I think what’s happening is that the old political boundaries are being rewritten. The MAGA crowd don’t hold all the same views as old school conservatives, and so some of them are now swing voters. But also Trump is pulling some votes from the democrats, most obviously the unions

I was ready for this to be a case of the students being too easily triggered, but boy was I wrong!

The real question is, how can we avoid the maple leaf being griefed?

Here’s the girl’s facebook post since it wasn’t linked in the article: https://www.facebook.com/emma.maclean.376/posts/1624020878439140?ref=embed_post

The powers that be will likely push for cashless society because it gives them more surveillance & control

If credit/debit cards were the norm and cash was invented today, it would likely be outlawed down because criminals/terrorists/child kidnappers will use if for nefarious purposes

It’s crazy that they change the weights on these indexes. How are you supposed to get an accurate inflation number if you keep moving the goal posts

Online market places to be jointly and severally liable for anything on their sites

This should be something AI can do now. Give it a list of what kinds of ads are not allowed, and ask it if the contents of this ad are acceptable

There’s been a slight downtick in recent years, but it’s still up +10 years from 1970

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/life-expectancy

While I think the student protest are misguided, this seems like a good development. People have a right to (peacefully) protest, and universities shouldn’t forcibly remove people that aren’t hurting others or damaging property

It’s not the simple unfortunately, because of 2 factors:

1. Our boomers are a very large generation, larger than the millenials

2. Life expectancy has increased so people live much longer (with high medical costs)

In the 70s - 2000s we had a large generation of in their working years paying for a small generation’s 5-10 year retirement

Now, we have a small generation in their working years paying for a large generation 15-25 year retirement

And this is not something we can solve by just “taxing the rich”. The numbers are so huge that taxing Canada’s richest people is a drop in the bucket

I can’t believe the carbon tax is getting such bad press lately. IMO it’s one of the best policies to come out of the current government. Everyone is upset about high gas prices, but the forget that they get a big rebate at the end of the year. This means for people with fuel efficient cars, the tax is minimal, and the gas guzzlers pay a lot. Encourages better use of limited resources.

This is a bit of a fallacy. In a normal market, the rent for a home is less than the costs of home ownership (mortgage + maintenance + taxes) and that saved money can be used to purchase other assets.

Until the real estate mania of the last few years, if you followed this strategy, you would not be any worse off than the person who bought their home.

I personally would much rather have equity in more fungible assets than a home. Owning a home ties you to a specific location, and can’t easily be sold in an emergency. Plus it’s not a very diverse portfolio if most of you wealth is in a single property

It would be very stupid to set up a system where you have to give the porn site your ID. Better to just have an attestation that this user is over 18 years old.

There even ways to do this without the government knowing which site you visited with zero knowledge cryptography. But that would probably require everyone to get a Yubi key or equivalent, which might be hard to swallow

Governments already have systems to handle citizen IDs. They’re not perfect, and fake ones do get created, but they’re good enough. All that is needed is to connect that system to a UBI key or other device. Then websites could use cryptographic tools (signatures, ZK-SNARKS, etc) to verify that someone is over 18 without revealing their identity

I fear internet ID is coming whether we like it or not. AI powered bots will pass all captchas and be indistinguishable from humans. The open, pseudonymous internet cannot survive under those conditions. You could spend all day without seeing a comment by a real human.

I suspect some of the negativity comes from porn users who are in denial

It seems to me much more likely that the porn industry is financing studies that say there is nothing wrong with porn use. The means and motive make a lot more sense going in that direction, as they don’t want to be seen as the new cigarettes

I agree some are problematic. The first one is based on brain scans, which is hard to refute. And there are many more like it

The porn industry has a vested interest in suppressing this, and billions of dollars to spend muddying the waters.

There are many studies that indicate porn use can negatively affect your brain, sexual performance, and pro-social behaviour.

Porn linked to decreased grey matter

Porn addiction linked to lower executive functioning

Porn linked to negative social behaviour

Meta analysis on research into adolescents porn use discusses a range of negative outcomes such as anxiety, suicidal ideation, social isolation, and academic disengagement

I’m not really sure this law will “solve” the problem, or if it’s a good solution to the problem. But there are real, negative outcomes of internet porn

The only developed country that doesn’t seem to have a housing crisis right now is Japan. After their real estate market collapsed in the 90s, they instituted a number of reforms to make housing less attractive as an investment vehicle. Now housing there tends to depreciate over time, not appreciate. Consequently, it’s viewed not as an investment but as a consumer product, much like buying a car, and there is competition that brings costs down.

I think this is the sensible approach we need to follow in the rest of the developed world, but I don’t think it’s not going to be politically feasible until a lot of homeowners feel a lot of pain and give up on the idea of housing as an investment