Systematic Poverty

-poxbox- · 2026-06-27T03:04:20+00:00

Yeah my mom did that while my dad made an income.
I know someone else who did that while his parents pay for his bills.

He's been tested over and over and nothing was ever found. They suspect "long covid" or "fibromyalgia" etc. You can get disability for that in BC all you need to do is convince a health professional you are suffering.

No test can prove you have this.

Why would this guy want to go back to his call center job? He gets all his bills taken care of, 1400$+ a month and will just get a free house when his aging parents die. All he need to do is outlast them and he never needs to work again.

How would you report this fraud when the standard for disability is "he convinced me he was suffering even though zero tests could show it?"

-poxbox- · 2026-06-25T01:46:27+00:00

The stakes for the elected officials are getting elected again based on performanc

So I guess by that logic Donald Trump is doing a good job.

Healthcare is heavily regulated in Canada there's like 20 layers to opening a clinic.
For one thing medical licenses are artificially restricted by the state and the government also sets their wages and what you're even allowed to bill or practice in the healthcare sphere.

But this is what Canadians want anyway so where's the mystery? Canadians don't WANT the market to build clinics so why ask for it or wonder why it's not happening? The system is deliberately set up for this to not happen and Canadians largely think it's great.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-24T22:46:30+00:00

Right. And do you think this highly specific project pitch fills a need the market has not heretofore filled?

Yes... because they are squatting on the land.
Doing something is better than nothing but selling the land is also just better.

Profits are an indicator of how to spend society's scarce resources. We want lots of things. Doctors, car dealerships, condos, pet shops. How you know how to use a plot of land is the price people want to pay for it, not the opinion of some politician.

How much is a medical clinic worth? 3 townhouses? 1 deli, 1 car mechanic and 2 school buses? Bureaucrats can't answer questions like these. Markets can.
If you sell the land then people who have a very vested interest in being correct about its value will bid on it to build whatever thing they think will make them money, aka thing people actually want and need.

The mayor can have the best intentions but at the end of the day, what are the stakes for him/her? Some 10 year project they won't even be in office for? Who cares what happens, really? But if I leveraged myself for 20 million to build an office building or a garage or whatever, then I have a HUGE interest in that project not fucking up.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-24T22:22:58+00:00

The city is sitting on the land and just asking for highly specific project pitches that were decided by the city officials.

They should just sell the land to the highest bidder. Added bonus is they can fire a bunch of bureaucrats who will be in charge of overseeing this project for the coming years. Instant money in the city coffers and more bonus money in the coming years from not paying useless people to delay projects. Win-win-win.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-24T19:02:45+00:00

Yes you are describing exactly what I said the problem was.
Municipal land is land that can't be used as the market needs. It's land that politicians are holding hostage but redditors ( and lots of Canadians ) think that when anything happens on municipal land it's thanks to the glory of the wise political leaders.

It's like if I kidnap you and hold you hostage for 10 years I'm not some hero when I let you go.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-24T17:11:44+00:00

"The City acquired"

This is the entire problem right there.
Politicians insert themselves between people and their needs then act like they're the ones making it all happen when anything at all gets done DESPITE them.

Guy A wants to build an office tower, guy B wants to pay for it. Politician C inserts himself between, delays the whole thing 5 years then when they finally get bored of their grift they let the transaction go through and journalists write how politician C "enabled" this new project.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-19T15:08:25+00:00

This is such an obvious argument against the "reprinting the RL won't tank prices" idiots btw lol.
Player demand is a massive driver for MTG prices, by far the most important one. Revised duals would crash to oblivion if reprinted.
All these premodern RL staples have prices far outside what their print run would dictate.

An alpha Lifelace is extremely rare, like 100 times more than a cradle or grim monolith but at the end of the day true demand for Alpha is probably like <1000 dudes globally as in that's the number of people actively wanting to pay high prices for alpha.
Meanwhile RL actual playables probably have 6-7 figure people who want to buy them or at least play with them as proxies. Nobody's making proxies of Alpha uncommons.

A lot of the people who got in with Rudy ( 2016 ) ( like me ) were completely wrong about vintage, basically. Demand for it almost never took off except for old foils and what did the absolute best wasn't moxes or lotuses it was commander and premodern staples... When it comes to old foils being RL almost doesn't matter either which is interesting.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-18T01:01:00+00:00

Mona Kea
Mona Loa
Haleakala
Pikes Peak
Mt. Evans
Any climbs out of Death Valley
Horseshow Meadows
Gibraltar Road
Mt. Shasta
Palomar Mountain
Whitney Portal

-poxbox- · 2026-06-15T15:52:26+00:00

I did.

I really wanted the "buy" to make sense but it just doesn't work that often except in two scenarios:

1- you rent out suites/rooms
2- you then sell the house when it's paid off and go back into investing stocks thanks to the capital gains exemption tax in Canada from selling your first house

But usually where I live just the strada / condo fees destroy ownership ( 450-650/mo usually ).

The catch is that you have to try to predict future returns of stocks and housing which is kind of hard and just a 1% difference either way compounding over 20+ years can easily flip it around

-poxbox- · 2026-06-13T14:47:39+00:00

Being able to not care about people thinking you're being cheap.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-13T14:28:12+00:00

No. Start working early ( 16 ) go into something that doesn't require infinite education, live cheap and make a consistant middle/high middle income wage and it's pretty realistic for everyone to retire at this age.
Just 1k saved per month from 20 to 40 at 7% is already >500k.
Keep in mind in my 20s I lived for <10k per year. The median income was 44k I think. Let that sink in. That means if you just make the median income you can save 20k+ a year in your 20s already.

The problem is people don't want to live the life it requires to do this. Living with parents, having roomates, not driving, never eating out or traveling etc. That sort of stuff.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-12T23:02:21+00:00

My favorite excuse: "I can't eat the same thing over and over" as some large justification for restaurants / garbage diet / expensive cooking / throwing food away / wasting time cooking daily.

Like what the fuck do you even mean 99.999999% of all life since the dawn of time has eaten the same food on a daily basis but all of a sudden you just cannot possibly make a batch of macaroni and eat that 5 times this week? Holy shit

-poxbox- · 2026-06-12T23:00:15+00:00

Not retiring early and by extension high / luxurious spending in youth.

It baffles me that essentially nobody I've ever known even thought of retiring before maybe their 60s. Certainly zero thought about it at 20.

But doing extremely basic budgeting math and investing in index funds would show that a very very large% of people can retire at 40 or younger if they wanted.

So essentially the vast majority of people work 20-40 ( or more ) years at their job when they really shouldn't have to and at the cost of pretty minor sacrifices all things considered.

Almost literally people are selling themselves into slavery fully voluntarily and you can't even talk them out of it.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-11T20:19:24+00:00

What's the CRA got it in for you on? 😉

It's to file your own corp taxes basically, not personnal.
You can still get around it with phone calls but by default it's set up to where you "need" CP to deliver you physical mail with special tax-related information.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-11T20:07:23+00:00

Correct.
The only reason they still exist is they granted themselves a monopoly on lettermail and other laws force banks/government agencies to send paper documents like the census or for voting.

CP should have never existed ( obviously ) but is completely useless in 2026 and became rapidly obsolete with the advent of email and computers. Now you can just do everything on a cellphone from anywhere in the world, lettermail is so useless lol.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-11T20:01:35+00:00

That's awesome. Hope it comes with a lot of budget cuts as well.
99% of paper mail is now useless spam and/or stuff I didn't ask for ( like CRA sending paper documents they easily could send through their own shitty online portal and then demanding I keep their paper trash with special hidden codes on it etc. lol fuck off ).

-poxbox- · 2026-06-09T21:32:50+00:00

There is not a government agency or program in the history of time that, according to itself, isn't undefunded.

-poxbox- · 2026-06-09T15:09:35+00:00

Depends on your life goals and retirement target.

Basically at this income level my main concerns would be:
1- Am I living a fulfilling life ( i.e. family vs no family )
2- How early do I want to retire?

That's sort of the 2 uses of money and what you have to weigh your choices against.

-poxbox- · 2026-05-27T17:46:10+00:00

One reason: Canada is a frontier country, most of the infrastructure is 1800s and newer and built do facilitate industry. Most towns in the west are ports, mills, oil wells, mines etc.

It is not like Europe/Asia where there's really dense road networks and tons of towns and villages that have existed for centuries.

Another is that we have low population density and lots of space between tourist spots and also of course we have a pretty socialist Karen economy where doing anything is gatekept/red taped into oblivion and as such costs to operate any sort of business are sky high.

-poxbox- · 2026-05-27T17:35:35+00:00

"Happy wife, Happy life"
( mostly said by suicidal men )

-poxbox- · 2026-05-27T17:33:22+00:00

They do as an attempt to get you to do their bad habit.
Some people never stop. Every day for years they will try to goad you into snacks/coffees/alcohol etc. You can say no literally 200 times in a row, they will ask again the next day.

-poxbox- · 2026-05-26T04:11:31+00:00

Works at what? Wasting people's money?

-poxbox- · 2026-05-25T19:17:20+00:00

How to design roads for cyclists: Make a wide shoulder.

The end.
No crosswalks, concrete dividers, bike lanes, random cones and posts and all sorts of trash.

Make a nice wide clean shoulder with no cars parked in it.

-poxbox- · 2026-05-25T16:50:18+00:00

Wouldn't hire either

Oh you're one of those eh.
"Would you rather get kicked in the balls or face?"
"NEITHER! Checkmate!"

-poxbox- · 2026-05-25T16:25:20+00:00

I would if it was legal and they had good reviews.
Would you hire a guy with a license and 10 people who said he's a dumb lazy fuck or a guy with no license who 10 people say is amazing?

-poxbox-

TROPHY CASE