The only way that could conceivably work out is if everyone collectively protested their student loans together since it’s such a massive problem for so many people. Even then, the government would probably buckle down and try to destroy half the country’s financial viability before they caved and admitted this toxic industry preyed on kids that didn’t know what that debt meant when they signed up for it.

The most effective ads I’ve seen in my lifetime have been podcast ads. I don’t remember shit I see in mobile apps or on most corners of the internet. I could personally sell Blue Apron or Harry’s Razors for all I’ve heard about them on podcasts though. The smartest companies allow the podcasters to joke around in their ads too. My Brother, My Brother, and Me will say some borderline offensive but hilarious stuff in their ads and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t keep me listening to their ads and hearing about the products being advertised.

I think it’s easier to understand net neutrality as something ISP’s can’t do rather than something they must do, since we’ve never seen them really act on it before. It just means they can’t speed up or slow down your internet based on what websites you’re visiting. Under net neutrality, there can never be a deal with Google to give people faster speeds using Google searches than Bing or DuckDuckGo searches.

How a person reacts to being asked about the version of these things most close to them is telling. If they get defensive and deny the event happened, I would hesitate to trust their opinion on other things. Clearly that person bases their opinions on what they want to be true rather than reality. That’s the kind of person whose ideology would likely lead to another event to be ashamed of. If, on the other hand, they admit it was a horrible thing and agree that people should be educated on it and that steps should be taken to prevent it from ever happening again, then I’m more likely to take their opinion seriously and believe that they can be part of the conversations we need to happen to create a better world.

If the contractual details of malt distribution were going to affect the quality of beers you were getting then you absolutely would care. Unity’s pay scheme will lead to studios shutting down if there isn’t pushback. Studios switching to a different engine like Godot will make their games feel different for better or for worse and efforts to help fund these alternate engines will help tip the scale towards that being “for better”.

But most importantly of all, this is a company using toxic and predatory practices. Regardless of the industry (yes, malt distributors too), if we don’t push back against toxic business practices, then companies in many different industries will see avenues they can take advantage of to make extra money. These ideas don’t hang in isolation. If Unity’s scheme works, other businesses will learn from it. This is the reality of capitalism. Whatever methods can turn a profit without generating negative attention will be employed. It’s in the hands of consumers, competing businesses, and the government to keep those toxic practices in check. I mean, why the fuck are we on Lemmy? Ultimately Reddit’s actions are not going to affect the majority of users on their platform. Most of us came here to protest shitty business practices.

No worries. You’re right that it’s absurd that we need to fight so much for our government to protect us from blatant corporate for-profit schemes. There was a time when even the US government at least did us the honor of pretending to not take bribes like this. The Intuit tax return money machine is such an obviously fixable problem. All my 20-something friends in the US know that this problem only exists because of lobbying. It’s disgusting to watch elected representatives become so comfortable with their positions that they feel safe enacting policies that hurt their constituents like this.

For context, the reason I’m hating on Intuit and H&R Block and encouraging people to use FreeTaxUSA is because the first two are the main culprits behind the extensive lobbying that has led to the US government continuing to require people to file their own taxes rather than modernizing and making this process free and easy. My “gushing” is in pursuit of changing the broken system you’re pointing out.

I know City-Data Forums is still pretty active. I’ve used it a lot when deciding on places to move. I’m also a bit of an urban design nerd and there’s a lot of fascinating discussion I come across there.

Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

A lot of people here mentioning scientology’s history of litigation and taking down the IRS and while that’s true, I also think it’s worth mentioning Waco. After the Waco seige the government lost a LOT of interest in going anywhere near cults. It’s just a giant mess that nobody wants to put their ass on the line to deal with. When you’re dealing with fanatics you never know what crazy shit is going to go down. As long as they aren’t hurting people outside of their cult itself, many politicians would sooner keep away from them and avoid having something backfire. That’s not to say that they’re right to think that way. It’s just the truth. Everything changed after Waco. Before Waco, the government was actually trying to do more about cults. The Jonestown massacre involved a sitting congressman getting gunned down. All the IRS shit with the scientologists went down before Waco too. IMO, Waco is the most important turning point to look at to understand why the government won’t touch cults anymore.

What I don’t like about this argument is it feels like the government trying to pass off their own responsibility to someone else. Like, if guns are so dangerous in purpose that manufacturers should be fined for shootings, then government officials should just be regulating gun ownership to begin with. Like, imagine if instead of criminalizing tobacco because of its dangerous health effects, the government said that anytime a person is caught smoking it tobacco companies get fined. At that point you may as well just outlaw the company itself. Which is fine. I have no problem outlawing gun manufacturing. But this is just an unnecessarily roundabout way of doing that. What are we actually accomplishing if we allow people to be shot and then take action and milk money out of the situation? A responsible government isn’t trying to point fingers after a tragedy like a mass shooting and they certainly aren’t trying to make money off of it. No, a good government takes the necessary direct steps to prevent those tragedies from happening again, especially if it’s a common occurrence. No need to dance around a solution instead of tackling it head on.

100% agreed on all your points. I think a lot about government structure and what structures lead to the most efficient and ethical governments. To some degree there isn’t a “perfect system” that will keep the fascists out and prevent the suppression of minorities. At least not a system that allows for healthy change. People will always be persuaded by those ideas unfortunately. Our biggest job is to fight these issues at the ballot box.

With that said, there are some major thinngs we can do systemically to prevent people like Trump from making it to the head of government. The biggest one would be ranked choice voting or one of the other alternative voting methods. Those systems tend to make fringe candidates unlikely to win.

The other big and interesting question I’ve had specifically in my move to Canada is deciphering whether a parliamentary system is fundamentally better or worse than a presidential system in these regards. On the one hand, a presidential system can turn a presidential election into a cult of personality. On the other hand, parliamentary systems by design always hand executive power to the majority party in their legislature. That means split government isn’t an option in a parliamentary system (unless the majority is formed by two or more parties). I thought moving to Canada that I would find the parliamentary system better, but I’ve honestly started to change my mind on it. I think not directly electing the executive here just means people do it through their single vote for a representative. As a result, the representitive as a concept is valued less. Beyond that, people have less direct control over the executive and people like Trudeau have less incentive to represent the nation as a whole. I think I prefer America’s system with a separate election for each position of government. If a country is divided then maybe it’s not bad for its government to also be divided. I appreciated having a Democratic house when Trump was president. It felt safer to have more views represented. This is in contrast to say, Ontario, where once the conservatives won, they had full control of both the provincial legislature and the premiership together, allowing them to get involved in all sorts of nasty business. If the government had been divided, Ford would not have been able to do things like invoke the Notwithstanding Clause.

My brain is powered by memes. Memory? More like memery.

I answered most of this in other comments, but long story short:

Housing prices and cost of living are insane compared to incomes here. And I work in STEM. Think California COL and housing prices with a midwestern salary.

The healthcare system is underfunded and struggling. You can spend a day on the phone calling every family doctor in an area and not find a single one accepting new patients. We did exactly that. Called 32 offices and nothing. The ER has nightmare wait times and walk-in clinics are not able to provide the care people need because they have such a large volume to work through.

No major political figures are offering good solutions to these problems. In fact, they’re using wedge issues from the US to stir up their respective bases instead of even looking inwards at Canada. Conservative leader, Pierre Pollievre, recently called Trudeau a marxist! I’ve heard comservatives ranting and raving about trans people instead of caring about doing anything productive. Meanwhile, Trudeau’s admin was focused on a toothless gun ban when guns aren’t a major problem here like they are in the US. The lack of a gun culture is actually one of my big positives here, so I don’t know why Trudeau is focusing on things like that when there are major crises at hand here related to the costs of living.

There’s a lot of corruption too. Trudeau is in the pocket of big businesses including the telecom triopoly (Rogers, Bell Canada, and Telus). Trudeau placed a former telecom big wig in charge of the CRTC, the Canadian equivalent of the US FCC. They have refused to allow MVNOs into Canada. Those are those third party cell companies like Mint Mobile that allow cheaper phone plans in the US. This refusal is despite Canada famously having overexpensive internet and cell phone plans due to the tripoloy. The insanity creeps into everything related to cell phones and the internet here. As an example, I am allowed only 3 voice mail messages in my inbox unless I pay more. I also have to pay long distance for calls to the US, something that isn’t true with US telecoms for calls to Canada. As someone who works in telecom, I can tell you that these kinds of fees are bullshit and cooked up given how modern cell networks work. I have had to pay $50 for an accidental one hour call to the US.

Anyways, that’s all not even to mention Trudeau’s scandals. Namely the SNC-Lavalin Affair and the Aga Khan Affair.

And all of that is just the liberals. The conservatives are no better. Particularly in Ontario, the premier (governor equivalent) here, Doug Ford, has been inundated with scandals. These include his scheme to give away preserved lands through under-the-table deals, his decision to put his unqualified nephew into a ministerial position in government, and an attempt to use an exception in the Constitution to freeze people’s rights to strike.

These scandals are all so frustrating, but what makes them unbearable is that there just isn’t the political willpower here to scrutinize these politicians and bring them to justice. Both Doug Ford and Trudeau were reelected despite their scandals. Parties aren’t offering good alternatives and the candidate selection process for parties in Canada is far less transparent than it is in the US, so political activism is that much harder.

Unless Canada gets its shit together soon, you’re going to be hearing negative big item stories coming from here not too long from now. Right now the conservatives are winning federal approval polls and there looks to be a good chance that their leader, Pierre Pollievre, could be PM come 2025. As much as I am not a fan of Trudeau, Pollievre would be even worse. Canada really needs there to be a political movement that realigns the current toxic party dynamics. People here just seem so disengaged from politics that I don’t foresee anything changing anytime soon.

Pollievre called Trudeau a marxist the other day. It’s the same empty rhetorical bullshit that Republicans in the US love to throw around. The CPC is headed on the same exact path that US Republicans were on a decade ago or so.

Housing has been one of the top issues for me. That mixed with comparitvely low incomes. I have a bachelors in a STEM field and I struggle to find places offering more than $60k/yr CAD. In US dollars that’s like $40kish/yr. Whereas I’m looking at close to a million dollars CAD for a house in some parts of Ontario. It’s absurd.

The other big thing has been the healthcare system. It was the big draw for me. But it’s severely underfunded and bursting at the seams. My wife called 32 family doctor’s offices the other day and couldn’t find one that would take us as patients. ER waits are a nightmare and walk in clinics are crowded and overworked.

There are also issues with government corruption and poor candidate choices in the major parties. I went into that in another comment so I won’t right here.

The best thing about Canada has been the lack of a police state and the lack of a gun culture.

If you’re worried about the stripping of rights from other humans and unadulterated corruption, then I would caution you about Canada.

Quick history lesson: Canada only created their constitution in the 80’s after centuries of British rule, both direct and indirect. When creating their constitution they ran into some major issues with provinces needing to get on board, just like the drama that the US faced with their Articles of Confederation and getting the states to get on board. As a result, some exemptions to the constitution were put in place to strengthen provincial power and weaken federal power. Specifically relevant right now is something called the “Notwithstanding Clause”. This clause allows provincial premiers (akin to governors in the US) to freeze certain rights in the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” (akin to the US Bill of Rights) at will until the next election. The current premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, has openly thrown this ability around to attempt to suppress strikes. That’s right, to end strikes that he didn’t like, he attempted to remove the literal right of the workers to strike. And this was a constitutionally enshrined power. So be wary, democratic backsliding is a problem everywhere and Canada is no safe haven from it.

Right now, Trudeau is exceedingly unpopular in Canada because housing prices and the cost of living is absolutely spiraling out of control. The conservative party is offering a horrible and corrupt man, Pollievre, as an alternative. He will only be worse for Canada. The third party, the NDP, has not been being taken seriously here (though they have my support). The NDP has been part of the currently formed government, which has caused them to take a hit to their approval. As it stands now, polls are favoring conservatives.

In terms of provincial politics, most of it is a shitshow here with the possible exception of British Columbia. Ontario has been especially terrible with our premier, Doug Ford, getting caught up in scandal after scandal. His administration was recently caught up in a corruption scandal of trying to use underhanded deals to sell off parts of the Greenbelt, a giant preserved belt of natural lands snaking throughout the province.

The only thing Canada has been noticeably better on for me has been the lack of guns (I don’t fear for my life walking around my city at night) and the greatly reduced police state. Even the healthcare system that’s so renowned in the US has been going through its own shitshow lately, with it being majorly defunded by conservative parties. It’s been put through a major stress test and it’s ready to snap. My wife called 32 family doctor’s offices the other day and we couldn’t get in to see even one of them. There are nightmare stories of 45 minute waits for ambulancea or several nights spent in the ER waiting to be seen. The walk in clinics are the best thing I’ve found, but those doctors always seem stressed out and very quick to get you in and out the door.

Moved to Canada a year and a half ago. They made the process pretty smooth and easy all told. With that said, I haven’t had a good time here and I regret moving. There’s a lot of “grass is greener” rhetoric in the US right now, especially from the left. Be warned that a lot of that is misguided. I was underprepared for the host of unique issues that Canada itself has. Leaving the US will not fix all your political problems. It’ll just reveal new ones that you aren’t familiar with. But, after saying all of that, I certainly would never discourage anyone from trying to move. Seeing the world and opening your mind to new cultures are never bad things. For all my misery here, I have learned a lot about myself. Just make sure you go into it with open eyes. Have realistic expectations. Visit the places you want to move before you move to them.

To be clear, I blame Republicans for our polarization completely. Democrats have been compromising to their detriment for decades while Republicans have taken advantage of every loophole they’ve been able to leverage in their favor. Republicans have also doubled down on the politics of hate and fear to motivate their base instead of using anything actually based in reality that might genuinely help people.

In 2012, when Romney lost, the Republican party created a committee to investigate what steps their party needed to take in order to succeed. The answer the committee came back with was “we need to stop being racist and sexist and focus on more inclusive policies”. Trump was a sound rejection of that direction. I still believe that once Republicans have lost another election or two, they’re going to be forced to face reality finally and listen to that committee.

Edit: This is the committee I was referencing. The so called “RNC autopsy”.

I don’t necessarily agree with this. I think any process to appoint justices is going to be vulnerable to politicization. Even the best case scenario, an independent body appointing them, is vulnerable to political capture or pressure from a polarized public. No, I think the reason America’s courts have become political is merely a byproduct of extreme polarization. Politicians don’t need to be polarized. In our country since the 80’s this has been the case, but there was a time when opposing views were able to cooperate and find more common ground. This polarization is new and it bleeding over into the courts was all but inevitable.