SkepticalButOpenMinded

Yeah, I suppose I'm questioning even the potential. Some technologies don't pan out, which is why we're not all riding around on our Segways. Underestimating future technology is certainly one risk, but the other risk is assuming every technology is inevitable progress.

Given how new this is, I doubt anyone knows how much this will cost at scale, even the manufacturers.

modular houses are nice, but they’re all similar to each other

I'm not so sure. New American and Canadian houses are famously similar to each other. We build big neighborhood blocks of almost identical looking track houses. If I could, instead, order a house from online catalogs, that might actually increase aesthetic diversity.

We used to have more diversity in housing styles, which is why older neighborhoods have lots of different home styles. But a lot of those 100 year old neighborhoods are actually full of Sears catalog homes. Basically, pre-cut, pre-fabricated modular homes!

But then you need to do significant construction with that material. And it’s not just one material: there are pipes, electrical, insulation, flooring, etc. It’s only replacing a few admittedly major parts of the material. Everything else still takes tons of labor. I could be wrong, but I’m not convinced the labor savings are greater compared to modular housing.

Is 3D printing houses a gimmick? Why not good old modular houses made in factories and shipped?

Yeah my first thought too given how much that’s been in the news.

Might be like how it is here in Canada. Pro-immigrant, but much more contemptuous of the indigenous population.

I wonder about the motivations of whoever started the misinformation, but it also says something about the credulous public who spread it. Vancouver is one of the safest cities in North America. Crime severity, including violent crime, is not even top 20 amongst cities in BC, much less Canada. It’s safer to raise your kids in Vancouver than many rural BC towns.

And yet, fear over crime is rampant. It makes no sense. It’s how the conservative ABC swept the last municipal election. Conservatives win on fear and division. We’re seeing that with the misinformation about immigrant crime being spread in Europe, with the subsequent rightwing riots.

Yes, Obsidian is great. The app itself is proprietary but the files are portable plain text. I feel like that makes it pretty future proof. If it ever shuts down or enshittifies, there will be alternatives.

Yikes that’s just straight up racist.

This isn’t whatboutism. Canada is not currently running residential schools and China is. That makes China much worse on this topic.

But I also think this is a perfectly apt time to bring up the comparison. These residential schools sound exactly like the British colonial residential school system, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if China was copying that. What makes Canada great is precisely that we can talk about these dark times in our history, and admit that they were shitty. Do you think Chinese Internet users are able to do that?

I didn't say you're evil. Let's not focus on hurt feelings. You made specific claims, and I gave arguments against them.

Better outcomes have nothing to do with government programs. That is an extreme position. I have never heard anyone endorse it with a straight face until now. Obviously, no economist left, right, or centre believes anything this extreme.

Immigrants cause problems in the US. The data does not bear this out. In the US, they commit fewer crimes and there's no evidence that immigrants treat their children worse or educate them poorly. This is just false.

Other countries do better due to culture and societal homogeneity. I gave you a concrete counter example of a country that is as similar to the US as possible in almost every way. In fact, Canada is more diverse, and has more immigrants. And yet, the outcomes are much better across the board.

If you're being intellectually honest, you should be willing to modify your beliefs based on argument and evidence, not just double down.

I am not doubting that residential schools in China are bad, but as a Canadian we have a duty as a part of our efforts at reconciliation to correct people who downplay the horrors of residential schools in Canada (and the US). There are mass graves across the country from willfully negligent living conditions leading to large scale death from preventable illness. The physical and material conditions were inhumane. One of the chief medical officers in Canada was so horrified, he wrote a book in 1922 called The Story of a National Crime where he described the malnourishment, lack of basic healthcare, and squalid living conditions. (Think about that next time someone says “disease killed indigenous people in North America, not genocide”.) To say nothing of the beatings and rape.

It was for a long time illegal for an indigenous person to raise their own children. Can you imagine if you weren’t allowed to raise your own child because of your race? The goal was cultural and linguistic genocide, but once that culture was destroyed, the people coming out of the system were never going to be assimilated and treated equal to whites. The goal of the “education”, as recorded in government documents, was to raise a permanent servant class.