Paul Nijjar's Internet Landfill -- Firehose
Against Forester and Also Zealots So the Not Just Bikes guy recently dropped a scathing critique of some guy named John Forester, who strongly advocated for something called vehicular cycling . According to the Not Just Bikes guy, the philosophy of vehicular cycling is that cyclists should ride in traffic, and that bike infrastructure (bike lanes, etc) do more harm than good. Since Forester was…
On Mamdani I am resentful that I have paid so much attention the New York City mayoral election, but here we are. I doubt I have anything insightful to add to the discourse, but that has never stopped me before. The Good My gut feeling is relief that Mamdani won over Cuomo. If nothing else Mamdani mobilized a lot of young New Yorkers into volunteering for his campaign (apparently 104k volunteers…
On Winter Although the weather is nice now I am in dread. Soon it will be winter. For many years I have been in denial, but now I am stating it openly: to a first approximation, I despise winter. My willingness to tolerate winter has diminished as I have aged, and I don't think I can take much more. Southwestern Ontario winters are not that cold (especially with climate change) but they are cold…
A Home is Not a House I have no doubt written about this before, but (lucky you) I'm writing it again. In my view there are two beliefs about housing that are incredibly harmful: Home ownership is a legitimate form of building intergenerational wealth The only legitimate form of home ownership is detached, single-family residential housing I am not arguing that housing has not been a form of…
Supply Management is Okay, Actually If there is one thing conservatives hate it is supply management. They hate that we pay more for eggs and milk because the government allocates quotas to farmers, and that those cartels can set minimum prices on their goods. That makes supply-managed goods more expensive than they might otherwise be, and that is a crime against God. I am not a farmer, but here…
'Feel Free' Considered Harmful Sometimes people will solicit input or questions or reviews using the words "feel free". For example, a podcaster might say, "feel free to leave us a review and a five star rating."[1] This is a terrible phrase. Whenever you say "feel free" I hear "don't bother". The phrase is so passive. I don't know exactly why the phrase grates on me so much but it does. Here's a…
"I Hope" Means 'I Do Not Want to Get Involved' When somebody says "I hope you are well," what they mean is "I don't wish you harm, and also I don't want to get involved with your drama." That's how I use the phrase "I hope you.." and I expect that this is how other people use it as well. If you do want to get involved in other people's drama, the correct phrase to use is something like "Please…
Riding After Dark I used to have a strict rule when cycling: I would have to be back under the light of streetlamps before dark. My thinking was that I would not be able to see country roads at night, and thus I had to be back in an urban area by sunset. Then in Dec 2023 I rode down to Brantford and mistimed my ride. I was still in Brantford and it was getting dark. I knew I would not be able to…
What is AI Good For? The last thing you want to read is another uninformed opinion about AI, so here is another uninformed opinion about AI. If you want more informed opinions about AI maybe read Thomas Ptacek or Ludic . I do not use AI much but I have typed text into a prompt, and I was exposed to some underlying principles of machine learning in grad school two decades ago. Thanks to the…
Weird Al Creative Categories, Ranked During the pandemic, "Weird" Al Yankovic's collection of cover songs during his 2018 "Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour" was one of my repeated listens. I would listen to that four hour album on endless repeat. That led me down a Weird Al rabbithole, where I would binge Weird Al content on YouTube until my stomach hurt. Although I was never a…
Mediocre You may have noticed that the quality of my blog entries has diminished. There are more typos and missed references. The structure of my entries has become less tight. Frequently I end blog posts abruptly without drawing conclusions from my arguments. Most of my arguments consist of haphazardly slapping down whatever thoughts are in my head and pretending that I am arguing something…
Disabling AI Results in DuckDuckGo So DuckDuckGo has introduced AI assisted search results. I find them infuriating and never want to see them again. DuckDuckGo says that if I click the "Never See AI Results Again" button I will not see any more... until I clear browser cookies. This policy is insane. DuckDuckGo is supposed to be the privacy-conscious search engine. Some significant fraction of…
Lately I have been listening to a lot of Volts , a (mostly) good-news podcast about energy transitions. Volts is helpful because it dives deep into specifics; the guests largely work in the energy sector, and talk in great detail about the work they are doing to generate and distribute clean energy, as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky generalizations politicians make about being "energy superpowers".…
No Regret Software Sometimes people talk about "dark patterns" -- user interfaces and system designs intended to trick people into acting against their own best interests. For example, it is easy to sign up for a service and very difficult to leave that same service. For example, unless you click on exactly the right pixel of your screen you will pop up a video or agree to cookies or sell your…
COVID-19 Five Years Later Everybody else did their five year retrospectives two months ago. So be it. I don't know that I have much to say but I am saying something anyways. At this point COVID has become endemic in the sense that it is still making people sick and isn't going away any time soon. We have lost count of the waves. There are always new variants popping up but we no longer care. Any…
Federal Election Postblather People are celebrating Mark Carney's victory. I ought to be happy, because I got most of what I wanted: Pierre Poilievre did not win either a majority or minority government. Mark Carney won a minority parliament. but a bunch of bad things happened too: Mike Morrice did not win Kitchener Centre and neither did Brian Adeba. The Greens fell to one seat (Elizabeth May…
One Vote MMP Whenever some government (like that backstabber Trudeau ) dangles the promise of electoral reform in front of the Fair Vote zealots, the Fair Vote zealots immediately rips themselves to shreds with internecine warfare about "the best voting system". Everybody has their preferred system, and everybody advocates for their preference to the exclusion of everything else. Backstabber…
Federal Election Preblather I am writing this the Friday before the federal election. I do not know whether I will publish this entry before the election, or whether I will publish it at all, but I have long ago abandoned any pretense that anything I write has any impact on anyone. The polls indicate that Carney and the Liberals are likely to win the election. Personally, I am wary. I think…
Wishful Thinking 011: Lower the Voting Age We should lower the voting age. If I had my way we would lower the voting age from 18 to 14, but most activism around this issue advocates lowering the voting age to 16. I am okay with that. The general principle is that most citizens should have the opportunity to vote in at least one election before they finish high school. Lowering the age to 16 will…
Air Travel is the Only Acceptable Mass Transportation For some reason we accept any number of limitations when travelling by airplane than we do any other transportation. For example, we get upset that we don't have GO trains travelling every hour (or more frequently!) from Kitchener to Toronto, but we are perfectly willing to get up early in the morning and show up at an airport two hours before…
Content Cadence One of my many failings is that I am a completist. When I read an article or tweet I want to read all the comments too. When I subscribe to a podcast I want to listen to all the episodes. Thus I have to limit the number of entertainment options I consume, or I will have no time for anything else. It astonishes me that some content creators feel obligated to produce content so…
Carney and Freeland So the federal Liberals had their leadership convention on March 9, and Mark Carney won in a landslide. It wasn't even close. Chrystia Freeland came in a distant second. I feel this result was necessary, but unjust. I think this is the best result we could have hoped for, where "we" is defined as "hoping against a Pierre Polievre majority". I have mixed feelings about Carney,…
Cycling is No Longer Enjoyable Over the past couple of years cycling has become less and less enjoyable. I perceive that drivers are more aggressive than they used to be, and now I regularly get yelled at by drivers that are unhappy I exist on the road. I am told to "get off the road" or "ride on the sidewalk". If there is some kind of bike lane that exists (regardless of whether it is convenient…
More Inflation I do not know whether it has been the US Tariffs or the end of Trudeau's GST holiday or just plain greedflation, but I have noticed that many of my junk foods have jumped in price over the past couple of weeks: City Pizza slices used to cost $1.67 ($1.75 with tax). Last week this jumped to $1.90 ($2.00 with tax). I expect we will hit $2.50 by the end of the year. City Pizza used to…
Poilievre via Peterson It very much looks like Pierre Poilievre will be our next prime minister. A few months ago it occurred to me that although I had strong feelings about Poilievre, I did not know much about him or his policies. Going into this exercise I had the following impressions: I vaguely remembered Poilievre as Stephen Harper's attack dog, who would say whatever he needed to to advance…