see, this is political, and everybody looks stupid.

what i want to see is shovels in the ground for affordable housing.

and i don't care what level of government writes the checks.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-tories-accuse-trudeau-of-stoking-fear-to-silence-critics-questioning/

july is winding down.

should i be concerned? yes.

should i panic? no.

i really wish i could get into that unit around the corner....i'm almost contemplating putting a deposit down without seeing it...

whether i'm able to find a small office in a safe building or not, i think that my ideas around what is feasible with this should expose my thought process on the matter - i am not looking for a fancy apartment or a bourgeois neighbourhood or even a dedicated bathroom, so much as i am seeking a place to store my gear. that is the #1 priority, and will remain so until i can finish the discography.

the problem with this scheme is that the availability of small office space in this town appears to be low.

office space is cheap and plentiful, but you have to buy it by the thousands of square feet. i'd be looking for less than 500. that simply doesn't seem to exist.

i found one add that is exactly what i want, but it's a little old. i'll see if i can follow up tomorrow....

so, it's less that i'd be renting an office to live in - i'd be renting an office to work in. i'd just be working very long hours, and crashing in hotels every now and again....

the reason this is reasonable to me is that i have every desire to spend essentially all of my time working, anyways. i want 130 hour work weeks, and 40 hour days. it's what i do. what's pissing me off is that i've been so unproductive...

if you put me in a room with my stuff, like this, i'm not going to want to leave very often, and i'm not going to want to sleep very often, either.

i'm honestly only going to want to sleep once a week, and i'm honestly only going to want to shower once a week. so, why pay for this stuff full time?

but, see, renting a room is a shitty deal when you want to fill it up with gear - you can't find a 300+ square foot room, and, if you somehow could, you don't want to leave that gear in a house with other tenants that you know almost nothing about.

and, while i guess i don't need a private bathroom all of the time, i'd like it to be private when i do use it.

this would obviously not be feasible if i had to get up to go to work every day, or i otherwise had some kind of serious schedule. but, the weirdness of my life, and the singularity of my focus, makes it something i want to think seriously about.

the downside of this is storage & convenience. i'll take an acceptable apartment if i can find one. but, if i can't...

...i'm going to need to get creative. and, with a little luck on the market, i think this can work.

i just remain skeptical that the worker will approve this.

there is really only one place on the market that i'm taking seriously right now, and it's through that screwy management company, and the tenants won't let me in.

new crazy plan.

i can probably get a nice 300-500 square foot office space in a secure building for under $500. the catch is it won't have a bedroom or a kitchen, it'll just be an office space.

but, i can get a mini-fridge. and, i can get a heating pad. and i have a microwave, too. in fact, i could conceivably share a kitchen - this bothers me much less than sharing a bathroom.

and, i could sleep on the couch in the studio/office.

everything is solved, except the bathroom. what to do about that?

well, i actually don't shower every day, and there's no use in pretending that i do. i shower five or six times a month - either when i'm going out somewhere, or when i really need it. and, if i'm spending 95% of my time in an air-conditioned studio, i'm not going to need to shower often.

let's say i can get an office for exactly $489/month, all inclusive. i'm budgeting $700-800 for living expenses. that means i'd have $200-300/month to spend on hotel rooms (in fact, probably air bnbs...), when necessary.

so, let's say i want to hit a concert in detroit @ 8:00 pm. i could check in somewhere at 2:00, do a small amount of laundry, clean myself up and be out the door by 18:00. i could then be back in the hotel by 9:00 am at the latest, take a shower and make it back to the office to crash - or crash in the room if i'm back earlier, whatever. the going price for this seems to be about $40-50.

if i average a shower once a week, whether i need it or not, that's <$200/month.

so, that's <$700 on living expenses - and i'm very much in the clear.

crazy?

i dunno.

it's probably both the safest possible place for my gear, and the nicest possible place to get some sleep, at the same time. and, in the process i may be turning this gig economy thing on it's head.

my disability worker says there's no problem with this. hrmmn. i dunno....

we have tremendous clean energy resources in this province.

the idea of people converting off the grid to natural gas in 2018 is retarded.

that should not happen. and, the government's policy should be to make sure it doesn't happen...

my opinion on the topic - and i've been clear about this for many years - is that government policy should be to ensure that clean hydro is a less expensive alternative than dirty fossil fuels.

electrical base board heating should be less expensive than gas heating, and it's up to the government to interfere with the market until this is true.

mark my words: if you recently spent thousands of dollars on a gas furnace to avoid electrical heating costs, it will not be much more than a couple of years before the price of gas has increased so that the cost of gas heating is comparable to the cost of electrical heating.

and, the gas companies will just eat the difference as profit.

because that's capitalism.

suckers....

if you find your heating costs are high, you are better off investing in insulation than you are in changing the fuel that you use.

new windows are a better idea than a new furnace.

what economics 101 will actually teach you is that, once the market settles, the owner of the natural gas company and the owner of the electricity company will then get together and collude with each other to keep the prices high.

it is not in their rational self-interest to compete. rather, it is in their rational self-interest to cartelize, and then set prices in co-ordination with each other.

so, if the electricity company wants to increase rates, it will call the gas company, which will also increase it's rates.

economics 101, guys.

and, you can try to get the government to stop them from doing that with regulatory bodies, but those bodies just end up in the cartel, in the end.

the only real solution is public ownership....

if you run a natural gas company, you're not going to look at the situation and say "gee, my product costs less than my competitor. hooray!".

rather, you're going to look at the situation and say "my competitor charges a higher price than i do, so i have the ability to increase my prices, until they are roughly comparable to my competitor. that is an opportunity for profit that i must take advantage of."

it's economics 101.

if you have a situation where two replaceable commodities are competing with each other on a market where demand is inelastic (like heating homes.), the cheaper one always rises to meet the cost of the more expensive one, in the long run. the reason is that producers make pricing decisions under inelastic demand, not consumers. consumers cannot do without heat to bring the price down. so, the cheaper producer may undercut the market in the short term, but will have infinite leverage in increasing prices, until it catches up to the more expensive one. and, because producers exist to maximize profit, they will do so.

in the end, buying natural gas is not cheaper than buying electricity - but it may be more profitable to sell it.

it is consequently not rational to convert to the cheaper production option, unless you can find some way to recoup the costs, quickly. and, if you're going to switch, you should ensure you can switch back at minimal effort.

what that means is that what these people should have done is keep the electrical baseboards in place, and let the tenants decide what to use based on what is cheaper at the time. and, if such an arrangement were to become widespread, the (relative) elasticity of the demand would increase, and market forces may have some effect on price.

something that's coming up over and over again is that units that i would be able to afford if they were heated by electricity are now out of my price range because they're heated by gas.

you have to pay $40/month here for gas as a base rate. if you have the gas off for eight or nine months, that's $250+ wasted on user fees. for somebody like myself that has very low electrical use, i'm going to make that up on baseboard heating.

i saw them do it in my old apartment, and looked into the costs - it's expensive. it takes 25 years to make the money back. so, the owners are understandably increasing rental costs to adjust - they don't want to take 25 years to make up the costs of renovations. but, what tenant wants a renovation that increases their monthly bills?

the end result is that what were once affordable units are now no longer affordable to the people they were once affordable to. so, we're seeing units sit for longer periods. but, it doesn't make sense for the owners to bring the price down - they have to wait.

the gas furnaces are also just ugly. they take nice units and run ducts through therm in awkward places. that itself is going to decrease the desirability of the unit. who wants to live in a warehouse?

i tried to warn the last guy that putting in that gas furnace was going to kill his property value, and i tried to warn him that the way markets work is that if the cost of natural gas is lower today then it is inevitably going to rise, tomorrow, to balance out. natural gas producers don't want to offer a more affordable option; if it's cheaper than electricity today, they're undercutting the market, and will eventually want their prices to be the same as that for electricity. and, while some of my arguments got through, his brother just wanted a furnace. i learned in the end that his son-in-law worked for the gas company...

most people don't have relatives in the industry. and, if it's not already obvious to them now, they're going to wake up soon and realize that converting to gas was a terrible mistake.

note to the universe: i cannot afford to pay for gas heating. that's an instant disqualifier. so, stop throwing these ads at me...