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Clickbait headline and first paragraph
Begin met with Biden, and vague reports described some sort of angry exchange. Begin’s recollections of that meeting were reported at the time in a mainstream Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Aharonot. Some of the details of what Begin recalls Biden telling him are genuinely shocking, but they seem to now be largely forgotten in Israel — especially a hypothetical Biden floated about the United States bombing cities in Canada. “If attacks were launched from Canada into the US,” Biden remarked, “everyone here would have said, ‘Attack all the cities of Canada, and we don’t care if all the civilians get killed.’”
It seems really clear it was an argument against using an absurd example.
Gordon Berry, the founder and leader of the Save the Children Convoy, recently gave a speech at the convoy’s Casselman base camp where he advocated jailing police and politicians, replacing Canada’s system of government and referenced themes associated with QAnon conspiracy theories.
You’re not “guilty by association” when you’re officially representing a group calling for treason and sedition. You’re just guilty of treason and sedition.
And fuck Arnold Viersen, the guy should lose his status for inviting known extremists to parliament for not reason other than causing a disruption.
The mortgage stress test should have helped with this, but I also think banks took advantage of locking people into obscene debt that they realistically shouldn’t have been able to do. The evidence of that is new private mortgage insurance that all the banks favoured because the CMHC thought too many buyers were too risky.
Banks also took on a lot of correlated debt by turning a blind eye to buyers using leveraged assets to secure additional mortgages. Correlated debt is bad, it’s the thing that turns your risk analysis models into piles of dog shit.
It’s great at keeping banks from collapsing, but terrible for the consumer.
But now we’re at the point where something has to give and the government is desperately trying to force the banks to not increase payments by increasing amortization periods, keeping cash on hand, and increasing their insurance…
You have to appreciate Conservatives (capital C) and their constant cognitive dissonance.
“The government can’t tell the press what to say”
“The government tells CBC what to say”
“The CBC won’t say terrorists and I’m the government and I want them to”
Which is it Conservatives? Only two can be true.
That’s an entirely separate issue, real estate speculation is not the same as development speculation, which is a necessary part of the system.
The government needs to actively build houses or their subject to matter fluctuations, which this is. But if they do build houses then they need to be careful they don’t build first cities like China and over invest too.
I’m not saying a fine will work, I’m saying that building houses for just the richest with the idea it will lift up the poor won’t work, the assumptions behind it are unrealistic.
As houses trickle down the market many get rented out instead of sold, or just owned as a secondary property. I know a guy with a house in NYC and SF and he flies between them, I know other people who have their house and their pad for when they’re working in Toronto.
If you only increase supply for the rich, it only marginally increases supply at the bottom, and by less than you’ve built.
If you only built houses for the poor you’d help more people, because the classes aren’t evenly split, they’re exponentially divided. But building only for one market is foolish.
Nobody here is mentioning that the cost to build just increased significantly with interest rates.
Builders take out loans to acquire land and line up supplies and contractors, they sell the unbuilt plots to buyers, then start construction.
It just got a lot harder to buy land and acquire resources, and the price buyers will pay has and is currently decreasing.
They’re seeing higher costs and lower profits, that’s not something their investors will want to pour money into, which reduces their liquidity and ability to build even further.
The clear solution to builders is to limit potential losses by reducing new expenditures until the macro environment stabilizes.
Assumption here: rich people buying houses only own cheap houses
Reality: rich people are entering the market (via immigration or coming of age) without a house or already have expensive houses.
More supply at the high end mainly affects pricing at the high end, more supply at the low end mainly affects pricing at the low end.
Two things:
- Are you seriously finding calling people by correct pronouns difficult?
- If there’s a bandwidth issue and right wing people are so concerned about it, then they should take their politicians to task for spending ask their time on those issues like Scott Moe and Desantis are doing.
I’m getting tired of “pronouns are too hard”.
I think that’s a false dichotomy. Your logic applies to every problem in the world, from throwing your trash in the bin to putting on pants in the morning (will anyone really care when we’re all dead?!).
It takes incredibly little effort to respect people’s pronouns, everyone I know cares more that you try than succeed 100% of the time.
That’s why it’s frustrating that people are making this such a big deal that people are asking their identity be respected.
It costs nothing at all.
With all due respect, if I started purposefully calling you ma’m or lil miss all the time (assuming you’re a dude) you wouldn’t like it.
If I suspended the charter to make a law that everyone has to call you lil miss you don’t think you’d be mad?
The left isn’t fighting a war of words, it’s just people asking for respect. The right however is going to war over this shit, look no further than this law, or what Florida is trying to do.
No, if they aren’t competing then the government should take stronger action than taxing them. We have more tools than this.
The Nash equilibrium for high entry industries (especially in a country like Canada where investors loathe anything new or risky) is to always charge what your competitors do, never lower.
You can charge them more taxes to which they’ll just adjust their prices to compensate for reduced shareholder returns (while blaming the tax for their prices). They’ll also find ways to hide earnings or wash them to reduce their tax burden.
The only solution is to break the equilibrium. Introduce a new player (by nationalizing one of them, even if only temporarily) which actually operates based on a fixed profit ratio instead. Or implement an emergency control which limits shareholder returns beyond some threshold.
The Conservatives will complain about the free market but an efficient market for strategic resources is more important than a free oligarchy. This should be Trudeau’s “just watch me” moment.
I don’t think it takes a legal scholar to see that no judge is going to let you take away children’s rights because they’re LGTQ.
And yes, choosing what people call you or what pronouns are used is a right.
It’s harassment to purposefully call someone the wrong pronoun, so why is it fine to do to children?
Minors are not getting gender surgery and the few that get access to anything hormonal are not offered anything irreversible.
I should clarify, I don’t know what care is given and I think doctors are the only ones who should be opining on this. I would assume doctors aren’t doing anything they know will cause harm.
Equating “story time” with adult burlesque is just simple bigotry. Someone dressing up as a princess to read a story to kids isn’t burlesque, regardless of their gender.
I know it’s not the same as a burlesque show and they don’t dress like they’re performing in one. What I meant was a story time lead by burlesque performers (out of full costume) would feel weird to me, and for the same reason drag story hour kinda feels weird too. There’s nothing wrong with drag in and of itself.
The only argument I’ve heard that makes any sense is against gender surgery or hormone treatments, with the argument being that they’re not adults and may regret having that medical intervention later. Truth be told, I don’t know enough to say whether that’s right or wrong, but I do think that’s a reasonable argument (but I would want to hear actual medical opinions over this instead of feelings opinions).
But pretty much everything else about it is silly and undisguised bigotry.
Not teaching kids about being queer isn’t going to make them not queer, as queerness existed before we named it. Dismissing it as a phase is kind of pointless as even if it were a phase, exploring pronouns and gender identity isn’t going to hurt them. Saying it’s just a mental illness to be queer is harmful and even if true it has a reliable treatment called gender affirming care. Stuff like making kids get parental permission to be addressed by preferred pronouns is clearly setting up abusive situations, so I don’t get how any (non bigoted) people can fully support that.
Maybe the one other thing is I do think drag story time is weird. I know the argument is it’s like an actor known for R rated movies doing G rated ones, but drag shows are more like an adult burlesque show and I wouldn’t bring kids to burlesque story hour either. People being in drag doesn’t bother me, but the drag queen thing is different to that.
Edit: I accept that the first doesn’t happen, my point was just that doctors who are sworn not to harm people should be the only ones deciding what medical decisions people are allowed to make.
The second one is a bad comparison yes, but I’m allowed to personally not like it. I don’t think it should be banned or that it is what people say it is.
They have an account but they post bursts of stories and repost them frequently