472 karma · joined November 27, 2012
If you are a 37 yo millennial who still doesn't own a house, can't afford to have kids moving back into the shitty style of apartment you lived in your early 20's but now it costs $2700 a month, you are going to be fucking pissed off.
If you are a new parent waiting 9 hours overnight in an packed emergency room, you are going to feel pissed off.
It is hard to tell Canadians this is good for them when everything has gotten worse.
We always joked he was going to get something from the chemicals, not so funny now that it hit.
Decrepit old SFH selling for $1.6 million turned into a 4 plex here in Vancouver would see each unit in the 4 plex selling for $1.4+ million (maybe $1.1 for the basement suite). Friend bought in a converted old place 780 sqft attic suite $940k. It doesn't really make stuff affordable.
It was sold here as "the missing middle" and they basically dragged a mouse over huge washes of neighbourhoods like SimCity and said you could do 5 unit conversions. Fixer-upper SFH become gut out conversion SFH and are priced based on the investment of the 5plex conversion and what those can be sold for.
Astronaut families are a problem and I feel leach on the society. Paying very low taxes, using all the social services, yet making income outside of the country so not paying anything.
So now when picking services I am not allowed to host on any non Canadian servers if we are hosting personal information about staff/users etc. It can be a simple event registration system, survey, or just having to be really careful when using cloud services. I even have to watch out when sharing a innocuous file over Slack.
This really sucked when stuff was moving over to cloud and we wanted to use a lot of hot new stuff, but most providers get it now and provide Canadian servers so not as bad finding compliant vendors.
The description on this was even funny "When you rent a place for 1 or 2 years". Just wait till it caretakes rent collecting, rent raising, and eviction services.
I only listen to podcasts on my iphone and already have a nice feed in the podcast app, I am good. I haven't even listened to more then 3 hours of podcasts in the last year since I am not on transit every day with covid/work from home.
The price point is ridiculous but the Bose go for like $350? so I can see it I guess. Will have to wait till reviews. For me on quality to buy they would have to compete the entry level prosumer stuff HD-650 etc. But they are closed back, active noise canceling so it is a completely other market that I don't even have headphones in.
For walking on the street or in a plane I am into chi-fi IEMs that are like $35 and compete with $500 stuff and just block out the sound through isolation.
We have very low to no property taxes. All of our taxes are based on income. So a condo could have annual property taxes of like $1800-$2000... So what is the point of renting it out if it is increasing in value 10% a year and you are going to use it maybe 2 months a year. The west side of Vancouver were all the mansions are, and had a the greatest new concentration of rich foreign buyers actually paid the lowest taxes in the province.
We also have very big immigration influx in Canada, foreign student population and a 10 year visa program with China. These all started shooting up rents. But also caused what is known as satellite families which drop of their kids and caretaker, use the public schools, health care etc but make all their money back in their country of origin not claiming income tax here. We had University students with their names on $30million houses. House wife seemed to be the most lucrative job going in real estate.
We got a new provincial government a few years ago who brought in the "speculation tax". Basically if you don't pay income tax here but own a house you have to pay a tax of 2% of the properties value. This is compounded on top of an empty homes tax the city put in place of 1% if it is not rented out. There was also some new laws/procedures put in place with data sharing across province/city/real estate board that is helping clearing up some malfeasance as well.
I stayed a beach hostel once in Tonsai where these plain clothes thai's rolled up in a boat (two saying they were local krabi police) and demanded payment for "music licensing" from Thai owners. The owner refused to do the payoff, and the gangsters tried to physically escort him to the boat for "arrest"... the bartender got me to take a photo of them. They demanded I delete the photo and I was like "no you aren't going to mess with tourists" and they let the owner stay. Thai RIAA is brutal!!