healthetank @ healthetank @lemmy.ca

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164

Joined

2 yr. ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGill_College_Avenue

Interesting article that goes far more into depth than I was anticipating.

If you're curious about the actual tax rates and burdens (ie when boomers were working age, there was 7 to ever 1 retiree, now we're around 3:1) I'd recommend reading it.

There's definitely going to be some harder times ahead regardless of how taxes are structured just because of how much older people are when they die, and all the extra healthcare burden associated with that.

Yet another example of a government more interested in the profits of a company than in the welfare of its citizens or their future.

Yes, this decision could add costs to development of houses. Guess what - it could also drastically reduce them, if new development forgoes ANY enbridge, saving time on utility install, plus the installation of the natural gas lines into the house.

Another great journalistic article from the Narwhal.

EDIT: I wasn't going to add this, but the OEB actually examined enbridge's cost and found that the cost to developers is minimal.

Beyond his backtracking on election reform when early results indicated it'd be a long, tough battle to actually change and re-educate people?

He ran on transparency, and while he has been faaaar more transparent than Harper, thats a low bar, and I expect better.

Hes had his share of scandals, which isn't good (SNC, ArriveCan, off the top of my head)

He supported the transpacific pipeline, which I personally am against.

The Liberal party drastically increased immigration rates beyond what the systems to help get them started (think transferring education credits, language barriers, community programs, etc) could handle. The current housing crisis is at least in part due to that.

All in all, not a terrible PM by my judge, but I tend to lean further left than him, so it's not like I'd vote for PP no matter what Trudeau did.

For those who aren't aware, Financial Post is owned by Postmark Media, a media conglomerate owned by (66% share) Chatham Asset Management LLC, an American Hedge Fund. They also own controlling stake in AMI media (now a360 media) which was responsible for killing a story about an affair Trump had with Karen McDougall (playboy) in advance of the 2016 election. Read the link for a few other stories they killed related to Trump and the 2016 election. (For what it's worth after the scandal broke, Chatham Asset MGMT took action and sold off some of the newspapers.)

Additionally, Postmark Media has a strong history of endorsing the conservatives, for what thats worth.

Can't say I'm surprised, but there's some irony in banning renewables to maintain 'pristine viewscapes' while still allowing open pit coal mines.

Yeah, it must be the spending, not the enormous cuts to large business taxes that have been continuously occuring over the last 40ish years.

When it moved to the natural resources committee in November for study, the debate descended into a chaotic mess and lengthy filibuster that at one point had MPs screaming at each other to shut up.

The noise was so loud during the final meeting in early December that two MPs voted the wrong way on a motion because they couldn't hear what was being proposed.

Man every time I read stuff like this or watch some of the videos from the house, it makes me realize how sad and pathetic this all is. Seriously? I can't imagine how my work would react if I began screaming and berating a coworker.

People who go hunting don't go by "off the top of their head".

Now I can't speak to the laws in California for hunting, but in Canada they have pretty crazy strict laws regarding illegal hunting, including seizure of anything used in the act (trucks, atvs, guns, boats, etc), removal of gun license, and huge fines.

A quick google search shows the method they've used, and have been using for the last decade as an attempt to stop the spread: Barred owls are much more aggressive, and playing their calls can lure them in to fight, in a way the spotted owls don't, so you don't need to just go based on visual differences. Here's one article about the removal process up to now with an interview of a biologist who's pro-hunting.

Relocation of the barred owls isn't feasible, because no matter where you send them, there's probably already owls there, and relocation often results in the animal dying off anyway.

What's the alternative? Watch as the spotted owls are out-competed and go extinct due to human development and habitat destruction? To me, that seems worse. We already hunt to maintain populations of animals in other species - deer spring to mind. Since we've eliminated many of the deer's predators, we need to maintain that role, which includes setting hunting targets each year. Why are these owls different?

I don't argue with your basic premise (companies pay the cheapest contractor, etc), but it is worth noting that because of those pressures, many experienced people leave the industry, thus creating the lack of workers they are talking about. Reversing that change is slow, even if wages rise, and there is no instant fix. Getting people who have left for another industry to return can be difficult, especially in the case of people selling off tools, etc. where the cost to re-enter is often too high to justify.

Add on to that, developers have no incentive to construct everything at once, thus stalling future growth for their company and over saturating the market, driving down housing prices and their enormous margins.

Do you have a source for this? From my discussions and research, most of the contractors we work with on a large scale basis complain about a lack of labour (though that's always a complaint from businesses).

I work on the linear infrastructure side as a consultant - any particular reason that they took so long to award the tender? That seems extreme given that I regularly work with municipalities and tendering processes, and its a pretty well oiled machine - 1 month is about as long as I've ever seen the award be stretched, unless the engineering cost estimate was waaaay below the bids and they had to secure additional funding.

Construction is heaaaavily influenced seasonally. Thats obviously largely dependent on the field of construction (ie residential, commercial, heavy construction, underground, factory, etc)

A large number of the contractors I work with either lay everyone off, or fully shut down over the winter. As soon as things start freezing, construction costs skyrocket. Daylight hours mean fewer working hours (unless you want to provide sufficient lighting, which is another expense), quarries and pits close, concrete requires winter heat and heating for the first 3 days to sufficiently cure, etc.

Additionally, construction is very boom/bust, where the rest of the economy impacts how much work is available for them. Right now, theres a huge demand. But go back and theres been two or three big slow downs in the residential construction industry in the last 15 years, which pushes people to other jobs (as mentioned by the other poster). When the economy is slow, there's less investment in infrastructure by corporations, meaning there's less demand for factory/commercial construction, and the host of trades that go with it.

Trades are a specific job that often have lots of working experience, so when a good quality tradesperson leaves, its hard to get the experience and knowledge to replace them effectively.

Its always scary to see the impacts of climate change on an individual basis.

No one here, especially those reading these articles, were around then. All we can do it mitigate and reduce future impact.

Part of that is understanding that shits gonna get expensive for us. BUT if people collectively push against the government and complain about things like high food prices (when driven by actual food scarcities, not 'inflation' and corporate greed), the response will be to offload problems to another generation by stealing water from elsewhere, increased use of fossil fuels, or some other short term stop gap.

We as a society will not get the same life our parents and grandparents had. Full stop. If we try to, we will fuck things up even more for the next generation. It sucks, but I don't see another way around it. It can still be a good life, but we need to change a whole lot to get there.

"As a hydrologist, I definitely agree that there's always a cycle with the water," Stadnyk said. "But what the science says is that this is one of the regions in the world where we can expect more frequent drought cycles, and longer drought cycles. "That begs the question about economic viability, right? How long can farmers and irrigators hold out without that water and still be productive and still have a viable business?"

This is what it boils down to. I think that unfortunately, we're going to have to either develop more water-effective measures of irrigation (which all cost significantly more than the standard sprayers), or the yields are going to fall significantly. Either of those mean that food prices will continue to climb.

Its not a good situation, and there's not a good solution.

I do have to say that I'm entertained by the complaint about the average person's economic position, which is entirely valid, followed unironically by the statement that if Canada had "merely matched US Growth" over the last 5 yrs, per capita we'd be making $5500 more per year. Per capita earnings mean nothing if 10 guys at the top are claiming all the extra, and the US has not exactly been a system that is in a stable, healthy economic place for the majority of its citizens.

I agree that's part of the problem, but see my comment below. Stats show we have an all time low for housing:people compared to our past and compared to most other western countries.

To fix it, for sure we need scaling property tax rates and higher empty/vacant housing taxes, but my point is that even if we forcibly removed 2nd or 3rd houses from every single person/corporation, as well as taking any empty/vacant housing, and distributed it, we still wouldn't have enough to be on par with our historical rates OR other western nations

I can agree it would help, but we're at an all time low for housing to population. A Fraser institute study, so there's a definite conservative bias to their presentation and info, but it shows how long this has been coming.

In theory, we should be okay - Fraser report shows were at 424 housing units per capita, and most households are an average of 2.4 people, which means in theory wevs got enough housing.

But comparison to other countries show that, in general, we need about 10% more houses (closer to the 471 G7 average) in order to feel more balanced. Most other European countries have more

I agree with all your proposals, but they all require land/housing already built OR the people available to build them, and THAT would be the real bottleneck

I mean depends on how you define easily.

Even assuming infinite money, Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s. This means we have roughly the same number of skilled and experienced carpenters, roofers, plumbers, etc that work in new builds.

This means that if tomorrow we passed legislation eliminating every single bureaucratic red tape AND convinced developers to build everywhere they have land to do so, we would take years to catch up with the point where our houses:population ratio is back among the rest of the western world.

Blah, I hate it when they don't link to the report or study they discuss.

I've looked it up on the ATI portal, but it doesn't look like the portal has previously requested data up for 2024 yet, which is frustrating. I did stumble across one that looks like its a review of the PRC interference in the 2019 election, so once that comes through I'll be interested to read it.

I'll eventually come back and see if I can find the original report.