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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • The problem is it's extremely energy intensive. The math just doesn't work. IIRC, we currently have three big "carbon capture" plants operating to try and remove CO2 from the atmosphere. (As opposed to the carbon capture they do in things like concrete plants.) Those plants are operating at a fraction the efficiency they expected. Age even if they did work, we'd need to open a new plant like those every single day for a decade before we could capture just the emissions we're putting out right now.

    It's not gonna work.


  • Yup, the idea of electric cars is great, but it easily becomes something like Braess Paradox. Where building bigger roads leads to more cars & more traffic. Building electric cars just means fuel is cheaper so people drive more.

    And even if we were able to electrify every single vehicle in the world, with sufficient charging infrastructure, cheap reliable renewable energy, and abundant resources for cheap replacement batteries; that still leads to collapse. Assuming electric cars are afforable,b that pushes more "investing" in so many car-centric single-family suburbs that are cashflow negative will have to finally face drastic increases in taxes. We'll wish that walkability and public transit should had been prioritized, as we desperately densify in patchwork ways that cost more in the long run.

    Then if you look at the amount of pollution caused by rubber tires, continuing with electric cars using rubber tires is just leading to collapse from inhaled particles and forever chemicals.

    The answer has always been walkable cities with infrastructure for bikes, busses, streetcars, and rail. This temporary century-long obsession with abandoning what's worked for human cities and splurging with the assumption that the temporary abundance of cheap energy would never end. But we never change in time.









  • Landlords provide housing the way scalpers “provide” tickets. The solution for people who need can’t afford to buy or who only need short term accommodation is public housing.

    The CMHC used to provide funds to the provinces which would then build big public housing units with affordable rent. This provide a check & balance to the free market, keeping rents and house prices from skyrocketing. But then in the 80s and 90s, both Conservative and Liberal PMs successively defunded that aspect of the CMHC to solve budget issues, and those properties were destroyed as they reached their “maturity” date, regardless of whether the building was still usable or not.

    I lived near one of them, located here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/SG2kkXeVsp3Nia2RA Check out the street view and click “see more dates” for 2012, that’s housing for 90+families. Then in 2014 it was closed for demolition. And today it’s still an empty grass lot. Almost 10 years as a Govt-owned empty lot, instead of affordable housing, because those Govts kept promising “market solutions” to housing problems.

    But it turns out the “problem” with housing was letting the “free market” turn it into another Tulip Bulb craze, instead of keeping it an affordable necessity





  • Historically, what made countries great was their ability to provide rising standards of living to its citizens. That often results in large gold reserves and military might, but plenty of places with gold and bullets were bad places to live.

    But the rich wasn’t us to believe those metrics, so we can ignore how living standards are dropping, indicating that Capitalism has failed to provide a better lifestyle.


  • And what’s really fun is that despite the housing crisis, many home builders outside the big-3 city areas are running slow right now because regular people can’t qualify for housing. I’ve only been working 5-12 days a month for the last year, between a shortage of framers (many moved to Ontario in 2021 due to work slowing), shortage of materials, and now interest rates killing purchases.

    We’re so fucked, and anyone in a position to fix things just refuses to. If you build public housing, prices drop and you get voted out by angry house owners. Don’t build houses, and both homelessness and living standards get so much worse, and you get voted out by angry poor folks.