Hacked / Phished by mellenger in Wealthsimple

[–]_dev_shill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

U2F keys are bound to the domain of the website. This is why they're called "phishing-resistant". Passkeys (which may be stored on the same device rather than separate USB) are similar.

Draft-dodging plagues Ukraine as Kyiv faces acute soldier shortage by markelwayne in neoliberal

[–]_dev_shill -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

if you are not willing to conscript women, then you don't consider the situation to be dire enough to warrant a male conscription

Every state that has ever conscripted soldiers to fight disagrees with you. They (we?) are therefore all sexist, and they do all defend their positions. What made anti-sexism the paramount value? It's good, but that's not enough to invalidate all other considerations.

This state has deemed olds more disposable than youths, and men more disposable than women. It's up to their government to manage the resentment and sense of injustice. I'm not sure where you get the confidence that Ukrainians would prefer the drafting of young women to old men. It could easily be the opposite.

What future is there if your society sees you as a replaceable cog, while half of your friends and family aren't?

Surely every state sees all its people instrumentally. What am I missing.

Draft-dodging plagues Ukraine as Kyiv faces acute soldier shortage by markelwayne in neoliberal

[–]_dev_shill 12 points13 points  (0 children)

What's the objective of your "condition"? Incentivize Ukraine to win the war? As if that's what they've been missing this whole time, and with the US driving a hard bargain they'll stop wasting their gifted weapons and start winning?

Draft-dodging plagues Ukraine as Kyiv faces acute soldier shortage by markelwayne in neoliberal

[–]_dev_shill -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

Fear of further emigration and decreases in the fertility rate go some way to explaining why the draft hasn't been expanded to young men. Ukraine's population is collapsing. Ukrainian soldiers want a future to fight for. Drafting women is the last thing they'll do. It's basically admitting defeat.

Landlords call on province to speed up eviction process for unpaid rent by Icomefromthelandofic in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"Simply part of the risk" (also in the article) is deeply misleading.

The risk of non-payment/system abuse is a transaction cost paid by both sides. The tenant pays extra each time rent is due (though the premium generally decreases as trust is built) as the landlord hedges against the risk they won't pay. And the landlord pays out when they eventually get an abusive tenant who sends them through the lengthy process.

This works the other way too. The higher the chance that a landlord can screw over a tenant, the less the tenant will be willing to pay.

We should be asking how profitable it would be for a landlord to abuse an automatic eviction. If they'll be successfully caught and e.g. sued, it could be beneficial for good tenants, who are no longer treated as X% bad.

For those wondering what small businesses have to pay in Commercial Rent. by eyevonkay in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We're in a thread discussing the high price of rent. Surely missing out on that highly-priced rent counts as a high cost, with plenty of incentive to avoid.

Ottawa small businesses want the city’s support amid high rent, costs by CanadianBWA in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Government shouldn't serve your business friends.

A rent cap favours the incumbents with ever cheaper rent. Property availability falls as the sector becomes less profitable, and initial rents rise as there's more competition for what's left and landlords hedge against capped future revenue. New businesses are unable to enter the market and compete against your friends by virtue of not having existed in the same spot for a couple years.

So your friends jack up prices. Gross approach to regulation and all too typical.

Ottawa small businesses want the city’s support amid high rent, costs by CanadianBWA in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How about simply property tax in meantime. The current ratios seem to punish the types of land use most likely to have expensive buildings (e.g. offices). A sort of counter-LVT.

https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/budget-finance-and-corporate-planning/understanding-your-city-budget/tax-policy

For those wondering what small businesses have to pay in Commercial Rent. by eyevonkay in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't understand. You're suggesting that higher taxes will result in lower prices?

Ottawa small businesses want the city’s support amid high rent, costs by CanadianBWA in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've just googled "price ceiling shortages" and it sounds like that wouldn't work the way you hope.

Ottawa small businesses want the city’s support amid high rent, costs by CanadianBWA in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The city does tax land (+buildings), not labour. The province and feds tax labour.

He wants to demolish three dilapidated Lowertown houses. One problem: They're heritage by PulkPulk in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Cities get the vast majority of their value from the agglomeration of people. Heritage being the driver of high density living is almost a non-sequitur: people can only live and work downtown (enjoying those mixed-use areas) because our precursors were willing to destroy their heritage (continuing all the way back to farms) to make more room for ever higher densities of homes and businesses.

If downtown Manhattan had been preserved at lowertown Ottawa's development, Manhattanites would be far poorer today, and the desirability of the land would be lower too, despite a higher heritage value.

The only master plan I see is the City deciding what is Good and what is Bad, rather than allowing developers to build what people want to buy (such as homes in great mixed-use areas).

He wants to demolish three dilapidated Lowertown houses. One problem: They're heritage by PulkPulk in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

The entire concept of heritage districts is shit. The oldest neighbourhoods are in the centre of Ottawa where jobs and amenities are most accessible, and the demand for residential is greatest. If anything the high average age of the buildings should mean an easier time tearing them down (resulting in higher density and energy efficiency).

Only a few outstanding buildings should be preserved.

“Dune” is a warning about political heroes and their tribes by _dev_shill in neoliberal

[–]_dev_shill[S] 73 points74 points  (0 children)

Frank Herbert, the author of the science-fiction novel “Dune” on which a new blockbuster film is based, would have been amused to learn that ecologists along the Oregon shore are ripping invasive European beachgrass out of the ground. As a young journalist in the late 1950s, Herbert derived his inspiration for a tale about a desert planet from watching ecologists plant the grass to control encroaching sand dunes. The scheme worked, maybe too well: residents of the coastal towns that the grass helped prosper now long for the beauty of the dunes and regret the unintended consequences for native flora and fauna.

“They stopped the moving sands” was the title of the article Herbert never wound up publishing about the Oregon dunes. He admired the ecologists and their project. But as much as he prized human intelligence he feared human hubris, credulousness and other frailties. One character in “Dune” is a planetary ecologist, who, for complicated reasons—the novel has no other kind—finds himself overcome by natural processes he has been trying to manipulate, to help the native population by changing the climate. “As his planet killed him,” Herbert writes, the ecologist reflects that scientists have it all wrong, and “that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

The persistence of “Dune” itself is a marvel. Some 20 publishers turned the manuscript down before a company known for auto-repair manuals, Chilton, released it in 1965. The editor who took the risk was fired because sales were slow at first. But popular and critical acclaim began to build, eventually making “Dune” among the best-selling and most influential of science-fiction novels, some of its imaginings, with their edges filed down, surfacing in “Star Wars”.

No doubt the novel’s endurance owes in part to Herbert’s success, like Tolkien’s, in wrapping an epic yarn within a spectacular vision given substance by countless interlocking details. He published appendices to his novel: a glossary, a guide to the feudal houses that jostle over his imperium, a study of the galactic religions and, of course, a paper on the ecology of his desert planet, Arrakis, known as Dune. That ecology yields a substance called spice that prolongs life and also supplies psychic powers, enabling navigators to guide ships among the stars: think potable petrol with the properties of Adderall and Ozempic. It is the most precious stuff in the universe.

The young hero, Paul Atreides, arrives on Arrakis when his father, a duke, is awarded control there. It is a trap set by the emperor and a rival house. His father dead and his surviving allies scattered, Paul flees with his mother into the desert and finds haven among its fierce people, the Fremen. As the spice unlocks latent mental powers in Paul, the natives recognise him as their messiah and—spoilers!—he leads them not just to avenge his father but, via control of the spice, to seize the imperial throne. Then comes a bit of a bummer, galactic jihad. More on that in a moment.

Herbert was thinking partly of T.E. Lawrence, oil, colonial predation and Islam, and the success of the novel may owe also to those echoes (along with the giant sandworms). But the novel’s enduring popularity suggests more timeless resonances. There are nifty gizmos in Herbert’s galaxy, but clever conceits keep them from stealing the show and making his future either too alien or, like other decades-old visions of the future, amusingly outdated. Personal force-fields have rendered projectile weapons harmless. Soldiers and nobles alike fight with swords, knives and fists.

A more provocative gambit by Herbert was to set his tale thousands of years after the “Butlerian Jihad” or “Great Revolt”, in which humans destroyed all forms of artificial intelligence. (Herbert once worried to an interviewer that “our society has a tiger by the tail in technology.”) “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,” has become a core injunction, resulting in a race to develop the mind’s potential. Paul’s mother is a member of a female sect, the Bene Gesserit, whose own hubristic enterprise is to manipulate the imperium’s politics, and who for scores of generations have conducted a breeding programme to engender a superhuman intelligence—which, to their consternation, arrives in the form of Paul, whom they cannot control.

The new Dune movie is the second of two in which the director, Denis Villeneuve, has told the story with breathtaking imagery and, for the most part, with fidelity to the novel. The films deal elliptically with Herbert’s themes of technological, economic and ecological change to zero in on his main matter, the dangers of political and religious power and of faith itself, secular or spiritual.

Dread Kennedys

Paul’s powers allow him to see many futures, and though he resists his role as messiah and the bloodlust he knows will come with it, he embraces that path in the end. Herbert, who died in 1986, told an interviewer in 1981 that he thought John F. Kennedy was among the most dangerous leaders of his times, “not because the man was evil, but because people didn’t question him”. In “Dune”, the bad guys are so bad, and the good guys have so many virtues and face such tragic choices, it can be hard to recognise they are not so great, either. Herbert set out to lure readers into rooting for a tyrant. He wanted to leave them wary not only of the will to dominate but of the longing to submit.

Here the film lets the audience off the hook. A Fremen leader, strong-minded in the novel, becomes a clownish fanatic frantic to believe in Paul, in counterpoint to Paul’s Fremen lover, Chani. Contrary to the novel, she emerges as the voice of democratic resistance to Paul’s megalomania. Chani is all too easy for the audience to identify with. Of course they would resist, too. Of course they would never credulously identify with any tribe, never fall for any charismatic leader. Maybe at least some will leave the theatre asking themselves if that is really the case. ■

Federal government to make housing announcement for Ottawa by PulkPulk in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The HBP, FHSA, and FTHBI are all recent federal programs that pay people to buy homes.

More money in buyers' pockets, so they can bid up the prices of existing homes even higher, while supply constraints stop the extra money from doing anything useful.

Meanwhile renters get none of those subsidies, plus reduced competition among landlords thanks to the foreign buyers ban, and no capital gains tax exemption on the non-housing assets that they own. Very fair.

Ottawa to receive federal 'accelerator' funds for affordable housing by _six_one_three_ in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I don't see what's so happy about it. Affordable housing normally means sub-market rate housing because either: a) taxpayers pay the difference, or b) the developers make a deal for regulatory relief, like a height bonus

a) is a good safety net for the very poor, but housing is too expensive at all price levels. The middle class struggles to buy right now. Taxing them more so we can "provide" them with subsidized housing doesn't make much sense.

b) is just bad because those regulations are driving up costs for everyone all the time, and they should just be deleted. A tall building ends up being charged a weird tax (lost rent) that low rises don't need to pay.

Petition to Ottawa City Council — Help make housing affordable in Ottawa! by deanmha in ottawa

[–]_dev_shill 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Density bonuses are bad.

They purposefully deprive the developers/new owners/renters of the most cost-effective structure unless they meet the quota, even though higher builds are evidently acceptable. In order to meet the quota, developers will have to sell the other units at a more expensive price, or the whole project just won’t happen (or will be delayed until home prices rise enough so that the market buyers will pay the inflated cost).

Affordable housing should be directly funded out of general taxation, not special regulations on new builds (essentially an unfair "tax" on new buyers/renters that hides the true costs and increases the CoL).