The situation is something that makes people pause for a second.

Like everyone knows that EVs are the future, but when gas is fine, status quo fine, that future can be a fuzzy thing in the distance and it's really easy to shut off your brain, live in the present, and not really do any thinking and just go through the motions.

A sudden oil shock puts the issue of EVs on the front burner and gives people reason to think about things for a moment.

I think the government now actually does keep tax records of buying and selling homes (became a bit of a question during the foreign buying debate) so going forward it's going to be no concern.

The value of homes is very well known and assessed annually in many provinces (some have weirdly become laggards). So no real problem there.

Any piece of art that is of any real value would have a provenance and it would be very well known what the value it was at any given time and at sale. If no one knows the artist or can determine the value it is very safe to say its value is nil.

A side comment but I'm sad to say I don't think that another electoral system (or at least not FPTP) fixes this issue of there being a niche group being kingmakers.

In FPTP the dynamic that occurs is that an enormous amount of seats become "safe" and then the kingmakers end up being the relative handful of seats that are likely to trade hands. This ends up creating distortions where certain regional seats and regional issues rise well above how important they should be.

PR seems like a more fair way to represent a niche group. At least they are a genuinely representative part of the population, and the influence isn't an accident of electoral math distortion.

The thing that is prized above all else is privacy and exclusivity. People are paying money to ensure that few people live near them and that those people are the "right sort of people."

Dating back to the 1930s the original core goal of zoning was to restrict apartments so as to keep poor people and minorities out of certain areas. We know this because it's well documented in the newspapers of the day because back then people were more comfortable explicitly saying how classist and racist they were.

It is of overall net benefit over the long term to raze a small three story walkup apartment and build something denser, overall increasing the amount of housing.

However, in the short term it's immediately quite (sometimes existentially) bad for affordability if existing affordable housing is destroyed and replaced by brand new (and thus inherently luxury) housing.

So accordingly we naturally see low income housing activists push back against some redevelopment and ask why development is not occurring in wealthy single family home areas where the amount of people impacted is less and class those that are not remarkably negatively impacted.

Personally I think the data shows that in general it is still really beneficial to build out as much housing as possible and avoid the negative impacts of a shortage, but I do think there are people validly pointing at a real problem of displacement.

The mechanism by which new construction drives down rents is that people that need a new apartment are in less competition with existing residents in older worse apartment buildings.

So the newcomer from SF moves into the expensive new apartment, which means that there's less competition for decades old apartments, which means that when one of those is vacated there is less price appreciation on that product.

If there is a scarcity of apartments what happens is that when a decades old apartment is vacant it is filled by a wealthy newcomer and the landlord increases the rent accordingly.

So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.

It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.

As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.

But answering the question, "what's not to like?" The main thing is the fact that none of this scales. All the good benefits you're describing rely on the fact that other people aren't doing them. Other people need to live in "cages" so that you can have all this extra space.

Similarly an enjoyable experience in a car free of traffic relies on other people not driving. If all the people that are using transit were driving a single car, the traffic congestion would spike and you'd be in misery.

None of it scales due to the unchangable dynamics of physical geometry.

A painful reminder of the harsh costs of automobile dependency.

We've had the solutions to get off this rollercoaster since the 19th century, but weird ideologues continue to throw up barriers to any and all change. The reality is that enabling the alternatives wouldn't just limit climate change, but save us money too.

Given the particular nature of this game, so reliant on inside jokes requiring a knowledge of SEGA history, it's likely an AI translation could miss a lot, and I think the community will eagerly await further real translations done by professional translators leveraging these tools.

One thing worth noting is that the tax structure of American cities can be more based on sales taxes than property taxes, and so if tourism is down, and sales is down, this will begin to impact city budgets, which can have rippling effects elsewhere. For example municipal cutbacks to landscaping budgets could impact private contractors etc.

I have friends that have gone on extended vacation work trips and have lugged along a laptop purely to connect to a beefy workhorse PC at home.

Maybe this is a tweener category though in that that sort of person would simply bring along a Macbook Air they already own? I dunno.

iPads with neither an ability to run VSCode nor Parsec have been frustratingly useless for this category.

https://www.bdc.ca/en/about/mediaroom/news-releases/bdc-intr...