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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • This makes no fucking sense - They just finished putting these bike lanes in on big stretches of Bloor and University. These streets are always under construction, it makes no sense to just undo years of work. Did people not drive here before the bike lanes? Cyclists are still going to use these streets and be veering into traffic, blocking that supposed second lane. The second was always blocked with parked cars on Bloor anyways. The bike lane made driving easier and cycling way safer. It was win-win.

    The result is going to be driving is going to be way worse on these streets and cyclists are going to die because of this decision. It’s also hugely regressive. You should not be driving across Bloor or down Yonge or University to traverse these streets, because there’s literally subways under all of three of them.

    It’s just such piss poor management. The more decisions I see Doug Ford make, the more I see the image of that stupid fucking Ferris wheel Rob Ford wanted to put on our waterfront. Dumb ideas run in the family, apparently.

    edit: we have to elect smarter people who aren’t going to play these stupid culture wars games and waste our own money doing it. Doug Ford’s strategy here is to set up a fight with Olivia Chow in preparation for an early election next year, because he knows the “surburbs vs. Toronto elites” narrative plays well with his base. It remains to be seen if the city can/will meaningfully fight back against this or if our mayor is just going to give us lip service, because she still benefits from this conflict by being on the other side politically.















  • The thing is, nothing gets done unless the government regulates it. The industry would just keep pumping out ICE vehicles. The only reason we have EVs at all is because most car companies saw the writing on the wall about the very necessary phaseout of ICE and knew this would be legislated sooner or later. I fully expect EVs will have either great range or super fast charging by 2035 because the market will be there to support it. (Regulating is solves the chicken and the egg problem - it guarantees demand so it de-risks investing in EV tech for the entire supply chain.)


  • It just moves the pollution to places you don’t see it, like power plants, rare metal mines

    The thing is, many places already have power that is free of CO2 emissions and mines are not huge CO2 emitters (afaik).

    As a case point: In Toronto, 30% of our emissions are from vehicles, 60% from buildings (natural gas heating mostly). If we ran all EVs, that 30% emissions from vehicles would be eliminated because nearly all our power either comes from hydro dams or nuclear power plants. And there’s no shortage of power either - we have loads of excess capacity at night, when everyone would charge their cars.

    I think you’re getting downvotes because you’re misinformed about the cost/benefits of EVs and the broader important (and urgency) of reducing carbon emissions. It’s such a critical and urgent challenge that we have to tackle this to avoid huge impacts on our economies due to heating of the climate (crop failures, flooding, more severe weather, erosion, wildfires, etc.).


  • This has nothing to do with protecting Canadians and everything to do with protecting big business

    I think what no politician wants to admit is that car industry is a strategically important industry and has to be protected for geopolitical reasons alone. We need the manufacturing capability to maintain our industrial base as a hedge against any future conflict. (I lump it in with why you need domestic milk and food production, vaccine production, etc. When the going gets tough, you need that.)

    That said, I do feel the bailouts from 2009/2010 were total horseshit and these companies got off scot-free. They’ve had ages to prepare to make EVs and squandered it, and now have to be protected by moves like this. We just end up paying for it, either through subsidies (eg. battery plants) or through the inflated prices of EVs.




  • If it makes you feel better, Consumer Reports still operates like it’s the year 1990 and is completely detached from the world of media today. There are YouTube content producers who make far better content than Consumer Reports does, in every category. Sites like RTings and YouTubers like Project Farm or Vacuum Wars completely obliterate Consumer Reports in terms of quality, freshness, and usefulness.

    Look at the way cars are even rated on Consumer Reports. They post “samples of the data” from their surveys, and you get examples like somebody having an ancient phone and not being able to Bluetooth pair it to their car ending up lowering the reliability rating of the car. It makes no sense.

    Articles like the one linked are what you get when you have a clueless, outdated organization with management who have their head in the sand, feeding some SEO suggestions from ChatGPT to their writers. It’s just layers of badness and poor decisionmaking.