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Vancouver Sun
3 hours ago
- Business
- Vancouver Sun
'That model is dead:' B.C. Premier, housing minister rebuff developers' request for foreign real estate investment
'We are not going back,' said Premier David Eby and Housing Minister Christine Boyle when asked separately Wednesday about a big push by some of the province's major developers to get the government to allow for more foreign investment in real estate. In a letter dated July 29, some of the biggest names in B.C. real estate asked the federal government to reconsider its ban on foreign entities purchasing residential property in Canada, and for the B.C. government to reconsider its additional tax on foreign buyers. The letter is signed by CEOs and presidents of several major B.C. real estate companies including prominent names like Polygon, Amacon, Westbank, Strand, Intracorp, Bonnis, Beedie, Mosaic, Pooni Group, and Cressey. It's addressed to Prime Minister Mark Carney and federal Housing Minister Gregor Robertson, as well as to Eby and the ministers of housing and jobs, Boyle, and Ravi Kahlon, respectively. A daily roundup of Opinion pieces from the Sun and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Informed Opinion will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The number of new housing starts in B.C. is of 'particular concern,' the letter says, citing a nearly 50 per cent decrease in starts comparing March 2024 with March 2025. The letter argues that in light of the recent industry slowdown — which has already seen layoffs at some big real estate companies and some projects delayed — the federal government should revisit the prohibition on residential property purchases by non-Canadians, which took effect in 2023 and is currently in place until 2027. The letter argues that foreign investors form an important part of the presale condo market, and without them, fewer projects will sell enough pre-construction units to get financing and move ahead. 'Canada's ban on foreign ownership was designed to help curtail the nation's housing affordability crisis, but it has also negatively impacted overall investment into the new home industry,' the letter says. No one from the federal Housing Ministry was available for comment Wednesday. The ministry sent an emailed statement, which didn't directly answer what the Canadian government will do about the foreign buyer ban but seemed to throw cold water on the developers' request. By reducing the impact of foreign ownership demand, the ban 'helps to ensure that those homes are used for Canadians to live in, not as a speculative asset class for foreign investors,' the ministry's response said. Eby and Boyle were more direct. On Wednesday, Boyle said she wouldn't comment on what the federal government should do, 'but certainly here in B.C., we're not going to stop cracking down on speculation. We don't want to go back to the days when foreign investors were buying up empty condos and leaving neighbourhoods empty and pushing up the prices for people and families across B.C.' B.C.'s foreign buyer tax was created by the B.C. Liberals in 2016, a year before the election that saw Boyle's party, the B.C. NDP, form government. Boyle said that even though the tax was created by her party's political rivals, the NDP has no plans to repeal it: 'I'm open to ideas from all over, and we're seeing it (the tax) make a difference.' B.C.'s foreign buyer tax revenues declined after the federal ban was implemented. But because the ban includes some exemptions — such as larger buildings with four or more dwellings — the provincial tax is still expected to generate $40 million over the next fiscal year . Boyle said her government will keep working with private-sector builders to get more housing built, citing changes to push municipalities to approve more housing and a recent deal that used federal funds to lower development fees in Metro Vancouver. 'We'll continue to do all of that work and continue to listen and talk through ideas,' Boyle said. 'But we are not going back to the Wild West days of empty condos, and foreign investment racking up the prices.' Eby, when asked about the letter at a news conference Wednesday, said he shares concerns about declining housing starts in some segments of the market but doesn't believe the answer is bringing huge amounts of foreign money back into B.C. 'Let me say this: We are not going back to the old model of doing things,' Eby told Postmedia News reporter Alec Lazenby. 'Under the previous (provincial) government, the idea was if you welcome foreign investment into real estate, everybody's going to benefit. 'And what we saw was real estate prices became completely detached from what people are actually able to earn in British Columbia, meaning that young people are priced-out of the housing market, and those prices are incredibly sticky. 'I accept that the old model of doing things is not working anymore. And frankly, I say good. 'If you want to see what the old market did, look at the CURV building project in the West End of the city of Vancouver, a site that started at $16 million by local developers that ended up being sold for $69 million after international money got involved. It was completely stupid and disconnected from what the local market can support.' The CURV project is now mired in financial turmoil and facing receivership, its future unclear. 'If foreign capital can help build housing for Canadians and British Columbians, great. But if the foreign capital is just housing that is going to sit empty in the middle of downtown Vancouver, like the CURV building, well, forget about it. That model is dead.' The letter urges governments to consider the policy implemented this year in Australia, which restricts foreign ownership of existing homes but allows foreign purchases of new homes and presales 'to maintain the strength of their construction industry.' One of the letter's signatories was Kevin Layden, president of Vancouver-based developer Wesbild. Layden said the current state of the B.C. residential real estate market is worse than the 2008 global financial crisis, and he has 'never seen it this bad.' 'If projects don't go forward, there will be an inventory decline in two-to-three years time, which means we will not have enough homes for the population that we have, so that will drive prices back up,' Layden said. 'So what the industry is basically saying right now is we want to keep the pipelines moving … We want to allow foreign investors to invest in these projects so we can get them built.' With files from Alec Lazenby dfumano@
Time of India
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Nintendo confirms date of its next Direct event; here's what to expect
Nintendo is set to hold its next Nintendo Direct event this week. The Japanese game developer has confirmed that the virtual event will take place on July 31. It's important to note that this is a Partner Showcase event and not a typical Nintendo Direct. This means that the upcoming event will focus specifically on third-party partners, rather than Nintendo-published games. So, gamers who are waiting for the release date of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond should not expect the same from this event. Instead, the presentation, which is expected to last approximately 25 minutes, will focus on third-party developers and publishers, allowing them to reveal their upcoming Switch 2 games. Nintendo Direct on July 31: How to watch the event Those who are interested in watching the event can catch it live on Nintendo's official YouTube channel. The event kicks off at 6 am PT / 9 am ET / 2 pm BST / 3 pm CEST/ 6.30 am IST. For easy access, here's a link to the YouTube video . Nintendo Direct on July 31: What to expect by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Elephant Digs A Huge Hole For 11 Hours And Sees What Comes Out Of It Reportingly Undo As noted earlier, Nintendo has announced that the upcoming Direct will focus on titles for the Nintendo Switch 2 and current Switch consoles, developed by its third-party publishing partners. This may include games like Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition for Switch 2, Star Wars Outlaws , Hades 2 , Professor Layton and the New World of Steam, and possibly even Hollow Knight: Silksong, according to a Polygon report. However, updates on Nintendo's first-party titles, such as Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Kirby Air Riders for Switch 2, appear to be off the table for now. Nintendo Switch 2 launch lineup suggests that many titles still don't have confirmed release dates, and more games are likely to join the list soon. The strong momentum behind the Switch 2 console, which is now the fastest-selling console ever, is also expected to drive more third-party support. A larger install base means developers will have access to a broader audience, increasing the chances of better sales. Boat Nirvana Zenith Pro Review: Spatial Audio on a budget AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Polygon back online after validator leaving the network triggers one-hour halt
Polygon is back online after a bug in the network's validation mechanism knocked it offline for an hour on Wednesday. During the outage, the network's Heimdall service, which manages validators and syncs the blockchain with Ethereum, became unresponsive. 'Heimdall experienced a temporary disruption that led to a one-hour halt in chain progression, caused by a validator exit,' the Polygon Foundation, a non-profit tasked with supporting the Polygon blockchain, said in an X post. It's not clear why a validator leaving the network caused such a critical issue. Polygon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Other blockchains, like Ethereum, regularly handle validator exits with no issues. Blow to confidence When blockchains go offline it can be a blow to user confidence. Polygon users have piled more than $1.4 billion onto the blockchain on the assumption that they will be able to move or withdraw those funds at any time. So when a blockchain goes down, those funds are stuck until it comes back online. Such situations have previously cost users dearly. Futures exchange Hyperliquid announced on Wednesday a plan to refund users who lost money after a 37 minute outage on Tuesday resulted in dozens of delayed trades. Solana has also experienced several outages in recent years, with many traders reporting financial losses because they were unable to close or alter leveraged trades placed through DeFi protocols while the network was offline. Polygon launched in October 2017 and was among the first cohort of blockchains to offer cheaper transactions than Ethereum. It's not the first time Polygon has gone down. In 2022, the network experienced an 11 hour outage caused by a bug in a planned upgrade. In March 2024, Polygon's zkEVM network also suffered a 10 hour drop in service, which its developers attributed to an issue with the blockchain's sequencer. Polygon's POL token is down 2.5% on the day. Tim Craig is DL News' Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at tim@ Sign in to access your portfolio
Vox
2 days ago
- Health
- Vox
The testosterone theory of politics
is an essayist and critic based out of New York. He's written about the intersection of technology & culture for Wired, Polygon, Mother Jones, and others. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the US Department of Health and Human Services, has supported the debunked ideas that vaccines cause autism and that organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have helped cover up the link. He's skeptical of the chemicals in our foods and skies, and worries that we've veered too far from all that is good and natural. Yet for all this, he admits to taking testosterone regularly as part of his 'anti-aging protocol from my doctor.' In April, in an interview with Fox News' Jesse Watters, the septuagenarian began to lament the testosterone levels of our youth. 'A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man,' he claimed. When Watters expressed disbelief, he doubled down, saying that testosterone levels have dropped as much as 50 percent from 'historic levels.' It's not clear exactly what 'historic levels' he was referencing— or, for that matter, what, if any, research he was citing. It's possible that he was misinterpreting the results of a 2007 study that analyzed data gathered from adult men from the 1980s onward and observed a 1 percent decline in average testosterone levels per year (meaning that a 68-year-old man in 1997 would have had 10 percent more testosterone than a 68-year-old man in 2007). The study, however, said nothing about how teenage or young adult testosterone compared. Still, the Fox News clip made its rounds online. On platforms like X, users reshared the video and parroted Kennedy's unsubstantiated claim, voicing suspicions of an intentional campaign to weaken the nation and sounding well-worn dog whistles. 'Mass poisoning mass murder mass replacement,' read one post responding to the video. Questions of scientific literacy aside, it was clear that Kennedy had struck a chord. Testosterone is having a moment. Within the sweaty halls of the gym bro internet, the trend of testmaxxing has gathered steam, with countless videos dedicated to how someone might 'naturally' (and not so naturally) increase their testosterone levels by, say, eating nearly a dozen eggs a day or simply getting on testosterone replacement therapy. The supplements hawked by alt-right podcasters like Alex Jones are often studded with possibilities of '[supporting] normal testosterone levels in men.' Famously, in 2016, Trump paraded his testosterone levels in his presidential bid against Hillary Clinton. And lest we think obsession with testosterone is restricted to the echo chambers of the manosphere, we should bear in mind that the physique idealized in mainstream Hollywood wouldn't be possible without artificially elevated levels of it, as Alex Abad-Santos previously observed for Vox. The same move that supposedly identified the chemical makeup of masculinity revealed just how unstable it was. We live in strange times, surrounded by positions that can seem like contradictions: Our HHS secretary doesn't believe in vaccines, but takes a hormone regularly; the Republican Party works tirelessly to limit access to the substance for people seeking gender-affirming care while simultaneously gutting the federal agency responsible for regulating testosterone in our farming industries (which employs it to increase the 'efficiency by which [the animals] convert the feed they eat into meat'). Meanwhile, evangelical leaders condemn trans people for existing, while also platforming doctors telling post-menopausal women to take testosterone so they might get back their curves. In many ways, testosterone sits at the crossroads of the tensions cutting through our culture today. By paying close attention to the history of the hormone and the often paradoxical roles it is made to play, we can better understand the forces shaping modern life. The road to testosterone Ask most people what testosterone is, and you'll probably hear that it's the 'male hormone.' In fact, type that very phrase into Google and all search roads will tend to lead back to T. The two are considered so interchangeably that they often function as synonyms: testosterone as the chemical essence of masculinity, masculinity as the product of testosterone. Online, this line of reasoning gets pushed to its limits. In one TikTok with more than half a million views as of this writing, a user boldly claims that 'Low testosterone is the cause of 99 percent of all male problems. When a transgender woman wants to feel like a man, she takes testosterone. Why? Because testosterone is what makes you feel like a man.' With testosterone comes all the characteristics and advantages ascribed to men: strength, mental acuity, competitiveness. Just last year, Elon Musk responded to a post on X featuring a 4Chan screenshot that argued that 'women and low T men' weren't fit for leadership because they would naturally defer to consensus beliefs, compared to 'high T alphamales' who were capable of objectively assessing a situation. 'Interesting observation,' replied the world's richest man. Despite the ubiquity and weight testosterone holds today, it's a relatively new entrant in our understanding of the body. In Testo Junkie, Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado explains that for most of Western history before the 17th century, sex was understood by a logic of similarity and inferiority. 'Female sexual anatomy was set up as a weak, internalized, degenerate variation of the only sex that possessed an ontological existence, the male,' he writes, citing the scholar Thomas Laqueur. You might call this the Eve-as-Adam's-rib model of sex. Women weren't seen as a distinct category, separate from men in their own right, as much as they were considered a 'worse' version of men. Then, at the dawn of the modern era, a new approach began to emerge. We started to create discrete categories that we might fit the world into, purifying it of ambiguity and hybridity: nature versus culture, animal versus human. Sex was no exception, and an oppositional, binary understanding of man versus woman emerged. Women and men were placed in entirely separate categories, overturning the previous understanding of women as imperfect men. Sex assignment became hyper-focused not so much on the complex web of social roles, anatomy, temperament, and reproductive capacities that organized identity previously, but on easily observable, 'mechanical' features like the shape and size of one's genitals. As Laqueur points out, organs like the ovary, which didn't even have a 'name of its own' for millennia (since it was often referred to by the same word used for male testes), became no less than a 'synecdoche for woman' during this time. These categories were 'not only natural but even transcendental,' in Preciado's words. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to phrase it, 'facts don't care about your feelings.' Today, you can still see this system hard at work whenever a troll uses a hashtag like #WeCanAlwaysTell to discredit someone's gender identity. Of course, the supposed facts didn't always line up quite so neatly with reality itself — as was the case with intersex people who challenge this paradigm — but doctors conveniently solved for this by creating sub-classifications like 'female pseudo-hermaphrodites' that still preserved the 'truly male,' 'truly female' binary. Testosterone didn't properly enter the scene until 1935. That was the year that three independent teams of researchers, each backed by a different pharmaceutical company, identified and synthesized it. There was only one catch: The long-awaited 'male hormone' didn't fit quite so neatly into the binaries that organized our understanding of the body. Research uncovered that hormones weren't exclusive to one sex. Everyone had testosterone, even if average rates tended to differ between traditional sex lines. It turns out that before menopause, women produce three times as much testosterone as estrogen. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, testosterone isn't the 'opposite' of estrogen, it's the precursor — men and women convert testosterone into estrogen using the enzyme aromatase, and higher levels of testosterone in men can actually result in higher levels of estrogen. The same move that supposedly identified the chemical makeup of masculinity revealed just how unstable it was. It was born as a paradox, the double-edged essence of manhood that never was. Maximizing masculinity These tensions haunt testosterone today. On the one hand, we still largely think about sex in terms of binaries, and of testosterone as the chemical distillate of a natural and inviolable maleness. At the very extremes, testosterone has been used to violently enforce old hierarchies. In the '40s, Nazis transplanted testosterone glands into gay men's penises in a brutal attempt at conversion therapy. On the other hand, it doesn't take much to sense the unease that the fluidity of testosterone has opened us up to. If maleness or femaleness were once something you unassailably possessed at birth based on unchanging physical markers and roles, then the presence of testosterone across sexes — alongside the development of other chemical interventions that disrupted traditionally sexed functions like the Pill — contributed to the growing awareness that these categories aren't given as much as they are produced. Critically, these scientific developments happened against the backdrop of broader social movements that sought to challenge the core ideas underpinning patriarchy. As second-wave feminists critiqued the idea of a 'natural' order where men ruled, and women were integrated into more spheres of economic and social life, traditional notions of masculinity began to lose their grip. Testosterone lives between these two slowly colliding cultural tectonic plates. The desire to compare T-levels — whether it's between 'low T men' and 'high T alphamales' or teenagers and 68-year-olds — ultimately boils down to the desire to lament the state of masculinity today while simultaneously legitimizing the reality of 'maleness' by pinning it on some objective and measurable metric. In short, testosterone has become a way that men can not only ground their masculinity in a moment when our ideas of gender are more fluid than ever, but even quantify it — all while borrowing the veneer of scientific legitimacy to feel assured in their manliness. It's this tension that lets conservative mouthpieces insist on the 'immutable biological reality of sex,' as one Trumpian executive order phrased it, while simultaneously making a profit by selling supplements that claim to enhance testosterone levels (and by extension your manhood). This doublethink is on full display whenever a product like Force Factor's Test X180 Legend advertises itself with lines like, 'Let's be honest: being a man is relatively straightforward. … Biologically, to achieve this goal you want more testosterone and less estrogen – maximizing your masculinity.' Major pharmaceutical companies are competing over the growing testosterone replacement therapy market, which is set to break $2 billion in the next few years. In the same ways that marketers for Listerine generated demand for mouthwash in the 1920s by popularizing 'halitosis' (or bad breath) as a medical and treatable condition, testosterone has become positioned as a salve for the supposed crisis of masculinity today. Masculinity is now both something straightforwardly given at birth, but also always needing to be maximized through consumable supplements, a commodified 'biotech industrial artifact' as Preciado provocatively calls it. Of course, this commodity isn't available to everyone. The desire to preserve traditional boundaries also helps us understand the restrictions that have been historically applied to the hormone. One of the reasons that testosterone therapy failed to gain larger traction in the 1940s after its synthesis was that physicians were worried about its effects on women, including vocal change and hair growth. Even today, although the Food and Drug Administration has approved 31 different testosterone products for men (not to mention the many products it has approved for livestock), it hasn't greenlit a single product for women out of this fear, despite studies that indicate that testosterone could offer women a range of benefits from breast protection to osteoporosis prevention. The hormone's male bias has impeded the kind of expansive testing needed for regulatory approval and created a host of misconceptions around its effects on women, even as interest in testosterone for women appears to have grown organically in recent years. It's not hard to imagine the commercial motivation to keep it this way either. Though women might represent an untapped market, offering testosterone to women could also result in what advertisers call 'brand dilution,' or overextending a product to the point of undermining its value. Natural and unnatural In his conversation with Jesse Watters, Kennedy attributed the decline in teenage testosterone levels to the quality of food being consumed today. 'The food our kids are eating today is not really food, it's food-like substances,' he claims. He's not wrong. A recent study found that over half the calories consumed at home in the US come from ultra-processed foods, or 'industrial formulations containing no or minimal whole foods and made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods.' Like any medicine, it is both a poison and a cure depending on how it's used. Our renewed interest in testosterone isn't just about the erosion of borders between gender classifications, but about the slowly crumbling walls separating us from the world we inhabit. Around a century ago, hormones like testosterone upended our ideas about how the body communicates with itself — allowing us to see how organs could speak to each other using our bloodstreams. Now, as we discover that the world has worked its way into our bloodstreams in the form of microplastics and the 'food-like substances' we ingest daily, it makes sense that this hormone would be caught up in these broader anxieties. As one user commented in the r/Testosterone subreddit, 'hormones given to animals we eat, pollutants in the air and water, blue light from devices etc all contribute to lowering of hormone production.' High testosterone is seen as a sign of a healthy and self-regulating body, and concerns about declining hormone levels stand in for a broader concern that the natural balance in us has been disrupted by our environment. At the heart of our fascinations and fears lies the growing awareness that our bodies are far more malleable and open to the world than we once thought, that our identities are far more unstable and fluid than assumed. What remains to be seen is where we'll go from here. There are those that want to lean into this radically chemicalized body. Sports leagues like the Enhanced Games, endorsed by transhumanist types like Bryan Johnson, are experimenting with steroids and testosterone regimens in an attempt to 'redefine superhumanity.' Meanwhile, Kennedy's use of testosterone despite his vaccine skepticism comes from the desire to preserve some delineation between what is natural and synthetic — to let in what is real (testosterone) and do away with what is artificial (vaccines). Many like Kennedy are unsettled by the idea that the borders of our bodies and identities are highly permeable, and taking testosterone is a way to try to get the body back to a 'natural' state, before it was disrupted by the unnatural forces outside of us. This desire to use testosterone to protect the 'natural' also runs through evangelicals who see it as a way for women to retain their femininity as they get older, as well as industrial farmers who use it to reinforce a natural order in which animals are treated chiefly as meat for human consumption.
Business Insider
23-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Crypto MEV Bot (Cryptomevbot.com) Launches Crypto Trading Bot for Individual and Enterprise Traders
The developers of the Crypto MEV Bot have announced the availability of their production-tested trading software for both individual and enterprise users. Following two years of continuous operation on mainnet, the MEV bot delivers institutional-grade speed, capital efficiency, and adaptive block-level execution while keeping its 'secret sauce' fully closed-source. What Is MEV Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to the potential gains from optimizing the ordering of transactions within a block, encompassing activities such as liquidations, on-chain arbitrage, and the execution of large swaps. Operating in this time-sensitive environment requires: Sub-30 ms latency to the mempool and private relays. Smart bribe & gas bidding to out-score rival bundles without overspend. Real-time path discovery across every major automated-market-maker. Mathematically proven, low-competition strategies built into the core bot How Crypto MEV Bot Stands Out Among Crypto Trading Bots Streamlined Deployment: The system can be launched by deploying a single YAML file and initializing the included Docker stack. No manual code modifications or relay configurations are required. Private-Relay Bundling: Supports throughput of up to 50,000 transactions per second. Capabilities include detection of large token swaps, liquidation flags, and 'harvest-on-deposit' vault interactions, enabling proactive bundle construction. On-Chain Profit Safeguards: All candidate bundles undergo dual eth_call simulations to account for factors such as slippage, flash-loan fees, gas costs, and validator incentives. Bundles yielding profits below a predefined threshold are automatically excluded. Dynamic Incentive Adjustment: A configurable bribe mechanism adjusts validator tips between 20% and 60% of projected profits to balance inclusion probability and fee efficiency. Multi-Chain Compatibility: A single executable binary supports multiple chains, including Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Arbitrum, Polygon, and Base. Chain-specific gas models and middleware are configured automatically. Ongoing Maintenance and Updates: Customers receive lifetime access to codebase updates, including strategy refinements and enhancements in response to MEV ecosystem developments. Step 1: Visiting the Website Heading to to get started. Step 2: Choosing The License Pro Retail – $4,999, for individual traders. Includes: Full MEV bot stack (multi-strategy, bundle engine, configs) Works on BNB, ETH, Arbitrum, Polygon, Solana Lifetime updates Enterprise – $50,000+, for trading firms, market makers. Includes: White-glove deployment, custom chains, vaults, dashboards 24/7 support, latency tuning, private bundles Lifetime upgrades, strategy modules Step 3: Receiving The Bot After purchase, users will get: Encrypted repo access Config templates Onboarding guide (Retail) or dedicated setup call (Enterprise) Step 4: Deploying & Trading The bot can be operational within minutes, enabling users to monitor transactions, submit bundles, and configure validator incentives without requiring code changes or relay configuration. Crypto MEV Bot was engineered by veterans from high-frequency trading, cybersecurity, and Solidity auditing. The collective has audited over $5 billion in DeFi TVL and managed latency-critical systems at tier-one exchanges. 'We built Crypto MEV Bot to solve the hardest part of crypto arbitrage trading: getting profitable bundles included, consistently,' said Alex Chen, lead engineer of 'Traders no longer need a seven-figure latency budget to stay competitive — our system leverages mathematically proven, under-the-radar strategies that most bots completely overlook. That's the real edge.' Contact
