You can’t redistribute your way out of a shortage. Any solution to the housing crisis that doesn’t involve a shitload more housing is rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

Refined form of Betteridge’s law of headlines: if any headline asks “can Toronto” anything, the answer is definitely very no.

Trans rights are human rights. That includes the right for privacy and safety of trans children.

The trick is the “half million population limit” he promised, which will make densification something he does to the Liberal cities on behalf of his exurban voter-base. And this is a specific, quantifiable promise he has mentioned repeatedly with hard numbers.

I don’t discount the possibility he could half-ass it and let it die in consultation the way the Liberals did with electoral reform… but on the other hand, when have Conservatives ever given a shit about consultation?

Edit: either way, I’m not saying “conservatives are good”. I hate them for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is they represent an active threat to trans friends and family.

All I’m saying is “using the threat of municipal funding cuts to force cities to fix their planning departments and rapidly greenlight large infill developments is a good idea and the Liberals+NDP should steal it”.

I used to bike commute every day before we went remote at the start of the pandemic. I did not find that it helped much. Maybe a little. But I’ve never found cycling gets my heart going the way running or a rowing machine does.

The fact that American sprawl cities have affordable housing shows that sprawl does help. Yes, sprawl is bad economics and worse environmentalism, but it does control housing prices.

For example, Zillow pegs the median home price in Houston, TX at $260k USD. It’s a suburban hellscape, but a reasonably-priced one.

That would only make sense if 100% of company 1’s costs were gasoline. Also, the carbon tax has been going up every year since it first appeared in 2019. The price spike started last year. And the same price spikes are happening in every country, and most countries don’t have carbon taxes.

Right but I’m talking about federal and that’s provincial. In fact, Ford put together a Housing Affordability Task Force a few years back and that’s exactly what they recommended! He just… y’know… didn’t do any of it. Not sure why he even asked them in the first place.

prices have increased for me

The price jump has nothing to do with the carbon tax. The carbon tax is $0.14 per litre, so it’s only about 10% of the price of gas. That means it can only be blamed for 10% of the price-jump at an absolute upper limit, and that’s only if your diet consists of chugging gasoline (hey, I don’t judge).

If prices were only up 10% since last year I’d be goddamned ecstatic.

It’s not. It’s supply-chains, shockwaves from covid-shutdowns, pandemic-spending, a massive war in Asia between the world’s biggest gas and grain providers, and anti-globalist on-shoring driving up prices. The last one of those isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has a cost just like carbon pricing has a cost.

We don’t really know what they’d build given the choice since one of those options is generally illegal (you can get special executive permission that makes it legal, but you could say the same about murdering people in countries that have a pardoning system).

The problem is, as I said, this is one of the few times where “letting dead-eyed mobbed up property developers make a goddamned mountain of money” will actually help everyone. I mean, even the abominable and corrupt crap Ford is doing to the greenbelt will help - every house, even million-dollar mcmansions, helps fight the crisis.

It’s a game of musical chairs where the chairs are allocated by money instead of by speed. Adding more chairs to the game helps more people win regardless. Even if you’re adding more thrones, that means there’s more milking-stools left-over for the poor instead of those milking-stools getting flipped and upgraded into artisanal urban kneeling seats to sell to the people who have the money for thrones.

And not only that, but PP’s stated plan: kick municipal asses until they start hitting housing targets? That would force municipalities to allow more housing. And assuming greenbelts remain in place (fingers-crossed), that would mean that cities would by necessity have to upzone and implement better, more urbanist, more intesification-friendly planning policies. That’s way better than Ford’s greenbelt crap, but then Ford didn’t campaign on the greenbelt crap.

But yes, assuming PP is being honest about his plan: It’s sneaky and yet still far better than not doing it and I’m mostly angry at his opponents for getting us to this point.

He might go through with it, but he specifically targets “cities of over a half-million people”. Here in Hamilton, most suburbs have fantasies about de-amalgamation, and with Conservative provincial governments in charge I could see that happening to pander to them. I mean, while it’s not directly applicable here, note how Ford is accommodating Mississauga’s exit of the Peel region – not directly comparable because it’s above the limit and the members of Peel that are below the limit are already their own cities and towns since it’s just a regional government and not a municipality. But still, it shows how the door is open for this conversation.

Basically, PP will pander to his base by making urban intensification something he does to the cities on behalf of his suburban supporters. I mean, his biggist threat against these cities is to cut transit funding… do most crappy stand-alone exurbs even have transit?

And as grotesque and craven as that is, it’s somehow still a better plan than anything his opponents have offered.

He will never get my vote. I can hear the transphobic dog-whistles and have people I need to protect. But I won’t blame others for choosing differently, and I do blame the entire political centre and left for carving out the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decorate the top when it comes to housing, which created the policy vacuum that PP stepped into.

The problem is we’re facing a crisis where once in the entire stupid goddamned history of economic crises, this the one time where small-government libertarianism actually really would help. Municipal government overrestriction of housing-construction (also a few federal housing regs like single-stair construction) is a massive chunk of the problem. And both the Liberal and NDP parties have a very tight relationship with municipal governments and so they want to keep their friends there. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre isn’t a “friends” type of person, so he’s able to call out the “let them eat cake” politics of municipal governments.

Of course, (a) there’s a substantial chance that PP is lying about his plans to strongarm municipal governments, and (b) while he may help solve the crisis with that action, he will also likely help exacerbate it on the other hand by slashing supports for the poorest Canadians, and he’ll also create a few new crises related to climate change and LGBTQ rights, and possibly vaccines.

So yeah, no love for him.

But I’m not looking forward to the day when a Conservative federal government is kicking municipal asses and I have to go to bat for an absolute shitheel like Poilievre on the principle that he is right exclusively on this one very specific issue.

looks.

Ooh, that’s neat! My only complaint looking at it is that they didn’t figure out some place to put a right-side thumbpad for a better mouse-mode. Joystick mouse emulation is a miserable solution, and the central thumbpad is too far for gaming (ask anybody who played Mario 64 or Metroid Hunters on the DS). My dream machine would be to use the old Blackberry trick of making the right-side of the keyboard able to masquerade as a touchpad (you literally run your thumb along the keyboard and it’s a pointing device), add a face-toggle-button to switch between mouse-mode and keyboard mode, and then add a scrollwheel shoulder-button.

The Logitech G-Cloud is similarly top-specced and pricy, although iirc it’s supposedly more lightweight and comfortable than its counterparts. It’s getting very crowded in that space, I don’t envy any of these companies that jumped onto this band wagon and found everybody else doing the same thing at the same time.

I’ve tried using gamer-clips on my phone and the top-heavy weight distribution makes them uncomfortable despite the lower-mass of phone+controller, so I can see how that would be a design challenge. I still wish Lenovorola had stuck to it harder with the Moto-mods, but I suppose the death of the Atom processor line and Windows Phone means that any such device would have to be Android, and gamers want x86-64 PC-compatible devices, and that’s probably not doable in a phone form-factor.

I’m just going by personal experience here - here in #HamOnt all of the chargers I know of that are working are on private parking lots, all the ones I know of that are not working are

a) On municipal parking lots,

and

b) Aren’t just “not working” but were in fact installed years ago but never actually finished to the point of being turned-on and usable. Like, there’s a fully installed EV charger, there are patches in the asphalt leading away from it that shows a bunch of underground work was done to support it (presumably hooking it to mains), but the screen is blank and dark and has been since the day it was installed long ago.

With the current housing crisis, I’ve come to the assumption you can never go broke betting on municipal incompetence.

They’re jumping into a very crowded space, one where Valve is the first-to-market. That said, Valve is good at proving a hardware market viable and then flubbing at actually dominating it (VR, PC set-top boxes) so I could see somebody like Lenovo winning at this.

I’m kind of surprised they went for the Switch/Tablet form-factor for this instead of targeting the phone scale, but Lenovorola already cratered at trying to do this as a phone once before (Moto Z with the gamepad mod).

Ditto. I subbed for yuks and solidarity with trans friends and family.

I had some mini ones last week. Seedless and still excellent. Maybe try the minis?

Exactly. Municipal governments block affordable housing construction that everyone agrees is a good idea, and everybody blames the Fed for the housing crisis, despite that they have no constitutional power to override the Municipalities (but the provinces do, but they’re happy to let the press blame the Feds while they exploit the housing crisis to give land to sprawl developers out in suburbia).