GenX here. So, I get to be suppressed by the Boomers my whole life and, just when the pay-out is due to arrive, it will switch to persecution by the millennials as payback for the crimes of my abusers.

Awesome.

Rent up 8% while the cost of a mortgage is up 25% ( the primary remaining driver of high inflation ).

Once again the landlord ruling class manipulates the economy in their favour! Oh, wait.

My experience with this article was wondering if funding will come in time to help my grandmother. She just recently had to move to long term care. She is now living in a room with 5 other people. Her first week there, they had a COVID outbreak and she had to spend a week sitting alone in a wheelchair.

If you can find a gap in your rage, consider that you may be cherry picking your data points to bolster your pre-conceptions.

Also, I know that “boomer” has shifted to more a meme than a demographic but we need to start getting angry at the next generation. Boomers are dying off and they will be transferring their wealth to a much smaller group of people. If the Boomers were too rich for you, you are really going to hate these guys.

Come on. This is very clearly “howaboutism”.

Counter argument. The US probably knows the current location of everything that could pose a credible threat to either a nuclear submarine or an aircraft carrier.

Defunding a large ocean perimeter is a lot easier when you know where everything is. Again, the first step would probably be to disable most of this stuff.

i don’t like to give the US credit but they have indisputably the most advanced global military logistics of any country in history.

The Americans can drop 100,000 troops anywhere in the world, have complete supply lines established in 24 hours, and have immediate air and sea superiority. If we are talking Europe, they already have a significant military presence in place.

The US military is immense and insanely equipped. The hundreds of billions of stuff sent to Ukraine is mostly old stuff that would have aged out anyway. They have not even touched anything they would use themselves.

I know “Britannia rules the Sea” but honestly, look how many aircraft carriers the US has. No contest. Also, how many cruise missiles do they have to disable military infrastructure.

US intelligence is similarly sprawling and deep pocketed. Their intelligence failures are almost always political. In an actual military led conflict, this puts them at an extreme advantage.

The Americans have also shown extremely effective use of patriotism and propaganda. It is unlikely that resistance at home would emerge quickly enough to prevent a successful invasion.

As of late, they have also demonstrated the ability to absolutely give the middle finger to their allies and international diplomatic bodies.

Where the Americans suck is in holding territory and in maintaining a focused agenda. A war with the UK and the US would probably result in regime change on both sides ( one through force and one through popularity ). However, in the UK, they would end up otherwise leaving pretty much the entire bureaucracy in place and, after wasting craploads of money, would probably pull out and go home. This is where all that resistance at home and abroad stuff would overpower them.

At the end of the day, Britain would be largely unchanged after the US pulled back out. The US would have gained almost nothing. If they were lucky, things would look much as they do now.

In fact, now that I have walked through it, I guess the answer is that I would certainly not fight against the US. It would be for nothing. Better to just wait.

In fact, the UK would be better off not fighting too hard and then just negotiating themselves back into power afterwards. I mean, the PM would have to change but that is hardly a big deal.

I am wondering what policy the UK would have to abandon. I mean, something must have caused all this in the first place.

Well, if we allow such a broadcast, the US is invading us. So, I guess I should deal with that first.

Totally. The inconvenience ( and inconvenient timing ) of having to fuel up is intolerable after being exposed to electric.

My wife drives an EV and I drive a gas guzzler. So jealous. It is going to change the second I can afford it.

I wish we would stop selling oil and gas in Canada completely though I realize we need to replace those industries ( revenue / jobs ) with something else to make that happen. It is a huge issue.

An even bigger issue is dishonest or misleading debate. I think that the tenancy to argue from emotion over logic or facts is central to many of our biggest problems, including the climate, and prevents us from implementing effective solutions.

In the interest of not coming up with the equivalent of a plastic straw ban for the oil industry, what are the facts here?

Are pumping more or less oil and gas than before? What percentage of our energy mix does that represent? What does the 5, 10, and 15 year outlook look like?

Are the number of wells drilled the right metric? How many drilled wells become productive? How long are they productive for? I imagine both those metrics are declining. It is possible that 8% more wells started results in less oil extracted than before.

Constellation and OpenText are both bigger today than RIM was at the peak.

What are you using the inflation number for? How does saying it is up 15% help you?

The point of measuring inflation at all is that we can use the information to make decisions. Knowing that inflation is slowing or rising is useful. I know prices have gone up. What I want to know is how much they are likely to go up in the future. Am I stockpiling sugar or putting a little money into stocks? How long should I lock my mortgage in for? Will I even be able to afford it? Do I need a second source of income? Or do I think I might be able to save a little this year for a big purchase? How much money am I going to need to retire? How old will I be?

The value of these numbers is forward looking. If I want to know that prices have gone up, I can just go to the store. I do not need the government for that.

Mostly no. The major drivers of price are supply and demand, not cost and demand. However, the “most profitable price” ( which is rarely the highest for those unfamiliar with economics ) does increase with the marginal cost. So the cost of production does play a role.

If not greed, how would you describe yourself in the paragraph above?

How are you calculating the value it had when “we” bought it? No matter where you draw the line if you reduce prices, some people are still going to do well, some will come out even, and some ( the ones that can least afford it ) will get killed.

Stagnation is the most fair to all interests. Inflation will take care of affordability.

What does an article about the top 0.1% have to do with home ownership? Are you for real?

EDIT: I misunderstood this post. I thought it was somebody calling out the homeowner as rich ( I had just come off another comment and was reeling ). I realized after I posted that the poster was responding to himself.

What if you have already “borrowed against it” and the thing you bought is the house itself? You know, a mortgage. How is a regular family with a mortgage not middle class?

Any age considerations here? 50+ year olds with no pension whose entire net worth is tied up in their home are not middle class?

A retired couple that have a reverse mortgage on their home to supplement their insufficient income are not middle class?

Honestly, even a regular person that busted their ass to pay off their house and who eventually bought a run-down property that they poured all their free time for years to fix up and rent out is not suddenly a member of the 1%.

You know what, I “own” the house my 4 kids call home. I owe pretty close to what it is worth and I can barely afford anything else with mortgage rates where they are ( certainly more than rent would be ). It needs some repairs that are going to force me to borrow from somewhere. I work two jobs ( decent ones ) trying to keep it all going. If I lose the house, I will end up with a net worth lower than a homeless person. And I have dipshits on the Internet lashing out at my wealth and privilege. For the love of God, who are you people?

If you move to central Alberta, there may be more Ukrainians than you are used to.

In all seriousness though, it is a big country so there are no definitive answers.

The Canada / US border is about the same latitude as Lviv ( south of Kiev ). Most Canadian’s live within 200 km of the southern border. That should give you an idea of the weather though it is milder out in Vancouver.

There is a lot of immigration to Canada. Food is dominated by which ethnic groups are common in the area and mostly British influenced outside that ( except in Quebec where you swap French for English ).

While I agree with you, shifts in valuation due to regulatory changes are not exactly “the free market”.

Philosophically, I am very attracted by what you are saying here. It is certainly something to hope for and not to give up on. We cannot completely ignore the evidence of history however.

Are you familiar with the name Neville Chamberlain and the phrase “Peace for our time”? Neville would be applauding your post. Many people believe his desire for peace allowed a lot of war, death, and suffering that could have been avoided.

The real world is complicated. What you want and what you must do are not always the same thing.

If not for nukes, the West ( really any single NATO country frankly ) could end the war with Russia easily. Russia could not only be pushed out of Ukraine but perhaps the easiest way to do it would just be to occupy Moscow, form a new government, and end the war.

The lesson of history though is that the real problems begin after you do that. While the threat of nukes is real, I think the West is hiding behind that so that we do not have to directly engage. Having Ukraine do it for us is not only preferable to putting our own troops at risk but, perhaps more importantly, there is a lot more legitimacy to them fending off an invader. If it is done that way, the ability to achieve political stability and peaceful progress is greatly enhanced.

The West could be a little faster sending more advanced weaponry. If I was Ukrainian, I would feel like the blood of my countrymen was being spilled unnecessarily. That said, for the same reasons as above, the current pace is probably better for everybody in the long run.

Putin and Russia ( as it has been ) are unlikely to survive this conflict. What they get replaced by remains to be seen. In the long run though, that is the more important question and the more important objective. Ukraine needs to be liberated. In a way, Russia does too.

Honestly, things are being managed pretty well.

I had my kids at Remembrance Day this morning. I think we were there for the right reasons. We need to remember the sacrifice made by those that came before. We need to do what we can to build a world that honours that sacrifice. Patience. The easy answer is not always the best.