It shows that “no rent control” basically means “your landlord can throw you out at any time without notice” by raising rent to a ludicrous amount. It completely undermines all other tenant protections. Even conservatives should be supporting at least modest rent controls to prevent cases like this.
I think last year’s inflation spike demonstrates that “2.5% per year regardless of your carrying costs or maintenance costs changing due to interest rates and inflation” is not modest. A reasonable rent control policy would let landlords gradually adapt to market realities without giving them the power to gouge or de-facto evict tenants with sudden rent spikes.
Negative Effects on Supply: Rent control can potentially lead to housing shortages over the long term. When landlords are unable to raise rents to cover maintenance and operating costs or to generate a reasonable return on their investment, they may have less incentive to maintain or invest in their properties. This can lead to a deterioration in the quality of rental housing and a reduction in the overall supply of rental units. In some cases, landlords may convert rental properties into other uses, such as condominiums or commercial spaces, further reducing the supply of rental housing.
Inefficiencies and Reduced Mobility: Rent control can lead to inefficiencies in the housing market. Tenants in rent-controlled units may have less incentive to move, even if their housing needs change, because they want to keep their low rents. This reduced mobility can make it harder for new renters to find suitable housing.
Selective Impact: Rent control often applies to older buildings or units built before a certain date. This can create disparities in rent levels between newer and older housing stock, potentially discouraging the construction of new rental units and leading to further imbalances in the housing market.
A short term band-aid that causes long term problems. Government price controls are a tale as old as time.
So the first point is simply false, the second point is symptomatic of the third point which is simply an example of a poor policy.
Also the second half of the third point is completely fucked off. If new construction were exempt from rent control then your ROI would be better on building units than buying units.
We have rent control in Paris, France. Appartments are still expensive, but I pay 1600 euros per month for 60sqm in the center of one of the liveliest cities in the world.
It’s inevitable that any type of price control will lead to supply/demand issues. That’s great it worked out for you but it is well documented that rent control harms rental markets long term. Anyone who disagrees is in denial.
I think your second point is valid, but the first is upside-down. Landlords compete with tenants for plots and bank loans. If they started leaving the market, more plots will free up and banks will be forced to start giving out loans to tenants. This will allow people who are currently tenants to build their own houses, rather than needing to rent. And your third point only applies if you exclude some properties from rent control, which is what Ontario seems to be doing.
Landlords compete with tenants for plots and bank loans.
Not really. Landlords need tenants. If tenants would rather own, then there would be nobody for the landlord to rent to. Landlords serve those who prefer to rent. Of note, one reason people prefer to rent is a belief that the housing market is about to crash. With a lot of signs suggesting that is a real possibility on the near horizon, this is why rents have skyrocketed recently. Nobody wants to be the bag holder, so many more are, right now, opting to rent over buying in order to wait and see what happens.
banks will be forced to start giving out loans to tenants.
There is nothing that forces them to give loans to tenants. If landlords start leaving the housing market it is likely that credit offers will grind to a halt. The bank wants absolutely nothing to do with a security that people are running away from. Furthermore, the money leaving housing is apt to flow into productive businesses, which means that any credit that the banks are still willing to extend will go in that direction.
If you honestly believe this then you are delusional. I’m sorry there’s pretty much no kind way to put it. This statement is that egregiously erroneous that it is so incongruous with reality so as to be delusional.
For what it’s worth, surveys in my country repeatedly show that renters would prefer to own. But the market here is rough and banks are denying people loans even with a lower monthly payments than their existing rent.
I would think it is the same in the US, but most people here rent because they can’t buy.
surveys in my country repeatedly show that renters would prefer to own.
That does not mean they prefer to own right now. If you plan on moving to a new place in a few months, for example, it would kind of silly to buy only to have to buy again a few months later. You may prefer to buy, but the rational person would rent for a few months to bridge the gap, and then buy once they get to where they plan to stay.
And, given the current state of housing, with a high risk of it soon imploding, a lot of people would rather wait a few months, even a few years, before they buy to see what happens to the market. Again, preferring to own doesn’t imply right now.
The data shows a clear downward trend in price, especially in the traditionally desirable areas. If you have somewhere to rent, why would you choose to buy at this exact moment, knowing – with reasonable confidence – that a house will be cheaper in six months?
Uh, part of the point of the greenbelt is to stop building detached houses because they’re actually environmentally quite bad. I mean maybe individuals could work together to put together a co-op but Housing Now TO says that municipal governments generally block any of those that would pencil out.
I wanted to build a duplex but “zoning laws” say that wasn’t allowed, only single family detached houses with at least X amount of land.
Most zoning laws are serious bullshit and work as defacto segregation to keep the dirty brown poor people away from the nice good rich folk. It’s why suburban school is a totally different things from poor urban school.
Zoning laws are why developers in LA can’t afford to build anything other than luxury condos. Land is literally too expensive to build. As an example: a requirement to have at least X parking spots per X units, even when it’s built right next to a metro and a bus depot and you’re building low income housing for people who are less likely to own cars in the first place.
part of the point of the greenbelt is to stop building detached houses because they’re actually environmentally quite bad.
If we’re being honest, all housing is environmentally bad. And not just environmentally bad, but bad for society in general. A necessary evil for the individual, perhaps, but it stands to reason that they should carry a high cost to account for the negative externalities they place on everyone else.
Jesus, I’m getting it from both ends here, somebody else is dumping on me for suggesting that a rent-control system that’s a few points above inflation so that landlords could adapt to the market without abruptly bankrupting their tenants was somehow a reasonable compromise.
I’m not arguing for extreme rent-control policies, just that no rent control is bad because it lets landlords write their own eviction laws.
Peg it at like 2.5% or 5% per year above inflation and you can’t use it as a sudden backdoor eviction but you also let landlords adapt to market reality over time.
Capping rents might be stupid for all the reasons economists say, but putting a damper on sudden price shifts is just being humane.
Most conservatives are middle class small business owners and landlords, this is why they are always supportive of “small government” it’s just a dog whistle for unregulated market.
They’re not generally cartoonish evil, I’m sure they agree that some tenant protections against sudden eviction are a good thing, and allowing unlimited rent hikes completely obliterates all that.
From my experience most people don’t care until they’re inconvenienced in some way, so they won’t have an opinion on it so they wait until someone they rely on and trust to tell them how they should feel. I think we all know which entertainment network is going to tell them all about why rent control is ruining Canada/America.
You really need to look at how they’re talking on landlord forums and such, the way they speak about tenants. Reality will remove this naive idea from your mind.
I agree they are not cartoonishly evil, in so far as that a cartoon villain usually is thwarted by good through the power of friendship. Real villains don’t have such opposition.
False dicotomy. People talk shit about landlords because of how they’re treated by them. Landlords talk shit about tenants because they’re pieces of shit which is the same reason they treat tenants like shit.
I saw a documentary that spoke to some Twump (sic) supporters who lived in a shithole building that they didn’t realize was owned by the Kushners. I can’t recall anything else about it that might help identify it.
You can’t afford to buy. If not for landlords who would you rent from? Where would you live?
The idea that if there were no landlords you’d be able to afford a house is absurd.
I agree corporations should be limited in how many single.family homes they are allowed to buy but this whole "all landlords are scum ". Schtick makes u look pathetic and ignorant of the facts.
When people trying to purchase their first home are outbid constantly by investors (corporate or not) who later try to rent out that same space at more than the first time buyer would be paying on their mortgage then no, you daft idiot, they are not providing a service.
This whole lAnDlOrDs ArE oUr FrIeNd shtick makes you look pathetic.
News flash dude. Way before all this increase when rates were low and there were tons of houses on the market I was trying to buy a first home and was outbid constantly by realtors who had more money and connections. It has never had anything to do with landlords per se.
If you dont think landlords are providing a service then you’re the idiot. No one is making you rent from anyone. I joined thought it was worth the space for the money no one would pay it.
News flash dude, it was wrong then and it’s wrong now, period.
If you think for profit renting is superior and less predatory to public housing, a successful model used in countries all over the world, and used to be successful in this country before the Conservatives and Liberals killed it in the 80/90s, then you’re an idiot.
No one is saying the empty nester with the basement suite charging an affordable price for the unit is in the wrong. The one’s that are in the wrong are the corporations and individuals who are buying up properties for their own personal gain at the sake of those around them who did nothing wrong other than being unlucky wth market timing. The ones in the wrong are the politicians who have lied to their voters into believing that for profit corporations are the solution to public services like housing, healthcare, and transportation, and the voters who have buried their heads in the sand and refused to listen to reason because they are scared of admitting they may not be right 100% of the time and would rather watch the world burn than change.
If you can’t understand this then again, you’re a fucking idiot.
Landlords provide housing the way scalpers “provide” tickets. The solution for people who need can’t afford to buy or who only need short term accommodation is public housing.
The CMHC used to provide funds to the provinces which would then build big public housing units with affordable rent. This provide a check & balance to the free market, keeping rents and house prices from skyrocketing. But then in the 80s and 90s, both Conservative and Liberal PMs successively defunded that aspect of the CMHC to solve budget issues, and those properties were destroyed as they reached their “maturity” date, regardless of whether the building was still usable or not.
I lived near one of them, located here: maps.app.goo.gl/SG2kkXeVsp3Nia2RACheck out the street view and click “see more dates” for 2012, that’s housing for 90+families. Then in 2014 it was closed for demolition. And today it’s still an empty grass lot. Almost 10 years as a Govt-owned empty lot, instead of affordable housing, because those Govts kept promising “market solutions” to housing problems.
But it turns out the “problem” with housing was letting the “free market” turn it into another Tulip Bulb craze, instead of keeping it an affordable necessity
public housing doesn’t require tax money. It is often facilitated by it, yes, but don’t act as if the rent is necessarily sponsored by the government just because public housing isn’t designed to extract the maximum amount of money from the renters. There’s plenty to criticize about public housing without resorting to falsehoods
I spent some of my formative years in public housing. It was definitely a bit more sketchy than the privately owned homes across the street but all in all it was a fantastic way for me to get my feet under me as a student and young adult. That’s exactly what scores of young and also not so young people desperately need right now
Decomodify housing. Like tax owning a home past like the 3th one so high it would destitute someone as rich as Musk in a month. Watch everyone who uses property for investment panic sell and crash the market into oblivion. The people who want to own a home can now do so and the rest can be bought up by the government for cheap to convert into public housing. Ez affordable housing and renting in one swoop.
So I’m a big fan of reducing landlords (especially big corporate ones), but aren’t you worried about what happens to all the people that bought a house to live in with your plan? If my house halved in value I’d be well fucked, the house losing value won’t make my mortgage go down unfortunately.
Edit: I guess I crossed a threshold in that comment which puts me in the “landlord sympathiser camp”, which is far from the truth, I’m not too surprised about that though. Look, my preferred option is annihilation of capitalism, but just crashing the real estate market without doing anything else about the system itself would be devastating for a lot of common folks, not just through housing prices but all the other economic effects it would have.
I own my apartment too and if its value dropped to zero it would have no effect, I would still be living in it with no change.
Something should probably be done about housing bought with loans but even if it isn’t anyone who bought a home to live in will continue to do so, it’s value being pretty much irrelevant.
There is a change which is that you can’t move anymore, better hope you chose that house really well and never need to move ever again (which is extremely unlikely for us and I would think for most people). Not to mention the sheer insanity to be paying monthly for another 25 years for something with no value.
It might be frustrating if the value of my home dropped after buying it, but I don’t imagine it would mean I couldn’t move. I sell my current home for a lower price, but wouldn’t that be okay because the price of the house I’m buying is also lower now? (/gen curious, I don’t know a lot about this topic lol, just thinking out loud)
If you’re “underwater” (your mortgage is higher than the value of the house) then yeah you’re stuck unless you want to pay off that difference. That happened to friends of mine after 2008. If you own the house outright then yeah it matters less.
There is also Soviet communism, Cuban communism, and North Korean communism. I’m sure one of those countries will happily welcome you with lovely high quality public housing.
Do you think you’ll get to keep your house under communism?
Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant people’s communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected.
So, this is a testy thread, but if you have a specific idea of what you do want I’m very interested. Capitalism is a weird solution but other than old-school communism (which was honestly a series of kludges masquerading as a solution) I’ve yet to hear another solution described in detail.
I actually have looked into that. From what I can tell they never really had a well-defined economic structure, since building up the economy bigger isn’t a consideration when fighting for your existence, and used a market system for basic purchases of supplies. Modern Rojava is the same way.
The Republicans were pretty close to winning from what I’ve heard, and if I could see parallel universes what they would have settled on after a victory would be one of the first few things I’d be interested in.
I don’t disagree but what we need is stability. So far capitalism has given the US that. If you’re proposing a different system fine just make sure that while we move to it the perceived wealth of the country doesn’t take a hit and after it is implemented do the same.
I don’t think it is possible from here. What we really need is loads more regulation and Corp criminals going to prison to start.
Largest gdp and arguably most stable economy of scale on the planet what are you talking about?
See this is what I’m talking about. Just devoid of reality
Public housing. That's where you rent it from. Landlords serve no purpose in society that can't be solved in better ways.
For example, I would gladly purchase my apartment. The rent that I pay would be roughly equal to mortgage payments on the approximate value of the unit. But instead I'm stuck paying that amount so someone else can own it. Just cut out the parasite in the middle.
Wow I never thought of that. It's almost like people treating housing as an investment portfolio, corporate landlords, and greedy developers have made all the housing around me completely unaffordable.
On top of that, I wouldn't qualify for a mortgage of that amount, despite the fact I've been paying the same in rent for nearly a decade.
Yeah, I know, because the banks also have to make money. So then OP can’t actually pay a mortgage for the same price, if you include downpayment and all those sort of things.
No reason, there are credit unions too, my riding association uses one, and I personally bank with my province. They still function like banks, though, and when they give out loans they expect interest in turn for not having the money to use themselves (basically), and various other things to ensure you can actually pay them back.
If you’re wondering why we can’t just give houses out freely, it’s because the construction workers have to do tangible work that sucks and will want to be taken care of in turn. The only convincing way I’ve seen to ensure that in a complex industrial society involves currency of some kind, and then you’re right back to banks.
Now, you could ask why landlords get to have so much more money than their tenants in the first place, and I’d say dunno, seems dumb. I never said I loved capitalism, I’m just not sure why landlords are worse than all the other Guys That Own Things.
I understand how banks work, and that labour has to be compensated, but thanks for being condescending and somehow taking away that I want to abolish currency?
First: We could absolutely be giving homes away and still compensate the people that build them. Finland has been having huge success by (in some degree) giving housing away, or providing it at cost.
Second: saying there's bigger evils out there doesn't mean landlords get a pass. Especially in Canada where our housing costs are skyrocketing DIRECTLY because of landlords, corporate or otherwise. Them being any better or worse doesn't matter when they're the biggest problem RIGHT NOW.
but thanks for being condescending and somehow taking away that I want to abolish currency?
I don’t actually know you that well, and there’s no shortage of people who do want to abolish currency on Lemmy so it’s good to get ahead of. Sorry if I came off as condescending, I’m actually enjoying this particular sub-chain, you’re bringing up lots of important stuff.
First: We could absolutely be giving homes away and still compensate the people that build them. Finland has been having huge success by (in some degree) giving housing away, or providing it at cost.
Well, yeah, the government could buy housing and then give it away at a loss. That could be an effective form of wealth redistribution, but we wouldn’t have more houses as a result, which brings me to…
Especially in Canada where our housing costs are skyrocketing DIRECTLY because of landlords
There is not. An equivalently sized apartment in my neighbourhood is on the market for $1.6M at least. Because the only things being built are "luxury" units made for investment, not housing people.
Also, I wouldn't qualify for a mortgage equal to my rent despite the fact I've been paying rent at that rate for nearly a decade.
And you think your apartment is worth a lot less? I don’t know if I buy that, honestly, unless it’s an absolute tear-down. I’ve played with markets enough to learn that there’s never an easy shortcut.
Yes, it is worth less. I know because they just did a valuation of it a week ago. A mortgage on it would be affordable for me. I don't care what's "believable" for you. Fuck off.
I’ve NEVER met a landlord who had low prices, just government subsidized low income housing. Even large real-estate companies/ banks tend to offer better prices. Landlords fucking suck. Investing in a house, is like “investing” in water. You’re just spending money to increase demand and make money, on SOMETHING PEOPLE NEED TO LIVE.
Please tell us more about how the types of people who decide to jack rent up to absurd levels when given the slightest push back are actually a good thing for society.
Lotta justified anti-landlord sentiment is overflowing the barriers of nuance and creating a flood of “everything should be free in a perfect society” quasi-marxism.
The reason so many can’t afford to buy is because so many houses are bought purely to be rented back out again, if no landlords existed housing prices would drop and more people could afford to buy.
For those who still couldn’t, as others have said - public housing
I mean this is patently false. Even when there were huge housing surpluses and rates were rock bottom people still rented. Sometimes even when they could afford to buy.
Sure now large corps have gobbled up the supply but even if they sold everything and tons of houses were on the market there would still be renters. And those renters need landlords.
Well yes, hence my last sentence - there will always be some people who have to rent (or just prefer it), and for those people, we could have public housing. Basically housing that’s treated as a public infrastructure - run not for profit, but for public good. It’s really not that hard to grasp - remove the landlords from the equation, and set the rent prices to exactly the cost of maintaining the properties.
If you remove the landlords leeching away extra value for investment profit, and instead just charged what it cost to make the housing available, it’d be cheaper by definition. Providing essential services at an affordable cost is literally the whole point of civil infrastructure
You don’t need landlords to give people a place to rent, in the same way I don’t need to pay someone to bring water to my house, or haul my sewage away, I use the public utilities in my area. And I’m not even talking about subsidizing the cost with tax dollars (though I think that’s a good idea), you could give renters significant savings simply by not trying to make money off them
No one wants to pay for any of that ever tho. You’re talking about massive infrastructure costs which sure on average is cheaper but good luck getting any gov to agree to the cost and maintenance. Idk about Canada but public housing in the US sucks.
Pay for what? Again, I’m not talking about subsidized housing here, just at-cost rentals. The only people paying are the renters, they’re just paying significantly less because they’re not funding some random person/corporation’s no-effort-required retirement plan.
Idk about Canada but public housing in the US sucks.
I’m in the US, and idk where you live but public housing in my area is both high quality and super affordable (granted I live in a very liberal state, where such things are given priority). The only issue is that there isn’t enough of it, but that would be solved if we switched to public housing for rentals instead of landlords. If your area has “sucky” public housing, you should advocate for improvements in your community and vote for local policy makers who will prioritize it.
You seem to have this odd insistince that you can’t possibly have rental properties without someone leeching profits off the top of the whole deal
Do you not realize that buildings cost money? That has to come way way way before a single dime of rent is collected. You act like rents collected from tenants equal the cost of the building immediately.
So again, where is the money coming from in advance to build the housing??? You only have one option. You keep pretending otherwise by creating a crazy unrealistic situation.
Of course buildings cost money, no one is suggesting that the tenants of these public housing buildings don’t pay rent. Just that the rent is set at a rate that simply recoup costs instead of making the landlord (which in this case is the state) rich in the deal. And if states don’t have the funds to invest in the property, I’m pretty sure the state governments would qualify for some pretty solid mortgages. And the costs of those mortgages can be added onto the rent - same as a landlord would do, only in this case, that would be the end of the rent padding.
I can’t help but feel like you’re deliberately misinterpreting me at this point. That, or you’re just incapable of fathoming how human beings could possibly interact without one profiting off the other. The renters still pay rent, the mortgages on the property still get paid, the only difference is that the profit that would have gone to the landlord stays in the tenants pockets. That’s it - that’s literally the only difference. No free houses, no huge tax bills, just the removal of profit, and at-cost rents for folks who need them.
It’s not that, it’s purely supply. Landlords are a proxy for tenants, whether willing or unwilling, in the housing market when it comes to demand. They are no more interested in driving up housing prices than owner occupants are (which is to say, the vast majority of both are interested in driving up housing prices). The catch is, you can’t drive up housing prices in a market where there isn’t a supply constriction. Build more housing where people want to live, and you won’t have to do anything else for the problem to fix itself.
People want to rent. The market responds with a supply of rentals.
I am not a “free market knows all” person but pretty clearly these sky high rents are a function of demand.
The inverse of your suggestion is that, if people bought houses instead of renting, there would be no demand for rental properties and prices would crash.
In fact, if it is true that there are excess properties being purchased to rent out, that should push prices down due to increased supply and competition for the finite number of people wanting to rent.
Demand isn’t high because so many more people prefer to rent - demand is high because it’s the only financially viable option. Why is it the only financially viable option? Because landlords (both corporate and personal) buy up all the property they can and rent it out. Because so many houses are getting bought as rentals, the supply of houses that can actually be bought is low.
Seriously, have you spoken to anyone who has tried to buy a house in the last few years? Every single one I know had a myriad of stories like “I put down an offer, but some investment company offered $20k over asking, cash in hand”
And because housing prices are so high because of the above behavior, more and more people are forced to rent, who would have 100% been able to buy a house not that long ago. And so rises demand.
If what you were saying was true (that rent prices are high purely because people love renting, and no one wants to be a homeowner), then why are we seeing sky high home prices at the same time? You’re quick to pull out a half baked supply and demand theory, but you’re very quick to ignore the other side of that equation.
Also, more fundamentally the whole “supply and demand explains all commerce” thing has been thoroughly untrue for ages. Maybe in a world without giant multinational conglomerates, political corruption, and price fixing. But in the real world, things are wildly more complicated
Found the landlord. If not for tenants, who would you and your estate agent squeeze for every possible cent, cutting every possible cost along the way so you can more horde wealth, buy more homes and get fat at other people’s expense.
Nobody that wasn’t bleeding renters would try and look reasonable by saying “corporations shouldn’t be able to own too many houses”.
The people complaining are not the ones who should be ashamed.
Lol. What a shit take. What is my kid supposed to do for a house? Pay market price in a year? How does that solve the supply issue again???
I love how you guys are just reactionary and don’t ever think any steps ahead about what the result of your propositions would be…just landlord bad. Free house good.
I’m a huge supporter of social welfare programs and limiting the num of houses ppl can buy so if u think I’m the enemy, buddy you’re fighting the wrong battle.
Some are good, some are bad just like everything in life.
This isn’t an attack on a specific landlord though, it’s a variation on the Land Reform Movement. Except instead of country land for the revolution it’s city properties to be used for 15 minute cites.
You mean you’d pay the same amount for a house as a landlord pays? But you can do that now, why don’t you?
Has nobody ever informed you that growing demand leads to price growth only if supply grows slower? But if prices grow, then supply does also grow faster. These are feedback loops.
Which means that what a house costs now it would cost still, after a short transient process.
“Suck all supply”, my ass. You mean that you’d buy that house for 1/10 of what the landlord has paid for it, because it’d just be there, like a mushroom after rain? It wouldn’t get built, dummy, cause it wouldn’t be worth the money.
Abooout 50-150k₽/m² of unit area or 0.5-1.5k$ depending on local labour cost, cost of materials in that area, building height and other stuff.
EDIT: found mention that Yaroslavl Department of Building says it costs 48k₽/m² of some area(need to look in source). If it is cost of buiding entire building per total area(roof in not added), then per unit it would be around 58k₽/m² of unit. To buy unit after being built it would be around 150-500₽/m².
OK, maybe I was too quick to judge. See, in my country most landlords own 1-3 apartments which they rent out. That includes new construction. The idea of “corporate landlords” is not very common here.
If there’s no way a person willing to be such a 1-3 apartments’ landlord can buy realty to rent out in USA - then you may be right.
If there is, then my position doesn’t change.
We are talking about 100x profit vs 10x profit for developers.
You are saying that rent a landlord collects from an apartment in 10 years (you may make it 5 years or 20 years, should be the span of time in which landlord’s investment should return) is 10x the price for which the landlord buys it? That is, what you pay to a landlord in 1 year is the cost of the apartment plus utilities plus decoration plus furniture? I suspect this is not true.
It wouldn’t, because a landlord proxies tenants’ bidding.
It’s funny, I had some course (or maybe it was after class activity) for one year called don’t remember what in school (2 different things, one kinda economics, one kinda sociology), we’d basically roleplay political systems and economic systems.
It’d give you the correct answer very quickly. Only you need a group of 20+ who are not all friends (like in a class).
Unironically no. Or, at the very least, the organisers of the concerts themselves would have to be the badguy charging giant ticket prices themselves. LiveNation is just a professional scapegoat.
I guess tickets going to connected people rather than rich and/or highly motivated people would be an option too, if artists could get funding other ways. Lots of societies have worked that way in the past; the Colosseum was free but you had to be invited.
Fundamentally there’s just less seats than people who would show up if it was cheap and open to anyone. Maybe you could build a bigger venue, if geometry allows, but then somebody has to pay for that too, and we’re back to real estate.
So you are saying if not fo scalpers, then organizers would charge the same?
Technically they could charge more. Clearly the market is willing to pay more, else scalpers could not exist. But it would require more work by the organizer to get the tickets sold, and that extra work would not necessarily be worth the added payoff. Organizers have way better things to do than to spend their days trying to look high and low for someone wanting to buy a ticket. It is beneficial to just get tickets sold as fast as possible, even if at a discount, and move on to more useful work. Those who have nothing else going on in life can justifiably spend their time looking high and low and capture the difference for their efforts.
And why organizers aren’t charging same anyway?
Because there is only so much time in the day. Same reason middlemen appear in essentially every industry known to man. They let people doing important things get back to doing important things rather than waste their time dealing with people.
As I’ve heard it explained, LiveNation gives a big commission to the organisers to resell their tickets, to the point where they’re really just taking a cut for reselling it under a different name, for marketing purposes. I guess the existence of the old-style in-person scalpers kind of undermines that, I honestly never really understood how those guys existed.
In-person reselling sometimes has legit reasons like person can’t or don’t want to participate anymore. But in that case people are ready to sell under nominal price.
You’re the only one being aggressive in this thread ; I’m being deliberately insensitive to worthless arguments and emotions from worthless people. OK, now you are not the only one anymore, maybe.
You are the one responsible for carrying through yourown point. Your failure to do that is not my problem.
The geniuses on this site think that if the government is your landlord then you don’t have a landlord. Basically they want a form of communism. Public housing has it’s place but as someone who has rented in the past it’s not the sort of housing I’d choose unless it’s a last resort.
In any case, VERY STRONG DISAGREE that the only rentals should be government run or co-ops.
I literally want communism. I literally want to deccommodify housing. I literally want to nationalize the housing supply. I am literally a communist and I was radicalized by greedy landlords and capitalism. The movement grows every single day, the unions more bold, and the people more aware.
If you deleted every single career landlord from existence it would exclusively have positive benefits and every single renter would be better off.
I disagree with you strongly but props for a clear policy and honesty. Too many centre-left liberals show up to scream “decommodify housing” but with no follow-through about what that means besides handwaving about the evils of moneyed interests. Imho, communists are wrong, but at least they’re consistent and coherent and unambiguous.
I’m sharing this article because it changed my perception of Jordan Peterson, and exposed him as intellectually dishonest at best and more likely a fraud artist. Starting with essentially his dissertation. It is a long read but it is incredibly well researched and written:
Reading 12 Rules for Life recently and I’d agree that Jordan Peterson is not a good writer that he uses too much words for the ideas he’s trying to say. He’s also too religious for my taste. However it’s a exaggeration that “he has almost nothing of value to say”. There are some insights of value if you skim through his words and it appears to me that he genuinely meant good for the advice he gives. I think he just needs a better editor.
The article was from 2018 and I also have not read “Maps of Meaning” (as it sounds boring as fuck) so I can’t really compare what I see with what the article is saying. I was hoping for more recent examples.
You haven’t read the linked article, because the author does adress this. They point out that Peterson specifically does hide obvious and banal ideas in his sentences, so that when people finally find some blatant truths in his word salad, it makes it seem like the ideas are much more profound than the platitudes they actually are.
Here is a quote from the article:
The inflating of the obvious into the awe-inspiring is part of why Peterson can operate so successfully in the “self-help” genre. He can give people the most elementary fatherly life-advice (clean your room, stand up straight) while making it sound like Wisdom.
And remember the author actually shows this with numerous in-depth examples from Peterson’s writings. A better editor would do nothing, because Peterson writes like that with intent, the intent being to disguise what a cultish hack he is.
I read the article and I agreed that Jordan Peterson used too much words as I said. I just don’t agree that “he has almost nothing of value to say” as I said.
The point that is being made, though, is that those things that do have value that exist in his writing, did not originate from him and are available elsewhere to the point of ubiquity. If you only heard about them from him, you should read more.
Eh, I think we have to recognize that many people using this site are doing things like taking the train, using the bathroom, or waiting on something. That often necessitates browsing to be short.
I didn’t mean it to be a jab at the users, but I might’ve written it too ambiguously.
Obviously in most cases it’s better when something you read on the internet is short and concise: my gripe was with a lot of news sites (and, in this case Peterson) who do the exact opposite of that to seem smarter. The “joke” was that it’s a behavior learned in school, where the more you write the better, even if you could’ve expressed the same concept in a much shorter way.
I don’t think it has anything to do with the education system. It’s simply that the commitment involved in the request is much higher than normal. I don’t read every 50-page article or 2-hour video I come across. But I can be compelled to when the value proposition is higher than normal.
I think my comment was misunderstood: it was kind of a half-joke about Peterson’s writing.
Everyone learned to make their concept as long as possible in school because they were better-received, and that’s what Peterson is doing: talking in the most convoluted way possible to make his otherwise bland ideas feel smart.
I completely disagree. Based off of your comment it seems that you did not absorb the article whatsoever.
There are many good examples in the article of Peterson presenting opinion as indisputable fact and obscuring ideas with complex language. Particularly when he is challenged based on those ideas.
Not to mention the examples of how he treats children and others. It is an absolutely wild read. Lengthy but eye-opening.
Edit: it also exposes how the ideas that his core philosophy is built on are simplistic at best and often flat out wrong or intentionally disingenuous.
It’s a good article. I’ll admit that Jordan Peterson is a good psychologist and knows many words and stories, he can make many people feel smart or dumb through his incantations of nonsense. But that’s it, all the rest of it is bunk.
His essays read like an anthology of writings someone made to finish a book report due tomorrow, after not sleeping for 3 days yet somehow feeling wide awake from the crazed panic.
Also see this screenshot on Firefox Mobile (Est. reading time 63 - 81min). Readers will be well-advised to skim over the copious amount of Jordan Peterson excerpts. Lol.
It’s hit and miss. It’s always a bit Juvenile and sometimes I find in a little detractive from the message. As in there are a lot of people I wouldn’t automatically show it to because of the humor despite how well researched and presented everything is. But I generally enjoy the schtick for what it is. This stuff would get rather dry an hard to get through without it sometimes.
The article was a fun read, but for readers who don’t have time, I believe Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” describes the same problem with marginally fewer words. My favorite excerpt, though, really nails exactly the BS your article mentioned:
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
Peterson’s writings are worse than Orwell’s own parodies.
The philosopher of language Paul Grice introduced the concept in his pragmatic theory, argued such:
Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.[1]: 45
There are a lot less calories in a litre of vodka than the alcohol content equivalent of beer. Hard liquor is much lower calorie than beer, but you’re not meant to sit around and drink a litre of fucking vodka dude. That’s definitely not on “the sources” lol
If you feel that Europeans drink a lot, your hunch is correct: people across the continent consume more alcohol than in any other part of the world. Each year in Europe, every person aged 15 and over consumes, on average, 9.5 litres of pure alcohol, which is equivalent to around 190 litres of beer, 80 litres of wine or 24 litres of spirits. That’s according to the 2021 European health report by the World Health Organization (WHO).
In beer form, it’s a bout a pint per day. Not too bad actually. I probably average close to that, since I’ll have a can of beer most nights, and a few pints and/or cocktails on weekends.
My favourite Jordan Peterson story is how he got himself addicted to benzodiazepines and then felt he knew better than all of western science so he flew over to Russia to be put into a medically induced coma to overcome withdrawals since it was “too hard on him”
Unsurprisingly, the procedure had many complications and left him requiring extra medical attention for him to recover from the procedure.
You forgot the best part. Before doing that he was (and probably still is) against medicating yourself out of addictions because it’s the “easy way out”. His entire shtick is about the right way of living and then he acts contrarily to his own teachings.
For some perspective being thrust into public eye world wide and having your daughter and wife with life threatening medical issues will do a number on you. He is still a dingus but things are rarely black and white.
My favorite is when someone asked him “Do you believe in God” and he was caught between his reputation as an “intellectual” and the fact that the apes he grifts are gonna hoot extra loud and fling extra poo if he says no. Recognizing that he was between a rock and a hard place, he gave one of the most amusing non-responses I’ve ever heard in my life. What he said was, from memory, “That depends on what you mean by ‘do’, ‘you’, ‘believe’ and ‘God’.” He then blathered on for a minute about how he thinks of God as a symbol for the human capacity for goodness and he believes in that, and no one asked why the symbol for the human capacity for goodness hates trans people and needs money, so everyone left satisfied.
Realising how precarious a pedestal the far right built him would be a rare moment of self awareness. He’s B-grade meat to them, so they’d Milo him in a heartbeat.
I just don’t know what he meant when he said “Don’t debate with women because they can’t think”. It’s a great big old mystery because he’s just so smart and I’m here in my messy room with the feminine dragon of chaos and no one has peed on my face recently.
He’s the perfect post-modern intellectual, which is rather funny when you consider how anti-postmodernism he is. He’s a media image of an intellectual, all big words and expensive suits, but his big words don’t really mean anything. The fucking “chaos dragon of feminity” is a hilariously stupid concept that rivals the shit Freud came up with when the cocaine was extra pure, but they eat it up. He and the rest of the so-called “intellectual dark web” provide a thin veneer of logic and rationality to the visceral hate that the alt right runs on, and it makes sense to people who really want and need it to make sense. He gives people the ability to be led around by their emotions and still feel like not only are they not being ruled by fear, but that they’re actually on a level above everyone who doesn’t accept the “cold hard truth” that we all need to be racist, homophobic, xenophobic and basically terrified all of the time.
The vaccine was clearly rushed into production and saved a lot of vulnerable people’s lives. That does not mean it does not have risks that, for younger and healthier people, those might outweigh the benefits.
But public hysteria and groupthink dictated that it had to be coerced on people.
Please not. I am an autist and I am vaccinated three times, waiting for the new vaccines to arrive for my fourth. Being stubborn and unwilling to learn and being autistic are two very different things. One of them is a choice the other isn’t.
For many people, myself, my daughter, and many of my coworkers, autism isn’t a disability, it’s a superpower. Many well known big thinkers were autists. Some will known monsters were, too. Autism causes vaccines.
Meh…I let the normies have their fears and prejudices then, when the time is right, I whip out the weaponized Autism and take them by surprise.
That’s what my Autistic friend calls it when one of us does something so wild that it blows the normies minds. A few weeks ago we got a late request to respond to an RFP. I had some cycles so I raised my hand. It was 516 questions, it was Friday afternoon, and we had until the next Friday to write our responses, review our responses, get the package together and to our partner so they could submit it to the customer. I told them to start working on the supporting material and leave the questions with me. I sat down on Sunday morning at 7 AM with my notebook, some dark trance music, and my two cats and wrote 504 answers over the next 30 hours. There was a HUGE scramble once they realized that I was done and they had to get their shit together and actually get it submitted. That’s the power of weaponized autism.
Someone needing an organ transplant doesn’t sound like “younger” or “healthier” people.
According to your criteria, regardless of vaccine efficacy: this sounds like someone that should have been vaccinated.
I love how people mention heart inflammation from the vaccines, but they never talk about heart inflammation from COVID itself - it’s more common with COVID itself, and it’s more severe with COVID itself.
And the vaccine was a choice. Noone was forced to take it.
Many lost their jobs and in places like Canada could not leave the country for refusing to take the vaccine? It was not a choice, it was forced and those who wished to be left alone, lost basic freedoms.
Imagine you wanted to leave Canada to go to a better place, but you were denied since you needed to show a digital ID. Think about it.
The provincial superior courts and the Supreme Court have long held and being vaccinated can be a requirement of employment. The people who lost their jobs did so because they did not meet their conditions of employment. Their choice.
You have the right under Section 6 of the Charter to cross provincial borders without restriction, to live anywhere in the country you choose to, and to leave Canada and return to Canada.
You could have walked to the border and left Canada if the US would take you (it wouldn’t nor would any other country). If you were outside of Canada you could have walked to to the border and entered Canada but you would probably have been required to quantine for a couple of weeks. Your rights were never in any danger you just don’t understand what they are.
This is false. Canadians could not board planes. How can you leave the country if you were denied access to a plane ride? This did violate the Canadian charter of human rights.
Yeah the US also blocked access to the unvaxxed, the only neighbouring country to Canada. And denying access to air travel was not done to “stop the spread of COVID”. It was malice, and to make excuses for this with twisted logic is quite disturbing to say the least.
You have no right to fly on an airplane or to ride on a train or a boat. You could have driven or walked to the border and left Canada if the US would take you. It wouldn’t. You could have driven to the coast, bought a boat, and sailed to any country that you could reach by sea if they would take you. They wouldn’t. You always had the right to leave Canada, you just didn’t have the ability to leave Canada as a consequence of your choices.
OMG! So you expect people to start their own airline, buy their own yacht? You must be Trudeau’s legal guy to use twisted logic to keep people from leaving the country. Unfrickin believable.
This did violate the Canadian charter of human rights.
Do you mean the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
In the case that this article is referring to Justices Frederica Schutz, Michelle Crighton and Dawn Pentelechuk of the Alberta Court of Appeals wrote that “Ms. Lewis’ COVID-19 vaccination status is not who she is,” the court wrote. “It is not an immutable personal characteristic … her choice not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is just that — a choice.”
What that means is that it isn’t a Charter issue because it was her choice not to be vaccinated which resulted in her being lawfully denied a transplant. It is the same for people who were not vaccinated and could not fly, it was their choice and therefore not a Charter issue.
There are excellent references available on the Justice Canada website that explain exactly what the Charter does and does not mean. Avoid Facebook because that is likely how you ended up confused in the first place and avoid the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom website because they lose 99% of their cases because they are just a right wing extremist troll farm.
They do, that’s why you’re likely not vaccinated right now, and why people who are against it are not vaccinated.
Freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequences of choices. If you make a bad choice, you aren’t entitled to be free from the consequences of that choice.
If you run around with Covid making others sick, you do not just weigh a risk for yourself, you are also inflicting it onto others. If too many do that, society breaks because hospitals get overwhelmed, firefighters and law enforcement are sick, the grocery store has to close and the government stops working. Children are unattended and whatever else.
If you do not wear a set belt your broken body takes up a hospital bed too, or are you going to accept the weight of your decision and abstain from health care because you inflicted that harm on yourself? Be welcome to not wear a seatbelt then, but make sure to have a big sticker on your car that says: “My head injury was my choice, so do not help.”
Most people are actually mostly reasonable most of the time because they don’t want to die or be seriously injured
Generally then, your scenario is unrealistic
If it were true, that most people were just dying to get brain damage in car accidents we could probably deal with it in a non-authoritarian way
Consider the billions per month alcohol and tobacco cost public health systems. We still let people do these things. Frankly I’d very much be in favor of taxing smokers more if they wanted to use the public health system.
The reality is, you just like a more controlling society as I like a more free one.
These are the same people who argue against wearing seatbelts and mandatory airbags because they could potentially be worse than an accident without them, which is ignoring the 99.999% of the time they help.
The vaccine went so fast because most of the part was already known and they had solution for other covid variants. They only needed to adapt it to attack the correct part of this covid 19 virus. It wasn’t a new study. It wasn’t rushed. And this person wasn’t healthy but terminal. Healthy, lol.
You know what? It’s a fucking opinion. This sort of shit is why we keep going through this over and over and over and over again. It’s why everyone’s so fired up.
Do I think they are absolutely wrong? Honestly, yeah I do. But trying to suppress opinions you don’t agree with, using mock outrage isn’t really any better. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can read this comment, shake their head and move on with their day. Screaming outrage and how dare they, supress them, block them, disinformation, report them/supress them, whatever else, honestly that makes you the fuckhead. Sorry pal.
The rest of us normies are quite capable of ignoring morons, don’t worry. We don’t need babysitters. The longer this sorta horseshit continues, the longer we gotta deal with all these dickheads and their signs in traffic and whatever else. Because they aren’t exactly wrong in that their free speech is being suppressed. Again, I ain’t saying I agree with them, but like this woman, she had the right to do what she did, and she fucked around and found out. Evidently.
“If you are not a scientist, and you disagree with scientists about science, it’s actually not a disagreement. You’re just wrong.”
The problem is that these wrong “opinions” are presents as fact, facts that are believed by the scared and the gullible, and they grow and gain a life of their own until someone uses them to manipulated someone who is vulnerable into literally dying instead of getting a safe, effective vaccine.
Lies and fear and hate are dangerous. Lies caused a violent mob to storm the seat of US democracy and lies caused this woman, this wife, this mother, this grandmother, this Canadian, to sacrifice herself.
The smart people have a moral obligation to reject and challenge and contradict these dangerous lies.
Another of my favorites… “Science said one thing then it said another thing. We can’t trust anything science says.”
“Science is not truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.”
The problem is there is no chance to refute any of it if you or other mods remove it. I can’t stand the conviction behind some of these beliefs but also I think its much worse to see it being removed
The mods aren’t removing everything. They have made that very clear in at least two posts. The ones where there is a good, detailed response are being left up. In one case a mod put a comment ahead of one saying, “the comment below is wrong but I’m leaving in there because the responses are good”. I think the mod is doing a good job.
I’m aware. And I fully support the mods not allowing this place to turn into what r/Canada became. But it doesn’t feel right to me to remove posts just based on a commenter saying some bullshit but with enough conviction to say it as a fact.
That makes you a Nazi monster obviously. These lemmy fuckers are pretty keen on having the powers that be tell them exactly what to do and think. Kind of surprising, considering the platform lol.
Of course I do. Your body creates antibodies to viral proteins or particles and develops memory to them. In this case the antigens are created by your own body via injected mRNA enclosed in lipids, not an injected weakened or dead viruses.
So…you proved you don’t have any idea. For illnesses like COVID-19 it is key for a vaccine to be applied to as many people as possible to make it harder - in the final consequence impossible - for the disease to spread.
That’s the case with a vaccine to any contagious disease. Life has trade offs. I prever not to live under an authoritarian state. I don’t think hive-minded harm avoidance is the be all and end all of existence.
No, you were not required to. But you were also excluded from a lot of life if you didn’t. And a lot of people were foaming at the mouth and very much desirous of an outright requirement.
“I showed up to the potluck with nothing even though I was told that I needed to bring something and expected to get the same things that everyone who brought something did, AiTA?”
No individual is more powerful than the state. That’s sort of the point of the state. Therefore, people who value freedom, like myself, are absolutely concerned with the decisions of the state and about the consequences of living a life out-of-line with the powers that be.
To use a hyperbolic example (and I fully acknowledge that is is hyperbolic, but I want to demonstrate a point), you were free to denounce Stalin and go to the Gulag. Nobody sewed up your mouth and prevented you from doing so. As you would aptly say, there are consequences.
I prever not to live under an authoritarian state.
So what authoritarian state? Being “excluded from a lot of life” is not an authoritarian state if it was just a result of people deciding not to be around you if you made the choice to be a health risk.
Or is this like a child screaming “YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!” Just because they can?
I didn’t want to have to sit next to someone infected with infectious disease when on an airplane.
Don’t blame the government, they were just implementing policies I wanted to protect me from people that had a higher probability of being a disease carrier because they get their medical advice from the internet.
“Life has trade-offs” is an interring philosophy to apply when you enjoy the benefits and others incur the costs.
There is a reason we do not let people breathe second hand cigarette smoke onto people’s faces at work.
There is a reason we apply speed limits on roads.
There is a reason that civilization has adopted rules of society that supercede the individual in every system ever devised.
The reason is that the collective has decided that being protected from the particularly terrible and wreck less decisions of the worst of us is a worthwhile “trade-off”.
I mean she did not avoid harm and no one forced her to, so everything is ok. She also wasn’t forced to get vaccinated, she could say no just fine which means there was no authoritarian state controlling her. Decisions come with consequences. The consequence for her was a certain death in a short timeframe.
What is wrong is to make decisions and expect others to bare the consequences, like getting a rare transplant and risking it because you could get Covid and die from it because for the transplant to work your immune system needs to be held back for some time, while someone who would have done everything possible to make this work can’t get a transplant.
Also there needs to be a level of trust between a doctor and a patient, so if she gets told to take specific medication or live her life in a specific way after the surgery, she will accept the advice. She was willing to take the transplant, but did not trust the doctors with the vaccine, what would she not have trusted them with?
She had her trade off and I hope she died thinking it was worth it.
Well put. She made her choice. I doubt she accepted the consequences of her choice though. All the noise about being “denied” an organ, the fundraiser, the noise she made.
A lot of people are going to die waiting for an organ transplant, there aren’t enough to go around. No one is entitled to an organ, someone has to die to donate one (other than kidneys). Her demanding an organ is condemning someone else waiting to death. It the fundamental ethical calculus of organ transplants and organ donation.
I just really get the impression that she felt entitled to an organ despite choosing not to follow all medical advice.
The vaccine underwent the exact same rigorous testing that literally every other vaccine or medication gets. The only difference is that COVID vaccines were given a free pass to the front of the line at each step necessary. As well, due to them having a much shorter timeline and higher competition, it was economical to run multiple tests in parallel that would normally have been done in series.
It wasn’t “rushed” as in sloppy, it was “rushed” in that it was given priority in the various governmental queues.
I have relatives that think the way the person you’re replying to does. “There’s no way it can be safe.”
I was grieving their position last night (momentarily, I’ve accepted that they think this way but it still makes me sad). There’s nothing I can do to persuade them. The fact that I’ve had four jabs and I’m still fine isn’t worth pointing out.
I agree with a sibling comment that says it isn’t worth trying to educate the willfully ignorant. However, you did a great job of saying it concisely. I appreciate you.
Ask me if my relatives have american flag iconography on their walls. Spoiler: they do. It’s almost as though there’s a very specific type of person who falls for this shit.
Perhaps, now that the vaccine has been around for years and there’s plenty of data on its efficacy and risks, you might cite some of those risks? Because the data I’ve seen shows that infection is still much worse for your health than vaccination, regardless of whether or not you are “young and healthier.” I would be very interested to see what data you have that shows otherwise. I quite like being proven wrong.
Tell that to countries like Peru and Mexico who had little vaccination and a mortality rate of nearly 5%. Compared to the countries who had the highest vaccination rate with mortality of less than .05%
So… over 100 times more?
USA and CA had 1.1% so 5 times more… (erm that makes no sense, but you get what i mean. I need coffee)
Those numbers aren’t accurate. They didn’t have the same insane drive to try to find and record every case, so the death percentage is artificially inflated
Exactly. So deaths are drastically overcounted, as opposed to “confirmed cases”. Which is why the combination of the two leads to drastically overstating the death rate.
You’re such a cute widdle bootlicker yes you are! Yes you are! I’m so proud my big boy right here did all his own research! It’s just too bad little smookums here seems to think vaccine bad but computer good but both came from scientists.
Oh look he’s bout to post a reply. Maybe it’s a “I have a bad attitude and this is not productive to a debate despite I was shit posting” or “keep crying, lib” or “whatabout Obama/Biden” or mAyBe he’ll use his big boy words and call be a Woke libtard!! Oh man it’s been so long since I’ve been called that! That would totally make my day. 🥰
But I’ll tell y’all what he won’t do and back his claims with some bonafide peer reviewed scientific evidence!
Ah my little BB is getting cranky again. Here take your ivermectin and go take a nap. You’ve have a long day!
I don’t understand this logic. It had to be quickly developed because the entire world population was affected by COVID. We’re talking about millions of deaths. Economies halted, everything literally went stand still and you expected the vaccine to take 3 years to develop?
I’m sure it might have sounded scary to have medicine developed so rapidly but I don’t think you realize the scale at how it was developed because so many countries and companies dumped a ton of money researching a cure out the door as fast as possible.
Sure there are side-effects but in that case the side effects were worth having versus the deaths of high risk individuals.
Economies halted because the public freaked out. The vast, vast majority of healthy people were absolutely fine. Most of those who died, with respect, had relatively few years of life left anyway.
Society should strive to keep these vulnerable people as safe as possible. But I personally think it was incredibly unethical to shut down whole economies just for that.
I was in Spain at the beginning of the pandemic. The bodies they were stacking in the back of army trucks because their mortuary system had collapsed were not fine.
They already did, that was done before they launched the vaccines. You still don’t think they are safe, so now it is up to you to prove why. Which you can’t, because you have nothing but your feelings to show for it.
They did but it was an abridged version shall we say. Which is fine. It was an emergency and the law foresees this.
But the cultural shift towards harm avoidance at all costs and general authoritarianism (as clearly on display here on this site) led governments the world over to, use heavy handed tactics, shall we say, to get people to take it.
I am absolutely not against the vaccines. I got three doses of Pfizer. But I am profoundly against the heavy handed tactics used in deploying them.
A lack of privilege is not a consequence. Receiving an organ donation is a gift, not a right.
Fact of the matter is there are a lot of people waiting for organs, whomever you give it to somebody else is going to die. When you get an organ transplant you have to take medication that leaves you immuno compromised.
So you have two people in front of you in need of an organ but only one organ to give it out. One is up to date on all their vaccinations and has been following their doctors instructions. The other thinks they know better than their doctor and has refused to get vaccinations. Which one of these two people do you think will have a better chance of surviving longer once immnuo compromised from the transplant?
“Woman who refused vaccine gets organ transplant, dies of COVID a month later” is a much shittier headline.
They completed all of the normal testing. The mRNA vaccines technology is decades old. They did all of the normal testing but the stages were done in parallel and pushed ahead of everything else in the pipe. Had any stage failed the approvals would not have been given. This is an anti-vax meme but it is completely false.
You do know you had a 99.9 percent chance of surviving COVID. COVID as a pandemic was a complete joke thanks to media hysteria. I am so tired of hearing this false belief of “the entire world population was dying”. Drop this crusade and move on already.
This woman died because of lies written by around a dozen people and spread by crushingly ignorant people like you. You’re so confident in your stupidity that it’s laughable. We literally don’t care anymore. Take the vaccine, don’t take the vaccine, we don’t care. We’ve moved on from you.
Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias whereby people who are incompetent at something are unable to recognize their own incompetence. And not only do they fail to recognize their incompetence, they’re also likely to feel confident that they actually are competent. See also @freeindv
I’m familiar with these people. I monitored some of their subs and argued with them a lot. I still don’t like the cheering.
When someone dies in a self-defense situation I still dislike cheering on their death. The death of criminals is tragic, too. You can create the situation that causes your demise out of ignorance or stupidity and I’ll still argue nobody should celebrate.
I agree and I’m definitely not cheering but when you’re dealing with this kind of smug arrogant hive-minded cultist stupidity it’s easy to sympathize with those who do cheer.
It was overwhelming hospitals, which means people with other problems were dying, because ambulances were not getting to them, surgeries had to be postponed. If all your firefighters are sick, more people will die in fires and accidents. If a high number of people in a society get sick that society is breaking. No law enforcement, no health care, no working government, no grocery store.
You are one of the people that complain when action is taken and works that that action wasn’t needed because it wasn’t that bad and when no action is taken how bad the government is. And Covid wasn’t at all the worst it could have been. There will be a next virus in the future and people like you will not have learned anything from this one and drive us into an even worse crisis, just by being stubborn.
It did not happen because most people stayed at home, were wearing a mask, followed social distancing rules, were working from home, kept their children at home, washed their hands and got the vaccine when it was available. Again, it did not happen because we stopped it from happening and now you go “it wasn’t that bad” ignoring the billions of people who stopped it from getting that bad.
It’s like “seatbelts are against my freedom” and when everyone wears one to go “look people don’t die in car crashs that proofs seatbelts are unnecessary and only made up by the news” when the reason for them not dying is that they wear a seatbelt.
The vaccine, a mysterious injection that was forced on the population, created by big pharma who has a repuation for dishonesty for decades. Comparing this to seatbelts is a horrible comparision. Seatbelts BTW are straps you wear to ensure you do not go flying out the wind shield during a car crash. No mystery around that, no closed source injection being pumped into your bloodstream when wearing a seat belt.
And COVID mass deaths would of not happen if life was allowed to go on as normal. There were places like South Dakota that did nothing authoritative and I do know South Dakota still exists, life goes on.
Again, stop watching the news. Unplug from the matrix and then you will see the source code to all of this madness.
Best counter point is y2k.
Huge publicity. Massive amounts of money spent.
New year 1999/2000 was uneventful (except for parties).
… Y2k was a hoax, waste of money… Wut?!
It wasn’t. There’s is proof of such. It was removed/mitigated by a huge effort of developers.
You are one of the people that complain when action is taken and works that that action wasn’t needed because it wasn’t that bad and when no action is taken how bad the government is.
Yup, that’s basically the entirety of the whole anti-vax thing in one sentence. Vaccines have been so effective at eradicating so many diseases people don’t have a concept of have deadly diseases can be and can’t grasp why getting a vaccine is so important to protect them from disease.
because the entire world population was dying from COVID
Okay I’m no anti vaxxer but this is just going to get you laughed at by the people you’re trying to convince.
About 1% was at risk of death, and that’s no small number, and we all had to get vaccinated to protect them, and that’s fine. But outright stating the entire world population was dying is just laughable sensationalism.
If you want to convince people, you’re never going to do it with sensationalism, especially when that sensationalism is so dramatic is flat out wrong.
Sure there are side-effects but in that case the side effects were worth having versus millions of deaths
I mean, one of the most commonly mentioned side effects was something that happened in a much more serious form with a real COVID infection. It’s the easiest way to meet antivaxxers in the middle if they’re arguing in good faith. Even if there’s a significant side effect of myocarditis, it’s not nearly as common or heavy as the myocarditis die effect of an actual infection.
Any sort of medical treatment has side effects. For instance I got diabetes, you know what the side effects of using Insulin is? Death. Do you know what the side effects of untreated diabetes is? Death. Do you know what the side effect of life is? Eventually death. We are all going to get there someday, but I mean might as well stretch it out as long as possible, way I see it. There’s so much I want to see, after all. Are the Leafs ever going to win the cup? Am I ever going to see retirement? Do I ever get my Corvette? This lady in the story is never going to have any of those answers, because they were too worried about side effects.
That’s what I don’t get about these people barking about the side effects, I mean it might kill you or make you stupid, sure (I mean it’s possible, but highly unlikely). But so can falling out of bed in the morning. Or you know, COVID or whatever other disease you are trying to prevent. Was it raced out? I mean, sure. But pandemics, you know? Not a lot of time on anyones hands. And I’d say they’ve been pretty god damn effective. Like they bitch about shutting things down and the economy and mAH freedumbs, but then they bitch about racing out the vaccines, it’s like shit, what can we do to make you folks happy here?
As I recall, all the side effects of the Covid vaccines are side effects present with other vaccines, and they are all auto-immune responses. You are at a much much greater risk of all of those if you actually caught Covid.
I suppose there is a bit of calculus involved. If you are 100 times more likely to suffer from Guillain–Barré syndrome or myocarditis if you catch a disease, but the disease is exceptionally rare, it might not make sense to get a vaccine. In Covid’s case though, a substantial amount of the general population caught Covid, meaning that the overall risk was substantially reduced by being vaccinated.
Some people just seem to have trouble with risks and percentages; shades of grey rather than black or white. Getting vaccinated isnt 100% the right call, it’s only 99.99+% the right call. Ironic that the same people were totally cool with a 0.5% of Covid killing them, never mind all the other severe side effects. You were asking them to make a choice between 99.99% fine vs. 90% fine or 99.9999+% non-lethal and 99.5% non-lethal. You look at the relative risks though and the vaccine was thousands of times more safe than catching Covid unvaccinated.
This is stupid on several levels, but I ain’t got time for all that so I’ll just point out that this lady wasn’t younger or healthier, given that she died without an organ transplant, and had she received a transplant she would be one of the vulnerable people on immunosupprressants. So even this stupid ass argument doesn’t apply in this situation.
The comment below by @nomadjoanne is incorrect, since a COVID-19 infection has a higher risk for myocarditis than what the vaccine can cause. However, I’m choosing to keep it up because there are a lot of comments afterwards outlining WHY it is incorrect, and that’s helpful for dealing with the disinformation.
I’m open to reviewing this again if people think it should be removed anyway
Same thing is happening to me right now (UK). LL inherited a portfolio of mortgage-free properties a few years back, immediately jacked the rent up on them all. I tried to haggle what imo was an egregious rent increase (notified middle of the year after asking for a minor repair), we agreed on a price then he served me notice to quit; via the letting agent, not a peep or thanks from the LL after I’ve put ~£90000 into his familys’ accounts over 13 yrs.
Of course, I can pay someone elses mortgage, but when I apply to a bank for one myself, I can’t afford it.
This is what I don’t get. Where’s the risk for the lender? If I can’t pay, they get the house and can sell it. I guess there’s a potential cashflow issue but the underlying asset isn’t going anywhere.
Typically it’s pretty low risk in comparison to other loans which is why home loans are relatively low but there’s a risk that both the property value declines and the outstanding loan and selling costs is more than property value.
Why? In a non-artistic sense it’s just a pretentious way to say “stuff you own”. (Unless you’re saying owning things at all should be criminalized, in which case… can’t really argue with you there.)
Yup. Literally the worst thing that could have happened to her had she taken the vaccine happened to her because she didn’t take the vaccine. Maybe they’ll put a monument to her on top of the hill that she chose to die on.
I was hoping to turn into a magnetic monkey with 5G tracking chips. No such luck.
The best few minutes of the pandemic for me was watching my 15 year old autistic daughter disassemble and completely humiliate a reality-denying mid-50s angry man at a farmers market. It was glorious.
Thanks. She is pretty awesome. Three of the people there to witness it, two labour negotiators and a “consultant” to CSIS, approached me the next week to say how impressed they were. She was clearly angry but she knew the data and presented it effectively. He slunk off after that. It was true awesome.
Language will evolve naturally over time. But to claim that hoping your children are intelligent/physically healthy is a form of eugenics is absurd. If QAnon was left-leaning, this is the kind of shit they would say.
I think it’s really funny that no one is taking the bait. All of the responses have been simple, on point, and non-engaging. That’s how you deal with a troll.
Disability studies, disability justice, disability theory, crip theory… lots of keywords for you to start googling. The other poster isn’t wrong: prioritizing intelligence and health in a child is the theory behind the practice of eugenics. Yes, these are strong words… but they’re not wrong.
I am. Disabled people are. People who work with disabled people are. I understand that this topic doesn’t interest you, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fucking important for a lot of us.
I think that people who are unvaxed shouldn’t get priority for transplants.
Even so, it’s not inappropriate to call out ableism in any topic. If somebody was racist, or sexist, or discriminatory in any other form, would you say, “Hey, we’re not talking about racism — stop hijacking the conversation”?
EDIT: For everyone else reading this: This is what people do when they feel uncomfortable with being called out. They deflect, refuse to admit they could be wrong, and stop engaging. That’s actually a fairly normal response. It’s hard to admit that, for example, ableist comments can be as harmful as racist comments. It’s okay to stop talking as long as one doesn’t stop thinking.
I wonder if you’d be able to take a step backward and consider that the linked article was written in earnest because it reflects a valid way of looking at the world that you may never have considered before. People disagreeing with you may not actually be trolling, but presenting their own valid beliefs. Look up disability studies, disability justice, and/or crip theory.
I agree that hoping for an intelligent and physically healthy child definitely reflects an ableist worldview. This is basic disability/crip theory.
For those who are going to argue: wanting an intelligent child is ableist because it implies that people who are intelligent have more worth than people who are not. It’s assigning the value of a person based on a pretty narrow and Western conceptualization of how people think. A person is valuable not because of their intelligence, but because of their existence — all are equally valuable because they’re people, and everyone is equal. The same goes, believe it or not, for physical disabilities, including health. If you disagree, then you think that not all people are equal, which is problematic, as problematic as hoping that your child is straight, or male, or has blonde hair and blue eyes.
I am a proponent of MAID, but I find it extremely disturbing that we’re opening up MAID to conditions that aren’t even covered under our social health system. We are openly saying that we consider mental health issues too expensive to treat and would prefer that people with these conditions just die already. Social supports for people with disabilities and expanding health care to include mental health coverage should absolutely be part of this, or we’re just being murderous ghouls as a society.
I agree in principle, but that's not what's happening in the real world.
My husband has ME/CFS. It's a life-destroying disease, even though it doesn't usually kill you. There's no treatment, no cure, and no idea about the underlying cause, after many decades of research.
It's heartbreaking to read messages from people who caught it as a teen, seen all their schoolfriend grow up, experience life, find love etc, all while the sufferer is in pain all day, no hope of improving, relying heavily on what family they have who are willing to support.
This is by no means ideal, but neither is decades of suffering. I err on the side of reducing the constant pain.
To be fair, that’s a poor example, as the research on ME/CFS is dogshit. It never gets the attention it deserves and its victims suffer in deafening silence, because it’s not some sexy field to research and there’s no immediate, highly visible threat to the almighty economy.
We’re seeing this mirrored with long COVID. At least 16 million Americans are suffering from it — nearly 1 in 20 — and, even with rates that enormously high, research is moving at a glacial pace. There’s no operation warp speed, no coordinated global effort, nobody in world leadership gives a fuck.
I’m not sure it’s as crystallized as that yet, but I agree with your sentiment. Everyone should have the right to choose to die but if the reason is “there was no other option,” then, we should be damn well sure we offered everything we could. Let’s not be taking societal shortcuts to “oh well, we gave it our best shot.”
I support someone’s right to end their own suffering, 100%, but it is very bad form to: be ABLE to help someone, INGORE that they are suffering, but SMILE while helping them polish their gun.
Yep. I believe people should have choices, but after proper care. My daughter has Anorexia, but since she was still not an adult she had access to a counsellor, medication, and programs. It turned her life around. But once you are 19+ there is nothing unless you have lots of money
It doesn’t help when a government offical got in trouble for suggesting a veteran apply for MAID when they complained about having chronic pain.
There’s a conspiracy theory that the government has rolled out MAID as a way to lower healthcare costs by just killing people instead of treating them and stories like these add fuel to that fire.
Yeah, like I think the option should exist once you’ve passed certain qualifiers. But being mentally ill has so many consequences from capitalism. I myself struggle with metal health at times, and those times are always at their absolute worst financial problems come up. And our society is extremely difficult to get started in. Most people my age are only one paycheck away from desperation. When you’re mentally ill poverty is a symptom, you’re that much less capable of working. And society refuses to help you in the long term. You’ll always have to face your own unreliability as an existential threat, which worsens how unreliable you are.
It is morally wrong to euthanize people because capitalism has decided they have no worth, and because they can never have a life worth living without society changing. But thats almost never what people want to talk about, they want to talk about how it’s just wrong to let the unwell die. Never about how they can prevent us from becoming so unwell we cannot function.
Not at all, its just important not to lose sight of what the actual problem is here. The problem being that capitalism causes mental health problems, and makes it almost impossible to completely treat many mental health problems. We can’t concede that point, least of all now when it is a subject of national debate. People don’t want to just watch our vulnerable and impoverished choose death over continuing to suffer in ways they don’t have to. Theres a real point of radicalization here, a point where people want solutions and we can actually offer real ones to them.
People choose to commit suicide all the time for thousands of different reasons, medical assistance doesn’t enable suicide it simply makes it more humane.
I never said it did enable it, nor did I say that we shouldn’t have legal options for people who are suffering.
But again, this isn’t entirely an issue of medical ethics. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have MAID, I am saying that every single time the subject comes up we should be saying as loudly and as frequently as possible that many of these people are dying of capitalism. They are dying of wage slavery. They are killing themselves because capitalism has decided they have no worth, and they are facing homelessness starvation and spiraling health conditions as a consequence.
You’re misunderstanding me. I am not anti MAID. I’m not going to share too much personal details here but I’ve dealt with suicide many times in my adult life. I am well aware of how real the suffering of the mentally ill is. That only galvanizes my conviction that if you’re talking about this subject and you’re not pointing the finger at the Canadian government and absolutely demanding that they expand disability income, create UBI, and expand public Healthcare and ensure every Canadian citizen has access to widespread and competent mental health care - then you don’t have any actual interest in helping the mentally ill. Only in making sure that death is an option, which is kinda like ensuring veteran’s welfare after deployment by making sure they can kill themselves when society fails them. You can advocate for both. You can think that MAID should be an option and that our government has to actually make society a livable place.
You could give free mental health to every Canadian and still 3/4 of it would never use it due to stigma, so it wouldn’t even cost as much as they think
If you’re ever at an anti-LGBTQ march “for the children”, ask these bigots why they aren’t marching against the sexual exploitation of children in local parishes.
They will stutter on their words, I guarantee. Seeing this strategy in action is hilarious and highly effective!
Yes, but the government is not grooming children in the church, it is for grooming children in the schools, it is trying to force the grooming of children in the schools.
Bigots really want to pretend that some teenager discovering that they are gay or trans is a result of some massive conspiracy rather than, you know, they just being gay or trans.
They call it "grooming" when LGBT people simple exist in society where people might notice them, and they want to make such a scandal that people don't even think what is the opposite of that which they want.
It’s so vile. I detest that so many people are so willingly and freely hateful of complete and utter strangers, over things that don’t effect anyone else.
This is slowly turning into everything history lessons warned me of, and it’s insane. We are in 2023, we have the damned WORLD at our fingertips, yet people happily choose blind hatred, even if it means they also get harmed in the process themselves.
I hate all of this. I used to believe that way more people were actually caring and intelligent, but it seems like many are very eager to prove that as wrong as possible.
If you ask me, it’s fuckin’ ironic that “facts over feelings” is a point that they try to make. Science supports transitioning, so that doesn’t even make sense. Many animals change their full bio sex in nature. It really shouldn’t be rocket science that humans change genders. It’s not a new thing either, historically speaking. We’ve been transitioning for a pretty long time, throughout many years and cultures.
Also teens are learning who it is they are and are going to try out all kinds of identities and activities til they find ones that fit. For some that includes their sexuality. No one is forcing kids to try being gay or trans, just not judging them for the curiosity. Some of those kids will find out that they are more comfortable that way, some will find out it is not really for them. C’est la vie.
Oh cool someone else who has no idea what they’re talking about! I’m in the education industry and work closely with 7 schools in my local district. No one is grooming or indoctrinating children, those are conservative buzz words. They’re simply teaching the kids that if they don’t feel like they fit the gender norms that it’s okay.
Riighhht, because your browser popping an image into temporary cache is the exact same as downloading a pdf into your downloads folder, as long as you ignore the security implications of holding random pdfs in long term storage, bypassing browser security features, and relying solely on your pdf viewer.
I mean semantically sure, you’re not wrong, but you’re well aware of what I meant and your condescending attitude reaks of someone stuck on the first peak of a Duning-Kruger chart.
Name one drag queen who has ever been convicted of grooming and sexually abusing children.
I said to someone once, "There are branches of several international organizations in town that have a centuries old well documented history of grooming and sexually abusing millions of children worldwide then hiding the abuse and moving the abusers to other locations so that they can continue to groom and sexually abuse children. These are the same organizations that are telling you that drag queens are the problem. Why aren’t you protesting them? "
That’s a bold but risky move, I wouldn’t bet the argument on someone having dug up some obscure examples. The set of people in drag has to contain at least one, and using a ‘gotcha’ like that could backfire.
But you’re right, they do seem exceedingly rare. Like, weirdly rare compared to the general population, even.
This is because interest in expressing one’s fabulousness and interest in abusing kids are radically different things. People become drag queens because they are too fabulous to be contained by a single gender and they have to hold it in with Spanx. People become religious leaders because they are trusted positions of power which can provide an opportunity for them to abuse kids and other vulnerable groups with little risk of consequences.
I’ll give them a list of 1,000 clergy who have been convicted and ask them for the name of another drag queen who had been. They will run out of drag queens long before I run out of thousands of clergy.
The drag queens are sinners, but the priests are believers and are forgiven for all of those children that they shoved their dicks into the asses and mouths of.
Wait, was that too graphic? Well it should be. By now “sexual abuse” has been overused into meaninglessness. Start calling it what it is and see if anything changes
The issue is a little more nuanced than that. Most buildings can only install a few EV chargers before they need to upgrade the mains, and if that needs to be done, the transformers likely aren’t adequate, and the local grid may not be able to withstand it as well.
The owners costs ends at the transformers, taxpayers and the energy corp are in for the rest, and until the energy corp upgrades the grid and transformers, building owners can only do so much.
If the infrastructure can’t handle it, then upgrade the fucking infrastructure! Politicians will fall at voters’ feet to build new roads, highways, etc., but when it comes to the green energy transition, there’s no problem too minuscule to be ignored!
I’ll happily admit that there are going to be many issues in the green energy transition; we should acknowledge them, but we should also strive to address them, rather than throwing our hands up in the air and idly promulgating the status quo.
They are upgrading it, as people need it and as fast as they can ahead of planned upgrades.
There shortages on parts, so most are being done as required, but to think it’s not being upgraded (in most places, local bullshit aside) is just pure ignorance.
I’m sure people are trying to address the problems, I’m not saying that’s not happening. What I find maddening however is the double standard between how issues are handled when it’s fossil fuels vs. green energy. Every tiny issue with green energy is breathlessly amplified, while there’s no shortage of idiotic solutions to resolve issues in carbon-based energy infrastructure.
It’s this atmosphere that I’m trying to raise awareness of and change!
Switching from one type of car to another isn’t a green transition. Car production still creates enormous co2 emissions, paving everything for cars makes heat islands, tires produce piles of particulate pollution, and so on. Fixing the car pollution problem means moving to other forms of transportation, not just slightly-less-bad automobiles.
First you have to get people out of the habit of being an active driver, and get to the point where their EV drives them to work. Once that becomes norm then taking a light rail transit is an easy sell. If you try to just force a new transit mode on motorheads they aren’t going to accept it. Small environment savings and having large generating company’s scrub pollution is better that leaving it up to individual car owners, and in places with Hydroelectic power it makes sense to ditch fossil fuels
If a medium sized city went all electric vehicles, there would be one or two possible ICEs producing electricity (assuming no hydroelectic) for the cars instead of 250,000+ ICEs on the roads. Quit your bullshit.
No need to swear, friend. If that city switched to walking and shared transport, most of those roads could be converted into housing or parkland instead of concrete and parking.
I mean, a heck of a lot of people do get by just fine using public transport.
I think a nice balance would be better, personally, but it is an option. Public transit would be more viable if we increased it’s infrastructure. I believe that more people would use it if it was more appealing.
Sometimes it can be fun to not need to drive lol. Some of the best nights out over the last year ended in a bus ride home. Nobody had to be the DD this way.
I don’t know why, but I feel like I should also specify that we kept to ourselves and didn’t really talk while we were on the bus those nights.
Amen. Don’t have to worry about the house, neighborhood, or city infrastructures supporting your EV if your EV is an ebike that can plug into a standard outlet in your living room, or wherever you keep it. Or if you can just walk a quarter mile and hop on a light rail. Or if instead of driving a Ford, you just use your Chevrolegs. Of course, this does also require development patterns to support it, i.e. roads that aren’t fucking death traps for anyone outside a car and stuff being close enough together that you can actually get to it in a reasonable amount of time, but hey, there are also non-car-related reasons we should be doing those things too.
I have up to 4 kids at a time in my vehicle along with an often substantial amount of their stuff ( school backpacks / sports equipment ). It is not uncommon to stop for groceries already loaded with passengers and gear.
What model of eBike should I get?
Also, I work 50 km from home and commute on a road that was made primarily to provide large trucks faster access to the port. It is a road along the river. In addition to the huge, fast moving vehicles, it has no artificial lighting and is away from building that might help with that ( so pitch black at times and also prone to significant fog ). Please recommend something safe.
It is probably 40 km and through a major tunnel and over a substantial bridge to the nearest “light rail”. I do not live in the country.
Now, not everyone has my situation. That said, I am sure MANY people ( in North America at least ) have needs that require cars today. Our culture and infrastructure has been designed around it and changing that is a bigger problem than migrating to electric vehicles.
Shared ownership or shared fleets is one middle ground. Autonomous cars would help but that timeline is uncertain.
I have up to 4 kids at a time in my vehicle along with an often substantial amount of their stuff ( school backpacks / sports equipment ). It is not uncommon to stop for groceries already loaded with passengers and gear. What model of eBike should I get?
That’s a valid question, and it’s one that anybody who advocates for better urbanism, like I do, needs to be able to address. Fortunately, there are multiple answers.
The most direct answer to your question on its face is that you could get a bakfiets, or what the English-speaking world calls a cargo bike/cargo ebike. These are available from brands like Orbea, Aventon, Tern, Co-Op, Specialized (that’s Specialized with a big S), and more, they have been showcased as potential car replacements capable of carrying people and large amounts of stuff on Youtube channels like GCN, Not Just Bikes, Oh The Urbanity, Propel, Shifter, and others, and some specialized (that’s specialized with a small S) models have even been deployed as low-footprint urban delivery vehicles in so far highly successful trials by companies like UPS and FedEx.
However, to address the frankly incredibly frustrating assumption underlying your question, neither I nor the vast majority of other urbanism advocates will actually try to take away your car, even if we were given dictator-like control, because I for one am not interested in controlling people, I’m interested in having multiple viable choices for how to get around. You would still be able to have your car. Driving it in the city center would be inconvenient and expensive enough that you wouldn’t want to do it, but it’d be trivially easy to get there by transit or cargo bike instead. Plus, while the drive to your work would be largely unaffected, that road wouldn’t be the only way to get there, either. Speaking of which,
Also, I work 50 km from home and commute on a road that was made primarily to provide large trucks faster access to the port. It is a road along the river. In addition to the huge, fast moving vehicles, it has no artificial lighting and is away from building that might help with that ( so pitch black at times and also prone to significant fog ). Please recommend something safe.
This is a systemic problem, not a you problem. As such, you shouldn’t be expected to take responsibility for solving it, least of all by just protecting yourself. You mention a port: most ports have existed for longer than cars have been the dominant urban species, and as such, that road you describe might have either replaced or run parallel to a railway that would have also gotten you there. The fact that that railway is no longer a viable option for you means that an option has been taken away from you, and that’s what you should actually be angry about. That, and the lack of artificial lighting on said road. Allow me to refer you to the second half of my earlier comment:
Of course, this does also require development patterns to support it, i.e. roads that aren’t fucking death traps for anyone outside a car and stuff being close enough together that you can actually get to it in a reasonable amount of time, but hey, there are also non-car-related reasons we should be doing those things too.
Emphasis added. Anyway:
Now, not everyone has my situation.
Yes. Hi, it’s me.
That said, I am sure MANY people ( in North America at least ) have needs that require cars today. Our culture and infrastructure has been designed around it and changing that is a bigger problem than migrating to electric vehicles.
That is exactly the problem I’m talking about. They have those needs because our infrastructure has been built to create them, and that causes far more harm than just switching to EVs will ever solve. EVs are like trying to wallpaper over the hole in the Titanic: better than doing literally nothing, but won’t actually fix anything.
Shared ownership or shared fleets is one middle ground.
Sounds like communism to me.
Autonomous cars would help but that timeline is uncertain.
Adam Something has a thing he does where he takes some kind of pie-in-the-sky techbro gadgetbahn idea, like AVs, and gradually addresses all the design flaws with it until he’s invented trains again, then ends with his catchphrase “just build a regular fucking train.” And I think that’s where I’m going to leave off.
Yes it is. Why switch to walking if just killing the whole population will do even more. Just because something else can do more doesn’t mean the original isn’t worth doing.
“The grid can’t handle it” is a bullshit argument that is easy to sell to people who want to keep their IC cars. The difference between highest demand and lowest demand in Ontario this week was 7000MW, if everyone charges their car at night there is power available AND it helps increase the base load which is good for the gird operators.
Even individual buildings may not need to upgrade their main service even with rapid chargers, the operators just need to keep in mind not to run the oven, dryer, AC and car charger at the same time.
Yes the power plants can pump out enough, but not all transfer stations are able to handle the load, each individual hub, may not be able to handle the load.
It’s far more nuanced than this even, but don’t believe everything everyone is selling you, everyone has an agenda and no one is going to tell you the entire truth.
If an entire block suddenly goes EV one night the infrastructure isn’t there, it’s slowly being updated which you don’t see, but there’s issues out there.
A friend showed me his overnight Tesla fill up. 6 bucks. That really doesn’t seem like much power used compared to everyone running baseboard heaters here in the winter.
New Brunswick had a program in the 1970s/80s to get people to switch to electric home heating due to the oil shocks. That was far more ambitious than what is being proposed here.
Edit. I was curious, so I looked up recent numbers for home heating in NB, as it's the area I'm most familiar with.
From 2000-2020, the number of residences increased by 46,000 (285,000 to 331,000). Overall, 72% of which are detached houses. The market share of electric heating went from 57% overall to 79% in those 22 years.
New generation was limited to ~400MW nameplate of wind and one 250MW combined cycle natural gas plant, while several older coal/heavy oil units were mothballed, so overall output hardly changed.
There are a lot of places that grew a lot faster. Yet, the power stayed on.
Multi family complexes do all the time, richer neighborhoods typically adopt EVs faster. Some municipalities are passing legislation mandating their use. Just because you can’t see it being an issue doesn’t make it moot.
It’s happened before, which is why it’s a known issue, so it’s far from moot if it’s happened before, no?
Municipality requires new buildings to be EV ready, ANY infill neighborhood would fit the requirements for your example. That’s just one city, happening all over the world.
Infills are where you rip buildings down and replace them with new ones, this triggers code changes. So any place with these mandates and allow infills can have this happening.
If your focusing on just the literal definition of “overnight… we’ll I can’t help there, but infills fit the requirements of your required “proof”.
If an entire block suddenly goes EV one night the infrastructure isn’t there, it’s slowly being updated which you don’t see, but there’s issues out there.
Those are you words not mine.
I’m asking you to provide some back up for your claims.
If you don’t understand how people could be put on a waitlist to get an EV charger because they can’t get a transformer installed because they the Nth house. I can’t help you.
Yeah I guess that’s my fault for reading the literal words you used as the main part of your argument instead of reading into them the way you just told me to.
No it doesn’t. They asked for proof of a place that it has happened, you’ve provided proof of places where it could happen. That still doesn’t change that it’s incredibly unlikely for an entire neighbourhood to replace all their vehicles in a short period of time and even more unlikely that they would all be EVs.
We’ve had customers be “refused” to be able to get their transformer upgraded. I can’t provide anything to prove this, other than it’s a possible issue and proof point to that.
The refusal came down to, they couldn’t get to their transformer for about 90 days, so they still had an EV and an EV charger, but it couldn’t be used or have final inspection until the power corp could get around to doing theirs.
Emergencies always take precedence, and you never know if you’re that house on the block that will be the straw to break the back.
Believe me if you want, or don’t, but that doesn’t change that it’s definitely already an issue.
It’s not a matter of believing you or not. You were asked a simple question and you repeatedly didn’t answer it while ending every comment with an insult as if the person you were responding to was an idiot.
I don’t even disagree with you entirely, I don’t think it’s as big of a problem as you made it out to be but I don’t think you’re incorrect. You can make those points without being condescending though because the way you’re replying will just make people dig their heels in.
I answered the question quite well actually, if someone comes in with zero knowledge on the subject, how am I supposed to know? Most people who engage in conversations at least have a grasp on the basics before calling someone out.
I knew right of the bat that the user wasn’t here to discuss in good faith based off how they came at me. Most of my lead up comments to the one they responded to touched on most of what I reexplained to the user.
Everyone in the burbs run their AC full tilt all summer and the grid holds up just fine. An EV charger used overnight, when your AC runs less, would present no more of a load than the daytime high usage. Stop pushing anti-electrification bullshit, or move to Alberta, they love that shit.
Dude, electric car’s are about 25 computers on wheels. Adding a “charge between hours” function is so trivial I would be surprised if it doesn’t already exist. But no, you’re right, computers are a complicated pipe dream, we should all go back to coal burning, steam powered, difference engines and horseless carriages.
I own an EV and there’s definitely a setting in the car to specify what time of day to charge (and my charger itself also has an app where I can specify that time restriction).
Depends, a 200amp nearly for sure has capacity. A 100amp likely does, but depends how electrified they already are, but many smaller houses that still heat with natural gas will have lots of space left in a 100 amp service
If it’s permanently installed it’s potential needs to be accounted for at all times, there is some conditionals, like ignoring AC during winter, but there’s nothing for intermittent loads, since it can still potentially be done at anytime.
The technology already exists to share charge across multiple cars, and since most cars don’t need that much charging, that’s not really a huge problem.
It wouldn’t be as fast as a dedicated charging spot, but for at home charging that’s fine for most.
No worries it’s a concern for even single family homes as well, a transformer can normally supply 4-6 houses, but put an EV in every house and they can only do 2.
Most people in non-modern homes will likely need a new panel and mains, same issue applies to the transformers and beyond there as well. Homeowner is responsible to the transformer.
Most buildings we have installed them they’ve made the people that want them pay to install them, now this may cause an issue when they leave and fight that the charger is theirs, but at least the wiring is in place for the next.
Some buildings are installing public ones, and it’s no different than other amenities, no one in a building utilizes all the amenities. It’s a red herring in the end to claim that.
Either the costs are shared between renters, like pools and other benefits, or they are charged to the people who use them. It is very likely that a portion will be shared by all with additional cost on use like parking often is.
That talking point is a bit out of date - the average price for a car int he USA (for example) is quite a bit higher than base EVs now. They’re cheaper to manufacture and gas vehicles won’t be able to compete. The only missing piece is infrastructure for charging in some places.
It won’t be long before EVs are the cheap option. Tesla for instance is supposedly putting out a cheap option soon, but I’m not holding my breath.
Tesla is probably a good one to bank on, though. The gigacasting process shaves a LOT of manufacturing cost.
Lol Tesla’s cheap option will be made of cardboard judging by the quality of their expensive models. Also the cheapest EV in my city used is roughly 15k. About 10k above my budget
Give it a few years. EVs are inherently cheaper to manufacture, and economies of scale are kicking in like crazy now. “Lol” is not exactly a great response to that basic fact.
That’s good to hear, but I think it’s disingenuous to say that EVs are the cheaper option when talking about people who aren’t within reach of even the cheapest new cars. Until we start seeing used decent condition EVs under $10k they’re still out of reach to a lot of people. It sucks because these are the same people who would benefit most from the lower operating costs.
Sure. But that’s something that’ll come with time. We should be preparing our infrastructure for five-ten years from now, not this year. If we wait until EVs are sub-10k used, then we’ll have a massive infrastructure crunch.
Yes, you can make an argument now for EVs being a rich person plaything, but that’s a snapshot in time. The curves are trending downward fast.
In a few years, gas vehicles are going to be for the rich assholes who refuse to get with the program and demand their precious gas stations get subsidized by the government more than they are already. It might not be too long before gas stations in city cores are completely uneconomic because 20%+ of their customer base evaporated.
There will almost certainly be a period where people are trying to dump their gas vehicles, selling them way below market, which will make them attractive to the less wealthy, which will also very much increase the temptation for governments to subsidize gas infrastructure. :(
That will further increase the price pressure on gas vehicles, they’ll be screwed by the new cheap EVs AND the cheap used gas market.
Im west coast Canada where central heat is more of a new home thing, every previous home has baseboard heat in every room. This is true in condos and town homes also. So every winter the grid handles every non new single family dwellings use of baseboard electric heat. I don’t see this being an issueto have an EV that can charge in late hours or at lower draw if needed
When I saw this post, I also thought about places like Camp, California, who weren’t so lucky in terms of having a safe electric infrastructure. I imagine it might be trickier to shift over in those types of areas.
It’s awesome that they managed that in BC. I hope more places gain that kind of stability.
It’s almost not worth the hassle for level 1 charging because it’s so slow though. Might as well put in a level 2, and even then, you’re not often charging every night unless you’re putting serious miles on your EV daily. I’d say one level 2 charger for four occupants/EVs would be reasonable.
It is my understanding that “level 1” charging is 110V 12A 60Hz AC? AKA just plug it into a normal residential wall socket like a toaster? I wonder which one presents more of a load on the power grid, charging an EV like that overnight, or owning a water bed.
Usually yes, level 1 is plugging into a typical 110V socket. You can also adjust the amperage draw on some chargers. I can go from 6 to 12 A in 2 A increments on the one that came with my ioniq 5.
Level 2 is 220V and 25-80 A (<20kW).
Level 3 is technically anything above 20 kW, but usually 50 kW is the floor. These are the EV-specific fast chargers or Tesla’s Superchargers.
An EV on level 1 (or 2) is a continuous load, so I’d imagine probably easier to handle than an intermittent load.
If everyone trickle charges every day it’s make a more even draw from the gird which is easier to supply. The equipment is also cheaper for the car/parking space owner.
Electrician here, no it would not need to upgrade your panel to add a charger. If you have an intermittent load, like a car charger, you can add it on to your panel provided you don’t run it along with your other high power, intermittent loads (clothes dryer, oven).
Just because you have a job doesn’t mean you are good at it.
I have an an electric car that has a 66kwh battery and I track everything. It’s not even in the top 3 categories of usage in my house. It only runs a few hours when I plug it in, which is 1 or 2 times a week. It also only charges at night, because the car has this super advanced technology where it can tell what time it is.
Every time these stories come out all of you people come out of the woodwork with your “the grid can’t handle it” bullshit, but it seems you all haven’t got the slightest fucking clue or are just being disingenuous. All you do is regurgitate long debunked Facebook myths and repeat them for every new story that mentions EVs in any way hoping to convince some more suckers.
The power company in my region is literally telling people in advertisements they should install heat pumps and buy EVs. Why the fuck would they do that if it would collapse their infrastructure?
This is no different from the widespread adoption of electric clothes dryers, water heaters or domestic home air conditioning. Electrical distribution is never static.
It is far different, the scales at play just aren’t the same and a lot of distribution centers are already near capacity even if the grid can supply enough.
Your not wrong that it’s not static, but it’s ignorant to believe that it’s even on the same scale as any of those adoptions.
Add in there has been a transformer shortage since before covid started…. Yeah it’s not the same.
It's exactly the same. You're adding one 30-50A circuit to residential that will be used intermittently, and primarily during off peak hours. Very, very few vehicles will need a full charge every night, and the software on the charger side typically meters in current at much less than capacity if it's on a schedule, as the lower the current, the less heat, and less stress on the battery . Large charging stations are on par with commercial/light industrial, and we add that sort of load all the time.
I've worked for power utilities for 25 years on the generation side with some on the T&D side. The planners spend a pile of time on analysis to determine where additional load and/or sources are being added and triage based on that. When old stuff is scheduled for replacement, sometimes an upgrade is warranted, sometimes not, based on that analysis.
A lot of electrical equipment currently has long lead times. I've got quotes for up to 70 weeks on some stuff. It's been a side effect of relying on dodgy suppliers overseas. It has been improving.
Commercial transformers have a hell of a lot more head capacity. Codes and standards when doing panel calculations don’t care about off peak in most places. And unless it has a proper timer, you can’t remove it from calculations on an intermittent basis.
2 houses on the same transformer in a dated neighborhood and it needs to be replaced with a new one. You can plan ahead all you want, but you can’t plan for that at all. And every single one of those requests will push back planned upgrades.
We had entire neighbourhoods go from oil furnaces and either 50A or 100A services to electric heat with 200A services. Yeah, equipment got upgraded, that's how it works. Where did I say otherwise?
And you certainly can plan for that. People are doing it as we speak.
Which is why BEVs won't be 100% of the market as some are imagining. It's simply impossible for a mostly inflexible idea to replace everyone's transportation needs. It requires a vast amount of cooperation and extra resources being spent. It's highly unlike to happen past a certain point.
I own an electric car and I accept maybe I’ve been luckier than most but my last basement suite the landlord put it in completely of his own will and his own dime at my request. He reused some old hot tub wiring and it worked great. And my current apartment I had them pick their preferred electrical company and paid for it myself since it was just a plug like 3 feet down from their sub panel.
So far I’ve not had a ton of issues finding places. It definitely limits where you can live with some places only having street parking or just not having the capability of putting in a charger or plug but there are definitely places out there
Look, if the rich don’t want you to have a house, they certainly don’t want you have a car.
In all seriousness, this is why it’s called late-stage capitalism: because at this point, it’s going to be fatal to it’s host. We’re nearing the point where there less and less value to extract from labour because they’re already underpaid for the value they generate and over-leveraged because debt was an easy substitute. At the same time, the wealthy are increasingly desperate for ever-larger returns.
Electric cars, if not personal transit in general, are probably going to be the iceberg that the ship of capitalism breaks on: the wealthy don’t want to pay taxes for roads and charging infrastructure, and they don’t want to pay for public transit, but they also don’t want you to have a home where you can charge your own car. But they want you to buy stuff, and they expect electric cars to sell for higher prices than gas ones.
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