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cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/498292

Apparently should be familiar to Gaga fans? Only ever heard this version myself, great chill start to my Friday

Lens manufacturers say that anything other than a microfiber cloth will damage the coatings on a lens. But microfiber cloths eventually pick up crap and they look like they're a pain to wash.

How do you keep your lenses clean? Are you using cloth/kleenex or microfiber cloths? If you use microfiber cloths, how do you clean those?

• Wholesale power prices are increasingly turning negative at times of high solar output
• Observers say rooftop solar is "cannibalising" electricity prices and hitting large-scale solar hard
• There are calls for storage and greater daytime demand to help soak up solar production

At last, someone from the world of politics is being honest about a pervasive and harmful trade-off. When home prices rise faster than earnings, owners like me gain wealth, while non-owners lose because their incomes fall further behind housing costs.

Honesty is saying that home prices have to fall. But this is progress.

The Generation Squeeze folks have recommendations.

The statements did not disclose why Mr. Rasheed resigned. But he did so the day after CTV News and Queen’s Park publication the Trillium reported that Mr. Rasheed’s office acknowledged providing inaccurate travel details to Mr. Wake about a trip the former minister took to Las Vegas in early 2020, where a developer who benefited from the Greenbelt decision was also vacationing.

These guys

The guy who runs Generation Squeeze says building more homes isn't enough to lower prices, because most people buying houses are already property owners. Property owners can either sell their current house to get a load of cash, or borrow against it to get a load of cash. Either way, they can pay a lot for their next property.

As evidence, he mentions that Alberta has less supply per capita than the rest of the country, but house prices are half those of Ontario and BC.

Here are the good bits:

While building more supply is absolutely important, setting ambitious targets does little good if property values continue to rise. Unless they are deeply subsidized by tax dollars, new market units will price in today’s high land values – which have soared well beyond what most can afford with local earnings whether the new homes are intended for renters or owners.

Plus all the focus on “Build! Build! Build” ignores that lack of supply isn’t the only, or even primary, factor influencing the price of rent and ownership. You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, since undersupply has become the dominant narrative shared by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and a variety of financial institutions.

The Bank of Nova Scotia, for instance, published reports lamenting that Canada has a smaller number of private dwellings per capita than the G7 average, blaming this ranking for much of our unaffordability problem. This leap in logic begs questions, since the same Scotiabank data also show that Alberta has lower levels of housing supply per capita than most other provinces, yet home prices in Alberta are about half as expensive as those in Ontario and B.C.

...

Mr. Pomeroy [who published a study about this stuff] encourages us all to widen our focus to include the vicious cycle by which rising home prices drive rising home prices.

First-time homebuyers are a minority of purchasers. They compete with many Canadian buyers who have already owned in the market. Bolstered by the equity they’ve gained from surging home values, existing homeowners bid up the price of housing to levels that are disconnected from earnings paid by local jobs. This was especially true prior to recent interest-rate hikes, because historically low interest rates made it cheap for homeowners to liquefy wealth windfalls created by skyrocketing home values.

Some homeowners bid up the price of housing simply to relocate. Others do so to purchase an investment property in search of additional wealth windfalls.

The latter are among the one in six Canadian homeowners who own multiple properties. Most are over the age of 55. To pay the mortgages on their investment properties, they increasingly collect rent from younger residents with dashed dreams that a good home should be in reach for what hard work can earn.

This reveals that the vicious cycle by which those enriched by high home values bid housing costs ever higher isn’t just ruining the market for aspiring owners. It is also breaking the rental market, as confirmed by the record-high rents reported this summer.

To disrupt this vicious cycle, political leaders must help break Canada’s cultural addiction to rising home prices by endorsing the plan that governments will use all available policy tools to stall home prices for the foreseeable future.

Does anyone have suggestions for storing fruit (apples, bananas, oranges, avocados, and garlic 🤷) that works better than a fruit basket?

I find fruit falls to the bottom of my fruit basket, and starts turning gross. It's easy to miss because it's under a layer of other fruit.

We're trapped indoors for the weekend due to a hurricane, so we've put an intermittent screen time limit on the kids (two under tens). They can stare at screens for an hour, then they need to spend a couple of hours doing something else.

My wife and I are both adhering to the same rules and it's good. There's a natural time to spend time together, and some time on our own.

A thread from Stephen Punwasi on how Canada treats its international students. tl;dr: we're not the good guys.

Highlights:

Canada's largest source of international students was China, with the 2nd highest concentration of millionaires. Many of the students were from these households, reinforcing that perspective in 🇨🇦.
In 2018, Canadian-China tensions rose & 🇨🇦 lost its appeal in China.

Canada, addicted to the cash, cooked up a $148m plan to replace those students with new ones—primarily in developing countries. Permits to students from India spiked fast... strangely fast. Who are these students? Get a spoon to bite, because this is where it gets f*cked.

India is a FAST growing country, forecast to have the world's largest middle class soon. It has wealthy families, but they aren't moving here. An Indian university study found most students looking to study in 🇨🇦 are from low-income farming regions & know little about it.

What they "know" is what the recruiter told them: It's filled with opportunity, automatic PR, guaranteed gov jobs, etc. Sometimes, the recruiters "get them in" to prestigious schools they could never actually get into. All lies—they'll say anything for the commission.

Recruiters tell these families their kid is brilliant & just in the wrong country. Find a way to pay their education, & all of the parents' hard work pays off. Bet the farm, like good parents do. So they round up their savings (& sometimes relatives). They take out loans.

Heck, some literally bet the farm. Oh, some recruiters know people that specialize in high interest loans secured by your farm? Super convenient. Oh, they have a secure stream of capital, a lot of it from investors in 🇨🇦? So lucky, what are the odds‽

So they:

• spent $50k to go to a diploma mill;
• don't speak english, because of testing fraud;
• have no money;
• often rent mattresses, taking 8/hr shifts w/other students;
• if this doesn't work, their parents lose everything A TO funeral home sends 5 dead back per month.

Don't worry. 🇨🇦 will help, right? In 2022, it lifted the restriction of 20 hours of on-campus work, to "help" 🇨🇦 solve its low-wage labor crisis. Those viral videos of hundreds of people waiting in line for a low-wage job interview? Those are mostly international students.

To reiterate, 🇨🇦 scoured the world for poor families. Promised opportunity if they risked everything. It turns out there was no opportunity, so now they're stuck paying off debt while most of their income is consumed by shelter costs. It sounds familiar, but why evades me

I always enjoy the RPGBot guides, and this is no different. It's a good breakdown of the One D&D updates for Barbarian, Fighter, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard.

I'd like to give my party the ability to control an unstable godling in combat. Do you have any suggestions on how to make this fun?

I have four party members. I'm thinking that on the godlings turn, each party member will be able to declare a target enemy and an ability to activate. If more than half of the party members declare the same target, then the target is selected, ditto for the attack. If they fail to meet that bar, something random will happen to a random target (including the party).

They'll probably be fighting 7ish clerics and cultists, and the godling will probably have two-ish attacks.

Edit: Any suggestions on how to make the control more fun for the players? I want a strong element of chaos, but more than half of the attacks should be controlled by the party.

Here's the context: My party has gotten involved with an almost-extinct god that has been revived. It's an unstable bundle of power that throws off random miracles. It has manifested a set of curse/boons for each party member. The godling had a portfolio of growth, but it'll probably get rebirth/reincarnation.