Pxtl

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Counterargument: if you need narrower text, you can adjust the size of your browser window. If I want wider text, you’ve capped it.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

Markets do not solve the problems they create. When the desired outcome is housing security rather than profit, governments must regulate markets and support non-market housing.

This argument would make sense if it were primarily a market-created problem, but the reality is we made constructing housing basically illegal while stepping up immigration. The combination of municipal NIMBYist anti-densification policies and hyper-elaborate guidelines with the provincial Green Belt (which is a good idea if densification is permitted but it wasn’t) and the Federal canceling of subsidies on market-rate purpose-built rental housing, and climbing immigration (something that’s otherwise excellent) are what created the problem. Not “markets”.

It should not be a surprise that housing prices – both rental and ownership – skyrocket when building housing is de jure illegal. Every new build requires one-off hearings and multi-year permission processes to get exceptions made to the “guidelines” that are actually rules. If something is legal only with a special government executive decision, then it’s not legal, unless you consider murder to be legal in the USA because they have pardons.

If you listen to below-market-rent subsidized home builders, you’ll hear the same complaints. They want to build, but can’t.

Don’t take my word for it, see this video of deposition by Mark Richardson of Housing Now TO:

mastodon.social/

I loathe the Poilievre conservatives, but they’re right about this. First step to stopping the housing crisis is to kick some municipal government ass. Trudeau is trying to do it with carrots through the Housing Accelerator Fund, but it’s long-since time for sticks and not carrots.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

“tax the wealthy” - I would say that in particular this should be taxing wealth. Canada is in the unique position that most of the wealth in this country is real-estate, and therefore has a street address. Capital flight is much more difficult under that circumstance. The guy who owns three houses and a few condos and a car-dealership is far more interesting than a well-paid surgeon, but one owes more of their lifestyle to their wealth rather than their labour. I tend to dislike Jagmeet Singh on policy issues but I think he’s spot on about it being time for wealth taxes in Canada.

Normally I’m pretty neoliberal when it comes to the housing crisis (ie: a huge part of the problem is overregulation) but at this point the solution will require undoing decades of damage and that will mean a need for below-market housing at least until the free market can catch up, if not forever. Taxing Canada’s wealthy land-owners is an obvious way to fund this, since they’re the ones profiting the most from this shortage.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

I think it should be a thing, but only allowed to be created by the admins of the community that they can use for creating tech-support and modmin discussions and whatnot. Not for normal users to create.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

imho this reflects a huge failure of the fediverse. Our accounts shouldn’t be tied to an instance that’s hosting content, they should be on a an auth-only server that only is responsible for managing our identity, separate from the content-servers. Then it would be up to content-servers to decide how much content they want to federate about an identity to show on that user’s profile-page on this particular content-server. Like either federating it right in (hey here’s @Pxtl’s profile/feed scraped from every fediverse server they use directly) or just autogenerating links to their content on other servers (we don’t want to host content from HowToBlowUpAPipelineLemmy.org on Lemmy.world but here’s a link to @Pxtl’s posts there).

Wouldn’t it be cool to have the same identity on Mastodon as on Lemmy?

Then you could continue to participate in the fediverse without creating a new user-account on every server. Of course, the auth servers would still be vulnerable to outage but since they’re lower load and just providing auth they’d be much less vulnerable.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Shows why Canadian news companies should be getting into the Fediverse.

Pxtl, 9 months ago

This highlights a big problem of volunteer-run/not-for-profit social media. Moderation is hard and expensive and tedious. The next one good be sending CSAM. I hope the Lemmy leadership is moving fast and working with orgs that provide detection tools for this stuff.

euronews.com/…/mastodon-has-child-sexual-abuse-co…

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I feel like he’s also forcing his eyes open wider. He tends to squint when he’s relaxed, and these days his brow is constantly furrowed. Like, he’s always trying to make himself look surprised to fight against his own natural squint.

It must be exhausting.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Houses are going for millions. Skilled trades are in short supply. The message for tradies should be loud and clear: raise your prices. Whatever you’re being paid, it’s not enough. Everybody else is gouging in this shortage, you should too. Get that bag.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

I mean governments have various things they can do. Push hard on cities that are blocking construction through obstruction or sloth. Prioritize tradesmen as immigrants. Use the powers of the federal government to create a national vacant unit registry so that lower tiers of government don’t have to run vacant unit taxes on the honour system. Allow single-stair multi-unit dwellings. Fund rental construction like they did before Chretien/Martin. Reduce the requirements to get your trade papers (apprenticeships are good but 5 years before your electrician papers seriously???)

It’s just that governments would rather argue about bullshit. Ford is focused on the fucking Ontario Place spa. Poilievre and Postmedia are flinging shit about bail reform. The CBC is, as ever, up its own ass about complete obscure nonsense. Trudeau is a fountain of empty nothings, as he has been since he lost Gerry Butts. Jagmeet is talking about the housing issue, but only in ways to throw more money at buyers and renters to juice demand in a supply-side shortage, which is basically subsidizing landlords.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Were any of the films good besides In The Beginning? I hated 3rd Space and Call to Arms. I don’t remember if I saw River of Souls.

Pxtl, 10 months ago

Just started playing Tooth and Tail with some friends. It’s an arcadey gamepad-oriented furry indie RTS game. It draws obvious inspiration from Animal Farm and Secret of Nimh - it’s a bloody revolution in a furry pseudo-Russian setting, where the animals are fighting over the process by which they decide who gets eaten. The single player campaign is dark as hell and excellent. I played through the first two single player campaigns and had 3 other guys who’d never touched it were kicking my ass inside of an hour. Very easy to pick up, which is rare in an RTS.