#canada money

[exdivine]

@hystericalgynophobia on writing for FC and reduxx, I’m less afraid of being sued and more worried about doxxing myself.

I will say I was not paid for my writing, which is hypocritical for “feminist” publications seemingly owned by women. Really they just get cash from groups like the Heritage Foundation (far-right think tank responsible for Project 2025), so they can certainly afford to pay writers. This isn’t exclusive to them but more like a media industry problem, I still find it fucked up.

Based on my workplace interactions specifically with Meghan Murphy, Posie Parker, and Anna Slatz, I think they’re conservative *heterosexual* grifters who found the “gender critical” label to be most similar to their beliefs on trans people. They happily licked the boots of Christian conservative men like Matt Walsh, a racist anti-abortion advocate, just because he was willing to publicize the gender critical perspective. I can’t emphasize enough that these people are grifters.

[eternalowl]

Solo doesn’t even get a “you suck” chant it’s just outright “FUCK YOU SOLO”

[praecurokat]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Thankful for class consciousness

On November 27, I'm appearing at the Toronto Metro Reference Library with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

On November 29, I'm at NYC's Strand Books with my novel The Lost Cause, a solarpunk tale of hope and danger that Rebecca Solnit called "completely delightful."

Before the term "ecology" came along, people didn't know they were on the same side. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer – what does the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians have to do with the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere?

But as James Boyle has written, the term "ecology" welded together a thousand issues into a single movement. When we talk about "looking at our world through a lens," this is what we mean – apply the right analytical lens and a motley assortment of disparate causes becomes a unified, coherent project:

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=dlj

Unfettered, planet-destroying, worker immiserating corporate power is only possible in the absence of such a lens. Before neoliberalism can destroy our lives, it must first convince us that we are all disconnected. "There is no such thing as society," isn't just an empty slogan: it's a weapon for dismantling the democratically accountable structures that can stand against industrial tyrants.

That's why neoliberalism is so viciously opposed to all kinds of solidarity, why corporate apologists insist that the only elections that matter are the ones where you "vote with your wallet." It's no surprise that the side with the thickest wallets wants to replace ballots with dollars!

Today, at long last, after generations of deadly corporate power-grabs, we are living through an ecology moment where all kind of fights are coalescing into one big fight: the fight to save democracy from oligarchy.

There are many tributaries flowing into this mighty river, but two of the largest are antitrust and labor. Antitrust seeks to ensure that our world is regulated by democratically accountable lawmakers who deliberate in public, rather than shareholder-accountable monopolists who deliberate in smoke-filled rooms. Labor seeks to ensure that contests between profit for the few and prosperity for the many are decided in favor of people, not profit.

This coalition is so powerful that the ruling class has never stopped attacking it. Indeed, the history of US antitrust law can be viewed as a succession of ever-more-insistent laws enacted solely to make it clear to deliberately obtuse judges that competition law is aimed at corporations, not unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

Rising corporate power and declining worker power is bad for all of us. The failure of successive US administrations to block airline mergers led to sky-high prices and a proliferation of "junk fees" that can double the price of a ticket. The monopoly carriers stand to make $118b this year from these fees:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90981005/airlines-fees-118-billion-dark-patterns

The consolidation of the agricultural sector led to cartels that conspired to rig the prices of our food. These Les Mis LARPers rigged the price of bread!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783

Remember eggflation? Nearly all the eggs in US grocery stores come from a single company, Cal-Maine, which owns dozens of brands, including "Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes eggs":

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/13/business/egg-prices-cal-maine-foods/index.html

With all our eggs in one basket, it was easy for a single company to rig the egg market, blaming everything from bird flu to Russian invasion of Ukraine for doubling egg prices while their profits shot up by 65%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

Antitrust isn't just about monopoly – it's also about oligopoly. The American meat cartel pretends that it's not rigging markets by outsourcing its price-fixing to a "clearinghouse" called Agri Stats:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Agri-Stats gets data from all the Big Meat companies, "anonymizes" it, and publishes it back to its subscribers, who use the service to coordinate across-the-board price-hikes that have cost the public billions in price gouging (meanwhile, Big Meat was able to secure $50b in public subsidies).

For forty years, governments have ceded power to "autocrats of trade" who usurped control "over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

But that era is coming to an end. In the past year, American regulators have blocked airline mergers and promulgated rules banning junk fees. They've dragged price-fixing clearinghouses into court:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-turkey-eggs-and-air-travel-just

They're getting results, too: for the second year in a row, turkey prices are down. Cranberries, too (18%). Same for whipping cream (25%). Pie crusts are down. So are russet potatoes. Airfares are down 13.2%.

The egg cartel just lost a long-running court case over the last egg price-fixing campaign, which gouged Americans from 1990-2008:

https://www.pymnts.com/cpi_posts/kellogg-kraft-secure-victory-in-price-fixing-lawsuit-against-egg-producers

The same fact-pattern that was revealed in that court case is repeated in this year's eggflation scandal:

https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action-Letter-to-FTC-Chair-Lina-Khan.pdf

That's terrific ammo for the FTC, and will doubtless benefit the Democrats running against would-be Indiana senator John Rust, whose family owns convicted egg cartel member Rose Acre Farms and whose wife just stepped down as chair of the board.

One underappreciated aspect of the global war on corporate power is that the same corporations commit the same crimes in countries all over the world, which means that whenever any government establishes evidence of those crimes, they are of use to all the other governments. Competition enforcers from the UK, EU, USA, Singapore, South Korea and elsewhere are coordinating to target the Big Tech cartel. Maybe Google and Facebook and Apple are bigger enough to resist any one of those governments – but all of them?

https://cmadataconference.co.uk/

One notable absence from the anti-monopoly coalition is Canada. While other countries merely stopped enforcing their competition laws in the neoliberal era, Canada never had a good competition law to enforce. Canada's official tolerance for monopolies has allowed a handful of companies to seize control over the economy of Canada and the lives of Canadians:

https://www.canadaland.com/shows/commons-monopoly/

These monopolies are largely controlled by powerful families, Canada's de facto aristocracy, whose wealth and power make them above the law and subordinate the country's democratic institutions to billionaires' whims:

https://www.canadaland.com/tag/dynasties/

At long last, Canada has called time on oligarchy. Last week's Fall Economic Statement included an announcement of a muscular new competition law, including new merger guidelines, a new "abuse of dominance" standard, and Right to Repair rules:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132855021548769282/

The law also includes interoperability mandates for Canada's highly concentrated – and deeply corrupt – banking sector. These measures are strikingly similar to new measures just introduced in the US by the CFPB:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

The arrival of Canada's first fit-for-purpose competition rule coincides with all kinds of solidaristic movements in Canada that are fighting corporate power from the bottom up. Even Ontario, led by one of the most corrupt premiers in provincial history, can't break its teachers' union:

https://globalnews.ca/news/10105600/ontario-elementary-teachers-reach-contract-deal/

It's not just workers who benefit from solidarity: Tenants' unions have formed across the province in response to corporate takeovers of scarce rental stock. These finance-sector landlords have armies of lawyers who've figured out how to bypass rent-control rules and evict tenants who balk. Rather than rolling over, tenants' unions are organizing waves of rent-strikes:

https://macleans.ca/longforms/rent-strikes-canada/

As with Big Tech, the illegal tactics of the rental sector aren't confined to a single nation. In America, Wall Street landlords have dramatically increased the price of housing and kicked off an eviction epidemic the likes of which the country has never seen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset

And as with Big Meat, landlords use arm's-length clearing houses to rig rental markets, coordinating across-the-board rent hikes:

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent

In other words: to fix the housing market, tenants all over the world need to learn the tactics of labor unions. Housing regulators have to learn from agricultural regulators. Americans tenants have to learn from Canadians. These aren't 1,000 different fights – they're one big fight, and the coalition for dismantling corporate power is vast and powerful.

The most powerful weapons our bosses have is convincing us that we are weak and they are strong – so strong that we shouldn't even try to fight them. But solidarity is absurdly powerful, which is why they go to such great lengths to discredit it. In Sweden, the solidarity strikes against Tesla – who refuses to recognize its maintenance workers' union – have spread to nine unions.

Tesla can't get its cars offloaded at the ports. It can't get its showrooms cleaned. No one will deliver its mail. No one will fix its chargers. The strike is spreading to Germany, and workers at its giant Berlin factory is set to walk out:

https://www.metafilter.com/201514/Swedish-Tesla-workers-go-on-strike

There's something delicious about how palpably frustrated Elon Musk is by all this, as he realizes that neither his billions nor his bully pulpit are a match for workers in solidarity:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-23/elon-musk-calls-swedish-tesla-strikes-insane-as-impact-spreads

It's a reminder of just how fragile and weak billionaires are, when we stop believing in them and deferring to them. Rebecca Solnit's latest Guardian column adds up the ways that allowing billionaires to run the show puts us all in danger:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/billionaires-great-carbon-divide-planet-climate-crisis

They are the unelected "autocrats of trade" who control "the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life." They are the force that this new ecology movement is coalescing to fight: across borders, across sectors, across identities. No matter whether you are a worker, a tenant, a voter, a shopper or a citizen, your enemy is the billionaire class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/24/coalescence/#solidarnosc

[awkward-teabag]

Love (cannot emphasis how much sarcasm there is in that word) that an official Canadian government response to high cellphone rates is to switch carriers.

Switch it to what? We basically have three companies since one was allowed to eat the forth (with the government saying it wasn't anti-competition and the company eating the other pinky promising they wouldn't jack rates up). Even the smaller companies have to rent infrastructure from the Big Three so there's only so much they can do if that rent costs an arm and a leg.

And that's not touching on how many "small companies" are actually just subsidiaries of the Big Three. You may save $5 but you're still with Telus/Rogers/Bell.

Or that the actual small companies tend to have shit coverage because they don't have the infrastructure available to them and are prevented from getting it. Or their traffic is throttled in favour of the Big Three's customers. Or both.

Or that they're extremely regional thus aren't an option for a huge chunk of Canada's population.

We have no true options and the government has shown time and again that they're fine with monopolies, in multiple industries, and don't care when said monopolies jack up prices to make shareholders and the c-suite more money at the expense of everyone else. At most there will be a verbal slap on the wrist and a giftcard for $25 that people have to register for, for a decade and a half of price gouging.

It's not talked a whole lot about outside the country from what I've seen and heard but Canada is a country of monopolies. A handful of companies own nearly everything, every province has a family or two that owns a hell of a lot (Nova Scotia is basically owned by one family at this point), and our government ignores it. Even the branch that is supposed to be against monopolies is fine with mergers and takeovers in most cases.

Because, you know, the company said it totally wouldn't use consumers' lack of options to increase prices.

[nakamopapina]

Speak of the devil! Here are the Ben and Ralph.

Freeform kept crashing on me so I gave up before I could fix/finish it,

[toucandrawz]

I recently got the chance to commission the amazing @temeyes!!

RAHH Her art is soooo cool!! They’re so talent, And her art infinitely worth the money!! I was actively giggling every time I got an update.

Explanation under the cut !!

It’s a retirement AU with Nik and Price, where they own a ranch with horses n’ shit, and then they end up adopting my sona (lil cringe but I am free <3), and this is when Tou first met Krupnyy!! (The Horse)

The ranch part is mostly because I recently got a fixation on horses again, so I started drawing them and obviously needed to combine the hyperfixations <3

[catgirltoes]

Epistemic status is there may be some other error but I believe DuckDuckGo is blocking searches about Apple (the corporation). I tried to look up the settlement against Apple in Canada (search: "apple canada lawsuit") but got an error message. I tried searching "apple" "steve jobs" "macintosh" and "macintosh apple" and got the same error message, but "apple pie" and "macintosh applw" both turned up results. My guess would be some sort of filter on search results, since I could bypass it with my totally-on-purpose typo, and it didn't bother to stop me from looking up recipes

[hamiltonsf1]

zo’s saturday

[eleemosynecdoche]

I'm not sure how movies are supposed to be made with anything more demanding than what the averaged student film at a minor film school would require under the presumably preferred world of anti-IP discourse where there are no restrictions on pirating movies or exhibiting pirated movies. After all, making a movie requires gathering a lot of people together and getting them to work towards a common goal of realizing a completed film, and much of the labor involved is not particularly fulfilling in its own terms, but it is frankly incredible to think that any of this labor would be compensated under such a system.

Perhaps all movies would be made on state salaries and with state-owned production firms. My personal preference would be to make movies through conscripted labor at gunpoint, and shoot a grip or lighting technician every so often pour encourager les autres. But I think the most likely outcome of such an unlikely system is that film dies out altogether without any system to enable the complex array of labor necessary to make a movie. Perhaps that's worth it?

[edilma-angel]

Stop putting limits on your life. You are worth everything.

Kik edilmaangel1 add me

[nico-di-genova]

Bridgerton strollonso idea is winning.

[53v3nfrn5]

The 3M Company, which manufactures bulletproof glass, placed $3 Million dollars at a bus stop in Vancouver, Canada with the slogan “If you can break it, you can keep the money” (2005)

[rickylafleurs]

my birthday is tmrw and my family hates me could i get a book from my list because i had to leave anything behind i couldnt fit in a suitcase

[royalteachitchat]

🤣💰💰💰💰💸💸💸🤑🤑🤑

[goldenpinof]

I know you might not have all the info, but just based off what you've observed, is tit selling better than wad? Outside of the uk, I mean.

hard to tell because wad had more shows everywhere, therefore more of them had problems with sales. but right now Europe looks worse than during wad, and i don't see dnp and their team trying to save it via bought ads. lowering ticket prices is nice, but they (Phil) also mislead people by saying Europe lowered it to 35 euros. it's not true, and i think it's also illegal to make false statements in advertising :) some venues didn't lower the prices at all, at least for now.

Australia/NZ now look a bit better that wad. fewer shows but more sections of the venues are on sale and they are selling better.

USA/Canada... are complicated. lots of venues are not matching, so i'm not gonna do mental gymnastics and maths today, i'll do it when i have capacities of all new ones, sorry. the ones that ARE matching:

Portland (OR), Indianapolis, Chicago, Toronto, Philadelphia, Durham, Reading, Red Bank - now better than wad;

Oakland - now worse than wad (linking a screenshot from 2022, so you can see it yourself. tbf, looking at it now, i don't think all sections were on sale but i didn't mention it in my post. so, our capacity in 2022 was less than 3040. now though, now everything is on sale);

Denver - now better than wad (in 2022 we couldn't see the chart, but by ticket selection, everything was on sale and worse than now, i think);

Kansas City - now almost the same as wad, at least for now (there are still 1 month to go);

St. Louis, New York, Fort Lauderdale - now a bit better than wad;

Tysons - now obviously better, although wad sold out this venue as well;

Orlando - now better than wad (if these fuckers aka venue/ticketmaster make "premium" tickets normally priced, it's gonna be sold out).

by matching venues the picture is very hopeful, but if you open each seating chart with available tickets, some are looking scary. even LA isn't half sold, which is very strange to me. but there's still time for everyone except Europe, and USA/Canada has a strong bought advertisement. it's the only leg who is still being promoted on Facebook/Instagram (from Phil's FB), and i see why :) wad had weaker promo, and the Phil factor wasn't there. so, i do think they are gonna be fine even if 10 USA shows lose money.