I’m also an early millenial / late GenX and broadly support the things you mention.

At the same time, how do you explain that earlier generations were happy to start families well before national pharma care, etc.? Before people were concerned with the climate crisis they were terrified of a population explosion (hence China’s one-child policy), nuclear war, etc.

My intuition is that the difference is that they were more financially stable and they were able to maintain a family with a single income, which provided them with both the money and the time that raising children require. So, maybe we should focus on that instead.

Basically, the “no immigration” path i

That is a strawman of your own creation. All I said is that I want my children to have the opportunity to have kids of their own if they wish to, which currently seems unlikely because our government does not prioritize fostering the conditions under which young people choose to start families.

I would prefer Canada to grow primarily through its own means rather than relying so heavily on immigration to avoid economic collapse.

If you prefer not having kids or grandchildren, that’s fine by me, but don’t assume we all want the same things.

That is a false dichotomy. Housing is expensive in Canada due to zoning laws forcing a very inefficient use of land, among other reasons.

I lived in Europe for decades, so I know for a fact that making our streets pleasant to walk around isn’t some weird utopia, it is the basic reality in many developed countries.

And I want my children to have the opportunity to have kids of their own. In my experience, when young people feel financially secure and are not working themselves to death, they tend to start families. I want our kids’ generation to have that opportunity.

Seriously. I’m in my mid-50s, and the bleakness of my generation is staggering. Nobody wants to be alive anymore.

I’m a decade younger. I thought Gen-Xers were doing decently well, at least compared to younger generations.

What sorts of problems are you folks having? I’d love to learn more.

Living in an area that is beautiful matters, and our urban landscapes are a big part of that. Trees, decorated facades, town squares, they may add some economic cost, but why is that the only cost that matters? What about the emotional cost of living in an ugly noisy jungle of concrete and glass?

I’m looking at 3br condos/townhomes for my car-free family and prices still look insane. We will likely have to leave the GTA.

There is probably no horror comparable to burying one of your children.

At the same time, I don’t believe anybody should be forced to live when they no longer want to. Suicidal ideation doesn’t come out of nowhere, it is the consequence of a tormented life where the desire to stop suffering eventually overcomes the fear of dying.

I hope all involved find peace.

Alcohol is bad for you too. Are you going to ban that?

I wish they did. My father died of alcoholism.

It’s generational discrimination

You mean, like between the people who lived and died without being able to smoke cannabis legally and those who now can?

Every single law ever approved has created a barrier between those who lived before the law was approved and those who lived after. Public health care, public pensions, everything.

What makes you think Canada will take half a million refugees? UNHCR indicates that we have welcomed a little over a million since 1980.

The death of babies lowers life expectancy a lot more than the death of seniors. Since COVID predominantly kills the elderly, it means that if life expectancy is going down then COVID must still be really mowing seniors down, even though vaccines are available.

They are fighting for that right because they are intersex or trans

Where did you get that? The article indicates that they are non-binary. That is neither intersex nor trans.

That’s the crux of the issue here: someone does feel the need to not fill out the field (i.e. filling it in with an “X”), and the health authority is forcing them to use either “M” or “F”

But the person in question is non-binary, which is a gender identity unrelated to their sex. It is perfectly possible that this person feels perfectly okay with a health card that indicates that their gender identity is non-binary while their sex is binary. In that case, separating gender from biological sex in their health card would address the issue at hand, particularly since nothing would prevent both fields to be left empty if they so choose.

As for why it makes sense to specify the biological sex in their health card, it is a medically useful piece of information that 99% of the patients would have no problem recording. Don’t forget that patients are not always able to communicate at the time they are in need to health care. So, again, if it is useful and non-controversial for 99% of the patients there’s no reason to remove it, just provide a way for patients to opt out of a simple M/F choice if they wish to.

I’m not sure you fully understand the issue. This isn’t merely about catering to a patient’s preference to be addressed in a certain way

…which is why I suggested differentiating between the way the patient would like to be addressed from their biological sex, and storing both in the health card.

What is the process for assigning gender at birth anyway? People look at the baby’s genitals and make a guess. For 99% of babies, that heuristic works. But it turns out that some people are trans or intersex, and that wrong guess causes nothing but trouble.

You appear to be conflating gender an sex. Sex is biological, while gender is a social construct. We assign sex at birth, and infer gender from that sex.

In trans people, the two do not match, which sometimes leads to disphoria. The sex assigned at birth is still accurate, but the gender that was inferred from it is not.

In intersex people, their biological sex is difficult to determine and often doesn’t fit a simple binary (e.g. XXY chromosomes or androgen insensitivity).

The same solution is to trust that people are whatever gender they say they are

There is nothing to trust about their gender, we can respect their self-identity or we don’t. As for their biological sex, it’s a significant piece of medical information. If somebody feels uncomfortable stating it clearly on their health card, they can choose not to fill it out, but for the immense majority of us it is a non-issue.

That’s because their zoning laws are different.

They allow building walkable neighborhoods with mixed-use buildings that have retail businesses on the ground floor and residential units on the 3-5 floors above. Their daily errands can easily be done by foot, so there is less traffic.

You can’t achieve that in a car-dependent suburb where you need to drive to get to the nearest grocery store, school or cafe.

You know, you are right. Since pressing beg buttons is not such an inconvenience, why don’t we make car drivers press them instead and let pedestrians continue unimpeded like cars do today?

Maybe there should be two entries: the gender they identify with, and the sex assigned at birth. One would be used to address the patient, the other would be useful for medical diagnosis and treatment.

And while we are at it, a few people are born with undifferentiated sexual organs, so it could make sense even for medical purposes to include a third option beyond male and female, rare as it might be.

There are multiple different ways to tax carbon. The current federal carbon tax does not include rebates for planting trees, so that loophole doesn’t exist.

The article does not justify why a carbon tax would not work, or at least be an important part of the solution. If we are missing our current targets, what measures can we take to do better? For example, how would increasing the carbon tax by 50% affect our emissions? Despair doesn’t get us closer to our goals.

Many years ago we got lucky and a recently-graduated doctor took us under her roster. Not losing that is one of the reasons we hesitate to move to a different place, even though our doctor is pretty much only doing phone appointments since the pandemic began.

Is it so hard to paint “RESCUE TRAINING” on props like these with big letters so that confusion can be avoided?

Don’t leave us hanging! Are you still stuck sitting on the toilet browsing Lemmy?

IMO, this money should go directly back to consumers

It nearly does. The government collects the fines, which reduces public deficit, which allows the government to either lower taxes or spend more relative to what it would do otherise, which means money ends in the pockets of citizens either way.

I would like to understand what you are saying.

The “crabs in a bucket” idea refers to:

The analogous theory in human behavior is that members of a group will attempt to reduce the self-confidence of any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of envy, jealousy, resentment, spite, conspiracy, or competitive feelings, to halt their progress.

How does it apply here? She is not “achieving success beyond the others” and we are not trying to stop her from doing so. Quite the opposite! We are trying to help people who find themselves in a similar position make the best out off the budget they have so that they can make ends meet like we do.

In other words, we are crabs who have gotten out of the debt bucket and are trying to help others come out as well.

The other analogy you seem to be alluding to is the “frog in a pot”:

The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

What I can tell you from experience is that during periods of hardship, the ability to adapt makes a huge difference and puts you in a much better position mentally and financially when things inevitably get better. Because this too shall pass.

In any case, it’s too easy for people to say that they aren’t making enough money when it’s their spending habits that really hurts them.

Yup. It happens at all income levels, too. There are surgeons out there with nice homes, new cars, vacations and everything, but still living paycheck to paycheck. If you don’t prioritize saving, guess what? You don’t have savings.

She would be living a safe, healthy and financially functional, but it would not be a sustainable, happy, and enjoyable life

As somebody living modestly, I’m laughing at this. It seems like people either overestimate how much satisfaction they get from their expenses, or they underestimate the peace of mind that comes from living within your means. I suspect it’s mostly the former.

She lives in a college town. The vast majority of people in Canada live in urban centers. So, for most single people in Canada, spending less than $200/mo in Internet+phone is trivially simple.

The differences are everywhere.

We live in a small apartment and I personally can’t see how a single person having budget constraints is living in a house. College towns have plenty of apartments suitable for single people.

We use transit, walking and cycling instead of having a car. She could probably do the same since she lives in a college town.

Our internet & phone bills are much lower because we shopped around and went for a basic plan and cellphones. We don’t have pets or other luxuries.

Ultimately, if you have trouble making ends meet you have to start from scratch: what are the bare minimums that you need to be healthy? Housing, transportation, etc.

I understand that some people have trouble accepting that their generation’s standard of living is worse than their parents’, but their inabiliy to adapt isn’t helping them. Most people around the world live much more basic lives than what is common in Canada, and they are able to thrive. They could learn from them.

Beanfield may not be available everywhere, but Teksavvy has similar plans.

Teksavvy is available nearly everywhere and I know they have similar plans because I was a customer.

Amazing how someone can take actual advice based on personal experience, and consider it “trolling”

This is the biggest problem, isn’t it? I understand somebody not knowing how to live frugally, but at the very least they should be open to learning from people who do.

Don’t worry, those of us who how to budget minimally know that you are speaking the truth.

Good luck getting an internet and phone plan for less than $200/month.

My own bills:

Internet (Beanfield): $40/mo including taxes.

Cell (Freedom): $34/mo per phone, incl taxes.

Beanfield may not be available everywhere, but Teksavvy has similar plans.

We are a family of four (renting) and we don’t spend much more than her living alone. She needs to make some tough decisions if she wants to save some money every month.

This has been done in the past in other countries. Multiple times. What were the consequences? Is that what you want to happen in Canada?

Learn from history, people.

At least it aligns our fiscal policy with our current monetary policy. I wonder to what extent they are making these cuts precisely to put downward pressure on inflation, and thus encourage the central bank to reduce interest rates in the future.

Or, you know, follow the rule of law instead of lynching people we don’t like.

They are indeed tightly interrelated because one of the big reasons why people want to live in the suburbs is in order to be away from traffic, which is tragic because those car-dependent suburbs are a big reason why there’s so much traffic in our denser areas. With better urbanism the denser areas become much more liveable for those of us who have no choice but to live there.

This means we need to address the housing crisis in a holistic fashion: housing, transport, daily errands and recreation all come together in a well planed urban area.

It feels like solving the housing crisis is as simple as universally allowing 4-plexes in existing single-family zoning

If you simply increase population density without addressing car dependence then traffic will get much worse than it is now. It is thus imperative that we allow for everyday necessities to be doable within a walking distance of where people live, so that people have the choice to avoid using their car for every single daily activity if they don’t want to. This entails at the very least having grocery shopping, schools, retail commercial spaces and pharmacies/clinics within a walkable distance.

Around the world this is typically achieved by allowing commercial activity on the street-facing ground floors of buildings.

It doesn’t matter what anyone tries to identify as … the problem starts when someone chooses to identify one way or another for monetary, social or professional gain. The problem start when the person appropriates an identity under false pretenses and then benefits from that identity and then chooses to live under that lie.

The biggest issue here is honesty

Another issue is that self-identifying in a certain way shouldn’t come with monetary, social or professional benefits. Easier said than done, of course, but at least in some cases it already happens. For example, people aren’t entitled to use a handicapped parking spot by merely self-identifying as having limited mobility; sports organizations have (still evolving) rules for trans athletes; etc.

Whatever we do there will always be people who try to take advantage of the system, and people who will unfortunately fall through the cracks. Part of the issue is also that many of these identities aren’t binary: plenty of people have mixed heritage, or have partial disabilities. What do we do about that, and where do we draw the line? Can we have the nuance to cope with gray areas on a case by case basis? A broad consensus will be difficult to achieve in gray cases.

There will never be a consensus on what it means to “be’ Indigenous or what the qualifications are for someone to claim that they identify as Indigenous. So when we consult “members of the Indigenous community” who are we talking about?

That is the crux of the problem, isn’t it? In other areas like sexual orientation or gender identity, there’s a decently broad consensus that we should allow people to self-identify. The benefit of self-identification is that it discourages gatekeeping. One downside is that it doesn’t change the fact that the broader community may still reject a person’s self-identity. See for example the debate surrounding trans women in sports.

The issue becomes more acute when being perceived as a certain identity comes with some privileges, whether informal or sanctioned by our government. When that happens, it creates an incentive for people to self-identify in a way that they believe will benefit them in some way or another.

I don’t have a solution. Just rambling.