One of the reasons I don’t run my own webserver, or mailserver any more, or Lemmy/Mastodon instance now, is because I don’t want the liabillity of having to deal with content I don’t control. I’m amazed people run these at all, because it’s trivially easy to end up hosting very problematic content and get the attention of government in truly unpleasant ways.

I cannot imagine anyone anywhere in this chain wants the liability of trying to gatekeep content via ID like this. It’s a technical impossibility, and a liability quagmire.

I said this in another post on this topic: this is a white guy who is shocked–shocked, I tell you!–to find out that the legal system doesn’t just punish brown people.

FINTRAC was freezing bank accounts on brown people with impunity in the 2000s, but white conservatives didn’t care, but oh no, now the law applies to them and they’re finding out that, holy shit, the law is a motherfucker. And do they think it’s unfair to everyone? That perhaps we need to reexamine things and think about civil liberties? Nope, it’s Big Daddy Justin being mean to them, it can’t be that they’re finally getting the experience what everyone else has.

Hell hast no whining like a white conservative who’s found out that the law applies to them, too.

I don’t trust people to write secure code.

I really don’t trust people who run low-margin, sketchy businesses like porn sites to write secure code.

That’s the issue.

Life imitates art.

Companies are about to find out just how expensive it is to remove front line labour.

They don’t care. The executives that made this decision already got their bonus for it. If they have to retrench, they’ll simply try this again in a few years.

Corporate and stock-market incentive structures are…perverse. They incentivize very short horizons, usually a quarter or at most a year. We’d have a much less sick society if those in charge weren’t allowed to realize gains for at least five to ten years.

And yes, I’m aware that communism worked on the idea of a five- or ten-year plan and it had problems with dealing with short-term supply-chain issues. Market-based solutions work great for things like warehousing, logistics or distribution because the feedback is immediate and the costs aren’t externalized. Where the costs are external and long-term, but the profit in realized in the short term, market solutions fail.

We can, but the capitalist class gets, well, intense about labour working collectively.

Premier Danielle Smith announced plans to implement a suite of policies affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults

Someone knows that, if she doesn’t keep the two-minutes-hate going, people will notice how much she and her backers are stealing from their wallets.

Really? A group with fascist tendencies that’s being whipped up by money-grubbing grifters is prone to acts of violence against a marginalized group?

Why, I’m shocked. That has never happened before.

Seems a bad long term strategy.

It’s not a long term strategy. The person who made this decision is thinking about their quarterly or yearly bonus. By the time the problems hit, they’ve long since cashed out.

I’m going to say again if the liberals drop the ball on providing a single payer pharmacare in Canada they’re going to hand the election to conservatives

The Liberals do not want to expand the state. People need to understand this: they’re small-L neoliberals to their craven, money-grubbing core that differ from the Conservatives in that they don’t care who you fuck. They like taxes low, regulations light and the public->private money faucet turned up real high.

Once you understand this, most Liberal (and Conservative) policy makes sense: they want to stay in office, and what services they’re forced to provide have to be “market-based” and involve some way for your taxes to fund some rich dude. This is why “pharmacare” won’t be national and single-payer, it’ll be “market based” and involve some way for existing insurers to make a buck.

Ontario is also not Alberta: Smith’s cheques are signed by the oil industry, and you have to get deep into denialism to whitewash that industry, and denialism comes with a lot of anti-intellectual and protofascist baggage.

Ford’s are signed by real-estate developers and small-business douchebags (and the Venn with them and organized crime on it, well, has some overlap). They’re a very different crew, and they prefer to operate in the shadows. Shouty religious zealotry results in unwanted attention, which is bad for business.

I just got into a debate with an erstwhile Conservative who assured me that this wasn’t something the political right was going to do, and that they certainly weren’t going to try abortion next.

Heh.

When the right-wing across the world is cashing Russian cheques, and support for Russia is becoming a right-wing shibboleth, this is asking a lot.

And frankly, this would come across with a lot more authenticity from someone who doesn’t have callouses on his butt from sitting so hard on the fence vis a vis Israel.

What did they expect?

I mean, seriously, what did they expect? Capitalism gotta capitalize, and I suspect that if our economy wasn’t in terrible shape we wouldn’t be witnessing any theatrical indignation on the part of our leadership whatsoever. They aren’t angry that this is happening, they’re angry they got caught and being made to look bad and are desperately trying to get ahead of the story before they become the story.

This is all theatre to avoid real discussions about how companies and the wealthy were not, and are not, taxed fairly. When you can make a billion in profit a year and pay your executives millions and still do share buybacks and still cut staff, employees and services while still raising prices then you have too much cash on hand.

Tax them. Force them to either put that money back into the business, or pay it to the government. Stop letting them create Scrooge McDuck-style swimming pools of cash that do nothing.

if it wasn’t for the gruesome humanitarian cost, it’s really funny to watch PP twist in response to Israel, trying to figure out how to hold his coalition of light-white supremacists, conservative Muslims and nationalist Israelis.

I miss the old-school “I love money” Bay-Street blues.

“It’s almost as if Canada is accelerating its arms export authorization process amid a genocidal campaign.”

Genocide is good business.

How grim does our future need to look before society slaps itself in the face and demands to have better wealth distribution?

Nothing is going to change until the wealthy fear for their bank accounts and/or their lives.

Want things to the change? Make the Rich Afraid Again.

So let me get this straight: we have to bribe corporations with taxpayer money to get them to attempt to fix the problem they created?

Do I have that right?

Fuck neoliberalism. Regulate them into submission.

I always liked “Timbit Taliban”, myself.

Let’s be absolutely clear about something; vulnerable children will die because of this.

They don’t care. Quite the opposite, really: in their mind, that’s one less deviant. Win-win.

The whole point of anti-trans hysteria, which will become ant-gay hysteria and, eventually anti-whatever-the-ingroup-is hysteria, is to other people and make them less than human, so that their deaths are immaterial, if not encouraged.

Ever wonder how Germany got to the point where it was acceptable to make Jewish people into soap? This is how it starts.