Dearche @ Dearche @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Making for-profit private organizations do not-for-profit work will never work. They'll either find a way to get around it, or just not do it in the first place.

Won't be surprised if we suddenly see a host of new 4842 square feet projects, or maybe joint projects between multiple companies (all probably owned by the same guy) that split ownership so that nobody builds more than 4842 square feet on a single plot of land.

Or alternatively they'll just hand over useless land somewhere else in exchange for building that massive high value condo or something.

The only way to make affordable housing is to either rely on not-for-profit organizations, or the government to do it themselves.

I don't really have any sympathy here. I mean, if prices are too low, that means that either competition is too high, or the product isn't as popular as people thought it would be.

Either way, the legalization is doing what it's supposed to do: squeeze out illegal trade and prevent this money from reaching the hands of criminals. I bet that no back alley dealer wants to touch weed with a ten foot pole as there's no way for them to make any real profit anymore.

Honestly, I never stopped wearing a mask. After having it for years, it just feels more comfortable wearing it than not nowadays. Not wearing it is like going shirtless or something.

That aside, it also feels like after COVID, a lot of people have lost their sense of smell. The issue of excessive perfumes and nasty odours has gotten worse and I feel like I'll choke on them if I'm not wearing a mask. I already feel like choking despite wearing a mask, so it's hard to imagine how much worse it'll be without it.

I don't think this is what he's talking about. It's not about a city where everything is in walking distance, is a city where 90% of the people live in suburbia, where nothing is in walking distance, but everybody is so far apart that no bus can service anything at any decent level of convenience, let alone cost.

Public transit doesn't work when the population density of your city outside of downtown is more comparable to Yellowknife than Toronto.

It's not the drilling that's the issue, it's the refining. The prices of crude isn't so high on the market itself, but the post-refined products themselves. American refineries are at capacity and have been for at least a decade now, yet they aren't doing anything to increase production.

And as for Canada, we don't have much when it comes to refining capacity in the first place.

It's not just that, but the Saudis are trying to pivot hard towards new industries. They see their entire government collapsing if they can't find a new source of revenue before oil demand collapses and their savings disappear.

Saudi Arabia basically bribed their civilians to stay in power by subsidizing gas, electricity, and water to the point that all three are basically free in the country, while their migrant workers are basically slave labour. The moment any of this changes, there's going to be a coup, and they see the clock ticking with oil demands having peaked in much of the world already.

RealLifeLore has recently released a video talking about their situation, though not so much on the oil.

And now I hope that we upgrade the danger level of Canadians going to China now that they're pushing anti-spying laws and policies on par with wartime levels.

The two Michaels were just a warning. We need to increase separation from China until they cool off and start actually following international laws and conventions.

Ha! It's not just that!

Where I live, they've got some sort of weird "The Future Is Electric" campaign going on. It's on the busses, there's a billboard of one near my place, and hell, that one's powered so it shines brighter than the street lights at night!

And what is it advertising? I have no idea. Just that our province paid for it. The province. For at least one powered, custom billboard along with who knows how many regular ads. For something that I can't even start figuring out.

Ads aren't just ugly and a cheap way to make people spend money on things that they don't need or even make their lives worse, but our tax dollars are spend on meaningless ads when there's so many social and economic issues that are being actively ignored or even caused by the current governments.

I think you misunderstand me. Running away from problems is rarely a good thing. Usually it'll only make things worse, so I completely agree with you.

But the issue is that it is human nature to go for the quick and easy way out, even if it means that you'll be in deeper shit because you did so. This isn't restricted to alcohol abuse either. I personally know a guy who got married because he accidentally got his girlfriend pregnant. He wasn't anywhere close to being ready to commit to it, but he went the easy route once, and now he's saddled with a marriage and baby he didn't want for life. And this is a common story, and people keep making this mistake even after being burned.

How many people can you think of who are obese and don't do anything about it despite knowing full well that one thing probably cut their life down by 10 years if they don't fix things, yet still eat far too much and indulge in sweets or other high calorie foods?

I'm not arguing against you on this point at all. Alcohol isn't a good drug at all, and generally don't provide any real benefits. Either you're dependent on it for numbing some sort of pain, or you consume it just so you're not ostracized by your social circle. Any time someone says that they drink because they truly enjoy it only does because one of those two things had happened in the past and now they've merely adapted to it and formed a different sort of dependancy.

Is Alberta housing that cheap? I was under the impression that anywhere worth living over there was actually extremely expensive and poor in quality due to how many people move there temporarily due to oil.

Yea, the boomer retirement is really messing things up on every level.

It doesn't help when Ford ignored nurse protest last year. Didn't he get into trouble with the courts with how he treated them at the time? Some sort of legislation he forced through that lowered their work conditions and gave pay cuts across the board turning out to be illegal?

If that's not one of the most bald-faced display of disdain for one of the most critical workers in modern society (outside of China that is), I don't know what is.

Did you know that the popular way to become a doctor is to first get into university as a nurse, then transfer to the doctor's course after the first year? It's well told and commonly accepted and done.

Except for the fact that those nurses find out that not a single credit gotten in the nurse course can be applied to the doctor's course. Even worse, if you've started the nurse's course, you're barred from the doctor's course, even if you try to switch universities. This has been true for more than a decade (I know, because I knew someone who suffered this). At least Ontario is so starved for nurses that they teach you in high school to go to nurse school as a shortcut to get into a doctor's course if you don't get accepted the first try. A lie that is perpetuated because becoming a nurse is so unpopular.

It does. But for those that use alcohol as a crutch, its use makes those problems feel further away. Especially if you don't know how to deal with the problems, or just desperately need some relief before tackling the problem (even if it means that you never get to it until it explodes in your face), alcohol is an easy way to pretend that a problem doesn't exist.

Why do you think so many homeless are also alcoholics? I doubt all of them were alcoholics before becoming homeless, and even for those who were, there's a reason why they're still drinking tons of alcohol. All throughout human history, alcohol was known as man's best friend because life was tough, and it let you forget that fact for a while. Or at least make it feel less bad.

Alcohol is a massive tax revenue in pretty much everywhere in the world, but especially here in Canada. It's pretty obvious when you see the difference in price of a beer here compared to the states, as 90% of that difference is purely taxes. Hell, you can tell the difference between the beer/wine costs in Ontario vs in Quebec. There's a reason why people in Ottawa and Gatineau constantly cross the boarder to buy their poison of choice.

That said, there's also the fact that when the States tried to ban it, they basically created some of the richest criminals in the world in like a single year. Alcohol is so ingrained into modern society that people riot over it.

Tobacco is a comfort luxury that pretty much anybody can get off of with some effort. Alcohol is a crutch that far too many people use to avoid going to some pretty dark places.

They did, if you look at late 20th century history. The lobbying and propaganda they did at the time was insane, but there was only so much they could do when people were dying from lung cancer, had trouble breathing, and even chewing tobacco was known to cause mouth cancer.

They simply gave up trying so hard in the west and concentrated efforts in emerging markets. Do you remember the infamous video of the smoking baby a few years ago? Shit like that's eerily common in places like Indonesia.

A lot of people I know have noticed this. Not just in typical groceries, but in a lot of food products.

Usually they don't know what's going on, but I've heard plenty of complaints about the taste of things they buy. Even weird ones like one beer tasting like a cheaper brand.

Honestly, it's the fundamental problem with capitalism, and while I personally advocate for a better system, it's not the sort of thing that can be put into place without major disruptions on all levels of society. Not to mention severe opposition from our allies at even the mention of such reform.

That said, the solution in the short term is to try to force people away from placing most of their money in nonperforming assets. Frankly speaking, getting the latest and greatest cars, smartphones, shoes, whatever isn't actually that much of a deal. The issue is the waste that comes from doing that so often. If all of these things actually lasted us a good decade (or 3+ for cars), it wouldn't be such a problem. Hell, we'd probably enjoy their use that much more if they were built to such a quality.

Imagine a smartphone that has a steel frame, engraved with a nice bezel pattern, and a colourfully etched backplate, strong enough that you don't need a protective case, and all its parts can be replaced by hand, or at least easily at any local repair shop? Sure, you might pay a few thousand for it, but if it's so beautiful, silky smooth to use, and easily lasts a good decade or longer, what's wrong with that? Especially if you can pass it down to one of your kids because it's still good and usable 15 years later.

I know there's software issues with such degrees of long term usage, but the thought that things might last more than a year or two has all but disappeared from most people's minds. It's sad that we're happy buying shoes that'll only last us 6 months of wear, just because you can buy it for less than the price of a week's Starbucks? I'd rather spend over $100 and get nice shoes that not only lasts me a few years, but feel good to wear and don't make my feet hurt after standing and walking around for 10+ hours a day.

On the other side, there's the issue that we don't have good ways to dispose of things. Human sorting is terrible and expensive, yet there's surprisingly little research into automating such processes because there's a lack of money to be found doing so. It takes government will to get these sorts of things done, but need awareness before the governments even start looking at such things in the first place.

The problem about just hoping for the best is that there's basically no way for it to happen naturally. Without an external force to make prices fall in some sort of controlled way, market and local forces will just keep the prices rising, until they crash. And while a part of me kinda hopes for it on a surface level, a housing crash is something we really don't want.

If the housing prices crash, that means that the retirement funds of most people will simply disappear. Most people have almost all of their retirement funds locked up in their homes, with the hope that the value will continue to rise until they're ready to withdraw from the market. But if the housing bubble bursts, then you've got millions of people who suddenly have to figure out how to go from expecting to smoothly sliding into retirement to not even being close to having enough money saved up to retire before 80.

The results of this is that everybody with a home will suddenly stop buying anything but the essentials, and doing everything they can to recoup as much liquid cash as they can with what they have left, while scraping every penny they can from their expenses. It's basically millions of people suddenly just eject themselves from the economy, and we're instantly into a major recession. Everybody's working as hard as they can to save as much money as they can, but nobody's buying anything, businesses lose profits, so everybody starts to shed jobs, making people try even harder to save money, and the cycle continues.

Without a controlled soft landing, it's hard to see how we don't get into a death spiral. And if you want the best case scenario of a place where this really happened, just look at Japan with its Lost Decades. And more of a worse case, look at what's going on in China right now.

I think it's not just the Liberals, but the Conservatives that are at fault. Neither parties have done much of anything when they were in power to help this and other significant stagnation issues over the least two or three decades.

At least for Toronto, the federal and provincial governments had to be punched in the sides to make public transit investments after being forgotten for most of a half century, and even then the new constructions are still quite inadequate and will require at least two more decades of consistent work before things reach a decent level, presuming that other areas don't get worse in the meantime.

It's unfair to just blame the Liberals. All our leading parties suck because they see themselves as invulnerable. They've gotten used to being an oligarchy, and the NPD is no longer scaring them, but instead have become a part of the oligarchy. Layton was great, Mulcair was okay, but Singh is just a puppy following Trudeau. Without someone new (it can be the Rhinoceros Party for all I care) getting a decent number of seats to become a legitimate threat to the oligarchy and make them actually move their asses for real and positive change, I think we're stuck with nothing but corrupt personal interests.

While I disagree about service industries bringing less value to the economy (remember, the technical term service industry doesn't refer to the hospitality industries like hotels and restaurants, but instead things like programming, design, and making movies).

On the other hand, yes, suburbia is the death of economies and livability. I hate how people are more willing to spend two hours driving 100km every day to work than to live without a lawn but be in walking distance of everything you need every week. And that doesn't take into consideration that suburbia actually costs tax dollars to maintain rather than high density mixed uses urban areas that actually generate taxes instead. People forget that the downtown areas of most cities are actually subsidizing the suburbs, rather than their land taxes paying for themselves.