i simply don't use twitter, either.

again: i had a sega genesis when i was like 10, and i played a few pc games in (junior) high school - civ 2, wolfenstein, doom, quake. but, i am not and have never identified as a gamer. and the gamer that posts as 'deathtokoalas' is simply not me; it's some high school kid from new york. i, on the other hand, am a middle aged transperson from canada.

i've confronted him on stealing the handle, and he denied it.

all i can do is wait for him to grow out of stealing my name.

and, yeah: if you live in ontario, your property taxes are going to go up as a consequence of the refugee influx.

that's 100,000 new people on welfare in a matter of months.

and, we pay for welfare with property taxes.

the best case scenario is that you get rentiers buying the housing up and renting it out to people on a room-by-room basis.

i was at a subdivision in east windsor the other day, where you had exactly that happening. the house hadn't even been finished yet, and the guy was subdividing it into rental properties.

if those houses were empty before the flood of refugees because nobody could afford to buy them, they're still going to be empty after the flood of unskilled refugees with few job prospects, because people still can't afford to buy them.

we don't need more people to solve the affordability crisis, what we need is more affordable housing.

i mean, let's get this clear.

i was disabled before rents went up, and i'm still disabled after rents go up.

my disability is not a function of the market.

i don't become undisabled via market forces.

i just have nowhere to stay, any more.

and, yes - the new houses in the suburbs will continue to sit empty.

but, i was never going to buy one of those houses...

....and neither were any of the refugees, either.

until the government builds more low rent housing, this is just going to get worse month over month.

these refugess are not bringing wealth with them.

they are not creating jobs.

broadly speaking, they are neither educated nor skilled workers.

so, what's happening is that we're recycling property taxes back into the economy through welfare, and sending it out of the country via multinational firms and into the pockets of rentiers. there's really no benefit to the local economy.

there's no increase in local production. no jobs created. no multiplier effects. just more people in poverty, and more people in general.

the unemployment rate in southern ontario has been very high, now, for years.

it's not a prosperous area.

and, rents are not increasing due to the economy getting better - they're increasing due to dwindling demand, as a consequence of a huge increase in welfare recipients.

if we continue on this trajectory, these cities are all going to go bankrupt. and i don't exactly care. i'm just trying to get the point across.

the entire southern half of the province has a 1% vacancy rate right now, or lower.

the "free market" is not going to solve that problem. that is going to require government intervention.

and, we're going to have crisis levels of homelessness, now. for a long time.

it's not complicated: if you let tens of thousands of people into the country without a housing plan, you're going to create a housing crisis.

you can argue they shouldn't have let them in, or you can argue they should have had a plan, but you need to do the obvious math of letting them in without a plan and then prepare for the obvious consequences.

and, what about montreal?

well.

i'd have to live in quebec for a fixed amount of time before i'm eligible for disability there, and i would not be eligible for disability here, if i go. i don't know the exact rules. but, in order for me to keep the check i have, i have to have a mailing address in ontario.

the way that would have to work is i'd have to go with a bank account and hope for the best. that's a hail mary.

so, i want to stay in ontario. if the last two tazs have been in montreal and detroit, where's the next one? buffalo?

niagara / st catherine's is something i should seriously look at....

...but, all of southern ontario appears to have been flooded by cheap labour, right now. & the north is poorly developed.

the refugees want to live in cities. the government would apparently actually like to direct them to the north, where the population density is extremely low, but they don't seem to understand that there isn't any housing up there, because it's largely undeveloped. are they going to start handing out plots of land like it's the nineteenth century? because, they seem to want them to act like settler colonists, without giving them the resources that the state gave the settler colonists. they can't buy land living on welfare.

this government operates on broad principles, and doesn't do the actual research. this is weird for the liberals, and is going to hurt their branding, long term. their reputation as the 'smart party' is pretty much in tatters, at this point. they didn't do any planning around housing at all, they just let thousands of people in without thinking twice about it - that's not smart.

wherever they end up, there's going to need to be housing built, and it's hard to understand what kind of private sector actor is going to build housing for largely illiterate refugees on welfare - or the disabled and other low income people they're displacing.

this might be a long term mess. and, all the government wants to talk about is free markets. so, it might require an election to fix the vacancy rate. sadly.

and, if my goal is to escape capitalism, rather than participate in it, my best guess in the short term may actually be too look for a small town, as the refugees don't want to go to small towns.

we may end up in a situation, for example, where housing in windsor is non-existent, but housing in the smaller towns around windsor starts to open up. &, likewise, i might be able to find cheap housing in smaller ontario towns like brantford or paris than i would in larger ones like windsor or london.

& if i want access to toronto, without living in toronto, i should start looking at something scattered around the 905 - something with go train access into toronto to see the odd show now and again.

we just brought in thousands of people with poor job prospects, which is not really going to change the economy. they'll take tax revenue and use it to pay for housing and buy imported food and imported clothes. this is not likely to have much of a multiplier effect - it's just more people on welfare. so, the basic premise of the taz in this region does still exist, it's just being pushed out of the population centres. we're not all of a sudden a prosperous region with good job prospects, but just being flooded with unemployed people, making it that much harder to exist.

a reasonable question is how many of these people stay here, in the long run. there's still no jobs here. the influx of refugees may help some grocery stores, but that isn't much of an economic driver. any jobs created will be in store fronts and restaurants and likely to add up to a net deficit.

some of these people legitimately just want to sit on welfare, and i guess we're stuck with them. but, it takes quite a bit of ambition to move across the world to claim status as a refugee. and, you'd think many of them are going to want more than that.

they won't find it here...

i don't have a good suggestion as to where to go. we used to send our surplus labour to the oil sands, but there's no future, there, either. this region will be automated before it is reindustrialized. do they want to work in agriculture?

we're left with the same set of solutions that we needed to the same set of problems in the first place, it's just more obvious now than it was before. we still need more subsidized housing. we still need more state funding for industry. adding thousands - tens of thousands - of illiterate people just exacerbates everything...

so, in the end, the government will need to step in, one way or another - or we're going to have a homelessness crisis of both refugees and non-refugees.

but, if it takes ten years for subsidized housing to materialize, the way, in the short run, may be to escape the cities for cheap rent in the towns...

i'm 37, not 27.

regarding the line-up?

i used to like st. vincent.

that is all.

mo pop is not the kind of thing i'd want to go to at all, actually.

sorry.

so, did the refugees ruin it?

yeah. pretty much.

but, i remember reading up on this idea of temporary autonomous zones when i moved in here. i'm stretching the concept; i need something approaching "normal housing" for as long as i need studio space. this is taking forever, and i don't like it, but so be it. but, the idea i can pull out of this theory is that the spaces are impermanent; they dissolve when capital identifies them. and, this is irreversible, until capitalism is abolished.

the idea is that, while revolution is necessary, struggle kind of sucks. we have finite lives. so, instead of fighting against capitalism, it may make more sense to just try and avoid it - at least until the social revolution brings us to critical mass.

if windsor was something like a taz, it was impermanent by definition. and, capital was always bound to expel me, eventually.

the challenge is in finding the next zone - and in cobbling together the resources required to get there.

i think you can maybe describe what's happened like this:

windsor used to be full of cheap, substandard housing. now, it's full of overpriced, substandard housing.

socialists are supposed to push back against bourgeois economic policies, not try to drown the bourgeoisie out by yelling the same thing back to them more loudly.

again, what's confusing and disappointing is the ndp.

we expect the conservatives to be xenophobic, and we expect the...we expect the liberals to do the math first, which they didn't do this time, but we expect them to react against the xenophobia. so, you get this dumb argument about racism and pointless finger-pointing that just distracts from the actual problem on the ground, which then never gets fixed.

as a left-leaning canadian, i would expect the ndp to stand up and demand more funding for socialized housing. that's what they did in the past. that's where they're supposed to be on the spectrum. & i would expect them to draw attention to the difficulties being faced by low income canadians, as vacancies fall & rents rise.

this pressure from the ndp then forces the liberals to act. that's how this works.

instead, they're basically just repeating the same lines as the liberals, and just trying to say it louder and more forcefully. and, the weird thing about it is that it actually makes the liberals seem further left, even though they're just pushing the standard bourgeois policies around population increases, to drive down wages and increase rents.

if the ndp won't be a left-wing party, we're going to have to build a new one from scratch. & let us be clear: the left-wing response to this situation is to push the government very hard to get shovels in the ground for more subsidized housing.

and i don't care, really.

listen to your thunderstruck and zz top all day if you want. i don't care.

just stop smoking.

...or die already.

windsor is a city where you can walk by a local bar in 2018 and still hear ac/dc playing.

it's not just the smoking, it's the broad attitude.

you see people driving around on motorcycles and in muscle cars here all the time, like it's 1975.

it's the city time forgot.

the city is really, legitimately trapped in a time warp - and the attitudes people have to smoking are one of the most obvious components of it.

the young people seem to be a bit better.

but, the sad and pathetic fact is that most of the people over 40 here were never told "you can't smoke here" until 2015-ish, and are still having trouble adjusting to it.

they just don't think it's a serious issue.

the reality is that you'll need to pay for premium housing to avoid smoking, in this town. you're looking at rents over $1000/month, for a bachelor apartment.

you might get lucky.

i'm hoping...but....

and, you can't walk down the street without bumping into a smoker, either.

you could smoke in the restaurants here until a few years ago. the culture shock that the rest of the world went through 20-30 years ago is just beginning to happen, here. people don't get it; non-smokers aren't bothered by it.

people smoke with their kids around, like it's not a big deal.

it's just still considered "normal" to smoke, here.

there are neighbourhoods downtown where it just hangs. for blocks.

i didn't think it would be this difficult to get away from it, but i didn't realize the preponderance of it, either. it's ubiquitous...

and, besides everything else, this is the point you need to understand the best:

if you do not smoke, you don't want to live in windsor.

it's uninhabitable.

i can't stay here.

i haven't been complaining, because what's the point? but it's a cancer-zone.

i'm better off homeless - it's better for my health.

honestly.

this is difficult right now.

but, if i end up with a nice smoke-free basement in waterloo, and a nice nest egg to sit on, it will have worked out for the best.

i just can't do anything the easy way, it seems.

so, what is my plan, here?

if i have to leave the city, i'll have to place things in storage - or just move straight out. so, even if i get the payout, i still can't be really seriously looking outside the area, because i won't be able to see anything. and, who is going to rent to me over the phone, right?

the fact that i don't have a laptop right now is kind of a really big problem...

regardless of the outcome, my options until october 1st are really mostly within biking distance. i'm not going to be able to seriously hitch out to waterloo or niagara or wherever else until i'm able to get my things in a safe space, first.

if i have to hit the street, i'll need a new (used) laptop, first.

and, i may have to get used to sleeping on the streets for a little while...

i have two months, still. but, i'm coming to terms with the increasingly clear reality that if i want to start over again post-smoking, then there's really nothing available here. i'm going to have to leave...and that's going to require a stay in some hostels until i figure it out...