Do you get a return on investment directly in merely owning a car? No, of course not. People still buy cars. (To avoid confusion: cars open other economic opportunities, but just sitting on a car by itself is not an investment.)
On the other hand, if cars did become an investment, people would hoard cars and they would be less affordable for people who actually use cars productively. High real estate prices are similarly hurting the economy.
When you profit off of merely sitting on land, you are essentially leaching off of society. Economists call this “economic rent”, which is a kind of theft where a person gains from the productive activity of others, without producing anything of value themselves. This is why the nickname for a land tax is “the perfect tax”. You didn’t “produce” anything from the increase in real estate price. Like a car, your house structure itself is actually a depreciating asset and is worth less every year.
This is different from a productive investment like a share in a company, because a company can use that money to invest in useful capital, like factories or workers. This is why Canada’s obsession with real estate “investment” is causing the economy to contract in terms of GDP-per-capita.
Your last few paragraphs denying that there is a housing affordability crisis in Canada is completely and ridiculously outside the mainstream. Literally no expert agrees with you.
No, this is revisionist history. The 90s were part of a nearly 15 year period when house prices were flat in Canada. For quite a few years your return would have been negative. People in the 90s were not thinking of their house as their retirement account.
We did stop making enough housing, but it’s precisely that artificial scarcity that is making people treat it as an “investment”. If we make enough, it will not be treated primarily as an investment anymore, which is how it should be.
If you don’t profit from sitting on land, then real estate is not a profitable investment. Prices should be flat. Still lots of reasons to own your own home, but leaching the productivity of others isn’t one of them. If you think that is good, then we’re in agreement?
Your personal interpretation of Stats Canada is like personally interpreting Ivermectin studies. Every expert across the political and economic spectrum, from left to right, thinks that there is a housing affordability crisis. It’s scary that people like you, who deny that there is even a problem, exist.
Yes same. I wish people didn’t use Facebook. I keep mine around for some groups like this one, and sometimes for marketplace, but I’m not happy about it.
That said, Buy Nothing is super useful, both for getting free stuff but also for unloading stuff in a way where you have some reason to think that it won’t immediately go into a landfill.
In Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals have dominated to different degrees in the past three elections, the government's major climate policy plank, carbon pricing, is a bust.
Carbon pricing in Canada is revenue neutral and, because both industry and consumers pay into it but only consumers get the refund, virtually everyone gets back more than they put in. But almost no one knows that and people don’t like seeing higher numbers at the pump.
Where have they been on messaging about this? Conservatives have been hammering away and Liberals have been silent. I think when people see how the policy works, there’s a lot to like.
Yes. I also wish people understood what a negative externality was. Trucks produce a ton of costs that society has to pay for. Without something like carbon pricing, big truck drivers are subsidized by cyclists. That makes no sense.
Housing is this federal government’s biggest failure. It’s causing the economy to contract, GDP per capita to fall, and affordability to collapse. Housing is not a productive part of GDP, which is why people aren’t better off when real estate prices grow. Conservatives of course would be much worse, since they also wouldn’t build public housing and would cut taxes for the rich and services for everyone else.
The provinces aren’t much better. The BC NDP is one of the only provincial governments massively expanding public housing programs.
I think we could do well with both. We build less public housing than virtually all of our peers. Our housing deficit is such that we need to do everything. I wouldn’t be so sure half measures will be enough.
Furthermore, I think we need to remove the stigma around public and non-market housing. In Scandinavian countries, public housing is for normal, even upper middle class families. These homes are beautiful and comfortable. If you want to stay out of the housing market, you can. Canadians are desperate to enter the housing market as a matter of dignity, as if they’re pathetic failures, less fully human, if they don’t own. It’s because of this unnecessary stigma in Canada that public housing often has the reputation of a ghetto for undesirables.
We are going through a demographic transition, a pinch in the hourglass. It will be temporary but painful, and the other side of the pinch might not be as big as it once was. Our population is aging.
It’s kind of crazy that our research apparatus is tied to how many students happen to be enrolling. World class universities is what makes the US economy so strong. From the tech to the biomedical industries, it’s not “the free market” that has boosted the economy, but being leaders in publicly available government funded research.
We’re already going through a housing crisis in this country and especially this province. Here’s hoping this fire tragedy doesn’t exacerbate a housing tragedy.
Some people make the following economic argument: rent control is bad because it discourages investment in new builds. I would find that argument more convincing if we didn’t have suffocating NIMBY laws that prevented the construction of new supply, often advocated by the same homeowners who don’t want rent control.
100% agree. I think this goal is not as far off as it seems either. It’s kind of like a “public option” in healthcare. It keeps the private sector honest, and if the public option is successful enough, it can incrementally provide more and more of the housing supply.
More Canadian developers are slowing their pace of building or nixing projects completely. Here's what you need to know about your rights if you bought a pre-sale home.
We were building so little already, I can’t believe that the already pathetic housing starts are getting reduced by 20%. The government should just step in with non-market housing already.
Late last week, MSN.com’s Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the “cannot miss” attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft’s AI model wrote, “Consider going into it on an empty...
Do you have a source for this? I worry about stoking anti-immigrant bigotry with unsubstantiated accusations.
All I can find is this CBC article talking about the many actually poor international students who increasingly use food banks to make ends meet. Not surprising given the cost of housing compared to even just a few years ago.
A single youtube video of an immigrant being a jerk is not data, or reputable reporting. This is Trump style rightwing fearmongering. It’s shocking to see this kind of thing on Lemmy.
There is zero cause for an international to ever require the food bank.
Do you really believe this?? Like the rest of us, an international student might not have budgeted for a several hundred dollar monthly increase in rent and food relative to previous years. Even some domestic students are living in tents in Canada.
Canada is in no danger of building too much supply too quickly. We have some of the lowest housing starts in the developed world. We build less than almost anyone. I agree that, for how little we build, quality is shockingly low, but that’s actually a symptom of low supply, not high supply. When there’s too little housing, consumers take what they can get, even if it’s terrible. Imagine the quality of food in a small town with only 1 restaurant, vs that same town with 20.
Serious question: do people on team fruit also call other “culinary vegetables” fruits, such as cucumbers, zucchini, corn, eggplants, bell peppers, green beans, etc.?
I prefer polysemy. There is a very useful category of “edible plants typically used in savory dishes”. Imagine someone being upset with you because you brought green beans when they asked for a side of vegetables.
I don’t see the point in taking the botanical definition of fruit and pretending it’s useful in the culinary world.
“It is a free market. Canada is capitalism,” Yang added. “You cannot say, ‘Oh, because I do the shorter lease, (as a long-term renter) it affects you badly.’ You cannot do that.”
What an infuriatingly entitled thing to say. Yes we can say that. We can and should have stronger regulations around this stuff. We’re building all this new supply but it doesn’t matter one bit if it just goes on airbnb.
Notice there is only 1 full headline (from /r/NoStupidQuestions) visible, it doesn’t even show the full post. There are 3 of those “trending” boxes but only 2 of those even fit their headlines because they are like 3 words long, they cut off anything longer including the description...
I think Reddit doesn’t realize that what made their UI so appealing was precisely that it felt really functional and bare bones, like Craigslist still does or Google used to. As if it was designed by nerds who just wanted the most functional site. It makes it seem more trustworthy and neutral, less monetized.
I don’t know what makes you so confident that inferences from the current state of AI are foolish. The black box problem is extremely tricky. This is a harder problem than the protein folding problem, which people thought we’d make quick progress on given all the other progress we made on “harder” problems, like the structure of the atom. This “simple” problem turned out to be one of the hardest in science. Progress looks fast now, but it’s not trivial. Some things may surprisingly remain an enduring mystery. We don’t know yet either way.
I don’t mean to pick on you, but I also don’t think “AI bad” articles are just based on fear of the unknown. Some of them are, but there are also reasonable concerns with all this, and I believe we will need strong and attentive regulation as we continue.
By analogy, people who opposed car culture in the 50s and 60s were seen as fear mongers who just opposed “progress”, but they turned out to be right. Cars don’t scale, they’re an environmental disaster, the most expensive and dangerous form of transportation possible, and we’ve completely redesigned our society so that now it’s extremely hard to reverse. We should have been more cautious.
The problems raised by these researchers may be an easy fix (disallow these specific tokens), or it may be surprisingly difficult to fix, or indicative of a bigger problem, and therefore worth worrying about. I’m concerned that society is a bit blasé about the risks.
I have been an Android user for 13 years now. After using almost every Google service possible I am going down the privacy rabbit hole lately. Gmail -> Proton Mail, Chrome -> Firefox, Keep -> Notesnook, Google Search -> Kagi, …...
Is that true? I thought apple’s business model was to not sell your data but charge more upfront. Do you have a source discussing this that you can point me to?
Edit: I’ve searched online and can’t find even a single article talking about Apple selling your data. I’m an iPhone user so I want to know. The most recent Apple privacy article I can find reports on how they’re closing fingerprinting loopholes in third party apps.
I definitely don’t want to be naive or credulous, but given how aggressively they’ve prevented third parties from gathering data, I’m cautiously optimistic. I don’t think this is a “both sides” situation, unless someone can point me to some information to the contrary.
You seem to be right: here is their app store policy. That’s helpful to know. They claim this is not sold to others and only used to recommend apps on the app store, but I may not be reading that right.
In theory, I understand some apps can be sideloaded on Android. But, in practice, can you actually get away with avoiding the Google app store for most apps? I’m skeptical.
I buy iPhones because I’m cheap and they’re a better value. My last phone lasted me 5 years, and my current 11 pro is 3 years old and still going strong. If you don’t replace your phone frequently, then iPhones are much cheaper than Android phones.
This sounds like selection bias. If you are sampling only people who are replacing their old iPhones, then they will obviously be more likely to have broken iPhones.
Even if the hardware lasts, most android phones historically don’t remain updated for more than a few years. Your OnePlus 8T is due to lose basic security support in October 2024, so one more year from now. It’s already lost OS updates. Meanwhile, my iPhone 6s from 2015 still works and is still receiving security updates this year!
Look I’m not looking to start a format war. I think android phones are great. But I’m cheap and concerned about ewaste. I just want something to work for as long as possible.
At the same time, it was also an era where the gender neutral or gender unknown pronoun was “he” for those roles. Eg “The congressman spoke at length. I don’t know who it was, but I’m sure he must have been tired by the end.” It was to the point where most style guides claimed that “he” was the correct gender neutral pronoun. Conversely, it wasn’t truly gender neutral because “she” would be the default for roles like secretary and nurse. I find it implausible to believe that all this really had no effect on the impression that women were not the typical congress person, firefighter, etc. So I think it’s a spectrum, and I believe you that you personally used it in a gender neutral way, but I doubt it was truly gender neutral in society overall.
That might seem plausible until you read deeply into the latest cognitive science. Nowadays, the growing consensus is around “predictive coding” theory of cognition, and the idea is that human cognition also works by minimizing prediction error. We have models in our brains that reflect input that we’ve been trained on. I think anyone who understands human cognition and LLMs cannot confidently say that LLMs are or are not intelligent yet.
The government’s antitrust case against Google just got significantly smaller. In a filing on Friday, a US district court judge dismissed several of the claims that the Department of Justice and a coalition of states brought against the company, including allegations that Google Search harms competing services.
After hearing the results of several antitrust cases, the standard of evidence for anti competitive behavior seems impossibly high with current laws and precedents.
The federal government used to build social housing. Then it stopped. How is that going? (www.cbc.ca)
Back to school means back to basics this fall as Canadians come up against high prices (www.cbc.ca)
Family evicted from townhouse awarded $27.7K to be paid by the buyer after sale falls through (www.cbc.ca)
The EU’s Digital Services Act goes into effect today: here’s what that means (www.theverge.com)
Liberals believe time is on their side. Is it? (www.ctvnews.ca)
In Atlantic Canada, where the Liberals have dominated to different degrees in the past three elections, the government's major climate policy plank, carbon pricing, is a bust.
Canada's housing affordability crisis requires wartime public effort: CUPE (cupe.ca)
This public university just announced massive layoffs. Is all higher ed at risk? (therealnews.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/1806644...
Since nobody likes calling it X, why don't we call the platform "ex-twitter"? That way it's technically true, and everybody knows what you're talking about.
or maybe eX-twitter
B.C. in state of emergency with thousands out of their homes due to wildfires (www.cbc.ca)
Tenants to Get Good — or Bad — News on Rents Next Month | The Tyee (thetyee.ca)
1 in 5 homebuilders are nixing projects amid high rates. Here are your rights (globalnews.ca)
More Canadian developers are slowing their pace of building or nixing projects completely. Here's what you need to know about your rights if you bought a pre-sale home.
Microsoft AI suggests food bank as a “cannot miss” tourist spot in Canada (arstechnica.com)
Late last week, MSN.com’s Microsoft Travel section posted an AI-generated article about the “cannot miss” attractions of Ottawa that includes the Ottawa Food Bank, a real charitable organization that feeds struggling families. In its recommendation text, Microsoft’s AI model wrote, “Consider going into it on an empty...
Housing experts, advocates, industry have unified message for government: Get more rentals built | CBC News (www.cbc.ca)
A dollar saved is a dollar earned (infosec.pub)
This Vancouver home made $18K a month from short-term rentals. Are regulations working? | Globalnews.ca (globalnews.ca)
As a 14-year long user, the new Fisher Price UI makes me sad :( What have they done to you, Reddit? (i.imgur.com)
Notice there is only 1 full headline (from /r/NoStupidQuestions) visible, it doesn’t even show the full post. There are 3 of those “trending” boxes but only 2 of those even fit their headlines because they are like 3 words long, they cut off anything longer including the description...
You can make top LLMs break their own rules with gibberish (www.theregister.com)
Paper & Examples...
Android vs. iOS
I have been an Android user for 13 years now. After using almost every Google service possible I am going down the privacy rabbit hole lately. Gmail -> Proton Mail, Chrome -> Firefox, Keep -> Notesnook, Google Search -> Kagi, …...
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Post (www.smbc-comics.com)
www.smbc-comics.com/comic/post
Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence (karawynn.substack.com)
Yes! This is a brilliant explanation of why language use is not the same as intelligence, and why LLMs like chatGPT are not intelligence. At all.
Judge dismisses major arguments in Google antitrust case (www.theverge.com)
The government’s antitrust case against Google just got significantly smaller. In a filing on Friday, a US district court judge dismissed several of the claims that the Department of Justice and a coalition of states brought against the company, including allegations that Google Search harms competing services.
Easy DIY pasta sauce?
I’m trying to learn to buy groceries, cook for myself again....