My wife and I watched this last night. Our conclusion was that there a whole lot of really dumb-ass investors out there.

The main thesis is that small, basically useless units are built to satisfy the requirements of people hoping to either flip directly or to rent to cover the difference between finance cost and eventual market value. That is they are built to the demands of the investors, both institutional and private.

How bad of an investor do you have to be to be sinking money into a dwelling that nobody actually wants to live in? And how did we get so many of them that it's impacting housing to this degree?

My opinion is that someone, somewhere has been running a con. A scheme where your market is not people who want a place to live, but people who are looking to make a profit by selling to others looking to make a profit.

Now the scheme has run its course and the most recent owners can't get out because, surprise!, nobody actually wants to mortgage their very lives for a glorified closet.

This is why aid needs to be delivered by military forces under the direction of aid agencies. Nobody really cares if a few civilians get killed, but when soldiers get killed, shit happens.

I don't know if you missed it in the article or simply didn't read it.

The case being discussed is one in which a family moved from BC to AB. As a result, they were able to leave behind an open investigation into child abuse.

There is no formal process of warning (alerting) other jurisdictions, so they got to start with a clean slate in AB.

The judge thinks that having these warnings cross boundaries might save lives.

So literally nothing to do with the emergency alert system.

Does anyone have a good estimate for what minimum wage would be if this had been implemented in 1970?

Under $90k and over 87 years of age.

Is it too much to hope for that they also realize that going ever harder might be the wrong approach?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is why I think we cannot deal with climate change in any meaningful way. Not "will not," "cannot."

We have the technologies and some of them, like nuclear power, have been available for more than 50 years. Others, like residential construction for passive heating and cooling, have been developed and proven at least 40 years ago, and still aren't found anywhere in our building codes. "But wait," you say, "we didn't know about climate change 40 or 50 years ago!" Well, maybe you, personally, didn't know about it. Maybe you missed the articles in the back pages of the newspaper. Maybe you weren't even born yet. Maybe your governments, like mine, have never seen fit to ensure that this stuff was incorporated into the curriculum. But I was reading about "the greenhouse effect" and likely consequences and possible timelines c. 1970. You can be sure that scientists were sharing what they knew with the economists and governments of the day.

We have the techniques and some of them, like high density housing and public transit and walkable cities, have not just been available for 100 years, but have actively been dismantled after having been part of the urban lifestyle for decades. "But wait," you say, "we didn't know about climate change 100 years ago!" Well, quite apart from the work being done 150 years ago that raised the possibility, we did have experience with fossil fuel pollution and it didn't take a genius to figure out that limiting the demand for fossil fuels would be just a generally good idea.

So what's stopping us? The same thing that has always stopped us: A combination of territorialism, greed, fear of change, and the inability to process large numbers, small growth over long periods of time, and compounding effects. These are all innate human weaknesses that seem to be our evolutionary heritage.

There was a time when I would have agreed with you. I now think that the problems we have in this world are because we've let the "small stuff" go until they've built into big balls of shit. Now our eyes are so focused on the big balls of shit that we not only don't see the other "small stuff" building up, we no longer recognize the "small things" at the centre.

We are not going to ever fix the big problems or prevent new ones without tearing things apart to get at the core. Selfishness, greed, and the desire for power over others are behind every major problem we've got, so everything we do to root those things out gets us one step closer to a better world.

The things you set aside as unworthy of attention are in fact the biggest problems we have. They are why the world is turning (has turned?) into a big ball of shit.

So this is not just a distraction, but the exposure on one of those who prefer us to keep our eyes covered. We need more of these investigations, not fewer and the investigations need to start earlier, before the ball of shit gets too big to handle.

We may have no more important social project on our plates than that of sorting out our colonial past and present to create a future for all, and this strikes at the heart of that project. This is not an entertainment story or a criminal story, but a story about deep, ongoing social injustice.

Looking at the breakdown, the variation in cost per unit makes me think that there is more than just the cost of the shelter itself. Remote areas, new service connections, etc must play a role in overall costs.

I remember when "the silent majority" were the ultra conservative and religious nutjobs who helped bring Reagan to power.

I don't know, but I don't think they were the majority and they certainly weren't being very quiet, let alone silent. Now, of course, we can hardly hear ourselves think for all the racket they make.

Really? Every boomer I know, including me, was an absolute pothead. Many still indulge regularly.

To be fair to your employer, he may have conflated two different kinds of 4-day work weeks.

The current discussions are mostly about 32-hour weeks, but there is a very long history of what labour law calls the "modified work week" in which the number of hours per day or days without breaks are changed to allow for alternate scheduling without triggering overtime. I've worked 4-10s, 8 on 6 off, and other oddities since I entered the work force in the early 1970s.

The most common of those is 4-10s, and it's always been known by that name (4-10s) or 4-day week, or "4 and 3", with "4-day week" being the most common in my experience.

I know that my own following of this issue makes it clear that there are a lot of people confusing the two different kinds of 4-day weeks.