Canadas family doctors apparently have the shortest residency in the world.

Saskatchewan is the birthplace of the NDP (Canada’s social democratic party), universal public healthcare (ever heard of Tommy Douglas?), and historically one of the pillars of the labour movement. It’s now the most conservative province, but still has tons of new immigrants, racial and cultural diversity, good education, and well funded government services. The SK NDP ruled almost continuously from 1971 to 2006.

SK is much more like midwestern farm states that were formerly pro-labour pro-union hotbeds but are now more moderate or conservative, like Iowa and Wisconsin.

I don’t think Canada has an Alabama. As conservative as they are, Alberta is wealthy, highly educated, and they frequently vote for women and POC. They like “small government”, but also have some of the highest paid government workers in the country. I just don’t see much similarity.

I think the comparison to Texas is more apt because they’re both conservative petro states with center left suburban sprawl cities.

I am in support of any measures to make the lives of speculators and investors miserable but even the graphic you share endorses increasing housing supply! Singapore is famously super YIMBY and builds tons of public and market housing.

Frankly, whatever else we do, there is NO solution without significantly more supply. Yes, let’s change our tax code to stamp out speculation, but it will take years, if not decades, to catch up on building enough supply even if we make changes now.

Vacancy is pretty much zero across the major Canadian cities. We have the lowest housing per capita in the G7. There is objectively not enough housing in Canada and it’s absolutely delusional to say otherwise. Is this wishful thinking just a form of NIMBYism? Do you own a SFH and you want to “preserve the character” of your neighbourhood or something?

Where are you getting that building more homes will disproportionately help realtors and speculators? Even non-market housing, like co-ops and social housing? How in the world does that even work?? Why would speculators like that? I hate speculators, but your theory makes no sense whatsoever!

There is not a single urban economist, right or left, who agrees with you. With beliefs like this so widespread, it’s no wonder we don’t enact any policies to actually help with the housing crisis.

Could be, but even the best case scenario for this bot is pretty bad. The bot “summarizes” by omission. That’s always going to be limited.

Could be, but even the best case scenario for this bot is pretty bad. The bot “summarizes” by omission. That’s always going to be limited.

Or at least make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial mail. I understand subsidizing a letter to a developing country but this is just extracting rent.

Bad bot. This summary is worse than useless.

These are good points. But I wonder if the longer life really comes from it being a general purpose computer per se. The points you make are more about the internet connectivity of the device. You can use a DOS machine in 2023 because it’s almost like an appliance. It works just as well now as a text editor as in the 90s. But an internet connected device has to be supported, and good enough for today’s processor intensive web apps. That general purpose DOS machine, like the first iPad, is never running Discord or Netflix.

Because they are a soulless profit-maximizing corporation, there will come a time when Apple stops supporting perfectly functioning iPads for no reason, but I’m not sure we’re there yet. The iPads they stopped supporting really do suck from a hardware perspective.

I agree the iPad is almost completely useless, but I don’t think comparing it to 13 years before the iPad is useful. My MacBook Air is 11 years old and it’s still great because it’s good enough to run YouTube, all the major websites, office suites, etc. It’s still getting security updates from Apple. I think that’s what 90% of people use a laptop for. A computer two years older than it, on the other hand, might be useless. It’s not really linear. Hopefully, iPads from 5 years ago can last over a decade.

I have noticed secondhand stores are getting more expensive. In my area, it’s still way cheaper for adults than new. For children, it’s more of a crapshoot, but it’s still hands down cheaper for more expensive durable items like coats, jackets, etc.

It’s unfortunate that life is increasingly unaffordable, but it’s an absolute win if we as a society shift to buying second hand and reusing things more often. I wish it wouldn’t be considered so shameful. Kids clothes in thrift stores are often in near new condition. We live in such a wasteful consumer society.

The anecdote in the intro makes it sound like Ukrainians are going home for economic reasons, which comports with domestic concerns about cost of living, but further down it turns out almost none cite that as a reason. Most are returning home due to family, friends, homesickness, love of country, etc.

Ok I get the message. I will refrain from cross posting as much as possible in the future. I do think this is not like Reddit and this tendency is a self-own for Lemmy where there is much more balkanization by design.

I agree. I hesitated to cross-post this, but someone suggested I do so on the original post.

But that shows a structural problem with the user incentives on Lemmy. The norm of discouraging cross-posting itself means that we have a system that actively discourages people from connecting with others. And if we’re actively incentivized to unsubscribe from multiple similar communities, that’s even worse! These are the opposite of the sort of incentives we should have in a healthy and viable social network.

Good point. I’m not as familiar with other Activity Pub interfaces so I haven’t thought about the implications for Mastodon, etc.

That’s an interesting proposal. I think I need to understand it better. Could you describe to me in what ways this would be better?

I agree. Do you feel this proposal doesn’t address that? My hope is that sibling communities would allow us to keep redundancy and diversity while still enjoying some of the benefits of sometimes coming together.

On The Media - a podcast analyzing the media, giving historical and scientific context to news coverage. In the process, it turns out to be the best in depth news shows. Academics and journalists love this show but it doesn’t seem to be as big of a hit with the greater public. I recommend this show very highly.

Also listen to a bunch of nerdy academic podcasts like The Dissenter and New Books in Science, Psychology, Philosophy, etc in the New Books networks.