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Investors reshaped Canadian home real estate. Something similar is happening in agriculture
  • Opening up the tools for becoming competitive in the market would be a good start. Crazy that it's harder to start your own farm or restaurant than to build your own web service company or open your own online clothing brand.

  • Victoria welcomes first of 2 electric fire trucks
  • “The total all-in cost was about $1.7 million," says Victoria fire Chief Dan Atkinson.

    Two grants from the provincial and federal governments – totalling $660,000 – bring replacement costs in line with a new diesel truck at around $1.2 million.

    “Total cost to ownership is definitely lower so when we look at that total lifecycle of say a 20-year vehicle, we’re saving a lot of money in fuel over that 20 years,” said Simon Upshon, manager of fleet operations with the City of Victoria.

    Seems to be a fairly financially sound decision to make. Fuel is a massive cost for a car of this size.

  • Trudeau says housing needs to retain its value
  • Yeah problematic tenants are an issue, especially when the landlords are elderly folks whose alternative would be to seek professional management or sell it to REITs, both of which exacerbate the issue of rent price.

  • Trudeau says housing needs to retain its value
  • I think a rent cap could be a good way. It could be raised wrt to inflation. Then, government housing, better loan systems for non profit and maximize density to allow building taller rather than wider (making land cost minimal), but not tall enough that would create increased cost (elevators are expensive to maintain for example). A lot of initiatives need to be put in place, but one that could be effective is to lower costs of construction and find ways to increase productivity by improving resource management

  • Trudeau says housing needs to retain its value
  • The fundamental issue with housing as an investment is that it is a monolithic and non-fluid vehicle, which makes it worse when leverage comes into play. Whereas stocks can be purchased/sold at any time in an instant and have fractional costs (sometimes as cheap as 10$ per stock), houses are not, and fast fluctuations in prices could heavily impact your ability to realize your gains. So it is, on that aspect, a terrible investment.

    For large companies owning thousands of units, this is not an issue since they are spreading the risks across the units (by buying diversely located units of all types). They can also quickly execute purchases and sales since they are in that exact business.

    So the argument that houses are ways to pass down wealth is misguided: they are terrible ways to pass down wealth, and parents should leave a trust fund or safe investments rather than a house if their goal is to build generational wealth - housing should be passed down for personal reasons.

  • [Laptop] Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro 360 13.3 Touchscreen AMOLED i5-1240P Processor/256GB/8GB RAM. ($1550 - $800 = $750) [BestBuy]
  • Take the recommendation from reddit with a grain of salt: if you are looking for a Mac alternative, you should look into the battery life before deciding. This also has a touch screen and pen, so I'd say its much more an iPad/yoga/surface alternative with better keyboard than an alternative for Mac.

  • Why VPN tunnels are safer than opening a port on my router?
  • How can you ever learn the risks of exposing ports if all answers are "if you don't know you shouldn't do it"?

    The post explicitly recommends ONLY exposing the wireguard port, not 80/443/22 which one should usually not do anyways. Very different things!

  • Growing food bank lines are a sign that society has lost its way, a Groceries and Essentials Benefit would help the most vulnerable citizens
  • Crown corp would be great but letting them monopolize the entire process might not be the optimal thing to do. In some cases it worked well (e.g. hydro-quebec prices are very competitive) but in others it gives them unlimited power to set the prices as they want in order to achieve a target profit, with potentially murky decisions like automatic bonuses and millions in severance payments.

    Oth crown corps competing in the market allows it to be more efficient since other players cannot push crown corps out of the market through acquisition, yet crown corps have to adapt their practice to be competitive and lean; good example is CDPQ infra participating in a competitive market when building light rail systems across Canada/UK.

  • Convoy leader Pat King heads to trial
  • As much as I disagree with the convoy movement, it seems that the charges are more politically motivated (anti-far right) than bringing justice. A lot of those charges could be applied to anyone partaking in a protest: mischief, obstructing police, and intimidation are all charges that could potentially be applied to both the convoy and the current ceasefire protesters at various North American campuses; given a literal reading of the criminal code.

    Intimidation:

    besets or watches the place where that person resides, works, carries on business or happens to be;

    Mischief:

    (b) renders property dangerous, useless, inoperative or ineffective;

    Offenses related to public officers:

    (a) resists or wilfully obstructs a public officer or peace officer in the execution of his duty or any person lawfully acting in aid of such an officer,

    Obviously there's a double standard where such charges would not even be brought up unless it's extreme cases. But shall pat King be charged and given a lengthy prison sentence (5 years for example), that'd probably set a precedence for the justice system to be used to deter politically motivated protests; this time it's the freedom convoy, the next could be Gaza-related protests shall it persist.

  • [Meta] The bot should be fixed

    I have updated some dependencies and refactored the posting mechanism, now the bot should correctly post to Lemmy. Previously Reddit's RSS was broken, then the lemmy Python dependencies became outdated, which caused the bot to be out of commissuion for a while.

    5
    PLUTO | Official Trailer | Netflix

    This trailer looks pretty promising, the art style looks somewhat similar to Monster.

    4
    [Meta] Introducing ignorelist for the Reddit BAPC Reposting Bot

    As you might see, we've had a multiple spam posts that made it through Reddit and got reposted by the bot. There was no way to determine if a post was spam or not.

    To partially alleviate this, I added a ignore list here: https://github.com/poutinetown/reddit-sales-repost-bot/blob/main/ignored.txt

    If you want to add something, please make a pull request (very easy with GitHub UI, you can learn here) that only modifies the ignored.txt file by adding a new line, and briefly describe the reasoning.

    If you feel a URL has been unjustly added there, please open an issue and I will remove if it makes sense. So far, the URLs were based on the removed posts.

    3
    [Meta] How would you feel if game deals are shared here?

    A popular subreddit like /r/gamedeals is a good place to find game deals. In the BAPCS Canada subreddit, game deals are forbidden except for free games.

    However, since the other game deals community are smaller/less active, would it be a good idea for this community to be a place to share Steam/Epicgames/Prime Games deals? Should there only been free games (like the subreddit), or is any discount okay?

    Not sure about GoG and other platforms, but happy to hear thoughts on those as well.

    7
    [Meta] It seems the bot was banned

    I was wondering why the Reddit deals were no longer being shown here, especially the $1300 Dell PC with RTX3080+7700x.

    It turns that bot was banned. I don't think there's any explanation available, guess bots are just not welcome in this instance?

    Anyway, it was a great run, but guess Reddit couldn't be replaced in the end.

    10
    [Meta] I plan to deploy a /r/bapcsalescanada repost bot here next week

    After reading this post and many comments supporting the use of a bot, I started testing a repost bot (initially announced here) on a test community.

    It seems to be working well so far, with posts every 10mins. Since it uses GitHub Actions, there's no hosting aspect involved. Although the actions might not start exactly every 10mins, which means in some cases the posts maybe be a bit more delayed, no hosting means it will work as long as the GitHub Actions service is not shut down.

    Unless there's serious opposition (happy to hear thoughts in the comments), I plan to deploy it here starting next week. If you simply do not like bots or don't want to get spammed, you can select "Block user".

    3
    Build a PC @lemmy.ca Poutinetown @lemmy.ca
    Would you run an Ubuntu server on a hard drive (without SSD)?

    If i want to run an Ubuntu server 24/7 with Plex and Qbit, would it make sense to use a hard drive as home/boot drive? Or is it better to use an SSD?

    0
    [Prebuilt] HP Slim Desktop with AMD Athlon Silver 3050U, 8GB DDR4 (180$) [SurplusByDesign]

    Product Details

    Model: 9EF04AA#ABL Processor: 2.30 GHz AMD Athlon Silver 3050U Display Type: N/A RAM: 8GB DDR4 Storage: 1TB HDD Video Card: AMD Radeon Graphics Operating System: Windows 10 Home USB Ports: 2 x USB 2.0 Ports, 4 x USB 3.0 Ports Additional Ports: HDMI, VGA Features: Optical Drive, SD Card Slot, Small Form Factor

    0
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PO
    Poutinetown @lemmy.ca
    Posts 12
    Comments 340