who don’t seem to care that other nations are expanding their use of coal. Meanwhile, we get lectured on carbon footprints while countries like China build two new coal plants per week. Does anyone truly believe Canada’s tiny fraction of global emissions is the problem? This isn’t about the environment anymore — it’s about control. The same people who want to shut down the oil and gas industry refuse to acknowledge that wind and solar are unreliable without a massive, stable energy backup. Instead of investing in practical, balanced energy solutions, including nuclear and cleaner fossil fuel technologie, our government is obsessed with eliminating fossil fuels entirely — no matter the cost. Now, we are watching as Mark Carney prepares to take over the Liberal Party and push Canada even further down this dead-end road. His plan? Spend another $80 billion per year chasing climate perfectionism, all while the country’s economic foundation crumbles. Carney and his allies in Ottawa want you to believe this is an “opportunity.” In reality, it is an economic suicide mission. Other countries have already figured this out. The U.S., Germany, and Italy are reversing course, bringing back reliable energy sources and cutting back on their green policies that have failed. But Canada? We’re digging in deeper, ignoring the warning signs, and pretending that we are leading the world when in reality, we are falling behind. We are losing manufacturing because we made it too expensive to operate here. We are losing energy investment because we have strangled it with regulations. We are watching our national debt skyrocket because we spend billions on programs that do nothing to grow our economy. We have done this to ourselves. The solution is not complicated. We need to reverse the damaging policies that have driven businesses, jobs, and investment out of this country. That does not mean abandoning environmental responsibility — it means balancing it with economic survival. We need pipelines, natural gas, and responsible resource development. We need to support industries that provide jobs and generate revenue instead of punishing them with ever-increasing taxes and regulations. We need to encourage investment by making Canada competitive again, not by pushing businesses to the U.S. and beyond. Most importantly, we need leaders who put Canada first — not activists, global bureaucrats, or radical environmental groups. Real people, real businesses, and real workers need sensible policies. The country cannot survive on slogans and wishful thinking, it needs a functioning economy. This is not just about politics. This is about whether Canada can survive as a prosperous nation. If we continue down the current path, we will not recover."
I truly have lost all compassion for the clientele I work with. : r/confession - "I am a social worker of sorts, and I help people get ahead in life. Some people actually want to make a change in their lives and make things better, but I'm learning so much, that the majority of people do not. They would much rather suck the syatem dry then try to make a living for themselves. And it's getting really hard for me to even fake compassion for these people anymore. Oh. You're getting evicted...but you still have your medical marijuana cigarettes. And your beer ? Okay. You don't want to try to get a job because your goal is to get disability because your anxiety is just too much. Okay. Okay. You can't get hired anywhere but you were just offered two jobs and declined then because they were not right for you. Okay. I still keep trying to encourage tho. I know there are people out there who want to change and will."
I truly have lost all compassion for the clientele I work with. : r/confession - "I ended a friendship with a lady because she couldn't afford to buy her son a birthday present. She was able to have a Mountain Dew every day and not run out of cigarettes. She could have gotten him something from Dollar General. Don't bother to get him anything. I went to the party just to give him my gift so he got something. Never spoke to her after that."
Heartless monster!
Lived experience is only important when it pushes the left wing agenda
I like how so many people call this compassion fatigue, rather than realising that "victim blaming" is not actually wrong
I truly have lost all compassion for the clientele I work with. : r/confession - "I had my eyes opened in college when I volunteered for a homeless shelter for a school project. Up until then, I bought the narrative that the homeless were just poor people trying to get by but who were down on their luck, etc. I was blown away when they opened the doors, offered people help finding an apartment, getting health insurance, finding a job, etc. and not one person moved- they all sat around watching tv . All the program volunteers were bustling around cleaning, offering them help, doing chores. I guess I naively assumed people went to the shelter TO access the resources to get out of homelessness, and at the very least the shelters could help them learn job skills by asking them to participate in activities like doing chores, preparing food, etc. Instead it was entirely service oriented going in one direction with a passive group of people who showed seemingly no agency towards improving their lives or station, and because it was voluntary participation, every one of them that I saw that day likely left in exactly the same situation they came in even though the resources were there. I reported back to my class that I found the experience strange, since I assumed almost anyone would take help to remove themselves from abject poverty, right? And being dismayed by it. The teacher seemed to want me to not have that be the takeaway, and made it seem like I should’ve seen this work being done as valuable and life changing, when in reality I just became aware that the problem was so much more severe and that just providing services cannot get people back on their feet if they’re the combination of completely unmotivated and passive to change their life situation combined with having no “rock bottom” so to speak that will convince them that living normally and doing work is better than the alternative. I can see how learned helplessness is a thing- I went through depression and as a young adult struggled finding work and was liable to give up as it being impossible and feeling defeated, but I can’t imagine someone else finding me a job, filling in paperwork, telling me exactly how and when to go to work, and then just not showing up or being unwilling to at least try. I don’t know how you fix that level of executive dysfunction frankly."
Jesse Kline: For the love of peat — how Liberals let moss block development of the 'oilsands of Ontario' - "Poilievre highlighted a story that should have sparked a modern-day gold rush. In 2007, prospectors found vast deposits of critical minerals — including chromite, which is used to produce stainless steel, cobalt, nickel, copper and platinum — in a remote part of northern Ontario, about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, that came to be known as the “ Ring of Fire .” Development of the area was initially supported by private industry, the federal Conservative government and even Ontario’s Liberal government. Dozens of companies began prospecting , tens of thousands of claims were made, billions of dollars’ worth of private investment was pledged, deals were struck with local Indigenous communities and private companies began exploring the possibility of building railways into the area. In 2013, then-Treasury Board president Tony Clement said the Ring of Fire had the same economic potential as the oilsands . The Ontario Chamber of Commerce later estimated that developing the area would create 5,500 jobs and generate $9 billion of economic activity in 10 years. But in 2015, the Liberals were elected, and they seemed to do everything in their power to stymie Canada’s natural resources industry, even though many of the minerals found in the Ring of Fire are essential to the production of electric vehicles and other green energy technologies. A few years after taking office, the Liberals passed the Impact Assessment Act (IAA), which made approving large natural resource projects next to impossible. In early 2020, at the height of the Indigenous-led protests against the Coastal GasLink pipeline through British Columbia, then-environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson announced a “regional assessment” of the Ring of Fire, at the request of a First Nation and two environmental lobbying groups. The federal government noted that regional assessments , which are conducted under the IAA, are intended to “go beyond project-focused impact assessments to understand the regional context and provide more comprehensive analyses” of the “cumulative effects” of the project. In layman’s terms, this translates to “mire natural resource projects in a bureaucratic bog.” Ironically, the bogs of the James Bay Lowlands, where the Ring of Fire rests, comprised one of the primary reasons Wilkinson chose for turning his back on the vast wealth that’s just sitting under the ground, waiting to be dug up. “There is a lot of that area that is peat,” Wilkinson, who had then moved to the natural resources portfolio, said... To further complicate the situation, at the same time, then-environment minister Steven Guilbeault launched yet another review process that he knew would take years to complete. This riled Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who complained that his government had already conducted similar environmental assessments and given them the go-ahead. Even back then, Ford recognized that we had to “get those critical minerals out of the ground as quickly as possible.” At the time, he cited the need for minerals to supply the electric vehicle and battery industries that the federal Liberals were sinking billions of taxpayer dollars into. Now, it would go a long way toward protecting our economy from U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war. But this is Canada, a country where nothing big ever gets done because governments, or the petty grievances of special interest groups, always get in the way. Right after Poilievre pledged to “green-light all federal permits for the Ring of Fire … within six months” and build a road connecting the site and northern Indigenous communities to Ontario’s highway network, Alvin Fiddler, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, said the timeline was far too short and promised the plan would be met with “ fierce resistance .” This, despite the fact that a number of First Nations already have a vested financial interest in future mining operations — the chiefs of the Webequie and Marten Falls First Nations both hailed the Conservative leader’s announcement, saying it would bring “long-term economic opportunities” to the region — and Poilievre promised that further benefits would flow to Indigenous communities, including much-needed jobs, wealth and infrastructure. Developing the Ring of Fire is a win-win situation — for governments that will collect royalties, remote First Nations that have long complained about inadequate infrastructure and few economic prospects, and the Canadian economy as a whole, especially as we face a tariff-induced recession. If it continues to take 10 to 15 years to get a mining project approved in Ontario, as both industry and government say it currently does, this country will be unable to survive the coming economic storm. Poilievre is absolutely right that the federal government needs to ensure projects that are in Canada’s national interest get approved posthaste, and that they bring enough economic benefits to the First Nations that own the land to secure their buy-in. The only question for Canadians is: who do they trust to do this — the Tories, or the party that has done its utmost to hamper resource development and placate special interests over the past decade?"
Left wing economics: climate change hysteria means you must force people to use electric cars and renewable energy, but you can't mine the minerals needed for those things because they damage the environment. So just outsource everything to the third world, weakening your economy and endangering your supply chain, because out of sight, out of mind.
Doug Ford on X - "Team Canada is strong and united. Today, Prime Minister @MarkJCarney and Canada’s premiers agreed on the need to cut red tape and streamline approvals to get big things built faster, including unleashing the enormous economic potential of the Ring of Fire. The prime minister answered Ontario’s long-standing call and agreed to end needless duplication by recognizing provincial environmental assessment processes for nation-building projects. This will let us get shovels in the ground years sooner. Business as usual is over. Let’s get building."
The environmentalists are going to be very upset
Meme - "r/DeepFuckingValue
Costco is quietly slashing prices. This feels wrong.
sus timing
Costco is quietly slashing prices. This feels wrong. I go to costco every week. it's probably the only thing i do consistently. i've been doing it for years, i know how the prices move. lately? everything's discounted. i'm not talking promo tags or little manufacturer markdowns - i mean whole shelves of items dropped 20-40%. across categories. not seasonal either. this isn't normal. prices are supposed to be going up with tariffs, inflation, shipping costs, whatever. instead they're dumping inventory. aggressively. either demand is collapsing or something upstream is forcing their hand. it just doesn't make sense. it feels off. maybe i'm overreacting, but i've never seen price drops like this since i started going. if this is what it looks like at costco - the most stable, boring, buy-in-bulk fortress of consumerism - then i don't really want to know what's coming next. maybe it's nothing. but probably not."
Damjan Cvetkov-Dimitrov | Facebook - ""I usually notice that most people who are vocal against car ownership, are vocal against marriage, raising children, owning a home, land etc. The basic denominator, it seems, is taking responsibility for things. Once one of these anti stances softens, the rest tend to follow. The cure, it seems, is learning to not fear responsibility, but rather to embrace it. It's a fringe thing to notice, and formulating it like this is bound to irk people the wrong way, but I'm seeing mounting anecdotal evidence that thins away as people age, or, more accurately, as they mature. Which, to my mind, confirms the intersection." -@Славко Дешиќ"
Kshama Sawant on X (2020) - "Our Tax Amazon movement has made history! Seattle City Council just voted to pass an Amazon Tax on the largest corporations to fund affordable housing & jobs, to begin to end racist gentrification. This is entirely because of the thousands of working people, unions, socialists!"
‘This is catastrophic’: Seattle payroll tax revenues $47M short as jobs leave city (2025) - "The payroll tax is levied on large corporations in the city, like Amazon and Expedia. Such a steep revenue forecast error suggests high-paying companies or their jobs are leaving the city... Even Harrell acknowledged, “This decrease in revenue is aligned with recent reports of major employers moving thousands of high-paying jobs out of Seattle to other cities in our region.” “Large corporations should pay their fair share and we should be wary when they use job placements to avoid paying funding that our communities rely on, but we also must recognize businesses will make choices based on their bottom line,” Harrell wrote in his statement. “We need to design our tax policies with the full context of our economy and a comprehensive view that ensures we raise the revenue needed to support all of our residents in a progressive way, aligned with our values.”"
Clearly, we need more regulation to solve this, like forcing companies to stay in liberal cities, and forcing them to employ more workers than necessary
Thread by @jasonrantz on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There’s something funny about trying to turn your screw-up into a controversy about Trump. This is catastrophic! Seattle collected $47m fewer dollars from revenue than they thought — while already facing a deficit. What people haven’t realized yet—but soon will—is that the sharp drop in payroll expense tax revenue means jobs are leaving Seattle. The whole point of the PET was to squeeze “free” money out of businesses because the city arrogantly assumed it held all the cards. But what did PET actually do? It pushed Amazon jobs to Bellevue, kept employees working from home (and out of Seattle), and helped fuel layoffs at companies hit hardest by the tax—like Expedia. The catastrophe isn't merely about this particular number. It's about what's going to happen next. And, naturally, Washington Democrats are taking this bad Seattle policy and bringing it statewide. Mayor Harrell acknowledges that big businesses are leaving. But the he offers a strategically naïve statement: "Large corporations should pay their fair share and we should be wary when they use job placements to avoid paying funding that our communities rely on, but we also must recognize businesses will make choices based on their bottom line." Businesses pay far more than their fair share and offer Seattleites high salaries that the city uses on wasteful, ineffective programs. Harrell knows big business already pay "their fair share" but offers his silly quote to try to villainize them, while lionizing his own efforts to go after the businesses he pretends are greedy. But he's the greedy one: he wants more money that he didn't earn so he can continue to misspend it. And he'll target businesses as greedy or deceitful so it can help his re-election campaign."
Matthew Lau: Poilievre's sensible solution to Liberal daycare nightmare - "Statistics Canada reported at the end of 2023 there were 118,000 fewer children in child care across Canada relative to 2019, including declines in every province except New Brunswick. Meanwhile, of parents using child care, the proportion who reported difficulty finding it increased to 46.4 per cent from 36.4 per cent — again, with increased difficulty finding child care reported in every province. To make matters worse, other survey data suggest the poorest families are the ones with the most trouble finding child care. According to Poilievre, Canada has worse child care today because the Liberals’ national program has “shut down private daycares” that do not meet the government-knows-best model. On this, there is little disagreement. Last year, Andrea Hannen, executive director of the Association of Day Care Operators of Ontario, told the federal Standing Committee on the Status of Women that “child care entrepreneurs are being targeted for extinction through the nationalization of Canada’s child care sector.” The Association of Childcare Entrepreneurs similarly said in a recent news release that because of the federal program, child care centres are being forced to cut back on quality and private operators “are being pushed out, reducing parental choice.” The federal government’s anti-business, anti-choice bias is hurting private daycares and producing negative results all across the country... Municipal data confirm the negative effects of federal discrimination against the child care sector. Peel Region in Ontario reports that because of the federal cap on private for-profit access to its program, there are 1,460 private for-profit child care spaces on a waitlist in the region “while non-profit allocations remain underutilized.” As a letter last year from the Peel Region Chair to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities said , federal restrictions on private for-profit suppliers “are contributing to a shortage of available child-care spaces for children and families.” In Yukon, the territorial government has outpaced national child care space creation targets, but as think tank Cardus points out , it was “only able to do so by working outside the federal system, using territorial dollars to fund spaces for a broad age range of children and to fund for-profit facilities that the federal government shunned.” In Nova Scotia, the federal Liberal government announced in 2021 it wanted “a fully not-for-profit and publicly managed system” — so it is no surprise that within just a few years, over 1,000 spaces were lost in the province due to the closure of private sector daycares. Poilievre says he will honour current federal agreements with provinces, but “we’re going to give more freedom and flexibility to parents, providers, and provinces to support the child care of all the kids.” In other words, kids whose parents work night shifts or weekends, and so need different forms of child care than what the government prescribes, or whose parents opt for private child care or home-based care. “We should support all child care options by having more flexibility. Then parents can decide which child care options they favour,” Poilievre said."
It's almost like the goal is greater government control, not affordable childcare
Dustin Grage on X - "My state representative, @MarionONeill1, shares new data from the University of Minnesota:
• 2,100 of it’s employees make more than the governor.
• The 100th highest salary exceeds $350K per year.
How can anyone call this institution a “non-profit”?"
Left wingers claim churches can't be non-profit because some megachurch pastors get paid a lot. So...
Gas prices tumble across B.C. after carbon tax lifted in late-night legislative session
Sharp drop in gas prices across Ontario
A lot of left wingers were predicting that prices wouldn't drop, because greedy companies would keep them high. Even after they fell, some of them were crowing that they wouldn't
C40 Cities on X - "What is degrowth economics & how did a conversation with a loved one spark the creation of an alternative index to GDP? In this week’s episode of Cities 1.5, we speak to researcher @ANGELOSVARVARO1 & @SCI_JGlobal's director to answer these questions. 🎧"
James Lindsay, anti-Communist on X - "They are still pushing degrowth, which is a Communist death cult ideology that's will only apply to the West, allowing the People's Republic of China to rise and take over."
Thread by @Will_Tanner_1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "When was the last time that England and her glorious Empire could have been saved from becoming a decaying, socialist hell? Many say, incorrectly, either WWI, when the empire was exhausted, or WWII when it was bankrupted The real answer is 1911, with the Parliament Bill🧵👇
The fight that led to the Parliament Bill began in 1909, with Winston Churchill's so-called People's Budget By that point, Churchill had shifted to the Liberals from the Conservatives and was allied with Lloyd George to tax the landed elite into oblivion, despite his family being part of that elite. The bill sparked a huge fight that culminated in England declaring war on its traditions and history in the name of socialism. The problem with the People's Budget was that it was the first overtly socialist law to come to England In fact, it was entirely unprecedented and is known today as a "revolutionary concept" because it was expressly crafted to redistribute wealth, taxing landed wealth and income to fund welfare programs of the sort that have now bankrupted Britain Because of its very nature, the bill was a shot across the bow of the landed elite, and fomented a great deal of social unrest and internal anger...
The Parliament Bill was really a turning point for the Empire. Even superficially, it marked England's shift from Victorian/Edwardian prosperity and preeminence to the long, bloody, painful decay of the 20th century. Within a few years, Lloyd George's government was sending England's best to die pointlessly in the fields of Flanders. As they bled out, the families of the Old Etonians who were killed en masse were taxed relentlessly to fund the war, and were financially bled out by endless income and death taxes, as Cannadine discussed in "The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy". But the bigger problem was the shift in mindset and policy that the bill marked. The social shift is what resulted near-immediately. Before the bill, the landed elite, both the gentry and the peerage, were widely honored and respected and seen as the goal state of anyone and everyone... After the bill, much of that disappeared. Estates were taxed at obscene rates, the Lords no longer had power, and global commercial interests won out over the internal landed, agricultural and industrial interest that profited from England-first policy. From then on, there was much more internal unrest and class warfare, whether in terms of taxation or national class war like the General Strike of the Interwar era... the transition from aristocratic government to bureaucratic government meant massive change in what was accepted... And, of course, there's the matter of private property. To a landed gentleman, property is sacrosanct because it is the basis of his life, wealth, and power; that same view generally imbues the classes under him, as they want to be like him. To the bureaucrat, however, private property is a threat. It's a basis for non-bureaucratic power, leads to anti-regulatory sentiment, and so on. So, it's attacked, whether through taxation like death duties, government fiat, or other devices. This happened in England under Attlee, who was elected in 1945 and quickly "nationalized" (stole) everything from railroads to coal mines while taxing agricultural estates out of existence. Harold Wilson picked up where he left off and further destroyed it...
So, before it you had a prosperous and free society led by those with a tradition of service, at little cost to the state, and a vast empire that supplied it with resources. After it, the bureaucrats quickly bankrupted the empire in WWI and II, taxed away its prosperity and gentlemen, and then gave the empire up because they didn't see the point of imperial splendor, glory, and paternalism"
