Oldfolio thanked me for my instructions on Palemoon and the
OverbiteFF extension. You're welcome! I'm glad that was useful to
someone. As far as old browsers not working on today's web, it makes
me appreciate gopher's lack of TLS even more.

gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~oldfolio/phlog/2021-10-14-thankyou-slugmax.txt

                         ~

The Canadian housing market is insane. Three years ago, you could
buy a decent 4-bed house in this area of Quebec for about 250k. Now
those same houses are going for 500k. A 33% increase every year!
This really only helps retirees who have already paid off their
homes - they can sell and downsize, skimming quite a profit from the
sale. Anyone else who wants to move to the same size or larger home,
or is a first-time home buyer is screwed. Just the 20% down payment
is a problem. How many people can afford 100k down on that 500k,
4-bed house? Not many. It's even worse in the big cities like
Vancouver and Toronto. Even if you had the down payment, and enough
equity to somehow make a modest profit, I'd be reluctant to buy at
what seems like the peak of a crazy market. We did that in late 2006
when we lived in the States, and regretted it when the market
crashed in 2008 and we lost half of our home's value. When we
eventually sold in 2016, the value of our home had crawled back
enough so that we just about broke even on the sale, even with 10
years of equity behind us. Never again. We bought our current home
three years ago, and we're staying put for now.

Rentals are not much better, I think renting a house used to be a
good option for young families, but now it is too unstable.
Landlords are kicking out renters so they can sell for a huge
profit, or are having a family member move in for a year so they can
renovate and massively increase rent on the next tenant (Quebec has
pretty decent tenant protections, but one of the holes is that a
landlord can force someone out if they or their family are moving
in, or they are selling the house).

Our previous landlord did that to us - she tried to get us to buy
the house we had been renting for two years, but when we refused (it
had lots of issues we could overlook as renters but not as owners),
she told us her brother was moving in. We moved out, and she
renovated while her brother was there, then more than doubled the
rent to new tenants when he moved out a year later.