Tiktaalik

you get rich assholes that have an ability to casually leave so aren't really invested in the country.

yeah a misguided fixed pie scarcity mindset

My ancestors were dirt farmers with absolutely nothing despite their health and work ethic that moved here in the 1930s. Do we think Canada is better than then?

We really, really under value the impact of low income, low education immigrants imo.

Eg. The railway that created this country was built by low income Chinese workers that probably didn't even speak English.

Canada doesn't exist without the effort of low income, low education people.

People criticize everything all the time. Why wouldn't people?

I mean should we shut down hacker news? the whole point is discussing.

yea really. The reality is that people who want to move to Japan, learn Japanese, devote their life to this are probably very interested in Japanese culture. There is no risk to Japanese culture from these people.

It's absolutely more likely that the very wealthy that aren't taking as many risks in moving to Japan are not going to care about Japanese culture.

you're on a discussion forum. The point is to discuss things. Why are you being such a scold about what we're allowed to talk about.

Carbon tax was great for me. I made money. Maybe you should have used less carbon.

It's deeply weird how little interest there seems to be the inquiry of why Georgism failed in the past despite being an enormously popular political movement. It was tried. And abandoned. Investigating that history would yield a lot more compelling information than musing about the hypotheticals of what would happen if it was implemented now.

Well I'm speaking from first hand experience knowing working people who live in such situations. Their existence is so precarious that a change in housing situation is indeed existential. So even if there are some disingenuous tenancy orgs out there, it doesn't change the reality that this is a real problem.

> They are nearly 100% funded by wealth foundations that have exactly the same motivations as Marc Andreesen, and the people carrying out the wishes of the wealthy foundations are merely woke-washing really bad behavior.These "tenant" groups fight the types of change that would redevelop wealthy areas, precisely because of their funding sources, and they do it just as hard if not harder than stopping housing going up in other areas.

Certainly not the case in my jurisdiction of Vancouver, where such political groups (eg. COPE) have explicitly advocated for apartment development in the wealthiest areas of the city. Maybe this is the case somewhere but a big [citation needed] here. If there are somewhere tenant advocacy orgs that aren't in favour of turning low density detached homes into apartments for workers that's certainly not one I recognize.

> If anything, these "tenant" groups only advocate for the interests of a small subset of tenants, those who have their forever home, and do so at the expense of tenants in general. It's "pure greed" too, at the expense of others in their same general social, economic, and political class!

Yes this is the point of my last comment. The solution is to increase the amount of people who have their forever home. The most equitable way to do that is to "destroy" the forever homes of the very rich for whom that is really no big disruptive deal, not to destroy the forever homes of the poor for whom it would be incredibly existentially disruptive. It is not "greedy" for people to want to keep their toehold on their long term home. To be clear the stakes here are not simply moving somewhere else but being priced out of the city entirely.

Tenant advocates recognize that eviction is an existential threat to their way of life and so understandably they are fighting for their short term future. I disagree with their efforts in the long term, but I understand why they'd do what they're doing.

In contrast when you have enormously wealthy people like Marc Andreessen fighting against higher density zoning there is no such excuse and it's pure greed. Nothing could actually be an existential disruption to the wealthy in the same way. There is no reason to listen to the rich like Andreessen at all.

The equitable thing would be to focus on redeveloping wealthy homeowner areas and limit redevelopment in areas occupied by poor renters, but somehow that option never seems to be on the table. Only the reverse.

This is a solved problem in other jurisdictions. Effectively you can just allow seniors to defer their property taxes at low interest rates and it becomes a liability on the house when it is transferred on death.

wait where in Canada do they don't do pspspsps?

(is there a francophone different one?)

That's a good question. The British were definitely engaging in a very, very lucrative trade in sea otter pelts from the NW Coast of British Columbia, trading direct to Macau, and the Boston Men/USA got in on that as well over time.

Plausibly some agency (Hudson Bay company?) had a monopoly on beaver trade and this did not apply to sea otter, or maybe the story isn't quite right or there were other economic reasons why beavers to Asia as a concept wasn't exploited.

As I recall the reason for managing blocks of data this way was memory cache efficiency.

First Nations have treaties with Canada with constitutionally protected land use rights that have implications beyond tiny reserves. Rights to hunt and fish can be implicated by heavy industrial land use which compels a duty to consult. Doesn't mean that First Nations can veto a project, but also doesn't mean that all this can be ignored.

All of this is more complex in British Columbia where in many places treaties were never signed and so the land is unceded and under unresolved land claim.

There's also the tooling. Game teams have artists and designers where baroque command line incantations are headwinds to their workflow pace.

For the longest time Git tools were really poor. In recent years there's a few ok ones, like Git Fork, though I wouldn't know if those tools scale to the level of a AAA team size repo and not fall over.

You generally see this sort of thing in the games industry when a publisher gives a developer a bunch of money to make a game but then the developer screws up and runs out of money. Publisher buys them to try to recoup their investment.

Is Cursor dying?

It isn’t just rent seeking, it is regulation to try to compensate for the negative externalities of a private ride hail system (ie. Induced traffic).

Part of the origin story of taxi regulation is the fact that in the early 20th century unregulated cabs caused an explosion in traffic congestion. People complained and so the amount of cabs was limited. An example of the tragedy of the commons.

I expect that eventually we will see the same thing with Waymo etc but we’ll see.

I think there's a huge bias toward this "easy money" yea. I mean the Canadian government is in a bind with these tariff issues and what do they reflexively reach for? Pump more oil and gas. It's the easy fast, simple solution to problems and so every government returns to this well to the detriment of other industries that don't receive the same attention.

The wild thing is that Canada is absolutely not alone in having this sort of insanely restrictive land use regulatory environment, as you hear similar stories from the UK (see: Clarkson's Farm) and even the USA (see: restrictive SF zoning). So the question for me is how the USA and other countries with similar regulatory regimes do well in spite of these things.

With the USA a possible answer is that the scale and diversity of the market adds more competition (ie. low regulatory areas) that Canada doesn't have.

Or it's possible that all these countries have awful zoning but while this is awful the factors that make tech a success in the USA are unrelated and dominate this (eg. unmatched wealth and financing)

Describes Canada too!

They should just return cash to shareholders if they can't think of anything better to do, but I guess Zuck has too many shares and no one can force him to do this and so we have to watch him light money on fire as he chases some gimmick that will take Meta to the next level.

It's a real tragedy for North American gamers because it seems like we were robbed of a lot of truly amazing games for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx due to mistakes on the business side of things.

The PC Engine, released in 1987, was an incredible success in Japan, rivalling the Famicom, as its graphical effects blew the socks off Famicom players. I imagine it would have done the same in North America if it had released in 1987 or 1988 but sadly it somehow took until late August 1989 for it to be released! Years late!!!! By this point the NES was firmly established and the same month, the truly 16 bit Genesis would be released. Turbografx didn't stand a chance.

> Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave.

The reality is more the complete opposite. People from not-Alberta care about their own provincial governments and issues and don't really think about Alberta at all.

It's the media and government in Alberta that is encouraging this notion that "Alberta is under attack" from others because lazy grievance politics works and it's a good distraction from scrutiny on the failings of the Albertan provincial government. You see the government of Quebec do the same thing, blaming Rest of Canada for all their woes, wrapping themselves up in the provincial flag, etc etc.

Don't fall for this stuff.

And we already have an infrastructure bank! Trudeau started it. And Carney was the financial advisor to Trudeau, so it was probably his idea too! lol.

Yea really. Feels like a bit of a communications exercise and effort to create arms length distance from the Federal government and spending on major projects.

Now it's not the Federal government and taxpayers propping up the oil industry by buying yet another oil pipeline, but rather a "sovereign wealth fund" (funded by Canadian taxpayers).

You're right. I'm not sure how I got mislead or misremembered the dynamic here. I thought there was a specific clear tax benefit but doesn't seem so.

There are tax benefits for new buildings for a limited time so maybe that's what I was thinking about and became confused.

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.