Yup, the whole generation grew up having been too distant from the horrors of WW2.
Most of them don't even know what happened the day after the British protectorate ended in Israel.
Hell most of them don't even know when, how, or why Israel was created.
History repeats itself because people forget.
The argument is that it's not billionaires causing the primary issues with affordability.
It's almost entirely the pyramid scheme that is the 8.5 trillion dollar real estate market, which is majority owned by the average Canadian citizen, not corporations and billionaires.
I mean feel free to eat the rich at the same time, but if we want to make things affordable and our economy competitive again for anything, we NEED to reduce property values.
Currently, my home consumes approximately 45% of the combined wages of my wife and I, and we're lucky enough to have it half paid off already. If we dropped the cost of housing significantly, it would hurt the equity of everyone, but also it would mean that I could work for a lower wage, and still take home more disposable income.
An 80% drop in real estate values could mean paying me 30% less and me still being ahead financially, especially once you account for the multi-stage effects where most of the things I buy are made using land and labour, both of which would now be cheaper, so the prices of most products (like food) could drop too.
All of that would need significant government regulation during the transition period to ensure companies play nicely, but it's totally possible.
If you take the top 10 billionaires in Canada, and take every single bit of value they have and manage to get every single dollar while doing so. You would still only give each Canadian $3000.
Once.
I'm not pro-billionaire, but if instead, you took every single piece of residential property in Canada, and took that value and divided it between all Canadians, each person would get $212,500.
The biggest problem with distribution of wealth in this country is not the billionaires, it's the appreciated property values of real estate and the vast majority of those are your standard every day Boomer house.
I have given more thought to what I would change my name to if I was trying to hide as a criminal than I have for if I switched genders.
I'd argue home assistant with some smart LEDs and a few sensors would be great.
Having a bulb that let's you know the outside temperature/weather when you're getting dressed in the morning is neat. Having a dimming pattern for sleeping time. Tons of other really simple stuff available too.
I mean, the text on a website isn't the problem for not being able to use 56k.
It's only images and video that take up space, the libraries used on websites are all cached at this point so that's hardly relevant to ongoing usage of a website.
All of those are part of capitalism. Even most homesteading these days requires significant purchased inputs.
Precious metals, crypto, and anything else that's an investment asset is quite literally the epitome of capitalism.
You really need a better economic education. You sound just as dumb as the people complaining about communism without knowing what that is either.
A proper Land value tax is a way of preventing owners from making any money off the appreciation of the value of land while still being profitable to construct or renovate if it adds value. It significantly reduces if not outright eliminates housing as an investment.
Land value taxes only apply to the value of the land itself, not the buildings, and therefore desirable areas with high land value taxes have a significant incentive to sell and be redeveloped with density which spread a that tax among a larger number of tenants.
The biggest downside is that it completely destroys existing equity. Which is both how it makes everything affordable again, and is also likely why it won't pass as a policy for many years.
Currency isn't the problem, and you really need to keep that concept separate from the issues that happen within Capitalism.
Currency is just a convenient method to measure and exchange resources.
Very few people desire an allocated home and weekly rations of flour, chicken, and butter. If you instead give them a list of things they can choose from, and assign ratios and a limit for total resources, all you've done is create a new currency.
Yes, but also, there's no reason to move 2000 people 500 miles in less than 3 hours in the US.
For the sake of argument, I'll pick two reasonable cities to connect. San Francisco and Seattle (which would probably be more like 750 miles away, but close enough)
I just checked Seatac's website, there are 16 flights today to San Francisco, at what, 200 people per flight.
That works out to 3200 people transported the whole day, or double that at 6400 if you count the return trips, and many of those are just going to be connecting flights, rather than people trying to specifically get between those two places.
So... a train system that can move 2000 people in each direction every 30 minutes, running 16 hours a day, would be about 128,000 people transported per day which is literally 20x more people than currently fly between those two places.
Why would an extra 100,000 people a day want to go between those cities? What purpose would they have for doing this that isn't currently being served by a flight?
Google says it's less than $200 return for the flight between those two cities. Would a train be significantly cheaper? Clearly no. There's no way it's going to be much cheaper than that.
Would it be significantly faster? Nope. It would probably take about the same amount of time.
It would likely leave from a more convenient location near town, and the seats may be a bit more comfortable. Those are really the only two benefits I see.
So the argument isn't "America dumb" it's "America has no real reason to do that"