Yes, but buying that game a 4th time seems excessive.

Not my kind of game, but I have friend who will be very into this.

Terrific somebody already did the work. I only got to Lemmy last month. This kind of thing might happen to me a lot…

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“Inspire” might be a better word. They’re not all stupid, you know. Indoctrination doesn’t care how smart you are. They get you young enough, beat the drum steady for long enough, smart people can be convinced of very stupid things.

Lets get in their face. No more false humility. Let’s show them that, imperfect and broken as we are, we know a better way to do some of this stuff. Follow our lead, make your country a better place.

Ah ha - I see, we’re talked over each other a bit but I think I get it now. You have to adjust for the assumed 7% in growth that would be considered “standard”. We’re not really at -2%, because we should be aiming for +7% at minimum. Which means the short fall is more than 4 times what it appears to be to my layman ass. I think I get it.

Right, and I can see that. But if you back out that line graph over a longer period of time, this dip would be miniscule compared to the overall upward trajectory. If the Y Axis tracking the market starts at 0 (which it wouldn’t I get that, but go with me here) and the X axis tracks time and we set it to say, a 3 year period - then the result is that the line has exploded upwards. The tiny tip at the end which represents the last 6 months barely registers. The average closing price in 2023 was 34,121. The close today was 42,454. So even if the market has dropped significantly in the last few months - it’s 25% higher than it was 2 years ago.

Again, I trust that people know what they’re talking about. I am certain I do NOT know what I’m talking about. I am not saying I don’t believe them, or that I’m right - I just want someone to explain the factor I’m missing. I have theories, but no way to confirm them because I lack the base knowledge to even phrase the question right.

Is the stock market supposed to have a “default growth” element that we have to account for? Like, is the fact that the market twice as high as it was 3 years ago an illusion because constant growth is just a necessary element of the market functioning at all? Does that default growth make longer timelines less useful as comparative tools?

Or is it that more that the market was projected to grow and then shrunk instead, so the relevant comparison isn’t to history, but to projections, which is why even a small dip seems more catastrophic? Because it was supposed to continue skyrocketing.

Or am I asking the impossible? Does gaining context for the larger momentum of the stock market take a degree in finance and by asking for someone for a simple explanation I’m just further showing my ignorance?

Did it? I really can’t wrap my head around trying to reconcile what the people who know about this stuff say and what the numbers on page seem to say. I’m just not smart enough. I know I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, but I’ve been trying to figure out the real impact of all this on the market and it honestly seems to be really minimal. Yes, it’s trending down and recession seems likely and a couple days had really big drops this month - but it’s nowhere near even its average, never mind its lows from the past 2 or 3 year periods. Just 3 years ago the market was at like 28,000 points. It doubled in 3 years and now that its shrinking a bit, that is a crisis? What do I not get?

This isn’t so much the market “plummeting” as it looks like to me a massive bubble bursting that was based on nothing to begin with.

But then, I’m the guy who thinks “The Big Short” was a smart movie. I’ll freely admit I’m a fucking moron who knows nothing about finance.

Yeah, our government is just the worst Joe. I mean, we don’t light our money on fire to pick a fight with all our friends. We’re not erasing our own history because we’re scared of black and brown people. We let people have access to healthcare without having to sell their youngest daughter in sex slavery (sorry, “child marriage”). And we haven’t even turned the keys of the kingdom to a mask off fascist doing the fucking seig heil on national television and then pretending to wonder why people want to kill him.

God, it’s like we’re not even trying to put our boot on the neck of our citizens. You should totally go to Russia. Like, right now. And I hope you fall out a window you drug-addled windbag.

Man, Charlie Angus has really been the man of moment here. He’s doing the same speech all over this country, seen it in a bunch of places. I know that sounds like a criticism - how can he be genuine when he’s repeating himself and refining the message? Isn’t that just a stump speech?

But it’s not. First of all, anyone who knows Charlie Angus’ record knows this isn’t new territory for him.

Second, the reason this feels so genuine is because it’s how WE feel. We aren’t being told what to think, we’re having our feelings put into words right in front of us.

And finally, these lines aren’t stupid slogans or focus group tested pablum. These are things I’ve heard other Canadians say to each other, things I’ve said, way before any political leader was saying it. He’s speaking in plain and easy language, in the exact terms Canadians think about this.

Populism and patriotism are heady, dangerous drugs. So quickly, they can pour over into mob-mentality, anti-intellectualism and nationalism. We have to be careful, and we have to be smart. But right now, man, I am riding this high. Elbows up!

I have never known a man who needed to get punched in the face worse than Donald Trump. I am not a violent man. I detest “online tough guys” who treat every situation as an excuse to advocate for violence. And I’m not saying I endorse a bullet or a guillotine or something like that. I’m not even saying I’d punch him.

But this man has clearly never been punched in his shit-talking mouth, and if someone had done it 40 or 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be here now.

That story is absolutely heart-breaking. It’s funny to me that reading that story, I can just tell I wouldn’t like Jasmine Mooney. We wouldn’t get along on a personal level. Her humour isn’t my kind. Her view of things doesn’t line up with how I perceive the world. We wouldn’t be friends. And yet, I’m so incredibly moved by her story and I really respect the humility she shows in highlighting the stories of the other women she met in that system. I’m going to share this around, this feels really important.

I’m not sure we need to waste a lot of time on the lunatics that make up that 10%. You can’t get 90% approval for fresh baked cookies, or friendly golden retriever puppies. While it would be nice for there to simply be no traitors within our borders, it’s not really a realistic goal.

Instead, let’s celebrate that by and large we’re all on the same page. Elbows up. One way or the other, old age or a bullet, we die Canadians.

Despite every horrible thing they stand for - it is completely reasonable to me if the thing you’re most pissed at them for is cultural appropriation of Norse Mythology. I know when people use my country’s flag in their hate-fests, it angers me almost as much as the hate itself.

Sons of Odin are a Canadian white supremacist movement with Viking inspired iconography and a stated mission to “stop the spread of Shariah Law”. They were started in 2018 and started with a very media-savvy push as a “service organization” doing park clean ups and handing out water and granola bars to homeless people. Their intent was to grow to spread their Xenophobia and anti-islamic rhetoric.

They aren’t a large group, maybe 15k members coast to coast and that’s spread pretty thinly. As for why I picked them? I dunno- memorable name and more “Canadian” than name dropping the Klan.

I would like “Kills Nazis” to be a common, simple part of Canadian identity, like hockey and manners. Basically, I want this:

“Oh Bob? Yeah he’s just a good old Canadian boy. Smooth wristshot, absolute sniper. Always helps his neighbour shovel the walk. There was a demonstration by a bunch of those “Sons of Odin” fuckers downtown last week and he stopped by to huck bricks at them and protect counterprotestors. You know, we should have him over for a beer and some steaks”

It’s true - I can remember a year ago, maybe two? Back when he was still on Fox News Tucker Carlson was constantly on about how we were under a tyrannical dictatorship and how Americans should “free” us. This “not viable as a country” thing is just another attempt at justifying their aggression and it’s just as hollow and stupid. The lies and fallacies just cycle through until something sticks, it’s the goals that remain the same.

The truth is, they want us out of the way because our multiculturalism and socialism are threats to their siloed reality. We’re too similar to them, too successful. We’re a living repudiation of everything they believe, of all the lies they need to be true to justify their cruelty and bigotry.

We were never going to be allowed to live in peace, for no other reason than we are a constant reminder of the truth.

I doubt there was one, given ICE’s recent behaviour, but did they give even the slightest reason why her student visa has been revoked? She was a fulbright scholar PhD student. Not exactly the supposedly “dangerous” immigrant the nazis always invent.

It’s honestly a little reassuring to here that the reason for these tariffs is “We want to tax the ever-loving shit out of our citizens so we can give money to billionaires, but we don’t want to call it a tax.”

At least that means that it wasn’t meant to be an act of betrayal and pre-text to war with Canada. I mean, it still was an act of betrayal creating massive hardship and permanently damaging our relationship. But the idea of a Russian/Ukraine remake happening along the 49th parallel seems less likely than it did.

I believe the way it worked was - the middle and lower class tax cuts had a built-in sunset and the upper class tax cuts were permanent. That way it looked like everyone got a cut, but really it was just a temporary relief for the poors and a real transfer of wealth to the upper echelons.

I don’t believe they’re engaging in such pageantry this time. But I’m not an American, maybe someone will correct me.