Jordan7hm posted:

I like this slightly more articulate and snarky CI.

I'm really curious about your position vis-a-vis rental properties Helsing. If you don't think real estate should be treated as investments how do you think people who can't afford to buy a home should live? Do you think the state should own all rental housing?

quote:

In World's Best-Run Economy, House Prices Keep Falling -- Because That's What House Prices Are Supposed To Do

Eamonn Fingleton , CONTRIBUTOR
A sharp eye on media bias, official propaganda, and globaloney.

When Americans travel abroad, the culture shocks tend to be unpleasant. Robert Locke’s experience was different. In buying a charming if rundown house in the picturesque German town of Goerlitz, he was surprised – very pleasantly – to find city officials second-guessing the deal. The price he had agreed was too high, they said, and in short order they forced the seller to reduce it by nearly one-third. The officials had the seller’s number because he had previously promised to renovate the property and had failed to follow through.

As Locke, a retired historian, points out, the Goerlitz authorities’ attitude is a striking illustration of how differently the German economy works. Rather than keep their noses out of the economy, German officials glory in influencing market outcomes. While the Goerlitz authorities are probably exceptional in the degree to which they micromanage house prices, a fundamental principle of German economics is to keep housing costs stable and affordable.

It is hard to quarrel with the results. On figures cited in 2012 by the British housing consultant Colin Wiles, one-bedroom apartments in Berlin were then selling for as little as $55,000, and four-bedroom detached houses in the Rhineland for just $80,000. Broadly equivalent properties in New York City and Silicon Valley were selling for as much as ten times higher.

Although conventional wisdom in the English-speaking world holds that bureaucratic intervention in prices makes for subpar outcomes, the fact is that the German economy is by any standards one of the world’s most successful. Just how successful is apparent in, for instance, international trade. At $238 billion in 2012, Germany’s current account surplus was the world’s largest. On a per-capita basis it was nearly 15 times China’s and was achieved while German workers were paid some of the world’s highest wages. Meanwhile German GDP growth has been among the highest of major economies in the last ten years and unemployment has been among the lowest.

On Wiles’s figures, German house prices in 2012 represented a 10 percent decrease in real terms compared to thirty years ago. That is a particularly astounding performance compared to the UK, where real prices rose by more than 230 percent in the same period. (Wiles’s commentaries can be read here and here.)

A key to the story is that German municipal authorities consistently increase housing supply by releasing land for development on a regular basis. The ultimate driver is a central government policy of providing financial support to municipalities based on an up-to-date and accurate count of the number of residents in each area.

The German system moreover is deliberately structured to encourage renting rather than owning. Tenants enjoy strong rights and, provided they pay their rent, are virtually immune from eviction and even from significant rent increases.

Meanwhile demand for owner occupation is curbed by German regulation. German banks, for instance, are rarely permitted to lend more than 80 percent of the value of a property, thus a would-be home buyer first needs to accumulate a deposit of at least 20 percent. To cap it all, ownership of a home is subject to a serious consumption tax, while landlords are encouraged by favorable tax treatment to maximize the availability of rental properties.

How does all this contribute to Germany’s economic growth? Locke, a prominent critic of America’s latter-day enthusiasm for doctrinaire free-market solutions and a professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii, notes that a key outcome is that Germany’s managed housing market helps smooth the availability of labor. And by virtually eliminating bubbles, the German system minimizes the sort of misallocation of resources that is more or less unavoidable in the Anglo-American boom-bust cycle. That cycle is exacerbated by tax incentives which encourage citizens to view home ownership as an investment, resulting in much hoarding and underutilization of space.

In the German system moreover, house-builders rarely accumulate the huge large land banks that are such a dangerous distraction for U.S. house-builders like Pulte Homes, D. R. Horton, Lennar, and Toll Brothers. German house-builders just focus on building good-quality homes cheaply, secure in the knowledge that additional land will become available at reasonable cost when needed.

Locke is the co-author, with J.C. Spender, of Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance, a book I highly recommend.

flakeloaf posted:

Yes, the tax revenue collected from smokers oughtweighs their medical costs.

Jan posted:

Cool, when you get cancer from secondhand smoke, do put on your big boy pants and tell us how that works out.

Trapick posted:

The danger of secondhand smoke is significant if you live or work somewhere people are regularly smoking*. If I walk by a smoking guy in a park every day or two that's not going to do a drat thing to my risk of cancer. It should be heavily taxed and banned in workplaces obviously, but outdoors it's fine. If butts are a significant problem where you are, campaign for better enforcement of littering laws.

*30% increased risk of developing heart disease or lung cancer. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44324/

Count Roland posted:

Yeah, this. I don't like smoke either but if it isn't being blown right in my face I can probably tolerate it for a couple minutes.

THC posted:

Rosie Dimanno wrote a racist article and when called out she declined to defend it claiming "some of us have to go to work"




...implying that indigenous people like him don't have to.

quote:

Only the bullies and bureaucrats of grievance could possibly find stereotyping offence in the noble profile of an Indian chief. Originally designed to honour an American army unit, the Black Hawks Division, formed in the First World War, in turn commemorating a Sauk and Fox Indian leader who actually fought against the U.S. government during the War of 1812.
But of course the professional taste inquisitors have taken umbrage because that’s what they do, if primarily to justify their existence, endlessly striving to homogenize the language and the landscape. Colour your world beige, bland and banal.

THC posted:

Rosie Dimanno wrote a racist article and when called out she declined to defend it claiming "some of us have to go to work"




...implying that indigenous people like him don't have to.

THC posted:

Rosie Dimanno wrote a racist article and when called out she declined to defend it claiming "some of us have to go to work"




...implying that indigenous people like him don't have to.

Jordan7hm posted:

Or that whining on Twitter is the worst kind of activism. Or both!

quote:

The Cleveland Indians have endured withering criticism for clinging to their cartoonish Chief Wahoo (actually a brave, one feather) emblem, though he’s been downsized in recent years, with the club emphasizing a blocky “C” on away uniforms. Naysayers object to the big nose and the red pigmentation, but he’s a caricature, and caricatures are always exaggerations. I don’t see where red skin is inherently racist, any more than black or brown. Nor are big noses a feature exclusive to any ethnicity. Yet small groups of Native Americans have staged protests on Opening Day for the past two decades. And every year, polls show an overwhelming majority of Clevelanders opposed to ditching the grinning ’toon. Again, the alleged stereotype is in the eyes of the perceiver.

Helsing posted:

Helsing posted:

I challenge anyone to read DiManno's trash article and then defend it here:


Twitter activism would be trying to measure your success by how many times someone retweets your stupid hashtag or whatever. Calling out a lovely journalist for writing a lovely article and happening to use twitter because it's (regrettably) now one of the main forums for such conversations isn't really "twitter activism" in any meaningful sense of the term, its just public communication.

I'm not exactly thrilled with the direction of a lot of modern activism that is focused on this kind of symbolism, but in this particular case I don't see how any reasonable person could fail to see DiManno is full of poo poo here.

quote:

We worked as a team, silently, efficiently. We had brought two helium tanks in bulky boxes labelled “party balloon kits.” Evelyn placed them beside Al’s bed. She attached plastic tubing to a Y-connection joined to both tanks, so the contents would feed simultaneously into a plastic bag. Our exit bag was 56 centimetres by 91 centimetres, with elastic sewn into a flannelette collar; a Velcro strip was used to seal the bag snugly around the neck.

Evelyn placed the exit bag around Al’s forehead, and I inflated it with helium. I waited a few minutes longer, still pinching his skin to make sure he was deeply sedated. The inflated bag rose above his head like a chef’s hat. It had to be fully inflated before being pulled down to minimize available oxygen. Evelyn pulled the bag down over his head and sealed the collar. I increased the helium flow.

The body shows no adverse reaction to pure helium. It responds as if the person is breathing normal air, except that the lack of oxygen causes the brain to black out within seconds. Al took a deep breath, and his body went limp. After two or three minutes, he seemed to draw a final breath, but this may have been purely reflexive. I allowed both tanks to empty into the exit bag. Then we removed the tanks and put them back in Evelyn’s van for disposal. We had chosen a secluded dumpster in advance, one with no surveillance cameras.

On the way out, around 11 p.m., I stopped to speak with Eurithe, who was dwelling deeply in her own thoughts and feelings. (A family member was present to comfort her.) I nodded and said, “It went well.” I did not need to remind her that, in the morning, she was to call 911, as if she had just woken to discover her husband’s lifeless body. No questions were raised. The media reported that Al Purdy died in his sleep from lung cancer.

His assisted death was the fifth of eight that Evelyn and I provided. The poet Susan Musgrave, who knew Al well, wrote of his final months: “Al looked at death the same way he has always looked at life—right between the eyes.” That was my impression as well.

THC posted:

Rosie Dimanno wrote a racist article and when called out she declined to defend it claiming "some of us have to go to work"




...implying that indigenous people like him don't have to.

Square Peg posted:

This claim was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell, noted 3rd party tabacco industry shill, and was based off of a study that Phillip Morris (indirectly) funded in the early 90s order to argue against proposed cigarette tax increases, arguing that the taxes would end up costing the (US) government more by way of medicare/medicaid. It's total nonsense. Repeatedly damaging your body by smoking and being sick all the time uses up tons of medial resources. And, yes, you might die earlier in your life, but that means you lose more working years, and so the tax base takes another big hit. The garbage continues to be parroted by the usual subjects, but it's never been true.

Kafka Esq. posted:

http://torontolife.com/city/life/john-hofsess-assisted-suicide/

By The Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead edit: by John Hofsess

The Duggler posted:

Thanks for this, do you have any other resources to learn more about this kind of thing? As a 26 year old the housing marketing is increasingly becoming something of interest to me, while also becoming less and less accessible as housing prices just go up and up

quote:

A $15 billion lawsuit by the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline against the US government shows the serious threat to democracy posed by special privileges for investors, a new report has said. TransCanada is suing under investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clauses of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to demand damages following rejection of the controversial pipeline due to its climate impact.

Keystone illustrates how the increasingly common ISDS clauses, that are contained in the draft EU-Canada trade agreement (CETA) and the proposed EU-US deal (TTIP), can be used to undermine climate action, the report by T&E, Friends of the Earth Europe and Sierra Club stated.

Last year US president Barack Obama denied permission to build the US-stage of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to American refineries, as it was not in the interest of national security and would have undercut America’s climate leadership. TransCanada’s lawsuit is under chapter 11 of NAFTA, which allows multinational corporations to sue governments if they feel they have not been treated as a domestic company would have been.

TransCanada has reportedly invested $3.1 billion in the project but is seeking five times this amount in damages. It will be able to launch its case as early as May 2016. A three-judge tribunal will issue a ruling, which cannot be appealed to any national court. It can award damages but not force the US to grant permission for Keystone to be built

Cécile Toubeau, better trade manager at T&E, said: ‘This is yet another example of how ISDS halts climate action. Worryingly, the revised Commission proposal on ISDS does not prevent this type of undemocratic privileges for foreign investors, which comes at the expense of citizens and the environment.’

If TTIP and CETA are passed with ISDS, thousands more corporations will be able to sue the US, Canada and EU member states for actions they take to protect citizens and the environment, the report finds. So even during the years when the Paris climate deal was being negotiated, the EU was providing, via TTIP and CETA, investors more opportunities to challenge climate action.

Last week trade negotiators from the EU and US discussed a European proposal for an ‘Investment Court System’ as an alternative to ISDS in the TTIP deal. The proposed new court has been roundly criticised by civil society for failing to fundamentally reform investor privileges and being legally questionable.

brucio posted:

Andrew Coyne is weird

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/704484423283183616

Hagborn posted:

Canada Goose jackets are so loving ugly

Kafka Esq. posted:

Oh no, coat chat.

brucio posted:

Andrew Coyne is weird

https://twitter.com/acoyne/status/704484423283183616

Kafka Esq. posted:

Oh no, coat chat.

Cultural Imperial posted:

In case you're all wondering what I really mean to say is, because I can buy such stupidly expensive garbage I am definitely much better than any of you

Helsing posted:

If you read through old planning documents you'll find some really heinous stuff. I remember reading one of the documents setting out a master plan for the Jane Finch area (somewhat unusually the entire area was bought by the province in the 1950s with plans to use part of it for social housing and part of it for what became York University. In the original version of the master plan York's main gate even opened onto the Jane and Finch intersection). The document says something like "Since this area (Jane and Finch) will be noisy and high traffic it will be ideal for low income housing". It's that blatant; this is gonna be a noisy, dirty area, so it's perfect for the poors.

And yet, despite that, they were still building low income housing. And a lot of it. Under Frederick G. Gardiner postwar Toronto got loaded up with some really lovely highways (the Gardiner express among them) but we also built a lot of social housing, and Gardiner and other members of the Metro government were way more willing to tell NIMBYists to gently caress off when they complained about the city building social housing nearby.

It's remarkable how awful the 1950s-1970s seemed while they were happening, and yet how often they seem like a lost golden age now when we can't even be bothered to construct rat infested slums for the poor.

Whiskey Sours posted:

conservative>conservative>principled>competent>crazy>stupid>crazy stupid

Dreylad posted:

I have! Well some of them. The trifecta of the Spadina, Scarborough and Gardiner Expressways would have really reshaped Toronto, and it's impressive that two of the three were stopped. It's a small miracle that Toronto didn't completely eliminate its streetcars. God knows how bad things would be without them. Although I think the real transformation of the city can't be seen in grand infrastructure projects and sweeping building developments but the gradual widening of city streets, the growing pathways of concrete, reclaiming more of the lakeshore, etc. It's boring and difficult to track but you really see modern Toronto take shape in those little changes, even if they have long-term consequences (green to greyscape, restricting pathways to and from neighbourhoods, the economic consequences of plazas and malls).

Although by the early 1970s there was a growing resistance to state infrastructure projects for a variety of reasons, from environmental to heritage. Jack Granatstein of all people wrote a community history of one neighbourhood that resisted part of the Spadina expressway that would have knocked over dozens of houses. David Crombie ran on an anti-developer platform and won.

Helsing posted:

Another great example of why letting corporations sue governments for lost profits is a really good idea.

Cerepol posted:

Is the Canadian goose new or am I just oblivious. I swear I've never seen that logo before but now I see tons of people wearing it

HookShot posted:

They've been around for ages but for some reason over the last 2 years or so they've become super in style and now everyone and their dog has one.

I personally think they're super ugly, but to be fair if I still lived in Ottawa and it was -30 all the time and they were the warmest jacket I could find I would definitely buy one and wear it everywhere because gently caress being cold.

Hal_2005 posted:

Make rules. Populists change the rules for some, but not for all companies. Companies, like all people argue for bias and win damages. Did you take the dumb pills again Helsing?

peter banana posted:

You lost. This isn't okay anymore. Let it go.