If rent would be the only obstacle I believe they would move East to Hungary or Romania or any other Eastern Bloc country to pay 100-200 euros rent.

that may well happen as the East becomes more Euro-fied

Peter Attia talks about metformin (https://peterattiamd.com/) also in the context of exercise and I've heard Dave Asprey (https://daveasprey.com/)talking about it.

I would really like this imposed on a Teams, Zoom, Lync, WebMeeting. This way you cam still be in pajamas...

That’s what I though too. 8 million is peanuts for Canadian government. Even for the provincial one. I think it’s more a PR move.

I'm assuming because of the way an animal is sacrificed in order to be considered "halal". It would require a large slaughterhouse with the proper setup, which in an 98% orthodox country is not a easy arrangement.

About 25% of red meat exports from New Zealand are halal, and almost every slaughterhouse is capable of halal slaughter.

It's actually not particularly difficult to do halal slaughter, the two main requirements are that it is killed with a cut to the throat (common in non-halal slaughter) by a Muslim.

I'm not sure the muslim is a requirement per se, it's just that in practice there's an overseer. Many/most Muslim clerics accept kosher meat as halal, for example, even though the supervision is not necessarily Muslim.

It also nudges the state towards a well informed populace over years...

I love your auto-correct function

Heh. I always like to challenge my ideas, if not from someone else then by myself. I don't think it is terribly healthy to be 100% sold on single ideas (or at least not to have thought about consequences).

The tariff idea was one that would work if everyone plays ball, but I'm not enough of an optimist to think that is going to work.

I wrote that without really thinking about the ramifications (until the second post). At which point, my pessimism won out.

Carbon tax could still work though (especially if it becomes a "carbon dividend" type plan). Probably it's biggest problem would be measuring carbon output.

I think parent comment was about your typos "Mexico and Candida"

Candida is scientific name for the Yeast genus

That's the Art of the Deal. Set the initial position much higher than desired and retrench to actual one on push back.

My impression is the last sentence - self preservation. With the threat of automation, they can see the pressure mounting on finding solutions that do not result in unions or pitchforks.

My assumption is that all the union talk and action in the last few months has board members scared and they want to put on a show to employees that they're doing stuff to make things more fair, in order to push off folks unionizing. Growing inequality...

There is also the option of Amazon buying Netflix or better yet Apple. So far I find Netflix content of higher quality than Disney. There is also a growing segment of the population that watches only YouTube. I find that is the main competition for Netflix.