John Button
403 posts
Very well said. It is not wise to trust the Yankees. Every few weeks on here you will watch them begin to openly fantasize about the full annexation of Canada, as though it were their birthright rather than their oldest unfinished crime.
The problems that afflict Canada today come from a single source: a political class that imports American ideology wholesale and possesses no faculty to filter it. We do not generate our own pathologies. We catch theirs.
And the Americans cannot help themselves. They have lived so long inside the bubble of being the world's only superpower that they have lost the capacity to read reality at all. Geopolitical privilege is a kind of blindness. When you have never had a serious rival on your own continent, never been invaded, never had to bargain from weakness, you mistake your particular moment for the permanent order of things. They believe history ended in their favour. It did not. It merely paused.
What comes next is already visible in the figures, for those willing to look. The republic that imagines itself devouring Canada is itself being quietly dissolved from within. Its founding stock is no longer reproducing. Its southern frontier was abandoned a generation ago, and the demographic centre of gravity moves further south with every census. The Anglo-American core that built the country is becoming a minority within its own borders, and a regime that long ago lost the will to assert any particular identity will not arrest the process. It does not even believe it has the right to. A nation that cannot say what it is cannot defend what it has.
So the trajectory inverts. The American who today dreams of marching north will, within a few generations, be looking north for refuge. The continental map will not hold its present shape. The southern portion of what is now the United States drifts steadily into the Latin American orbit it already half belongs to, culturally and demographically, and the rump that remains will be a contested and exhausted thing. It is then that the real opportunity arrives: a future nationalist regime in the north, secure in its inheritance, extending its boundaries to receive the Anglo-Americans who wish to save themselves from being absorbed by a civilization that is not theirs. Canada will not be annexed. Canada will be the ark.
There is justice in this, and it is worth naming. The Yankees are usurpers of the Loyalist inheritance. They seized our farms, our homes, and our property, drove our people north with nothing, and called themselves Patriots while they did it. The whole edifice was built upon the theft of what belonged to others and then sanctified with the language of Liberty and Freedom. A nation founded on confiscation, moralized as a revolution. That account has never been settled. It is simply waiting.
Fortissax@FortySacks
Beware the Americanizers, who for centuries have cynically pushed for greater and greater integration with the United States, and whose position was originally the liberal one before they were left behind by progressives. These fossils of liberalism would push us into the direction of a declining United States, who at the rate of demographic change, socioeconomic and military decline may not even be a single state in this century. Canadians have always valued stability, and sought to build it wherever there is none. The geopolitical pivot to Europe is less uncertain than the United States, and I believe even post-Trump, no liberal internationalist is going to trust Blue America ever again.
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what problem do you most hope AI will solve in the future?
maybe we can help!
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@matthewswspence It’s actually quite easy. He spends every moment with himself and then 99.9% of his time with people he chooses to.
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Bezos is objectively a very smart man, so it blows my mind that he can’t see the very obvious problems with this logic.
Jeff Bezos@JeffBezos
Thank you. The important part is zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. Best way to put money in someone’s pocket is to not take it out in the first place. Bottom half is only 3% of total tax revenue. But it’s very meaningful to that person. Zero it out.
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@BrandonLBradfor Because all capital gains were made with post-tax money and then also taxed at corporate level.
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Lol the top 1% in the US hold ~32% of all wealth while the bottom 50% hold 2.5%.
Leaving that out as if it's not pertinent is a little dishonest. Labor is taxed at a significantly higher rate than capital gains, and this isn't even bringing up write offs.
Jeff Bezos@JeffBezos
Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.
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@johnbutton @P_Remarks It’s a car company my man😂 I agree they are great cars, and the company deserves a higher multiple than all other car makers. Still tho, it is a car company—low margin, cyclical, and operating in a competitive market. It should not trade at all 50x sales…
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@revenant_MMXX I mean you have literally millions of videos and a few free unjudging AIs to teach you.
I think a lot has to do with comparing yourself to a Gordon Ramsay risotto video vs. your mom happily serving up whatever monstrosity she made with the help of a cookbook.
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Boomers and Gen X deleted home economics to pay for more sportsball shit and now they wonder why their kids don't know how to do anything for themselves
Lauren Chen@TheLaurenChen
Relevant to the debate on dining out is how few young people know how to cook. It's actually shocking. And while we can laugh at Gen Z for this, we should also ask why their parents never taught them. My eldest is my sous chef and has helped me in the kitchen since she was 2.
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@MattWith2Tees @BasedHypnotist Eating out whenever you like, doesn’t mean everyday. I was a child in 90s and neither my family nor anyone I knew ate out or got take-out daily. If anything it’s far more common today than then, if only because the options are so much greater.
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@johnbutton @BasedHypnotist My friends and I grew up in the 90's and we ate out whenever we felt like it.
The ones who didn't do it often bought homes in their early 20's.
The ones who didn't had to wait until their late 20's.
See the difference? See the problem?
Do you have any children?
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You guys really don’t understand how entitled zoomers are about their luxuries.
I didn’t either, at first.
They will absolutely die on the hill of “I deserve daily $30 lunches”
EducatëdHillbilly™@RobProvince
I really had no idea there would be this level of hate, anger and just absolute psychosis over suggesting frugality.
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The annoying thing about boomer-zoomer struggle discourse is the lie you can scrimp and save your way to wealth. If you want to be rich, with no luck or trade-offs, you have to make more money.
You should try to make more money. That’s how this whole thing works.
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@girltummyfan I think Europeans just don’t get the level of choice in the US. You CAN get a $9 coffee at Blue Bottle or a giant $2 one at 7/11.
Not every lunch is sold in Manhattan.
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Germans actually think that a tray of hospital cafeteria food in America would cost $30 and warrant a 33.333% tip
Littoria@Littoria14
This is what an ordinary German factory worker can get at his employer provided cafeteria for 8 Euros: Breaded veal, veggies, french fries and mashed potatoes, a dessert and a soft drink. Anywhere in the USA, this same exact meal will cost you 30, maybe 40 with tip. So no, don't listen to conservatives, they are paid to gaslight you to protect Trump and the GOP. The American economy is structured to maximize shareholder profits at the expense of everything and everyone. That is not how economies work in normal first or second world countries, where there is much more balance between capital and labor.
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@Barry59700119 @pitdesi @im_roy_lee I don't think anyone has a great answer to that. But pretty much every consumption-based business is going with it right now.
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@johnbutton @pitdesi @im_roy_lee Should one use run rate revenue on revenue that's not recurring? Also just a genuine question, idk what industry norms are anymore
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this particular group of white guys have pretty much solved app building and distribution
100k mrr by next month probably
Alex Slater@alexsllater
We fixed flight booking. flysoar.ai
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@im_roy_lee how does a flight booking app have MRR?
do they charge a monthly recurring fee?
genuine question, not a gotcha
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@Empty_America They also don't account for qualitative differences.
It's just frustrating to argue against a no trade-offs misremembered past where everything was as good as today, but also 1960s prices, and somehow everyone was rich despite no one from then experiencing it that way.
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Fast food price discourse is infuriatingly stupid because many of the *same people* relentlessly advocate for higher wages, tighter labor markets, elimination of cheap migrant labor, encourage citizens to refuse low paying work, etc.
I mean can you think at all?
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@BarneyFlames Yes, provided there are still more burritos. We are re-learning productivity from first principles yet again.
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The thing is "society getting better" means fewer burrito slaves
Conor Sen@conorsen
We didn’t have DoorDash and Ubers 20 years ago but also real incomes were lower. Maybe young people today are overdoing it but the whole point of society getting richer is so that we don’t have to forever live like it’s 2004.
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@ChoochSkookum Absolutely but people should look at the cost drivers there. They aren't just standard inflation but actively supply constrained by all sorts of bad actors.
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I think you should pack your lunch instead of eating out every day. But that doesnt negate housing food and gas prices. Boomer arrogance and pretending everything is fine if you just pack your lunch is rather offputting and out of touch.
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@SlumRNA_Dog oh also guess who comprises the majority of the top 10% of wages.... BOOMERS!!
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Not to motte and Bailey the pack your lunch discourse but, while I’m sure zoomers are spending more on lunch, can you really blame them when their only option for homeownership in the city they work in is to win big on the shitcoin casino? Might as well lunchmog your peers.
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@conorsen I mean if you want that you can go visit Japan. Strangely, they can't afford to the same.
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@woke8yearold Cost disease discourse also turns it into a negative (it's a "disease"). You avoid it by having a large sector of desperate workers. This is the implicit trade-off of income equality and social supports. The balking cost of labor is high.
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Lots of zoomers grew up with zero interest rates so they wrongly think hiring a servant to bring them their burrito should be affordable. Google “Baumol’s Cost Disease”
Aleph@woke8yearold
For the same reason that people in the West stopped having servants around the turn of the 20th century. The West is rich, so employing humans is expensive. Cars started off as a luxury while many middle class people had servants. Now it’s reversed. A lot of the time what people mean when they talk about QOL abroad is there are a lot of poor people to employ as servants
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