It's Niccol. I was briefly confused and thought that I somehow missed Nichelle Nichols in Gattaca.

That said, is Gattaca forgotten? And what was wrong with his later works? I haven't seen them all, but the ones I've seen have been pretty good. They're all pretty much a bleak and dire warning about our future, and Gattaca may have done it best, but there's nothing wrong with his other films.

Where can you get a BYD Seagull outside of China for that price? When they install all the required safety features, it's much closer to 20k Euros (30k CAD).

That's still a little cheaper than anything we have here, but not so much cheaper that it's worth the human rights violations and loss of local industry.

I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.

You're absolutely correct in that. We've mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.

This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.

if you’re not increasing supply then you’re failing your free market duty

I disagree. Brooks is correct in saying that it's not their job and that its two separate industries. Affordable/social housing is the government's job, not theirs.

In theory, the free market should see this increase in rental prices and react by building more units. Why isn't that happening? Largely it comes down to the fact that a lot of developers are also landlords, and thus have a huge conflict of interest in this area. This is where regulators need to step in. But landlords (on their own) do not, and should not, be responsible for building housing.

I went to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand. They explained that riding elephants is incredibly stressful for the elephant's back, and that in order to train them to obey, torture is usually involved.

I'm against zoos as well. I know some do good work with rehabilitation and such (and we should support them), but a lot just capture animals for our enjoyment. Even if they're not explicitly mistreated, it's pretty cruel to just keep them in a cage for the rest of their lives.

Ontario had a program called micro FIT (feed in tariff) to encourage people to generate electricity. It paid higher than the going rate for electricity and was a really good deal if you could install solar. I think it was capped at 10 kW systems, but wasn't dependent on your own usage. New sign ups ended years ago, but the existing contracts were something like 20 years.

Now the best you can get in Ontario are credits that expire in a year.

This fine isn't even punitive. It's just the wages owed plus interest, which is the same as if they'd paid the wages properly the first time.

If only the NDP had made electoral reform a part of their deal to support the liberals. None of the other parts of the deal mattered - they could easily do all that and more after winning the next election. But instead, we get a bunch of half measures and they don't have a chance at winning a majority.

Do they prevent people from outside those groups from joining? If I, as a white non-Christian wanted to join black Christian people meet, would they ban me? Or would I just not get any matches because the clientele aren't looking for someone like me?

No such thing.

The $10k Chinese EV is only $10k in China. When localized for other markets, it's much closer to the same price as all other EVs. Some of this is tariffs, but there's a bunch of changes they need to make to meet safety requirements. Even the $15k Seagull they talk about in the article is expected to be the cheapest offering in Europe, eventually, and they're aiming for 20k Euros, which is 30k CAD.

Keep in mind that the "housing" cost includes either moving to a bigger property, or simply assigning part of your current mortgage costs to your child. If your house is sufficiently large, there won't be any much additional cost here beyond an increase in utility usage.

Similarly, transportation downloads a lot of the cost of a vehicle to your child. Maybe you do need a bigger car, in which case that makes sense. But maybe your car is fine, so the only added expense is gas and maintenance for the extra mileage for children's activities.

If you're talking about the "Value" booster, your LGS probably won't (and shouldn't) stock those. That's for grandmas to buy at dollar stores and Walmart checkout aisles. It's an absolutely scummy product, but it shouldn't cause SKU issues at your LGS.

MKM was less bomb-heavy than OTJ, so at least drafts seemed better. I missed the prerelease, so I don't know how swingy it was in limited. I suspect quite a lot anyway - prereleases have always been swingy, and as long as rares are more powerful than commons, more rares in a pack will always make it swingier.

The good:

• My LGS doesn't have to order 3 different types of boosters and guess how much everyone wants of each. They have run out of draft boosters before, and they're stuck with a bunch of extra boosters from sets that didn't sell so well. This is partially just a reality of running a store, but only having 2 types of boosters with vastly different audiences is better.

The bad:

• Sometimes there just isn't a pick 1 in your colors in packs 2 and 3 (on Arena). This is especially obvious in MH3 with the colorless theme, but it's also possible in normal sets. I don't know if this is different in arena vs. in paper.

• Everything costs more. I'm in Canada, so draft prices were going up well before the switch, but this made it even more expensive.

• Sealed is swingier. With a chance at opening up to 4 rares in a pack, those that do will have more bombs and more powerful cards in general. OTJ was very bomb heavy, so sealed was even more lopsided. This also affects drafts somewhat, but I think that can be fixed with design balancing once they get used to the changes. I don't think sealed can be fixed with card design.

Ultimately, I think this is worse for players and better for businesses and way better for WotC. They can fix most of the problems, but price isn't something they're interested in fixing (and, to be fair, the price of a booster has stayed well below inflation). Unfortunately, this means that some people just can't draft anymore or as often.

It's also in the same carcinogen group as electromagnetic fields, aloe vera, nickel, and kimchi. Most of those things you listed are quite dangerous for other reasons, but cancer is not the primary concern with any of them.

IARC group 2B is where substances end up if a study manages to produce cancer at any dose. If you drink 50 cans of diet coke per day (which is the equivalent of the rat study that demonstrated that it's possible for aspartame to cause cancer), then you might get cancer caused by the aspartame you just consumed.

Aspartame is not carcinogenic.

CBC didn't offer all the events in previous years. They may have had everything that had Canadian participants, but for the smaller sports, coverage was hit or miss.

I'm not sure why you think I'm rich. Mail isn't like any of those other services. There is no mail urgent enough that it can't take one extra business day to arrive. If there is, it certainly wouldn't be sent through lettermail nor delivered by the normal carrier.

If we're going to raise taxes to pay for things (and by all means we should), I would much rather prioritize all of the other strawmen you brought up than continue to pay for lettermail delivery 5x per week.

Two days per week can still be constant and reliable. It's not like I actually get mail every day - the mail carrier just walks past my house about 2-4 days per week anyway. The only thing that comes on an actual weekly schedule are the flyers.

I think we need to address the gig economy as a whole. It's not good for anyone other than the companies who are exploiting these workers.

Beyond that, for Canada Post specifically, I don't understand why I need lettermail delivered 5x per week. Cut it back to twice per week, and suddenly one worker can deliver to 2.5x as many houses per week. Or even just give them a day off and "only" double the number of houses served in 4 days.