Exploring issues of social class in Waterloo Region, working to enable change by understanding our local context through examples. Used to be: WRecordPitchbot
Aug 17, 2022 • 27 tweets • 8 min read
A face that most of us recognize, Galen Weston Jr., heir of billionaire Galen Weston, never had a day of need in his life, is one of the oligarchs cannibalizing our healthcare system.
Why? Because it makes him tons of money of course! Where did this wealth+power come from? 1/x
According to Forbes, his family is the third wealthiest family in Canada and in the top 200 globally. His family is among a number of ultra wealthy and powerful families, like the Rogers (telecom, TV+news, etc), or the Irvings, who control much of Atlantic Canada's economy. 2/
Aug 15, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
We are witnessing a very clear example of how public systems are cannibalized by private markets. Has been increasingly happening here and across much of the Western world in a process sometimes referred to as "neoliberalism", where capitalists have organized around common 1/x
goals to lower taxes for the wealthy, asset strip public institutions (eg CN railways privatized from Via Rail), holding regular people ransom for exorbitant profits (privatizing Connaught Labs which made very cheap at-cost insulin, etc), & so on. They organized via business 2/
Jun 14, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
This little piece of sensational reporting is a nice little case study of how to sell content to a specific audience (suburban subscribers) and how easy it is to mislead readers. Small thread
I cannot fathom how staff would be against this as they have adopted a Vision Zero policy goal, which aims to(somehow) reduce pedestrian fatalities to zero. Reducing speeds is an incredibly effective way to do this: energy of vehicle impact goes as velocity squared and hugely 2/
