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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: February 14th, 2025

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  • People are weird.

    Had a neighbour who just left the basement door open and threw a bag of dog food on the floor for their dog and left for three weeks. I didn’t know what was going on or I’d have called someone - anyone. They were homeowners.

    Over COVID I heard the apocryphal stories of support payments going out and landlords getting stiffed as they watched new TVs being delivered. I don’t believe a lot of that, though.

    I do think that short of a serious effort to acquire, build, maintain, and expand public housing, small scale landlords are an important part of society. But they need a lot of controls and limits, and tenants likewise need to have reasonable respect for the property. It’s not always the case but I feel a small scale landlord is better positioned to be (and certainly isn’t always, as in this case) connected to the community than BlackRock.

    It would be nice to have a public record for tenants and landlords to share warnings about bad behaviour, but that sort of thing gets corrupted so quickly.










  • I think I read that these trees won’t grow again, because of climate change. They grew up in an oxygen rich humid environment and that’s not there anymore. Without these trees, the forests dramatically change.

    A notice posted on B.C.'s Forest Operations Map website shows the yellow cedar was felled in an area where Matchlee Ltd. Partnership, majority owned by Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nation, holds a non-renewable forest licence.

    Remember this when someone says that the precolonial peoples should take priority in environmental decisions.

    ETA - but also remember this when anyone has environmental thoughts. Follow the money!





  • I think you can just as easily flip that on its head.

    USA consistently weaponizes its companies through sanctions. If a country wants to be part of the global economy you need to do business with USA banks (eg SWIFT) and tech, and if your country is sanctioned, it cannot. Speaking of tech, the tech companies actively participates in wiretapping and that’s really old news - who knows what they’re doing today.

    China is typically careful about throwing its weight around because of its high dependency on exports and limited deployment capability of its army.

    In terms of a shooting war with the USA, China has a strategic advantage in being able to shut down Canadian transportation remotely, agreed.

    I think recent events have shown, however, that there’s no guarantee that the USA would automatically be on the side of Canada. I’m thinking more it’s more along the lines of how Germany and Austria were “on the same side” in WWII ie Annexation.



  • Canada has an auto industry? More like outsourced manufacturing. There’s no Canadian automaker (pace Edison) and the western automakers are retreating on the EV front (and thus far have targeted middle-high end range and also used Chinese components in many cases) so they’re less supporting the industry and more bailing out companies that aren’t innovating.

    Why Canada would follow the USA in this tariff with the current trade war I can’t understand.