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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Why can’t a country (or city, or anythung) choose what others call them?

    We call it Timor Leste instead of East Timor. We call it Cote d’Ivoire instead of Ivory Coast. We call it Kyiv instead of Kiev. We call it Russia instead of USSR. All of these are names chosen within the last 50 years or so.

    A lot of the “traditional” names are just historical holdovers from a very long time ago. If we encountered them for the first time today, we probably would use their chosen name. If tomorrow they said they wanted to be referred to as Deutschland or Nippon, we’d probably accept that and start calling them by those names.




  • Can I ask which province you live in? In my experience (Southern Ontario, not GTA) local meat is not cheaper (though it’s definitely better quality). Same with locally milled flour and locally grown produce (when in season).

    I have tried to support local (and sometimes still do, despite the cost) but I just don’t understand how labour costs in Ontario can be so much higher than labor + shipping for produce from California or Florida or Mexico.

    Is it just a bigger markup because there are enough people who are hardcore about buying local here? Is there another factor I’m ignoring?



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

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






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

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




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

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

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


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

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

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






  • No such thing.

    The $10k Chinese EV is only $10k in China. When localized for other markets, it’s much closer to the same price as all other EVs. Some of this is tariffs, but there’s a bunch of changes they need to make to meet safety requirements. Even the $15k Seagull they talk about in the article is expected to be the cheapest offering in Europe, eventually, and they’re aiming for 20k Euros, which is 30k CAD.