Just a Southern Saskatchewan retiree looking for a place to keep up with stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This is the closest thing to a solution they will find. It’s too late to switch leaders. That might have worked a few months after the last election, especially if it had been coupled with a bit quicker action on the expansion of Medicare.

    Now it’s their turn to take one for the team. We’ve been voting liberal instead of our true preference in order to keep the Conservatives from destroying our country. Now they have to go hat in hand to the NDP and hammer out a different voting system and put it in place before the next election. If they don’t, the Conservatives will take power and it will be their fault.


  • My wife and I watched this last night. Our conclusion was that there a whole lot of really dumb-ass investors out there.

    The main thesis is that small, basically useless units are built to satisfy the requirements of people hoping to either flip directly or to rent to cover the difference between finance cost and eventual market value. That is they are built to the demands of the investors, both institutional and private.

    How bad of an investor do you have to be to be sinking money into a dwelling that nobody actually wants to live in? And how did we get so many of them that it’s impacting housing to this degree?

    My opinion is that someone, somewhere has been running a con. A scheme where your market is not people who want a place to live, but people who are looking to make a profit by selling to others looking to make a profit.

    Now the scheme has run its course and the most recent owners can’t get out because, surprise!, nobody actually wants to mortgage their very lives for a glorified closet.













  • Too many people have no concept of how great the change is. We got married in the late 1970s. My wife’s high school education and receptionist job was enough to get us into a decent 2-bedroom apartment, buy her a brand new motorcycle, and pay for my schooling in a trade. My trade was enough to upgrade our apartment, pay for my hotrodding hobby, let her quit to stay home with our son, buy a camper for weekend trips around the province and vacation trips around Canada and USA, all while saving enough for a down payment on a house with double-digit mortgage rates.

    A few financial setbacks (extended layoffs mostly) meant starting almost from scratch (we kept our home but lost all savings and investments) in the early 90s and completely from scratch (lost our home, too) in the early 2000s. It took both of us to barely afford the same apartment of our youth. We finally gave up in 2011, changed careers and moved into a 1968 mobile home on a leased lot in the middle of nowhere. We’re back to being able to afford leisure, although on a much, much smaller scale than in our youth.

    We’re still in that 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. It has apparently quadrupled in value since 2011, so if we were forced to start over again, it would be out of reach. We’d be homeless.

    Divorce? Fortunately, that has never been on the table, but it’s been at least 2 decades since we’d have been able to contemplate single life from a financial perspective.







  • I don’t think it’s fair to lay current economic landscape squarely at Trudeau’s feet.

    I agree. There is plenty of blame to go around. Trudeau, the other leaders, the MPs, and the very parties themselves going back to at least 1990 are to blame.

    There is virtually nothing that can’t be traced back to changes in policy enacted by, supported by, and tacitly accepted by literally everyone involved.

    Changes to EI that gutted the power of non-union employees.

    Changes to business and labour policies such that “society owes me a business” and “nobody owes you a job” attitudes were fostered, then cemented.

    Any subsidy or tax reduction or public funding of anything that generates private profit.

    Complete dismantling of a world-leading social housing program.

    Gutting civil service in favour of consultants and industry association advisors.

    Allowing already weak anti-monopoly legislation to gather dust in a drawer.

    The focus on the financial health of the stock market instead of the financial health and stability of the general public.

    The idea that industry can self-regulate potentially damaging behaviours. It’s never happened. It never will.

    And my favourite, running the country like a business. Every employer runs their business as a dictator. Who the hell thinks that’s the right model for running a country?