Is the NDP website incredibly slow to load for anyone else? Unexpected traffic?
Since surveillance pricing mostly punishes higher earners, I thought it was good for socialist purposes.
That’s not quite true. A firm wants to sell at a higher price to a customer who can afford it but also sell at a lower price (above cost) to one who can’t afford the “regular price” but would buy it cheaper, thus maximizing profit both via margin and volume. There’s nothing socialist about it.
Only if the money circulates back into the economy here rather than being tied up in some exec’s offshore bank account. Plus, “higher” earners doesn’t mean high earners—the burden will disproportionately end up falling on nominally middle-class people who don’t have time to shop around.
I think those factors you mention depend on the specific store, not on whether it uses surveillance pricing.
Price discrimination is also bad for the economy, FYI. This is one of those policies few people can really disagree with, like UBI. It also may or may not happen, because it’s wonkish but radical, like UBI.
NDP once again proving to be the only ally the working class has
Which is why it’s sad that the Liberals got a majority government now. But it is still thin so maybe some deals will still need to be made.
Dawg if Marilyn Gladu becomes some sort of kingmaker in this current parliament I’m actually gonna crash out.
I think the silver lining to this is that whatever they do from here can’t be written off as concessions to avoid a non-confidence vote. They own everything from here, including whatever the floor-crossers do next. Perhaps Carney announcing “AI for all” is going to be the start of their downfall if they don’t stop ignoring what most Canadians want prioritized.
[Sad Green noises]
And honestly the Bloc and Liberals too. They just disagree about how to get there.
The Conservatives are more like allies of working class bigotry.
No. The Liberals have been neo-liberal for quite a long time now. Never really representing the working class.
Right now with their capitalistic leader, they might as well be true blue conservative.
Then the actual Conservatives aren’t (which TBH is a completely valid interpretation).
Even if we rule out the Liberals, it still leaves the Bloc and Greens. This community is big on the NDP, but it doesn’t seem like that’s because of policy.
The LPC consistently weighed on the side of corporations in the major labour disputes over the last few years. They’re friends of the working class insofar as - they improve conditions for corporations and … something good is supposed to happen to workers as a result. Which is just anti-worker trickle down economics that’s lead us to where we are today over the decades it’s been practiced. I hoped for some change in direction on labour diaputes with Carney but so far it’s been more of the same.
It would be pretty interesting to see what the NDP would do with a nation-paralysing strike if they were in power. There’s lots of reasons why any current government hates that and wants it to stop. Edit: Even if they believe it’s bad in general and in the long term.
If you look at the policies that get passed at Liberal conventions, it tells another story. Trudeau added a tax on the very rich in his first term. The Conservatives would never have made the same deal with the NDP as he did in his last term…
I guess, do they have to do exactly what you would, to be considered pro-worker?
There are two ways to break a nation-crippling strike. Take an action that benefits the workers or take an action that benefits the corporation (exec/owner). The libs took actions that benefit the respective corporations. They could have instead broken the strike by stepping in on the side of workers which would have made the workers better off and broken the strike. (And earn them a lot of organic votes.)
I’ve never made the argument that the libs are the same as the reformacons and I maxed out my contribution limits to help them take power instead of PP. That doesn’t change that on the labour file they don’t act in my general interest, instead they help my boss. I should tell you a story abt how I explained a Jira epic to a gov’t lawyer so that my employer could get a subsidy. We had record profits that year.
E:
They could have instead broken the strike by stepping in on the side of workers which would have made the workers better off and broken the strike. (And earn them a lot of organic votes.)
BTW, given how popular such action tends to be if you’re not asking yourself why don’t they do it, you probably should. I began doing it over the last few years and it’s cleared up a lot of seemingly confusing things they do.
E2: Also have been on the Trudeau train almost till the end.
Okay, so sure. They’re more pro-worker then the Conservatives, but not as much as the NDP or Greens, by any reasonable metric.
I guess you could pass a you-must-accept-the-worker’s-terms legislation, although the company would have options there, including just deciding to close.
Should I ask about Jira, or would that be a self-dox?
Avoiding as much self-dox as possible:
It’s a well known American private (as-in non gov’t, but publicly traded) corpo with a Canadian sub. There’s this R&D tax credit/subsidy that’s supposed to fund novel R&D. You show novel work to the gov’t, the gov’t gives you money. I’m leading the design/dev of this software feature that’s just … a required feature for our system to do what it needs to do. It required some digging into AOSP to figure out how to do it. Something we regularly do since we develop an Android system component. We finish the feature. Lo and behold comes my boss with a corpo lawyer and says - hey look this lawyer here think this qualifies for this R&D program. We go over it. A month later the same conversation repeats before a gov’t lawyer who approves it. We did not discover an algorithm, or create something of any significant novelty, no value beyond saving cost for this corpo. We did something that many other teams do regularly. Turns out, the corpo has a whole team that asks managers regularly to submit “novel R&D work” to get subsidy money and this happens throughout the org like a clockwork. Again, this is a profitable corporation.
Wow, that is a pretty low bar. Technically, you did do some research and develop something, I guess.
I wonder if it’s as easy for a startup or individual to apply. If not, there’s the bad environment for innovation and competition you hear about.
There are currently 6 NDP members in the house, and the NDP leader isn’t even one of those six.
If this were anything other than performative, they’d be working with the government on a law.
I really wish the Canadian 2-party duopoly was broken and a third party (ideally the NDP) had a realistic chance of winning elections. But, IMO, performative stuff designed for social media likes isn’t going to convince anybody that the NDP should be in charge of the country.
Of course it’s performative and the audience of the performance is potential NDP voters as well as LPC and CPC voters. Why do you think this performance is worse than any other campaing method? To me it’s Avi using whatever platform he’s got to beam the message we voted for, whch we think others would find compelling.
On the value of talking to people, I think building popular support for policy is very important. If you get 60-80% of Canadians to want a policy, whoever’s in power would be pressed into implementing it. I think the technocratic approach we’ve practiced over the last several decades where we outsource policy to politicians who we vote for every few years isn’t working too well. In some areas it’s even undermined democracy by creating wide disparities between what people want and what ends up being done by the elected politicians. Cough … voter reform … cough.
Focusing on laws alone did not work too well for the previous NDP. Avi’s looking to create a bottom-up approach where we get policy from people and socialize them to the ones who aren’t as engaged in order to create demand for this policy, offer ourselves as implementer of this policy. But if the demand we created is strong, it wouldn’t matter much if we’re the ones implementing it. Bottom-up democracy as opposed to top-down.
Show me that it is already in place first, before banning it.
Do you wait until there’s a fire to buy an extinguisher?
Especially since if they learn that your house is on fire they will raise the price on you.
That’s where we are heading in the US, privatized fire, they will be bringing back the firesale. Hopefully the private equity guys that get involved with it meet Crassus’ fate, the Roman prick that popularized the practice around the 1st century. (He financed an expidition to persia, lost, got captured, they are said to have poured molten gold down his throat, because they knew how much he liked gold.)
Old timey values.
Why? It’s already in place in the US. Preemptively banning the practice here makes 100% sense.
What? Why?
Yea seriously. What actual benefit would there be to consumers by allowing individualized pricing? Certainly not lower prices.
As you stand there and wait for that digital price on that item to lower, because you figured out if you wait, the price will drop slowly, you can watch an ad while you wait and knock off additional pricing!
Then our lives are people standing around in grocery stores waiting for prices to drop, and those that can’t afford the time, will pay the fast premium price!
Then when all the prices and this practice normalizes… you compare to what it used to be like.
And the prices we pay now requires wait 2+ min per item… and more money and profits go to the corporations as a whole.
Manitoba already preemptively banned this practice. Why not go nation-wide with it?
There was a consumer reports investigation that uncovered discriminatory pricing through instacart if memory serves. It’s coming, and retailers dream of digital price tags connected to their cctv networks that id you and deliver prices based on whatever criteria they choose.
It’s done by Temu and AliExpress, too. Not sure how much power the Canadian government has on direct-from-China online storefronts, but it’s already happening to Canadians, if not by Canadian businesses.
