I’ve never heard of ricing but come to think of it I have heard of “rice rocket” to describe Kawasaki motor bikes so that’s probably a titch racist.

I.e. you see your home as an investment from which you expect to see a positive return, but now you are afraid that it may lose some of that value.

No, I don’t see it as an investment. The way the system works sees it as an investment. We’ve created a system whereby housing is overvalued because it’s meant to have inflationary payoffs.

My parents didn’t see our home as an investment. They just bought homes at random that were close to where they worked and seemed good for kids.

There’s no option for me to buy a place that isn’t an investment because that’s the very nature of the market.

I never wanted my house to be a stock market investment. It’s just that I want some consistency. Tell me what I’m getting into. Are we playing this game where we bid for overpriced housing as a supplemental retirement benefit? Or are we building a better future where the former doesn’t matter? I just don’t want to get fucked, that’s all.

Sorry, you misunderstand slightly.

I don’t mean investors in the sense of speculative parasitic humans who are devaluing life by overvaluing housing.

I mean, people like me who have worked from the age of 15-49 and now own a very modest sized apartment that is grotesquely overpriced and has quite literally enslaved me to mortgage payments for years to come.

If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.

And this isn’t the same argument as the “why should people get free school when I had to pay student loans” since one doesn’t affect the other. In this situation, if the value of homes come down too significantly, it’s literally devaluing my work.

I didn’t create the horrible dystopian system we live in but I do unfortunately have to abide by its rules. And now that I have a tiny piece (on paper but owned by the bank) I am hoping (like most Canadians) to take that piece and cash out to retire on in 10-15 years time.

What I’d really like to see is some kind of national housing strategy that guaranteed people basic housing regardless of their income (even if it’s “zero”). That housing wouldn’t impact the market but it could slow down the unhealthy growth of the valuation of housing.

If we could totally slow housing valuation growth to the normal 2% inflation, while also creating affordable housing for lower income/no income earners, then the system could adjust and that could be a true win win.

There will likely be a gen pop booster for all ages in the fall to coincide with the influenza campaign.

I got Disney free through some kind of shady Shaw deal I signed up for but the billisecond I see an ad it’s gone.

Homes will never again be affordable because the system is completely broken (and not broken in the Millhouse expression, but rather in a normal definition). We made housing a commodity rather than a necessity of life and it ended with predictable results.

Now we have the unpleasant decision of diluting the investment of millions of Canadians or continuing to allow millions of Canadians to never own a home.

All fiscal Cons peddle the absolute same baloney, including Harper. And then we get the opposite.

Cons are liars, every single last one of them. Their whole philosophy is fundamentally provably false.

If Canada elects this career grifter and fake family man poseur, I am genuinely done with this country. I don’t think I can take another rightwing government at a time in history when we desperately need a party for the working class.

The last thing this country needs is yet another white male cishet christian fiscal con telling us what the fuck we need. “Everything is broken.” Yeah, because your donors own all our hard work, you muppet.

I will genuinely move to Europe or something.

I know it sounds like a /r/thathappened but it was one of those situations where it built up over several trips to the store of this guy harrassing me to the point where I didn’t want to shop at Walmart anymore. I am averse to confrontation so when he took over my self-checkout to sign up for the credit card I was like, dude fuck off, go away. And he was a bit shocked and acted like I was being dramatic but it was because I hadn’t been more politely forceful in our earlier trips.

Yeah, you always think of the negative stories you’ve heard. For example, my accountant’s husband had an operation and the surgeon didn’t do a follow-up with him and he passed away from a blood clot. The widow feels that if the surgeon had done better follow-up care he could have sought help and lived. I guess I just want that reassurance that I’m being looked after and not just another number in a health care system.

I also recognize it could be a time sink to call and say “hey everything’s fine” but it sure would make me feel better/appreciated as a human being.

Sometimes the cashiers themselves are slow and scan items like they’re regretting every life decision they ever made.

What I love about selfcheckout is I go at my pace, as fast or slow as I want to be.

At the self-checkout at the Walmart near me a little man would go around asking if we want to save on groceries by signing up for their credit card.

The fourth or fifth trip there that he did this I had to get a bit ruder until he finally grabbed the self-checkout and clicked the credit card opt-in and I had to tell him to fuck off. He acted shocked but dude I go to self-checkout to avoid human interaction, not be sold a bullshit credit card only a teenager would fall for.

You’re the reason I go to self checkout. You’re seeking out social interactions in a purely business relationship. I want my avocado and grapes and to get the fuck out of there, not stand there while you ask somebody how their day was and whether the weather might be getting cooler this weekend.

What value does a real human provide you though?

I genuinely don’t think I’ve paid in cash in Canada for about 10 years now.

I find cashier lines to be too slow because of the socialization so I always go to the self checkouts.

A lot of old ladies will go to cashiers and have ridiculous questions and requests and you’re standing there with your 3 items dying inside.

What a joke, eh. Spinning it as helping Canadians. Where was the Canadian Competition Bureau when they allowed 3 companies to own the entire cellular network in a country second only in size to Russia?

CRTC is helping nothing.

Canadians are, more than ever before, influenced by American media and social media and that includes the dogmatic and polarizing rightwing anti-science narratives rooted in conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. We’re being absorbed into the American weltanschauung since the advent of the Internet and our culture diluted. You can see it in our politics.

COVID-19 is now endemic, like influenza. However, we do have vaccines so every 6-12 months when we get a booster shot we can get a bivalent vaccine that contains some of the latest variant to help prevent serious illness. This allows us to recover much more easily, reduce transmission, and ultimately eliminate the clogging of hospitals.

The real danger is from people who refuse to vaccinate because they’re going to be more susceptible to the endemic virus and its subvariants.