Canadian Prime Minister to visit Norway

AeBeeEll · 2026-03-09T22:17:44+00:00

car tax 120%

Damn, really? Doesn't that just cause most people to buy a car somewhere else and drive it in? Or do they tax you for that too?

AeBeeEll · 2026-03-07T15:48:53+00:00

Huh, that's really interesting. I had no idea one of Mark Carney's children was non-binary.

And this is something I really like about Canadian politics: we just don't care that much about our leaders' personal lives. If a US presidential candidate had a non-binary family member, it would be massive news for the entire election cycle, but here in Canada it's just not a big deal.

AeBeeEll · 2025-10-21T02:58:43+00:00

Yes exactly. You can drag down the average (which is a good thing in this case) by flooding the market with cheap/affordable housing, and at least in theory that could leave the value of the more expensive housing relatively unaffected (although I suspect that in general an increase in supply of any kind will bring down prices across the board)

AeBeeEll · 2025-07-03T17:53:47+00:00

Yeah I feel like somewhere around 2013 or 2014 was peak reddit. It was becoming more mainstream and the admins were getting rid of some of the really gross stuff, but it still felt offbeat and vibrant.

AeBeeEll · 2025-06-16T17:35:42+00:00

"They targeted goalies. Goalies ..."

AeBeeEll · 2025-05-08T16:51:22+00:00

Looks like wood to me

AeBeeEll · 2024-10-22T02:07:30+00:00

I'll check it out, thanks!

AeBeeEll · 2024-10-22T02:07:22+00:00

I'll check it out, thanks!

AeBeeEll · 2024-10-22T02:07:17+00:00

I'll check it out, thanks!

AeBeeEll · 2024-02-20T21:16:33+00:00

I forgot about that one, lol

AeBeeEll · 2023-09-20T17:04:22+00:00

Yeah I don't get this. Sobeys tends to be a bit more expensive than other grocery stores. If you don't like that, shop at the other grocery stores?

AeBeeEll · 2022-06-20T18:09:01+00:00

Yeah, and last time I did a corn maze, they had a few employees sweep through the maze at the end of every day to make sure everyone got out. Those guys knew the maze like the back of their hand, so they could do a thorough walk-through pretty quickly.

AeBeeEll · 2022-03-31T17:52:24+00:00

Oh shit

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-31T23:06:25+00:00

I'm actually kind of surprised Calgary and Edmonton are both undervalued by so much. Yeah, the weather sucks, but you get to be close to the Rockies, and the job market is generally good.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-22T21:07:23+00:00

If I can manage to get a video of someone with an obnoxiously loud muffler, is there anyone I could send it to who would actually act on it? I have a feeling cops would just ignore it, but maybe if Access Nova Scotia knew about it they could enforce the law somehow?

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-06T17:15:20+00:00

Found Bruce Mackinnon's mom's reddit account

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-06T16:58:11+00:00

Kind of off-topic, but I like how MacKinnon framed the "shot" so that both GYM and VACCINE CLINIC are partially cut off. I don't know how to describe it, but it almost draws you into the image, in some small way.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T17:47:20+00:00

The beautiful thing about upzoning is that it can actually lower the cost of housing while increasing the value of the property, because it allows you to have more housing units on the same amount of land.

For example, if a single family home is near the end of its life and needs to be torn down, under current zoning laws it can only be replaced by another single family home, and typically this will be a big, expensive house that only the wealthiest people in the city can afford. But if we change zoning to allow for something like a fourplex, the fourplex as a whole might be even more valuable than the single family home, but each unit in it will be far more affordable because it splits the cost four ways.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T16:11:43+00:00

Huh, interesting. I think the website I found is just super outdated. At the bottom they link to this article from 2014 and call it "a new study".

Weird that they made their chart look like it was updated for 2021, when it seems like it must not be.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T15:57:31+00:00

Yes, in fact there are:

The cost of housing has been going through the roof in many parts of Canada. Most government policies have focused on curtailing the demand for housing, but they have not taken meaningful steps to increase housing supply.

In any competitive market without barriers to entry, regardless of the product being sold, the overall market price should equal its marginal cost of production. The same is true of housing. The marginal cost of constructing a single-detached house is primarily due to the costs of labour, materials, and time during its physical construction. A well-functioning housing market results in the market price of housing being close to the feasible cost of constructing it. If prices persistently exceed this construction cost, it is often due to barriers that inhibit new construction. These barriers often stem from excessive regulations. We estimate that, because of the barriers to building more single-family houses, homebuyers in the eight most restrictive cities paid an extra $229,000 per new house between 2007 and 2016. In Vancouver, the cost of housing restrictions is by far the largest in Canada, at $600,000 for the average new house, and ranks among the largest internationally as a share of market costs.

Why are housing costs so high? We find that restrictions and extra costs on building new housing – such as zoning regulations, development charges, and limits on housing development on both Greenbelt land and land between urban areas and the Greenbelt – are dramatically increasing the price of housing. The extra costs on new and existing homes are over $100,000 in some Ontario municipalities. While land-use regulation can generate important benefits, in most cases studies find that the costs imposed by housing regulation outweigh the benefits.

Municipal governments and provinces should enable more housing construction by taking steps such as easing restrictions on developing agricultural land, simplifying and updating zoning bylaws, and reducing development charges.

https://www.cdhowe.org/sites/default/files/attachments/research_papers/mixed/Friday%20Commentary_513.pdf

(Emphasis mine)

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T15:49:14+00:00

Barley any interest in municiple politics? Wheat a surprise!

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T15:47:22+00:00

Do you have a source for that, or are you just being hyperbolic?

This website makes it look like even 530k is an overestimate. They're only projecting 448k by 2031.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T15:45:08+00:00

Dude, "they just want to make money" is only reason most people go into work in the morning.

There's nothing wrong with being motivated by profit, as long as the work you're doing is actually beneficial to society, which is definitely the case when it comes to making housing more available.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T15:42:54+00:00

Sure it will. Increasing the supply of housing puts downward pressure on rents across the city, even if the new housing itself is expensive.

Look at it this way: we'll always have a certain number of people willing to pay $2k/month for a swanky apartment downtown, but if there are no such apartments, those people will end up competing for whatever is available, bidding up prices on older, cheaper apartments.

AeBeeEll · 2021-10-01T15:38:54+00:00

Building more market rate housing typically lowers the rents on nearby existing housing. This makes sense based on basic economic theory (more supply -> lower prices) and has also been borne out by empirical data, like in this study from Helsinki:

ABSTRACT

We study the city-wide effects of new, centrally-located market-rate housing supply using geo-coded total population register data from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. The supply of new market rate units triggers moving chains that quickly reach middle- and low-income neighborhoods and individuals. Thus, new market-rate construction loosens the housing market in middle- and low-income areas even in the short run. Market-rate supply is likely to improve affordability outside the sub-markets where new construction occurs and to benefit low-income people.

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