Mike

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  • 33 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I highly recommend taking a look through pages like this: https://www.policyalternatives.ca/news-research/platform-crunch-3-every-party-is-promising-tax-cuts-and-cash-transfers/

    Its really interesting to see how the proposed changes actually benefit different income brackets. TLDR: Proposed income tax changes from the Conservatives and Liberals predominantly benefit the richest tax bracket(s). If you happen to be in those tax brackets, I can see how conservative policies might ‘appeal’ to that demographic.

    Benefit of Proposed Tax Cuts

    In general, when parties propose tax cuts (unless very thoughtfully targeted), they benefit the rich - who already have ample financial resources to pay for things they might need (like healthcare, private education for their children, etc.), while those who get net benefit from taxation through services are net losers from tax cuts… Because cutting taxes necessitates some reductions in service funding to balance the books. (I’m always fascinated when low income voters vote conservative as opposed to NDP.)



  • I’m also a subscriber - and that was my initial reaction as well - but perhaps if they can get more Canadians (to whom that ad appeals) reading the Globe instead of Postmedia, we end up in a better place?

    I still think it’s a bad look if they just ran partisan ads supporting a specific party - I wonder how many stories they ran as promotional / paid content? Hopefully a blend of stories?








  • I was heartened last week when the US pre-sales were delayed but Canada was not… However, here we are.

    I wonder if FX is another factor at play here. With such volitility in the market, and almost two months until release, I can see them wanting to limit exposure to both FX and Tariffs. The easiest way to do that is to wait.

    Interestingly, this tendency to wait applies to almost all business investment decisions when there is uncertainty / volitility… Leading to increased risk of recession caused by the orange man.




  • Surprisingly taxation isn’t hugely different, at least for average income levels, according to the latest OECD report – and we get publicly funded healthcare!

    I suspect many of these wannabe Americans would be in for a nasty surprise when they learn that the US in fact does have reasonably comparable taxes… And limited healthcare coverage, and very poor maternal leave benefits, shorter average lifespan, lower minimum wage, the list goes on…

    I for one, am proud to be Canadian! 🇨🇦

    OECD (2024), Taxing Wages 2024: Tax and Gender through the Lens of the Second Earner, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/dbcbac85-en.



  • Purchased some local onions instead of onions from the US, along with a few other things. Salsa from Mexico. Was a small grocery run, but my purchases would have been 15% American previously - but 0% this time.

    If everyone is doing this, the numbers do start to add up quickly to a meaningful impact.


  • Plasma is great for the flexibility (shortcuts), and so easy these days.

    I was searching for task switcher, expose, etc. And just completely gapped on searching ‘overview’. (Web searches didn’t show it either, possibly because it’s too simple, so nobody posts about it.)

    Next up I might have to play some window tiling (e.g. like i3, sway & hyprland).






  • I also wonder how much the shift toward mobile devices in browser market share (>60% today from nearly non-existent 20 years ago) played into declining Firefox market share.

    Not only was Chrome lean, clean and fast at the time, it was also the default option on mobile for Android. Same for Safari on iPhone. Since (most?) people use the default option, especially if it worked well during early adoption on mobile, it seems pretty understandable why we see chrome / safari where they are in browser market share.

    Anyway, I’m glad we still have options like Firefox, and hope we don’t see decreasing support for the Gecko browser engine associated with the lower market share.