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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • We bear witness. But CBC News does not itself designate specific groups as terrorists, or specific acts as terrorism, regardless of the region or the events, because these words are so loaded with meaning, politics and emotion that they can end up being impediments to our journalism.

    Surely there are objective examples that require no attribution though. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center is a good example.

    As well, I don’t think there’s any argument that the Hamas attack on Israel could be anything other than a terrorist attack (without attribution) because they targeted civilians with the specific intent to kidnap. It wasn’t a country invading another country, or a case of a resistance force pushing out an occupier. Had Hamas attacked only military targets only the hard liners would call it a terrorist attack. But what Hamas committed was terrorist atrocities.

    On the flip side, one could argue that Israel’s retaliations are state-sanctioned reprisals that ostensibly act as a means of terror to the Palestinian population. However, since Israel as a nation is condoning the military action I don’t think it could strictly be said it’s terrorism.






  • I agree it’s not the supermarkets’ fault but it’s an industry problem. Why is everything wrapped in plastic? Even bananas and cucumbers and things that don’t need plastic?

    One thing we could do is have refillable containers and just reuse them! Why are bulk aisles just a thing for nuts and grains? Why can’t we come and fill up milk or shampoo or other things in our refillables?

    Anyway, the bigger story is that there are too many humans. We don’t have a plastics problem, we have a human overpopulation problem.




  • I’m not sure what a solution is but I do think that we should encourage people to not have children, stop handing out the baby bonus, and reduce immigration. I feel these moves can provide a (non-genocidal) way to relieving the pressures of human overpopulation. For example, Japan is doing great work in reducing their population, a trend that will reduce the strain of housing and services in that country.




  • Immigrants are at least partly to blame for the pressures. I mean, it’s impossible they’re NOT impacting the cost of housing. If you add 400,000 people to a country and do not add 400,000 units of new housing that year, you’re in a deficit. It’s Grade 1 math.

    But what is genuinely to blame is a cogent political strategy to house Canadians. We can’t just leave it to the private sector to maximize profits. We can’t expect homeowners to make secondary suites. We can’t do nothing.

    Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource. It may sound right-wing but that’s the way it goes.





  • I.e. you see your home as an investment from which you expect to see a positive return, but now you are afraid that it may lose some of that value.

    No, I don’t see it as an investment. The way the system works sees it as an investment. We’ve created a system whereby housing is overvalued because it’s meant to have inflationary payoffs.

    My parents didn’t see our home as an investment. They just bought homes at random that were close to where they worked and seemed good for kids.

    There’s no option for me to buy a place that isn’t an investment because that’s the very nature of the market.



  • Sorry, you misunderstand slightly.

    I don’t mean investors in the sense of speculative parasitic humans who are devaluing life by overvaluing housing.

    I mean, people like me who have worked from the age of 15-49 and now own a very modest sized apartment that is grotesquely overpriced and has quite literally enslaved me to mortgage payments for years to come.

    If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.

    And this isn’t the same argument as the “why should people get free school when I had to pay student loans” since one doesn’t affect the other. In this situation, if the value of homes come down too significantly, it’s literally devaluing my work.

    I didn’t create the horrible dystopian system we live in but I do unfortunately have to abide by its rules. And now that I have a tiny piece (on paper but owned by the bank) I am hoping (like most Canadians) to take that piece and cash out to retire on in 10-15 years time.

    What I’d really like to see is some kind of national housing strategy that guaranteed people basic housing regardless of their income (even if it’s “zero”). That housing wouldn’t impact the market but it could slow down the unhealthy growth of the valuation of housing.

    If we could totally slow housing valuation growth to the normal 2% inflation, while also creating affordable housing for lower income/no income earners, then the system could adjust and that could be a true win win.