EhForumUser @ EhForumUser @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

If someone is going to cause trouble because of some words someone said, they are mentally unwell and it is best to get that out in the open so they can receive the help they need.

Everything is transactional. Even trying to not be transactional towards another because it makes you feel good that you are not being transactional is actually transactional. Those good feelings the other person gave you are payment for your efforts.

That’s an intriguing point. Before the car, city living was nearly unheard of.

Bill C-18 clearly includes Lemmy in theory, only excluding it by virtue of it not being considered dominant. That could change some day should it ever become popular.

As much as humans don't like to admit it, human behaviour is always perfectly transactional.

People don’t seem to really care about their kids/grandkids being unable to afford housing.

Well, that's because affordability is about the same. Granted, that is because the youth have much cheaper lives than we did. In my day we had to spend $20 to see a movie. The kids these days can watch all the movies for $20. To listen to a song you had to pay $20 too. Today you can listen to any song ever made for free. We dropped $100 a night at the bar. They flip through Tinder. We had to buy $20,000 cars to get anywhere, and let's not even talk about the costs that followed. They toss a few bucks at transit and move around to their heart's content.

There is concern for whether or not they are missing out on their lives because of that. Going to the movies, for example, brought more than just a movie. It was a social adventure. Staying home to watch Netflix is not the same. But it's also hard to judge if that is actually something to be concerned about, or if it's just us trying to re-live our youth? Is one life actually better than the other?

I really don’t understand the people who rush to defend Meta/Facebook on bill C-18.

Because it is what is most likely to provoke a reaction? Like all internet comments, the words aren't grounded in anything. They are crafted such that they attempt to get something back in return (a reply, a vote, etc.) If you want to learn what people really think, you need to find a way into their private journal (without them knowing, else you will influence the activity). As soon as other people become involved, the motivations change.

(on an open source social media platform of all places!)

Well, if Lemmy ever becomes popular, it too will become subject to the same law. Open source especially doesn't like such encumberments. This surprises you, why?

Yet all the major news sites I checked provided Open Graph content.

In case you don't know, Open Graph was created by Facebook to give publishers control over what information is displayed on Facebook when a news resource is introduced into their system.

If you don't want Facebook to display that content, knowing it means you won't see the traffic, why explicitly provide and denote it for their use? Open Graph content isn't naturally occurring. These news companies are going out of their way to tell Facebook exactly what they want shown.

Is this simply a case of the top brass spending too much time in Ottawa and not enough time talking to the technical people?

A shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.

While we do have such controls in certain areas of the economy – you were probably bitten by one case at the onset of COVID when toilet paper wasn't legally able to rise in price due to price gouging laws, leaving the shelves bare instead – I'm not aware of any attempts to restrict the price of housing?

Setting a government mandated price limit on housing is oft suggested as a solution, but the so-called problem here is that the prices have been able to rise. Literally the opposite of a shortage.

Not to mention that, save the guilded few who had the farm given to them, one needs a lucrative career to fund their farming habit, so you're going to find a lot of farmers who also work as electricians, programmers, doctors, lawyers, etc.

Isn’t that sort of convenience kind of the whole point of a city?

That's the point of a small town.

The point of big cities is to concentrate capital so that a few people can become exceedingly wealthy.

Isn’t the argument for C-18 that the advertising market isn’t doing the news organizations much good anyway?

The officially stated reason for Bill C-18 is to give news organizations in Canada balanced negotiating power with entities like Facebook.

Which, I guess, was successful. Facebook pushed away from the bargaining table as it no longer feels like it holds dominance over it.

But now the news companies are saying that's not good enough. They want more power than Facebook has.

It was, but we also saw deflation in 2009. It is less common for us to see than inflation, to be sure, but it is far from something that never happens. On average, we experience it about once every decade. No doubt it will be twice this decade by the time we reach the end.

It’s actually a lot better to just go to the news sites.

Not true at all. Being from a small community, news is pretty well only reported by the local CTV news reporter. Said reporter was maintaining his own Facebook page, and through that I could zero in on his content that is relevant to where I live.

If I go to CTV directly, there is no way to get only the local news. It's mixed in with news about places hundreds of kilometres away. News about a place hundreds of kilometres away has little relevance to my life. If you dig deep you can find the local news somewhere in there, but unless you work as a full-time researcher, who has that kind of time?

Maybe said reporter will create his own website in the wake of this – but at the same time, maybe he doesn't have means to do so. There isn't a lot of money in being a small town reporter. Facebook made that accessible to most with little investment and to those with little technical knowhow.

Maybe CTV will smarten up and build a website that is more usable. But not likely, as why bother trying when you can just go crying to the government?

But as it stands right now, the only thing keeping us abreast in the local news is that he is posting to X. But presumably it will go the same way, or, more likely, end up bankrupt in the near future.

the grocery industry is much more…peculiar, or at least idiosyncratic than most

In what way?

• Inflation is only concerned with the value of the currency. Like everything on the other side of the transaction, food has its own independent value. One that has risen, largely due the Ukraine conflict reminding people how vulnerable the food supply chain is, and them now seeing food as being more valuable than in the recent past. They are willing to pay more – much more, in a lot of cases – because of that.
• Let's not forget the farm gate price peaked in 2022 at around ~100% over 2018 prices – for a number of reasons, but the EU fertilizer plant shutdown quickly followed by loss of access to Russian fertilizer being a primary driver. That is what you're currently feeling at the grocery store. The farm gate price is now down ~50% off the peak. You will start to see that roll into the grocery store within the next year. Remember, wholesale food is largely purchased on futures contracts. You, at the store, are mostly buying what the farmer sold in 2021-2022 right now.

Frankly, the grocery industry is one of the least idiosyncratic markets around.

The buyer sets the price. Inflation tells half the story, but the other half is that the people generally believe that things like food are worth more now. When the Ukraine conflict began, people started seeing famine as a real threat, which put them in "Oh shit, I'd better not take this thing for granted anymore!" mode.

Inflation is not prices, it’s a rate of increase of prices.

Inflation attempts to measure the decreasing value the of currency as observed over time. The change in price across a certain basket of goods is the proxy used to determine that.

Even if Inflation is at 0%, prices won’t decrease

All else equal, a decline in value of the currency means that price will rise. However, there are two sides to every transaction. The thing on the other side may also decrease in value. If that other thing decreases in value faster than the currency, then it is possible for inflation to be >=0% and for the price to still fall.

We saw deflation as recently as 2020. Prices do not always go up.

Moreover, every single high inflationary period in history, save one time, has seen deflation occur soon after. Why do you think this will be the second outlier, especially when the driving forces are closer to every other time and quite unlike that one unique time?

Sounds like every farmer. Who knew they were all so interesting?

we’re only entering this El Nino cycle.

El Niño typically brings rain. In fact, as you know being a farmer, several weeks ago there was drought panic in the market – but with that cycle starting to set in the rains finally came and the prices came tumbling down again thereafter.

Commodity prices are 30-50% of what they were last year. The grocer price remains high only because it takes a while to work through the system. Next year things will look quite a bit different.

Drought has crushed yields over a vast area of Canada’s agricultural land.

We've mostly recovered here in Ontario, but true that things don't look so great in the west. However, the markets aren't terribly concerned. Wheat, for example, is down 10% in just a couple of weeks. Canada isn't that significant of a producer in the grand scheme of things, really.

What won’t plummet is the consumer price of beef, I can almost guarantee it.

Well, it is certainly volatile right now. The dumping is visible as you can see beef being sold for half the price of the day before if you go to the store at the right time, and then it jumps back up soon thereafter. But, overall, beef lags corn. It will take several years to work its way through the system, just like in 2013. Eventually it will return. It always does. We've been here a million times before.

And I shudder to think of what grain and bread prices could be by the end of this year.

All us farmers would love to go back to last year's market, I'm sure. But for the consumer, the rains came at just the right time in the most important places, so things are going to almost certainly going to become cheaper still.

The cure for high prices is high prices.

For those who don't know why:

To preface, there are two sides to every transaction: Something being offered, and something being traded in kind. Exchanging parties must feel that both sides of the transaction are of equal value in order to see a transaction carried out. The unit of measure used to determine where that equalization point is found is known as price.

On one side of the transaction, the value of what is being offered had been declining in value at a rate not seen in a long time. This means that it takes more of that thing to equalize the other side of the transaction. COVID factors has lead people to not see this thing as being as valuable as they once did. While that decline has pretty much settled down now, it does partially explain why prices have risen up to this point.

On the other side of the transaction, the value of what is being offered has been increasing in value at a rate not seen in a long time. This means that it takes less of that thing to equalize the other side of the transaction. The Ukrainian conflict suggesting that famine is a real possibility has reminded people that they shouldn't take this thing for granted, and as such they now consider it more valuable. This explains the remainder of the price growth.

they are showing some of the content from the article itself.

They are showing the content found in the og:description meta tag, you mean. The "og" bit stands for Open Graph, which is a protocol developed by Facebook so that news sites can define the content they want Facebook to show.

If news sites don't want Facebook to display this information, they could stop providing it via Open Graph. Again, Open Graph was created exactly to give publishers control over what Facebook shows when linking to their resource. A quick check of the major sites in Canada reveals that Open Graph use is omnipresent and that they are quite welcoming of Facebook using their work.

Funny, that.