mostly inactive, lemmy.ca is now too tainted with trolls from big instances we’re not willing to defederate
IMHO Canadians are not significantly friendlier than most nationalities. At most they are friendlier than the average big-city dwelling Americans, and that’s where the meme came from. Up until a few years ago Canada was a country of small cities, and these comparisons are all inherently flawed given the myriad of factors involved.
There is a LOT of conservatism brewing in Canada, and this hasn’t much to do with friendliness. Some of the most astoundingly friendly people I’ve met were midwesterner Americans… and these same people were very bigoted in some regards. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.
Of course there’s a theme, and big truck jackasses playing heavy metal with “Fuck Trudeau” & MAGA stickers abound. But visit an assembly from any affluent neighbourhood residents association and you will see highly educated and courteous old ladies parrot genocidal talking points.
Mobi in Vancouver is pretty decent, some stations have reliability issues but there are enough stations to make it work. I too own a bike and use Mobi pretty much every week for the same reasons described in the article. It’s also perfect when friends come visit the city and I just lend them my anual pass, it blows their mind that they can bike around mostly for free.
If only the service was slightly cheaper, and there were more AAA bike facilities specially outside downtown. Maybe one day when municipal government stops moving backward into car-dependency.
The main thing that concerns me about a fully cashless society is that the means of buying and selling stuff shifts fully into the hands of the for profit, private company payment processors.
Not necessarily true. The federal government can and should roll out their own instant payment mechanism under the supervision of the central bank or federal reserve. For reference: the FedNow initiative in the US, FPS in Hong Kong, and PIX in Brazil.
Interac is an aberration and it should be killed by a real public service.
Hell yes they should. Every city should. And expand labour laws to force companies to pay for some of it that would otherwise be coming out of worker paychecks. Make companies share the burden of sprawling development and car dependency. When companies decide to put their offices in Richmond and selectively hire people who commute from North Vancouver, it ruins transportation and the planet for everyone.
It’s understandable that this person has this much influence, even though it’s not an elected position. But I do agree that the PBO tone and positioning is very worrying. There’s clearly some agenda in there and the man felt he had something to gain in this biased report. 100% influence peddling, though this is usually hard to prove.
I appreciate the Tyee squeezing every possible angle against this but…
trading partners take the threat of climate change seriously and use carbon tariffs to punish other countries they see as free riders
The US and they would be happy to see the carbon tax go away, so they don’t have “communism” nearby, and we know that “trading partner” for Canada means mostly the US. The odds of Canada getting sanctioned for backtracking a 1 yr old tax is negligible.
This is addressed in the article (A greening American leviathan), but I won’t be holding my breath. Even if carbon tariffs has bipartisan appeal for now, let’s see what happens when the time comes.
keeping returns below inflation will divert investors from the real estate market over time.
There are multiple types of Real Estate investors. We want to attract investors who build, who finance land development, infill, retrofits and so on. These will keep coming because the goal is to sell the labor of construction, and that can still be profitable. We don’t want to attract land speculators or rent-seekers, these provide little value to the market.
They will HODL however if not presented with exit strategy. If they are allowed time to divest and exit - they will IMO
Investors (i.e. institutional/professionals, not amateurs) don’t hold on to investments because they lack an exit strategy. It’s the exact opposite. Investors get rid of assets as soon as there’s enough information to say a loss is likely.
I know that the biggest chunk of real estate “investors” are amateur shops, people hoarding homes as their retirement plan, and these might hold on despite bad performance yeah. This happens all over the world because in most markets Real Estate is a bad investment, yet people are addicted to it.
But in any case, I was discussing the outcomes under the hypothesis that home prices are following inflation, so the hypothesis includes the assumption that there’s enough market transactions to put those prices under control.
I’d say that would be fine in theory, if “retain its value” meant that housing would follow very closely but tailing local inflation. That won’t happen though. As long as “housing needs to retain its value” ideology runs the country, housing will be viewed as an investment and scarcity will cause it to push inflation upwards. Even trying really hard to quell these prices it might beat inflation, and even if it were a success it would take decades of nominal-growth with negative-real-returns to bring those prices to parity with incomes.
So no, even if “technically maybe?” the answer is still no.
they need to open the code enough for fans to keep the game functional
That makes sense. Another commenter pointed out that even for defunct MMORPGs people were able to spin up their own servers to keep the game alive. If companies are forced to provide something to help that, it’s already a win.
I’m not hopeful Canada would be able to pass legislation forcing companies to open source things, though. Maybe if this was the EU lol our track record of fighting tech companies hasn’t been pretty.
Welp, at least it’s a non-profit and the amount of people under care is increasing.
I’d say this kind of thing is in the best 1% of UCP moments, considering everything else. It’s a low bar but still.