• 6 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My point is that the principle of existing homeowners funding infrastructure for new homes is only tenable when

    • developers are not creating huge externalities by creating ever larger suburbs with infrastructure funded by the core (take Ottawa as an example for that dynamic)
    • when the base of established homeowners is large enough to support the rate of growth.

    In the first case, development fees based on lot size for new sprawling burbs are a reasonable way to push the market towards density.

    In the second case, with a high rate of growth in a specific market, other means of redistribution such as government subsidies may be a better way to redistribute.


  • Actually, they did not get subsidized by prior generations of owners - unless you’re talking about people in their 90s.

    That’s what the development fees and taxes were put in place for - especially in places where extending services out across greenbelts into suburbs was incredibly costly.

    Having crumbling roads and community infrastructure in the core and polished, higher quality infrastructure in the burbs was an equity issue that was taken on in the 1970s, long before my generation was anywhere near buying homes.

    I do think it’s fair to have lower development fees where there’s densification - that bringing more people to use and support existing infrastructure.

    But subsidizing sprawl remains as problematic as it was in the 1960s.

    Last thought, Intergenerational Inequity wa ma first recognized and discussed in the 1990s regarding GenX.

    GenX remains the most ignored generation but the fact is that the generation suffered two very deep recessions in 1983 and 1987-1991 plus faced incredibly high (18%) interest rates and inflation in the 1980s. This meant that none of them were buying homes before their 40s without the help of parents. While Canadian GenX ducked the US mortgage-backed securities disaster in 2008, it’s really a false narrative to suggest they are or have been in the ‘I’m all right Jack, devil take the hindmost’ frame of mind. If anything, they know the social safety nets and equity provisions were the only thing that made things possible for them.



  • I’m rather interested to see where they go with Korby.

    It’s important for Christine Chapel’s character that the backstory they are developing for the TOS relationship is credible.

    It was really rather sad and mortifying for Chapel in TOS to be shown as a intelligent and successful scientist, who took a Starfleet starship posting as a nurse to track down a missing fiance only to have him revealed as a dark mastermind turning people into androids.

    Having what appeared to be a one sided, unrequited longing for Spock as well, made Chapel come across as pathetic, and very much shifted it to misogyny. Or, at least a complete failure of a Bechtel-type test where a female character exists for more than her interest in male characters.

    (Even Majel Barrett’s Number One in ‘The Cage’ was put in an unrequited attraction situation with Pike.)









  • I’ve been wondering how much of the decision to wrap SNW with a short sixth season might have to do with Goldsman’s contract with Paramount coming to an end and his new one with another franchise and major studio.

    SNW really was his project, regardless of Alonso Myers being the co-showrunner.

    There’s a possibility that this is also about a change in leadership as the show transitions to a true TOS show, perhaps hopping to a time post-TAS but before the movies, and even shifting somewhat in tone.

    All of this would make sense of casting an older actor as Jim Kirk.



  • Losing a spouse and choosing to focus on raising your kids when you have the financial resources seems a value-based choice.

    Martin Short, another Canadian comedian of the same generation, also stopped working for many years when his wife died in 2010.

    His return to work in Only Murders in the Building has been enormously successful - and has reportedly led to a romantic attachment with Meryl Streep who also lost a spouse to cancer and had a hiatus in work.

    One has to wish Moranis similar professional and personal success.





  • I would argue that a lot of the computational based problem solving , from middle school through early undergraduate years, focused on topics historically oriented to boys’ interests, aren’t a good measure of innate math talent either.

    But those have historically left a lot of female students behind.

    Male or female, most students are really looking to get through math requirements with plug-and-chug replication of algorithms to get to an answer - not genuine problem solving or abstraction. However, being able to reproduce an answer on a very slightly different problem, or just one with different numbers to plug in, does very little towards using mathematical as a means to model problems independently and find solutions.