Author: Dennis

Money For Nothing

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing nannystate 5 Comments

Yet another example of what happens when a bunch of politicians scream “emergency” and a gullible John Q. Public largely falls for it. This reminds me of a Seinfeld episode where Kramer tries to explain to Jerry what happens when a company makes a bad investment decision: “They just write it off, Jerry!”

Ontario wrote off more than one billion items of personal protective equipment at a cost of $1.4 billion since 2021 and is now burning expired products, the province’s auditor general found.

The province signed long-term contracts for PPE between October 2020 and April 2021 that locked it into buying 188 million surgical masks annually. Yet it only distributed 39 million of those masks last year, or 21 per cent.

Protection Racket

Canada’s Bolsheviks Chief Big Screen TV New Governor We Are All Treaty People 23 Comments

Hardly a week has passed since the memorandum of understanding with Alberta, and already the Libs are laying the groundwork for endless “unavoidable” delays. At this rate, I don’t know why Guilbeault found it necessary to quit caucus at all.

On his way into a cabinet meeting Tuesday morning, the former minister of Crown-Indigenous relations told reporters he sees a difficult road ahead for any pipeline project.

“If everyone thought Thursday was difficult, that was probably the easiest day in the life of that pipeline,” Miller said.

Circling The Drain

Gaming Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing There Goes The Narrative 9 Comments

The mainstream financial media is subtly acknowledging that a lot of the price action in Bitcoin was fueled by leverage. We seem to be in the process of finding out how leveraged bets on a rising asset price work in reverse. Hint: they don’t work very well.

Bitcoin, which was soaring around $125,000 in October, dropped below $86,000. That’s down roughly 7% from a day earlier.

Strategy, the company that used to be known as MicroStrategy and now raises money just to buy bitcoin, lost 10.3%. It said that it raised a fund of $1.44 billion in U.S. dollars, not in bitcoin, by selling stock to help pay for its dividends on preferred shares and interest on its debt.

Added Costs

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 28 Comments

It looks like someone forgot to tell John Deere that tariffs are a win/win proposition. Considering that companies like Deere are a perfect example of what most people would consider heavy industry, what’s the point of burdening them with extra costs?

Deere & Co on Wednesday flagged a bigger hit from tariffs in 2026 ​and forecast its annual profit below estimates on the back of weaker ‌margins on large tractors, sending the farm-equipment maker’s shares down 5%.

Caterpillar didn’t get the memo either.

Caterpillar now expects a tariff hit of $1.5 billion to $1.8 billion this year, up from its prior forecast of up to $1.5 billion.

Car Loan Blues

Climate Cult Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 30 Comments

Yet more evidence that the marginal consumer, in this case the marginal car buyer, simply can’t afford that shiny metal anymore.

Scott Terrio, manager of consumer insolvency at Hoyes, Michalos & Associates, says that in his 17 years on the job, this is the first year he’s seen people contacting the firm with the intention of returning their vehicles.

“It’s very non-typical,” he said. “They’ve recognized that their car is killing them financially.”

Not to worry. I’m sure that tweaking EV mandates from 100% of new car sales to 90% will fix all of that.

Union Mentality

Canada’s Bolsheviks entitlement generation nannystate 20 Comments

The last time I checked, the NFU was down to a handful of members and were being led by “farmers” so far outside the mainstream that they hardly qualified as such. I don’t know what’s worse: that these clowns are demanding a form of UBI for farmers, or that a mainstream media outlet reports on it so uncritically.

Farmers want Ottawa to set up a 10-year pilot project that would ensure they receive an annual income of at least $50,000, a rate that would rise by inflation every year.

David Thompson, executive director of the union, says a guaranteed income would help stabilize farmers’ incomes, which are often unstable.

Now they’re channeling Zoran Mamdani and this nonsense gets breathlessly regurgitated by the same bunch of toadies.

One resolution calls for the union to lobby the federal government to introduce legislation that would put a cap on the profits of major grocery chains that control the lion’s share of the market.

Another resolution calls on union to create a national coalition pressing the federal government to purchase food directly from farmers to be sold at cost in a “network of national/provincial/municipal public grocery stores.”

Sovereign Money Pit

Canada’s Bolsheviks Chief Big Screen TV We Are All Treaty People 5 Comments

What’s not to love about a sovereign wealth fund where others are forced to pony up the seed capital? It also helps to imagine that such a fund could not possibly make anything but the wisest investments.

Chief Joe Miskokomon said the fund would be a “critical step” forward in bolstering the economic capacity of First Nations.

“We’re not saying to take out the banks,” Miskokomon said in an interview.

“What we’re saying is the banks don’t need to have as much as a say as they do.”

Furry Friends

Insufferable Twits There Goes The Narrative 23 Comments

I had been told years ago that if you were hiking with at least six people, bears would not bother you. It seems some bears didn’t get that memo or the other one regarding pepper spray. Too bad someone in the group didn’t have a gun on them, but that promotes disharmony with nature. A ban on hunting these animals couldn’t possibly have led to them losing their fear of humans either. And so on.

“It’s the ecosystem being out of balance that means grizzly bears are getting desperate,” he said, citing recent clear-cutting and forest fires pushing bears from of their habitat.

He dismissed suggestions that bears may be more aggressive before hibernation because the animals do not look to human prey. Scapillati said he worried about pro-hunting groups using the attack to spread inaccurate information about bears being aggressive. “That’s so inappropriate at a time when we’re focused on holding the children and families and all those affected in our hearts and focused on them,” Scapillati said.

Talkin’ Bout My Generation…

entitlement generation Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 10 Comments

The more pressing question is: can most retirement funds generate sufficient capital to sustain themselves for such a long period? I’ll hazard a guess that most government plans don’t have nearly enough. Speaking from personal experience, I’d go crazy if I stopped working completely.

Not only is retirement coming faster, Canadians are also living longer. Since 2023, life expectancy in Canada has risen two years to 83, and since 2001 the number of people over 100 has doubled, said the study. Globally, the number of centenarians is expected to grow by 800 per cent by 2050.

Instead of the 20 to 30 “golden years” of earlier generations, workers today are potentially looking at retirements that span 40 years or more.

 

Protection Money

Canada’s Bolsheviks Climate Cult We Are All Treaty People 16 Comments

If you pony up enough money to the paleolithic set, maybe your project can go ahead.

Jonathan Wilkinson, a B.C. Liberal MP and a former federal environment minister, said today that “a number of things” would need to happen before the tanker ban could change, including discussions with the B.C. government and coastal First Nations.

Scroll down to see the Financial Post point out the errors in Eby’s arguments.

As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts. Premier Eby’s objections to another Alberta pipeline are rooted in fallacies, not fact. The Carney government should recognize that and decide soon whether or not another pipeline to B.C. tidewater is “in the national interest” — which apparently is how you get a permit to build major projects in Canada these days.

The Cheque Is In The Mail

Cronies entitlement generation It's Probably Nothing nannystate 19 Comments

I’m suspicious about the impact of these measures for a few reasons: voluntary departures come with severance; government retirement plans often require funding out of general revenue so early retirement just means more losses to cover; many eliminated jobs are potential positions as opposed to actual ones, and the timeline is an entire decade.

He said the company will use “attrition first” to downsize from the roughly 62,000 people it employed at the end of last year.

The company expects to shed 16,000 employees through retirement or voluntary departures by 2030, with an additional 14,000 leaving by 2035.

Wizardry, Not Wisdom

Climate Cult I, Napoleon We Are All Treaty People 16 Comments

When a cultural movement allegedly based on science starts to bring in mystical “wisdom keepers” in an attempt to remain relevant, this merely confirms that it was never based on science in the first place.

The COP so far “was a testament that unfortunately, for Indigenous peoples to be heard, they actually need to be disruptive,” said Aya Khourshid, an Egyptian-Palestinian member of A Wisdom Keepers Delegation, a group of Indigenous people from around the world.

Indigenous people are putting a lot of energy “to be in this space but to not necessarily be given a platform or voice at the decision table with the ministers and those who are in power,” said Whaia, a Ngāti Kahungunu Wisdom Keeper.

Money For Nothing

DigitalCurrency Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 26 Comments

That’s 600 billion, with a ‘B’. How much of the melt-up was driven by leverage, and who’s left holding the bag for those loans?

After topping $126,000 in October, Bitcoin has fallen sharply, briefly wiping out its 2025 gains before stabilizing on Monday.

With gold and stocks near all-time highs, Bitcoin is the “tip of the risk-assets iceberg and melting,” said Mike McGlone, senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence. “I expect Bitcoin and most cryptos to keep falling.”

Echo Chamber

entitlement generation Insufferable Twits 18 Comments

Only customers with obsessive compulsive disorder would be bothered by any strike. The rest will just buy their latte at the myriad of coffee shops that can be found down the street from every Starbucks.

Starbucks Workers United said stores in 45 cities would be impacted, including New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Diego, St. Louis, Dallas, Columbus, Ohio, and Starbucks’ home city of Seattle. There is no date set for the strike to end, and more stores are prepared to join if Starbucks doesn’t reach a contract agreement with the union, organizers said.

Maybe Some Other Time…

Canada’s Bolsheviks Climate Cult New Governor 4 Comments

I assume that if an Arctic hydro dam was a viable proposition, someone else would have already done it. But cost is apparently no object. In order to expedite that, a bitumen pipeline is going to get dropped from the list. What’s notably missing from the list as well is any mention of funding to complete a four lane highway across the country, which would finally put us on par with most semi-industrialized nations.

The Crawford nickel project in northeastern Ontario is also expected to be on the list, as well as Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc.’s mine and battery-materials plant project in Quebec, an Iqaluit hydro project and a major electricity transmission line in northern B.C., according to reports from CBC News and Bloomberg News.

 

Dissension In The Ranks?

47 Art Of The Deal There Goes The Narrative Trump 35 Comments

If you take a gander at the conversations on Twitter today, Trump’s apparent endorsement of the H1-B visa program in an interview with Laura Ingraham doesn’t seem to be going over so well. My earlier understanding was that there was going to be a $100,000 fee applied to those visas. Does anyone know what’s happening with that?

More Twitter opinions from Yahoo news.

“This is insane—we are going to lose the mid-terms so badly,” Anthony Sabatini, a vocal pro-Trump county commissioner in Florida with a large online following, wrote on Tuesday on X, where the president’s remarks quickly went viral.

 

The Excuse Factory

Canada’s Bolsheviks The Tolerant Left We Are All Treaty People 13 Comments

It’s hard to imagine that anyone with a shred of moral conscience could face themselves day after day after delivering a judgement which brazenly excuses such psychopathic behavior.

Mr. Garlow is the personification of intergenerational trauma. I cannot imagine more sympathetic circumstances or mitigating factors that cry out for some compassion. Punishing him with a further period of incarceration for the sake of the common good would be unjust,” wrote Justice Brenda Green, who recently handed Garlow a suspended sentence and three years of probation.

The judge saw a “clear, causal nexus between his father’s brutalization in residential schools and the trail of damage and devastation that slammed like a wrecking ball through the next generation. I cannot imagine a case with a more shocking example of the detrimental impact of colonialism, intergenerational trauma and the attempted cultural genocide by seizing children from their communities only to be placed in horribly abusive environments.”

Nothing Burgers

Gradually Then Suddenly It's Probably Nothing 8 Comments

When the marginal consumer can no longer afford Wendy’s, you just know things are going downhill.

There are currently about 6,000 Wendy’s locations in the U.S. Locations that are “consistently underperforming” will close in late 2025 or at some point in 2026. The number of stores affected could be up to around 350. Nation’s Restaurant News noted that Cook indicated they were “acting with urgency” to reverse the negative trend.

As CNN detailed, Wendy’s sales in the last quarter were down nearly 5 percent.

Elbows Down!

It's Probably Nothing Never Before Uttered There Goes The Narrative 9 Comments

Generally speaking, the leadership cadre of large Canadian businesses tend to carry water for the Liberals no matter what. It’s refreshing to see at least one of them speaking out about the Canadian economy’s appalling lack of productivity.

“The business sector (has) grown productivity about 50 per cent since roughly 2000 (but) the non business sector — this is government and not-for-profit businesses and workers — in those areas … productivity has been absolutely flat, zero growth, not one bit of productivity,” she said at the University of Waterloo’s Tech Horizons conference.

“I find it kind of frustrating because those people were telling us in business that we’re not productive when they’re the ones who are flat like pancakes.”

 

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation