Why can’t a country (or city, or anythung) choose what others call them?

We call it Timor Leste instead of East Timor. We call it Cote d’Ivoire instead of Ivory Coast. We call it Kyiv instead of Kiev. We call it Russia instead of USSR. All of these are names chosen within the last 50 years or so.

A lot of the “traditional” names are just historical holdovers from a very long time ago. If we encountered them for the first time today, we probably would use their chosen name. If tomorrow they said they wanted to be referred to as Deutschland or Nippon, we’d probably accept that and start calling them by those names.

So the only difference is that if you survive your encounter with the police you can get some taxpayer money?

I think people would be more upset about a secret foreign police force if they had any sort of faith in the non-secret local police.

We had a drone scare in a town near where I live. It was dropping a “mysterious substance” on cars and houses. Turns out it was just a heron pooping on things.

Now, there are photos of the NJ drone, so I’m more inclined to believe this is actually a drone, but even still, consumer drones are getting better and cheaper. This could easily just be a teenager having fun.

Can I ask which province you live in? In my experience (Southern Ontario, not GTA) local meat is not cheaper (though it’s definitely better quality). Same with locally milled flour and locally grown produce (when in season).

I have tried to support local (and sometimes still do, despite the cost) but I just don’t understand how labour costs in Ontario can be so much higher than labor + shipping for produce from California or Florida or Mexico.

Is it just a bigger markup because there are enough people who are hardcore about buying local here? Is there another factor I’m ignoring?

The title is preachy. It is correct based on the data presented, but still preachy. The title of the article is good.

The data itself is probably fine, but it’s hand picked to come to that specific conclusion. I’ve had many vegetarian Thanksgivings, and I’ve never had Mac and Cheese at one.

The article actually goes into some nice detail, but people wouldn’t know that from the extremely obvious title.

OP is posting this as a narrative with a preachy agenda, and that will turn people away before they even get to the content.

What makes the Kindle more annoying? I’ve only owned a single Kindle, but I’ve never had any problem dropping pirated content on it using Calibre.

My next eReader probably won’t be a Kindle, but not for reasons related to piracy.

No, but it doesn’t really matter, as long as everyone is trying to be not the lowest.

Whoever is lowest at the time will raise their price until they’re not the lowest, then repeat with the new lowest seller.

The only losers in this race are the customers.

That’s the same thing, but more profitable in America. Instead of trying to undercut each other, they just try to be second lowest, which results in markups instead of discounts.

People don’t become inherently better or worse drivers on average based on the car they buy

Have you driven one? The instant torque and acceleration is really fun, to the point where I can honestly say I was a worse (or at least more irresponsible) driver for about the first 6 months that I owned my model 3.

How many of these fatal accidents were in the first few days or months of owning an EV?

aside from ensuring the fundamentals are in place of affordable accessible homes, is there really any realistic way of nullifying that advantage and is it even right to do so?

I don’t think that’s an aside, I think that’s the key to solving a lot of problems with our current society. Give everyone a roof and enough nutritious food, and most people can figure out how to live their lives from there. The problem is that the lack of housing and food options forces people into low paying jobs with no upward mobility, and continues the cycle of poverty.

Canada

About to do the same thing

The UN first has to acknowledge that a genocide is taking place.

If only there were some sort of article attached to the title that contained quotes and statistics to answer your question. I guess it will forever remain a mystery.

If pp cares so much, he can get the security clearance and look at the list himself.

The “big five” banks in the states actually represent less than half the American population, whereas the major banks in Canada cover about 85% of us. (Note these numbers are from before the pandemic - I’m no longer involved in the banking industry.)

The US system is still incredibly fragmented, though a lot of consolidation is happening (yay oligopolies). Canada, on the other hand, has had stricter regulations for longer, which meant that even the 15% of Canadians with small banks and credit unions were included in the changes to the industry as they happened.

It’s Niccol. I was briefly confused and thought that I somehow missed Nichelle Nichols in Gattaca.

That said, is Gattaca forgotten? And what was wrong with his later works? I haven’t seen them all, but the ones I’ve seen have been pretty good. They’re all pretty much a bleak and dire warning about our future, and Gattaca may have done it best, but there’s nothing wrong with his other films.

Where can you get a BYD Seagull outside of China for that price? When they install all the required safety features, it’s much closer to 20k Euros (30k CAD).

That’s still a little cheaper than anything we have here, but not so much cheaper that it’s worth the human rights violations and loss of local industry.

I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.

You’re absolutely correct in that. We’ve mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.

This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.

if you’re not increasing supply then you’re failing your free market duty

I disagree. Brooks is correct in saying that it’s not their job and that its two separate industries. Affordable/social housing is the government’s job, not theirs.

In theory, the free market should see this increase in rental prices and react by building more units. Why isn’t that happening? Largely it comes down to the fact that a lot of developers are also landlords, and thus have a huge conflict of interest in this area. This is where regulators need to step in. But landlords (on their own) do not, and should not, be responsible for building housing.