In an attempt to deal with an affordable housing crisis, the Dutch housing minister recently proposed a law that would have allowed municipalities to force some property owners to sell their homes only to low and middle-income earners. The problem the policy is trying to fix is one that's particularly acute in Canada.
The solution is a wealth tax. It worked for the first 10,000 years of human civilization, after the 100 year failed experiment of income/sales tax it’s time to go back.
Their “stress” is also bullshit. A rich guy being worried about his pile of gold getting smaller is not the same as a struggling mother worrying about feeding her kids, or a miner worried about a cave-in.
There really needs to be a common, open standard for EV charging, it’s honestly one of the biggest things holding back higher adoption. The worst part is that there is one, but the most popular vehicle refuses to implement it because they have control over a huge proprietary network.
Imagine if there was “Ford gas” and “Honda gas”, and even though they were the same fuel, you couldn’t fit the fill nozzle into your car with the other one. That would be absolutely insane.
People hate thinking about dongles and connectors, it just needs to work.
The Ontario Public Health Association … cites multiple studies showing that increases in the number of places where alcohol can be bought in Ontario, and in other jurisdictions, have already led to more consumption and more of the harms that come with it, such as suicides, drunk driving, emergency-room visits and higher rates...
It’s sad that our regulations about alcohol sales are so restrictive, but it’s unfortunately very necessary because of how our built environment exists. It’s correlated with drunk driving deaths because there’s not enough ways to get home that aren’t driving. We can’t really fix one without the other. I’d love to have a European-style picnic with wine I bought at the store on the corner, but that means at least 10% of the people on the road are going to be drunk driving at any given time which isn’t ideal.
The nuclear power industry is essentially the only one that’s been mandated to be responsible for the cleanup of the entire lifecycle of their product. No other industry has to pay clean up after the mining, refining, use, recycling, long term storage, and disposal. And to be clear, that’s good – every industry should be like that. Nobody should have the “freedom” to dump without repercussions.
I think if the fossil fuel industry also had to shoulder the costs of all their externalities, they would be far less profitable than nuclear power. The entire industry is basically reliant on their ability to dump toxic garbage wherever they want, because if they couldn’t do that, there would be no industry.
This new normal of near-constant wildfire smoke annoys me as much as the next person. But it serves as a reminder that we share one fragile atmosphere that we're collectively screwing up. Fruitless to waste all this energy pointing fingers like children when we should be joining hands to fix this. It's like nature's warning...
Some people seem to think that you can rope off a “designated peeing area” in the swimming pool…
We all share one climate – it doesn’t matter where in the world you burn the coal or where the fires break out, we all suffer together. That’s the reality that a lot of people all over the world don’t seem to be willing to understand.
First is where the hydrogen comes from. Most commercially available hydrogen comes from fossil fuels. The most common process involves superheated steam, methane (aka natural gas), and a catalyst. Very little hydrogen comes from renewable energy via hydrolysis.
Second is efficiency. The total process of transforming renewable energy to hydrogen, storing and transporting the gas, then using it to move a locomotive is only about 30% efficient. There are significant losses at every stage, and it’s a very complex supply chain.
Now, compare this to very boring overhead electrified railroads, which have existed for over one hundred years. Modern systems can achieve nearly 85% efficiency from generation to locomotion, are cheap and easy to build, and have some of the most reliable rolling stock around since they’re essentially a really big slot car. The only downside is the big up-front investment in overhead lines, but that quickly pays for itself with the overall efficiency of the railroad system.
If you ask me, this is a bad idea. It’s somewhere between well intentioned but poorly thought through engineering, and the good old fashioned greenwashing of the fossil fuel industry.
The social contract has failed in Canada. We've basically reverted to feudalism (with big TVs & iphones) with barely a whisper. We're working harder than ever and getting less and less... It's extremely demoralizing when we realize that all our work is going straight into stock buybacks & real-estate investment funds for the boomers to suck dry, leaving us with no savings, investments, homes, or really anything with value.
I think the most important change is to revert taxation to the way it was for thousands of years up until about 100 years ago.
It used to be that all taxes were wealth taxes. A guy would come around, eyeball all of your stuff, guess how much it was worth, and then demand a cut of it for the emperor/pharaoh/ceasar/etc. If you didn't have anything valuable, the guy would more or less leave you alone.
That's not how it works now. The main forms of taxation are on income and spending, with tax codes carefully written to avoid any "non-income" forms of revenue. There are very low capital gains taxes on stock dividends, zero on most home equity gains, and loads of ways to avoid those if you're even remotely savvy. Basically, it's specifically structured to extract wealth from the working and preserve the wealth of the rich. Personally, I paid nearly twenty thousand dollars in income tax alone while the richest guys in Canada paid practically nothing.
We need to go back to a wealth tax, which worked for 99% of human civilization. It's easier than ever, considering that every financial institution and government knows your exact net worth down to a few %. The burden needs to be taken off of the working class, and this is the easiest way to do it. No revolution, no eating of the rich -- just some rich guys kicking in their fair share.
Of course, we all know it's not going to happen -- the wealthy are far too powerful to threaten their own interests. Until then, we work the fields I guess.
It’s still useful for doing advance customs declaration, can save 10 minutes or so at the airport. That being said, YYZ and/or Air Canada will happily eat that time up…
It’s crazy how they blew their lead. In 2019 there was no Rivian, no F150 Lightning, just them and their goofy prototype. If they went for something they could have actually mass produced w/o the stupid gimmicks, they probably would have dominated the E-truck market before it even started.
It’s actually kind of problematic, since tempered glass is an important safety feature in cars. It’s strong and resists impacts, but when hit with the right kind of tool will shatter into small ‘cubes’ that don’t have sharp and dangerous shards. Without safety glass it’s much harder to rescue people that are trapped in a vehicle, you basically have to hammer on the shatterproof glass for several minutes which you might not have if the car is sinking in water, near a fire, exposed to dangerous chemical spills, etc. Honestly, I don’t think that design for ‘cybertruck’ would be approved by US regulatory standards.
Linus' thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can't seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)
MinMon - minimal monitoring and alarming tool (github.com)
Hi guys,...
Folder (lemmy.world)
UI updated to 0.18.2-rc1
Heads up that we’ve bumped the UI up to 0.18.2-rc.1, which should resolve the current exploit that was seen on lemmy.world....
To solve Dutch housing crisis, proposal aimed to ban the rich from buying some homes. Could it work here? (www.cbc.ca)
In an attempt to deal with an affordable housing crisis, the Dutch housing minister recently proposed a law that would have allowed municipalities to force some property owners to sell their homes only to low and middle-income earners. The problem the policy is trying to fix is one that's particularly acute in Canada.
For the fourth day in a row, Earth has broken or equalled its hottest average temperature record (www.abc.net.au)
The planet’s average temperature hit 17.23 degrees Celsius on Thursday, surpassing the 17.18C record set on Tuesday and equalled on Wednesday.
Tech execs are stressed out. Half are heavy drinkers and 45% take painkillers, a new study says (www.businessinsider.com)
High stress and job insecurity have many tech executives turning to alcohol and controlled substances to cope, a new survey says.
Road trips lose power as charger outages leave northern Ontario EV drivers stranded (www.cbc.ca)
Non-Tesla EV drivers couldn’t go from Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie much of June (Heather Kitching / CBC News)
Working doesn't rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people (gazettengr.com)
A bill that would allow police in France to spy on suspects by remotely activating cameras, microphone including GPS of their phones has been passed.
Doug Ford wants alcohol in convenience stores (www.theglobeandmail.com)
The Ontario Public Health Association … cites multiple studies showing that increases in the number of places where alcohol can be bought in Ontario, and in other jurisdictions, have already led to more consumption and more of the harms that come with it, such as suicides, drunk driving, emergency-room visits and higher rates...
Canada’s Oil-Sands Miners Want to Flush Oceans of Wastewater Downstream (archive.ph)
Waste sitting in pits could fill almost 883,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, and oil companies say they need to find a way to reduce it...
This blame game over Canadian wildfire smoke has got to stop
This new normal of near-constant wildfire smoke annoys me as much as the next person. But it serves as a reminder that we share one fragile atmosphere that we're collectively screwing up. Fruitless to waste all this energy pointing fingers like children when we should be joining hands to fix this. It's like nature's warning...
Canada's first hydrogen train is taking passengers | CBC News (www.cbc.ca)
Halifax Citadel - Olympus M5mk2 14-150mm (i.imgur.com)
f5.6, 1/640s, iso200, 14mm
Renters in 36 of Canada's largest cities can't afford to buy a starter home: report (www.ctvnews.ca)
FTA: The unaffordable cities:...
Kei Van - Lumix GX85, 12-35mm (i.imgur.com)
f5.6, 1/80s, iso200, 25mm
Only a small percentage of travellers are using ArriveCAN months after it was made optional | CBC News (www.cbc.ca)
OPP officer recently convicted of sexual assault got 7.5 years of paid leave and made over 120k last year (www.cbc.ca)
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith not banned from Facebook, Meta says (nationalpost.com)
Turns out she's not banned, just bad at using Facebook? Did she forget to log in or something?
Welcome to M43, home of micro four thirds photography
Smol lens enjoyers assemble!...
Leaked Tesla documents shed new light on why the Cybertruck is taking so long (www.theverge.com)
Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political! (cdn.masto.host)
Linus' thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can't seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)