Dearche

joined 2 years ago
[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 months ago

Every time I see one of these, I get a bit more depressed. It's just incredible how people can vote for a party that openly declared to make depriving Canadians of some of their fundamental rights as part of their platform. How if you take even ten seconds to think about their policies, they're basically to purely empower the rich and powerful, while screwing over 98% of Canadians.

They basically stand on the same platforms as the Nazi party did almost a hundred years ago, and it's not like they're the only right-wing party. Just the most extreme right-wing one that has more than 1% of the expected votes.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

It's because DOGE is basically cutting government everything, something the ultra-wealthy love, because it makes it easy to use money and power however they want because of the lack of government power to do anything about it. Doesn't matter if what they do is blatantly illegal if there is no department to even investigate such illegal activities. It's better than tailoring laws to suit them since they don't have to plan years ahead and instead just do so.

Imagine a mafia successfully eliminating the entire local police force. They could murder people out in the open, but without any cops to do the arrest, they effectively got away with it even if hundreds of people recorded the crime happening and posted it online. Nobody to do an investigation, nobody to do an arrest, and nobody to take them to court. DOGE is doing the same thing, but on a national level for the richest and most powerful.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Too bad the only non-right parties got single digit seats or less in the last election.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago

Very, very encouraging. I hope this isn't a one-time thing and we'll see at least double this on the actual vote day, and continue seeing such results on subsequent elections.

The more people vote, the more our leaders need to pay attention to our wants and needs, leaving little space for corporate corruption. This is especially for those of us unsatisfied with how our only leaders are all center right to far right and want leaders that actually lean in any direction but right.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

No, it will affect us. Not massively, but it will, since now the producers will have to divide their shipments to route around the US. This will add to extra shipping since they benefit less from bulk.

In addition, while we'll cut out the US middlemen, there'll likely be a Canadian middleman taking their place to do distribution on a more local level, negating any cost savings from removing a step from the process.

Still a minor logistics issue, but one that'll likely take several months at least to resolve that'll land us with a few points higher in cost.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

If I remember right, that was basically what they did to make commie blocks.

If the building isn't too tall, maybe 5 stories or less, that is proven to work, though I don't know about the quality, at least it's durable. But I strongly doubt that it would work for skyscrapers. I don't think there's any way to get beyond single large support struts to go throughout the entire building, and concrete walls feel too heavy to be used. Maybe prefab concrete floors could work, but I don't work construction.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

Could be. Some places make election day a mandatory holiday to encourage turnout. Frankly, I think we should do that here for elections on all levels for the same reason.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 months ago (2 children)

This can work in some places (mostly looking at the prairies), but will do close to zero in others (like eastern Canada+BC). The simple problem is that the land the house is built on is often worth something like 80% the cost of buying property. The cost of a new house can be zero, but that will do little to help people afford new homes. Only slightly better than the tax cuts PP is proposing, which will have just as weak of an effect helping those who don't already own six houses.

The solution is to use the land we already use for homes more efficiently, and the only way to do that is to build condos and apartments. Make them mixed use and you can add the rental fees of a grocery store and several other services to the mix to subsidize the cost even further. A single grocery store that'll take up half the ground floor paid something like a million in rent a year, and that was before COVID. Add a convenience store, a couple fast food restaurants, a bar, and a dentist or salon, and you've got a mini-mall that'll rake in several million in rent that has a captured clientele in those that live above and near them. And that number will be in the hundreds for a 30 story apartment in the space of half a city block, since there'd be more than ten units per floor, even if it only has two-four bedroom units.

Such buildings can't be built in a factory, even partially. Not if we want them to last more than ten years, since that's the problem with the quick condos China tried to build.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

I don't agree. This is only true because supply is so badly constrained. If each province had another million homes tomorrow, with the biggest cities building another 200 thousand plus a year until capacity is greater than demand, such a thing wouldn't happen. It's entirely because people were allowed to believe that a necessity to life could be treated like investible asset despite being an entirely non-performing asset.

It's like hoarding wheat, then blocking farmers from increasing production so that the value of your wheat stockpile grows. Yes, it technically works, but that's because you're artificially preventing the market from doing its job. The value of homes only go up because demand rises without supply keeping up, and various housing associations and interest groups have kept it that way to make their investments grow instead of prioritizing on making this country more livable.

The fixing taxes can fix things, but they're not the root problem. It's the sheer lack of development, and if normal developers won't do their damn job, then it's the government's job to step in and fix things like it once did.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I waited an hour in line on Friday to cast my ballot.

During the provincial election, I didn't wait even a second. In fact, it looked like some of the workers there hadn't had any work to do for a while and were bored out of their minds.

While I won't say that this was the reason why we got a selfish and corrupt moron a majority government (my district elected Lib), the fact that people were so unaware of what's going on in the Provincial government was depressing.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

One hour lineup on fri.

Frankly surprised at how many others showed up that day, but glad. People need to be more active in the democratic process or else it only benefits the already powerful because they never forget to vote.

[–] Dearche@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

I understand spending $100million of it's to fix Ontario's infrastructure and get more people connected, but this isn't it. It's simply paying off someone else to put in a band-aid solution that only looks good on the surface.

I understand the idea of building up the infrastructure for isolated communities to become connected, but I strongly feel that this isn't the way. It's forcing a group of people onto a monopoly that can be taken away at any point. If the government really wanted to do this, then they'd fund cell towers to these isolated communities instead. That'll give them reliable internet access that isn't beholden to a single company on top of helping local companies. Nobody would be forced to use hardware from a specific company or suffer complete loss of service.

This is likely more expensive, but it's far more beneficial and forward looking and may even bring people together more. And it doesn't exclude Starlink for those who want it as well. They just have to pay for that on their own, but Starlink is already priced to be affordable to individual families.

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