Make Canada Oh-Kay Again Party

[weatherman667]

I'm getting tired of Canadian Politics. For those that don't know, we have 4 main parties, 2 alternative parties, and a bunch of nobodies.

Main Parties

Liberals (red): Standard modern bullshit Liberals. White people are evil, we need hordes of rampaging barbarians to save us. Castrate young boys to end toxic masculinity.

Conservatives (blue): Liberals going the speed limit.

New Democratic Party (orange): Communists, but the cuddly kind, not the murderous, rapacious ones.

Bloc Quebecois (light blue): Basically Quebec conservatives.

The protest parties (you know they aren't going to win, but you don't want to vote for the main parties):

Green Party (green): You would not be surprised by any of their parties. Until the last couple of elections, they were the main protest party.

People's Party (purple): The only actual conservatives in Canada. They are being sidelined, like every other Western country is doing. they also named themselves the People's Party, which is fine in French, (Partie Populaire), but in English implies they are communists. When they are libertarians.

Because of my malaise at Canadian Politics, I would like to announce my own party,

MAKE CANADA Oh-KAY AGAIN!

MCOKA (pronounced Mocha)

[mcoka]

I've had enough for clothing stores going from 50/50 male/female to 1/3 male/female to having a men's corner in the back of the store.

Stores can only sell clothing for men or women, not both.

[isaacsapphire]

It feels like everything is always getting worse: the packaging “shinkflates”. Staffing levels fall, putting more work on those who remain and reducing the service for customers. If you thought you found a good company to work for or buy from, lols no you didn’t, because venture capital and business consultants and shareholder value WILL literally cash out your trust and loyalty and love for the company and leave you mourning a good company and community pillar that they chopped up and sold like a stolen car.

[noobnoob814]

It's somewhat of a tangent, but this makes me think of an anecdote I heard years ago, that Apple's most profitable division was their legal division. No idea how true, but the reasoning made sense; they're highly paid, but the overall headcount is comparatively small, and the profit from their work was in finding the best way to structure the network of corporations, headquarters locations, ways to classify mergers, etc. which cut down on taxes & regulations paid.

And this makes sense! Legal isn't parasitizing Apple at all. But it's in a weird spot, because none of these activities are directly producing anything. They're augmenting the value produced elsewhere. You obviously can't do away with the ostensibly less profitable R&D group, in the same way that you can't make money just by finding a clever way to pay zero taxes.

But then I wonder, if I was looking at ways to reduce spending at Apple after a bad year, could I justify cutting the legal budget? Probably not, even thinking long-term that's a gamble. And how many rounds of that attrition have they already gone through? How many at other companies? And that's with a pretty clear distinction; if it's murkier where the augment/production distinction lies, could a company sleepwalk itself into being a shell game pearl? Could a whole industry?

And then I think about Sears.

[isaacsapphire]

So so many companies that were once major employers or beloved chains and brands have done it, and most of the remaining companies are somewhere in the process. Sears, Borders, Caldors, Ames, Radio Shack, Toys R Us, KB Toys, FYE, The Sharper Image, Dots, Tower Records, Limited Too, Delia*s, Dressbarn, Fashion Bug, Justice, Papyrus, Payless Shoes, Circuit City, Orvis, Wet Seal, Bob’s, Woolworths, Casual Corner, Fry’s, CompUSA, Brooks, Riteaid, Kmart, etc etc etc. some of them were poorly managed in one way or another, but everything moves towards maximum profit and treating customers and employees worse and worse every year, every industry hell-bent on becoming a duopoly and eventually a monopoly and fuck you if you don’t want work or do business with the only game in town, assuming the big corporation that may not even be headquartered in your country calculates its worth their time to grace your area with their store #56899554.

It doesn’t matter if your local store was profitable, if the employees worked hard and customers were loyal, someone a thousand miles away fucked up or just got old and died and their heirs sold out and venture capital dismembered it for value.

Everything enshitifies, everyone is expected to make more bricks with less straw every quarter, rent costs more and products get worse, every single year. It’s a ratchet and it never stops.

[mitigatedchaos]

A while back I went looking for a small flashlight for a friend. Apparently the Energizer ones suck now despite being a name brand, and you can't just go to REI and buy a good small flashlight (??), so if you want a good one, you have to buy it from this random small company with a factory in Pennsylvania that I'd never heard of before, who sell flashlights to cops. (I've also bought the Coast brand from a local retail chain, which... seems OK?)

My assessment is that, for a good product from a good company, three things are needed... which happens to be in line with my "investment, discipline, choice" model.

A favorable economic situation that allows the company enough surplus to invest in the product properly. (investment)

A specific guy in charge of the company who is setting out to make a good product on purpose, and his supporting officers. (choice)

Discerning customers who can evaluate a product deeply. (discipline)

It's a three-part system.

Without the right management, discerning customers can't use their dollars to preferentially fund a good product, because the good product doesn't get made.

Without a favorable economic context, customers may be unable to find the good product, or unable to pay for it in sufficient numbers to fund development and manufacturing.

Without the discerning customers willing to pay for quality, the company cannot obtain a market advantage from quality even if they can communicate that they have it.

[the-grey-tribe]

What's wrong with the cheap Chinese ones you can charge with a powerbank? Or with a simple camping headlamp?

I get your point in general, but not the particular example.

[mitigatedchaos]

In this case the item was for a gift, and so cheap Chinese items were not considered. It is likely that a higher quality Chinese brand could have been identified.

The thing with Chinese products on Amazon is that the quality is highly variable. There are, basically, Chinese factories camping out on Amazon that produce high-quality niche products, like floppy disk drives or certain staplers, where Amazon is their means to reach their market. There are other imports like automatic litterboxes which will literally and not figuratively kill cats due to poor product design.

Often, the storefronts for the notebooks or pens or what have you will include other office supplies, but the product selection can be kind of random. It's not clear if it's small distributors with regular access to small factories for the Chinese market, small factories doing alternating production runs by month, or what.

The reviews for the REI keychain/small flashlight indicated that it sucked, which means that you can't just walk into REI to buy one to give away, because apparently the threading in the housing or some internal connection is of low quality. (A co-op should exercise more care in selecting camping gear than that.)

So basically, you have to do the same evaluation process in both cases.

Personally, I use Amazon mostly to obtain niche items not sold by Walmart, Target, Staples, or local grocery stores. With brick and mortar retailers, you know that if a sufficiently bad or dangerous product is put on the shelf, someone is going to get fired. No such guarantee with Amazon.

There is one other product (by a specific supplier) where the difference per unit is like %30, and Walmart doesn't sell the large quantities that I want.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I find it odd that Isaac didn't include "actual inflation" on the list of reasons things get worse. Or even "tariffs".

Just private actors.

[weatherman667]

The worst part is that most of what is discussed is a product of the destruction of the Glass-Steagall act, and the removal of the President of the Company's duty to the longterm survival.

The Glass-Steagall act forced banks to legally separate their investment and deposit banking, which is why the Great Recession was treated as such a crisis, because if the banks fell, so would all of your investments.

They removed the duty of the President of a company to it's longterm survival, but kept the fiduciary duty of corporate officers to make money for shareholders. Because of this, corporate officers can be SUED if they don't do whatever they can to make money now, even at the expense of longterm survival.

There is also a mountain of regulation that helps megacorps, because they can hire a dozen six-figure lawyers to make sure they comply, but over the whole company still see massive savings.

It took us 8 months to build the pumps for a new well, not because it actually takes that long, but because the government wanted to inspect the filtration systems, and we waited 8 months to get approval, and only got fast-tracked after we had to shut down for a day because the old well crapped out on us.

[noneatnonedotcom]

Dodge vs Ford definitely didn't help matter. Definitely made things worse in the long term

[mcoka]

This set the precent that corporate officers have a fiduciary duty to stockholders.

But, it was offset by the requirement for the long term survival of the company.

Of course, shareholders already have a way to effect this change, and it's by voting for the President of the company.

Wait, it was SPECIAL dividends? It wasn't even part of the regular dividend schedule. This implies he was still paying the regular dividends. They sued over SPECIAL dividends.

Goddamn fucking activist shareholders.

And there was no legal basis for it?

And competitor stocks should be turned into special (non-voting) stocks. For, frankly, pretty obvious reasons.

...

He says this is the ruling that broke capitalism, and it did, because this is an arduous rule applied without consent onto a business contract.

All business contracts.

[mcoka]

Rewards Programmes Will Be Banned

The main points of rewards programmes:

Blatant anti-competitive behaviour by megacorporations.

Illegal selling of personally identifiable information.

The actual benefit to consumers are rounding errors. The benefits to megacorporations is ridiculous, while the costs to consumers are equally so.

Companies will have to compete - on their own merits.

People will have to discover that they can go to a store they don't inherently despise.

[mcoka]

Make Mortgages Great Again

Mortgage amortization is limited to a maximum of 7 years.

Mortgage term must match the mortgage amortization.

Mortgage rates are fixed.

Mortgages cannot be refinanced, except by properly certified debt relief agents.

Mortgages cannot be resold. If the bank itself is purchased, they cannot change ANY details of the mortgage, including but not limited to how payment is made and who to contact. Even minor changes to payment schedule, (even by a few days), cannot be made.

Long amortization rates dramatically increase the cost of housing.

Mismatched terms primarily confuse new buyers, with banks hoping to milk the mortgage for decades after it's original term.

Variable rates are useful to skilled borrowers, but for first-time home buyers dramatically increase the chance of the mortgage going into default. What about the one it would be useful for? Useful to leverage to dramatically increase the risk/reward of their investments. They will likely have other assets they can get take out other loans against.

Refinancing does not make sense for a short-term mortgage. Refinancing typically does not happen until at least 5 years. It's only use would be for banks to confuse borrowers, and promise that it would be fixed with the next negotiation, and would violate the the no-variable-rate clause.

Mortgage reselling is part of the insane volatility of the market, but also adds confusion as to ownership. This allowed banks to claim foreclosure against houses that never took a mortgage. It also dramatically changes repayment terms without any agreement from the borrower.

[mcoka]

Final Pricing

Something that North America has gobsmackingly managed to avoid is, but many other countries do.

All of the line-item add ons? You have to list the final price that includes them, and it has to be bigger than the other numbers.

e.g.

Bone-in Chicken Thighs: 1.00kg @ $13.50/kg = $13.50

GST @ 5% = $0.68

PST @ 7% = $0.95

Bottle Deposit Fee: $0.05 per thigh = $0.20

Environmental Fee: $0.10 per thigh = $0.40

Recycling Fee: $0.05 per thigh = $0.20

Upcycling Fee: $0.10 per thigh = $0.40

Petroleum Surcharge @ 0.5% = $0.68

Trudeau is too much of a cuck to haggle tariff @ 10% = $1.35

Carbon Dioxide exhaled while shopping: 5L @ $0.25/L = $1.25

TOTAL PRICE = $19.61

[mcoka]

Exile to the North

A new punishment. Anti-social activity, and manbuns will get you exiled beyond the 50th parallel until you learn to act like a man. You pick where you want to go. We find or build you you a cheap shack north of 50th, and move you there. Everything else is up to you.

Note: They do get the Northern Allowance, because we're not savages.

[mcoka]

Oh-Ca Zoning

Our current zone paradigm is created off a lot of flawed assumptions made in the 1950's, with zero attempt to ever shift the paradigm. This schema is based off what works or does not about other countries, most notably Japan. Tokyo went from the most expensive place to live in the world, to a place that charges LESS rent every year, because better housing is going up all of the time. The solution was streamlining and simplifying zoning laws, to the point that if you are in-zone and to-code, no one can question what you are building.

Building codes are created at a federal level, while cities and provinces pick which zones apply in their territory. Things like noise and pollution bylaws will also be on a local basis. This includes other things that are restricted, like casino licences.

I will be making the assumption of maximum 12ft per floor. Undercroft and peaked roof are not included. If you do not have a peaked roof, you lose 12ft off the maximum. Because you are too stupid to understand that peaked roofs are useful.

Also, structural requires for the height will obviously included.

LowAgri

5% of the land space is LowRes, while the rest is reserved for agricultural production / support. Every agricultural building can have 24ft of unlimited residential space on top.

Parking for civilian vehicles, (my province calls them class 5), is considered part of the LowRes part, not the agricultural part.

Parking for larger vehicles, (class 1-2-3), is considered part of the agricultural part.

MedAgri

5% of the land space is MedRes, while the rest is reserved for agricultural production / support. Every agricultural building can have 48ft of unlimited residential space on top.

Parking for civilian vehicles, (my province calls them class 5), is considered part of the LowRes part, not the agricultural part.

Parking for larger vehicles, (class 1-2-3), is considered part of the agricultural part.

LowRes

Maximum Height: 48ft

Either 1/3 of the floor space, or the entire lower floor, can be commercial. The rest is residential, with no maximum number of units.

MedRes

Comes in (4)-(6), designating the maximum number of floors.

MedRes(4) - Maximum Height: 60ft

MedRes(5) - Maximum Height: 72ft

MedRes(6) - Maximum Height: 84ft

Either 1/3 of the floor space, or the entire lower two floors, can be commercial. The rest is residential, with no maximum number of units.

HighRes

The added number indicates the maximum number of habitable floors.

Minimum - HighRes(6): Maximum Height: 84ft

Maximum - HighRes(20): Maximum Height: 264ft

Either 1/3 of the floor space, or the entire lower four floors, can be commercial. The rest is residential, with no maximum number of units.

Cities can designate any above-ground two-floor height as needed for transport, as is required by the city's transportation system, along with 2 subterranean levels.

MaxRes

No maximum height.

Either 1/3 of the floor space, or the entire lower eight floors, can be commercial. The rest is residential, with no maximum number of units.

Cities can designate any above-ground two-floor height per 15 floors as needed for transport, as is required by the city's transportation system, and must provide express elevators between these, and any access floors, along with 2 subterranean levels.

LowCit

Maximum Height: 48ft

No maximum number of commercial floors.

MedCit

Comes in (4)-(6), designating the maximum number of floors.

MedCit(4) - Maximum Height: 60ft

MedCit(5) - Maximum Height: 72ft

MedCit(6) - Maximum Height: 84ft

HighCit

The added number indicates the maximum number of habitable floors.

Minimum - HighRes(6): Maximum Height: 84ft

Maximum - HighRes(20): Maximum Height: 264ft

No maximum number of commercial floors.

Cities can designate any above-ground two-floor height per 15 floors as needed for transport, as is required by the city's transportation system, and must provide express elevators between these, and any access floors, along with 2 subterranean levels.

Max

No maximum number of floors.

No maximum number of commercial floors.

Cities can designate any above-ground two-floor height per 15 floors as needed for transport, as is required by the city's transportation system, and must provide express elevators between these, and any access floors, along with 2 subterranean levels.

---

But, you might, ask, if they can add as many people as they want, what are they going to do with the cars?

Tokyo has a solution to that, too. No roadside parking, (deliveries excepted). Every lot has to figure this out on their own.

But every lot can also add a complete floor of parking, with denser zones being able to have their own parkades.

If you place one medium density zone within a 10/15min walk of the low density zones, then public transport is incredibly easy to plan and implement: you just go from medium to medium.

That, and bike paths, (NOT BIKE LANES), but that a different post.

[mcoka]

Make Trains Great Again

Canada was literally. Literally, literally built on the railroads. The majority of Canada's population that is not in Ontario or Quebec live along the railroad lines going west.

And then we decided to just abandon it.

Now, the idea was to create car-centric infrastructure, but car centred infrastructure is actually bad for cars. You see, it doesn't matter how many lanes you build, if the roads are congested, they will stay congested. This is because of "latent demand", i.e. more people would drive if the roads were less congested. If you build more lanes, more people drive, until the congestion levels are the same.

The best way to reduce congestion on roads is to get people off of the road. That's with functional mass transit, bike paths, etc.

Also, Canada is literally built on the railroads, and railroads are the best way to move material overland.

[mcoka]

Hovercraft

Canada invented the Hovercraft, and like everything Canada does, we are terrible at using them.

Hovercraft are, quite frankly, the single best way to cross the vast tundra.

And when used as ice breakers, they would better than the giant, massive colossi typically used, and far more efficient. You see, hovercraft create shockwaves in the ice that cause the ice to break itself up. This is roughly equivalent to pulling something out of the freezer, and dropping it a few feet to get the pieces to separate.

[mcoka]

The Mammoth Tank

The Mammoth Tank was the iconic weapon of the Command & Conquer series. Now, in game it was just a stupid-big tank.

It has two 120mm cannons. Why would a tank need two? Either targeting two enemies for the opening barrage, or have it work like it's own artillery battery.

The Mammoth Tank also uses a nuclear power plant. I did the math, and a typical naval reactor would take up 1/3 of the internal space, but LFTR reactors could be MUCH smaller.

Now, when thinking about the Mammoth Tank, the first thought among many is the simple impracticality of the Ratte. Well, the Ratte has battleship cannons, which were legitimately overkill for battleships, nevermind tanks. The Mammoth Tank instead has two 120mm cannons.

The Ratte also could not ford rivers, nevermind bridge, had ridiculous fuel requirements, and was so big that even with dozens of AA guns, it was still vulnerable to air power.

But, the Mammoth Tank is nuclear, meaning it's range is unlimited. It could also carry enough personnel and supplies to make it completely self-sustaining for the long term. It could even act as a mobile base. It would probably be closer to the Maus in terms of weight.

See, while the Ratte was going to be used in Europe, we are Canada. We have vast tracts of open land that right now are being patrolled by natives in orange jumpsuits, because without the Arrow, we don't even have air power suitable to the job.

Now, I', not going to in any way insult the Canadian Rangers, as they are insanely capable. What I am saying is create a regular unit of them and give the Mammoth Tanks.

[mcoka]

The Holy Bolter

A gyrojet with a high-explosive dual purpose warhead.

The gyrojet basically turns it into a tiny rocket. Manufacturing the ammunition was difficult, and one of the main reasons it was not adopted.

High explosive dual purpose has a slightly delayed charge an a hard tip to penetrate before exploding, so all of the explosion goes into the material. We already use this.

Minifacturing has improved dramatically, so we could probably automate all of it. Hell, each unit could have their own bolt foundry which they keep at HQ.

Now, it would not make sense to replace the average service rifle with it, unless we get 8ft generically engineered super soldiers with powered armour, but anti-material weapons have not really kept up with modern armour. So, it could provide section-level anti-material. Or maybe swap out the HEDP for a proximity flechette round.

[mcoka]

Increase required points for immigration, but have a logarithmic scale to adds points based off the number of times they say sorry, to pro-social things, (like open doors), or offer someone else the right of way, during their immigration tests and interviews.

[mcoka]

Bring Back Empire Day

The British Empire is the most moral institution in Human history, and deserves to be celebrated.

And, you might ask, what about relationship with the Yanks?

They can join in. Who do you think taught them how Democracy works, or to place so much faith in freedom.

[mcoka]

End Exclusivity Agreements

You know when you sign in to your favourite streaming service, and the show you want is not there? There's a good chance it's because they signed an exclusivity deal.

One of the most important parts of Capitalism is competition. Because of their exclusive content, none of the streaming services have to compete, they never have to improve, and in truth, they are all pretty terrible.

[mcoka]

The requirement to use any non-concealable fire arm:

2 years of military service, (including reserve).

Marksmanship test (on the specific fire arm).

[mcoka]

North West Passage

Nuclear icebreakers, hovercraft icebreakers, way stations, northern airbases