Please email [email protected] if you’d like a source on anything! I will try to keep this up to date but it may not be 100%.
So climate scientists say that heating of 3 degrees celsius would be literally catastrophic for human civilization… but economists aren’t too worried. Why? Welcome to the appallingly bad economics of climate change.
Because according to these clowns, 87% of the economy will remain unaffected by climate change, since they’re indoors. Food doesn’t come from farming! It comes from the grocery store!
Yeah, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here are some more insane and unhinged predictions from climate economists that kept us from doing anything about it for decades:
Here’s an example of their logic for how warming works: Let’s say there’s 2 fake made up countries called I dunno, “canada” and “New Zealand” and New Zealand is on average 1 degree hotter than Canada but its GDP is 5% lower. So that must mean that if Canada gets 1 degree hotter, its GDP will only go down by 5% — so no big deal. It is just such kindergarten logic I can’t even believe it. Tipping points who? Actually, they do account for tipping points. their made-up-ass numbers say that if all 8 critical tipping points were reached — which scientists say would basically be the end of modern civilization as we know it — GDP would only take a 1.4% hit. They take these made-up equations, show them to politicians, and the politicians go wow, that’s definitely science you guys are doing over there, and let them write climate policy.
75% of the Covid Paycheck Protection Program *didn’t even go to employees*. Hey guys remember when there was a deadly pandemic that shut down the whole world so the world’s governments gave out a bunch of money to workers so they didn’t literally starve and then everyone was really, really mad about it? Well, workers didn’t get most of it. So, if they didn’t get it, who did? Well, 72% of the total 800 billion dollars from the program flowed to the top 1/5th of income earners — people making six figures or more. For every job saved by program, the study found it cost taxpayers between $170,000 and $257,000 — which would have been
hold on let me crunch some numbers
around only $50,000 [i just did this math myself lol] if all the money gone towards employees. I will note that this was during the Trump administration, and their qualifications for who could get the money were comically loose, so that helps. But Trump, Biden, frickin, Trudeau — the pandemic was a time of huge transfer of wealth, like some kind of fucked up reverse-robinhood — 2/3 of all new wealth created went to the top 1%, and by the end of it, 8 men held as much money as the poorest half of the world. So what now? Oxfam recommends a sweeping, world-wide wealth tax, my commenters recommend a not-very-well-thought-out violent uprising, so, who’s to say?
Notes: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621477/bp-survival-of-the-richest-160123-en.pdf
BC is cracking down on short term rentals like Airbnbs, forcing hosts to use Airbnb as it was originally designed — to rent a room in your house. Where you live. No longer will you see investors bragging in their lambs about having 15 properties that they airbnb out — and they’re already crying about it all over the internet. You love to see it.
But does Airbnb really make housing unaffordable? Well, yeah, actually. Any small change in the supply of housing, especially in big cities like Vancouver and Victoria, has an outsized impact on the price: or inelastic demand, if you’re a nerd. So even though this will only free up around 16,000 homes, the math shows that it could have a very noticeable impact on rent. And now, the federal government is considering doing the same. But what’s really causing Canada’s housing crisis isn’t just Airbnb — three quarters of properties not owned by individuals are owned by corporations in BC, and investors hold about 1 in every 5 homes in Canada. Just because we’ve shut off one source of income for these lambo-driving hustle-culture parasites doesn’t mean the work is done.
Why is everything getting shittier? Specifically, stuff online: Tiktok sucks now, reddit’s API is gone, everything on Amazon is a shitty knockoff, I don’t even want to talk about X. Turns out there is a real term for this, “enshittification,” and a real reason.
According to the guy who coined the term, Cory Doctorow, tech companies have a life cycle: first, they’re good to their users: they show them what they want to see with minimal prices or advertising, until they get enough of a userbase. That’s like marketing 101. But the users aren’t the only customers: marketers or sellers are the other customers. So now that they’ve got all these users, or buyers, they can be good to the sellers. I’m sure you’ve heard “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” but in this case the buyers are paying to exist on that platform, but they’re also the product. And once users have been locked in, and sellers have been locked in, the big tech companies can fuck both of them over simultaneously and keep all the revenue for themselves. This happened on Amazon, which first offered amazing convenience and deals to users, then good discoverability for sellers, and then fucked both of them over simultaneously by only hawking their own shitty Amazon products and making everything else expensive and harder to find. And now, Tiktok too has been enshittified, so that half my For You Page is insane livestreams of weird products, ads and sponsorships, and bland advertiser-friendly content, while suppressing any potentially controversial videos, especially any video contianing the words “cl**** ch****. [BLEEP]
Companies can only do this if they have a monopoly over their market, so this is a solvable problem, if we start to bust up monopolies and take away their power.