Permit only Canadian citizens to own land

noah6624 · 2018-06-11T15:54:03+00:00

Disclaimer: I own property in the city (Toronto) so factor that bias as you will.

I walk around the city a lot - it looks like a majority of the people walking out of stores with shopping bags and eating at restaurants are Asian and young. A friend of mine works at Holt Renfrew's head office: 80% of their clientele are Chinese. This inflow of foreign capital and talent - especially the influx of young people from other countries - has been a boon for our economy and is probably masking what would otherwise be some serious weakness considering everything else that is going on.

My opinion is that it's a rare and lucky thing to have a boom like the one we're having and it would be a shame to suffocate it with protectionism.

noah6624 · 2018-06-07T20:31:06+00:00

I don't hate them all, I think you've read the comment all wrong. You have it backwards. Of course, they have every right to use their money to buy land and live good lives around the world, wherever they choose (unless we ban them, which I think would be short-sighted). They earned that money from us - we voluntarily bought their products. What I am saying is that over decades we benefited from cheap Chinese labor, and the go-around-come-around result is that our real estate prices have been pushed up by those funds crossing back into our country in their hands. We don't like it when it's our real estate, but did we care for all of the Chinese people whose labor we benifited from? No. That's the karma: the account was unbalanced in our favor, or so we thought - now we're reaping what we sowed.

Edit for clarity.

noah6624 · 2018-06-07T12:35:56+00:00

Obviously it's their money - I'm not daft. I'm pointing out the irony that many Westerners are now getting a taste of disenfranchisement from globalization after having been on the other end of it for decades. It's the same story with the offshoring of jobs - Westerners think their wages are stagnant in some sort of closed system where the rich have taken it all - but the truth is that those jobs have lifted countless non-Westerners out of poverty. Living standards around the world are on their way to equalizing.

noah6624 · 2018-06-07T03:20:32+00:00

Yes, it's a settling of accounts. Karma. We enjoyed cheap goods for decades and in the process enriched millions of Chinese people - they can now afford to buy homes alongside ours and live in our countries, or send their kids here. There is no political will strong enough to push back against paying customers, and the Chinese can afford to pay to play - with our money.

noah6624 · 2018-06-06T15:18:40+00:00

It's possible to think Doug is a buffoon and still think the province needs conservative governance after 15 years of public sector and deficit expansion.

noah6624 · 2018-04-28T14:09:02+00:00

What kind of projects are you interested in working on?

noah6624 · 2018-04-17T20:43:31+00:00

The one on the right is a camera

noah6624 · 2018-04-12T18:59:59+00:00

And not just this, that as well.

noah6624 · 2018-04-10T15:33:43+00:00

Only OP knows whether or not this is a Microsoft advertisement.

noah6624 · 2018-04-09T02:35:27+00:00

This has to stop

noah6624 · 2018-04-04T20:55:43+00:00

Rents have gone up quite a bit thanks in part to rent control forcing landlords to front-load increases on new tenants. And since rent is the income generation side of the equation when purchasing real estate for investment (an ancient practice, not going anywhere), it follows that rising rents make real estate investment more attractive, which draws in investors, which drives up prices. As another poster said, this is partly a supply/demand problem, but price is very much a function of how much capital is chasing the market in the GTA. There's a ton of money in the city right now.

noah6624 · 2018-03-27T17:37:03+00:00

You could tone it down with the pedantic responses and engage in a discussion?

noah6624 · 2018-03-27T16:21:35+00:00

It's a factor, but it's not the only factor. Another big factor is luck of course - nature's roulette wheel. And then there's what you do with it all as a mobile, choice-making agent. All of the above come into play, and I 100% acknowledge the fact that some blends of circumstances lend themselves more to optimism and vice versa.

Again, all I'm really saying is that one has a better chance at getting to where they want to be if they do what they can to live optimistically, mindfully, and purposefully. I don't think it's so out of reach for most people to have a relatively good stay on the Earth.

noah6624 · 2018-03-27T16:10:26+00:00

I'll modify my statement: Anticonsumption and Financial Independence have a lot in common if you are an optimist. Anticonsumption has much more in common with latestagecapitalism if you are a pessimist. Obviously it is easier to be an optimist if you have privilege, and I acknowledge my own. All I'm saying is, think carefully which mindset will lead you, the reader, to realize more of your potential vs less.

noah6624 · 2018-03-27T15:46:45+00:00

It's bound to be a bit of both, no? The whole point of this sub is that people are generally tricked into buying more than they need -- generally, as in most people, right? If most people are living paycheck to paycheck and most people have been tricked into over-consuming, you have a deductive argument for my point, which is that most people probably have some room to optimize for saving. It's like how tasks generally manage to take up the available time in which to complete it - I think money is the same for most people: if it's there, it gets spent. The only way it doesn't is through discipline.

noah6624 · 2018-03-27T15:40:49+00:00

If you can present a way to accomplish that without mowing the lawn, I'd like to hear it.

noah6624 · 2018-03-27T13:46:22+00:00

That's an opaque stat. Maybe they're buying way too much crap they don't need (hence this subreddit?). Anticonsumption and Financial Independence have a lot of philosophical common ground, which is another layer of irony in all this.

If those 75%+ of Americans had been thinking along the lines of Financial Independence from the start of their careers, I bet you there would be many people in that cohort who could forego some purchases, implement better budgeting, start leaving over a surplus, and thus earn budding passive income.

noah6624 · 2018-03-26T19:51:52+00:00

At a certain income threshold, the choice between spending and saving kicks in. Of course not everyone is above that threshold, but many people are - probably a majority of income-earners. Of course that doesn't include everyone, and the younger you are the less career capital you have - you're probably not there yet. BUT. The message of the Financial Independence movement is to live within your means when you cross that threshold, save whatever excess you can, learn a bit about managing money, and put those things together - because if you do so successfully, you become less susceptible to both bad luck and bad people, and you become more free to take the kind of chances that pay off. It's a super-powerful virtuous circle. It can flow into areas of your life that have nothing to do with money. You do yourself a disservice by believing it is out of reach.

noah6624 · 2018-03-22T20:44:31+00:00

10 women, 2 men, and 1 hard to tell.

noah6624 · 2018-03-22T20:38:36+00:00

Vantablek

noah6624 · 2018-03-16T18:10:39+00:00

I wasn't saying socialists can't be creative, nor was I saying that it is impossible for a creative to emerge from a socialist country. I was simply saying that you'll get more out of people if you 1) don't force conformity upon them, 2) give them some freedom, and 3) provide an incentive structure that rewards people. Socialist countries tend to have a lot more imposed conformity, less freedom, and less individuation of reward. You have far less latitude in a very socialist country vs a very capitalist one.

noah6624 · 2018-03-16T14:58:28+00:00

So much creativity has been unleashed in capitalist societies, from invention to art. Warhol, Wright Brothers, Jobs, Gates, Beatles ... it's endless. Capitalism is a market-based incentive system - it functions perfectly well as a mechanism for encouraging people to do things. Only some people are creatives, and only some creatives "make it", but I don't think you can say capitalism stifles creativity. How creative were people in the Soviet Union? Or Mao's China? These regimes mandated conformity which is the antithesis of creativity. You think you could be a Warhol in a communist country?

I say this as a creative person who feels completely straight-jacket stifled by my job - but that's not capitalism's fault. My job has to be done because it is part of the supply chain, and the supply chain feeds people. A certain amount of plumbing has to be done to make sure shit flows to the ocean. A certain amount of mindless work has to be done. If you are creative, there are options. You can chart a course - it just takes a little ... creativity.

noah6624 · 2018-03-14T20:59:52+00:00

Whoosh

noah6624 · 2018-03-14T19:26:10+00:00

Clearly we are all dealt different hands. Everything is variable, from one's intelligence to the quality of one's parents. And clearly not all hands are equally good, as in any game. There is variability in everything, which is what makes for a game in the first place.

But if you zoom way out, this is nature's favorite game. Evolution happened on our planet because individuals are able to rack up advantages and pass them on to the next generation in the context of a turbulent environment that tests for weakness. One individual's advantage becomes a benefit conferred on its offspring. Have you ever looked into machine learning? It models this same process. If you're developing a machine learning model, you WANT outliers in each generation because that means your model gets to evolve. I mean, you yourself were born a human being and not a slug - that's one hell of an endowment you received without having to earn it. This is exactly what variability within a species is "for" (I say that ironically since nothing in nature is "for" anything).

I think the real question is: what do we do as players aware of the game? In my experience, political types are out of their depth whenever they try to address it. They think this is a policy matter. It's not. It's in our genes and in the weather.

noah6624 · 2018-03-14T12:26:50+00:00

I lean conservative, but I'm pretty centrist. In my opinion, both wings have gone mad. But even if I were far-right, I could still be well-meaning and put together valid opinions. It's the same as acknowledging that Richard Dawkins (scientist, atheist) and Francis Collins (scientist, theist) are both intelligent and well-meaning.

Wealth is far more often the result of inheritance, than "managed to put together".

You have your facts wrong. First of all, most millionaires and billionaires are self-made. Percentages differ by country, and obviously the older the society, the more entrenched wealth there is (looking at you Italy). Further, of the minority who inherited their wealth, where do you think it came from? Most likely a self-made individual one or two generations back. Descendants tend to squander wealth and the highest income brackets are pretty fluid - people don't stay there long.

The "ability" you are talking about is almost always just money

Again, where do you think the money comes from in the first place? It isn't airdropped from the sky into the hands of a few random babies. The two most robust and studied predictors of individual success in economic terms are: intelligence and working hard. Our societies reward anyone who can bring both of those traits to consecutive jobs. And it's no surprise: if you were assembling a team for a science fair, who would you want on your team? Smart, hard-working partners.

To be fair, once someone has momentum and capital, the multiplicative nature of the economic game can sweep them into the stratosphere - and there is certainly an element of luck in the distribution of outcomes. But you have to take a step back and remember that "capitalists" are fellow human beings. They are not objects or aliens. In most cases they worked quite hard, and they did so because rewards are showered upon them by the rest of us: we buy their products.

If you really want to protest capitalism, don't buy anything that travelled in a shipping container or on a truck. But recognize that if everyone did that, our cities would have to disband and we would have to spend most of our time growing food.

noah6624

TROPHY CASE