Adding to this, but I’m also not aware of many great Product Managers, UX designers or UX writers contributing to FOSS. Many devs have worked with shitty PM’s and like to dismiss their value, but a great one can make a massive difference in the quality of a product.

Same with the extensive UX design and UX testing that goes into making great products.

Ha, yes I heard plans that I believe would actively make it worse from the Cons and PPC, and plans that I believe will have a marginal positive impact, but won’t address the problem from the Libs and NDP. Reducing the cost of housing by 1-2% or even 5% isn’t going to make $1M house suddenly affordable.

If done at massive scale then yes that would also work, but I don’t believe the Canadian government is willing to go there either. It would truly need to be a huge scale to be able to bring housing back to affordable levels.

I think that is a second best solution, but would take a huge investment from our government.

It would still tank a lot of people’s retirements, because at its core more affordable housing means people can sell their houses for a lot less.

At its root I think Georgism is actually quite socialist. You are effectively saying nobody really owns land anymore, but instead have to rent it from the state for the value that you would get if you rented out just the land.

Totally fair. I think it’s just terribly unlikely to ever happen, and the ramifications aren’t really understood.

It amounts to wealth redistribution at the end of the day. Tax the land at a really high rate and redistribute the tax to everyone equally. This is precisely why it won’t take hold. Too many people have invested in land speculation (which is where most real estate investment profits come from) and it would tank a lot of peoples savings and retirement plans - but so would anything that delivers on affordable housing at scale.

So I at least don’t think it is a silver bullet. The obvious downside is that a lot of retirees who were counting on using the proceeds of selling their house to fund their retirement or end of life care would be absolutely fucked by it. Retirement homes are really expensive. It’s a choice though. We either decide to hurt the retirees who can’t work anymore, or put the pressure onto the youth and others starting out who have the ability to dig out of this mess.

When I bought my house I paid $330k for everything. Now the land alone is worth more than that. We’ll never see affordable houses again until the cost of land goes down, and Georgism is the only path to that I’ve heard of. I am not sure if this is something we should do or not.

I’ve heard them say it, but then quickly walk it back with phrases like how of course they are for affordable housing.

Note that this isn’t a liberal, conservative or even NDP or PPC thing. I haven’t heard ANY of them propose anything that would actually make housing affordable at scale.

If you’re heard any different please point me to it.

There is only one mechanism that both reduces rent, and increases housing supply that I’ve heard of. Taxing the shit out of the land value (not the property value) a.k.a. Georgism.

The problem with this is that it WILL reduce the cost of housing which isn’t what our leaders actually want. They won’t say that part out loud though. This is because people want both affordable housing for our youth and people starting out, and they want retirees to be able to cash in on the value of their home.

You CAN’T have both things. If the market was flooded with $300k houses then the value of everyone’s house would plummet because why wouldn’t you just buy a $300K house instead of a $1M house?

When you are starting out in an hiring environment like this, you pretty much have to do this, but you should also be prepared to back it up.

25 years ago during a major tech downturn I said I had experience with C for my first programming job (I didn’t, but I knew others). Before I started I studied my ass off and learned it so I wouldn’t look like a fool on the job.

End result was that when I started, I knew C.

Don’t lie about stuff that is easy to verify like a degree from Harvard. That is just asking to be blackballed.

Maybe yours doesn’t, but plenty do.

Source: have worked at multiple companies interviewing people who would have been promising candidates, but got bounced during the screening process.

Believe it or not but I’ve seen the mobile apps be required to use totally different abstraction layers than websites, usually due to different authentication and access management methods.

“Back-end” is often relative when talking about these old systems. There are sometimes multiple layers of abstraction with different business logic built into each layer.

It’s fixable of course, but it is costly to unwind 30-40 years of bad technical decisions made by business people who never understood the systems they were making decisions for.

I might know the answer to your last point. I have experience working with financial services and large old institutions.

In short the front end is likely lighting fast and lightweight but the services it relies are incredibly old and outdated. Like mainframes running COBOL old. There is likely some abstraction but there are also likely literal decades of technical debt. Sometimes a call to understand what should be simple like what accounts does this client have might need to call multiple legacy systems that were integrated over the course of multiple acquisitions.

Slackware in 1998 I think, from a cd that came in a book I bought while in university.

It didn’t stick, but it demystified it and I’ve used a lot of flavours of *nix since then.

I remember not being able to get sound to work at all on my pentium computer.

Ya, I’m a lefty city dweller who also happens to be a gun owner. If you have gone through what it takes to get your license I believe most people will realize that the rules are fine.

Edit: pre the most recent liberal bans I mean. The total ban on handguns and specific scary black guns is quite ridiculous. I own an SKS and I’m just waiting for it to be banned.

Now I have also been to several ranges where I meet morons and start to question if they should own guns, but I’m not worried about them committing crimes, I’m just worried about accidents.

Those will help a bit and sound good, but will take decades to bring down costs, if at all.

They also do nothing to prevent investors from buying up all of the land. My main criticism against it vs the liberal plan is that they have no restrictions on the tax reduction on ALL sales of homes.

This is a good benefit for individuals, but a massive benefit to investors. Why they wouldn’t limit it to only primary residences boggles my mind.

He liberals limit it to first time home buyers which has its own problems (prevents downsizing for seniors etc), but it is much better than the cons plan.

I should also say that I believe the only way out of the housing crisis is significant tax reform, specifically a revenue neutral land tax that is very heavy based on what the owner could get by renting the land, but gets equally distributed back to the people.

I don’t see anything that stops investors from buying the homes to rent out. Without it we’re bound to continue to move towards effectively feudalism.

The only thing I have heard of that will actually solve this long term is a heavy cost neutral land tax. Tax the land for the value you can get for renting it and then redistribute the tax income equally back to the people.

I agree that the liberal record in housing is terrible, but looking at the conservative proposed policies I believe they will only make things worse. It’s like it is designed to sound good but enrich investors.

Do we know if it is even possible for another company to take over starlink infrastructure ? These are satellites. It’s not like they’re cables in the ground.