Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 34m

The housing crisis has defined people's lives - they've deferred university, turned down job offers and delayed having families because they can't afford the housing they need.

But the real tragedy here is that investors who bought at the top of a bubble might make less money.

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 34m

It’s time to be done with the phrase “mom and pop landlords”. Conjuring up a fictionalized image of grams and gramps scraping by on their meager rental income obscures the truth - these are real estate speculators from all walks of life who made high-risk investments on purpose.

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 35m

“Desperate people are no longer lining up in droves for a chance to pay $1200 to have an extended sleepover with a stranger” is good news. This is good news for renters, for communities, and for future students.

But Globe and Mail begs you to think of the landlords.

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 35m

These landlords are not upset about the international student cap - they are upset that they no longer have unlimited access to a vulnerable population of renters who are desperate for housing, do not know local laws or price ranges, and don't yet have local friends to rent with.

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 36m

I work in housing and homeless services in Halifax. Even in the worst months of Halifax's rental crisis, $1200/month was about the going rate for a *private bedroom* in a regular shared apartment or house in the university neighbourhoods

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 36m

the landlord interviewed in this article is the owner of Granville Hall here in Halifax, a “student accommodation” not affiliated with any university, which charges nearly $1200/month to *share a bedroom* with a stranger

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 39m

I could pay the finest scientists and engineers in the world to spend the rest of their lives pushing the limits of nanotechnology and still not be able to produce a violin small enough for these landlords

www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...

‘If there is no demand, we can’t operate’: Small landlords ponder future after foreign student cuts

The case for investing in student housing isn’t as obvious as it once was as the federal cap on international students enters its second year

www.theglobeandmail.com

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 1d

every night my father goes outside to yell at this porcupine to stop eating his apple tree, and every night this porcupine makes eye contact with my father as it continues to eat his apple tree

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 3d

imagine overhearing your 12-year-old threaten to fuck their opponent’s mom over Xbox live and they are speaking to Bashar al-Assad

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 4d

I think a Victorian orphan would survive drinking a McDonalds Sprite, but I think the sentence "in the future, Donald Trump opens a Qatari military base in Idaho" would have roughly a 38% mortality rate in the year 2002

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 5d

it's crazy how fast movies become dated. for instance, the 2021 movie "Don't Look Up" no longer makes sense, because if an American scientist discovered a planet-killing comet heading towards us today, their main response would be "oh thank fuck for that"

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 7d

boiling the oceans so a robot can check and see that you like Green Day and then recommend you a Green Day album that does not exist

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 7d

this is what my brain pictures when you tell me that you’re generating AI content

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 9d

writing a 2025 version of "We Didn't Start the Fire" that is just four minutes of indistinguishable frustrated yelling that ends with an evacuation alert for an actual wildfire

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 10d

genuinely hard to believe that the lyrics “and I scream at the top of my lungs, what’s going on?” were written in 1993. What’s going on is that you can buy a house for $4 and a button, get on that.

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Reposted by Janel Comeau 🍁

Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · Apr 17

the thing about that “first they came for” poem is that we’re already at least 2-3 lines deep and it’s not a very long poem

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 11d

every day I wake up and read a headline that sounds like something a concussed writer for The Simpsons would come up with while trying to make an intentionally stupid joke about George Orwell

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 12d

when they said there'd be bread and circuses, they should have specified that the bread would cost 200% more than it did four years ago and the circuses are only available on your least favourite streaming network for $19.99/month

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 15d

.... go on

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 15d

went down a research rabbithole because I was curious how viruses get their names, and I don't know what I was expecting "papillomavirus" to mean, but it was not "nipple tumour virus", I can tell you that much

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 15d

no one:

some Disney exec in 1995: obviously children won’t understand the theme of architectural preservation in the original Hunchback of Notre Dame. so write a song about the corruption of religious power and sexual resentment disguised as piety. I’ll book the chamber choir.

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 15d

are you filling up Howl’s Moving Castle

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 15d

when I was a kid my mom would make me give my little brother a turn on Crash Bandicoot and I would have to sit there and watch him run off the map and waste all my extra lives and that's sort of how it feels to watch the news right now

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 16d

daily Chinese news headline: Scientists grow the world’s first functional human spine replacement from a single drop of blood

daily American news headline: White House declares that sunburns are caused by bees

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Janel Comeau 🍁 @verybadllama.bsky.social · 17d

just saw a French-language ad for the existence of Philadelphia, just in case anyone was wondering how desperate American businesses are for Canadian tourists to come back

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