This picture is so crazy that if you had this as a scene in a made-for-TV dystopian scifi movie in like 2014 people would switch channels because you’d ruined the suspension of disbelief.

[handcuffed] officer, the Dow is at the highest it’s ever been!!!

I'm gonna virtue signal for a bit: today's cold and sunny weather is ideal for easily popping off all the compacted snow on your sidewalk with a little light steel shovel action.

GM seems to think nobody wants affordable EVs - why are they concerned? Is it because they’ve genuinely forgotten how to compete?

rightwingers see people caring about others in their community and instead of finding that inspiring they think it’s some sort of grand conspiracy because they don’t understand what it means to care for others you don’t personally know

state-sponsored child trafficking

replace rfk jr with this guy

Carney: "American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, a stable financial system... this bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as a weapon. Tariffs as leverage ... "

Zoning in theory: You can’t build housing next to the pollution source 😊 Zoning in reality: You can only build housing next to the pollution source, also daycares are illegal

With all the news around the water supply in @regionofwaterloo.bsky.social, has anyone in office commented on ending our limits on land use that saves water and maybe start dis-incentivizing wasteful land use? Is anyone asking staff why this wasn’t a priority during project approvals for decades?

Brick and mortar store: giving you “points” but actually creepily tracking every purchase you make Also the same store: sorry we can’t do returns or warranty stuff without that wee little paper receipt 👉👈

small-government conservatism is when a guy in a mask who won't show you his badge shoots you through the window of your car while you're driving away from him

Yet another porch pirate theft today… I’m starting to see how constant crime stories make people insane and misanthropic. I hate this.

Mark Carney turns off geolocation on phone just in case

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.