Links - 1st October 2019 (2)

Hong Kong immigrants streaming out of Canada - "Despite Canada’s rapid population growth in the past 15 years, there are now 32,000 fewer Hong Kong-born residents in Canada than there were in 1996.The 2011 National Household Survey, released last week, shows 209,000 Hong Kong-born residents in Canada (about one third of them living in Metro Vancouver). That compares to 241,000 who lived here in 1996.Their total numbers in Canada have been dropping despite 1,000 to 2,000 new Hong Kong immigrants a year continuing to trickle in. Even accounting for deaths, it is clear that thousands of Hong Kong citizens each year have been leaving Canada.Hong Kong now contains more than 350,000 residents holding Canadian citizenship... Numerous studies for Metropolis, a federal government-funded immigration research body, report that many newcomers to Canada from Hong Kong (as well as from Taiwan and China) “never intended to stay.”The Metropolis papers reveal a large portion of ethnic Chinese immigrants talk about being in “immigration prison” while in Vancouver, Toronto and elsewhere – enduring the three-year residency required to obtain a Canadian passport... “Most Hong Kong people know that there is no big money to be made in Canada, even less so in Vancouver. Vancouver in many people’s eyes is a place for retirement of rich people, as they find the living standard in Vancouver very high. Which is true. People who want to make money choose Toronto over Vancouver.”... When Lebanon became embroiled in a war with Israel in 2006, more than 50,000 residents of that country held Canadian passports.Many hadn’t seen Canada in more than 20 years, Kurland says. But, since they had dual citizenship, we had an obligation to airlift thousands out of the war zone.“They ended up having a Canadian vacation, paid for by Canadian tax dollars. And three months later, they were back in Lebanon”"
From 2013

Vancouver planner Andy Yan fights to prevent a ‘zombie’ city - "Only one-third of the residents of Vancouver, Richmond and Burnaby were born in British Columbia, with the rest from a multitude of homelands, from Winnipeg to Shanghai.“We’re a city from everywhere,” he says. “We’re more extreme in that than the mass majority of cities in Canada or the U.S.”Residents of Vancouver tend to have shallower roots than those in, for instance, New York City, where half were born in New York state.Even in Los Angeles, which is seen as having a highly migrant population, 42 per cent of residents are born in California. Montreal is also a magnet for immigrants. But, still, Yan found two out of three Montreal residents were born in Quebec. One of the few Canadian researchers doing work similar to Yan is University of B.C. geographer Dan Hiebert. Hiebert recently projected that by 2031, only one out of four Metro Vancouver residents will have grandparents born in Canada... Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City, called Vancouver a “consumer city.” But there is a crucial difference between being a “consumer” (including one who can afford to buy a property and not live in it) and being a “citizen,” Yan says.“We are being given the profound challenge of making strangers from all over the planet into citizens.”Working with sample data he dug up in part from the province, Yan has also discovered that 50 to 60 per cent of downtown condos are not inhabited by their owners.They’re owned by investors, many of whom are holding on while wishing their value will rise."

Chinese immigrants: Why they come, why one-third return - "recent immigrants from China believe that Canadians are generally more fair, ethical and respectful of the law than people in their homeland... Many recent immigrants from China also told Yu they “disliked showy, dirty and noisy cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.”... “I like the blue sky and white clouds of Vancouver. In my home city in China the sky is always grey. Once when my eight-year-old son saw a large piece of white cloud flying over his head, he was startled.”"

Whites will decline to two of five Metro residents by 2031 - "ethnic groups in Metro will increasingly concentrate in neighbourhood enclaves, creating a degree of racial segregation paralleled only by blacks and whites in major U.S. cities... Hiebert cites a popular standing joke to describe just how ethnically segregated Metro Vancouver has already become:
“Question: What river separates China and India?“
Answer: the Fraser River (which separates Richmond and Surrey).”"

Vancouver real estate: The fog of foreign ownership - "concern about foreign ownership clearly cuts across Metro’s ethnic spectrum. The Vancouver Foundation survey, for instance, found residents who speak Chinese in their homes, by a margin of almost three to one, also agree “there is too much foreign ownership of property here.”... To determine the extent of foreign ownership, Yan also admits it’s not entirely reliable to track the addresses to which B.C. property assessment reports are sent. Nor is it really dependable to determine if condos are vacant by measuring how much electricity they use. Which he has tried.What’s stopping politicians from collecting proper data?If scores of jurisdictions around the world, including in struggling developing countries, are able to collect solid information about foreign ownership of real estate, why can’t it be done in our rich, technologically sophisticated province?"
From a while back

Canada Releases Data on Foreign Influence on Housing - WSJ - "as of mid-2017 nonresidents owned 3.4% of all residential properties in the Toronto-area market. The share was slightly higher in the Vancouver market, at 4.8%... The average price for a single-detached home in greater Vancouver stands at 1.61 million Canadian dollars (US$1.25 million) and about C$996,000 in Toronto."

Looks like foreign buyers aren’t the big problem in Canada’s housing market after all - "Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Financial Group, said the low proportion of foreign buyers nationally doesn’t mean their influence in the housing market is just as small. Even a small percentage of new buyers in a market that is already stretched can have large ripple effects, he said... CMHC survey data showed that non-resident ownership rates hovered at 1.2 per cent in Toronto and Vancouver in buildings built before 1990, but jumped to 4.3 per cent in Vancouver for anything built between 2000 and 2009, and 4.1 per cent in Toronto for anything built since 2010. That means those units may not be available for local residents in need of a home or rental unit, Haines said.“It seems like a relatively small number, but when we talk about vacancy rate in the rental market, anything below three per cent is a big deal”"

Foreign ownership main culprit for unaffordable housing in Vancouver, a top destination for Chinese funds, ‘unimpeachable’ study says - "The white paper by Josh Gordon, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of public policy, found a near-perfect 96 per cent (or 0.96) correlation between various metro Vancouver municipalities’ price-to-income ratios (a common measure of unaffordability), and the proportion of their detached houses in which at least one owner was a non-resident.A leading researcher who was not involved in Gordon’s study said its findings were “unimpeachable”: the more that a Vancouver municipality was favoured by non-resident owners, the more unaffordable its detached houses tended to be... By investigating non-resident ownership, Gordon’s study sought in part to address the issue of “satellite families”, who live in Vancouver but whose primary breadwinner earns abroad. “[A] family with a low declared Canadian income might live in a multimillion-dollar mansion. This particular situation would represent ‘decoupling’ on steroids,” the study said."

Amazing Facts About Franz Joseph Haydn - "Haydn was kicked out of the choir. He went down swinging. He cut off another boy’s ponytail in anger and was publicly caned for it"

Link Text and Location Copier - "Link Text and Location Copier is a Firefox WebExtension that helps you creating links right from the context menu. It copies a link’s text and location, the page title and URL, or selected text and page url as either plain text, HTML, Markdown or BB Code links... It is heavily inspired by CoLT, one of my favorite add-ons, which will not be ported for Firefox 57""

Link Text and Location Copier - "Link Text and Location Copier is a Firefox WebExtension that helps you creating links right from the context menu. It copies a link’s text and location, the page title and URL, or selected text and page url as either plain text, HTML, Markdown or BB Code links... It is heavily inspired by CoLT, one of my favorite add-ons, which will not be ported for Firefox 57"

The unbearable wokeness of Tarantino’s critics - "If anybody is still uncertain about the extent to which woke identity politics has corroded the arts, one need look no further than the mainstream critical response to Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I have argued elsewhere on spiked that good criticism is characterised by a balance of individuality and objectivity. Of course, we expect critics’ interpretations to be informed by their own temperaments and tastes. But we also need them to stop their ideological leanings from overwhelming their critical faculties. I am always most attracted to work that divides audiences and reviewers, and I would be keen to read an intelligent critique of Tarantino’s latest tour de force. But for all my efforts, I have yet to find a single negative review that doesn’t favour tedious moralising over meaningful analysis. Richard Brody in the New Yorker complains that the film is ‘obscenely regressive’, ‘ridiculously white’, and ‘celebrates white-male stardom’. Matthew Rozsa in Salon dismisses it as ‘sexist historical revisionism’. Writing for the Observer, Wendy Ide mars an otherwise insightful review by expressing frustration at ‘the positioning of middle-aged white males as the real victims’."

Trump's secret weapon is that he's always ready to rumble - "When you attend one of his rallies, as I did last week in New Hampshire, it is obvious that Donald Trump has modeled his presidential persona on WWE pro wrestling.The banter, the jokes, the trash-talking, the catchphrases, the crowd manipulation, the belligerent patriotism, the villain-slamming: It’s all straight out of a preordained WWE storyline... From a political point of view, Trump’s WWE appropriation makes perfect sense, since the wrestling audience is huge — 800 million households worldwide every week, says WWE — and its demographic aligns with those of his voters: 60 percent are male, 60 percent are white, and more than 60 percent are not college graduates.Even his feud with The Mooch, former communications director Anthony Scaramucci, is a WWE storyline. The Mooch is a babyface-turned-heel who appears at Joe Biden events. Trump tweets that he is a “highly unstable nut job.”Is Trump a good guy or a bad guy?“He’s a heel to some. He’s a babyface to others,” says “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, once the greatest wrestler in WWE history, who now hosts a podcast drawing 2 million downloads and a USA show, “Straight Up Steve Austin.”Trump seems to have modeled himself on Austin, who was an anti-authoritarian, blue-collar, cussing heel who didn’t care how he was perceived and was so admired by audiences that he “turned face.”Like Austin, Trump’s persona is champion of the underdog, “the People’s Billionaire,” the “heel” who picks fights and always prevails."

Linda Sarsour blocks Wall Street Journal reporter from press brief - "Controversial American political activist Linda Sarsour has been recorded on video directing associated-members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to prevent a Wall Street Journal journalist from entering the office of freshman Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib during a recent press briefing over unspecified reasons... Sarsour wrote that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” on her Twitter page, a post which she has still not removed.Sarsour in addition has notedly encouraged the stoning of the Israel Defense Forces and has been photographed with a former Hamas operative jailed by the Israeli authorities in the 1990s, all the while acknowledging having many male relatives in Israeli prisons."
It's only attacking the press when Trump does it

Frank Dauenhauer's answer to Why wasn’t Hermione portrayed by a black actress in the films if in the novel she is a person of colour? - Quora - "J.K. Rowling, while writing the original Harry Potter series of seven books, envisioned that Hermione was white. However, after all seven of the original Harry Potter books had been published, she did some mental backflipping to say, at the insistence of her publishers, that Hermione could have been black. Ergo, Hermione was ex post facto, a black girl...
the proof is in Book Three, Prisoner of Azkaban, where Buckbeak is supposed to be being beheaded, where the trio are using the time turner: “Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree.”"
Comment: "There’s also a couple of drawings by JK Rowling herself, illustrations in some versions of the books that must have been approved of at some stage and various other bits of merchandising (e.g. Figurines by Enesco dating back to 2000) depicting Hermione with pale skin."

How Australia is Exposing Student-Debt Issues in the U.S. - "Other countries also charge their students for their higher educations as a portion of their later incomes, including Hungary, New Zealand, England, Wales, South Africa, South Korea, and now, the United States—where many kinds of government-backed loans are now also being encouraged to take advantage of a similar option... In Australia, graduates don’t have to start making payments for their college educations until they reach a salary equivalent to $39,152, at which point they’re charged 4 percent of their total earnings. That increases gradually to a maximum of 8 percent for people making $79,945 or more. There also isn’t any interest; the balance rises only at the same rate as inflation, which was less than 2 percent last year... While a form of income-based repayment has been on the books in the U.S. since 1994, it’s been implemented with excruciating slowness"