Decided to walk the puppy downtown on a nice sunny holiday - only got halfway before I gave up. The law says you gotta shovel your sidewalk after snowfall - but apparently leaving it as a skating rink is fine. @cambridge.ca @regionofwaterloo.bsky.social

Disclaimer: I know that the stock market is not reality in 2025. All I hear is doom and gloom about Canada and how we can't do anything right economically. Why have my Canadian equity ETFs kept up with the American ones all year - and even over the last 3 years?

One of the busiest routes in town, completely impassable for me to walk 5 mins to the hardware store. Local leadership ignores the poor. They ignore children. They ignore the disabled. This is not radical - it is the default policy of council. @cambridge.ca @regionofwaterloo.bsky.social

Living on a busy Regional Road gives me the luxury of sidewalk plow priority when I want to be a lazy homeowner. Where are they this morning?

Average voter: Now that my number in my stocks app is red, I have very serious thoughts about Epstein that I did not have yesterday on a green number day

I had no idea I could give a shit about baseball and here I am in 2025 having a heck of a time (Not cardiologically though)

Simple question: Why aren't the democrats running this Reagan ad, if it makes him so angry? If he does stupid things when angered, why aren't they running 30 ads just like this 24/7? What are all those donations for?

Carney: "We can't control the trade policy of the US. We recognize it has fundamentally changed from the policy in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, & it's a situation where US has tariffs against every trading partner... what we we can control is developing new partnerships, including w/econ giants of Asia"

Of all the housing charts not made by MMI, this one is my favourite. It shows how, despite rhetoric, housing shortages aren't a global phenomenon, but they do seem to be an Anglo-American one.

Nothing about the current collpase in housing starts is shocking to me For years people warned cities not to cook the golden goose with high DCs and onerous application processes because they needed the eggs not the meat! All the meat is eaten, the feast is over, and now we suffer empty stomaches

the political policy cure for “male loneliness” is - more time to hang with the fellas (4 day work week) - more money to spend with the fellas (higher wages) - more things to do with the fellas (taxing the rich and building 3rd spaces)

Idea while biking: measure the ratio of content to ad time in podcasts as a metric for the overall economy

The “problem” with vaccines? They so effective at preventing deaths that they create generations of people that question whether disease was a problem in the first place because they have never experienced the horrors of a world without vaccines.

Lately I’ve been using the internet just to be crusty and reinforce my own internal crustiness - but I took a 6 minute bike downtown to get groceries and forgot the world is still here! There’s people and sun and happy kids and fancy art students with coffee… no negativity in sight. @cambridge.ca

White woman puts Mexican flag on her truck to waste ICE’s time.

To put it in another way, since bikes kinda break people’s brains in 2025: If the government removed a bollard in front of a school, and a kid died the next week, and the documentation around that bollard removal never mentioned kids’ safety in the rationale, that would be a problem, right?

We are watching in real-time as an administration and an entire party attempt to cover up the single most notorious child sex trafficking ring in modern history in order to protect their leader being implicated in it

a society that would like to keep functioning must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

Oh grow up. There’s more to politics than your survival. For instance, my comfort

Only an "academic brain" would call withholding payment for failing to meet contractual obligations "using money as punishment". Why do we infantilize municipal governments? They're billion-dollar corporations, not toddlers. www.cbc.ca/news/cana...

I decided to go for my favourite doughnuts in town this morning. It turns out that the bike lane doesn't exist on Sundays. Do wrongful death lawsuits apply to Sundays? The Cambridge Master Cycling plan uses the word "safe" 70 times! (but doesn't mean it) @cambridge.ca @thebikinglawyer.bsky.social

once again, this is describing the life of a baby

Fact: an Ontario municipality and their engineers actually approved and built this in 2025, on a busy road with heavy high-schooler foot traffic and high vehicle speeds. I didn’t know that simple bollards, paint, and signals were more expensive than eventual wrongful death lawsuits.

One of the most insightful things I've read in weeks: "How the Anglosphere's Planning Department is YIMBYism’s Main Obstacle" It's telling what gets studied at a site level (shadows), and what doesn't (economic impact, homelessness, etc.) Read here: substack.com/inbox/p...

putting generative AI into MS Paint is a crime on par with air dropping coca cola and colt .45s on uncontacted indigenous peoples

Dear reader, I was expecting to be sympathetic to their answers to this and now I want AI banned across the board. It’s not a calculator simplifying math, it’s a machine destroying people’s capacity to think deeply and creatively.

Talked with a soon-to-be college grad about AI use for term papers. “I could not have passed college without it” “It’s too difficult to think through a thesis and write out a bunch of paragraphs about it” “My field isn’t a writing field, it’s technical” “I don’t understand why they need us to write”

A man in a lifted truck deliberately sped between a crossing teen and I this morning. This same intersection saw a truck hit 4 people in 2024. A woman crossing died months later. No physical changes have been made since. @cambridge.ca @regionofwaterloo.bsky.social @thebikinglawyer.bsky.social

Does anyone else’s local council spend all day talking about parking and keeping taxes low, but never once talks about why buildings like this don’t get made anymore? Weird how those housing crises keep happening… @wryimby.bsky.social

“Drivers and cyclists” Interesting choice of words, hopefully stemming from a tone deaf literal reading of the law and not something more sinister-ly suburban.

lot of negativity towards AI lately, but consider : are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No. *but* do they enable great things that people want? Also no. *but* are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no. maybe you're not being negative *enough*

Just bums me out when people advocate for the Plagiarism Machine That Lies. Announcing to the world that you like abdicating your brain to the world's shittiest machine. Have an ounce of self-respect

I hate this. I hate everything about this. We are led by misanthropes who would rather see future neighbours starve and suffer than allow change that might benefit others. I firmly believe that if you are a young person trying to decide where to start your life, don't do it here. You're not wanted.

Last night was the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's midnight ride to warn the Minutemen of approaching British troops. I want to take a moment to share an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence's grievances against King George III. Remind you of anyone?

My least interesting election quirk: I like voting specifically on election day, early voting seems less patriotic and a bit subversive and I don’t support that kind of activity

The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory. www.ft.com/content/8459...

Import Chinese battery: 145% tariff Import Chinese battery inside Chinese laptop: 20% tariff Import Chinese battery inside Vietnamese laptop: 0% tariff Fuckin brilliant. A+ work here team. I am so glad there are such smart people working on our trade policy.

It's like suggesting that your household should sell exactly as much stuff to Target as it sells to you

i think the trick to not aging into an annoying crank is to accept that you're getting dumber without losing your curiosity

I need help from the real enthusiasts and smart people in the housing reform world. My city, Cambridge ON, is starting the process of implementing form-based residential zoning. They have a history of pro-NIMBY policies and sometimes this stuff is too dense for me to really absorb.

Weird question: how does bluesky make money? Is this a long term problem for the site? Will they monetize and begin a slow death spiral into advertising-fuelled big tech hell?

This is blood-boiling. Charles Rogers was awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam after being wounded three times leading the defense of a position. Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you'll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include "DEI medal."

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

I tried to walk to get a sandwich today - buy local, of course! Turns out that @cityofcambridge.bsky.social thinks it’s better to use American gas to support local than it is to simply walk there in safety. It didn’t feel nice to be passed by transport trucks 2ft away.

I will never forget the photo of Zelenskyy’s face after he saw Russia’s war crimes in Bucha in 2022. He seemed to age years in an afternoon. Watching him constantly cross the world asking for aid that should have been thrown at him is one of the deepest shames of our age.

What’s left of the American “shining city on a hill” is dead forever. There’s no recovering from this hit to the American soul.

Unfortunately for academic anti-YIMBYs, building more market rate housing to lower housing prices works in practice but not in theory.