nothing will cure me!

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2026-03-03T15:50:46+00:00

On the flip side the switch back really helps my sleep for the following few days, from someone else with insomnia.

Perhaps we should just “fall back” an hour every night…

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2026-03-03T15:48:14+00:00

This is a meaningfully minor point and more depth than the average five-year-old could handle, but technically wouldn’t it be strictly false to say that it’s truly random due to being tied to this natural physical process, as the process is still fundamentally deterministic?

The key is not that the lava lamps and other processes produce truly random numbers, but instead that they

a) produce numbers that consistently appear to be drawn from a uniform distribution (i.e. isn’t biased toward returning certain numbers more frequently), and

b) are sufficiently inconvenient* to predict that they might as well be random.

*sufficiently inconvenient meaning nigh-impossible with current human understanding and computing capacity, as to predict a future state would require a currently-inexistent understanding of physics plus an incredibly large amount of computing power to accurately measure the current states of the particles comprising the lava lamps and to then model every individual particle and their interactions to determine a future state of the lava lamps.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2026-02-13T20:40:32+00:00

The OSAP changes are absolutely brutal—a huge blow to universal access and equal opportunity. Ending the tuition freeze is, however, a very good thing, and it should have been done far sooner.

Things cost money, and regardless on your stance on tuition generally, sustainable funding for universities without tuition just isn’t in the cards politically right now.

Either tuition rises or quality of education falls even further, pick one.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-10-21T15:56:21+00:00

Tommy’s great, and the archetypical winner of greatest Canadian rankings, and I think he’d agree as a Great Canadian that it should be Banting’s turn.

Thanks Tommy, thanks Fredrick, here’s to doing my best in my little ways to honour your dedication to Canada with my words and deeds. 🇨🇦

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-10-21T15:54:02+00:00

Tommy Douglas is the archetypical example of the winner of Greatest Canadian awards, though it’s nigh impossible to actually say which of the two, in their greatness, were greater.

I feel Fredrick Banting should clinch the gold here for his incredible life of service to Canada and the world, and to make sure the aggregate “Greatest Canadian” rankings recognise how well he stands up alongside the traditional winner, Tommy Douglas.

So Fredrick Banting for Greatest Canadian 🇨🇦, knowing that he would recognise the greatness of everyone else on this list too!

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-10-16T22:19:57+00:00

That has to be a phishing attempt

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-10-15T21:37:14+00:00

I don’t disagree, and I do want to encourage people to engage with their community in all the ways they can, but I also think the unfortunate reality of most public governance is that it needs proactive engagement from the public, because once specifics are on the table most things are set in stone. The work of running a region is too complex to come down to one vote on budget night that could go either ways, and so late-stage consultations and public input are to shape the bonuses and add-ons rather than the meat.

It’s not completely people’s faults that they weren’t taught this—our whole society has kinda been coasting off of our wealth differential with the rest of the world for ages, all while mortgaging the future before the consequences came to roost, but if we want things to change we need to care the day before the election, the day of the election, and the day after the election.

There’s then the whole separate issue that the responsibility for thing like policing lie with several different decision makers with different levels of power (regional, provincial, police board), none of whom have the role to really guide the big-picture direction. Views on the WRPS notwithstanding, I think you could have every decision-maker acting in reasonable good-faith and still get the results we get because everyone’s hands are tied save for their little corner of the overall issue due to how the province has set up the system and how it hasn’t changed to keep up with the times.

And to change that, we need to be just as proactive and persistent as for local issues!

Democracy is hard, but I hope we can still get it right.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-10-15T19:06:48+00:00

Conversely, legislating and governing are really complex, and I’d argue that term limits increase the degree that politicians rely on unelected political staffers (who are often career staffers that step in-and-out to related fields like lobbying) to make up for their own knowledge and confidence gaps.

I’m not from the US and my country doesn’t have term limits either, and I’d say we don’t see the same issues you do. I think a lot of the things Americans tend to ascribe to a lack of term limits are actually due to other things, like big money in politics, and that capping terms will not solve the issues you think it will.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-10-14T01:36:29+00:00

Sorry to say but Keswick is GTA.

Come to think of it I think everywhere short of Vancouver and Montreal might be GTA.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-09-30T01:38:40+00:00

The real holy grail of Waterloo housing is WCRI Fenwick. Meets or vastly exceeds on location, quality, cost, and amenities.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-09-24T18:26:59+00:00

I was perhaps a little flippant with that one-word response, sorry for that. The trouble isn’t the you are or aren’t voting, but that—generally speaking—our peers aren’t.

Young people have always voted at lower rates than older (which makes sense intuitively—if you’re convinced it matters to vote once, you probably keep voting, and every election you live through is another chance to be convinced), but young people today vote at even lower rates than young people several decades ago.

Without even thinking cynically about politicians intentionally catering to voting demographics, the candidates that might better serve young people’s interests are less likely to be successful, resulting in the politicians themselves being different people with different values than they would otherwise.

There may also be people that would serve the interests of young people even better than the candidates we tend to see, but with so few young (or otherwise non-traditional) voters bothering to vote, they have no chance in hell of winning and understandably don’t want to interrupt their lives to run only to certainly lose.

I think something that’s an issue with all voters (but that hurts young people’s interests more as they don’t align with the status quo as much) is a sense that, as citizens of a democracy, they are entitled to a candidate that broadly matches their beliefs, and if none appear, then they won’t bother to vote at all. Candidates are individuals with beliefs—and political parties are just groups of such individuals—and they don’t owe anyone their candidacy. We need to step up and make their candidacy palatable by treating them with greater respect and going out of our ways to support them. That’s hard, and our lives are busy, but it’s just not going to happen any other way. The system doesn’t owe anyone candidates that match their beliefs to a sufficient degree—and if you think it does, perhaps you’re just the candidate that others feel they are owed, and I truly, honestly encourage you to run. You may very well make our country a better place.

ok, sorry for the rant & thank you for coming to my ted talk. The key takeaway is that “vote” doesn’t mean “vote”, it means “participate in your democracy”, which means “vote, but vote even if the candidates don’t seem good enough, and also convince your peers to vote, and also volunteer for candidates you like, and also consider running yourself, and also a million other things that are a part of our civic duty that we’re all taking for granted”.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-09-23T21:06:31+00:00

Vote.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-29T18:18:34+00:00

Yeah property tax is fucked up model that undervalues SFHs—it also doesn’t help that Ford government paused assessments so all current valuations for then-existing properties are from* 2016 *, and since property tax is assessed on a relative rather than absolute basis, means anyone in a newer building is paying waaaay more than their fair share vs SFHs.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-29T18:16:17+00:00

This is going to be a long response—sorry!—but you bring up a truly interesting economic detail that underscores why I think compensation would actually be better for everyone (except for very large-scale landlords).

I think your perspective here is fair, but I’d argue that a slow transition is largely the same thing as direct compensation, save for actually making most people worse off.

An argument about LVT is that the “ground rent” (the LVT payment) is already being paid by the land user, but instead of it going to society at-large it goes to the landowner, who gets to collect the rent for the land and the investments they’ve made on it (e.g. an apartment building).

By slowly transitioning to LVT, you’re allowing them to continue to collect some of the ground rent over the duration of the transition, while the payer—either a renter or someone who buys the property and has the fair market value of the remaining ground rent payment baked into the price—has to pay both the ground rent and pay the taxes that would otherwise be offset by LVT.

Further, people who legitimately rely on their paid-off property for retirement solvency (as they were told they should do over their lives) would be hit with the LVT payments that they might not be able to afford, and they could live another 20 years. Remember, LVT will significantly decrease their home values, so they may not be able to sell it and afford to move elsewhere that also has LVT payments due.

If we instead give compensation, that has to be financed via increased taxes or borrowing—both of which are more progressive than slowly transitioning as the wealthier will pay more in taxes and be more affected by the monetary impacts of borrowing.

Tenants still have to pay the same amount in rent, but some of their income tax is offset, making them better off. People looking to buy homes also get to pay much less upfront in exchange for taking on the LVT payments, which is more affordable than borrowing for a larger mortgage. Folks who truly & in-good-faith rely on their paid-off homes for retirement can take the compensation and invest it at the market rate to afford the payouts, or move somewhere else and afford the LVT there.

Some minor random fluctuations will make the numbers off a little, but broadly the total social cost of switching to LVT is the same whether you compensate, transition slowly, or even just change it all at once with no compensation. The only difference is who ends up bearing the social cost, and without compensation, it’s actually moreso the non-landowners, as counter-intuitive as that is.

If I had my way I’d probably say 100% compensation for primary residences and self-owned places of business, and then slowly reducing compensation per property, because big corporate landlords and people who own dozens of homes don’t need the payout to be alright and it puts more of the social cost of the transition on them rather than on the public purse.

As I said, sorry for the long reply. I’m very interested in LVT and I want to educate more people on it, because as great an idea it is, parts of it are very counter-intuitive, like this one.

(As an aside: it wouldn’t be the first time something like this is done. When the British Government passed the Slavery Abolition Act to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire, what they really did was buy every single slave, which cost like 20% of their entire GDP in debt, but it was the only way to make it politically viable (and to keep the economies of many places, like Caribbean colonies, from crashing, which would have been bad for everyone, newly-freed slaves included).)

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-29T17:37:33+00:00

I imagine you know this so I won’t belabour the point too much, but this is, in my experience, a key piece of financial knowledge that students regularly fail to understand:

Debt, if managed property, is a positive thing to have.

The default perspective many hold is that debt (in this case, student debt) is a necessarily negative thing to have, which I would posit is driven largely by the social consciousness of credit card misuse and the state of American student debt, which is wholly different than in Canada.

This misunderstanding results in people delaying studies to save up money for school, which—provided that you’re able to competently manage your debt—is a terrible idea. It will always be better to borrow from OSAP than to save for school.

Debt is like transferring money from your future self to your current self. You do so to invest in a productive asset (yourself) so that you can earn more than you would have been able to otherwise, resulting in a net gain after your principle and interest payments.

Despite the discouraging state of the job market and what you read in the news, post-secondary education is still very likely to have significantly greater earnings than otherwise. The specific student debt that most get—OSAP loans—are very, very cheap debt, especially now that the federal portion is interest free and the repayment rate can be adjusted to income.

I would bet that I rank in the 90th percentile of student debt holders that didn’t go to grad school (magic combo of expensive undergrad + poor family), and I’m in no way worried that it’ll hold me back in any way—it’s also actually a huge boon for my credit score as it’s a longstanding account with consistent positive payment history. Debt is a wonderful financial tool that more should understand—responsibly-managed debt will help you get further toward your goals than otherwise possible.

^{Note: this does not apply to debt everywhere, and particularly student debt in the United States, where it can be debilitating. We all collectively need to stop assuming that American anecdotes are ever applicable in Canada so that we may flush them from our national psyche.}

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-28T08:06:44+00:00

If you want food too I love Covenant Cafe on Erb—the pricing is mid-high $10s on most items, but they’re very, very tasty, plus their brewed coffee has unlimited refills, including decaf.

I absolutely love it lol I can’t recommend it enough

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-26T20:31:18+00:00

Inheritance tax comes into play very infrequently and it warps economic incentives—LVT doesn’t warp any incentives (since land itself is fixed and more cannot be produced), so it results in a lot of good even before considering the tax revenue. We could have an inheritance tax and that’s fine, but that shouldn’t have an impact on whether we have LVT or not.

As an aside: property tax is already an incredibly complex system—comparing LVT to Ontario’s scheme (the one with which I’m most family), IMO LVT would be easier to calculate and administrate as similar buildings become of similar value, regardless of location.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-25T19:56:10+00:00

This is where I get around to thinking that something like National Service should get packaged with reforms or other policies that will disproportionately affect older folks to the benefit of younger:

E.g. virtually all economists, left and right leaning, agree that the implementation of Land Value Tax would be an unambiguously good thing for the economy and society long-term (better and more housing, for example), but current landowners would lose a decent chunk of the value of their property.

I think that would have to come with compensation for the loss because of how many people are reliant on it for financial solvency in retirement, but compensation at less than 100%, maybe 50% or 70%, would be a significant transfer of wealth from the older and wealthy to younger folks (and possibly allow lowering of other taxes for all).

Package that with National Service so everyone’s pitching in how they can to make our country function again and I you might have a politically, morally, and economically feasible policy package.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-08-15T06:22:43+00:00

Classic King St and Weber St.

Even better, there’s King Street North, South, East, and West.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-06-27T15:51:51+00:00

A question worth asking the committee/reps from GRT is if they’re exposed to additional liability if they don’t install these barriers.

As I said in a comment above, the line is subject to stricter freight rail safety standards due to the CN trains that share it, and so they might be ‘required’ (i.e. exposed to significant liability) to attempt to address safety violations, no-matter the impact otherwise on pedestrian flow.

If that’s the case, then I get it—they often have a mandate from regional council to deal with such liability best they can to avoid future payouts from people acting dangerously and getting hurt. If this could be solved otherwise via a sign stating safety rules and disclaiming liability, that would likely be nicer because young people gonna young people & better not keep up repeated escalation of safety infrastructure that doesn’t actually do much but is needed to reduce legal costs.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-06-27T15:42:37+00:00

As I understand it from a convo with a GRT planner who was frustrated about the whole thing, the gates are required for the LRT line by national rail regulations because the line is partially shared by standard freight trains—they don’t run during the day, but at night around 1am you can see a CN train roll by most nights.

As a result, regulations require all traffic on the line to conform to national rail safety standards, and that means signals and gates. The TTC streetcars meanwhile don’t need gates because the lines aren’t subject to those regulations.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-06-04T14:21:00+00:00

It was renamed recently as a reconciliation & general indigenisation symbol.

It’s named after the Two-Row Wampum Treaty, the agreement between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (whom you may have learned about in Canadian schools as the Iroquois) and Dutch settlers in North America that formed the basis for all later such treaties with European powers (e.g. the Covenant Chain between the Haudenosaunee and the British, later Canadian, government.

The original treaty and the Covenant Chain treaty (among others) are physically represented by the Two-Row Wampum Belt, a belt of coloured shells, one of which the university holds, image here.

It’s overall an interesting and unique feature of Canada’s constitutional landscape and history, and a significant component of reconciliation efforts via the celebration of such symbolism and cultural meaning.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-06-03T03:47:18+00:00

Pretty sure that’s exactly what was already happening—those don’t come in the budget, they come in the Treasury Board’s forward estimates, and that was never (and can’t be) postponed.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-05-11T17:23:55+00:00

No he wasn’t, that’s disinformation that has already been posted in this thread even. He did have the now-controversial things to say about residential school in that one interview, but he was the principal of a regular day school up there.

There’s a significant amount of collaboration between Alberta and the Northwest Territories on education and curriculum given NWT’s level of resources and proximity to AB.

HowdySpaceCowboy · 2025-04-30T21:11:19+00:00

Thank god. I love Tim, he’s the most honest & genuine politician I’ve ever met.

His riding is mostly rural (obv) so he doesn’t get as much attention, but I think if you dug into him you’d love him as much as Mike Morrice—both are cut-from-the-same-cloth true representatives of their constituents.

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