Some liberals did vote in favour of electoral reform, and supported the motion, and had it as part of their platform. But I get your point that they are ultimately responsible for not passing reform. Maybe time to try again.

Ideally it would be put to Canadians on whether we want to move forward with PR or STV/ranked ballot. Status quo not being an option. Arguably democracy is eroding, this a meaningful pro democracy reform.

My biggest concern with PR is that it would give a platform to extremists, but I’m less concerned about that these days as they seem to have a platform anyway. The next thing I think we need to consider is whether PR makes sense in the context of Canada, we aren’t a small country geographically and we aren’t homogenous. Local representation matters.

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Is a change to our voting system something the NDP can ask for to continue propping up the liberals? Or would that be too political?

Yes, confiscation of illegal and dangerous substances and drunk tank for public intoxication. Why is this outlandish?

If I go through an airport I’m frisked and water can be confiscated. Open liquor at a beach can be confiscated.

If I get drunk to the point I’m out of control I can be placed a drunk tank.

Crystal Meth, fentenyl etc… are very dangerous drugs. And people on these drugs are very antisocial.

You may just be saying that those policies won’t help an addict. Addicts have different profiles and so would behave differently. Having consequences on actions would be helpful for some.

Conversely, a complete laissez faire attitude is propelling addiction for some. We are implicitly condoning their behavior.

It’s OK for there to be consequences to an addicts behavior, while also providing more support.

Their behavior disproportionately impacts the poor. Consider addicts tend to poorer neighborhoods, but only a very small portion of the neighbourhood are addicts. And it’s the poorer families who can’t use their parks, or have their kids run to the corner store or maybe even play outside. Their public amenities are trashed, and local funding doesn’t go as far. The normalization and access to drugs is certainly not helpful either.

What about a third choice of confiscating their very dangerous drugs?

Or a fourth choice of putting them in a drunk/drug tank for 24 hour hold with optional invite to a treatment center? I get it’s certainly not ideal to use force on people.

Why is thinking of the children not valid? Certainly they have some right to be able to walk around their neighborhood without fear.

Maybe tough to get a concensus on where the economy is going to be, a bit of reading tea leaves.

Regardless, agreed on extended 0% being problematic. Out of all the factors dragging us down:

interest rate history, pandemic, demographic shifts, climate change, global instability…

It could be interest rates that are having the largest impact today. Considering it caused such a large wealth transfer, equity inflation, and a drag on productivity.

The economy is important. Rates will go lower to protect that.

Central banks I think need to consider a higher neutral rate. Interest rates were too low for too long to try and move GDP growth. In retrospect not a great policy, as it led to a decade or so of inflation in stocks markets and housing.

Why do anything of value if I can just leverage at low rates and dump borrowed money into stocks and real estate?

Central banks tend to be arms reach from government, but maybe they should be doing less and the government more.

GDP growth low? Invest in infrastructure and research. High inflation? Increase taxes.

CPI inflation is reported higher than ‘all items’ though…

Grocery is seeing lower inflation. Seems to have come back down to earth.

We need wage growth to continue to outpace inflation like it has been for the past year or so.

I like this - as a fan of democracy.

Democracy costs, I think it’s OK that it takes a bit of time, more representatives, more votes is OK.

More civic engagement is a positive. Hearing the viewpoints of your neighbour is positive.

A really interesting dynamic, is that you would be creating a strong pipeline of leaders/representatives developing bottom up.

A lot of things of value are very hard to measure.

X degree influences can be very hard to measure.

You may hit your target metric, but secondary effects may be making the whole system worse.

Ideally you could A/B a parallel universe to isolate your specifc change, but that is challenging.

For sure, happy to open up the conversation again later

Very little of the demand is demand to drive a car. It’s mostly demand to travel as effectively as possible.

When you build out road networks you make traveling by car more effective, increasing demand on that specific mode.

When you build out transit networks you make traveling by transit more effective, increasing demand on that specific mode.

When you have well designed cities, you reduce the demand for travel, period.

Higher population centers have favorable economics for transit vs. Personal vehicles. And are more impacted by pollutants.

Low population centers have favorable economics for personal vehicles vs. Transit. And are less impacted by pollutants.

That’s a description of the dynamics anyway.

I imagine vast majority of people would agree that folks that live in the densist cities need transit, and those living in a forest need a personal vehicle. The debate occurs somewhere in between of the extremes.

Personally I’m of the opinion that we skew too far towards cars, because the true costs/externalities are harder to see, so what seems like favorable economics is actually just socializing the costs.

Agreed we are not in a good spot and unlimited population is not sustainable. However, sex education, access to birth control, and strong women’s rights is the answer in my opinion not ‘enforcing’ limits - which reads as an authoritarian dystopia to me. Economic growth is good as long as it’s decoupled from natural resource use/impact.

Restricting reproductive rights is not ethical.

Alternatively, if there was no Google or Google like company, we would likely be much further along in tech, and have better functioning democracies. They have limited innovation in maps and search products. They rely on being big to be competitive. Their products are pretty poor given their engineering team size. Digital advertising: they bought their way into a quasi monopoly, siphoning dollars from people that actually create things.