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.

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.

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.

Maybe they could send some firefighters instead

I actually locked the D&D community on lemmy.ca that I created once the ttrpg.network D&D community took off. I recommend that one. I could reactive the lemmy.ca if someone went sideways with that instance.

I also recommend the lemmyverse.net website for finding communities to subscribe to. Copy and paste the community name – should look something like !dndnext@ttrpg.network – into the search box and then subscribe.

Also, try to subscribe to communities that aren’t on lemmy.world, even if one exists on lemmy.world. Let’s avoid putting all of our eggs in one basket ;)

Before the enshittification took root, reddit was where I interacted the most with people online. You could buy a subscription to get an ad-free experience. It came with a bunch of Reddit gold you could hand out. Basically, help pay for server time, and get an ad-free experience without adblocking.

The amount of time I spent on Reddit I would compare to a Netflix subscription or similar.

In the ramp up to their IPO when they started to fuck with everything, my goodwill evaporated. I stopped moderating and abandoned my subs. Whenever I had new content I wanted to post, I instead post to the fediverse. So, there ya go 😅

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

Request for info to be added to fundraising page: which fundraising payment options are processed by American companies. If they’re taking fees, I’d like those fees to go to Canadian firms.

Fuck it, sending an e-transfer. ;)

E: sent $100. The equivalent of two one-year reddit subscriptions. I cancelled my subscription to move over here. Good luck with the fundraising :)

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

I thought GCC dropped support for compiling to the abacus?

Ewwww.

Well, whatever. 31 teams don’t win every year ;)