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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Price is what moderates demand. The higher the price, the less demand there is. Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!

    So long as price is able to rise, rise it will, and demand will keep eroding until equilibrium with supply is found. And I think it is fair to say we have found equilibrium. If you are in the market, there is no trouble finding a home. If you have sufficient transactional value in hand, someone out there will sell you their home, guaranteed.

    That’s quite unlike the toilet paper situation we saw a few years ago, where even a million dollars in your pocket wouldn’t necessarily secure you a roll, even though the lottery winners were paying dollars at most. That happened because price gouging laws prevented price from rising. That’s a shortage.

    If you ignore the price component then everything is in a shortage. There is always someone who is happy to take more, more, more. Call it that if you want, but what’s the point? What, exactly, are you communicating when there is nothing not in shortage? There is good reason why the formal definition is more succinct.




  • People don’t seem to really care about their kids/grandkids being unable to afford housing.

    Well, that’s because affordability is about the same. Granted, that is because the youth have much cheaper lives than we did. In my day we had to spend $20 to see a movie. The kids these days can watch all the movies for $20. To listen to a song you had to pay $20 too. Today you can listen to any song ever made for free. We dropped $100 a night at the bar. They flip through Tinder. We had to buy $20,000 cars to get anywhere, and let’s not even talk about the costs that followed. They toss a few bucks at transit and move around to their heart’s content.

    There is concern for whether or not they are missing out on their lives because of that. Going to the movies, for example, brought more than just a movie. It was a social adventure. Staying home to watch Netflix is not the same. But it’s also hard to judge if that is actually something to be concerned about, or if it’s just us trying to re-live our youth? Is one life actually better than the other?


  • I really don’t understand the people who rush to defend Meta/Facebook on bill C-18.

    Because it is what is most likely to provoke a reaction? Like all internet comments, the words aren’t grounded in anything. They are crafted such that they attempt to get something back in return (a reply, a vote, etc.) If you want to learn what people really think, you need to find a way into their private journal (without them knowing, else you will influence the activity). As soon as other people become involved, the motivations change.

    (on an open source social media platform of all places!)

    Well, if Lemmy ever becomes popular, it too will become subject to the same law. Open source especially doesn’t like such encumberments. This surprises you, why?


  • A shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.

    While we do have such controls in certain areas of the economy – you were probably bitten by one case at the onset of COVID when toilet paper wasn’t legally able to rise in price due to price gouging laws, leaving the shelves bare instead – I’m not aware of any attempts to restrict the price of housing?

    Setting a government mandated price limit on housing is oft suggested as a solution, but the so-called problem here is that the prices have been able to rise. Literally the opposite of a shortage.




  • It’s actually a lot better to just go to the news sites.

    Not true at all. Being from a small community, news is pretty well only reported by the local CTV news reporter. Said reporter was maintaining his own Facebook page, and through that I could zero in on his content that is relevant to where I live.

    If I go to CTV directly, there is no way to get only the local news. It’s mixed in with news about places hundreds of kilometres away. News about a place hundreds of kilometres away has little relevance to my life. If you dig deep you can find the local news somewhere in there, but unless you work as a full-time researcher, who has that kind of time?

    Maybe said reporter will create his own website in the wake of this – but at the same time, maybe he doesn’t have means to do so. There isn’t a lot of money in being a small town reporter. Facebook made that accessible to most with little investment and to those with little technical knowhow.

    Maybe CTV will smarten up and build a website that is more usable. But not likely, as why bother trying when you can just go crying to the government?

    But as it stands right now, the only thing keeping us abreast in the local news is that he is posting to X. But presumably it will go the same way, or, more likely, end up bankrupt in the near future.




  • we’re only entering this El Nino cycle.

    El Niño typically brings rain. In fact, as you know being a farmer, several weeks ago there was drought panic in the market – but with that cycle starting to set in the rains finally came and the prices came tumbling down again thereafter.

    Commodity prices are 30-50% of what they were last year. The grocer price remains high only because it takes a while to work through the system. Next year things will look quite a bit different.

    Drought has crushed yields over a vast area of Canada’s agricultural land.

    We’ve mostly recovered here in Ontario, but true that things don’t look so great in the west. However, the markets aren’t terribly concerned. Wheat, for example, is down 10% in just a couple of weeks. Canada isn’t that significant of a producer in the grand scheme of things, really.

    What won’t plummet is the consumer price of beef, I can almost guarantee it.

    Well, it is certainly volatile right now. The dumping is visible as you can see beef being sold for half the price of the day before if you go to the store at the right time, and then it jumps back up soon thereafter. But, overall, beef lags corn. It will take several years to work its way through the system, just like in 2013. Eventually it will return. It always does. We’ve been here a million times before.

    And I shudder to think of what grain and bread prices could be by the end of this year.

    All us farmers would love to go back to last year’s market, I’m sure. But for the consumer, the rains came at just the right time in the most important places, so things are going to almost certainly going to become cheaper still.

    The cure for high prices is high prices.


  • For those who don’t know why:

    To preface, there are two sides to every transaction: Something being offered, and something being traded in kind. Exchanging parties must feel that both sides of the transaction are of equal value in order to see a transaction carried out. The unit of measure used to determine where that equalization point is found is known as price.

    On one side of the transaction, the value of what is being offered had been declining in value at a rate not seen in a long time. This means that it takes more of that thing to equalize the other side of the transaction. COVID factors has lead people to not see this thing as being as valuable as they once did. While that decline has pretty much settled down now, it does partially explain why prices have risen up to this point.

    On the other side of the transaction, the value of what is being offered has been increasing in value at a rate not seen in a long time. This means that it takes less of that thing to equalize the other side of the transaction. The Ukrainian conflict suggesting that famine is a real possibility has reminded people that they shouldn’t take this thing for granted, and as such they now consider it more valuable. This explains the remainder of the price growth.


  • they are showing some of the content from the article itself.

    They are showing the content found in the og:description meta tag, you mean. The “og” bit stands for Open Graph, which is a protocol developed by Facebook so that news sites can define the content they want Facebook to show.

    If news sites don’t want Facebook to display this information, they could stop providing it via Open Graph. Again, Open Graph was created exactly to give publishers control over what Facebook shows when linking to their resource. A quick check of the major sites in Canada reveals that Open Graph use is omnipresent and that they are quite welcoming of Facebook using their work.

    Funny, that.







  • Except, it is exactly a failure of the markets.

    Well, the market is acting rationally given the circumstances. The trouble is that the market is heavily encumbered by regulation, so the cure for high prices being high prices isn’t able to exercised.

    Is that a market failure, or is it that it is not truly a market, but rather a government program?