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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:05:30 GMT -8
My dog’s a genius. I asked him what 100 minus 100 is, and he said nothing. Inflation is so Bad They are Leaving the Country.The dream of making it big in Canada is turning into a battle for survival for many immigrants due to the high cost of living and rental shortages, as rising emigration numbers hints to newcomers being forced to turn their back on a country that they chose to make their adopted home. Trudeau has made immigration his main weapon to blunt Canada's big challenge of an aging and slowing population, and it has also helped fuel economic growth. That drove Canada's population up at its fastest clip in more than six decades this year, Statistics Canada said. But now a reversal of that trend is gradually taking hold. In the first six months of 2023 some 42,000 individuals departed Canada, adding to 93,818 people who left in 2022 and 85,927 exits in 2021, official data show. The rate of immigrants leaving Canada hit a two-decade high in 2019, according to a recent report from the Institute for Canadian Citizenship (ICC), an immigration advocacy group. While the numbers went down during pandemic lockdowns, Statistics Canada data shows it is once again rising. While that is a fraction of the 263,000 who came to the country over the same period, a steady rise in emigration is making some observers wary. For a nation built on immigrants, a rising trend of people leaving Canada risks undermining one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau government's signature policies, which granted permanent residency to a record 2.5 million people in just eight years. Reuters spoke with a half a dozen people who have either left the country or are preparing to do so, because of the high cost of living. Canada's surging cost of living fuels reverse immigration |
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:07:35 GMT -8
The Appeals Court Kept a Gag Order in Place, But There May Be a More Important Part of the Ruling
Trump can cry foul and appeal a gag order decision in his criminal case for alleged attempts to cling to the presidency after the 2020 election that led to the attack on the Capitol, but the countdown to raise the curtain on his criminal election subversion case will continue ticking, a legal expert said on Friday.
On the day that the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld Judge Tanya Chutkan's gag order against the 45th president, former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig said he is convinced there won't be any budging and the March 4, 2024, trial start date will stand.
"This is the buried headline of the ruling today," he said during an appearance on CNN's "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer. "That is going to become monumentally important because Donald Trump is in the process of appealing the immunity motion."
Honig added: "He is certainly going to try to get the trial date, currently set for march 2024, pushed back to after the election.
"He is going to try anyway possible to do that."
But as Hoenig pointed out, the appeals court cast down any potential effort to slow walk the trial.
“Delaying the trial date until after the election, as Mr. Trump proposes, would be counterproductive, create perverse incentives, and unreasonably burden the judicial process," according to the ruling."In addition, postponing trial would incentivize criminal defendants to engage in harmful speech as a means of delaying their prosecution."
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:11:32 GMT -8
Prevoius Guy's Experts Are About As Good As You Might Imagine
Trump's cronies are proving her case.
New York Attorney General Letitia James recorded another video testimonial that her office plopped on Twitter/X showcasing her smiling at some of the efforts made by former President Donald Trump's legal team to counter the case brought against him in the $250 million civil lawsuit claiming the Trump Organization, Trump himself, and his eldest sons committed widespread fraud for financial gain.
After entering the tenth week of trial, James appeared to mockingly grin when summarizing the "expert" witnesses trotted out in court.
"Over the past few days, we continued to hear testimony from the defendants' many expert witnesses," she said, with extra English placed on the word "expert."
She first brought up one of the witnesses admitting that "the valuations of some of Trump's properties on his statement of financial condition were neither "proper nor reasonable."
Without naming him, it is likely she's referring to longtime Trump Organization controller Jeff McConney.
During his testimony this week McConney blanked when trying to remember why the decision to value Mar-a-Lago as a private residence was made, but said the effort was wholesome.
"Our intention was always to reflect as best we could the value of these properties," McConney said.
James then talked about another nameless witness, whom she described as a Mar-a-Lago club member.
"In fact, this witness testified that he was at Mar-a-Lago when he ran into Donald Trump who asked for him to 'help' with 'an issue in New York.'"
"That issue was our lawsuit."
She's likely referring to Lawrence Moens, longtime Trump friend, and who counts as clients Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, casino mogul Steve Wynn, and Citadel hedge fund owner Ken Griffin.
And finally she described the testimony of an accounting professor whose fees she said were "paid for by Save America, Donald Trump's political action committee."
It's believed James is referring to Eli Bartov, an NYU professor.
“There’s no fraud here,” he said after reviewing the statements.
James said that the professor maintained that "the value of Donald Trump's triplex was inflated," adding, "On that, we can agree."
But then she discredited his expertise when validating that Trump's statements were on the up and up "even though he has not prepared a financial statement since the 1980s."
This Story Lies About a Liar For Hire. Previous Guy Didn't Pay the Guy. His SuperPac Did.
NYU accounting professor Eli Bartov testified yesterday as Donald Trump's hired expert witness that he did not believe that Trump committed fraud when he filed financial disclosures in connections with his applications for bank loans. We learned today on cross-examination that Trump paid him $877,500 for his work and testimony on the case.
Bartov testified that he was paid $1,350 an hour and worked a total of 650 hours on the case.
In his testimony yesterday, Bartov claimed that someone valuing their apartment at three times market value because the square footage was tripled was "not that unusual." He also compared Trump's disclaimer clauses on his statement as akin to the Surgeon General's warnings that smoking causes cancer.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:15:49 GMT -8
Paxon and the Court Are the REAL Abortions Here.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has asked the state Supreme Court to intervene and stop a Dallas woman from having an abortion.
Paxton’s office petitioned the high court just before midnight Thursday, after a Travis County district judge granted a temporary restraining order allowing Kate Cox, 31, to terminate her nonviable pregnancy. Paxton also sent a letter to three hospitals, threatening legal action if they allowed the abortion to be performed at their facility.
On Friday evening, the state Supreme Court temporarily halted the lower court's order but did not rule on the merits of the case. The court said it would rule on the temporary restraining order, but did not specify when.
“While we still hope that the Court ultimately rejects the state’s request and does so quickly, in this case we fear that justice delayed will be justice denied,” said Cox’s lawyer, Molly Duane, in a Friday evening statement.
This is the first time an actively pregnant adult woman has gone to court to get an abortion since before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. A similar case was filed in Kentucky on Friday.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:19:45 GMT -8
They Should Show How Bad It Was When Biden Took Office.
Many blue-collar workers are riding into 2024 on a year’s worth of stronger hiring, more plentiful job opportunities and faster pay growth than some of their white-collar counterparts.
After two years of rapid growth, the United States’ job market is finally slowing down as 2023 draws to a close, but Americans broadly continue to benefit from its strengths. Unemployment clocked in at 3.7% last month, the 22nd straight month when the jobless rate has held below 4%.
People also appear to be working or looking for jobs at higher levels than before the pandemic, with 83.3% of those between the prime ages of 25 to 54 participating in the labor force.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:21:37 GMT -8
Opps! Kevin Must Have Accidently Let a Little Bit of Truth Sneak Out
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:22:33 GMT -8
How much does GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley hate unions?
The former South Carolina governor once devoted more than three minutes of her “State of the State” address to a diatribe against organized labor, boasting about her state’s low unionization rate. “We don’t have unions in South Carolina because we don’t need unions in South Carolina,” she said.
She waged a years-long personal crusade against a union organizing a Charleston-area factory, putting an anti-union lawyer in her administration expressly to help her “fight” the campaign. She later lent her voice to radio ads urging factory workers to reject the union effort.
And she once declared that she didn’t want jobs coming to her state at all if they were going to be union jobs. “We don’t want to taint the water,” she said.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:24:38 GMT -8
I Inherited Money. I Did Nothing to Earn it or Deserve It. I Just Happened to be Born in a Particular Family
Super rich heirs are getting to keep more and more of their late parents’ money.
The share of estates that trigger the estate tax has reached a historic low in America, a new report has found. In 2019, the latest year for which the IRS has released data, only 8 out of every 10,000 people who died left an estate big enough to be subject to the tax.
“Today the estate tax is the weakest it has been in its century-plus history,” said the report, by the liberal nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. For 99.92% of Americans, the report says, the estate tax is “irrelevant.”
The culprits are a series of laws enacted by both parties that have steadily raised the estate tax exemption over several decades, as well as a boom in special trusts that the ultrarich use to avoid taxes altogether.
At the most recent peak, in 1998, almost 2.5% of estates triggered estate taxes, a figure that has dwindled dramatically.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:27:38 GMT -8
Has Tom Brady, the Deflation Expert, Been Spending a Lot of Time in China?
China Can’t Shake Deflation
Consumer prices in China fell for the second straight month, a deepening bout of deflation that shows Beijing’s efforts to reignite faltering growth are falling short.
China’s top leaders telegraphed Friday that more support is coming for the economy, with pledges of new fiscal stimulus and supportive central-bank policy in the months ahead.
Still, the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo signaled that stimulus will be measured rather than aggressive, reinforcing expectations for steady if unspectacular growth in 2024 as the economy grapples with a drawn-out property bust and a global backdrop darkened by war and slowdowns in the U.S. and Europe.
Consumer prices in China tumbled 0.5% in November compared with a year earlier, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said Saturday, steeper than October’s 0.2% fall.
Prices charged by companies at the factory gate also fell in November at a steeper annual rate than in October, as firms slashed prices in an effort to beef up sales.
The weak inflation figures add to a run of signals suggesting that China’s economy is losing momentum again after modest interest-rate cuts and other small stimulus steps drove a pickup in growth in the third quarter.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:29:57 GMT -8
Water, Water, Not Everywhere
Along-sought and disputed project in drought-prone California aimed at capturing more water during heavy rain storms reached a key milestone on Friday when Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration finished an environmental review for an underground tunnel.
The tunnel would be about 45 miles (72 kilometers) long and 36 feet (10.9 meters) wide, or large enough to carry more than 161 million gallons of water per hour. The tunnel would be another way to get water from Northern California, where most of the state's water is, to Southern California, where most of the people live.
The Newsom administration says the tunnel is a necessary upgrade of the state's aging infrastructure because it will protect the water supply from earthquakes and capture more water from rainstorms known as atmospheric rivers that scientists say have been increasing because of climate change.
But environmental groups, Native American tribes and other opponents say the project will take more water out of the river than is necessary and will harm endangered species of fish.
Friday, the California Department of Water Resources released its final environmental impact report for the project. The report is the last step of a complex and lengthy state regulatory process. But it doesn't mean the project is close to being built. The project still must complete a federal environmental review and obtain various state and federal permits. That process is expected to last until 2026.
State officials have not said how much it will cost to build it. A previous estimate on a different version of the tunnel was for $16 billion. State officials will release a new cost estimate next year.
Still, Friday's report is significant because it signals the Newsom administration's commitment to completing the project despite strong opposition from communities in the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta region. Newsom says climate change is threatening the state's access to clean drinking water, warning the state's supply could drop 10% by 2040.
The state recently went three years without significant, sustained rain. The drought dropped reservoirs to dangerously low levels and forced millions of people to ration their supply. That drought ended suddenly last winter when California was hit by a series of storms that flooded the state's rivers and filled lake beds that had been dry for years.
In Spite of El Nino, California Rainfall and Snowpack are Well Below Average
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:33:48 GMT -8
Deciding How Much Money Rudy Will Owe, But Won't Pay
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani faces a trial on Monday to determine how much he owes a mother-daughter team of Georgia poll workers who were harassed and threatened after he defamed them on national television with false and lurid claims of election fraud.
Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss sued Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, in December 2021 after he’d accused them a year earlier of committing election fraud while counting votes in Atlanta’s State Farm Arena.
The women said they suffered an onslaught of violent and racist threats and harassment after Giuliani, comparing the mother and daughter to drug dealers, named them at a state legislative hearing and in news interviews. State election officials investigated Giuliani's claims and found no widespread fraud in President Joe Biden’s victory.
In August, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruled Giuliani liable for defamation after he refused to contest the lawsuit’s major accusations. Howell has already ordered Giuliani to pay Freeman and Moss $89,172 for legal fees and for his businesses to reimburse them $43,684 in sanctions for refusing to share emails and other records in the case.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:35:16 GMT -8
The Ugly AlligatorlingAn extremely rare white leucistic alligator has been born at a Florida reptile park.  The 19.2-inch (49 cm) female slithered out of its shell and into the history books as one of a few known leucistic alligators, Gatorland Orlando said Thursday. “This is beyond rare. It is absolutely extraordinary,” Mark McHugh, president and CEO of Gatorland, said in a statement. The park is asking for the public's help in the naming the alligator, which is descended from a nest of leucistic alligators discovered in the swamps of Louisiana in 1987. The blue-eyed newborn is the first solid white alligator ever recorded to have descended from those original alligators. Of the seven remaining alligators from the nest, three are at Gatorland, McHugh said.
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 9, 2023 9:42:11 GMT -8
When the Population Grows Faster Than the Housing Supply, Housing Prices RiseUrbanist Twitter has a favorite meme pointing out how nonsensical American urban planning can be. It started when one account posted an image of a downtown street in the cartoon sitcom Bob's Burgers and wrote, "This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities." The viral phrase has since been repeated ad nauseam and spawned countless parodies. But there's a nugget of truth in the silly message. Single-family zoning dominates even the densest US cities. Townhomes, apartment buildings, and even duplexes are illegal to build in vast swaths of urban residential neighborhoods that are instead reserved for lower-density detached houses. About 75% of residentially-zoned land prohibits anything but single-family homes. Homes are often not allowed near shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. Restrictive land use laws have helped create a US housing shortage of somewhere around six million units. And as home prices and rents become increasingly unaffordable, the American public is starting to take issue with policies that restrict housing. Large majorities say they support policies that would facilitate more — and denser — housing, according to a Pew Research survey conducted in September and published last week. The survey asked respondents about 10 different pro-housing policies. The most popular included streamlining the permitting process; legalizing apartments in commercial areas and near transit; allowing basements, garages, and attics to be turned into accessory dwelling units; and allowing student housing and affordable homes on property owned by non-profits, including churches. The least popular policy — which got 49% support — involved allowing smaller home lot sizes. The vast majority of Americans support housing policies that are widely illegalOf Course, People Who Alreay Own a Home Support Policies that Pushing Housing Prices Higher
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Post by sagobob on Dec 9, 2023 12:56:21 GMT -8
When the Population Grows Faster Than the Housing Supply, Housing Prices RiseUrbanist Twitter has a favorite meme pointing out how nonsensical American urban planning can be. It started when one account posted an image of a downtown street in the cartoon sitcom Bob's Burgers and wrote, "This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities." The viral phrase has since been repeated ad nauseam and spawned countless parodies. But there's a nugget of truth in the silly message. Single-family zoning dominates even the densest US cities. Townhomes, apartment buildings, and even duplexes are illegal to build in vast swaths of urban residential neighborhoods that are instead reserved for lower-density detached houses. About 75% of residentially-zoned land prohibits anything but single-family homes. Homes are often not allowed near shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. Restrictive land use laws have helped create a US housing shortage of somewhere around six million units. And as home prices and rents become increasingly unaffordable, the American public is starting to take issue with policies that restrict housing. Large majorities say they support policies that would facilitate more — and denser — housing, according to a Pew Research survey conducted in September and published last week. The survey asked respondents about 10 different pro-housing policies. The most popular included streamlining the permitting process; legalizing apartments in commercial areas and near transit; allowing basements, garages, and attics to be turned into accessory dwelling units; and allowing student housing and affordable homes on property owned by non-profits, including churches. The least popular policy — which got 49% support — involved allowing smaller home lot sizes. The vast majority of Americans support housing policies that are widely illegalOf Course, People Who Alreay Own a Home Support Policies that Pushing Housing Prices Higher Be careful what you wish for. www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/ADUHandbookUpdate.pdf |
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Post by mhbruin on Dec 10, 2023 7:36:25 GMT -8
What do you see as the problem with these homes? Yes, they increase population density, but when population increases, populaition density has to increase somewhere. |
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