Yup. I had that one. It was awesome. Only disappointment was that it wasn't RC.

edit: also isn't Galoob such an AliExpress-ass name for a toy company? Can't you imagine "GALOOB Harrys Potters Wand Gyro Children Luminous Rotating Gun Parents and Children Outdoor Battles Boys Light Toys" next to the lead-painted dildos and self-destructing flash-drives?

This is why the digital good I buy the most of is music. MP3s are just dumb files. There's no subscription fees, no DRM. Nothing but digital watermarks. The "service" is the ability to redownload and stream the songs that I've purchased on other devices, but I also store the raw files on my fileserver.

Now, the challenge for the vendor is that I can also just as easily pirate these same files.

And yet somehow I still buy.

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Large Corporate Landlords: There’s a perception that these entities buy up substantial amounts of property, making it difficult for individuals to purchase a home due to increased prices and limited supply.

People keep looking for the bogeyman here but this is one where that's too facile. Rents in Canada have skyrocketed, and REITs rent out their properties. Sure, they rent them out as expensive as they can, they're jerks. But they're profiteering off of the shortage of rental properties. And if they've got a crapload of property, and they're profiting from the shortage.... well they're not really the cause of the shortage when they're offering a lot to rent, are they? They're profiteering from it, but they're not causing it. If there was truly endless money buying up everything and then renting it out, prices to buy would climb, but prices to rent would plummet, and that's obviously not happening.

You want to look at the cause? Look at people who prevent new housing from getting built. Petty bureaucrats. Wealthy NIMBY neighbours.

And yes, as much as it goes against Canadian values: if you've got more immigrants than you've got new housing, you're going to run out of homes, and the people who have homes can price them as high as they want because everybody needs a roof.

I watched the al Jazeera vid where they pushed that theory and it's completely incoherent. I honestly lost a lot of respect for AJ there.

Realistically he should just switch to another public domain fantasy. Kickstart "American McGee's Oz".

Interest rate spikes killed a lot of projects, and municipal stonewalling keeps the developers riding a pretty thin edge of profitability. These are for-profit businesses, of course when the loan repayments are going to eliminate all profit, they're going to back off on their plans.

Imagine you're planning a building - you design a massively profitable but huge building, but then years of bickering with city hall shrinks the building and raises your carrying costs until it's just a modest win. Still fine. You get the permits and then interest rates jump. Now if you go forwards, the project will be deep in the red. The city won't let you go back to your original huge form of the project without another multi-year fight.

If you sit on it until interest rates go down again, you're not building. If you get started on a new application for a more profitable building, you're not building.

You don't have to listen to the dead-eyed mobbed-up reptiles of the for-profit housing industry to see this, listen to progressive affordable housing builders like Jen Keesmaat or Housing Now TO and they'll tell you the same thing.

Mario Kart 64 Balloon Battle 64

Twitter has gotten enshittified. Reddit has gotten enshittified. Now Unity is getting enshittified.

It's time to learn the lesson: don't be a sharecropper on somebody else's property.

unless there was an urgent need to get rid of it

Darn it the wrong royal went to Epstein's Island.

Grammar Nazis strike again.

That bottom they're racing to is defined by supply and demand. All these problems -- the REITs, the AirBNBs, the foreign investors, the gouging landlords, the sleazy dishonest realtors, etc. are all exploiting the same underlying issue: housing is in short supply, and so whoever controls it can name their price. The way to defeat all these monsters is to get more built ASAP.

I mean I could but she's NDP and I feel like I'd be preaching to the choir.

Edit: but yes, at the very least the greenbelt plan must go back to the drawing board. As long as the corrupted process is allowed to continue, any suggestion of justice is a sham.

The bad guys were caught red handed and they still get to win.