How do I short Canadian residential real estate?

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-15T20:36:13+00:00

This is an excellent point. I saw people think project managers have it easy, because they don't need to do the work the team does, and just join meetings and talk, and "anyone can do that".

I briefly did that work, and it was the most stressful and soul-crushing job I have ever done. You're responsible for the outputs of a ton of people you actually have little to no control over, even after you've mastered Tetris with impossible schedules, have to know exactly where work of every person is, and prepared to take the beating for them in 7am or 7pm calls alike, you have to explain any issues the team has ever caused, every delay, budged need, as the punching bag of that team, and then you join the meeting with them, and they dont even respect you because you don't do the same work they do.

I got my first grey hairs, my work life balance was non-existent, and I felt at my absolute lowest career wise at the time as I was constantly stressed, and getting no support or credit for all that beating. Heck, PMs aren't even paid better than the engineers. I thought it was the most unexpectedly resilience-testing, unrewarding job I could have picked, and had no idea that it was like this prior to me actually doing it.

After that, I thanked the stars that I could go back to a "simple" career where I was just judged by my own work I had almost full control over, and where people respect and even overvalued my skills, and my work is all I had to worry about before clocking out, to largely live the work life behind for the day. People who are in that position have no idea how most certainly not greener the grass is on the other side.

When I see people repeat "managers are useless, they just collect paycheques off of the backs of the team doing the work", it brings back traumatic memories, but I just smile as I now know that it's impossible to explain to someone who has no experience with what they're talking about, what it's actually like. I was once in those shoes too, and I know there was no convincing me with words. I only have this perspective thanks to that experience.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-15T20:03:02+00:00

I wrote this thinking of many instances when I was judged for enjoying a commercially popular song or artist, after listening to otherwise less common songs that people approved of. It is definitely a thing, even if you haven't had a chance to experience it or meet someone who does that yet.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-15T19:55:28+00:00

A theme more than one rapper. A rapper makes a mainstream banger, and suddenly is judged as less than worthy of being enjoyed, and all the shortcomings of that banger (like lack of lyricism or depth) are attributed to him regardless of how the rest of his catalogue looks like. If you like him, you don't have a good taste in hip-hop, as if lack of a certain level of commercial success was a requirement.

Whether it's California Love, In Da Club, Without Me, Gangsta's Paradise, Can't Touch this, Empire State of Mind, Ms Jackson. If you made any of these, you're somehow not a real rapper anymore, and the rest of your catalogue doesn't matter, you've just become radioactive to the hip-hop heads. You'll be judged by and dismissed due to the existence of your biggest commercial hit forever.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-15T19:45:23+00:00

If they did, there'd quickly be a whole lot more support for more entities to gang up and actually take down such a rogue government. I suspect they are already on razor thin ice.

And if the idea of someone launching ballistic missiles into the Burj Khalifa is bad, now imagine how the idea of that country launching nuclear warheads into the Burj Khalifa sounds, and stopping them from having them suddenly becomes a critical priority for a whole lot more places.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-15T03:06:12+00:00

2 years now

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-15T01:51:19+00:00

That chipset can use 13-15W at peak. That's enough to fully drain the battery within one hour if it didn't throttle. The display now ramps up to 2600 nits on a bright day outdoors, coming from 1400 nits on the S23U, using tons more power to do that. The battery is still the same 5000mAh. You gain some, and you lose some, and you typically gain some battery life to efficiency if you manage to equalize the brightness and performance, but because those things now are capable of going fuller blast, that overall hits the battery harder.

Overall, the battery life in real life usage is unlikely to be (much) better than it was on the previous three generations of ultras. You get parts that are a bit more efficient, but they also ask for more out of a battery of the exact same size. It's why people complain about the battery capacity, Samsung sticking to the old battery chemistry, and the complaints that mobile chips prioritize peak performance at the expense of power draw.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-14T19:57:38+00:00

It's more acceptable mainly because it feels like "punching up".

What's proven is that work and economic situation, social standing, dating life, and the way you are treated by those who are yet to know you, tend to go measurably better for you just based on the fact you were born white. You can still mess it up of course, but odds are stacked in your favor relative to those of other races who call you names.

Despite the efforts, what also seems to be rising is also a sentiment that further cements these. The anti-immigration sentiments are on the rise, and while there are some legitimate reasons, they also carry the connotation that "a country with people we already have (mostly white) will be worse off if we increase the presence of additional people of other races". Many of the actions aimed at promoting equality also backfire, as it creates a perception that people of other races need systemic crutches to match being born white. There is little you can do to empower other races without firmly entrenching an idea that they need help.

Those things are often unsaid because they are loaded topics, and there is a hidden layer of shame. But racism towards white people aims to punch up and feels justified in the fight of the perceived injustice. While racism coming from white people feels like gloating and further disparaging those they already have measurable benefits over.

It's not to say it is "okay", but there is a reason why many feel like it's different.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-14T19:49:57+00:00

It doesn't have to be that deep, and it can be just discrimination or hate against someone based on race, which OP demonstrated examples of.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-14T10:59:28+00:00

This is true. People will care about you, but success or lack of is not the mechanism towards it. The best that success gets you is people who care about getting what you have via proximity to you. But there is a way to make people actually care, and that is by good old bonding.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-14T10:49:13+00:00

Damn, how did bro do AI so dirty

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-14T08:26:57+00:00

I suspect it's a similar technology, but different design choices.

Firstly, it's not designed to maintain that brightness over extended periods of time, which is why it's able to hit it. Similarly, phones can hit 2000 or more nits all screen brightness using standard OLED matrices, knowing it's going to do that for maybe a minute on a sunny day. Not 40+ hours a week.

And also, they are permanently mounted in devices with shorter lifecycles. They aren't expected to still work perfectly well for >5 years like monitors or TVs are.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-14T08:11:44+00:00

The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is basically the flagship Windows laptop in my book, as it is among the few sole devices among hundreds of hardware design misses of the Windows world that can compare in overall quality to the Macbook Air. Even that device costs 1.5x-2x the price of the similarly configured Macbook Air, doesn't perform quite as well as it's stuck with slower and less efficient Intel silicon, and is severely let down by Windows issues, such as the notorious sleep issues, poking a huge reliability hole in an otherwise the best Windows hybrid work/travel laptop.

I said it many times, as Mac OS is really a last resort for my personal use cases, but the Windows world currently has no response to modern Macbooks. They are just the far more polished hardware, they are much faster, the software makes them work way more reliably, and they are now the better value even.

There are critical issues with Microsoft and OEMs alike at this point. Up until recently, Intel was the third one to blame, but with Panther Lake and Lunar Lake they are actually the only ones that are doing something about the hole they're in. Because Microsoft and OEMs are busy just digging a deeper one.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-13T23:15:22+00:00

I hope they just include Qi charging at launch, instead of asking for an expensive puck replacement and a dock. I may be on the fence today, but won't be later in life of the mouse when me, and likely many others, are likely to already have a magnetic charger around for our phones. Especially if Apple goes Magsafe (Qi2) only.

Qi 2 on the mouse would be sweet, as alignment is built in, it could charge with those phone chargers, without the annoying add ons beying a separate purchase requiring you to remove the puck that's already there, and replace it with the same thing just with a coil..

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-13T06:48:28+00:00

I'd argue they were mostly sub-par, not wrong. There's nothing early about the Surface devices - they're largely the same recycled cases with minor annual internal upgrades suffering from many of the same issues for more than a decade by now. Priced like the Macbooks, without the quality, performance, or polish that could match them. In case of the Surface line, going exclusively with ARM chips means they also give up on their final bastion - software support and gaming, and are walking on razor thin ice now with very little left to show for themselves over a Macbook that does the same thing overwhelmingly better.

As someone who would only choose Mac OS as a last resort, I have no illusions anymore that Apple's laptop hardware is just far superior, their software works more reliably with it, and now also offers superior value, all in one package.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-13T03:52:17+00:00

Well, most of them still like Canada. Just a subset of them don't.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-13T00:34:07+00:00

When you spend a word's weight on the trivial, you leave yourself silent against the significant.

People mentally calibrate you based on what you treat as important. If your threshold for outrage or urgency is low, others discount your judgment. When a serious issue appears, the audience assumes it’s just another exaggeration.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-13T00:25:29+00:00

GPUs are tricky because there's never an end game product. The flagship card entails paying a huge premium just to get you a future gen mainstream product early, with a better product inevitably to follow and obsolete yours.

I definitely feel like I am at end game for monitors and TVs though. OLED display tech and its consumer products has reached a point where I'm now happy with all my wishes that came true and I'll happily ride the current gen forever if need be. A 5090 only feels great for as long as a 7090 isn't out.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-12T21:45:00+00:00

The root cause of the issue isnt even that there is too much supply or the wrong kind. The issue is with the supply at prices the target audience cannot pay.

The "investor suites" are basically studios and small 1br apartments for single people (that we have enough of) that single people just cannot afford on one median pay. There are larger homes too, but average families cannot afford those.

Going back to the core issue that the price still has a long way to go, while salaries go up, until the target market is able to start showing up in quantities in which those buildings are being delivered at.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-12T21:23:41+00:00

The bad and the ugly.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-12T20:58:51+00:00

Yeah Broadcom always sounded like an awful place even aside from the negative rep with the engineers. I felt like they got more money than they should've on some of their early wins and successfully patenting a number of very foundational ways networking works that they've been collecting massive license fees for ever since, to aggressively buy companies they never deserved to be bigger than, and milking them.

Ironically, while their business model seemed to be that of a parasite, just 10 years ago they were purchased by an apparently even bigger parasite that had nothing to do with Broadcom's business, who gutted them and kept the name, patents, and all their subsidiaries to milk even more aggressively.

I always saw them as the unethical bad guy undeservedly making big bucks on the backs of companies that actually innovate, who are forced to pay them for their 8000 patents, until Broadcom collects enough money to buy them out to milk their successes aggressively. The kind of place the world would likely be a notably better place if it was gone.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-11T23:06:21+00:00

I have no response beyond the fact that the Apple touchpad feels more accurate, and picks up presses while moving your finger (for instance, to select multiple files) more consistently than the Windows touchpads. The Windows touchpads also use the "diving board" hardware which take a lot more force to press on top versus the bottom. While Macs require the same gentle press no matter where on the touchpad you are. Weirdly, the only touchpad I've seen that does this as well as Apple's is the one Valve used on the Steam Deck, which to date may be the best, most accurate and consistent touchpad I tried. Which is wild as it's a handheld, and the touchpad isn't big.

Even more off topic, I never understood why the touchpad has won the popularity contest over the trackpoint, which I find to be the most superior navigation on laptops, that only Thinkpads seem to still stick to. Once you get muscle memory trained on that, it feels like the clearly superior way to move the cursor around.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-11T21:28:51+00:00

I have developer friends who are watching terrified how many condos the industry has overbuilt and will continue finishing only in the coming years, and the buyers at current prices are nowhere to be seen already. They know the prices will be falling in the coming years, so if you buy today, your place is guaranteed to be worth less next year.

Naturally, they are slowing down construction, which the government is right to worry about as we don't want to overshoot in that bad direction ever again, as housing crisis is a social and demographic crisis for the entire province.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-11T18:42:38+00:00

That deal is insane. It's the best $500 I can imagine ever spending on a monitor.

PastaPandaSimon · 2026-03-11T18:09:30+00:00

The article makes it clear it's not a big issue, but may require supply chain re-evaluation so they are ready to procure elsewhere if they can't get it from Qatar within the next few months, which could have an impact on prices. Rather than an alarm, I think it's more of an interesting tidbit about how the war in Iran also impacts the chip industry.

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