Victor Villas

nice

That’s unfortunate, but makes it extra funny all the drama about Chinese EV’s “flooding the market”

Ah I see, makes sense.

Count me in, while I still have the energy I try to get organized as well. I just tend to pushback on the idea that education is the solution to our problem, or the root cause of the state of things; on the contrary I believe that education is a reflection of politics more than politics is a reflection of education. Minor differences in practice come from this though, just a bit of a worldview nitpick I guess.

The really big problem we have is with the lack of education.

Nah, education can’t compete with organized propaganda. There are powerful people paying good money to contaminate the public discourse. More education is not enough, because there’s a power imbalance: we’d need to invest a thousand dollars in education to counter each dollar of propaganda; because you need to prepare an average citizen with higher-education-level critical thinking skills and even then it might not be enough. On the other hand, a few bucks of ads on Meta and some astro-turfing can push an otherwise reasonable voter into paranoia.

The really big problem we have is the 0.1% having the budget and leeway to poison the well.

I know, which is why I said it’s technically correct

The article says it directly

Rather than raising pay and improving labour standards to attract and retain drivers, employers have turned to the TFW program to fill the gap.

So really quite the ridiculous choice of headline. It’s technically correct, but it reads as if Temporary Foreign Workers are the problem, not the TFWP program rules that these companies are themselves lobbying to stay loose.

You’re not wrong, and maybe I’m splitting hairs here… But I’m from Brazil and we while had very good results with Bolsa Família - really really good results, made history lifting millions of people out of poverty - we learned in practice that while the effects of inequality are most tragic among the poor, the real inequality happens between between the 99% and the 1%; and then again between the 1% and the 0.1%. While the wealth transfer has been successful, just like gas tax cuts the political capital generated is very feeble and easily coopted by following administrations.

I know that Bolsa Família it’s not the same as UBI, but it turns out that the political power unlocked lasted less than two decades. The elites will find ways to erode it eventually, if allowed to amass power to do so.

But anyway, yes I love your list, and would vote for anyone that got any permutation shuffle of this agenda.

Saudi Arabia probably has a total value in resources not too different from Canada, but much more concentrated on fossil fuels and for which it is/was much more straightforward to build the extraction infrastructure

My next immediate goal would be tax reform to target the 1%; then UBI

(not because I think we lack the funds for UBI, but just because I think that if the 1% paid their share properly, other things should start falling into place as well)

How does that answer the thread question? You’re passing a law saying what?

I’d rather have Canada nationalize most of these but without doubling down on oil pipelines and more mining projects… – Nationalizing agriculture and fisheries and tourism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Ok, thanks for the heads up.

The National Post isn’t credible, regardless. Not that the facts aren’t verifiable, but news aren’t just facts; they’re also framing, context, editorialization…

Wow, an elected official defending First Nations interests really grinds your gears huh. Take care.

That’s a lot of words just to say that you resent representative democracy when the representative elected is defending interests of a group you don’t belong; which is the norm in representative democracies.

I guess I have to break the news that the goal of reconciliation is not to achieve “parity for local population increase”. What a weird angle, great-replacement-theory adjacent stuff.

But the ‘foreign interference’ concept is new to me, so it gets the cake for the weirdest shit I’ve read recently. Got too much free time in your hands…

So what all we can do is trybto be better we can’t fix the past.

Looks like you could do some googling about the meaning of truth and reconciliation. No one is arguing we have to fix the past, it’s the “try to be better” we’re all aiming for.

Not attacking the declaration of indigenous rights is a part of “try to be better”

Like the story highlights that the NDP backed off because they couldn’t get the support from one of their members, who happens to be the wife of a First Nation chief

That’s not really true though.

Joan Phillip is not just “a wife of a First Nations Chief”; that’s kind of insulting. She’s First Nation and a long time activist at that, not just someone’s wife.

She’s voting the way she was elected to vote. It’s absolutely how democracies are supposed to work.

And she was not the only on the NDP caucus opposing the bill; though since it’s a slim majority it only takes one to say “I will nay” to put the bill at risk. It’s Eby who would put the government at risk by making a risky bill a confidence vote, not Joan. She doesn’t decide what is a confidence vote, she just votes.

It’s interesting that the article frames this as an issue that could topple the NDP, and that the NDP is basically backing out to appease a minority group at the potential expense of the majority’s interests.

Same could be said for trying to undo DRIPA in the first place. Risk a confidence vote to go backwards on a landmark reconciliation legislation that will affect generations just to appease a few landowners who eat rightwing fearmongering propaganda.

Most people would not mind that, especially if transit got better. What’s your point?

For sure. A great medium to educate the average viewer about issues most people would never encounter themselves.

I learned a bunch and I’m excited for this getting a bunch of seasons.

I think this is known everywhere, except that

1. selling land brings politicians short term gains;
2. high density is unpopular with large swaths of constituents;

So 3 and 4 is what we’re getting in practice, but for 1 and 2 we need a proper government running by decent people, which has been hard to come by. We can’t even do the bare minimum of 1 and 2 to build supportive housing for the homeless…

I think we agree on 99% of the issue; we do need non-market housing and we need a diverse range of sizes; we do need to reduce the attractiveness of housing as an investment class.

But I disagree that we have excess 1bd units directly because of housing is seen as an investment. Small time investors bought these like hot cake because those investors, in large part having no idea about what they’re doing, were hyped about just getting into the market purely due to speculation, and of course the lowest entry into the market is the smallest unit possible. Pre-sale marketing treated these people like a Ponzi scheme: let’s sell as many as possible while it’s still profitable, these suckers will eat the price drop when it inevitably lands.

The reason why I’m nitpicking the root cause is that the main problem is not the investing, but that this investment is a badly regulated market, with a lot of silly myths going around (housing will never be a bad investment, rent is throwing money away etc). Basically Millennial’s covered call ETFs but for boomers. Or Gen Z’s shitcoints, but for boomers. A properly regulated market should mandate diversity of unit sizes, land use, non-market housing etc. Even if we spend zero energy on de-incentivizing buying homes for investment, at least a regulated market would prevent a bunch of idiots betting their retirement on “housing only go up” to cause the market to get distorted. Of course I do also agree we should work to not treat housing as investment, count me in for a 5000% increase on property taxes for non-primary residences.