A useful thing to track would be the percentage of transit trips in Ottawa that end up taking more time than walking.

In other news, congratulations to former mayor Jim Watson on his receipt of the Order of Ottawa today. 😐 www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

Pretty shocking how AI consistently gets incredibly simple single-source facts wrong, and how tech companies still shove it down our throats anyway. Quickly searching for reliable info is the #1 thing google is good for and they're like "eh why don't we ruin it"

This is my fave misquote of the day:

An underrated part of the discussion of how to fund Vancouver's Celebration of Light is that a generation ago, big businesses spent tons of money on local culture because it was an efficient form of advertising. And today, when everything can be targeted through online algorithms, they don't.

This is infinitely more practical than the once-ubiquitous "how to OWN your conservative uncle at Thanksgiving" advice, which I suspect no one has actually successfully followed in real life

If this is philosophically conservative, then I guess that makes my view (make [below] mandatory for every undergraduate who will ever have to write or even read a paper) straight-up RETVRN

[argument at thanksgiving dinner] wife: *whispering to me* don’t start taking sides this time me: why not? *sliding roast potatoes in pocket* they're too busy yelling to notice

This is more outrageous when you consider the details. Barrhaven residents are just asking for their transfers to be valid for long enough for them to commute to work, presumably downtown, without paying twice. They're not even asking for their *30km* commute to take *less than 2 hours by transit*.

Internet scams are going to get worse and honestly it’s just a sad situation. If you have billions of ppl in developing countries who don’t have opportunities to make a decent living but do have access to the internet, some are going to use that to degrade themselves + others, to all our detriment

About two or three time a week, I see additional evidence that this city intends to drive itself into the fucking ground.

My serious answer is "liberal men who have been baited into paying $168 for this monstrosity in order to signal that they're not MAGA"

this is a metaphor for waking up and logging on

This is the start of round 2 of program cuts. A number of colleges tried to hold off these closures for a year, hoping the feds might change their mind about the visa programs. Now, the hope is gone.

I think about how big tech openly and frictionlessly scrapes/steals everything to train AI models every time I have to work through a multi-part, multi-month research ethics review process to interview a half dozen people who actually want to talk to me about their work.

I'm thinking about how my department had to scramble to figure out how to cover my classes when I went on sick leave with three weeks' notice and if nothing else this would be a consideration that would make me think twice before cavorting with child sex traffickers

One of the most upsetting articles I've read in a long time www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-grade... UCSD report senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347... We are failing a generation of kids.

Lol. Amazing.

bsky.app/profile/nich... 1. I stand corrected 2. LOL, "I'll vote against the government as long as it doesn't affect anything" is extremely on brand for the NDP

So if the budget passes, we'll have Elizabeth May to thank/blame, do I have that right? LOL

thecjn.ca/opinion/pers... Of interest at least to @aryehcw.bsky.social but maybe more!

I love the Grey Cup because all the cheerleaders are trying to look cute while wearing gear that is usually reserved for solo climbing K2

Oh my

My precise level of online-ness is "took me until November 15 at 8:15 PST to figure out why people are talking about Larry Summers"

I've filtered Ottawa's traffic collision data to show only collisions with injuries for each year, and then added the speed camera locations present in those years. It looks like speed cameras have made the roads much safer.

Oh, this is what happened in Ottawa! A single bus route was replaced by an LRT, value-engineered to within an inch of its life, that meant two outdoor transfers to downtown instead.

Every so often I think about this "Starting a new position as Deceased" LinkedIn post from 2024.

From populists on the right, but also from establishment figures desperate to bury their responsibility, there's an ongoing push to bury the harms of COVID. Long COVID alone costs 7M life-years (QALYs) and on the order of a trillion dollars a year in the OECD. www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issue...

Academic administrative bloat being what it is, one might assume that there was *someone* at this joint whose job duties included, eg, sending out an alert within, say, 15 minutes of a campus-wide power outage. And yet!!!

I used to work summers in the US. I was on some sort of visa that my employer arranged for me. It was accepted the first couple of times, and then one border guard rejected it and sent me back. I have no idea how that would play out in 2025.

ding ding ding

This is also something that Dem governors also either don't understand, or pretend not to. "Come visit us! We're nice and we also hate tariffs and Trump!" Yes, and ICE operates in your states too, so...?

It is very weird when US media does not report on the safety concerns, which are top of the list for Canadians I know. Yeah we are also pissed off but we've been pissed off since January, the decline was not gonna keep declining based purely on "elbows up."

Ahhhhhh: "The AI boyfriend as feminist alternative to flesh-and-blood man-about-the-house has something in common with political lesbianism. In both scenarios, men are liberated from housework and child care."

My favourite is "it's not a zoning issue, it's that young people have too high expectations these days" my century-old semi-detached (1200 finished sq ft when we bought it) would be illegal to build today under Toronto's current zoning rules

I am so here for the "Hitler was neurodivergent" discourse, what a time to be alive

Repost with an iconic fictional band.

I know no media is covering the Canada Student Grant cuts, but it's real and it's going to cost several hundred thousand students about $1200 this year. Here's the explainer.

"Canada is currently experiencing a large, multi-jurisdictional outbreak of measles that began in October 2024 with cases in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan..." The UTTERLY USELESS LEFT: "Thanks, Cons!" Because...

Lots of reasons for Canada (and the US?) losing measles elimination status, and I don't think we can discount the likelihood that one of them is some variation of "every generation must learn for itself that the stove is hot"

What a preventable tragedy caused by a disinformation grievance industrial complex. Shameful.

I’m gonna come out and say it: Vancouver is having a spectacular fall. - Minimal rain - But also nice CRISP temperatures, puts us in the season - Summer not too hot, so trees kept their leaves, creating full cover for nice colours - No elections or giant weather events to distract from joy 10/10

2025 poppy report: bought, and subsequently lost, two poppies, but also *found* two poppies, one of which I lost within the hour. So I am currently in possession of one poppy, the expected lifetime of which is around 20h.

At the Ag Fair & @Uofg has a presence. I was talking to the DNA barcoding people & found out that Steve Newmaster has been effectively banned from teaching & research but still gets his salary. If we can’t fire people for research fraud, what are we doing? www.science.org/content/arti...

No but yes? Decency and empathy are fundamentally different things, to the point of often being in opposition. Decency is better: it is less susceptible to manipulation, and accounts for the possibility of conflict.

I am responding to the extremely polished multi-paragraph student emails with two-line invitations to visit me during office hours, which in 2025 means that I'm putting at least as much work into crafting a reply as the student put into putting together the original message.

Following a link from a QR code is *exactly* like clicking one in an email. Think about how often you've heard not to click links in emails unless you're certain you can trust the source.

Welcome, new readers who are responding to this in extremely normal ways

www.statnews.com/2025/11/03/m... Actually, we were first