> Gas prices have been "sky high" for a week and people who are under financial stress just decided to ditch their cars and buy a brand new BYD? Are we children now? listening bedtime stories?
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.
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.
It's really not that easy at all. Especially with art or jewelry. We can know the current value. It could even be a very famous piece of art.
But these types of things are found all the time in attics and basements. Art especially is moved around without sales records all the time, and jewelry even more-so.
Heck, I have things I bought myself that I have no idea what I paid for them.
But I'd sure be upset if I had to pay cap gains taxes on these things assume their prior value was zero.
House purchase price might be easy to determine; although old records aren't always great; certainly the price paid indicated on the front of the deed is often a formal requirement value, not the actual price, so hopefully the real price was written down on the recorded deed too. I wouldn't rely on assessed values, at least without a lot of cross referencing many jurisdictions setup assessments so that they reflect market value, but jot directly.
On the other hand, cost basis in a house is not just the purchase price. Many improvements add to the cost basis, and good luck finding records to support that. Especially for a home owned by your parents since the 1970s.
That doesn't make it equitable to step-up on death; but it does make it very convenient.
yeah it's not perfect, but there's absolutely well enough data for the ballpark appraisal. Onus is not on the government to do any of this. So keep records folks.
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.
> One of the issues with our proportional electoral system is that smaller, more extreme parties can become kingmakers and in our current situation the centre-left governing party relies on the support of the far-left party to stay in power, and those guys are rabidly anti-nuclear power.
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.
There's a lot of talking past each other on this issue. Sure there's probably clueless people out there, but a lot of left wing housing activists that are skeptical of free market housing liberalization understand very well economics and the benefits of housing supply, but are concerned about the time horizons involved and concrete near term impacts on low income residents.
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.
what you're neglecting to consider is what would have happened if someone moved to Austin (say a wealthy person from SF) and that expensive new apartment didn't exist.
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.
The problem is that this cool technology got taken over and advanced by companies, Meta and Apple, that are not games companies and do not understand nor are interested in games.
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.
Otoh, someone with a massive checkbook had to fund the hardware and optical research to enable the devices. Small gaming studios weren’t going to be able to do that. A lot of the smaller VR device companies weren’t able to build on top of core research or hire people that learned on Zuck’s dime.
> But the U.S. economy is still more reliant on oil than others: U.S. oil intensity is twice as high as the European Union and 40% higher than China’s, according to Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at think tank Defense Priorities. This is largely because the U.S. doesn’t have much public transportation or electric-vehicle adoption.
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.
It's not just the ideologues; it's the people with vested interests in seeing oil companies continue to dominate. Lindsey Graham has been pretty mask-off in wanting to take control of Iran's oil resources and, in his words, "make a ton of money."
> Lindsey Graham has been pretty mask-off in wanting to take control of Iran's oil resources and, in his words, "make a ton of money."
Which kind of set all of this off back in the day: UK/US oil companies controlled Iranian oil, the legislature nationalized it, the Shah suppressed the legislature and portions of the population:
I find it utterly amazing that a country like the USA does not have nationwide high-speed rail and mass transit in every major city (that works for everyone).
Comparing with Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia) and certain EU countries (Vienna, Netherlands, etc.), it just shocks me how much people need a car for everything. Even a visitor needs to rent a car to properly go about their business.
Automobiles also run on electricity, there’s no need to bundle them up with fossil fuels. Car centric development is awesome. Big backyards, lots of space, convenient setups with parking attached to each shopping center. What’s not to like? It’s definitely better than living in apartments which are essentially cages where you’re forced to be mild mannered. Places like shenzen are 90% EVs and we’ll get there too.
All those things are awesome (if you're into that sort of thing, many people aren't) but they don't really rely on the car. Many of the low density detached home suburbs that people drive to these days were once upon a time street car suburbs.
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.
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