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Cake day: March 9th, 2025

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  • wampus@lemmy.catoMemes@sopuli.xyzAnyone in tech confirm?
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    7 days ago

    Yep. I’ve middle aged coworkers who are saying quite emphatically that they can’t imagine retiring in tech – they know they’ll need to move to another industry well before retirement, in part because of AI reducing the need for certain skillsets. They also know they’re too old to be considered a ‘good hire’ due to ageism in tech. Most seem to have made plans to try and move on to something relatively low skill for the last part of their working lives. I know one of their plans is to do a food truck.


  • So to the OPs broader point, you’re still participating in the broader financial system/market – the financial system doesn’t “just” refer to items placed on the stock market, it includes any money stored in a financial institution, and ultimately even ‘money’ itself. The OPs position sounds a lot more like a libertarian / anarchist take, stating that all ‘money’ is essentially a bubble with imaginary value. I imagine this sort of mindset is increasingly on the minds of people, Americans in particular, as international trade starts to flounder – the value of the US dollar is, in some circles, starting to cause concern. I think there was a news piece from one of their central bankers a couple days ago, commenting that the value of the American dollar is down 10% against other currencies this year, so if your net worth hasn’t gone up by 11% you’ve taken a loss. Currency values are arguably based on difficult to quantify things – it can be viewed as bubble-like at a fairly fundamental level.

    For the RRSP item, typically banks/CUs provide parent accounts and sub accounts, in my experience. So, for example, you can have an RRSP account at a CU which has just cash sitting in it, or that RRSP can have a sub-account Term deposit where the cash is locked in for 5 years and earns 2-4% per annum in interest (essentially just keeping up with inflation) – or an RRSP parent account with a trading sub account. Terms have lower return than the market, in general, but less risk. I’ve personally tended to split my savings between longer Terms in the RRSP for long term retirement needs, shorter more numerous Term Deposits in non-RRSPs that I can cash in for emergencies (taking a small hit if I break the term early), and a Market investment account I handle through my TFSA for now – not really sure if that’s a good approach, but it spreads the risk profiles around, and ensures that I have a baseline of emergency funds available.

    In terms of interest rates / fees, if money is locked in for a longer period FIs generally don’t charge fees, and instead you earn a higher interest rate. The BMO Investonline example, I would guess, is a result of that money getting booked differently in terms of their ability to leverage it for lending, and/or it’s shunted over to a BMO subsidiary entity setup to specifically handle market actions, which is subject to different standards/fee structures. I’ve worked at banks/CUs that did that sort of thing for departments like their auto-leasing programs – which was fascinating, as the CU actually had policies in place not to lease cars to their regular financial members, because they were totally fleecing the auto side and knew it (which was deemed ‘ok’, so long as those people aren’t members/can’t vote in elections). There were also likely larger regulatory hurdles if they were to try and cross sell that sort of product.

    But the long and short of all this, is basically just … if you’re storing a pile of money in a bank/CU, stick it in a term deposit so that it at least keeps up with inflation / earns you interest, rather than costs you in fees. As an added benefit, moving those funds into a non-demand account makes them a lot more difficult for scammers to get at – because the money isn’t available “on demand”.

    Though again, if I’ve interpreted the Ops sentiment correctly, none of this matters from their POV, as it’s all just a house of cards.


  • Eh? Term deposits/GIC savings vehicles generally just generate interest for the depositor, without fees involved. Demand accounts like chequing accounts / payment oriented accounts, will sometimes have a fee, which will typically get waived if the amount in that account exceeds a certain value (typically around $1000-1500). Been that way forever at CUs. It’s generally because they can use that capital to fund loans, more confidently, if the money’s locked in to a term deposit for a set period – in a simple small CU setup, they’re essentially taking all those deposits, pooling them together to help people buy homes, and charging the borrowers enough to pay both the deposit interest and the CUs operating costs. There’s very little ‘risk’, given that any loan is secured by property, with a loan to value ratio of around 75-80% at the high end – something regulators seem oblivious to at times in Canada, as many cripple industry without cause. They’re actively working to kill small CUs, while also whining federally about a lack of financial industry competition.

    But back on topic, I think the posters comment is more trying to imply that all assets/money is a bubble. I’m not really sure why. But whether you have money in property/assets, or money sitting in an account, it’s part of “the entire financial system” that the poster says is a giant bubble.





  • Personally, assuming its the local language, I’m fine with the idea.

    People who are multilingual don’t always seem to get how it looks/feels for monolingual people – but it’s a way of excluding them from participating in whatever the conversation is. I think back to a camping trip described by an X with her friends, where in most of the group spoke english and chinese – except my X, who only spoke english. Because one or two in the group were more fluent in Chinese, for most of the weekend the vast majority of conversation was in Chinese, which really drove home how isolating / alienating it can be to be the person left out. You’re basically being pre-excluded from a conversation, just to make it easier for communication with someone else – your basic participation is less important than the other person’s ease of communication. My X had no concern about them “talkin bout her behind her back” or anything, they were all friends, but she finally understood how it comes across.

    While the majority of the work force may speak another language, the “main” language in a country is to me, meant to serve as a default for business. If I were multilingual, working in a foreign non-english country, I’d expect any business I worked for to require me to use their local language. Even more, when it comes to supervisors/team leads, hearing the conversations can also help you target potential issues – like if you overhear a team member teaching something incorrectly. So there’s a potential business liability type reason to make sure that all team members, especially oversight, can understand what’s getting said if it pertains to the business.



  • buncha folks talking about savings accounts and rates, its easier to think of accounts in three categories: loans, savings, demand. The last one being where the money’s available to you ‘on demand’ with no extra conditions – ie. a chequing account, or a ‘savings’ account with a low rate… because the money’s available on demand.

    Higher rate savings accounts are common, I don’t know why people almost always seem confused by the notion. You get a term deposit/gic or whatever, where you lock money in for X period, to get a higher rate – and if you tap that money before the period’s over, you lose the interest.

    Locked in deposit rates will almost always be about 1-2% lower than regular mortgage rates that people pay, with CUs using the difference for operation costs. So like my CU has mortgage rates just shy of 5% at the moment, and term deposit rates of around 2.7-3% give or take. A rate cut was just announced in Canada, so those will likely go down a bit this week.


  • As a foreigner/westerner, I don’t get why Iran would do this at this point. There are western powers in that region that don’t comply with international treaties related to Nuclear weapons/capabilities. Israel being the obvious one, where “no ones totally sure” how many nukes or what capabilities they have. The west also seems to use the IAEA to help it find good targets/sort out logistics for attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, be they civilian/compliant with international norms or not.

    They’ve been screwed fairly regularly when trying to comply / align with the IAEA and various political agreements on development. I don’t see why they don’t just go strengthen ties with Russia, NK and China, and say “screw you” to the traditional USA-oriented international rules. Not even the USA bothers to follow those rules anymore.



  • To me it seems naive to think that the disparity between the people of Gaza, and the people of Israel, is not dissimilar to the wealth inequality of the poor, and the rich. People seem to gloss over how modern western democracies generally got going – through violent revolutions with lots of dead rich people. And those movements were often seeded by essentially the middle class military, who the rich had paid to outfit with the intent that they’d carry out the upper class’s orders. People like Cromwell didn’t exactly wake up one day, and just happen to trip across a bunch of Cannons to point at the British royalty. Until there’d been that blunder from the nobility giving the military too much autonomy, coupled with the advent of Canons, the ability for regular peasants to rise up against the nobility and their goon squads was pretty fuckin limited. For such a revolutionary figure to emerge from a poor, downtrodden and financially bereft area such as Gaza, would just be highly improbable.

    Like China hired gangs of thugs with bats to beat the shit out of Democratic advocates during the crack down in Hong Kong, and has taken out bounties on people living abroad who advocate too vocally for human rights in the region. You can’t realistically look at what went on there, in my view, and say that the people didn’t try really hard to maintain their civil liberties – but were beaten down quite explicitly by force and the sheer scale of resources available to the CCP. Yes, if there was some mass uprising all across the country they could spontaneously change their systems of governance – but that’s practically unheard of in real world countries of note in modern times. Taking a more realistic view of the situation doesn’t make it any better, in that things will most likely continue to suck for most people, but it at least sets more reasonable expectations.




  • Your phrasing of “allowing” implies that these guys are in power through some sort of legitimate electoral process. They’re both dictators, who claimed power through force and intimidation. There’s no “let” about it, nor any “say” in the situation from people at large.

    Just because dictators demand to be called by western elected official terminology in translations to english media, doesn’t make them same animal. It’s propaganda meant to normalize their rule.


  • Well, that latest mass shooting in the media was done by a trans person, yea? And Trump’s busy deploying National Guard units to most blue states in an authoritarian/fascist push…

    So I imagine, that the left may have a chance of getting gun control on the agenda this time. Though it may not look like how they want it to. It’d be gun control to deny lgbtq+ and blue voters guns.



  • It’s accurate to describe it as abnormal – something that’s less common deviates from what is normal, is abnormal. There’s often a connection to abnormal things being ‘worrying’, and lgbtq+ stuff falls into that category for many as well – case in point, Snoop. Few parents ‘wish’ their kids to be lgbtq+, it worries them, even if many will (hopefully) love their kids regardless. I reckon lemmy has a significant number of lgbtq+ people on it, which presents echo chamber bias. I still think it’s important to voice dissenting opinions / views, even if it triggers a bunch of people – so long as it’s done in a generally neutral fashion. My communication skills feel ok to me, though some groan that I write longer posts. Sure, I often have people post ad hominem type insults / personal attacks against things I post, but I rarely respond back attacking the personality/character of those folks (admittedly, I’ve been more lax lately).

    Sorta like how there are seemingly a lot of FN people in many of the Canadian subs. Most/many of the articles that get posted there are primarily about FN topics, with FN bias. While I know my views on FN issues are not “in line” with the FN narrative, I still think it’s important to highlight things in a mostly neutral manner, so that there’s a diversity of opinions presented to the broader community. Without more diverse opinions displayed, it gives the wrong impression to readers of the general public opinion about various topics – I doubt I really need to go on about the risks of echo chambers on social media.


  • I know about ancient greece, and as I’ve said I don’t care personally what people do / who they love. Don’t assume just because I consider homosexual behaviour to be abnormal, that I’m somehow opposed to it / think it inherently “wrong” or anything. I also don’t have a personal issue with it in movies, particularly more adult themed movies – though I do think it’s massively over-represented at this point, as almost every movie/show I see has heavy lgbtq+ themes wedged in haphazardly, often to the detriment of the plot.

    Younger generations claiming to be lgbtq+, or being on the gender spectrum, doesn’t really impact my view, I admit. First, it’s still a minority, which makes it abnormal. Grouping all abnormal types together also inflates the perspective of how common it is for any one subset. Young people are also more inclined to be affected by perceptions of benefits / “going along with what’s approved in media”. Even the stats on that site generally support this, noting that the breakdown between men/women is hugely lopsided amongst Gen Z, and with the bulk of the change seemingly being women identifying as bisexual. That fits quite a bit with how its presented in media – so I’d still question whether it’s kids being ‘genuine’ in their experiences/feelings, or if it’s media pushing certain messages and kids reacting to those messages. Media can clearly influence peoples world views / perspectives, at times in ways that aren’t authentic – we’re all keen to recognise as such when we talk about the negative impact of fox news – so it’d seem strange to pretend like it can’t have a similar reality-distorting effect in this area, given the level of over-representation of lgbtq+ themes. Particularly bi-sexual women, as media likes to treat women as sex objects desired by “everyone”, and wedge in some lesbian sex scenes to boot. Almost every series/movie has lgbtq+ stuff in it these days, which is one reason Snoop is uncomfortable taking kids to movies – it’s gotten pretty rare to see a same-race healthy relationship straight couple in media.

    To approach it from a slightly different angle: it’s like trying to find non-emo edgelord male characters in anime (which, in its space, feeds the indoctrination of alpha male sorts) – or the negative male stereo-types pushed by people like Tate. If we accept/recognise that certain media representations can “make” young people more extreme in that sort of space, then I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to say that media can “make” young people more gender fluid on the flip side. Part of being young, is lacking critical objectivity.

    Also, in terms of the polling and benefits, hell, I personally identify as “other” on all government polls, because “other” gets preferential treatment/hiring options, while “male” gets rejection letters. That isn’t an authentic response, but it’s a necessary response to get past certain hiring criteria – I’ve literally had rejection letters stating “you’re not part of an equity group” in the past, when I answered male (in Canada, literally the reason the federal government rejected my application). Workplaces have no business blocking people from employment due to their preference, even when it comes to us CIS folks.

    As for seeing things in public – a kid could see a horrific car accident by chance, corpses everywhere. That doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to show a 6 year old graphic death scenes. Or to use a less extreme example, and a fairly common one, they could walk in on their parents fucking – it still wouldn’t be appropriate for a movie for kids to have a bunch of sex scenes. Content involving adult stuff should have an adult rating, even if “some” kids may encounter those things earlier in life by happenstance.


  • wampus@lemmy.catoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldFrom Snoop Dogg to Lap Dogg
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    4 months ago

    Me personally? I wouldn’t care either way. I’ve seen a woman on the street fingering the ass of a muslim dude before, and just sorta walked by. But I don’t have kids. I imagine if I had kids, I’d be opposed to public ass-blasting.

    A parent that I work with has had awkward conversations with his kids, after they came to Canada and saw guys kissing / making out in public. I can appreciate that such PDAs can prompt similar ‘awkward’ conversations, but also that they’re much less ‘common’ than encountering them as part of a big budget movie – and encountering them in public is often an easier way for parents to broach the subject. Kids noticing that stuff is unavoidable as they mature, but having it forced to the front by media / schools is questionable, and I can appreciate the parents’ concerns on that front.