BlameThePeacock @ BlameThePeacock @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

It wouldn't work.

In order to have a military, you'd have to have at least one or more dedicated people, those people would need to be supported with resources and given that it's a stateless society there's zero chance that enough people would voluntarily choose to help them to allow them to operate effectively outside of a wartime event without requiring some sort of payment from everyone and then you're back to having a state.

I mean, basic logic would dictate that if there are 1,918,990 properties in BC (2022 stats can data linked below) and 1,622,625 of them are owned by single owners, the number of 3rd properties is going to be a lot less than the remaining amount of 15.4% because a lot of that is going to be second homes only. This is backed up by a previous statscan release, also linked below which says:

In the three selected provinces, the majority of multiple-property owners owned two properties. Just over three-quarters of multiple-property owners in British Columbia (76.7%) and Ontario (76.0%) owned two properties, as did 70.2% of multiple-property owners in Nova Scotia.

So the number of properties owned by someone who has 3 or more is about 3.5% of the total properties in the province of BC, give or take a couple percentage points because the data and those percentages are from a few years ago (but still fairly recent)

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=4610003801 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/46-28-0001/2019001/article/00001-eng.htm

Just for context, BC builds about 2.5% new housing each year, so it's a little more than a year's worth of inventory.

Condo builds are risky, a 12% profit margin is for a successful project, plenty of projects and developers fail and go bankrupt. I bet you the average return for every attempted project is much lower, but that's not being calculated into that number. A non-profit can still fuck things up and lose money, even (and maybe especially) the government.

The land costs for a condo should be nothing they use almost no base land per person, but even in this case it's still a third of the price. Condo land prices should be a smaller part of an apartment, that's literally the best case scenario for land use per person and why we build giant sky scrapers in the first place. Unfortunately they're also not optimal outside of city cores, and most families don't even want to live in one.

Now go look up the land price vs house price for a 4 bedroom home in the immediate suburbs of a large city.

https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27750787/236-w-12th-avenue-vancouver https://www.bcassessment.ca/Property/Info/QTAwMDAwMVJYQw==

3.5 million dollars, Assessed at 3 million, and land value assessed at 2.8 of that 3 million. Even if you bought that property and build a new detached house on it from scratch for 1 million dollars, it would still be 75% land costs.

How about further out, somewhere in a random Richmond neighborhood.

https://www.bcassessment.ca//Property/Info/QTAwMDA1WE1UVg== https://www.realtor.ca/real-estate/27926782/5280-cranbrook-avenue-richmond

This property is being advertised as basically a single lot for a single home rebuild and it's 2 million dollars. A million dollar home build on it would give you a 66% land cost.

You're absolutely right that a non-profit may build slightly cheaper buildings, but again, it's not going to be a lot.

It will absolutely get passed, it just needs to sit on the back burner until home ownership rates drop to probably around 40-45% rather than the 65% we have now. Non-home owning voters need to outnumber home owning voters, with a bit extra to deal with cultural inertia.

Small adjustments will just keep the pain going for longer, but eventually enough people will get upset enough to flip the table.

Since when is renal failure a death sentence? We can keep people alive for decades without even having kidneys with regular hemo-dialysis machines. Kidney transplants are super common too.

I assume there are other significant injuries that aren't fixable?

I'd actually commend them and give them financial advice regarding it's longevity, it's a high income job but your income drops as you age so it would be good to put a lot of it away or invest some in a secondary income source for when you transition out. This is also true for many other jobs which are reliant on peak physical function/visuals such as modelling or professional sports

Why do I care about the difference between using your hands to rub someone's muscles (a massage therapist) and using a different body part to rub a different body part?

There's nothing special, secret, or wrong about having sex, it's just a normal everyday human activity. Use appropriate protection and go for it.

Do you work a job? You're a whore too.

You're selling your body for money.

The sex aspect is irrelevant, stop being a puritanical religious zealot.

Coop prices stay fixed over time, that's the big benefit. They don't increase rental rates, because they don't need or want to generate profit.

That's how they become cheaper over time, but you're right, they're often not cheaper the day the open up.

I mean, even in Ottawa is there actually enough federal land for that to matter? And if it's not enough there, there definitely isn't enough in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Victoria, etc.

I have a different idea.

LVT is significant, like 25-50%+ of land value.

Use that money to fund a Universal Basic Income.

The goal is to crash the price of land for everyone, probably by like 75% or more in many areas. The ongoing cost to owning land should be something you're willing to pay because you want to live there, and the benefit should be shared by all citizens of the country because that's what the country is... land.

The amount of the UBI should offset the amount an average family would pay in increased taxes if they're using a "reasonable" amount of land for their family size and location.

This way if you use more land than you should be, you pay for that privledge, and if you use less you benefit a bit.

The amounts would be fairly self-levelling, as the now significantly lower price of land would still reflect the desirability of an area because people are essentially now bidding on how much they're willing to pay in taxes since the tax amount would be much higher than the fixed land cost on a yearly basis.

A family property that's $500k in land today, with a $300k home on it would drop to like $100k in land and $300k in home value, going from a total price of $800k to $400k, which would be like a $4000/month mortgage swapping into a $2000 mortgage plus $2000 in land value taxes (at 25%), and then the family of 5 living there would see a $400 per person UBI which offsets the tax cost.

Meanwhile, grandpa and grandma living in that same paid off large home would see a $2000 per month tax increase, and only a $400 per person UBI which means they can either pay $1200 extra per month to stay in the too-big for them home, or they could downsize to something more reasonable for just 2 people.

A lot of republicans do live in a bubble yes, they either do not pay attention to the news at all, or only get it from sources that are heavily biased or even censored.

I have a question for you.

What percentage of Canadian homes are owned by a single person or family who has 3 or more properties?

What if I told you that number is so small that your argument is great rage bait, but realistically useless?

65% of residential properties in Canada are owned by the family that lives in them, another very large chunk is dedicated rental apartments, then there's a ton of second properties like cottages, etc., then of course there are people who have a second property for rental, but the number left remaining for people with a third property (for themselves or rental) is less than a couple percent of the total housing market.

Go ahead and implement that tax, it's not going to hurt anyone I care about, but if you expect any noticeable effect on the housing market you're not thinking logically about the situation.

There is no significant amount of federal public land sitting unused where people want to live. Only 4% of the total land in the provinces are federally owned, and most of that is parks and military bases.

The provinces themselves have some public land, but even most of that isn't in or near cities where people want to live. They could build entirely new cities from scratch in slightly less desirable locations, but that's about it.

The cost to buy private land to do this would be impossibly expensive.

It's a great concept, but it simply doesn't work in reality.

I'm going to take a slightly more nuanced take on this as someone who works in the enterprise software ecosystem.

Microsoft doesn't just sell office to the government or university anymore. Their Microsoft 365 subscriptions include e-mail, office, intranets, communications, security, collaboration tools, and even more.

You can replace the office part with Libre Office no issues, and for home use I would absolutely recommend that instead of paying for a Microsoft license, but the moment you need to start building your own e-mail servers, file sharing systems, getting software for messaging and video calls, etc. the price (software, hardware, maintenance, tech support) goes up to well above what Microsoft charges.

Unfortunately, Microsoft provides decent value.

I'd love to see a non-American competitor that offers such a comprehensive business package, but there isn't even a realistic American competitor at this point, Google is the closest with Google Docs/Sheets, Gmail, Google Meet, Google Drive but having used it extensively it's still falls short of what Microsoft is doing and of course it's also American.

If you need to sign up to 6 different companies to get the same functionality coverage it's never going to be as integrated, as easy to use, or as cheap.

No, cashback is literally a "use this credit card and we'll give you 1% of your money back as a reward" then they charge the vendor 3% to process the transaction.

This is simply wrong.

The article goes into details about the profit margins for developers, but they are not the problem.

The problem is the land value appreciation over time.

A recent study by the Cooperative Housing Federation found that coop rents in five major Canadian cities were on average twenty-five percent lower than “market” rents. What’s more, the differential widens over time, with co-op rents becoming one-third lower on average than market rentals.

They're a third lower because they don't increase their prices at all to match the market rate, because the land cost was locked in at the lower rate and unlike private entities they're not trying to maximize profits by matching current value.

Then the article makes the biggest mistake by saying that the government can just do it. Unfortunately there's almost 0 government owned land in cities where people want to live. That means they would have to buy it on the private market. Buying any reasonable amount of land for this would cost an astronomical amount of money, even if you wanted to reach a goal of 10% non-profit housing the land cost alone would bankrupt the government, and 10% isn't enough to significantly drop the overall prices on the market. It would just mean a bunch of people win the lottery and get a low cost unit, and 90% of the population gets no benefit.

The only viable path to affordable housing is by crashing the value of land. The government could do this in multiple ways by implementing policies or taxes. 100% capital gains, or preferably an ongoing Land Value Tax (not the same as a property tax) that is large enough to eclipse any potential increase in value.

Unfortunately those policies are political suicide right now, far too many Canadian voters own a home and are not willing to give up the value they've accumulated in this pyramid scheme.

The pizza is flat, we're unsure how it fell off.

It does not raise a question, it provides the answer.

NOUN THE VERB

Better than four years of walking backwards