You are in a boat.

There is a hole in the boat.

Water is rushing in.

Your three boat mates each have a plan: one of them is wearing a lifejacket and pitches that we should do nothing about the hole.

One of them does not have a lifejacket and pitches that drastic action should be taken and the hole should be patched up.

The third one, also equipped with a lifejacket, intelligently suggests a compromise: we will fix some of the hole, but not all of it.

With the hole half fixed, water continues to pour into the boat, but more slowly.

The first boat-mate argues that the hole fixing plan has failed and pitches that the hole fixing plan be dismantled and abandoned.

He is overwhelmingly popular, for reasons that elude you.

The compromise candidate defends his half-hearted hole fix.

The boat mate who proposed fixing the hole is now being fully ignored.

Next to you, a much larger boat, one without a hole, has filled up with hole-worshippers, led by something of a hole, and they have decided to unnecessarily create a hole in their boat.

As you watch them sinking, you think “perhaps the compromise half-hole guy had a good point.”

Things are looking good: you might, if you’re lucky, maintain your half-hearted hole plugging efforts.

In order to appease the hole worshippers, the compromise candidate promises not to touch the existing hole at all.

His plan gains a lot of steam and honestly the pro-hole party is furious. They’re still very popular, though.

Unrelated, a vote is coming up in Canada

My thoughts on trade protectionism are actually kinda fraught?

Like, it turns out the ability of global capital to reposition itself with unlimited freedom just means that all work is done by the lowest bidder, with labor going to the country that has the fewest anti-slave-labor laws and food safety regulations on the books, right?

Trade makes us all richer but protecting a local industry by pushing out gigantic international incumbents - like with dairy, or the CBC - also can be good?

China’s ridiculous digital protectionism utterly sucks, but also China’s software industry wasn’t completely flattened by FAANG like it was in the entire western world.

Lots of local industries here are choked by practices that are so shady they almost feel like racketeering - tomato companies disappearing any stock that goes over quota so that they don’t ruin the price of tomatoes as part of a vast tomato conspiracy, in order to preserve the profitability of tomato growers. Dairy prices artificially inflated so high that a basket of cheese feels like a treasure chest. (i mean, it is)

Canada is just chock-a-block with local cartels enforcing profitable little fiefdoms - with oligopolies that collude to create monopolistic behavior.

Bad for the consumer and yet when trade disaster strikes we suddenly have no oranges but a lot of tomatoes and cheese.

I think the analogy I go to for this is that off-the-grid subsistence farming where you compost your own feces is miserable, but also living in 400 square feet downtown doing gig-work for pennies and doordashing everything you want to eat is miserable:

sane trade policy lives somewhere in the middle, so trade protectionism vs globalism both exist on a spectrum where total adherence to one or the other is going to be… bad

“maybe we need worker protections but also mcdonalds” is the kind of lukewarm centrist take you should expect from me

As a little treat post-US-election I let myself subscribe to r/LeopardsAteMyFace again, but as much as I enjoy the handful of cherry-picked “I voted Republican then lost my job to a Republican” stories, they’re ultimately kind of meaningless.

The “I voted for someone to do cruelty and then they did it to me” stories serve the same kind of dark lizard brain urge as the other subreddits for watching people make stupid decisions and then suffer.

The content doesn’t have to be accurate, or new, or true, or really anything more than a pithy headline that’s fun to say. I’ll make one up right now: “Man who voted for mass deportations is deported by accident” - ha ha! Isn’t that kind of satisfying to think about? Mmm, karmic retribution.

But the buyer’s remorse for Trump in the USA hasn’t set in at all, really: his approval rating remains imposingly high. His terrible agenda is popular: Americans crave fascism.

Following that kind of content will give you a false impression that justice will be done, that stupid, needless cruelty contains the seeds of its own destruction, that the USA will realize it is hurting itself and improve.

But karma doesn’t actually exist.

Worse, I think, that impulse to enjoy bad things happening to stupid people is actually wrought of the same nasty impulses that brought us here in the first place. That’s why I always leave that subreddit before long.

i wonder how the whole western economy collapsing is going to affect my Q2 KPEs

a lot of people secretly wish to be a part of a small, close-knit democratically organized co-living community, except for people who are from big families or people who’ve been very involved in their strata or people who’ve had roommates

i come from a very close knit family and have participated in strata, and as a result my ideal living situation is me, my wife, and my cat on an island that my friends and family visit regularly, then leave

it’s absolutely disgusting that so many people are cheering for the murder of a medical insurance CEO.

Very wealthy people in exploitative industries are people too, and just because they live luxuriously capitalizing on the suffering of others doesn’t mean that they deserve -

you know what

i might have talked myself out of this moral high ground, you do you

i wish BC had ranked voting, so that I could vote for NDP and Green, and the ridiculous joke candidate who’s name is “Jimmy Boxcars” and who promises to establish a BC colony on the moon, and literally everybody but this conservative goon who’s promising to bring law enforcement into hospitals or whatever

i’ll take the guy who’s platform is literally “i don’t know how my name got on here, please don’t vote for me”

as a side note if I can figure out how to navigate any of the bureaucracies involved, I would love to get my name on the ballot as that guy

Would throwing hands help or hurt Jagmeet in the polls?

Personally, I propose a political pillar of “punching Pierre Pollievre” practically promises positive poll performance.

Lately it seems there’s a tonne of anti-anti-natalist discourse in the conservative sphere, like “how dare women decide not to have children, where will new children even come from, what’s wrong with people that they don’t want big families anymore” but i’m not sure what huge baby shortage they are talking about, it seems like there are plenty of fuckin’ people, which makes me think that this has always just been a racist dogwhistle because the babies being born are the wrong ones I guess?

everyone knows that the only babies that matter are the ones your millennial daughter-in-law are not having, how dare she

there are loads of people

if someone has a one-in-a-million mental disorder you could still find 8000 people like that and put them on the same website

how else would you explain Mastodon?

“Hey, gang, let’s see who this ‘millennials aren’t family oriented enough’ discourse is coming from!”

“why it was old man white supremacy all along”

I guess, in a different direction, calling anybody who doesn’t have kids for whatever reason “anti-natalist” is wrong, on account of actual anti-natalists being real weird.

I don’t want kids, but I’m not an anti-natalist.

Hardcore anti-natalists appear to believe that anyone having children At All is on the face of it evil, and believe in the voluntary extinction of the human race, it’s actually an extremely Overwrought Anime Villain belief system.

“Existence contains suffering, ergo, making people exist is doing violence to them.” is an extremely “I am going to have a second boss-phase where I grow wings and deal massive extra damage” kind of philosophy.

It’s fine to want to have kids and to have kids. It’s fine to not want to have kids and not to have kids.

maybe I’m cranky, but “watch collecting” is up there with “yachting” as the kind of hobby that makes me think that taxes aren’t high enough

also, “Stanley Cup Accessories” (not hockey)

If you just learned (or are just now learning) that Sticker Mule is run by a hardcore Maga guy, and would like an alternative, may I suggest not buying stickers? You’re an adult. Don’t pay people for things printed on sticky paper. Replace your furnace air filter. Buy an immersion blender. Save for your retirement.

nation’s women disappointed by three inches, again

I don’t like it when people say “late capitalism”, first of all because it’s too optimistic: it implies it’s going away, which, good luck with that

and second of all because it implies that capitalism has become somehow worse, as if there was a time when it was pleasant and humane, which seems willfully ignorant of a lot of history

when was the kinder, gentler capitalism that we’re hearkening back to? the CIA overthrowing oil-unfriendly democracies? union busting with lethal military intervention? children’s hands mangled in automatic looms? the east india trading company?

i’m not sure how many kinds of social conservatism are powered by an uneasy feeling of “they are being allowed to have a kind of fun that I was not allowed to have and I hate it” but I’m assuming its quite a lot of them

It’s a little known fact, but 100% of carbon emissions are the responsibility of one billionaire named “Peeps McRockefeller” and if we simply eat him the world would go back to being sustainable