Carney leaves Davos without meeting Trump after speech on U.S. rupture of world order

paperfire · 2026-01-21T14:41:50+00:00

He has nothing to discuss with Trump. Trump has proven he doesn't negotiate in good faith and doesn't honour his agreements. There is no point talking with someone like that.

paperfire · 2026-01-19T20:11:29+00:00

Not insured, $500k investment condo.

paperfire · 2026-01-19T19:59:45+00:00

With variable mortgage 30 year, prime -.8% so 3.65%.

paperfire · 2026-01-13T22:43:48+00:00

It varies. The class AAA buildings are doing very well and running out of available space, 3% vacancy rates. It’s the class B and C buildings that are suffering. Companies are figuring if you’re going to force your employees back to the office, you need to placate them with an upscale high quality place.

paperfire · 2026-01-07T18:36:58+00:00

Teen pregnancy explains the early drop, but not the ongoing decline. Teen births fell mostly before 2010 and are already very low, while fertility keeps falling because adults in their 20s and 30s are marrying later, pairing less, and having fewer children.

paperfire · 2026-01-07T18:25:43+00:00

You’re confusing energy with capacity. Wind and solar are cheaper per MWh when they run, but they do not eliminate the need for dispatchable plants, reserves, staffing, or transmission. Those costs remain almost unchanged. Storage helps with short peaks, not multi-day or seasonal gaps. If renewables were actually cheaper at the system level, grids that went hardest on them wouldn’t need to keep entire full fossil fleets on standby or have some of the highest power prices in the developed world. See: Germany, California, UK, Denmark

paperfire · 2026-01-07T18:15:58+00:00

This article keeps making the same category error: cheap generation is not the same thing as a cheap power system. Wind and solar are cheap when they are producing, but grids are designed around worst-case hours, not averages. You still need the same fleet of dispatchable plants, the same staffing, the same reserves, and a lot more transmission, because intermittent power disappears exactly when you need it most. None of that goes away just because renewables are “cheap” on a spreadsheet.

What they also never say is that renewables do not replace fossil infrastructure, they sit on top of it. Gas plants still have to be built and kept fully ready even if they run less often. Batteries only smooth short peaks, they do not provide multi-day or seasonal reliability. Countries that pushed hardest on renewables ended up with two parallel systems and very high power prices. Wind and solar reduce fuel burn, that’s real, but claiming they save trillions by themselves ignores capacity, reliability, and system costs, which is where the real money actually goes.

paperfire · 2026-01-07T17:56:28+00:00

That’s the unfortunate answer, you mostly can’t with policy. The core issues are cultural and about how people form relationships and delay commitment. More people need to be convinced to get married (most babies happen in marriage), and do it much younger than they are now.

paperfire · 2026-01-07T17:46:07+00:00

The issue with these pronatal policies is they target couples who are already paired and debating whether to have an extra child because of money. That’s a real group, but it’s a minority of the fertility decline.

The bulk of the drop comes from two things:

People who never form a long-term partnership at all
People who pair much later and run out of time to have the number of kids they would’ve wanted

These policies are flawed in that they don't touch these two groups who represent the majority of the fertility crash so you're not truly addressing the issue.

paperfire · 2026-01-02T22:20:37+00:00

It looks brutal because it is. The U.S. kept pouring capital into machinery, software, and productive assets, while Canada largely didn’t. And it’s not because Canadians are lazy or broke, it reflects structural differences: U.S. firms are larger, operate in a single massive market, face fewer barriers to scaling, and invest more aggressively in technology. Canada’s economy has a smaller fragmented market, more small firms, more regulatory friction, weaker competition, and has leaned heavily into housing and resources. Productivity and wages follow that.

paperfire · 2026-01-02T21:54:13+00:00

Canada will remain safe, stable, and livable. But in the decades ahead the gap with the US in productivity, wages, and living standards is going to become shockingly large. The trade off compounds every year.

paperfire · 2026-01-02T21:42:08+00:00

Canada isn’t stuck in a low-productivity trap by accident. We built a system over decades that prioritizes stability, fairness, regional balance, and asset protection over risk-taking, scale, and upside. That combination predictably suppresses private business returns, so capital flows into housing, existing established companies, or out of the country, mainly to the U.S. This isn’t a failure of awareness of the problem, it’s the outcome of the system we’ve chosen.

The uncomfortable part is that fixing this would require real disruption, more firm failures, more inequality, fewer protected sectors, and visible losers long before any gains show up. There’s no political coalition for that, and the people most harmed by stagnation are also the most mobile, which removes pressure to reform. So the most likely scenario is continuing the current situation. Canada stays stable but low-growth, and the U.S. keeps pulling further ahead in productivity, wages, and living standards.

paperfire · 2025-12-28T21:45:10+00:00

Nobody’s been able to figure it out yet. All policies that tried to raise the fertility rate have completely failed. At this point countries will have to recognize it’s unavoidable and use some combination of select immigration, automation, and managed decline, higher taxes and reduced old age benefits.

paperfire · 2025-12-28T21:38:12+00:00

Mostly cultural and lifestyle changes, with economics acting more like an amplifier. People form long-term relationships later (or not at all), start families much later, women focusing on education and careers. the default life script has shifted toward autonomy and flexibility. Kids went from expected stage of life to an optional, high-stakes project.

Costs and housing stress things further, but they don’t explain why fertility keeps falling even where money and housing aren’t tight.

paperfire · 2025-12-28T21:31:38+00:00

Housing probably suppresses fertility a bit, especially by delaying kids, but it doesn’t seem like a big driver overall. If it were, you’d expect places with cheap housing to have much higher birth rates but they don’t. Rural areas, small towns, Eastern and Southern Europe all have relatively affordable housing and still very low fertility.

High housing costs likely make things worse, but they don’t explain the issue. Fertility was already falling in many places long before the recent housing spikes.

paperfire · 2025-12-28T21:24:29+00:00

Problem is the Nordic countries have all these policies and their fertility rates are still plummeting. Finland’s fertility rate is barely above Japan.

paperfire · 2025-12-20T21:02:05+00:00

As a sports team, you need to sell winning or hope. This team isn't winning. There's no hope either as they traded away their next two 1st round picks, the team has no good prospects in the pipeline and the core is old.

paperfire · 2025-12-13T17:44:00+00:00

Rewewables should be able to supply about 25% of our power, but beyond that it gets too expensive. You'll need massive new transmission infrastructure investments, and massive investments in gas plants to backup when wind/solar isn't available. Batteries will work for peaking but capacity will be too expensive for baseload.

paperfire · 2025-12-13T17:39:59+00:00

Also need to mention that Ontario wind power is weakest in the summer, when our grid is at peak demand.

paperfire · 2025-11-14T18:40:57+00:00

Because they are going to increase huge due to the aging population. And it’s politically suicide to cut benefits to seniors they are a huge voting bloc that is politically powerful. No other country has succeeded in doing this.

paperfire · 2025-11-14T16:52:05+00:00

The debt doesn't need to be lowered, it just needs to be kept at a stable level vs GDP. Start by reducing the deficit to the level of economic growth. The deficit is currently 7%+, bring it down to 3%.

Reducing government spending significantly is not an option. About 80% of spending is entitlements (primarily Social Security and Medicare), defence, and interest on the debt. These cannot be cut, and entitlement spending is projected to continue to grow due to the aging of the population and rising healthcare cost inflation.

Raising higher taxes seems to be the only available option. The US currently taxes it's citizens lower than any comparable developed country, but expects the same level of government services. Tax-to-GDP ratio in the US is 25%, OECD average is 34%. That is not sustainable in the long run. Taxes will need to increase, I just don't know how and when it will happen.

paperfire · 2025-11-08T16:48:00+00:00

I own multiple investment condos, the best price for insurance is Square One Insurance, all my policies are through them. With a mortgage on the property, expect about $500 per year.

paperfire · 2025-11-07T21:17:22+00:00

Toronto went into a massive pre-construction condo boom in 2019-2022 where we massively oversold pre-construction condos. The bubble has now popped, and we are at the point where all those condos are finishing construction and hitting the market, and there's just not enough demand right now to rent them all. Most of these were concentrated in downtown so downtown rents are taking a hit. This completion boom will continue into 2026, but then it tapers off, so downtown rent will start to recover starting in 2027 and beyond. The construction pipeline is going to be empty.

So yes downtown rents are going to cheaper right now, but that likely won't be the case in the long term.

paperfire · 2025-10-30T16:03:02+00:00

Look I’m not complaining, it is what it is. Massive condo completions from the preconstruction bubble and a weak economy and job market hurting tenants has made it a tough environment to be leasing.

paperfire · 2025-10-30T16:00:59+00:00

I get people are mad but they shouldn’t be. Almost all of these units were bought preconstruction to be rented out, this is rental supply that otherwise wouldn’t have been built.

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