• 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • It’s absolute shit for young people and anyone who doesn’t own a home already. Pants on head insane house prices for cardboard walls and mould. Violent crime and especially gang crime is straight up scary now (though not as bad as the bad parts of America). I left NZ because my outlook was so bleak. I ended up in Denmark and couldn’t be happier. Australia is also a good bet and the women are GORGEOUS. Also Switzerland if you find a path to employment there. Norway is great. Many places in America are still great, despite the counter-jerk.


  • This is one of the issues with democracy: people vote in their own interests. Perhaps I should be more specific: this is the problem with democracy in a culturally fragmented nation. Without shared values and a sense of camaraderie, people don’t vote altruistically, but self-interestedly. They don’t care about their neighbours because their neighbours don’t care about them. I live in Denmark now which is very culturally homogenous and people do vote altruistically. They vote for higher taxes because they know their neighbours share their values. They identify with each other like a loose family. This is one of the drawbacks of multiculturalism which is rarely discussed.





  • Rowling is an hell of a woman. She’s donated more money than we will ever earn and doesn’t dodge her taxes.

    She lost her billionaire status a few years ago after donating between 160 to 200 million quid!

    Say what you want about her views on gender, but she has done more good for the world than most.

    Introduced an entire generation to reading. Millions of kids who weren’t big readers picked up lifetime habits!

    Started or donated to many charities. Including the Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland, The Maggie’s Centres for Cancer Care, Doctors Without Borders, and more. She founded the Children’s High Level Group, known as Lumos, which works to “end the systematic institutionalization of children across Europe and help them find safer, more caring places to live.” She has also contributed to various other charitable causes through her philanthropic trust, Volant.

    Helped save female Afghani lawyers from the taliban.

    Funded the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology clinic in Edinburgh.

    And rather more contentiously, has stuck to her guns about the areas where she believes sex should take precedence over gender identity in the face of abuse, rape and death threats.

    And now employment tribunals are ruling again and again that gender critical views are perfectly reasonable to hold and in fact are legally protected.








  • First, immigration is currently calibrated FAR in excess of any demographic gaps. The population is growing rapidly. If the premise were to plug demographic holes, we wouldn’t need nearly this many people.

    Second, if the premise were to alleviate demographic issues at the young end of the pyramid, then immigration policies would block any applications for those over 30, or at least heavily bias the young. They don’t.

    There is exactly one reason immigration has been calibrated so high, and with such little care for the skills and qualities of the applicants: to suppress wages and working conditions. It’s the same playbook all over the West.


  • To be fair we’ve never had more choice, and music has almost never been more affordable. We used to buy singles for like $10+. Albums for $20+. Now there are several competing streaming services where we can listen to almost unlimited music each month for less than the cost of one album. Hell, YouTube Premium includes unlimited music steaming for free. Being an independent artist has never been easier, and you can find and pay for any music you like directly with millions of your favourite artists all over the world. The industry used to be entirely controlled by large labels. Honestly, I consider the industry far healthier than it used to be.

    I pirate movies and shows because they refuse to create a Spotify-like service. Content is fragmented across a dozen services, they’re infested with ads, content quality keeps declining, the interfaces suck, and prices are outpacing inflation. I pay for Spotify because it’s still a good service for a reasonable price.



  • For this to be true all immigrants would have to be wealthy enough to be able to scoop up all supply of homes in Canada.

    No, it would require them to rent houses. Investors buy all the houses because they can reliably rent them. If they couldn’t, their business case would be completely different. They wouldn’t be buying houses, and they certainly wouldn’t be paying so much.

    Further to this, so many renters places upwards pressure on rent prices.

    Then we have to accept that some consequential proportion of immigrants do indeed buy houses, and place upward pressure on house prices.

    We agree it’s a complex system, but I do not agree with your implied argument that supply and demand doesn’t exist for housing in Canada. Clearly it does, and higher demand increases both rent and housing prices.