A painting of me
  • The Condo Crash. 

    A great article about the rise and fall of Toronto’s condo market. Some of the quotes and stats in the article are bananas.

    On the advice of a realtor he’d met through a friend, Tajdin made a 10 per cent deposit on an $855,000 pre-construction condo. It was a 468-square-foot, one-bedroom unit in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighbourhood, a wealthy enclave not far from downtown. … But Tajdin didn’t intend to move into the condo, or even to close on the deal. … If he couldn’t sell in time, he’d have to close on the property himself, and he knew he’d never be approved for such a steep mortgage. … By the first quarter of 2024, average condo values in the city had dropped by nearly $100,000 to $696,000. As his closing date neared, Tajdin panicked; his only hope was that the market would unexpectedly rebound. But in February of 2024, the worst-case scenario became a reality. Tajdin’s closing date arrived, and he couldn’t seal the deal. He didn’t even bother trying to secure a mortgage; after multiple discussions with banks, it had become obvious that it was futile. The developer, CentreCourt, kept his deposit. Then it went a step further, suing Tajdin for $860,000 in damages, interest and legal fees for breach of contract. It sold the unit to another buyer for $420,000, less than half of Tajdin’s agreed-upon purchase price only two years earlier. Tajdin, in turn, filed his own lawsuit against Hirji, seeking indemnity from liability with CentreCourt and damages equal to his deposit.

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  • The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans by Jeffrey Goldberg. 

    I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

    So, quite literally.

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  • It Is Now or It Is Never. 

    Rachel Cohen’s resignation letter from her law firm, who is capitulating the Trump, is a good read.

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  • Is it okay? 

    Making the case for large language models. This was a good read on a topic that often feels very polarized.

    If super science is a possibility — if, say, Claude 13 can help deliver cures to a host of diseases — then, you know what? Yes, it is okay, all of it. I’m not sure what kind of person could insist that the maintenance of a media status quo trumps the eradication of, say, most cancers. Couldn’t be me. Fine, wreck the arts as we know them. We’ll invent new ones.

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  • Soy Right ascendant. 

    Everything is so terrible it’s hard to point to a particular article that sums up the terrible neatly. This one looks at the sort of right wing we are dealing with at the moment: abject loser machines, I guess.

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  • A Coup is In Progress in America. 

    The reporting about what is going on in America right now seems to really underplay what is taking place. And I think talking about what is happening plainly makes you sound like a crazy person. If everything Trump, Musk, and friends were doing was happening in Afghanistan it would be framed completely differently.

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