Yes, things are tough now. Climate change is a very serious challenge ahead. I vote Green, ride a bike, etc.

All that being said, I’m probably older than most of you. I grew up during the cold war, when we sincerely believed we were at the brink of nuclear annihilation.

It didn’t happen.

I will spare you the countless doomsday headlines I’ve read in the news over the years. The hole in the ozone layer, the wars, the genocides, the natural disasters, the political churn.

The details don’t matter. We were truly terrified of the future, just like you are. Yet, the immense majority of the fears we had did not materialize, either because we took action to prevent them or because they had been overblown. We also faced some challenges that the news didn’t warn us about.

We prevail, like we have always done. People are much more resilient than they imagine. You can handle it and so can your children, and your children’s children. Living in fear doesn’t solve the problem, so why do it?

JFC. This one is so much worse, being in the kernel.

I don’t know who is downvoting you because you are completely right.

At the same time, I am delighted at the idea of a bunch of speculators being stressed out and losing a ton of the money they obtained while making housing unaffordable for everybody else.

Housing can be affordable or it can be a good investment. It can’t be both, and it is time it starts being the former.

If my family of four can live cramped inside a one bedroom apartment for years, then overleveraged folks can downsize from the large houses they bought during the pandemic. And, if nothing else, it will feel a little like justice.

Land can either be a good investment, or it can be affordable; it can’t be both. A land value tax does nothing to prevent wealthy people to hoard vast amounts of land, driving the cost of land higher. Foreign investments in real estate are particularly damaging to affordability, because it makes ordinary Canadians compete against the wealthiest people around the world, a fight they can never win.

Things have gotten so bad that I’m willing to vote for whoever takes the most significant measures to make housing affordable. Here’s a half-baked assortment of the sort of policies that would either increase supply or reduce demand:

1. Allow mixed-use medium-density housing in areas that now allow only single-family homes. Allow mixed-use high-density housing to be built in proximity to subway, train, bus stations.

2. Reduce the taxes and paperwork required to (re)build a home.

3. Pay several architecture firms to design a variety of housing and offer those projects free of charge to the public. A la “Vancouver Special”.

4. Use public land to build social housing below market rates

5. Municipalities buying old apartment buildings and renting them out below current market rates

6. Maintain a central registry of who owns what housing and who lives there (necessary for the policies below). This can be used to audit abuses

7. Raise property taxes on vacant housing

8. Introduce a new yearly anti-speculation tax that depends on the owner of the unit:

   • Canadian citizens: 0%.
   • Permanent residents and people with work permits: 0%.
   • Companies established in Canada:
     • Single-family dwelling: 5%.
     • Dwelling between two and 6 units: 2%
     • Housing with more units: 0%
   • All other assumptions: 10% <-- this includes foreign investors

9. Halve immigration targets until housing crisis is over

Edit: 10. Eliminate parking minimums. Let business decide how much parking they need.

I hope the speculators who are leveraged to their tits will feel the pressure and this will lead to a housing crash. I don’t care if this causes a recession – what is the point of having a “good economy” if we can’t afford a place to live?

Some years ago we were able to get a family doctor who had her own little walk-in clinic. The waiting room always had some patients in it, but she would see you within an hour.

Since the pandemic the clinic is mostly empty because she no longer accepts walk-ins and even patients in her roster must get a telephone appointment first before even having the possibility of meeting her in person. And when you have an in-person appointment it only takes a day or two and when you arrive you can see that there are no patients before or after you – she must be seeing very few people per day.

Her case isn’t unique. It is difficult to find walk-in clinics anymore, and family doctors accepting new patients were already unicorns before the pandemic. Why is this happening? What sort of incentives and disincentives in the system turned regular doctors into hermits that do a fraction of the work they used to? Large swaths of the population are not receiving any medical care at all and we are considering to move out of the country.

I agree, and I think both situations are clearly bullshit. My employer should have no say on my sexual life.

Indeed there is a broader conversation about what amounts to “inappropriate conduct” outside the workplace. Assuming the person isn’t doing anything illegal and maintains their work at arm’s length, does the employer get to police what they do outside of their working hours?

If a teacher hustling as a sex worker in her free time is grounds for dismissal, would a teacher hiring the services of a sex worker in his free time also be a fireable offense?

We don’t have enough information. As long as she kept her work in school separated from her OnlyFans, I see nothing wrong with her having a second job.

This sentence is ambiguous:

Among them is allegedly posting material on public social media accounts that “involves the sexualization of the school environment.”

Is this implying that she took any of her OnlyFans pictures while inside the school? That wouldn’t be okay. But if what it is referring to, as she alleges, is that she took pictures elsewhere while wearing a school uniform, then the only thing that matters in my mind is whether it was a generic school uniform or the specific uniform used at the school she worked at.

We are generally very hypocritical in matters surrounding porn and sex work.