Yaztromo @ Yaztromo @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

No — the current housing troubles go back a long way. Back to at least the early 90s. A housing crisis like we’re seeing doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been going on for a long, long time. But just like climate change people ignored it when it was a more superficial problem until we got to a point where it is close to intractable.

The early 90s was about when the NIMBYs took over in full force. Construction companies had by this time stopped building starter homes, and virtually nobody was building apartment buildings. Condos were suddenly where all of the vertical construction was going in Canada’s biggest cities.

The big problem here is that big projects like these take time — and the lack of focus in the 90s on these types of housing really started to manifest itself around 10 years later. If you lived in one of Canada’s big cities at the time complaints about how hard it was getting to buy a home weren’t a lot different than today (smaller centres didn’t quite have the same problem, although it slowly started to spill over into them as people moved to the peripheries to avoid the soaring costs in the major centres). Projects that can take 10 years from start to finish in the “missing middle” had been ignored, and you can’t go back in time to correct that.

It isn’t as if we didn’t have immigration before. In fact, the previous record number of immigrants into Canada was in 1921, at 22.3%. And the record highest per capita immigration rate Canada ever saw was in 1913, when Canada (with a population of only 7.6 million people) let in 400 900 newcomers — or nearly 5.3% of our population. It didn’t cause Canada to collapse.

It may feel like the Feds just decided to bring in all these people and dump the problem on the Provinces to deal with, but that’s not how the system works. Here is what Chris Alexander, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration under Prime Minister Steven Harper says about the process:

Under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), as adopted in 2001 and amended and updated regularly by successive governments ever since, the federal government must consult with its provincial counterparts on three issues: the number of permanent residents to be admitted in a given year; their “distribution in Canada taking into account regional economic and demographic requirements”; and what we call settlement issues, namely “the measures to be undertaken to facilitate their integration into Canadian society.”

In concrete terms, this means federal and provincial officials are in touch constantly, with the minister meeting his or her provincial and territorial counterparts regularly, as well as many other groups with an abiding interest in immigration.

So it isn’t as if the Provinces didn’t know and weren’t part of the conversation, and didn’t help come up with the numbers. The Feds numbers are typically the summation of what the Provinces want/need (all except Quebec have their own Provincial Nomination Programmes). But by and large, the Provinces still did fuck all about housing, even after asking for all these new immigrants (including international students).

You shouldn’t blame the immigrants or the Feds for that cockup. That is ENTIRELY on the Provinces.

We need more people, especially young, working professionals who produce high-value products. We have an aging population that is barely having babies at replacement level, and we need younger taxpayers coming into the system to help keep it propped up. We’re currently top-heavy in terms of demographics (thanks to the Boomer generation being the largest generation in at least the last two centuries), so we need those people otherwise the shit is going to hit the fan WAY worse than a housing crisis.

The Provinces knew the Feds were going to bring in more people. They knew we needed more housing. But many of them listened to the NIMBY’s of this world (or thought they could stick it to the Feds and make them look bad) and so did little to nothing to improve the housing situation.

Housing is nearly 100% a Provincial affair in Canada. You should absolutely be angry about the situation — but the bad guys here aren’t the Federal Government, and it isn’t the immigrants themselves. It’s the Provinces (and through their jurisdiction the Municipalities) who have been ham-stringing housing development.

Oddly enough, the situation will eventually work itself out as more of the Boomer generation die off (or downsize). Although I suspect it’s going to be a long, slow ramp-up with a smaller cliff at the end (unless immigration is raised again to match the death rate).

As far as the DST. I find it interesting that a tax we never collected is being framed as a loss we deserve compensation for.

I can explain that. While on the one hand I don’t really have a problem with attempting to level the playing field between international tech companies that don’t pay any corporate taxes in Canada and local Canadian companies who do, the big problem is that ultimately the pocket that those taxes will come from is “all of us” (at least those of us who use American online services). The companies weren’t going to take a loss — they were just going to jack up the prices they charge to Canadians.

And because the payment was intended to be retroactive to 2022, we’ve likely already been paying it. Again, big tech companies weren’t going to take a loss, and they’ve known about the payment date for years now, so they’ve been collecting it from us in the form of higher subscription fees and rates. And now that the DST is cancelled — they get to keep it. Oh, and as we’re now all used to paying the higher rates, they get to keep that too.

So that’s where the loss is. IMO the DST wasn’t all that great an idea to start with (taxing those companies sounds great until you realize they’re just jacking their prices up on us to pay for it), but having told companies to plan for it all these years and then yank it back has just put a ton of Canadian dollars into their coffers they don’t have to give back. And they’ll keep charging us the jacked-up rates we’re now used to and keep that as well.

The main browser to use WebKit these days is Safari. You’ll find that on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I’m guessing that would be why someone downvoted me (some people have strong feelings about Apple, even though WebKit is Open Source and is very highly privacy focussed).

I had thought there were more options out there outside the Apple ecosystem, but it seems many of the browsers I once knew were using WebKit moved at some point to Blink (like Maxthon and Slepnir). The Gnome Epiphany browser for Linux however is built atop WebKit.

There are others, but you’re not likely (or able) to use them on desktop systems. PlayStation’s Orbis OS for the PS4 and PS5 uses WebKit as its underlying browser engine, for example. And there is WPE that is intended for use in embedded system environments (like for digital signage).

I did think there were more options out there (there once was!), but it seems a bunch of them moved to Blink when I wasn’t looking!

You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.

There are people who write about Hermione feeling uncomfortable as her physical gender after taking the polyjuice potion to become Harry and wanting to transition back to her perceived gender — and who somehow can’t extend that to trans people in real life.

[:Looks vaguely in the direction of Jo Rowling:]

I truly hope Prime Minister Carney doesn’t drop the mandate.

There are two very important parts of the enabling legislation that too many people just don’t seem to know, and it’s skewing the online discussions everywhere:

1. PHEV’s are still going to be allowed after 2035. So if you are so enamoured with giving your hard earned money to the oil and gas companies you’ll still be able to do so for decades to come;
2. The mandate doesn’t affect used vehicles at all;
3. Companies that miss the legislated targets can instead get credits by building out EVSE (charging) infrastructure. So for all those online pundits who think we should drop the mandate because we don’t have enough charging infrastructure, we get that infrastructure by keeping the mandates, and it gets paid for by the companies selling too many gas powered cars (and not taxpayers).

PM Carney needs to tell the automotive executives who say they can’t sell enough EVs/PHEVs to start building out infrastructure. It may be worthwhile to re-balance some of the timelines and how much the infrastructure credits are worth, but dumping them entirely is bad for Canada as a whole.

And nothing of value was lost.

Let’s be very clear here: HOUSING IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PROVINCES.

As well, PROPERTY TAX (TAX ON LAND) IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PROVINCES.

So if by “this government” you mean the Carney Liberals you’re right in the sense they won’t do anything about this — but the reason for that is they can’t. That’s not their Constitutional role, and the levers they can pull in this regard are minimal (and mostly revolve around either mortgage insurance, regulating the financial sector, and dolling money out to Provinces).

If you’re upset about housing, you should be upset at your Provincial Government, not the Feds.

The difference I would note is that in North America those 240V plugs aren’t likely going to be on a 10A circuit — usually they’re going to be more in the range of 30A to 50A, as they’re typically designated in homes for use by a dryer or a range (and if you’re lucky, in the garage for an EV).

That’s not to say you couldn’t run a lower amperage 240V circuit — there just aren’t a lot of practical uses for doing so (I believe some air conditioners only need 15A 240V circuits, but in my (limited) experience these are usually hard-wired, and aren’t plug-in devices).

From a physics perspective any air that exists anywhere on this planet at any time has still got huge amounts of heat stored in it (it's literally hundreds of degrees above absolute zero, the most blisteringly cold arctic air still represents a huge reservoir of physical heat energy even when it's cold enough to kill us)

Great explanation — the fact I always like to use along these lines is that there is enough heat energy in an iceberg to boil a pot of water.

They could be living wonderful lives in a tropical paradise, and they just dont want to share, you don't know."

Like Whitman, Price, and Hadad. You remember them‽

There is a Tesla New Buyers delivery checklist you can find online that was written by a group of Tesla enthusiasts. Just a few years ago one of the items on the checklist was “Make sure you can put the car in Park (and that it stays parked)”. (Ref: https://driveteslacanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Tesla-Model-3-Delivery-Checklist.pdf).

I’m not away of any other car where this was something people had to check before delivery — apparently it was a bit of a common problem for a time. That seems absolutely crazy to me, and a major failure of QA as it poses a significant safety hazard.

(1812 wasn't Canadians, it was the British)

This isn’t accurate in the slightest. Fencible and Militia units were formed in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and the Canadas (upper and lower) from local civilians, who fought in a variety of battles throughout 1812. These civilians were in fact called “Canadians” at the time as well.

And that’s to say nothing of all of the Native peoples of Upper and Lower Canada who aided in the fight.

Ultimately the British held command, but many, many Canadians participated and were involved as well.

The big problem here is that we’re eventually going to hit global peak oil use. Building out new infrastructure like this takes nearly a decade to complete, and paying it off usually takes multiple decades. If it’s going to take you 20 years at 100% capacity to pay off, and 10 years to build, and we reach peak oil earlier than 30 years from now (the IEA predicts 2030, however other international agencies push that out as far as 2050), then building extra capacity just doesn’t make sense.

If the IEA models are correct, then we wouldn’t even be finished expanding or building any new pipelines before global oil demand starts to drop. That risks a big drop in prices, which makes it more difficult to pay off any new pipelines once they come online as transit fees bottom out. And then taxpayers are stuck holding the bag.

Thanks for adding that — yes, you can do this with any electric motor; EV motors have simply been optimized for this purpose, and can generate power in the kW range. They have the necessary wiring for handling high voltage, along with built-in cooling tubing/conduits.

They’re as close to a drop-in-and-spin electrical generator as you can get. And unlike gas engines they don’t really ever wear out — so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see these become highly available and pretty inexpensive as EV uptake continues to increase, and as we finally start seeing huge numbers of current EVs being taken off the roads due to age in 15 years or so.

Used EV cells are already starting to find use in industry. In Japan, Nissan resells pairs of used Leaf batteries that pass their testing inside an inverter pack that can provide emergency power or as a generator replacement. On top of that, they have repurposed 16 Leaf EV batteries to provide backup for and smooth out fluctuations from a solar power array in Japan. And Canada’s own Moment Energy specializes in building grid-scale storage from used EV batteries.

(Here’s an example of a Canadian company that resells used EV batteries and motors for use in DIY projects).

Work in this area is admittedly low right now — but mostly because in the 15 years since the first readily available commercial EVs started shipping, the vast bulk of them are still on the road today. So EV battery supply is pretty low right now (I’d imagine mostly being from EVs that have been in accidents which haven’t affected the battery itself). But with EV adoption increasing that supply will also increase, albeit with a 15 - 20 year lag.

And the motors don’t really ever wear out. I have no doubt some company out there will start using them for small-ish wind turbines once a reliable second hand supply is available. I agree for now that’s most likely to be in the domain of hobbies to, but if it becomes easy to source hundreds of EV motors cheaply that I don’t see why they wouldn’t be used to create small, and relatively inexpensive power stations for remote communities.

The possibilities are pretty huge here. On top of that, once these second-life uses for EV batteries and motors have finally exhausted their usefulness, they’re 95+% recyclable into new battery packs and motors, allowing the cycle to begin anew. It’s pretty exciting stuff — which is why I’m hopeful long term that the Canadian governments investments into both mineral mining and battery production pay off — EVs are just the tip of that iceberg.

Exactly — which is why I think any money that could be put towards an e-bike rebate would be better spent working on infrastructure. Offering a rebate without suitable infrastructure for riding is putting the cart before the horse.

And I’ll tell you — as a former e-bike rider^0, I’d much rather share the road with EVs than gas and diesel vehicles. EV rebates benefit cyclists and pedestrians too. California has seen a measurable drop in fine particulate matter and ozone pollution thanks to EVs. Noise pollution is also reduced. EVs running alongside good cycling infrastructure is a win for everyone.

[0] — e-biked 10km each way too and from work for about 3 years; stopped about 14 years ago because I’ve been 100% work-from-home since that time.

E-bikes are already cheaper than even the cheapest new car. If people want an e-bike instead of a car it’s already affordable. Having a Federal Rebate isn’t going to move any more e-bikes, and isn’t going to convince more than a handful of people to stop driving and cycle instead.

The end result will simply be that we would still have too many gas-guzzlers on the road spewing CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere (right next to bike lanes, where cyclists have to breathe that crap in). The CO2 reductions for the cost would be significantly less than incentivizing EV sales. The current incentives are supposed to help reduce the cost of EVs so they are comparable in price to the gas guzzlers; e-bikes don’t need an incentive as they’re already pretty cheap.

Governments would do better by investing in better cycling infrastructure than providing a rebate for something most people won’t use anyway.

I put nearly 10 000 km on my e-bike back when I commuted to work; I’m very familiar with the issues around infrastructure, and am more than supportive of infrastructure improvements for cyclists.

But that still doesn’t negate the fact that people want cars. If they wanted an e-bike they’re already significantly cheaper than a car and they could just go out and buy one. Would more people ride them if we had better infrastructure? Maybe — but that’s an infrastructure problem, and not one of having an e-bike rebate.