In Canada this is a huge scam. The government advertizes that it's funding incubators. Great, right?
The money doesn't go to the start ups - it all goes to large tech companies like IBM, etc, because, obviously, IBM knows about innovation.
The cover is that the government doesn't know tech so it will give money to trusted partners and they will choose who to give the money to because they've been doing such a great job innovating in Canada. Surprise: they gave the money to themselves!
You might have wondered why all these incubators in the crypto era were desperate to get you to go to their office. You might have also wondered: what fool is paying for this nice office in downtown Toronto where the prices are crazy-high? The taxpayer.
All of that money was completely wasted and worse, little of it went to actual start ups.
If you can read it, here's the same story happening in Hong Kong, but with outright fraud on the recipients' end.
https://thecollectivehk.com/%e7%a7%91%e6%8a%80%e5%88%b8%e8%a...
Governments should really get out of it's free money crap everywhere. Only people that care should be giving out money so that they can look at their investments and make sure they want to keep spending.
Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff? Pay them competitive wages. If they're corrupt, prosecute the corruption.
I feel like these discussions always devolve from "a government is doing a thing badly" → "governments always do things badly" → "governments should stop doing things". But governments are basically the only party that can act in the best interest of citizens rather than shareholders.
So, I would much prefer "a government is doing a thing badly" → "here are ways we could fix it". This should be perfectly achievable. Of course, no bureaucracy—public or private—will ever be perfectly efficient. That doesn't mean it can't be better, or produce a net good.
Also, I do think people tend to miss all the successful things governments fund, like science research.
> But governments are basically the only party that can act with the well being of citizens, as opposed to shareholders, in mind.
Founders that hasn't gone public yet and sold out are the only ones. The government has already sold out to shareholders, at least in USA.
And no its not just "hire good people", its not just "raise wages". What happens if you raise wages is that the useless people get more money, since the ones who decide who to hire are still bad at hiring, so them raising wages without hiring better people is also a form of corruption.
In the end you need to do a deep cleanse to fix it, there are no easy fixes. Root out all plants from all interest groups, everyone that has been bribed via lobbyism money etc, in the entire government...
> And no its not just "hire good people", its not just "raise wages". What happens if you raise wages is that the useless people get more money, since the ones who decide who to hire are still bad at hiring, so them raising wages without hiring better people is also a form of corruption.
Why do you think this doesn't happen outside the government?
> government doing badly -> government always do things badly -> government should stop doing things
Well, I don't think government does ALL things badly, so this is clearly not the case. But the NGO fraud loop is now extremely well established. The thing is none of these programs existed until pretty recently. And before this time in history, we had two mostly co-existent parties in power. Now it seems like specific people will do or allow fraud all the way to the top. We also have bills like "AB 2624" that will make it harder to even find fraud. If our government is behaving this way, I find it best to cut it off from even being allowed to do it.
Go back to roads, police and safety, not funding for alphabet causes.
But all those VC projects are crap too.
Canadian fraud is on another level. When I worked for a Dutch company my boss forced me to take a sales pitch from some Canadian startup. They claimed to have some new magic wireless electricity technology using new unreleased quantum physics principles or whatever and had actually managed to get a significant contract from some part of the Canadian government (that was the only part of the pitch that was not a lie). The website was screaming scam with: crypto AI quantum compute, etc. The sales pitch was an actual live videocall where they just told us a bunch of lies straight to our face.
First and last time I ran into something so blatant. We didn't fall for it btw.
> The money doesn't go to the start ups - it all goes to large tech companies like IBM, etc, because, obviously, IBM knows about innovation.
And the big accounting firms.
It's incredible how efficiently they divert all activity and attention from the core task, and then wonder why things don't take off.
This is the crux of why neoliberal policies don't work.
Public-private partnerships are a breeding ground for corruption. The government either needs to own what it owns or completely give up and leave it to a well regulated private market.
That's not to say one off contacts need to be eliminated. But when it comes to things like building and maintain roads, these private contacts end up being huge sinkholes for public funds.
Public-private partnerships work very well in Asia. But the government has more oversight over the private entity and a heavier hand with policing results.
A big problem in the Anglosphere in particular is that the government is too focused on politics and catering to internal stakeholders and not enough on measurable results.
I've heard horror stories about some parts of Asia. There are huge cities built because some bureaucrat wanted to build it, not because anyone wanted to live there. And the buildings are largely empty. Those are the most visible examples.
That being said, there are some good examples too. And even a few good examples might be better than the partnerships in Canada.
Let's not forget 1MDB, where $4.5B of government money was looted under the pretense of investment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1MDB_scandal
Meanwhile they haven’t raised the HST/GST threshold to start collecting from the $30k in sales it was since the tax was launched in the early 90s.
You know, just something that could provide a little leg up to every small business until they’re not small anymore. But no, inflation doesn’t exist!
I'd never heard of this. Can you provide a link?
I'd be very interested in reading about this fraud.
Sounds like Europe....
Yeah, I used to work for a large-ish company that participated in projects like this.
The company has a project manager with a large spreadsheet to keep track of everything so that no employee would accidentally be officially double booked because that could be detected as fraud.
Some real work was done, but the meetings with other partners were a farce. You had these tiny companies whose only existence was to feed off the European money.
One day our manager asked if the architecture document of a 100kbps modem that I had worked on could be repurposed for a 1 Mbps modem project that was European funded…
https://www.plexal.com/our-partners/
Yes, I remember someone explaining that a similar thing happens with all kinds of research grants in the EU. Some companies specialize in writing very complex grant proposals in just such a way that they are likely accepted, and then produce some useless bullshit reports. Actual specialized companies with expertise in the matters the grant is about don't have the knowledge of how to fill out grant proposals in a way that gets them accepted by bureaucrats because they don't know how the decision process works. Depressing.
Indeed. Also, companies with a genuine and socially at least somewhat useful business model prefer focusing on customers buying their actual products as the main revenue source. The state- and EU-driven funding ecosystem is so convoluted that one either mostly ignores it in favor of value-creating work, or specializes in exploiting it, unfortunately.
Sounds like Brazil...
German here, can confirm. Although, I don't think it's honest incompetence, but intentional corruption. Eg. public calls for bids tend to be a little too specific and politicians tend to get jobs where they funneled public money.
However, things are changing... As of this current government, nobody is scheming anymore. The corruption and wealth extraction happens openly. They are really testing the waters in what they can get away with. It's almost US level audacity, tho not yet as undignified. The sad part is, although people here are universally frustrated about it, they flock to the one party evidently more corrupt and incompetent than the CDU: The AfD.
Honestly, despite political disagreement, all my life I considered myself lucky to live here, but for the first time it makes me sick thinking about Germany's future, working here and paying taxes. And the base motives showing as reactionary malice by my fellow citizens disgust me. It's shameful to admit, but this country is truly ill and deeply corrupt.
People want more government control, but when governments take more control the press tells the people that it's bad and the people acquiesce.
In local forums, so often you see (paraphrasing a pattern) "why are the government interfering with landlords, they should stop so many barbers opening instead". That is, why are the gov interfering in property markets, instead they should interfere in property markets AND plan the economy (where economy here means 'financial system').
The people promoting planned economy without realising it are always 'right wing' 'all Communists should be shot'-types. It's fascinating.
I know a lot of left win Europeans who promote planned economy without realising it. So there's that.
I think a better way to look at it is people demanding the government to intervene whenever intervention is beneficial to them personally, while demanding the government leave things alone whenever intervention is detrimental to them personally. Which is just a long winded way to describe the basics of democracy - people voting in their own interest.
> people voting in their own interest.
There are some people who care about policy, care about a generally healthy environment. Which has a strong self-interest aspect, as it should, but not narrow.
Few people manage to vote for their own narrow interests in a reliable coherent way. Even the rich and powerful reliably foot gun themselves.
I believe the vast majority, the vast majority of the time, reliably and enthusiastically vote for their group's shibboleths. Regardless of what they might say or believe their own motivations are. Even seemingly sophisticated and principled thinkers. It shows via the reliable, trivial to resolve, but reflection impervious group-coded "misunderstandings" that even "serious" people defend and nurture. The group reinforced, often meme-reflex deflected, unthinkables. Across the political spectrum.
People vote for brands.
I think people overwhelmingly voting in line with their group is the effect, not the cause. People start off by being in a group, and their group teaches them what's good and what's bad, as well as how different policies will affect them personally. Mind you, they're most often taught wrong - but uniformly wrong within their group. They're similarly taught about WHO's good and WHO's bad, and how different political parties will affect them personally. Loaded with all these misconceptions, they apply the self-interest mindset and end up with a voting pattern that to an external observer doesn't look like self-interest at all. That's an oversimplification of course, everybody is part of multiple overlapping groups at every point in time and joins and leaves groups frequently, creating a gradient of opinions in a society. But the main mechanism is the same.
The result is mostly the same as with your explanation, except yours doesn't explain why there are primary elections and how they can be so unpredictable.
> People vote for brands.
Right, so the government should be based on brands rather than people. USA trying to make a people centric system still ended up into a brand centric republican vs democrat, just that now those brands changes dramatically every 4 years just people still vote for the brand even after it changes.
Its much more stable when you have stable political party brands like in multi party system, then a person voting for the same brand for 40 years will vote for roughly the same politics instead of it changing all the time.
In practice, multi-party systems rotate their brands in and out with much higher frequency than two-party systems.
“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” ― Frederic Bastiat
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/70896-the-state-is-that-gre...
Properly planning the economy, ala the Chinese tier system, is a good thing.
They have 3 tiers. Its called 新基建 - *Xīn Jījiàn
Top tier is for essentials like food, electricity, internet/comms, water, sewer. Heavily controlled, usually state owned companies.
Middle tier is stuff that's integrated into essential tier.
Lower tier is forefront of tech, and not at all critical for life.
And a reminder that even fucks like Nestle said that water is not a human right. But every capitalist would do their damndest to put a sale price on anything they could. They'd charge breathing if possible.
This is not that dissimilar to the US. The government either controls directly or is very heavily involved in all those things you listed in the top tier.
The fact that PG&E exists is a clear contradiction to your statement.
In most countries, water, electricity, waste management and public transport are government controlled through and through, even if the government might sell shares to the public markets or induce competitive bidding. Except in dysfunctional countries of course.
Every non capitalist would force you to work in random job they assign or force you to obey some rule or law they wrote for their own interest. you don't want to do the job? or dont want to follow the law and rules? fine! go to gulag and enjoy it there.
alternatively, non capitalist eras had real famines and lead to millions starving and dead. but sure putting a price for product/service after risking lots of capital is the real enemy, lmao. why biggest famines mostly happened in non capitalist places is real historical detail with lots of facts.
The irony of defending capitalism's record on human rights with that username...and I'm speaking as someone who likes capitalism.
So you are from Europe, then? :-D
> Every non capitalist would force you to work in random job they assign
Nope. Most non-capitalist systems have a competitive school environment. Students compete for education slots for the careers they want to work in. The only people who end up assigned work are those who have basically no aptitude for higher careers.
> force you to obey some rule or law they wrote for their own interest.
There is no society, capitalist or otherwise, that isn't governed by some set of arbitrary laws, usually for the interest of the state but not always. See, for example, the MJ ban in the US.
> you don't want to do the job? or dont want to follow the law and rules? fine! go to gulag and enjoy it there.
What happens if you don't want to work in a capitalist society or you don't follow the laws? We have a gulag in the US that people are being sent to. Utah just recently criminalized homelessness.
> alternatively, non capitalist eras had real famines and lead to millions starving and dead.
Non-capitalist eras? I don't think there has ever been a true non-capitalist era. Even under the feudal system, that was still capitalism just at it's extreme "might makes right" era. Serfs were forced to do their work because of contracts they signed with their lords for protection. They had to work the fields, in exchange for housing.
There's also plenty of famines caused directly by capitalism. The most infamous one being the Irish potato famine. Ireland is extremely fertile and at the peak of the famine they had bumper crops. The reason the famine happened is because poor irish citizens relied heavily on growing crops for personal sustenance in small gardens. Potatoes being one of the most calorie dense foods for a small patch of land. When blight hit the potatoes, there was not an alternative crop these citizens could get the calories from their small land plots.
Meanwhile, they'd be working giant grain fields and maintained cattle herds which were already sold to english markets.
This famine was entirely from capitalism. The land and the people grew plenty of food, but the capitalists cared a lot more about the wheat and cattle and not the people so the Irish starved.
> putting a price for product/service after risking lots of capital is the real enemy
Yup, in the Irish market that was literally the real problem. The price was higher than the Irish wages.
> why biggest famines mostly happened in non capitalist places is real historical detail with lots of facts.
I think you are mostly just unaware of famines. Not all, for certain, have been caused by capitalism. A decent chunk have been.
> There's also plenty of famines caused directly by capitalism. The most infamous one being the Irish potato famine. Ireland is extremely fertile and at the peak of the famine they had bumper crops. The reason the famine happened is because poor irish citizens relied heavily on growing crops for personal sustenance in small gardens. Potatoes being one of the most calorie dense foods for a small patch of land. When blight hit the potatoes, there was not an alternative crop these citizens could get the calories from their small land plots.
Unfortunately thats only a portion of the story. They had LOTS of crops and meat. The Irish were not *permitted* to eat any of it on threat of death by the English.
Ireland was an occupied country since Elizabeth met with Pirate Queen Grace O'Malley in 1593 up to 1921, where half the country won their freedom. Northern Ireland still is a territory of England.
Prior to that, during The Famine, the Irish were forced to ship all "good" food to England. That left them to eat predominantly potatoes. We all know about the monoculture, and the potato blight.
As a corollary, Irish are to Potatoes, as Black Americans are to chicken and watermelon. Its a massive racial insult, and similar in magnitude.
But no, it was the predominant capitalist country of that age that systematically drained all wealth from Ireland. As is the story of capitalism everywhere.
> As a corollary, Irish are to Potatoes, as Black Americans are to chicken and watermelon. Its a massive racial insult, and similar in magnitude.
This is not accurate. We really need to stop getting offended on behalf of other people. Black people like fried chicken and watermelon, irish people like potatoes. In fact, black people like potatoes and irish people like watermelon and fried chicken.
Nothing about that is racist or offensive.
isn't that what he said?
> Meanwhile, they'd be working giant grain fields and maintained cattle herds which were already sold to english markets.
> This famine was entirely from capitalism. The land and the people grew plenty of food, but the capitalists cared a lot more about the wheat and cattle and not the people so the Irish starved.
And in my experience, the capitalists are SUPER OBSESSED with tallying exact numbers of dead by Communist countries.
Of course in the USA, "Nobody dies due to capitalism!" It's always a 'personal decision'.
Medicines gatekept? Talk to a doctor (state-controlled monopoly)
Go to the doctor? Cant afford it? Go die! :)
Have a nasty disease that will kill you, but pills purge it? $80k please. And insurance wont pay. Hope you can afford it. Solvaldi says hi.
Cant afford housing? There's an underpass or park for that!
Oh you're homeless now? Well, we criminalized that.
OH, so you're in jail? Enjoy substandard living conditions, lack of effective medical, poor food, and slavery. And die in prison? Not a life sentence? Fuck you, you deserved to anyways!
Groceries gouging on food (like meat or eggs or whatever)? Thats a capitalism correction.
Industry polluting your area and causing life expectancy to drop and massive reproductive harm? SHoulda chose a better neighborhood.
Even with Solvaldi, a hepatitis cure costs $84k. But it costs $300 to synthesize at home. And over 6 million people have needlessly died because the cure was capitalistically priced above their legal means. But they will all be labeled as "poor life choices", and not the correct capitalist death. https://kolektiva.media/w/uvD1wWTRoh7HEto8zeSswr - Four Thieves Vinegar Collective video in synthesizing your own pharmaceuticals to bypass capitalist deaths.
The key to capitalism is the magic word "externality". If it's external to what you're doing, you can make others suffer and die and keep your hands clean. And all of this then get shoved on the individual for "Poor Life Choices". In reality, these too are capitalist deaths, but you will *NEVER* see them marked as such.
Inside non capitalist places, those solutions dont even get to EXIST. Nobody even cares about nasty disease solution and funding. They don't get invented or they are not allowed for your use, by design. This is a very narrow view and what a word salad.
Now tell me name of the great "Communist countries" that exist today and they are big and have lots of great things to pursue humankind and human lifespan.
I will wait for the name of those counties :)
> Nobody even cares about nasty disease solution and funding.
This is just silly.
The US has such a large lead in research output because of direct government intervention and funding since about the 1950s. That is a big part of why up until the Trump admin the US has been a powerhouse in medicine.
China is very likely going to be the next world leader in medicine. They've been investing heavily in biomedical research and they are sucking up all the talent that the US is defunding.
> They don't get invented or they are not allowed for your use, by design. This is a very narrow view and what a word salad.
That's a wild conspiracy. Governments want healthy citizens because healthy citizens power a government's economy. But further, governments are made of people and most people realize that general medical research is beneficial to all.
> Now tell me name of the great "Communist countries" that exist today and they are big and have lots of great things to pursue humankind and human lifespan.
China is the best example. Few communist countries have been able to be successful because it's been US policy to undermine them at every turn. Cuba is perhaps one of the best examples of this. And also, remarkably, even with the trade embargo of the US, cuba has a relatively decent healthcare system. The number one thing holding it back is they can't import what they need. Ironically enough, because the capitalists have decided to forgo profit because hurting a communist nation is more important than making money.
China got it's special status because for whatever reason Nixon fell in love with them.
> China is very likely going to be the next world leader in medicine. They've been investing heavily in biomedical research and they are sucking up all the talent that the US is defunding.
They sure have. They created a global pandemic! And convinced the world it was from bat shit. Incredible.
So you're one of those conspiratorial gain-of-function Wuhan infection wonks.
Good to know.
Nah. Occam’s razor is still a real thing.
Yep. One big pattern you will see with capititalist countries is they will carry on that "competition is amazing and wonderful"....
But when communism wants to compete with capitalism, suddenly competition is evil and you're godless and all the slurs capitalists use.
And we see with mild socialists like Mamdani, its easy to see the hate and slurs.
Like, do you or do you not like competition?
This happens in the US, too. Maybe with different drivers, though certainly money moves to people close to the problem.
Now wouldn't it be interesting to dive into how old the extortion tactic of creating the problem you solve goes?
Canada has the same GDP as Texas (well worse). It is a 2nd world economy. You are better off getting a job in El Paso.
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