Oh it’s definitely a great city builder, I quite enjoy it myself! Even when it comes down to putting down housing, you can adjust the size of the plots to perform different functions, whether it is to grow large veggie crops, whether you need housing for specific specialized individuals, whether you just need to cram as many families as you can into one housing unit, assigning specific families to work at nearby locations, I could go on and on!

And there is a peaceful mode if you want to avoid the wartime strategy bits, but even those seem to be rather enjoyable, at least from the initial experience I have had with it. Very much looking forward to seeing what the expanded final product is going to look like, it is definitely a game worth all the praise!

Well, think about it this way:

A standard house for 4 people is probably in the range of 200k - 400k. Then you would need supporting infrastructure for each house - sewage and gas pipe connections, electrical connections, road infrastructure, all that jazz. That’s probably another 100k right there. And then public infrastrcture for things like schools, parks, firefighters, police, road equipment, etc. It’s easy to see why the costs would add up quickly to roughly $1 million or more per person. Managing city infrastructure is really damn expensive, especially for more ineffective housing options (hellooooooooo, suburbia!).

Maybe they don’t explain it in the article, but I’m gonna posit my own two cents: Alberta’s economy is quite big, relative to how much it contributes to Canada’s GDP as a whole, but the overwhelming majority of that is in oil and hydrocarbons, and a lot of the overall economy is geared towards that particular industry. Without it, Alberta would be in a significantly worse position. I would wager that we are seeing a good example of Dutch Disease.

What Ontario and Quebec lack in oil, they make up for in a more diverse economy, especially being the economic financial and trading hot-spots a la Toronto and Montreal. They have a robust enough economy that they can basically support their own dedicated Provincial police force and not have to rely too much on one singular economic output to fuel the entire thing.

With the EV market looking to expand faster and faster, Alberta hitched its economic future on a product that people actively want to turn away from. To create their own police force would mean they’d need their economy to be capable of funding this police force permanently, no Federal assistance, and if the demand for oil craters out because more and more people start getting off gas and going towards EVs, heat pumps, nuclear / solar / wind, etc., well, then Alberta would be quite pooched. Also, worth pointing out that neither Canada nor Alberta have enough weight in the global oil markets to guarantee that oil is a prime economic benefit, especially if new sources of cheap oil start popping up in the US.

I can’t speak to all of the political reasons for wanting to create a new Provincial police force, but economically? Alberta is better off relying on the RCMP rather than trying to do its own thing, just in case funding becomes a problem in the future.

Honestly, if Ottawa can pull this off in their winter climates, I’d be excited to see how well these EV’s will work in the milder climates around the GTHA.

So I ran the math on the election outcome on this, as someone who lives in the riding directly:

32401 / 116259 = ~ 27.9% (Voter turnout)

27.9 * 0.574 (Percentage of vote which went to Jivani) = 16.01%

16% of the electorate gets to decide a candidate for the remaining 84%. I don’t know about anyone else, or whether it’s just supposed to be the way that things go, but it gives me a real ick feeling when I see a number like that. Maybe if it was something closer to 30% or something along those lines, I could at least begrudgingly accept that this is such a solid Conservative riding, but only 16%?!

I just really hate voter apathy, guys. Come on, we had 4 days of early voting, mail-in voting, the actual vote day itself, you can legally request time off work to go vote if you need it… was it that difficult to get out and vote, or am I just missing some other context?!

Obviously the filthy casual didn’t know how to parry.

I shudder to think what country would want to actually buy asbestos. All I can think about is how much of a pain in the ass it is to clean up once used in construction.