ah, I see what you mean now. Yes, Vancouver is MUCH more dense than Calgary. But Calgary isn’t just sprawling, they also deliberately planned for more housing supply throughout the city, including more density. Vancouver and the LM have not implemented such a plan.

I think there needs to be some disambiguation.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One is literally a train. They themselves call it a train. I guess the idea is that they’re small individual cars (called pods) instead of a chain of train cars connected together, which seems really energy inefficient.

Elon Musk’s Hyperloop is a train for automobiles, which has all the inefficient downsides of a personal car, with none of the energy benefits of a train. It is the worst of both worlds. And it relies on car infrastructure at both ends, so it will bottleneck just like a highway on/off ramp. Completely nonsensical.

Vancouver geography is not that constrained. Land use is just very bad. The classic Vancouver skyline is a surprisingly small area. It’s surrounded by SFH suburbs. The Lower Mainland has tons of strip malls and parking lots due to car culture. It’s not a lack of land, it’s a bad use of land.

• BC Lower mainland: 36,000 km^2. Population 3 million.
• Netherlands: 41,500 km^2. Population 17 million.
• Belgium: 30,500 km^2. Population 11.7 million.
• Switzerland: 41,250 km^2. Population 8.7 million.

These countries are not Hong Kong. They have nature, a mix of big cities and small towns, and lots of low density areas. Switzerland is a famously mountainous region with lots of untouched nature and rural areas.

haha I thought it was a good question!

There is a pinned post on this community. It reads:

Firstly, the issue of donations. Since the inception of this instance, your most frequent request has been the ability to make contributions to support my initiative. While initially, I had never intended to accept donations, I’ve come to realize the value this brings in ensuring our platform’s sustainability. In response to your requests, within the next week, I will be introducing several options for those of you who wish to donate. I want to emphasize that these donations are entirely optional and will directly support our instance’s operational necessities - dedicated hardware, colocation fees, email services, and more.

I’m not sure, but I can think of two reasons for this:

1. Being a single parent is more expensive than being a couple. Because you can’t share costs with another person, a greater proportion of your income goes to required expenses like food, housing, and utilities.

2. Along those lines, food is cheaper per person the more people you buy for. Buying in bulk is a huge savings. This is presumably why they give you more money for the first child than for each subsequent child.

But weirdly, every time Singh or the NDP propose things like a windfall tax of better regulation, the comments are dominated by criticisms.

We can’t just be loud when we criticize. We need to vocally support progressive policies when they come up.

On a related note, you can think of wildfires as forests transforming themselves into deserts.

Albertan cities have been very good about planning for future supply. Former Calgary mayor Nenshi explicitly zoned for future housing, which cities like Toronto and Vancouver refuse to do.

Yes, they are awesome.

From a macroeconomic perspective, lowering inflation is exactly what taxation does.

Economists were initially skeptical, but they are increasingly in agreement that so-called “seller’s inflation” (called “greedflation” by the media) is real. “Excess profits” means profits in excess of what would be expected under competitive market conditions. Here’s the economic puzzle: when costs go up, profits should go down. But the opposite is happening. There must be some market failure.

Correcting this failure doesn’t “drive away competitiveness”. Excess profits are a market failure precisely because of a lack of competition! I think what many Canadians confuse is “defending industry” and “defending competitive markets”.

Coddling uncompetitive industries is precisely how we get things like the worst telco industry in the world, and super high grocery prices. That is what actually stifles competitiveness.

The headline of this article is very strange. It implies that 3 in the top 100 falls below expectations. What number would have met our baseline expectations?

Japan, a country with 125 million people that puts a big emphasis on education and research, has 4 universities in the top 100. France, a country of 68 million, has 4 universities. Germany, 84 million people and 4 universities. The entirety of Latin America has 3 universities in the top 100, ranked at #85, #93, #94.

If anything, this is a huge win for Canada. This article almost feels like propaganda.

These are good ideas and I share the concern. The dynamic is similar to city government, where an active minority of usually wealthy retired homeowners has outsized power because they have more leisure time. It’s undemocratic.

Another idea to ensure that decisions are not made by an unrepresentative minority is a minimal voting threshold. For example: Only threads with a minimum of x votes will be considered. (Where x might be a percentage of total users of the instance, so that it changes over time.) It would be silly to make important decisions based on a thread with just a handful of votes.

I was curious about this topic, so I looked it up and found this Atlantic article.

It begins:

if the purpose of academic grading is to communicate accurate and specific information about learning, letter, or points-based grades, are a woefully blunt and inadequate instrument. Worse, points-based grading undermines learning and creativity, rewards cheating, damages students’ peer relationships and trust in their teachers, encourages students to avoid challenging work, and teaches students to value grades over knowledge.

Also, to clear up a possible misunderstanding (that I had and others may have), getting rid of letter grades does not mean getting rid of evaluation. Instead, students are assessed on whether they are achieving/not achieving proficiency in specific skills.

Could you explain the contrast? On its face, bringing back cursive seems totally compatible with removing letter grades.