Evacuating thousands of people ahead of wildfires and hurricanes is gonna be lit when we're all forced into EV's. #masscasualtyincidents https://t.co/5TqsqF8Pw7
— Katewerk (@katewerk) August 19, 2023
There’s a Salt Monopoly?
Windsor Star- Inside the worker strike that has left Calgarians with a shortage of salt
The shortage is the result of a bitter workplace dispute in eastern Canada that’s entering its seventh month. In mid-February, 250 unionized workers at Windsor Salt, one of the largest salt producers and distributors in Canada, walked off the job after bargaining talks collapsed.
It’s Probably Nothing
Evergrande, one of China’s real estate giants, just filed Chapter 15 bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, China’s HY real estate index is down a massive 82% in just over 2 years.
This puts the index back down to 2008-levels.
All while China just “unexpectedly” cut interest rates.
Is China… pic.twitter.com/p3yuIqPmxL
— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) August 18, 2023
An affiliate, Tianji Holdings, also sought Chapter 15 protection on Thursday in Manhattan bankruptcy court.
A lawyer for Evergrande did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Evergrande’s filing comes amid growing fears that problems in China’s property sector could spread to other parts of the country’s economy as growth slows.
Since the sector’s debt crisis unfolded in mid-2021, companies accounting for 40% of Chinese home sales have defaulted.
Bicycle Lanes
Jeremy Clarkson is spot on here. He’s saying what the vast majority of folk are thinking about the absolute clown world being created by our political leaders.pic.twitter.com/RZK9sQjuL7
— James Melville (@JamesMelville) August 16, 2023
The Government Will Kill You Now
Why was euthanasia medical assistance in dying (MAiD) up 41% in Alberta between 2021/2022 when the other prairie provinces were only up 6% in Sask and [down] 9% in Manitoba? Notley’s continued NDP influence over Alberta Health Services??
Everything Is Fine
Fitch warns it may be forced to downgrade dozens of banks, including JPMorgan Chase
Good Stuff
Spoiler Alert!
The left is upset Poilievre stole their WEF conspiracy theories.
Saving “Democracy”
By banning it.
The Telegraph- Germany considers ban on far-Right AfD
Germany is debating whether to ban the far-Right Alternative for Germany (AfD) as the party surges to 21 per cent in the polls, amid warnings from intelligence officials that its members are becoming increasingly extreme.
Temporarily Unexpected
Canada’s annual Inflation rate crept upward to 3.3% in July, an increase from 2.8% in June, and once again outside the Bank of Canada’s target rate of 2% with a range of 1% to 3%.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 3.3% year over year in July. On a year-over-year basis, energy prices fell less in July (-8.2%) compared with June (-14.6%). That’s because oil hit an all-time high 12 months ago, so now inflation will resume its rise
Prices for gasoline fell 12.9% year over year in July, compared to a 21.6% decline in June. This was the result of a base-year effect, with prices remaining nearly unchanged on a month-over-month basis in July 2023.
The real proof that inflation is still climbing, will come in a few weeks when the Bank of Canada announces another interest rate increase. Don’t expect the Liberals to brag about their “measures working”, the way they did last month.
Y2Kyoto: Screw The Whales
The poster fish of the environmental movement have outlived their usefulness.
Wind energy companies and their foundations have donated nearly $4.7 million to at least three dozen donations to major environmental organizations. Linowes has made public a report and a database documenting the conflicts-of-interest she discovered. — The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a granting organization, took up to $1 million from wind energy companies Avangrid and Shell, and then distributed it to other environmental groups. In August 2020, the National Audubon Society received a $200,000 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund. — The same year, the Nature Conservancy received a $165,218 grant from the New England Forest and Rivers Fund. The Nature Conservancy has supported offshore wind since at least 2021. — NJ Audubon has partnered with wind farm developer Atlantic Shores, a joint venture between Shell Oil and EDF Renewables. Ocean Wind, another wind energy developer, has sponsored NJ Audubon’s World Series of Birding event multiple times. The wind industry has also made hefty donations to scientific organizations.
Trucking blues
Buried in the stories about the collapse of Yellow Trucking is an even bigger, but unfortunately commonplace story, about how taxpayers poured billions into an organization and received a 100% loss for their efforts.
If you are a taxpayer, you know all this, your government being a 29.6 percent shareholder of Yellow and all. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus, Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act dished out $500 billion to businesses, states and municipalities as a result of the coronavirus. Yellow Corporation received $700 million of the $735.9 million set aside for national security loans.
Once the loan was funded, Yellow executive officers and directors received stock options and Yellow stock went up ten times in price from the bailout to the end of 2021.
New, Improved Parenting
By harnessing the untapped power of unrelatedness, diffused responsibility, and a total lack of attraction.
Readers are invited to ponder the appeal, for any gentleman with fatherhood in mind, of effectively becoming a sperm donor who is also expected to perform household chores, for many years, and to pay child maintenance. In a sexless relationship with random lesbians who may find him barely tolerable, a necessary complication. But this, it seems, is how one “redefines the family unit completely.” It’s “the ideal parenting setup.”
A zero percent interest miracle
The fact that the idea of parking interest rates permanently at zero gets any academic attention at all, is in itself worrisome. It’s no secret that this was an idea embraced by none other than John Maynard Keynes, who thought it would be the key to effortless financing of whatever projects a central planner might dream up.
If the interest rate were permanently zero, the government’s fiscal levers of taxation and spending would be the alternative means of controlling inflation.
Naturally, this nonsense goes hand in hand with direct central bank control of individual spending decisions:
Also worth mentioning is the current push by the Bank of England towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), in which buyers and sellers would transfer money directly without having to use the banking system. This could enable central banks to encourage or discourage certain spending in more targeted ways, for example by restricting what can be spent by people in certain areas or income brackets. If inflation was controlled using only fiscal levers, CBDCs could be used to reinforce this policy.
O, Great Spirit Of Cascadia
O, Sweet Saint Of San Andreas
More Pavilions At Folkfest
The other 39% are newly arrived immigrants: A recent survey by Ottawa-based Abacus Data showed 61 per cent of respondents believed Canada’s immigration target is too high, and 63 per cent of them said the number of immigrants coming to the country was having a negative impact on housing.
Has Your Country’s History Been “Queered” yet?
And if not, why not?
Because when you look at a sixteenth-century mirror salvaged from a warship belonging to Henry VIII, the first thing the want to know is how it might induce psychological crises in the sexually dysmorphic.
Clearly, our culture is in the best of hands.
The central bank casino
It’s not news that many of the industries of the Western world have gone overseas since the late 1970’s, thus creating the “rust belt”. What’s largely missing is a proper understanding of why this happened and how that trend is accelerating, with so many companies now involved in what can be accurately termed as “financialization”. With central banks pricing capital at an absurdly low cost and governments happy to cover any and all losses, what could possibly go wrong?
At the heart of the issue is government intervention designed to provide the investor class with greater gains and fewer losses.
Yet the prevailing “wisdom” among policymakers and central bankers is that ever greater amounts of financialization—propped up by repeated government interventions — are somehow just a natural and inescapable feature of the market economy. With each new bubble and each new crisis, the central banks become ever more willing to try risky and “nontraditional” interventions, whether it’s negative interest rates, the abolition of physical cash, or ever larger purchases of near-worthless assets. Thanks to decades of government-fueled financialization, the stakes climb ever higher.
Real estate woes
Why worry? There’s no problem here that can’t be solved with infinite amortization.
“…he owns 8 condos in toronto. half of them he told me are negative geared.”
one of the biggest problems we face in is the damage RE participants caused because of a belief in an INFINITE UP market.
very few have mitigated downside risk by simply paying off debts or leveraging more safely.
last night i attended a party where a 35 year old so called…
— daniel de melis (@d_demelis) August 6, 2023