[QuickTidal]

Tsundoku, on 19 December 2019 - 03:47 PM, said:

Completely out of context crosspost from another thread, but posted because this line needs to go into the Canadian National Anthem, or on the coat of arms:

"Quite frankly I don't have to be careful about anything man.

I'm Canadian." - QT

LOL. I just found it an odd thing for an American to say to a Canadian who has opinions about US politics.

[Malankazooie]

[Malankazooie]

You thilly Canadian geeth, keep the crazy aunt in our attic (Canada), where she belongs, and keep tabs on her so she doesn't do something crazy like this. Maybe let her play with the Christmas decorations we store up there to keep her occupied. Idle minds are the devil's playground, yeah? You thilly geeth.

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

IMO, BC needs a resurgence from the long expired Conservatives or a much stronger Green Party - not that I would vote for either, but to push the Liberals or NDP back towards the centre.

Recent campaign promises/selling points

NDP
Building the Skytrain to Langley - there isn't enough density to justify this, making it a money sink over the long term. Environmental impacts will be minimal. The expansion to Fleetwood is the same and the UBC line not much better (though for different reasons).
Massey tunnel replacement - oh wait, there wasn't much on that. Though the original replacement design would be nearly finished construction by now for less than the cost of starting the project now (or in five or ten years the way it looks under the NDP).

“Investing in public transit and roads is a win-win-win. It cuts gridlock and commutes times, it reduces carbon pollution, and it creates good jobs,” Horgan said.

If investing in roads is a good thing, replace the tunnel already.

Liberal
Allowing competition with ICBC - great, we've seen what allowing private insurance in competition with Crown corps has done for rates elsewhere in Canada. Looking forward to paying an extra 50% on my insurance. Likely a stepping stone to privatization. Neat, there go my rates again.
Reducing business taxes - I get that businesses are struggling due to Covid, but a permanent reduction in taxation is not the way to address this.
Not to mention the anti LGBTQ candidates running for the party.

Not sure if I'll vote giant douche or turd sandwich. Nah, if the Liberals can't sort out (get rid of) the anti LGBTQ candidates, I can't see myself voting for them.

[QuickTidal]

Mentalist, on 27 October 2020 - 04:03 AM, said:

Gwynn ap Nudd, on 27 October 2020 - 02:25 AM, said:

Mentalist, on 27 October 2020 - 01:05 AM, said:

QuickTidal, on 27 October 2020 - 12:50 AM, said:

Mentalist, on 26 October 2020 - 08:43 PM, said:

Umm, QT, we live in a country with socialized medicine/healthcare. And banks + insurance cos still run everything, lmao.

Which is why my example wasn’t us.

We have a long way to go on a lot of social issues, and an even longer way to go with regards to unchecked capitalism...but we are not on the bottom of the list either like the states are.

Oh, and the real money maker scam in our country is goddamn Student Loans. That shit is rife. ~source, once worked for the NSLSC...the amount of money they make off interest alone is...insanity. We need free/socialized post secondary education like yesterday.

*shrug* I'm one of the lucky ones, I guess. I paid off all of my debt in less than the 10 years they give you post-graduation.

It's not an amazing system, but from what I've seen (among my peers), it works.

I think a lot depends on when you graduated. Fees have gone up significantly since I went through university (cost of living in Vancouver was a bigger reason for loans than tuition/books). I had loans from third and fourth year and paying them off was never a big deal.

Undergrad in '09. Got a quarter of my initial 4 year loan forgiven (through non-refundable grants), and my parents paid off half.

in 2010 I started Law school, and accumulated a bigger chunk. I had a part-time job through Law School, though so all of the loans went into tuition/rez (it helped that I went to Winterpeg, and the second cheapest law school in the country).

I graduated in 2013, had a part-time assistant job for about a year and then started articling, which was a contract job; got my license in 2015, finished paying off my loans in December of last year.

I can imagine with the dollar tanking tuition prices are probably significantly higher these days though.

Edit: we should prolly stop derailing the US thread. Mod can move this to the CAD thread if anything.

So let's be clear. You get 6 months grace period after you graduate before you need to pay back your loan.

The interest rate is currently 2.4% or something, but back then it was higher.

The repayment time of the loan is dependant on the size of the loan. So like a 50k loan will have 10 years, and every 10k after that the repayment time jumps a little up. I think the max is 30 years for 80k or more.

When I was at the NSLSC in the mid-2000's the problem (and I think it's still problem) is that everything young people were graduating with diploma in were jobs that were held by Boomers (far and away the largest Demo. population in our country) who were clinging onto those jobs and not retiring. So every other person who phoned the centre was a person who had reached the non-grace period payback section and were asking for help because they were going to have problems paying back their loans. And 10-25 years of amortization is...quite a bit of interest. So even if you pay it back in good time, you're still forking over a large hunk of interest.

So yeah, this isn't to say that everyone is going to have a hard go of it...but a fair amount (probably more than half, closer to 3/4) of the thousands of calls I fielded while I worked there were from people who were struggling with their loan repayment, and as a result the interest was piling up for the govt. And usually people have more than one loan, normally a Federal one and an OSAP loan because the costs of schools and programs in the country are...insane. That interest/year on an 120k loan over the full 30 years amortization is around 50k - 70k depending on your repayment schedule/monthly payment.

So yeah, some people, yourselves included maybe have no trouble, but the govt isn't making their money of your loans. But there are a lot of others in which they do. And ANY chance of relief is tightly guarded and only given to select individuals who...for example, don't have rich parents.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 27 October 2020 - 01:42 PM

[Mentalist]

Yeah, like I said, my case wasn't terrible. I finished Queens undergrad with 30k overall, my parents paid off 15 of that (they also paid for my rent (400-450/month) while I was rooming in houses for 3 years, cuz they didn"t want me working in school); after law school I was back up to 54k (I think?), which is what I ended up repaying over the next 6 years.

Like I said, my education didn't cost a ton; I was also banking okay money in the summers (working insane hours at WWK those years) and generally kept my expenses pretty low, so didn't dip into the loan money for any living expenses- it was purely tuition/rez/meal plan. After I got the guard job in summer of 2006, all my personal expenses for food and alcohol came from my own money, not the loans. (1st year I also had a bunch of bursaries, cuz my high school grades were decent, so I lived off those)

And yeah, I also had the experience in 2009 when I started looking for actual jobs that, yah, good luck with your non-specialized BScH. Though to be fair, psych faculty informed us we need to get at least a master's if we wanna work in the field... halfway through Third year

There definitely need to be changes in the system, including better communication of job market expectations. Pursuing your dreams/interests is great, but people need to have an early reality check as to how marketable that poli sci degree actually is, regardless of all the genuinely cool stuff you can learn.

And basic post-secondary education should be affordable- because we deff need the majority population to have at least a modicum of critical thinking so as not to end up like our southern neighborinos.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 27 October 2020 - 11:55 PM

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

I finished undergrad in 2002 at UBC, so to be fair I finished prior to most of the tuition hikes.

I went the college transfer route, which allowed me to live rent free the first two years, but took about six months longer and packed a couple extra courses into third and fourth year as not every credit transferred. Between that, scholarship funds, working 20 hours a week during the school year and full time summers, I only had loans in third and fourth year. My total loans were around 12k. My post grad was paid for by an industry funded research grant.

I had no trouble finding work after graduation, and most the people I knew in applied science undergrad programs had jobs lined up 3-4 months prior to graduation. I didn't find the interest rates on student loans that high. There were a couple times I looked into lump sum paying off my student loans and realised I could get GICs with a higher rate than I was paying. Of course, if you can't find a job and have no money, that doesn't help.

I do think there was a mistake in the predicted timing of boomer retirements. Anecdotally, I've known a few people who went into fields where a large wave of boomer retirements had been predicted and did not occur or was overcompensated for, leaving job prospects scarce. Education is the one I am most familiar with. There was expected to be a large turnover in positions there, but from my understanding people were spending years as TAs or on the substitute list if they weren't willing to relocate to small isolated towns.

I don't find it surprising that most of the phone calls to the NSLC are from people who are having trouble repaying loans. I expect most the people who are not having trouble would have no reason to phone.

Mentalist, on 27 October 2020 - 11:52 PM, said:

There definitely need to be changes in the system, including better communication of job market expectations. Pursuing your dreams/interests is great, but people need to have an early reality check as to how marketable that poli sci degree actually is, regardless of all the genuinely cool stuff you can learn.

Just bookmarking this. I used to agree strongly with this sentiment - starting when I was in high school - and job expectations were one of the reasons I pursued an engineering degree, though that was probably second to my interest in it. But, I've known people whose unmarketable degree has opened other doors and given them a decent career they are happy with, and people who got a marketable degree and been nothing but miserable with the jobs it has led to, or who have gone back to school later to change careers. Ideally, everyone could find a pursuit they like that has decent job prospects, but I realise that is not realistic. There needs be some balance between earning potential and the other aspects of job satisfaction. What that is and where I am going with this, I ma not sure, so I will get back to it later.

[QuickTidal]

This doesn't really belong anywhere else so I'll put it here.


After last month finding a mass grave at a Residential School in BC with some 215 dead children in it, they've found another mass grave near Regina, Saskatchewan...with north of 600 bodies of children, close to 700.

I'm sickened by what my country has done to the Indigenous people of this land. SICKENED. And this is just 2 Residential schools in the country. There were 130 of them total, the last of which was ONLY closed in 1996. I think we are looking at 10's of thousands of missing and murdered children over the course of their operation and we just haven't found all the grave sites.

I hate that my country not only doesn't acknowledge this in any significant way, but that they actively avoid taking the responsibility (not to mention the Pope and the Catholic fucking church) for the still relevant repercussions of those schools and the 60's scoop in the Indigenous communities of this country. No clean water, no doctors and hospitals, rampant drug abuse and crime. We made this. Canada did this. This is probably genocide on such a massive scale that I feel like this is going to be harder and harder to ignore and the global community should look on us with disgust.

Canada has a lot of decent things going for it, provided you're the right skin colour...we have FAILED the indigenous people of this land.

Sorry for the rant. I'm fucking angry.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 24 June 2021 - 03:17 PM

[amphibian]

I'm absolutely furious about this too - and 100% convinced there's similar things in US residential schools + asylums too. There might be anywhere from 5000 to 10000 missing people that we will find in the near future.

I want them found, reparations made, and the end of the residential/reservation system as we have it.

[QuickTidal]

amphibian, on 24 June 2021 - 05:54 PM, said:

I'm absolutely furious about this too - and 100% convinced there's similar things in US residential schools + asylums too. There might be anywhere from 5000 to 10000 missing people that we will find in the near future.

I want them found, reparations made, and the end of the residential/reservation system as we have it.

Agreed.

I'm not even sure what reparations we can make to a people we so summarily systematically destroyed...but yes, I very much want something done.

My PM should START with clean fucking drinking water in Indigenous communities...they can't even do that right.

[LinearPhilosopher]

Wasn't there a line in one of the malazan books about the futility of focusing on anything else when children are dying.

Appalling is too soft of a word. I think the residential schools need to be recognized for what they were. An attempt at cultural genocide. And rather than fighting indigenous people in court, failing to provide waters and making a half hearted attempt at reconciliation, they do something more substantive.

And the Vatican can go !@#$ itself. That the pope doesn't want to give an apology is just astounding... pretty sure apologising is a central tenent of catholicism... not that i wasn't raised in the catholic system or anything.

This post has been edited by LinearPhilosopher: 27 June 2021 - 02:50 PM

[Mentalist]

Soo... elections again.

What's everyone's thoughts?

Will PPC actually get any seats from the covid denier pushback?

[QuickTidal]

Mentalist, on 11 September 2021 - 06:15 PM, said:

Soo... elections again.

What's everyone's thoughts?

Same as usual. I want to vote NDP, but the threat of the CPC’s getting in will scare me into voting Liberal. It matters less anyways since I live in Toronto, the epicentre of Liberal stronghold anyways.

I’m Always amused by my father in law, he always votes Cons and has lived most of his adult life in a region that has not been Con since the 1950’s, yet he wastes his vote every time because Meanwhile he’s NEVER complained about how the incumbent who runs his area (mostly well)…but he votes against them for some tribalistic party affiliation reason.

Quote

Will PPC actually get any seats from the covid denier pushback?

Oh gods no. The odds the leader even gets in his riding are slim. The amount of ppl who will vote PPC is really beyond minimal. Even the COVID deniers will fall back on the CPCs if push comes to shove.

My nutbar sister will vote PPC tho….so that’s amusing.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 11 September 2021 - 07:01 PM

[LinearPhilosopher]

Hate Trudeau Hate Liberals.
Like O toole, Hate the tories
Apathetic about Singh, lukewarm with NDP.

PPC- LOL NO.

[EmperorMagus]

I am in the fortunate position of being in a NDP/CPC swing riding and so can vote my conscience and have it matter.

[QuickTidal]

LinearPhilosopher, on 13 September 2021 - 12:59 AM, said:

Like O toole

WTF?

He's Trump Jr. man. A populist piece of shit trying to ride the alt-right to a win. He's a fucking shitstain.

[Mentalist]

QuickTidal, on 13 September 2021 - 11:53 AM, said:

LinearPhilosopher, on 13 September 2021 - 12:59 AM, said:

Like O toole

WTF?

He's Trump Jr. man. A populist piece of shit trying to ride the alt-right to a win. He's a fucking shitstain.

Then what does that make Bernier?

[QuickTidal]

Mentalist, on 13 September 2021 - 06:31 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 13 September 2021 - 11:53 AM, said:

LinearPhilosopher, on 13 September 2021 - 12:59 AM, said:

Like O toole

WTF?

He's Trump Jr. man. A populist piece of shit trying to ride the alt-right to a win. He's a fucking shitstain.

Then what does that make Bernier?

Bernier is the pillow guy, or maybe Alex Jones. Like full-tilt nut job.

[Abyss]

No one needed this election now. Swing voter irritation means a fair chance of a CPC gov because the Libs couldn't keep it in their pants another six months or so.
Feh. The CPC are closer than ever to their US equivalents and hiding it well. The NDP will grab whatever they can as usual.

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

I'm in one of those ridings that reliably votes Conservative, but might just be able to elect a Liberal if the small percentage who vote NDP or Green vote strategically for the Liberal candidate. I will be voting Liberal on the off chance that happens.

I expect the PPC will get as many votes here as the Bloc does, and I'm not in Quebec.

Edit:
PPC candidate in Vancouver compares the BC vaccine passport to the Native passport, um Wow.

https://globalnews.c...l-school-flyer/

This post has been edited by Gwynn ap Nudd: 16 September 2021 - 11:53 PM