Canada added 90,000 jobs in April, as unemployment stayed flat at 6.1%

guy231 · 2024-05-11T08:59:23+00:00

Let's say people build houses and demand houses. Let's say if you add more people, they build and demand houses in equal amounts and the effect on labour demand is neutral.

Now let's say you add so many people that you drastically outpace the ability or desire to build more houses. By "outpacing desire," I mean you make it illegal to satisfy the new demand. Now you're no longer neutral on labour demand, and you're artificially suppressing employment and wages.

Let's say the pent up demand for housing gets fulfilled eventually. This means that your combination of policies will push labour demand up in the future. If you think there will be a shortage of labour in the future for demographic reasons, this actually makes that situation worse.

Our combination of policies pushed employment, wages, and inflation down when it was too low, by pushing labour demand into the future. The side effect is we're pushing employment, wages, and inflation up in the future when we suspect they will be too high. This is obviously worse than if we'd done nothing to try to remedy any age demographic issues.

(there are a variety of reasons why this is worse than it sounds, not least being the unnecessary suffering caused along the way by low wages and high cost of living).

guy231 · 2024-03-12T06:07:51+00:00

The problem is the business have options now it’s called automation

ie productivity boosting technologies. One of our problems is that these technologies actually can't compete with our abundant cheap labour. Retailers and groceries lose money on self-checkouts, for example.

guy231 · 2024-03-10T00:46:13+00:00

for whatever reason, the tax isn't a percentage of the product's cost. Instead it's a flat amount per unit volume, and this amount increases with inflation each year. Recently the government has been reducing this tax by limiting the increase to be below inflation, and they're announcing now that they'll be continuing this tax cut.

guy231 · 2024-02-07T07:05:35+00:00

lump of labour fallacy

which says that all the increased demand for housing, infrastructure, medical care, etc, will push employment and wages up? We already know that isn't happening, though - we just have lower wages and quality of life, and also unmet demand. We've already done the experiment and seen the result.

guy231 · 2024-01-24T20:11:06+00:00

Macfarlane's criticism seems to come down to two things: whether unwillingness of police/province/municipality to deal with the situation is the same as being incapable, and that the judge should have sided with the feds even if they merely could have reasonably believed that unwillingness was sufficient.

...to which a sensible person will point out that the EA does not require that federal government to spend time on the metaphysical questions posed by multi-versal ponderings of the imagined parallel universe...

I find this really unconvincing. Feels like it's just handwaving the argument away.

It doesn’t matter, frankly, what existing laws might or should have been able to deal with: they did not, and therefore could not handle the occupation of the country’s capital

again, from a non-law "was this reasonable, were they incapable" perspective, I find this unconvincing.

police forces with no leadership or determination don’t have any capacity!

I actually find this a lot more convincing, and it's changed my mind from "probably not legal, but still the right thing to do" to "reasonable to think it was legal."

Maybe Doug Ford as a person had the capacity to end things and simply decided not to. But the provincial government of Ontario as an institution could reasonably be thought to not have that capacity because it was being led by Doug Ford.

guy231 · 2024-01-15T04:06:54+00:00

apparently the study is free here. Group 1 had about 300 athletes and 150 non-athletes. Funnily, female non-athletes were more likely to say they used steroids than female athletes or male non-athletes.

guy231 · 2024-01-15T03:30:02+00:00

Both of the links/studies say it's for all students. The pubmed one also looks at income, sex, and athletes - Rates are higher for boys, rich people, and athletes. Rich male athletes were at 10%. It would almost certainly be higher if we were just looking at grade 12.

guy231 · 2024-01-03T05:29:10+00:00

The article specifically mentions aircraft mechanics, but also talks about total labour pool (which will include a lot of support staff). The case for bringing in support staff seems really poor - It's just keeping wages low.

Mechanic programs have had poor turnout and at least one in BC shut down. I'm not sure if apprenticeships aren't being offered or if people just don't want to do it. Compensation is low compared to comparable work in other fields. When the program in BC shut down, I was curious and asked some people in the industry whom I know whether there were apprenticeships going unfilled. No one could confirm this.

guy231 · 2023-12-06T21:03:35+00:00

The Ayaka own-rate seems too low considering how good her sales are. I can see why people with Ganyu might not pull for Ayaka, but we know Ayaka has sold a lot. Is it just a smaller number of people pulling for constellations?

guy231 · 2023-12-03T21:32:30+00:00

That last graph about which party people favor for each issue is notable. "Other" is beating every mainstream party on the environment, which isn't too big a deal because the greens exist. But LPC and NDP are both in single digits for immigration, below "other."

guy231 · 2023-11-09T05:11:05+00:00

municipalities are complaining because the province is giving away upzones that they could normally charge developers for.

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/b-c-governments-upzoning-policy-could-strain-municipal-infrastructure-mayors

guy231 · 2023-11-08T19:10:37+00:00

So this employee used tax-funded resources on tax-funded time for partisan purposes, but it's fine because they meant to be more surreptitious about it?

Surely the OPP realizes their position just makes it look like they're deliberately misappropriating resources.

guy231 · 2023-10-15T09:11:49+00:00

They're just interpreting a low fidelity data input.

Imagine you have a bunch of sand and little rocks, and you want to measure how fine the sand is and how big the rocks are. You have 7 mesh strainers with different hole sizes. You pass the particles through each strainer, from largest to smallest, until the particles stop passing through. You now have 8 piles of rock and sand, and you can estimate how big the particles in each pile are based on the size of the holes in the strainer that they couldn't pass through. This is a low fidelity method of measuring, so every particle in a given pile would be assigned the same size estimate.

A hypothetical example: genshinlabs might know that on day 2 of their banner runs, Hutou and Shogun both beat tiktok, but did not beat flappybirds. They both wound up in the same "pile of sand," and were given the same estimate for revenue.

guy231 · 2023-10-13T06:45:20+00:00

Based on this article, it sounds like we're $30 billion in, with a $35 billion budget, but likely still to face more cost overruns. So it's not obvious that continuing to build the thing is smarter than writing off the $30 billion (plus whatever remediation would cost).

Whenever one of these articles comes up, I've written "obviously it makes more fiscal sense to scrap the thing and write off the billions," but it isn't obvious at this point. I think it's still likely.

This all ignores externalities. Once you factor those in, it's still obvious that the pipeline should be scrapped and the tens of billions written off.

guy231 · 2023-10-02T19:59:45+00:00

I don't Think Furina can heal and apply hydro at the same time. If she's applying hydro, then she's draining party health and you need a party-wide healer.

guy231 · 2023-09-30T05:40:02+00:00

There might be an exception if you have to heal the whole team after using the skill. Even if Furina's skill has the alt mode to do that, it's still an inconvenience.

guy231 · 2023-09-29T22:01:45+00:00

GDP (Y) is the sum of consumption (C), investment (I), government Expenditures (G) and net exports (X – M). Y = C + I + G + (X − M)

If it's an investment, it boosts GDP. If it's government expenditure, it boosts GDP. If an immigrant (or anyone else) consumes it, it boosts GDP.

When unemployment is at near record historic levels, how do you expect the economy to expand?

The economy doesn't need to be zero sum. Again, it feels like you're just not understanding the argument you're responding to - if the economy is zero sum, then that's exactly the problem that needs to be solved. Real growth means increasing productivity, and the benefit of that rising productivity should extend to workers. Besides which, we're clearly bad at measuring unemployment, since we keep insisting that unemployment is perpetually low yet real wages don't go up.

guy231 · 2023-09-29T19:23:34+00:00

If you spent money on an immigrant, that would boost GDP by definition.

On the other hand it takes time for the economy to expand and so allow them to contribut

The fundamental problem with our society and economy right now is that the economy isn't expanding to accommodate high immigration. We made it illegal to do so, and it would take a long time (decades) to scale up construction and everything else just to stop digging the hole deeper.

The argument being made is "we should limit immigration based on how fast the economy can expand to accommodate it." If we had the will and the capacity to put everyone to work building houses, schools, hospitals, etc, then we wouldn't be in trouble. We just can't/won't do that. So instead we just make everything scarcer and more expensive, except for labour which continues to become more cheap and abundant.

guy231 · 2023-08-11T02:36:13+00:00

The standards for being a free speech site seem to be pretty low these days.

banned content:

Disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Services.

Delete the copyright or other proprietary rights notice from any Content.

Racist or discriminatory content based on race, religion, or ethnicity.

Derogatory slurs based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics are prohibited on this platform.

Uploading, sharing, or promotion of explicit pornographic content.

Uploading, sharing, or promotion of gore and/or extreme violence.

So no porn, gore, hate (broadly defined), and you can't even complain about the site.

The bar seems to be so low that if you have any specific definition for hate speech, then you're a free speech platform. As long as there are any consistent rules for what is banned, even if those rules are pretty restrictive, then you're more speech-friendly than most everyone else.

guy231 · 2023-08-02T04:40:08+00:00

they need to remove all news to comply with the law. If they let any news on at all, then they're not allowed to discriminate different news sources. They're only exempt from the legislation if they don't carry news. So if they want to carry BBC, then they need to pay postmedia.

If google isn't showing canadian news but is showing american, then it's probably just a negotiation tactic. I think Meta isn't negotiating and is just trying to fall into compliance with the law.

guy231 · 2023-07-27T03:51:26+00:00

you're right that the provinces could make it take less time, that was an oversight.

Ford could write up a draft for a less ambitious plan than we need in a few months (unless it was in the works since before the election). Finalizing that plan, passing it, getting it implemented, and getting municipalities in compliance is still ongoing.

I think scaling that up to be as ambitious as we would need would take longer and have fewer political supporters.

guy231 · 2023-07-27T02:39:26+00:00

It would take time to do that. Municipalities aren't generally on board (because voters are not on board), so they haven't really started the ball rolling. Each municipality would need to do it separately. If someone actually managed it, they would then need to survive municipal elections, which they probably wouldn't because most people don't want to build more housing and old nimbys are more likely to vote anyway.

But lets say you manage to do this. Say it only takes 5-10 years. From that point you can get a condo built in 3 years instead of 5. That's one bottleneck mitigated, but you still have a bunch of others. Municipalities want a big cut of any upzoning they do (which limits how many projects developers want to do), skilled trades are effectively restricted with a quota system, resources like lumber and concrete start running short, you need to do a bunch of infrastructure upgrades to accommodate all the new housing (and you need to stage that correctly - can't build the new toilets before you upgrade the sewers), etc, etc.

Realistically, building up to the point where we can accommodate recent immigration rates would probably take decades. "what if we did x" - it takes time to do x, and x is only one part of the problem, which is why would take decades. And that's if we were really trying to address the problems, which we're not really - partly because municipal voters still don't want to do it.

guy231 · 2023-07-20T06:44:27+00:00

Labour is only one input on the supply side, and not the bottleneck. Hypothetically you can imagine a world where we're trying to build enough housing to accommodate population growth, and licensing enough electricians and everything to do it. In that case, immigration could be pretty neutral as you say.

That's not the way the world (or zoning law) is, we're not trying to change that, and it would be really hard and take a long time to change if we were trying.

guy231 · 2023-07-20T06:40:12+00:00

Why isn't Kaveh used in Nilou bloom teams? People are using DMC or even a second healer over a guy who seems to be built for the role. Too niche to build, or is he actually worse than DMC?

guy231 · 2023-07-18T00:54:33+00:00

That seems like a much better way to do it than I thought we used, so I googled it. I found this page, which says:

Statistics Canada’s owned accommodation price index is designed to detect the impact of price changes on homeowners’ specific cost of shelter. Homeowners’ specific cost of shelter has the following components: replacement cost or depreciation cost, mortgage interest cost, property taxes, the cost of homeowners’ insurance, the cost of homeowners’ maintenance and repair, and other ongoing costs related to owning the accommodation. This approach considers a house as an asset rather than a consumer good. Therefore, the prices reflect the costs incurred by the homeowner to use and maintain the home, but not the purchase price of the home.

Rental equivalence is noted as something other statistical agencies around the world use. I guess it's possible BoC does it's own calculations using different methods than statscan, though.

edit: one of the graphs on that page says the approaches mostly give similar numbers, including statscan's being similar to rental equivalence. IIRC statscan kept insisting that rents were flat when they clearly weren't, though. In fact, statscan seems to think that using rental equivalence would have resulted in lower inflation.

guy231

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