I would love to pump some baby batter into my gf and start having a kids, can’t do that while we’re stuck living paycheque to paycheque on a combined 130k in my parents basement.
How bad is housing in Canada right now? This is not a prominent topic here in Europe, so let’s say you look for a 200 m² house in the outer parts of a bigger city, what would be the price for that?
I bought a townhouse that was 1700sqft (~150m^2) in Markharm, a suburb of the GTA (1hr to the center of toronto by car, 1.5hrs by bus), in a pretty bad area for 800K CAD during a slight market crash during covid. By all accounts this was an exceptionally good deal, by realtor didn’t think we could get anything for under 900. I sold that townhouse for 1.1 mil in 2023.
The issue is that investors are buying houses 100k over asking price same or next day because they don’t plan on living in them, they just want to make the investment and prop up the housing market bubble for as long as they can.
That can’t possibly be true. Just using simple logic: if someone owns a vacant house or unit, why wouldn’t they rent it out considering the absurd rents that can be charged in this market?
That’s a US statistic. Their housing market is very different from Canada’s.
It’s clearly referring to seasonal residences, many of which are properties that aren’t suitable for year round use. My uncle owns a cabin up north that is only accessible by sled in the winter. Should that really be considered an “empty house”? It’s a huge red herring to measure every single building someone can sleep in as housing, rather than measure the buildings people are actually treating as housing.
It isn’t “4 empty homes for every person”. That’s a crazy number. It says some counties (again in the US) (specifically rural counties) have more seasonal vacant residences than non-seasonal. Which makes total sense. The county where my uncle’s cabin is located doesn’t have any major towns in it. It’s just cottage country.
None of that has anything to do with the housing crisis.
Start with income perspective. The average annual salary in 2022 was just under $60,000. Nationally, the average house price in summer 2023 was a bit over $750,000. These incomes and house prices are affected pretty strongly by the lower incomes and lower housing costs in rural Canada vs the major cities like Vancouver and Toronto
So… shift attention to the cities. In Toronto and Vancouver, the average house price is around $1,200,000 give or take a little. You need at a combined income of least $280,000 to qualify for a house like that (or have substantial equity built up in previous home purchases). Most people are earning at or close to the national average… with a few - especially those in STEM careers (sw devs for example) up over $100,000 per year.
I live in a suburb city (I own my house)… it’s inconveniently located if you want/need to be in the core city centre for work (I’m about 3 hours commute right now if I needed to go in to a downtown office… thankfully I don’t). Houses on my street are relatively new (most built in 2019 and 2020). The houses currently for sale are listing between $1,250,000 and $2,350,000.
Thanks for the insight, this is crazy. We are looking for houses right now here in Germany, and and the last one we visited was 269 m² for around 500.000€ and 30 minutes drive away of the inner city of the next major city. I hope politics does something about your problem, it can not stay like this.
Germany has its own insanity in the housing market :-P I lived in Germany or several years. I rented vs buying and I dreaded moving because facing that shit show of a rental process (at least in places like Hamburg) was… too much. Queuing up with 100 other people all racing to fill in the rental application form first just so they’d get a chance at a place. I quickly learned to use an agency to line up rentals… and ended up renting a VERY nice newly built flat for the same price as the old many-times-renovated flats in the same district.
I did buy a house elsewhere in Europe and it was… interesting as an expat. It was substantially cheaper than Canada… granted it was many years ago, so not a fair comparison.
The Canadian government makes noises about “fixing” the housing crisis in Canada, but… I honestly don’t think they can. Houses are currently priced out of reach… WAY out of reach for the average new home buyer. People can’t save up a 5% to 20% down payment fast enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. The cost of everything is increasing at multiple times their potential salary increases (if they even get any).
Without writing out my whole life story: student loans, unexpected vehicle issues (public transit isn’t an option where I live), out of pocket medical costs not covered by benefits or gov’t, long commutes with expensive gas and no feasible alternatives and few job opportunities closer to home in my field. Can’t afford to move due to high rents so I’m stuck driving.
There’s more but I’m hungry and wanna eat dinner and don’t feel like going into it. We save everything that isn’t essential and barely go out for fun, anything extra goes towards a down payment but the way things are going right not it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to buy for years unless we can put away like 2k a month.
I don’t know what province youre in but also the skyrocketing cost of food and groceries.
What I got a couple years ago with $100 doesn’t buy shit now a days.
Fuck our government both federal and provincial, and all parties. Fuck every politician that sits in parliament collecting a pretty 6 figure paycheque and watching their real-estate asset appreciate as Canadians get perpetually fucked over time and time again.
My partner got food poisoning a few years ago and kicked her food intolerances up a level where even trace amounts now wreck her so we’ve had to go to the dairy free route which is expensive and very limiting. Her doctor recently told her to try cutting gluten so now I have to relearn how to shop and cook to accommodate that which adds more to the bill. She’s essentially a gluten free vegan who eats meat.
When people say pay cheque to pay cheque in this type of situation they’re still putting money away into savings typically but are out of reach of where they need to be. There’s usually large debts, medical costs or other financial burdens that aren’t mentioned like maybe taking care of a family member. Their pay cheque to pay cheque situation is a bit different than someone working minimum wage and will be out on the streets as they still have money going into some sort of savings
She does have an iud so I could before, but her Dr put her on medication for her rheumatoid arthritis last year that causes birth defects so at the moment we gotta double up. Even if that wasn’t the case, still couldn’t afford to have a kid right now.
Are you kidding? Should we not give narcan to OD’d drug addicts? Should we keep people from dying from lung cancer because they smoked? Should we not try to help people dying from liver disease because they’re alcoholics? They chose those situations, right?
Should we keep people from dying from lung cancer because they smoked? Should we not try to help people dying from liver disease because they’re alcoholics?
When the smoker/drinker fully admits they have zero intention of quitting, I would much rather give my lung/liver to someone who isn’t going to get a full, healthy life out of it, rather than someone who clearly would rather continue abusing it and burn through it in a couple years.
Organs are a limited resource, that’s why there is a list - and we should absolutely dedicate limited resources to doing as much good as possible
Yeah medical providers routinely do deny limited treatments (like organs) to people who refuse to stop taking drugs, smoking, or drinking. It makes complete sense too.
In the US, no one forces anyone to get a vaccine. But if a patient doesn’t cooperate with the doctors’ orders, they won’t get the treatment.
It’s not even really denying. They are just giving that organ to someone else. I’m sure if there were a glut of organs on the market somehow, then they could get less picky, but you don’t. For every successful organ donation there are probably a dozen people who die waiting.
A lot of people would say no to this. From a personal perspective I’d say “depends on the circumstance but not repeatedly of signify continues to use”.
As for smoking/alcohol and transplants… yes they did and those are already exclusionary factors.
If they plan to continue smoking or heavily drinking, then yes we should skip over to the next person on the list.
If they refuse to take up the lifestyle changes or follow medical advice, the organ should be used for the next person on the list.
People who’ve got transplants need to take immunosuppressants to reduce risk of rejection. Making them much more vulnerable to COVID. If the person is adamantly refusing the vaccine for bogus conspiracy theory reasons - it doesn’t give me much confidence that they would even follow through on other medical advice to prevent rejection.
That comparison makes no sense lol. You can get a vaccine for zero downsides at any point in time with next to no inconvenience. And you compare that to someone dying of lung cancer?? Especially when lungs are extremely limited and they are clearly showing they don’t care. You can’t say the same about the other comparisons you’ve made and that’s why it makes no sense.
You have to remember that anyone that receives an organ is another that don’t. doctors are very strict to not give organs to ppl that can suddenly stop taking meds to keep a thing so important working, receiving an organ is not a right, is a gift from someone that died to keep another alive.
Actually smokers who haven’t quit don’t get lung transplants either. Same with alcoholics who keep drinking, they are not put on the waiting list for liver transplants. There is a whole list of requirements you need to follow before you are even considered for a transplant. One of them is being fully vaccinated.
We respect those who have given life as their final act by making sure their organs aren’t wasted.
Those going through organ transplants are immunocompromised and it is especially important that they be vaccinated. Giving someone who is rejecting medical advice related directly to the transplant and it’s aftermath isn’t something we can do while there’s an organ shortage.
That’s the other angle. Someone has to die to donate organs (other than kidneys and I think liver). There aren’t enough organs to go around. Who lives and who dies? It’s a classic philosophical conundrum.
If you were in the wilderness with only 1 dose of Narcan and you had to choose between administering it to a drug addict dying from a bender, or their 8 year old that accidentally got into what was causing their parent to OD who would you give the single dose to? That is the kind of decision being made here.
Yep, not enough organs to go around. Some people are doomed to die waiting. It’s right out of a philosophy textbook.
You’re escaping from a burning building, the stairs are about to collapse. Do you assist the elderly smoker or the teenager? The pregnant woman or the father?
Classic. In this case do you save the entitled woman demanding an organ who refuses to follow medical advice, or the next person waiting?
Your example of narcan doesn’t even make sense - no one has to die for there to be more narcan. They just make more. So yeah, obviously we should give people narcan even if they’re making bad choices. People dying of lung cancer or liver disease require someone to die (or at least permanently give up part of an essential organ, in the case of livers), and we can’t just go to the pharmacy and pick up some spare organs just in case. It’s part of the deal that you don’t get an organ if you don’t meet a whole bunch of criteria, like being sober, getting vaccines, generally doing as much as possible to ensure the success of the transplant, because there’s someone else who will. Maybe they can’t change the past behavior that got them in the situation, but choosing not to change current/future behavior is absolutely grounds for denial.
It literally was. She had the choice to get vaccinated and get it. She choose not to and die. That is an extremely easy choice. Which part of that is not having a choice?
If you’re choosing to jump off a cliff because it offends you to walk on a paved road and you’re being offered to walk on the paved road then it really is your own fault.
You’re given a very reasonable and next to no effort choice. You’re choosing against that and choosing to hurt yourself by not picking that option. Except in this case you’re also hurting others around you. It’s like you’re suggesting it’s the grounds fault that she died when she choose to launch herself off the cliff, she could’ve just taken the paved road for no effort.
If I was drowning in a raging river and somebody threw me a rope, I could refuse the rope and demand that somebody else risk their life to swim out to get me. When they refuse, I am not going to say that they made the choice for me. I chose to die.
I understand that I am not going to convince you. That is fine. That does not change the fact that they gave her the choice and told her the steps she needed to take. The choice was hers and she chose. The fact that they did not decide to risk or kill somebody else waiting for that organ to accommodate her “choice” does not transfer the responsibility to them.
It is tragic to see somebody destroyed by their choices. That said, I am glad that somebody that was willing to save their own life got a chance at that organ instead. I hope that nobody that I care about is ever impacted by the kind of decision making you are defending here ( the woman who refused the organ that could have saved her life ).
Not vaccinating against an infection puts you at dramatically increased risk of poor outcomes. When deciding who gets a lifesaving organ, you have to consider chance of success and the chance that person can follow through with the rigorous regimen for successful outcome. This is the same reason drug users are denied organs. This is nothing unusual or unethical. She can choose not to get vaccinated, and doctors will choose a more suitable recipient for the organ.
Why sentence somebody that wants to live to die ( by denying them a transplant ) so that the organ can be wasted on somebody making choices inconsistent with survival.
All transplants have waiting lists. Getting an organ probably means denying one to somebody else.
The headline should be “Idiot sacrifices their life opening a spot for somebody smarter to live”.
Organ transplant recipients have a weakened immune system for months to years afterwards, in large part due to immune suppressants taken to prevent organ rejection.
That does not go well with being unvaccinated in a pandemic. The vaccination gives you a fighting chance even with weakened immune system, but without you’re screwed.
Transplant candidates must also receive the seasonal influenza and hepatitis B vaccines, follow other healthy behaviors, and demonstrate they can commit to taking the required medications following transplant.
Nevermind you trying to misrepresent the subject by saying it’s a flu vaccine.
Since getting the flu will probably kill you with all the immunosuppressants you have to take for life in order to not reject the transplant. They didn’t want to waste the organ on an idiot who can’t follow simple rules when someone who wants to live could use it
"Taking this vaccine offends my conscience. I ought to have the choice about what goes into my body, and a lifesaving treatment cannot be denied to me because I chose not to take an experimental treatment for a condition"
Hun, you're not the only person who is looking for a transplant. If you're not going to protect yourself from COVID-19, you don't get the organ. Plain and simple.
Yup. The courts have long held that being vaccinated can be a requirement of getting an organ transplant. Organs are hard to come by and they should go to the people who are going to listen to their doctor and do what needs to be done to keep that organ alive for a long time. If not, it should go to someone who will.
I put on the mask months before it was required because it was the right thing to do. I kept wearing the mask for months after they were required because it was the right thing to do.
You put on the mask when you were told to and took it off when you were told you could.
You call me sheeple? Give your fucking head a shake. You anti-reality cultists think with one brain and it isn’t yours.
I'm not sure whether I take more offense to people still calling the vaccine experimental or thinking it's a treatment. Being so desperately against something without bothering to even pretend to understand what it is or why irks the shit out of me. Good riddance.
THIS is the key point. She had made this her entire identity. When billions of doses had been administered to billions of people worldwide and none of them became magnetic, or sterile, or had tracking chips installed, or got 5G, or turned into monkeys and the world went on with life while she slowly killed herself while wailing about the injustice…she would rather die than admit that she was wrong.
It's worse than just being stubborn though. Being wrong and not willing to admit it is petty, but people are willing to go much further (up to dying, apparently) if they're too willfully ignorant to even be open to the possibility they could be wrong. This is some dark ages shit, and it's terrifying how much of it's out there in the wild.
For an "experimental vaccine" it's had a pretty amazing job at limiting the severity of covid and reducing deaths. If only all experiments were that successful
Even if it’s not fake… this is kinda how it is. You’re required to jump through so many hoops to get a transplant. One of the steps is to suppress your immune system, and not taking one of the required vaccines increases the chances of not only your death, but the waste of the organ.
Good. These people paid their nickel and took their chances. It’s not anyone else’s fault that they made a stupid bet. It’s no different than those whiners suing over their stupid NFTs being bad investments.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Imagine being the donor and your organ goes to someone like that. It’s like someone pissing on your grave (assuming the donor is dead or will die, article doesn’t mention the organ).
Also the comment section from that article, holy shit what a dumpster fire.
I’ve worked in this field for 25 years and don’t think that ChatGPT by itself can handle most workloads, even if it’s trained on them.
There are usually transactions which must be done and often ad hoc tasks which end up being the most important things because when things break, you aren’t trained for them.
If you don’t have a feedback loop to solve those issues, your whole business may just break without you knowing.
I ordered Chipotle for delivery and I got the wrong order. I don’t eat meat so it’s not like I could just say whelp, I’m eating this chicken today I guess.
The only way to report an issue is to chat with their bot. And it is hell. I finally got a voucher for a free entree but what about the delivery fee and the tip back? Impossible.
I felt like Sisyphus.
I waited for the transaction to post and disputed the charge on my card and it credited me back.
There’s so many if-and-or-else scenarios that no amount of scraping the world’s libraries is AI today able to sort out these scenarios.
Yes these kind of transactions really need to be hand coded to be handled well. LLM’s are very poorly suited to this kind of thing (though I doubt you were dealing with an LLM at Chipotle just yet).
Oh hey! It’s literally describing my current situation.
Got engaged, got a promotion, have solid long term housing (“renting” from family)
Still can’t keep more than 1.5k in savings month over month. No way in hell in having a baby in these conditions… and i feel like I’m better off than most
Cheaper than outsourcing to poor countries with middling English speaking capability.
Coming to call center lines near you: voiced chatbots to replace the ineffective, useless customer support lines that exist today with the same useless outcomes for consumers but endless juggling back and forth without any real resolutions. Let’s make customer service even shittier, again!
On one hand, they’re crap jobs. On the other hand, in most economies we have crap jobs not because they’re necessary for productivity, but to give us an excuse to pay people to live.
Maybe if enough jobs are lost to automation, we’ll start to rethink the structure of a society that only allows people to live if they’re useful to a rich person.
Essentially, we’re just still doing feudalism with extra steps, and it’s high time we cut that nonsense out.
I think once workers can be replaced, there will be some virus that wipes out most of humanity. No point keeping billions of people around if they aren’t needed.
Username checks out… suffice to say that a time of increasing social unrest is on the way, when it’s even easier for the haves to sideline the have nots than it already was.
We have crappy jobs because jobs need doing and it was still cheaper to get humans to do it without a substantial loss in functionality. They don’t exist because of some form of social altruism, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as a semi-viable alternative is offered then the jobs are gone.
With the dynamic shifting to automation, prematurely I would add, then employers are seeing a much cheaper way to achieve 80% of what they currently offer.
When I think of crappy jobs I think of a number of different sets.
Busywork for the extra hands in the clerical pool. This is the stuff that defines the careers of a lot of people in developed countries, in which they’re hired and trained, may even work on projects for a while, and then are dropped into a holding cubical and tasked with sometime benign but probably useless (say entering archived paper files from decades ago into the new data system in case we need them someday – I did that.) Here in the states (and according to anecdotes, the UK) we have a lot of this kind of work, and while it should only be a temporary measure between company projects, entire department clerical pools have been stuck in such holding patterns for years at a time.
It happens for two reasons I’ve seen: One, the economy tanks such as during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, in which lower management in a grand effort of humanitarian desperation, tell the upper management that no, my crew are working hard and very necessary in hopes that theirs is not a department that gets eliminated during the downsizing. (These managers in question are covering their own butts too, but ones I talked with recognized that anyone they dismissed would be eating ramen in a month). And two, the mismanagement of responsibility in linking tasks that need to be done with worker pools capable of doing them. Either the managers tasked to making such links are overwhelmed, or the process of connecting pools to duties is distributed so broadly that it’s de-prioritized by everyone. If those tasks are particularly odious (say they involve interacting with a toxic upper manager) then the lower management will find reasons that their own pool is not able to help, and so the company has simultaneous worker shortages and surpluses. For large, multinational conglomerates, this sort of thing is routine.
Jobs that are facades to cover for social or moral obligations that are expected of the company, but (from the perspective of shareholders) are too expensive to actually do, such as the faux tech-support services the US exported to phone banks in India that are limited to some very short troubleshooting trees rather than someone actually familiar with the technical aspects of the product. This is (I think) what the business owner of the article is talking about replacing.
Now what he should be doing is hiring a tech service and including the troubleshooting tree in the manual, what is typically done with household appliances. The workers on that phone bank are being set up with pressure by angry customers to offer some productive solutions, while also getting pressure from management to placate the angry customers, for which they have insufficient facilities. I’m reminded of my own experience being told by upper management I should be spending only fifteen minutes explaining to customers how to install CD-ROM drives (to MS DOS, mind you), which it usually took forty-five minutes to an hour to walk a non-geek through the process.
Such jobs shouldn’t exist, rather the company should actually hire real departments to deal with social responsibilities, rather than front veneers and marketing campaigns, but that’s a problem intrinsic to the system and not one that will be solved with LLMs given the same short troubleshooting trees. (An LLM with a big troubleshooting tree developed by a serious tech team might work, but would require ongoing development and maintenance, and the occasional tech-support call with a human being. Also a better LLM than we have.)
Jobs that are odious because they’re labor intensive, hazardous, tedious, frustrating or otherwise taxing on the worker, and yes there are a lot of necessary tasks that need to be done that fall into these categories. So when you say We have crappy jobs because jobs need doing, I assume you’re talking about these.
Because we’re in a capitalist system that mandates shareholder primacy, our companies first seek out a labor pool they can exploit since they don’t have any other choice. This is classified as bonded servitude, id est slavery but we don’t like to call it that when an enterprise uses human beings like interchangeable, disposable parts. Historically, we’ve hired children, exploited prison populations, immigrants, invoked a truck system, a culture of obligatory productivity, whatever, anything to force our fellow human beings to toil under cruel conditions.
Without an exploitable population enterprises face labor unrest (unions are the least violent version of this we know) in order to improve conditions and compensation, leaving industries to either capitulate and pay extra and provide proper gear or to automate wherever they can.
I imagine in collectives, everyone eventually gets pissed off from drawing straws and start working on ways to make odious tasks less odious, either through automation or improving the conditions of the task that it’s no longer odious, e.g. making actual cleaning as close to Power Wash Simulator as possible.
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