This is the closest thing to a solution they will find. It’s too late to switch leaders. That might have worked a few months after the last election, especially if it had been coupled with a bit quicker action on the expansion of Medicare.

Now it’s their turn to take one for the team. We’ve been voting liberal instead of our true preference in order to keep the Conservatives from destroying our country. Now they have to go hat in hand to the NDP and hammer out a different voting system and put it in place before the next election. If they don’t, the Conservatives will take power and it will be their fault.

My wife and I watched this last night. Our conclusion was that there a whole lot of really dumb-ass investors out there.

The main thesis is that small, basically useless units are built to satisfy the requirements of people hoping to either flip directly or to rent to cover the difference between finance cost and eventual market value. That is they are built to the demands of the investors, both institutional and private.

How bad of an investor do you have to be to be sinking money into a dwelling that nobody actually wants to live in? And how did we get so many of them that it’s impacting housing to this degree?

My opinion is that someone, somewhere has been running a con. A scheme where your market is not people who want a place to live, but people who are looking to make a profit by selling to others looking to make a profit.

Now the scheme has run its course and the most recent owners can’t get out because, surprise!, nobody actually wants to mortgage their very lives for a glorified closet.

And the truly horrific part is that their advice further guts the civil service. That leaves us in a position where we have to hire fake experts as a substitute for the actual experts we used employ.

Forget all the “not actually first” and “misleading headline” stuff. If we can do this on donations, probably mostly from people only a paycheque away from needing a food bank themselves, imagine what we could do with an actual social system funded by properly taxing wealth, high income, and corporations. We could turn that headline into something approaching reality.

Yes, that too!

I agree. I’m also not a huge fan of rebranding “military conscription” as “national service”. There have been people talking about “national service” in ways that specifically excluded military service. This feels like yet another case of the right stealing a term from the left and redefining it to suit themselves. It’s something they have been doing with national and religious symbols and slogans forever as a way to hide their true intentions.

One thing I find particularly concerning is that military conscription has generally been reserved for invasion or active defense. What are they not telling us?

Maybe if the mandatory service were installing fiber to rural areas the way we managed to get copper out there or dealing with infrastructure (especially water and schools) in Indigenous and remote communities. Maybe health care or emergency response.

But guns and bombs? No thanks.

Also, I’m old enough to be exempt by any rational measure. If it came to a vote, my vote shouldn’t be counted.

I thought pensions and RRSPs were supposed to pay for retirement.

Housing is for living in. Maybe some small- and medium-sized business in rental housing because not everyone wants to own.

But investment commodity or retirement vehicle? Sounds dangerous!

No doubt, but this isn’t about the general population, but someone who is supposed to be trained in the ways of making sure that they’re not leading kids too far astray.

But a basic understanding of the Israel/ Palestine conflict doesn’t include being able to recognize the borders of Israel/Palestine from a child’s art project.

Why not? I have only a high school education and some trade school, all before 1980, and have what it takes to not screw up like this. Surely a university educated person charged with the responsibility to guide our children through complex issues should be held to at least that standard.

They could prohibit him from being the registered owner of a motor vehicle. That way whoever is the registered owner can be charged for letting an unlicensed driver take the wheel. That should also come with the threat of loss of ownership privileges.

Or moving to SK

Same thing. (Or was that the joke?)

Lifelong SK resident.

My favourite was a report that showed a percentage increase in profit that was higher than the percentage increase in revenue. Is that not the very definition of “higher margin?”

Being an art teacher isn’t an excuse. Everyone should have a basic grasp of the issues and I would argue that being a teacher in any subject elevates that from “should” to “must.”

I would hope that art is in our schools not merely to promote a leisure activity but to examine different ways of viewing the world. Doing that requires more than just drawing counterfactual maps.

Which borders should a Palestinian state be given?

Personally, I say go back to 1967, do a “land back” divestment of territory taken and make reparations consisting of both money and supportive resources. With international support, given the role of the international community.

Why do you feel that the border results of that particular war matter more than any other war (that came before, or that has come after)?

Because that was, as I understand it (which is far from complete), the final straw for the Palestinian nation’s quest for autonomy and security.

Nobody seems to be able to answer these questions without massive hypocrisy when the same logic is applied to other countries whose borders were also formed as the result of wars.

It’s not hypocrisy to grow and change over time, as long as one acknowledges the failures of the past.

It’s like there’s some sort of cut-off date right after WW2 where people feel nobody should be allowed to invade anyone else.

Exactly! This is the “growing and changing” I spoke of earlier. We know better. We know that nations need autonomy and security, that countries need autonomy and security, and that individuals need autonomy and security. In the years and decades following the two world wars (especially WWII), a very large fraction of the planet came together under the auspices of international organizations, including the UN, in recognition of those facts with the desire to fix things, once and for all.

There have been and will continue to be missteps and outright failures. Neither should cause us to dismiss the goals or give them up as a lost causes. Instead, every failure should rally us in a redoubling of effort.

In my opinion, that is what we are seeing, a redoubling of effort in response to an abject failure to conform to the new standards we have set for ourselves as a global community.

This sounds like just standard traffic analysis. Nothing to do with WhatsApp or any other messaging platform. It’s been in use since at least WWII.

Who is talking to whom? How often? Under what circumstances? How do patterns of communication correlate with events? Who are the hubs of communication (ie leaders)?

The big difference between then and now is that instead of needing rooms full of people drawing graphs by hand, there is software to handle it. In turn, that means it’s not really important to have initial suspects to get started, because the computers are quite happy to tease out interesting signals from total communications. That also increases the likelihood of false positives, but the kinds of people who do traffic analysis at this level aren’t usually the kinds of people who worry about a little collateral damage.

It seems like a pretty tall order to construct a system of communication that is useful for coordinating activities, affordable to operate, and secure against traffic analysis. At best, you’ll end up back in a situation where other intelligence will be required to identify a manageable pool of suspects.

Too many people have no concept of how great the change is. We got married in the late 1970s. My wife’s high school education and receptionist job was enough to get us into a decent 2-bedroom apartment, buy her a brand new motorcycle, and pay for my schooling in a trade. My trade was enough to upgrade our apartment, pay for my hotrodding hobby, let her quit to stay home with our son, buy a camper for weekend trips around the province and vacation trips around Canada and USA, all while saving enough for a down payment on a house with double-digit mortgage rates.

A few financial setbacks (extended layoffs mostly) meant starting almost from scratch (we kept our home but lost all savings and investments) in the early 90s and completely from scratch (lost our home, too) in the early 2000s. It took both of us to barely afford the same apartment of our youth. We finally gave up in 2011, changed careers and moved into a 1968 mobile home on a leased lot in the middle of nowhere. We’re back to being able to afford leisure, although on a much, much smaller scale than in our youth.

We’re still in that 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. It has apparently quadrupled in value since 2011, so if we were forced to start over again, it would be out of reach. We’d be homeless.

Divorce? Fortunately, that has never been on the table, but it’s been at least 2 decades since we’d have been able to contemplate single life from a financial perspective.

I agree, but a big part of whatever problems there are with this program is that the various agencies aren’t actually holding up their end of the bargain.

The program really should be primarily true social housing, not this public-private partnership, but the checks and balances should at least work.

They did eventually get around to mentioning in passing some of the reasons this particular program fails in some ways. It would have been a much better piece if they had started with the objective to compare and contrast programs that actually work (Medicine Hat, last time I looked) and those that don’t (this one, apparently).

We only alter those halls by gaining access to them

To a first approximation, no person or group who has entered the existing halls of power has done more than cosmetic redecoration.

We need complete renovation or destructive replacement. We do not get that by playing their game by their interpretation of their rules, but by forcing the creation of new interpretations, new rules, and even entire new games.

We do that not by aspiring to join their club, but by exercising the power inherent in mass movements in opposition. We don’t need to change who holds the reins, we need to discard the very harnesses that bind us.