🤞🤞🤞

He also studied at Queen’s University for 2 years.

While this is subjective, IMHO there’s no way 2024 was the first influencer election. It was definitely 2020 and that was turbocharged by COVID.

Why wasn’t an address provided? I’m not familiar with Kingston’s pilot, but the social service department of most cities have solved this pretty simple problem by either renting a PO Box or using their own address. Sure, people in the know recognize the address but at least people can receive their mail.

It will be interesting to see how the three of them fair.

What three are you talking about?

I bought some at Bulk Barn for Christmas.

I was really hopefully that the messaging around the carbon tax would have been better, and Canadians would realize most of us earn money overall with the carbon rebates.

I was hoping that could lead us into more Pigouvian taxes to financially encourage people to make better choices. For example, a Pigouvian tax on clothing to reduce our reliance on fast-fashion and encourage consumers to buy more high-quality, long lasting clothes.

Oh no, these are my Dad’s favourite!!

Not as it stands. Sure, the Ontario government could allow municipalities to introduce sales tax, and it has come up a bunch lately. However, municipalities are creatures of the province, and as such, new provincial legislation would be needed to allow municipal sales tax.

I think you’re making a lot of assumptions here, many of which I have contentions with.

we had very little moderation in the early days of the internet and social media

It differed from site to site, but in my experience of the Internet in the '90s and '00s, a lot of forums were heavily moderated, and even Facebook was kept pretty clean when I got on it in ~2006/2007.

and yet people didn’t believe the nonsense they saw online,

I fully dispute this. People have always believed hearsay. They’re just exposed to more of it through the web instead of it coming verbally from your family, friends, and coworkers.

unlike nowadays were even official news platforms have reported on outright bullshit being made up on social media.

1. We live in a world of 24-hour news cycles and sensationalization, which has escalated over the past few decades. This often encourages ratings over quality.

2. Mainstream media has always had problems with fact-check. I’m not trying to attack the news media or anything, I think most reporters do their best and strive to be factual, but they sometimes make mistakes. I can’t remember the name of it, but I there’s some sort of phenomenon where if you watch a news broadcast, and they talk about a subject you have expertise in, you’re likely to find inaccuracies in it, and be more skeptical of the rest of the broadcast.

To me the problem is the godamn algorithm that pushes people into bubbles that reinforce their correct or incorrect views

Polarization is not limited to social media. The news media has become more and more tribal over time. Company that sell products and services have been more likely to present a political world-view.

Overall, I think you’re ignoring a lot of other things that have changed over the years. It’s not like the only thing that has changed in the world is the algorithmic feed. We are perpetually online now and that’s where most people get their news, so it’s only natural that would also be their source of disinformation. I think algorithmic feeds that push people into their bubbles is a response to this polarization, not the source of it.

But they’re doing that by increasing taxes on wealth, capital gains, windfalls, luxury real estate, and income in the top 10%, right? They’re totally not increasing taxes by even so much as one penny on working class citizens when there’s so much obscene wealth controlled by a few.

Municipalities in Ontario don’t have the ability to tax those things.