Tea & Two Slices is a long-running local news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran dishwasher Sean Orr, who lives and works in Gastown, deeply aware of his privilege.

Good riddance: Granville Street nightclubs disappearing as millennials drawn to pubs and restaurants instead. Ok, first of all, millennials are between 25 and 39 and maybe don’t feel like navigating the shitshow. Maybe they don’t want to spend their Friday night paying $15 for a gin and soda that could get them date raped. Maybe they want to avoid fights with coked-out trust fund kids and roid freaks. Maybe they don’t want to eat overpriced pizza and then wait for a $60 cab to the suburbs because the Skytrain stopped and it’s the only place you can afford to live. Maybe they want to have a conversation with their friends who they never get to see because they work 3 jobs.

Millennials need 4,459 hours of minimum wage work to pay for four years of college. To put that in perspective, Boomers needed just 309. Blaming millennials, who face a rising tide of fascism coupled with impending climate catastrophe, because they don’t want to go to your shitty nightclub is nothing short of gaslighting. Besides:

Never fear, the tech industry is here to save us with…more debt? Rising Rents for Millennials Give Rise to a New Breed of Lender.

Of course, the capitalists will do their best to blame everyone but themselves, and the media will continue to prop up their bullshit: Average Canadian household spent more on taxes than living costs in 2018, report finds. Only this time, people are catching on. After decades of corporate tax cuts, this “report” by the Fraser Institute is just laughable. Why would a family pay payroll taxes? And what the fuck is a profit tax? Also:

A family would have to spend about $14 000 a year on alcohol to pay $1800 in liquor taxes. That works out to 27 bottles of plonk a week.

This Fraser Institute “average family” has bigger problems than taxes.

— Teresa Kelly (@Teresa_Kelly) August 2, 2019

And this all presumes things like healthcare, public schools, roads, waste collection, transit, sewage and storm water management, environmental protection, and, um, water aren’t basic necessities as this new parody account reminds us:

We crunched the numbers and realized that people spend more on taxes than necessities. Unless you include police, fire, medical, roads and highways, education or other various things that our taxes pay for as necessities of a quality society. #FraserInstitute pic.twitter.com/uHQemrUJ6f

— The Fraser Institurd (@FraserInstiturd) August 2, 2019

More anti-tax nonsense: What do we have to show for 10 years of carbon tax? That’s a lot of words for “I cant cite my sources because they don’t exist.” The letter writer goes on: “The point is there are no alternatives! Why are we being heavily taxed when there isn’t anything else available”? We have the best transit in North America thanks to carbon tax. Use it, motherfucker. I hate to quote Ken Hardie but:

And if he checks his income tax statement, he’ll find that he’s paid the lowest rates in Canada because the base carbon tax has been used to offset income taxes in BC since day one. Gordon Campbell’s strategy was brilliant! Lowest taxes…average GHG emissions down 14%…economy grew by 26%.

Despite what Fraser Institute tells you, we’re doing better than what I assume their perfect model of taxation looks like: Most Canadian households better off financially than American counterparts: income comparison. The parade metaphor in this article is very hard to understand. Do I get to dance on a float in my underwear or what?

Speaking of comparing ourselves to America: Canada should follow the lead of Trump’s America and grow jobs, not regulations. I like this idea of growing jobs. Just put my job in the dirt and smother it with manure and it will blossom like a lovely turnip. Besides, they aren’t even close to being mutually exclusive. In fact, regulations protect workers.

Vancouver Centre NDP candidate tears page out of AOC’s winning playbook. Is this supposed to be a hit piece? Because it’s actually the biggest endorsement I could imagine.

And in the next riding over: Yvonne Hanson: Fighting for the Green New Deal—why social justice and climate action must go hand in hand. Another industry-killing lazy millennial…

In 2012, when I was 17 years old, I decided I wanted to get involved with politics. I was driven, just as many young people are driven now, by the realization that we were running out of time to address climate change in a meaningful and effective way, and that elected leaders were inexcusably hesitant to take the needed action

Strathcona summer days be damned: One of summer’s ‘great joys’ ruined by herbicide, says Vancouver berry picker.

Bonus: What future Canadian drug shortage caused by the US will you die in?