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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • The government doesn’t guarantee the pension if the fund fails

    This is incorrect, emphasis mine:

    Funding shortfall The Government of Canada has a legal obligation to pay plan member pension benefits. If the plan becomes underfunded for any reason (for example, higher-than-expected costs, lower-than-expected investment results), the government is required to transfer additional funds into the public service pension plan. This has occurred before, including during the period from 2013 to 2018.

    I don’t dispute that they’ve renegotiated contribution rules, I don’t know the history of this pension fund that well. Typically these rules are renegotiated with union agreement.


  • I think this is more complex, then an employer vs worker issue:

    When the Govt originally made these pension investment “corporations”, the notion was: “go invest this money and build up enough that we can pay all the members out their defined benefit”, if something goes wrong the government will back the pension sort of “de-risking” the investment.

    With that de-risking comes the other side of the coin, excess surpluses go to the government, the original agreement stipulated that, this is not a “the government is unilaterally taking money”, this is something in the original contract. i.e it’s not a surprise to anyone.

    This gets to the heart of the matter. Though workers and employers both make contributions, employers ultimately hold all the decision-making power over workers’ pension plans.

    This is true, but this is also a defined benefit pension: members know exactly how much they are getting from the pension at all times (with some assumptions about what their work history will be). They shouldn’t be expecting more, and (for the positive side they know they won’t be getting less). These kinds of pensions are rare, and everyone should want one.

    As PSAC warns, “If the government can poach pension funds from its own employees, what’s to stop other employers from following suit and putting millions more at risk?”

    I don’t think this argument holds much weight, this isn’t a flippant decision but something that was decided ages ago.

    It also miss states that the money belonged to the employee’s or employer in the first place, it does not belong to either it’s more of a backup to gurantee future benefits


  • This all seems like it’s part of the plan, and the title is super biased?

    However, legislation governing pension funds restricts the size of accumulated surpluses to no more than 125 per cent of the plan’s liabilities.

    Just like the govt guarantees the pensions if the fund fails, it can also take excess surpluses. That seems totally reasonable?

    I don’t get why the union is acting like it’s their money when it isn’t – it’s a defined benefit?







  • If the internal sponsor of an idea get bored or loses support from colleagues, the project just halts.

    Yeah, i kind of agree with everything you’ve said, and history as i remember it kind of backs up what you’ve said about tf2.

    But I don’t agree that they don’t care about story and only do it for marketing. I think halflife’s episodes are all about an attempt at continuing that story.

    I think that the Cave and Glados bits of portal are a large part of what made those games (of course the gameplay loops are really tight there.

    I think the only way to know would to be an insider. I also don’t think it really matters, the games they make are good.


  • I do think you are right, they start out on gameplay; getting that inner game loop to be fun is primary (I kind of though that’s how most (non narrative) game studios worked though).

    they don’t make games to tell stories

    This was mostly what i was suggesting was incorrect. I also don’t think it’s a major part of marketing. I’m suggesting they don’t bother putting the work of story into something until that inner game loop is fun.

    TF2 was the result of experimentation with team based death match gameplay

    Didn’t they already know about team fortress? This seems off based on team fortress having already existed, same with wolfenstine enemy territory.


  • I’m not sure your theory stands up, they did all those comics around TF2. They hired those old man Murray dudes I thought just to work on narrative. They’ve gotten famous actors to do roles!

    I think saying halflife was never about story is just wrong.

    If you stripped dialog from portal you’d have a significantly worse game. Did you forget all the glados shit that came out after portal? Humor is a major part of those games which is all about dialog.


  • I’ve got seinheisser 598 that are quite good, but I understood seinheisser to have been bought and maybe quality went down. I also have byerdynamic 990s that I find uncomfortable for longer periods.

    I also have hifiman sundara that are (except for the cable) far and above the best headphones I’ve ever had both in comfort and sound.

    There’s a person on the bapcsales Canada reddit called lifelongcaboose who seems to really know their headphones that recommended them







  • Sometimes home owners will sell their house after retirement for something smaller, live off the difference, then sell that house and use the money from that for long term care, or inheritance.

    There’s also the obvious: they worked for something, possibly quite hard, why do they have to pay the price for others? Presumably they’ve been paying taxes all along, and have already been contributing to the greater good.

    I guess my feeling is, it’s not so simple to just wreck housing prices. I absolutely feel like corporations, and probably some ultra wealthy don’t work that hard and get most of the rewards (or aren’t even people), like if the money has to come from somewhere there is a clear set of people who could afford to lose some wealth, and not materially effect their life; and that’s not necessarily single dwelling home owners.


  • I think what’s being said is: if housing prices lower, you are going to ruin some people’s retirement plan – at least some of those people will have worked hard their entire life to purchase and pay off that house. There’s been some incentive to save in this way as well (first time home buyer plan, tax deductions for more ecologically sound houses, that kind of thing).

    I suspect he’s probably right, that letting house prices drop would over all make things worse in Canada. My goto solution would be to subsidize housing by increasing taxes on corporations and people/corporations that own more than one house. but i’m not any kind of expert