Tiktaalik

There are other aspects beyond simply being more permissive. I recall reading for example that property transfer tax is remarkably less on bare land, enough so that when travelling in Japan you will regularly notice bare lots for sale, as it is beneficial for the seller to tear down a lot before they sell it. This sort of thing encourages churn of housing, and coupled with liberal zoning, enables an accelerated increase in denser building. Tbh it probably encourages lower construction costs since more people are doing construction.

IMO in this whole conversation, whether discussing any jurisdiction not just japan, impacts of zoning is an over emphasized and tax policy under emphasized (ie. almost never discussed).

Folks are not paid terribly high wages in Japan. I saw McDonalds "we're hiring" signs when I was eating there and I don't recall the wage but it was below 1000¥.

(That being said I tried to calculate the ratio of hourly wage to McChicken sandwich and Japanese workers came out with a better deal than Canadian ones)

Many of these lines were built by the public, then privatized.

I suspect they've been behaving like google in using a stable golden goose to fund moon shots, but unfortunately for them now that golden goose is rather sick and no longer making so many golden eggs.

Games imploded long before AI was in wide use. There were back to back worst years ever for layoffs in 2023,2024.

> Gas prices have been "sky high" for a week and people who are under financial stress just decided to ditch their cars and buy a brand new BYD? Are we children now? listening bedtime stories?

The situation is something that makes people pause for a second.

Like everyone knows that EVs are the future, but when gas is fine, status quo fine, that future can be a fuzzy thing in the distance and it's really easy to shut off your brain, live in the present, and not really do any thinking and just go through the motions.

A sudden oil shock puts the issue of EVs on the front burner and gives people reason to think about things for a moment.

yeah it's not perfect, but there's absolutely well enough data for the ballpark appraisal. Onus is not on the government to do any of this. So keep records folks.

I think the government now actually does keep tax records of buying and selling homes (became a bit of a question during the foreign buying debate) so going forward it's going to be no concern.

Easier than you'd think.

The value of homes is very well known and assessed annually in many provinces (some have weirdly become laggards). So no real problem there.

Any piece of art that is of any real value would have a provenance and it would be very well known what the value it was at any given time and at sale. If no one knows the artist or can determine the value it is very safe to say its value is nil.

> One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.

A side comment but I'm sad to say I don't think that another electoral system (or at least not FPTP) fixes this issue of there being a niche group being kingmakers.

In FPTP the dynamic that occurs is that an enormous amount of seats become "safe" and then the kingmakers end up being the relative handful of seats that are likely to trade hands. This ends up creating distortions where certain regional seats and regional issues rise well above how important they should be.

PR seems like a more fair way to represent a niche group. At least they are a genuinely representative part of the population, and the influence isn't an accident of electoral math distortion.

It's absolutely the latter thing.

The thing that is prized above all else is privacy and exclusivity. People are paying money to ensure that few people live near them and that those people are the "right sort of people."

Dating back to the 1930s the original core goal of zoning was to restrict apartments so as to keep poor people and minorities out of certain areas. We know this because it's well documented in the newspapers of the day because back then people were more comfortable explicitly saying how classist and racist they were.

There's a lot of talking past each other on this issue. Sure there's probably clueless people out there, but a lot of left wing housing activists that are skeptical of free market housing liberalization understand very well economics and the benefits of housing supply, but are concerned about the time horizons involved and concrete near term impacts on low income residents.

It is of overall net benefit over the long term to raze a small three story walkup apartment and build something denser, overall increasing the amount of housing.

However, in the short term it's immediately quite (sometimes existentially) bad for affordability if existing affordable housing is destroyed and replaced by brand new (and thus inherently luxury) housing.

So accordingly we naturally see low income housing activists push back against some redevelopment and ask why development is not occurring in wealthy single family home areas where the amount of people impacted is less and class those that are not remarkably negatively impacted.

Personally I think the data shows that in general it is still really beneficial to build out as much housing as possible and avoid the negative impacts of a shortage, but I do think there are people validly pointing at a real problem of displacement.

Yeah this would be the interesting thing to try to normalize the data against somehow.

what you're neglecting to consider is what would have happened if someone moved to Austin (say a wealthy person from SF) and that expensive new apartment didn't exist.

The mechanism by which new construction drives down rents is that people that need a new apartment are in less competition with existing residents in older worse apartment buildings.

So the newcomer from SF moves into the expensive new apartment, which means that there's less competition for decades old apartments, which means that when one of those is vacated there is less price appreciation on that product.

If there is a scarcity of apartments what happens is that when a decades old apartment is vacant it is filled by a wealthy newcomer and the landlord increases the rent accordingly.

The problem is that this cool technology got taken over and advanced by companies, Meta and Apple, that are not games companies and do not understand nor are interested in games.

So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.

It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.

As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.

lol oops

All those things are awesome (if you're into that sort of thing, many people aren't) but they don't really rely on the car. Many of the low density detached home suburbs that people drive to these days were once upon a time street car suburbs.

But answering the question, "what's not to like?" The main thing is the fact that none of this scales. All the good benefits you're describing rely on the fact that other people aren't doing them. Other people need to live in "cages" so that you can have all this extra space.

Similarly an enjoyable experience in a car free of traffic relies on other people not driving. If all the people that are using transit were driving a single car, the traffic congestion would spike and you'd be in misery.

None of it scales due to the unchangable dynamics of physical geometry.

> But the U.S. economy is still more reliant on oil than others: U.S. oil intensity is twice as high as the European Union and 40% higher than China’s, according to Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at think tank Defense Priorities. This is largely because the U.S. doesn’t have much public transportation or electric-vehicle adoption.

A painful reminder of the harsh costs of automobile dependency.

We've had the solutions to get off this rollercoaster since the 19th century, but weird ideologues continue to throw up barriers to any and all change. The reality is that enabling the alternatives wouldn't just limit climate change, but save us money too.

Yes the real achievement here I think is the creation and public sharing of the translation tools. The AI translation here should be considered effectively a proof of concept of the tools.

Given the particular nature of this game, so reliant on inside jokes requiring a knowledge of SEGA history, it's likely an AI translation could miss a lot, and I think the community will eagerly await further real translations done by professional translators leveraging these tools.

Those are our emissions that we have exported to china. Your TV, Phone, etc etc isn't built in NA.

I agree that there are other factors likely impacting job losses in 2026, but it is possible that the impacts of a tourism downturn are only now being felt.

One thing worth noting is that the tax structure of American cities can be more based on sales taxes than property taxes, and so if tourism is down, and sales is down, this will begin to impact city budgets, which can have rippling effects elsewhere. For example municipal cutbacks to landscaping budgets could impact private contractors etc.

I agree. My point though is that this extends the market of this device beyond the educational sector.

I have friends that have gone on extended vacation work trips and have lugged along a laptop purely to connect to a beefy workhorse PC at home.

Maybe this is a tweener category though in that that sort of person would simply bring along a Macbook Air they already own? I dunno.

This thing loaded up with Parsec could maybe be a great small, cheap coding machine, for accessing a more powerful computer beyond.

iPads with neither an ability to run VSCode nor Parsec have been frustratingly useless for this category.

BDC, the Business Development Bank of Canada, has shifted toward investing in Defence, which from my understanding they didn't really do much of before, so it's probably a better time than ever to be a defence startup in Canada.

https://www.bdc.ca/en/about/mediaroom/news-releases/bdc-intr...

Unpacking the software issues with the Dreamcast a bit more, while so many of the games on the Dreamcast were great, it is very clear looking at the lineup in retrospect in comparison with the games that would release on the PS2, the Dreamcast was dominated by a sort of short form arcade[1] type game that would swiftly go extinct.

Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.

Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.

[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.

I think a common thing in Greece was that owners themselves would redevelop their properties much denser, retaining an apartment or two of equal floorspace to their own home, and then leasing or selling out the others to fund the redevelopment of lot.

This sort of flexibility would be really welcome in North America but SFH neighbourhoods are frozen in stone, so when the nearby high street becomes cool, all the little former working class single family homes become million dollar homes that can only be purchased by the rich, and the working class people that may have previously rented them are booted out to who knows where.

It's absolutely the case that poor residents get priced out and do not necessarily benefit from a neighbourhood becoming hip.

The cool new retail is tangentially to blame through second order effects, but the real problem is the inflexibility of the system in responding to change which results in a shortage of housing, which means that the disruptive impact on low income persons is really severe as they have no where to move to when things become more expensive or they are evicted.

Much like how the solution to increasing retail rents is more flexibility in retail zoning, so to is the solution for increasing rents.

It's less of a big deal if a cheap lame neighbourhood suddenly becomes cool if you can easily bail out because there's plenty of affordable apartments elsewhere. The problem we're in is that there's a general shortage and so in many places, losing a long held apartment is like an existential crisis because everywhere else is even more expensive and there's a shortage.

Another approach is that in redeveloping "cool" areas we could increase land/property taxes and developer fees so as to recapture the land lift and divert toward public realm projects that benefit existing long time residents. The area becoming cool and getting new condos pays for the new pool and new below market housing.

Should be mentioned as an aside that the actions themselves of poor people can ultimately gentrify a neighbourhood just as much as retail. A neighbourhood can become known for a vibrant arts/music scene that ultimately gentrifies it not just because it has some bars, but because the working artist residents are they themselves creating the attracting works in putting on events and shows. They earn a meagre income as working artists but ultimately may displace themselves as condos come advertising themselves on the scene that they've created.

Cyclical neighbourhood change I think is inevitable so I think what we really need to focus on is not necessarily finding ways to keep neighbourhoods the same, but giving people and retailers options so that when change happens, it's not disruptive and painful.

There is risk in choosing tenants for sure, though it is usually the case that the retailers themselves are putting in the expense and sweat equity into renovating a space. Sometimes this is cost shared, often it isn't.

I know my retailer friends painted their store themselves.

It is in the scarce retail environment where landlords have the least amount of risk around choosing a tenant because if one fails they can easily get another. So a city adding more retail zoning would increase vacancy, increase risk to landlords and hopefully reward good retail tenants.

This is a vexing problem I was made aware of by friends that are in the retail business, renting their stores from landlords. It's really brutal. Retailers take on all the risk, put in the work to revitalize a neighbourhood, and their reward is that when lease renewal comes up in 10 years, it spikes and they're faced with a choice of being displaced or handing over an enormously increased part of their margins to the landlord which has done literally nothing.

The others that benefit are the nearby condo developers, that take photos of cool retail in the area to put into their brochures in order to help sell their product. They benefit from the land speculation and the work from others.

I don't really have a solution except that I can see that the landlords benefit from scarcity, and their leverage and ability to raise rents would be lessened if there was more viable retail spaces to take advantage of.

So the city could help retailers by dramatically liberalizing retail zoning and allowing more competitive high streets to develop. This could take the edge off being forced to move by a landlord jacking up rent.

There's lots of support at 0

> I don't understand why people expect the Chinese economy to crash - they can basically make everything, a lot of which is internationally competitive, they can trade for the resources they don't have with the goods that they do - with basically the whole world dependent on them.

One absolutely would have been able to say the same thing about Japan in the 1990s when they were top of the world.

So I dunno! Anything's possible!