man i gotta stop reading about geopolitics before bed

I enjoy the annual reminder to fill out the form that if I fill it out the Provincial Government pays a substantial chunk of my property taxes

it's kinda bizzare if you think about the response here. Like the primary response to someone starting up an automated CSAM-on-demand service shouldn't be a boycott it should be prosecutions.

Canada cannot wait for cooler heads to prevail in the US, because they won't. The US is an imperialist power with territorial ambitions in its near abroad, and must be treated as such.

I think that institutions were always going to get wise to activists trying to operationalize institutional conflict aversion, something that got much easier to do as social media made it easier to gin up groups of people shouting at them

There is 2016 job data in cansim and there's this table for 2021 www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/t... Removing ALR, provincial and regional parks, Metro Vancouver sensitive ecosystems, and water Along with population dot density, I used this to compare a bunch of crayons in R5R

The City of Vancouver continues to provide real-time text updates about council meetings exclusively on a website that produces mass amounts of deepfake non-consensual sexualized images of minors

This is harm. Time for serious people to get serious about it.

Bowmac sign must be destroyed

How exactly does a “single grain whisky” blend three different types of grain?

Nothing that doesn't reinforce my priors - these are the areas I spot that seem like good next candidates for rapid transit (on this specific metric):

I have opinions. We are now doing 10-year Asset Management planning in #NewWest. The single largest line item ($60M, which is 10% of the 10-year total) is paving. Not bike lanes, not sidewalks or even traffic lights or crosswalks, not new roads or structures, just the asphalt...

note that the biggest single item here is roads. Like what if we just built fewer, less aggrandized roads?

using CensusMapper.ca, a different way of representing transit usage - transit commuters per square kilometer

Just kinda wild to read that the Tokaido Shinkansen averages 442,000 riders per day “The number of users of the Tokaido Shinkansen on January 4th was the highest ever, the most since the inauguration of JR Tokai” www.nagoyatv.com/news/?id=033...

let's go fishing

So, Brendan, Why is the Millennium Line Bad?

People talk about the importance of transit-oriented development in Metro Vancouver but these two stations have approximately the same annual ridership

Vancouver needs two things: * a 533.3 meter tall communications tower with a public observation deck * more water-line snow days (Vancouver needs many additional things but I am highlighting these two today)

'Alone England Stood' doesn't sound so lonely if you define 'England' as 'one fourth of the planet' Even in the worst days of 1940-1941 'The British Empire v. Nazi Germany' is a surprisingly even fight

Never really expected the 240 to be packed on a rainy Saturday afternoon

One wonders what *Canadian* interest the Tories see in our neighbour attacking Venezuela

if this is ~it for the US in Venezuela it’s a win for Trump and is going to embolden him to do bigger, dumber things The lessons these people have taken from Bush-era messes isn’t not to start wars but rather to not finish them. Destabilizing Venezuela will be for them someone else’s problem

Whatcha doin' there eh neighbour?

$25-40k for the sensor/computing installation and this sounds like something might actually start to make sense for transit purposes.

A gentle reminder that the social media savvy realtor is not an expert in economics

The problem is that "smaller metro area" where a tram-like LRT can perform the role of higher-order transit spine in North America means places like Québec (barely 1M) or Waterloo (1/2 M). Everything else is either too small and weakly centered for rail or too big for low-speed LRTs.

There’s some nice light right now

Waiting for the transit boat

My property assessment went down another 5% this year

brutalist at its best would seem to be a platform for the display of plants

BRB going to start an openstreemaps revert war by reflagging the Finch Line as a tram

Given such limited coverage wouldn't the night bus make more sense as something of an express rather than an all stops local?

Some people get mad at me but I think it's good that the Province have thus far resisted demands that pets be required in all rental apartments.

“Starter home” has got to be one of the more infuriating terms in housing discourse . Like that’s not a starter home it costs one point three million dollars

There will be so many cars that none of them will be able to move

The mist

Happy new year!

Note: 17 minutes from Pacific Central to Sapperton

Ahh, the mysterious New Year’s Eve sink leak

It’s amazing to me that people can live in the year 2025 and think automated metro trains are bad

An app that exists “This app tells you the name of every tree planted on Vancouver, BC's city streets.”

it kinda seems to me like the planning profession developed this as a best practice and starting codifying it into law well before any kind of public anti density backlash happened

IKEA should make everyone use Robertson screwdrivers

From back when plastic doodads were built right here in Vancouver

I was on the Early Edition this morning to talk about the year in housing, along with Michael Geller! Link to the full interview below. I'm always trying to articulate what matters most to me when it comes to housing: values, and people. Here's what I said about those today:

I appreciate that a clickable dot map can only fit so many cities in it but the distribution of 'world cities' here leaves something to be desired Vancouver should be so flattered though

Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans

why in gods name do I have two imperial-only tape measures?

Here's a few to start... (rough calcs) London 14M (1.556) Singapore 6.9M (1.129) Tokyo 40M (1.081) Buenos Airies 13.5M (0.985) Paris 11M (0.887) Madrid 5M (0.714) Vancouver 1.56M (0.639) Bogota 4M (0.364) Curitiba 1.1M (0.314) Mexico City 4.5M (0.205)