• 109 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: April 1st, 2025
  • dwazou@jlai.luOPtoCanada@lemmy.ca•This month, Canadians aged 35-64 can now apply for Government Dental CareEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    Thank you so much. This means a lot to me.

    I come from a third world country with tremendous inequality. I was born in the most privileged classes.

    In my country, poor people who don’t pay a lot of money die like DOGS in hospitals. Private hospitals don’t hesitate to overcharge sick people as much as they can. If you are not happy, if you protest, they just let you die. We have mostly free elections. But they are useless. Because most of the time, useless and ignorant politicians get elected. Very few people read investigative journalism. In fact, our newspapers are mostly dead. I’m one of the very few people trying to financially support quality journalism in my country.

    I used to think our problems were specific. We are dumb. We are fools.

    Our problems are actually surprisingly common. I lived in many nations around the world. I noticed that in some countries, some cities, politicians can achieve absolutely amazing things in public health, labor rights, housing. They can really take great decisions. And I noticed that in some rich countries, like the United States, incredibly dumb and corrupt politicians can get massive popular support. And ordinary people always pay the price:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/02/10/inhaler-cost-death-optum-rx-walgreens/

    My conclusion was simple. At the end of the day, everything stems from the people. In corrupt places, like my country, people don’t pay attention to politics. They don’t educate themselves about policies. They don’t read quality newspapers. Few people get involved in the local community. As a result, they can be easily lied to by oligarchs.

    In democracies that work great, like Denmark, you have ordinary people that educate themselves and actively get involved in their local community. They support strong independent newspapers. They join community organizations pushing for change. They pay close attention to their MPs and their votes.

    If my comment helps people pay closer attention to politics, then I would have achieved my goal.

  • dwazou@jlai.lutoEurope@feddit.org•Green deputy launches leadership bid with UK ‘eco-populism’ visionEnglish
    1·
    18 hours ago

    I’m not British. But this is what I think Britain needs :

    1. Campaign finance reform. The United Kingdom is one of the only democracies in the world where corporations are allowed to wire hundreds of thousands of pounds to political parties. Brits often argue their system is better than the US. I’m sorry, but being better than the US is the same as having no standards at all.

    2. Publically owned water companies. The senior management of UK water companies have looted the country. Billions were lost. It’s a complete disaster.

    3. A ban on gambling ads. Gambling ruins the lives of so many people.

    These 3 policies are not extreme in any way. They are not far-left, hard-left, communist, or whatever. They are simply about creating better incentives for a better country. Implementing them would help ordinary people.

    Yet Keir Starmer doesn’t have seem to have the guts to do that. I hope I’m proved wrong.

    Britons deserves better.

  • dwazou@jlai.lutoWorld News@lemmy.world•Carney vows to transform Canadian economy to 'stand up' to TrumpEnglish
    91·
    3 days ago

    To do list for Mark Carney:

    • Encourage all Government Agencies to switch to Linux. It’s completely ridiculous that hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money are wasted every year on Microsoft licenses. The French Gendarmerie switched to Linux and they never went back to Windows. They saved millions. Money that they can spend on actually doing their job.

    • Create a Canadian fund to encourage Open Source Software. A $10 million fund over 5 years would not be much money, but it could help open source software developers. A small $100 000 grant could really help Gimp, Kdenlive and Krita fight Adobe. Too many Canadian artists and Canadian production companies are exploited by Adobe.

    • Ban foreigners from owning more than 40% of any Canadian media outlet. It’s absolutely sickening that an american hedge fund (Chatham Asset Management) currently owns 20 different canadian newspapers.

    • Reduce the immigration rate. Justin Trudeau did a lot of good things, but immigration was one of two biggest failures. Under his leadership, the population increased by 3% a year. The Canadian population increase twice as fast as the population of Mexico, Brazil, Spain, the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. This is too extreme. Canada should aim for 2% population growth instead of 3%. Also, don’t concentrate people in a single place. It’s wrong to have a 4% population growth in Toronto and 0.5% elsewhere.

    • Improve the voting system. This was the second failure of Justin Trudeau. The First-Past-The-Post voting system is just flawed. It is basically designed to create two very powerful political parties, at the expense of pluralism. FPTP is the reason why the US is stuck with only two parties.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

  • dwazou@jlai.lutoWorld News@lemmy.world•Peter Dutton to leave Coalition leaderless, conceding he has lost his seat of DicksonEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    I’m not Australian and I don’t know much about Australian politics.

    However, I know that Australian people drive some of the biggest cars in the world. Car companies just manufacture huge SUVs and sell them to the Australian, thinking “these dumb fucks will buy them”.

    That’s not good for the climate. That’s bad for the roads. That’s not even good for Australians themselves, because it’s very unsafe for pedestrians. I heard that Albanese encouraged mandatory rules for better fuel efficiency. Which is a good idea. I just don’t understand why the other bald guy says they are bad.

    In the 1990s and 2000s, the US Auto Industry successfully fought against every attempt to impose fuel efficiency rules. After US Auto manufacturers went bankrupt in 2008, President Obama bailed them out and forced them to save some fuel. Because outside North American, no one wanted to buy american cars anymore.

    During his first mandate, Trump rolled back all those Obama fuel-efficiency rules:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/politics/trump-obama-fuel-economy-standards.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html

    Lack of strong fuel efficiency rules is the main reason why American cars are so heavy and consume so much oil compared to European cars. The bald candidate is wrong to say fuel efficiency rules are bad.

  • dwazou@jlai.lutoTechnology@lemmy.world•Court ruling bars Apple from charging 27% commission on purchases outside the App StoreEnglish
    594·
    4 days ago

    Imagine if Microsoft banned Windows users from downloading software outside the Microsoft store.

    Imagine if Microsoft required all Software developers to give them 30% of their income or be banned from Windows

    This is nothing but pure extortion.

    Thank god for the EU, which forced Apple to back down:

    Fortnite, one of the world’s biggest video games, is available as an iPhone app for the first time in four years. However, it will only be available to players in the European Union. This is because EU law requires Apple to allow third-party app stores on its devices - other parts of the world do not have comparable legislation. The game was removed from the App Store in 2020 following a payments row between Apple and Epic.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70j5rx72yvo

    As for canadians/americans, they are in jail.

    Imagine your friend in Europe sends you a phone invite to play .

    -“Oh. I’m sorry but I am not allowed to do that 😢”