sbv

What Canadian podcasts do you recommend? My podcast app is currently downloading:

• CanadaLand - It's mostly opinion, but the host does talk about the media landscape and what it takes for Canadian news outlets to survive. Hosts occasionally shoot their mouths off and then give mea culpas.

• The Big Story - An Ontario-centric daily news show by Rogers. The host knows his audience and does decent interviews. I appreciate their ongoing focus on cost of living issues.

I've tried:

• Front Burner - Another daily news show. The interviews feel scripted, but there's occasionally good stuff.

• The Loonie Hour - I tried to listen to this for its right leaning perspective, but I gave up after one of the hosts said reliable sources told him Russia would never invade Ukraine.

• Backbench Podcast - as much as I like the new host, it doesn't feel like it offers a lot of insight.

EDIT: fixed formatting.

I enjoyed that brief Android Chrome experiment where the browser supported moving the address bar to the bottom. Now that feature has been made available on iOS, but remains AWOL on Android.

A Verge story on hacking your robot vacuum so it doesn't phone home.

Canada gives visas to at least 10k farm workers every year under various programs. The programs are typically structured so the worker can't leave the employer unless they can prove abuse. This clearly puts workers at risk.

Villegas said she has seen cases where workers are housed in barns or makeshift sheds, or where dozens of workers are crammed into a single house with limited washroom facilities.

“I remember one of the workers telling me, ‘My dog in Mexico lives better than I do,’” said Villegas, who works for Radical Action with Migrants in Agriculture, a grassroots non-profit operating mostly in the Okanagan.

In typical Canadian fashion, provincial and federal governments deny responsibility and state the other is responsible for the program:

When asked about problems in the program, Weiler said the two governments often point to each other.

The article suggests such shocking ideas as "providing workers rights under law."

People are finally talking about shifting income tax to take some of the money out of the housing market:

First:

a lifetime cap of $1-million on the personal residence capital gain exemption [...] would limit unproductive investment in the real estate sector by discouraging retirement strategies based on the gains made from selling a house. It would also stop the investment strategy of buying a house, renovating, living in it the minimum amount of time to claim the tax credit and then flipping it for a tax-free gain.

They note that the lifetime cap wouldn't hit most Canadians in lower-cost communities. It should mostly hit higher end houses and higher income taxpayers.

Second:

a limit applied to the amount of interest that can be recorded as a business expense for single-family residences let as rental properties

They're suggesting these changes because

investors are the fastest growing mortgage segment with a 30-per-cent share of mortgaged home purchases nationally in the first part of this year, up from 19.6 per cent in 2020. They are now a bigger segment than repeat homebuyers and, over the past few years, have taken 6 per cent of market share from first-time buyers

Peter Watts is a great (Canadian) author. He merges Canada's literary style with hard science fiction.

As far as I can tell, most of his writing is available on his website. If you enjoy science fiction, do yourself a favour and read his Sunflower cycle.

I had a cold last month, but I'm still getting rid of a mild cough. This seems pretty timely for me.

The findings suggest there may be long-lasting health impacts after non-Covid acute respiratory infections such as colds, influenza, or pneumonia, that have been going unrecognised.

However, the researchers do not yet have evidence suggesting that the symptoms have the same severity or duration as long Covid.

With the website there's a handy crosspost button when I'm scrolling a feed. Is there similar way to crosspost with Sync?

Statistics Canada confirmed last week that 351,679 babies were born in 2022 — the lowest number of live births since 345,044 births were recorded in 2005.

The disparity is all the more notable given that Canada had just 32 million people in 2005, as compared to the 40 million it counted by the end of 2022. In 2005, it was already at historic lows for Canada to have a fertility rate of 1.57 births per woman. But given the 2022 figures, that fertility rate has now sunk to 1.33.

...

Of Canadians in their 20s, Statistics Canada found that 38 per cent of them “did not believe they could afford to have a child in the next three years” — with about that same number (32 per cent) saying they doubted they’d be able to find “suitable housing” in which to care for a baby.

...

A January survey by the Angus Reid Group asked women to list the ideal size of their family against its actual size, and concluded that the average Canadian woman reached the end of their childbearing years with 0.5 fewer children than they would have wanted

“In Canada, unlike many other countries, fertility rates and desires rise with income: richer Canadians have more children,” it read.