prodigalsorcerer

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 day ago (1 children)

aside from ensuring the fundamentals are in place of affordable accessible homes, is there really any realistic way of nullifying that advantage and is it even right to do so?

I don't think that's an aside, I think that's the key to solving a lot of problems with our current society. Give everyone a roof and enough nutritious food, and most people can figure out how to live their lives from there. The problem is that the lack of housing and food options forces people into low paying jobs with no upward mobility, and continues the cycle of poverty.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago

Canada

About to do the same thing

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The UN first has to acknowledge that a genocide is taking place.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

If only there were some sort of article attached to the title that contained quotes and statistics to answer your question. I guess it will forever remain a mystery.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

If pp cares so much, he can get the security clearance and look at the list himself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The "big five" banks in the states actually represent less than half the American population, whereas the major banks in Canada cover about 85% of us. (Note these numbers are from before the pandemic - I'm no longer involved in the banking industry.)

The US system is still incredibly fragmented, though a lot of consolidation is happening (yay oligopolies). Canada, on the other hand, has had stricter regulations for longer, which meant that even the 15% of Canadians with small banks and credit unions were included in the changes to the industry as they happened.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

It's Niccol. I was briefly confused and thought that I somehow missed Nichelle Nichols in Gattaca.

That said, is Gattaca forgotten? And what was wrong with his later works? I haven't seen them all, but the ones I've seen have been pretty good. They're all pretty much a bleak and dire warning about our future, and Gattaca may have done it best, but there's nothing wrong with his other films.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Where can you get a BYD Seagull outside of China for that price? When they install all the required safety features, it's much closer to 20k Euros (30k CAD).

That's still a little cheaper than anything we have here, but not so much cheaper that it's worth the human rights violations and loss of local industry.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.

You're absolutely correct in that. We've mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.

This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

if you’re not increasing supply then you’re failing your free market duty

I disagree. Brooks is correct in saying that it's not their job and that its two separate industries. Affordable/social housing is the government's job, not theirs.

In theory, the free market should see this increase in rental prices and react by building more units. Why isn't that happening? Largely it comes down to the fact that a lot of developers are also landlords, and thus have a huge conflict of interest in this area. This is where regulators need to step in. But landlords (on their own) do not, and should not, be responsible for building housing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I went to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. They explained that riding elephants is incredibly stressful for the elephant's back, and that in order to train them to obey, torture is usually involved.

I'm against zoos as well. I know some do good work with rehabilitation and such (and we should support them), but a lot just capture animals for our enjoyment. Even if they're not explicitly mistreated, it's pretty cruel to just keep them in a cage for the rest of their lives.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If you're talking about the "Value" booster, your LGS probably won't (and shouldn't) stock those. That's for grandmas to buy at dollar stores and Walmart checkout aisles. It's an absolutely scummy product, but it shouldn't cause SKU issues at your LGS.

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