Of course $7500 isn't nearly enough for pulling someone out of homelessness.

To be honest, I think it's far more efficient to give the homeless proper homes with locking doors and a respectable level of privacy as well as access to clean water and some sort of minimum level of food (like an infinite supply of rolled oats). It doesn't need to be a big home, even something little better than a capsule hotel room would be enough.

The homeless stay homeless because nobody can pull themselves together if they're constantly stressed trying to figure out how to even reach the next day. It's even worse when you don't have access to a shower to clean yourself up to be presentable enough to get through an interview at even the most unwanted jobs.

It's the single biggest reason why mental illness is so rampant amongst the homeless and few ever repair their lives.

What a waste of time. Who cares about the name of a street. People focus so much time, energy, and money (not to mention public time energy and money) on things that don't matter when we have real issues that need to be dealt with, and quickly.

How about getting some of the current transit projects fixed up so that they actually finish during our lifetimes? Or fix the housing crisis? Or deal with all the empty office space? This city has countless problems, many from neglect over the decades, and people think that changing the name of a damn street is more important.

People need an ego check.

For those people who are actually wishing for the bubble to burst, remember that's exactly what happened in 2008, and what happened back then. Literally the only people who won were the rich as they just bought out all the property that got severely discounted while other rich people got a massive payday from the government (aka regular Joe's tax dollars) for fucking up. And the bubble simply got restored because those rich people could afford to sit on unproductive products for a decade at a time because they knew that without a constantly increasing supply of housing, the prices will explode again because housing is a requirement, not a luxury.

And the losers was everybody who doesn't make 7 figures or more. People's retirements were crushed, their savings crushed, their existing lives crushed. And the economy was set back for years and inflation skyrocketed for a little while, which never came back down.

And in places where such housing bubbles really burst, Japan hasn't seen any growth for 30 years. They're still in what they all the Lost Generation, because they realized that calling it the Lost Decade was premature and it didn't end in 10 years. We're watching China's housing implode on itself right now with hundreds of thousands of people losing their entire investments and retirement savings. We're watching 80 year olds going back to work so that they don't starve to death while youth unemployment reaches levels so insane that they'll take a job that only pays under the table because the company can't afford to pay minimum wage!

You want a dystopia, you'll get it if the bubble bursts. You'll also get it if the bubble continues to inflate.

So the only solution is to slowly deflate the bubble by increasing housing construction so that it outpaces demand in a controlled manner until the prices come back down to something reasonable, then to continue keeping pace. And for that, we need the political will for both government subsidized housing and a overhaul of zoning laws to allow for mixed-use residential to replace all residential zoning.

Detached single family housing don't belong in major cities, and suburbs shouldn't be subsidized by the downtown core.

Any solution, no matter how perfect, will take years to implement and have a real effect on housing prices.

That said, it's either a half decade form now with a great policy, or several generations from now with bad policies, so don't give up the fight to have good housing within our lifetimes, as it will transcend elections.

I understand to a degree allowing an increase in pesticide use (though that'll seriously impact the water quality due to runoff), the only thing that the industry needs to do to reduce pesticide residue is to just spray the produce with water.

It's just a way to cheapen out the process at the expense of people's health. And I don't just mean the end shoppers', but also all the industry workers along the way. While I imagine the amount isn't a lot, but an increase in pesticide residue that makes it all the way through the supply chain increases how much the workers are exposed to as they handle the produce.

This summer? This winter was insane as well! (at least in my area). Two weeks of actually below zero, and virtually no snow outside of those two weeks this entire summer. The average temperature, once you exclude those two weeks, was like +5-10! It felt like we were living a good 20 degrees further south or something this winter.

Sure, I understand that the system failed him, or at least failed someone close to him. But what he's doing is just generally raging against the leaders and using random excuses to justify causing chaos.

There's no focus, no message. No way for anybody to respond in any way other than flat out rejection. How can you respond to something like this if when you try, it's like "okay, I understand this this this, and this. But this one and these three others are unacceptable to us. But then there's another sixteen that we can talk about. Please give us your side of the story and we can continue from there." How do you form a conversation with that?

Not to mention that he's trying to gather people from the widest spectrum he can, each with a different grievance. How do you talk when you have a dozen "I won't budge on this one thing" when each one thing is something different? Just like the previous convoy, it's just plain civil disobedience for the sake of letting out steam, no actual attempt at making change.

$15B a year subsidizing private for-profit corporations by cutting the budgets of all sorts of public institutions. Great.

And that doesn't even mention that these corporations are double-dipping by charging the government then charging individual customers.

I thought this sort of extremism was more of a feature of the States, but to think that it had infected our country as well to such a degree. The hilarious thing is that it was the religious figures that were originally pro-choice decades ago and were one of the deciding factors why abortions were originally legalized.

It's hard to imagine that this is considered a right wing issue rather than something radical, but more and more it feels like the right are defining themselves through the act of degrading personal freedoms and rolling back the clock wherever they can to the Victorian era.

This is literally the reason why free markets are the bane of all that is good. Sure, it's nice to get the shinies quickly and cheaply, but then you find out the cost of that is how the world is being torn apart because it's cheaper to do it that way.

The only solution is government regulations to force companies to become responsible for their actions. And the only way to have that is for politicians who think about the country first and have the will to enact the necessary change.

I mean, down south the erosion of government regulations is bringing back child labour. Imagine a 15yo working in a steel mill, as it's recently been legalized in some states.

While I see the emotional appeal, I don't think that EVs are the future on any significant level. Most people only use their cars for routine trips between home, work, and a few popular places for shopping and entertainment. Two of the four are completely centralized and the other two are generally focused into notable clusters. This creates nothing but choke points for cars, and commute time data shows just how bad it is.

Toronto had an average commute time of 84 minutes of 2019. One way. I use transit between bus, subway, streetcar, then walk, and still manage under an hour despite going halfway across the city to work, with 5-10 minute wait times between each transfer. That time doubles the moment I had to use a shuttle bus because that has to go through one of the massive choke points in Toronto.

What we need is greater capacity, more extensive, more reliable, and more comfortable transit solutions so we can just stop making it take 10 minutes to go 3 blocks during rush hour. So people can go even long distances quickly and comfortably when their jobs require it.

EV charging points are important, but only in strategically placed locations like on highway rest stops, as if you still insist on using an EV for commuting, you can just charge at home overnight as 99% of drivers would use less than 10% of their car's charge a day. It's only for vacations that fast charging stations would actually be used.

Also we need to properly promote remote work. Commutes suck especially bad when you're doing a job you know you could be doing from home instead of wasting 20% of the day just getting to the office.

From a societal standpoint, the lack of children is harmful on quite a few levels. The obvious is the lack of population growth, and an aging society. But the issues that stem from that are pretty serious. On the top level, most of millennials won't be able to experience retirement like how the boomers are, as there isn't enough young people to support the aging population, and few millennials will 20mil in the bank when they reach 65.

On the other side, the GenZ and future generations are inheriting a world that's been ravaged by rampant consumption, and they themselves don't have the numbers to do much about it. Entire towns are being abandoned with the environments around them being left as messed up as ever because nobody is around to even notice that abandoned factory from 30 years ago had tons of toxic chemicals left over when the company left the town and never got cleaned up. And even if it is noticed, the potential to clean any of that up is evaporating as there's just less people to do something about it.

And that doesn't even get into how there's fewer people doing essential jobs. And I'm not just talking about the blue collar void. Do you remember how much the farmers were complaining that they didn't have enough hands to harvest their crops during the worst of COVID?

Hell, I've seen entire neighbourhoods that's had help wanted signs posted for more than a year straight. We're already starting to see the early onset of labour shortage, and Canada's one of the few top tier countries that has managed decent population growth thanks to our immigrants. Imagine how bad it is in Europe and East Asia?

That said, from an individual level, the governments, on every level, are really failing to create an environment where people can decently have children in the first place. When you work full time and constantly worry about making your bills, you have significantly less leeway to think about something that'll add massively to your payments.

Even dating is difficult under those circumstances, not to mention hookup culture that basically treat long term relationship as a thing of the past.

Marriage, and then having a child instead of a pet? Forgettaboutit. Not when a significant percentage of the population is already living paycheck to paycheck. One wrong move, and they're heading right into bankruptcy. Not the sort of environment to have children.