Must be a leadership review coming up. Pandering to base.

Manitoba should invade down that highway – see how the rest of Canada feels when the Riel Rebellion …

Ah nevermind, let bygones be bygones.

Or logging, or farming. There’s a bunch of reasons to have low population density road networks.

At this latitude?

Epic answer haha. My other half grew up in a Soviet apartment block, so I get stories from her about that on occasion. Mostly about not owning any of it except their contents. Definitely a “poor but housed” situation – don’t look behind the curtains. I’m not sure it’s a good idea either. During the collapse of the Soviet Union when the power and heat shut off, they were burning furniture in there – but I guess that’s a testament too a solid construction haha.

Anyway, fun reply! :)

Was in Regina for the weekend (I’m a Bomber fan, don’t hate me) and had a nice time! We were looking up real estate and comparing against Winnipeg and it seemed similar ish. But that doesn’t tell us about the rental market which sometimes has weird emergent phenomena.

If you were benevolent dictator of Canadastan, how would you fix it?

Yeah, and the east coast, excluding Halifax.

Prairie cities, except Calgary, doing alright too.

Nice perspective.

What would you consider to be a contribution of value? Posting? Comments? Moderating? Installing a server rack in your closer for nightly backups? What would you suggest a minimum contribution for continued use should be?

Conclusion, based on some random scrolling around in the maps.

The rural north is fucked. But we already knew this. You could make the same map for teachers, nurses, postal workers…

In the bigger cities, it’s a bimodal distribution – the newest neighbourhoods (where sprawl is occurring) lag behind, but also the older poorer neighbourhoods. So it isn’t just socioeconomics, but also about sprawl.

I actually tried to work out the economics of it based on the rate we were paying ($200/night) in a place that was clearly worth at least half a million.

$200 per night. Assuming they only get occupancy on the weekends, and use some weekends for themselves. Then you could reasonably presume they can get maybe 150 rental-days in a year. More likely to be 100. Let’s use 100 because it maths easy.

That’s $20000/yr. If you were only paying for your place with short term rentals at that pace, and interest wasn’t a thing, it would take 25 years to break even. If you include interest at a trivial 4%, then you’re looking at a 40 year mortgage.

And that’s not including all the cleaning, repairs, etc.

So if you’re using the place as an income stream, yeah, that ain’t happening. Not unless it’s in a high-demand location that you can charge a lot more for.

Unless you’re looking at it like a retirement-home-in-waiting or something.

There is (or was) once a pretty nice industry of “cabin resorts” – basically a facility with a bunch of cabins for rent. They are functionally hotels, and subject to all the regulations. Now you rent a VRBO and show up and there’s rotten food in the microwave and you have no recourse.

Yes, this actually happened to us. Yes I have pictures. You can’t smell it in the picture.

Good.

I say this as someone who recently stayed in a brand new cottage built largely for VRBO in Manitoba. It’s one thing to use the empty cottage to generate a little extra cash. It’s another when cottages are built solely for temporary rental on these sorts of services. Hotel legislation was written in blood. This is people doing a end run around those legal protections.

It’s also how you would typically fence a stolen laptop.

Paid online event? Weird. What happened to IRC for these sorts of meetings. I’m old.

Capitalism is a funnel -> those with capital extract additional capital from those without. I say this as a small business owner, just barely turning towards “winning” the game if capitalism after decades on the other side. It’s a resource snowball, and only a few can win.

Ideally, there is regulation, scaling taxes and redistribution. That part seems more broken the further along you get.

I’m in this comment and I don’t know why

Maybe they could send some firefighters instead

Pissing into the wind.

It was a matter of time. The insanity cannot be normalized.

Got rained out playing Slopitch this evening. Too bad for the game, but good for beer. Happy Canada Day ya hosers. 🇨🇦