Chris Usher

What makes a pair of sweatpants life changing?

I remember a lot of confusion on whether an earthquake had occurred, given it happen between classes so half my high school (same one Matt and other early LRR folk went to) was outside crossing between the buildings and did not feel it while the other half had been inside and felt it.

Because the nice consultants we hired said it costs this much and no one who advises them knows how things are done outside the Anglosphere

Generally you only pay development charges when you add housing units - tearing down a small detached house to replace it with a huge one on the same lot does not attract any charges.

The high end of each range is for a single detached house; the low end of the Metro Vancouver range is for an apartment while the low end of the Toronto range is for a 1 bed rental apartment.

TransLink demands between 3416 and 1774 CAD in development charges per unit of new market housing in Metro Vancouver. The City of Toronto gets between 57 565 and 20 725 CAD per unit for transit. All of the TransLink and almost all of the Toronto charges are not tied to any specific project.

There has been criticism of development paying for development in Canada going from the opposite direction - taxing development makes housing more expensive. Many Canadian cities, especially Toronto and Vancouver, love these taxes, with charges sometimes adding ~200 kCAD to the cost of new housing.

Historically the case would be stronger for a captain not to be lower middle class - clerks and shopkeepers were seen as being the lower middle class.

I would say no but an element of class identity is tied up with background. Despite being the in the middle management of the navy, a captain could still see themselves as being lower middle class if they grew up that way.

Also 21 M from Coquitlam for the Evergreen extension.

Looking at the funding for recent SkyTrain projects, the contributions from municipalities look to be relatively small (100 M in kind from Vancouver for Broadway extension, 30 M from Surrey for the Langley one) but YVR did chip in 300 M for the Canada Line

UBC is a bit of a weird one since the university acts like a municipality on its Vancouver campus

Especially for the cutouts at the bow, my brain is asking why are they there? There should be some cleats and ropes there for tying up the ship.

There are two main reasons for having piercings of the bulwark like that. One is to let ropes pass through to winches or cleats mounted on the deck. The other is to let water drain off the deck; in this case the bottom of the opening would be flush with the deck.

I was eating pizza and reading about mercenaries in ancient Greece

@geo-meg.bsky.social Are there any resources you would recommend for learning about geology? I recently discovered an interest in it, despite the prof who taught me about the solar system doing his best effort to make it boring

Part of me is mildly annoyed when Halifax gets into lists of Canadian cities but Victoria does not. Halifax and Victoria are twin metro areas in a lot of ways and Victoria is more isolated from Vancouver than it looks from half a country away.

Also, the paper claims their is weaker evidence for multiple populations in metal rich GCs without providing a reference. While there is some evidence for the details (O, Mg, Al) to be different at the highest ([Fe/H] > -0.5) metallicities, you do see multiple populations in GCs of all [Fe/H]

A challenge with tying LRDs to metal poor GCs is that metal poor GC formation has a lower redshift tail. Since dwarf galaxies were still forming metal poor GCs when giant galaxies where forming their metal rich GCs, you should expect some LRDs at low redshift (z ~ 2) in low mass starbursts.

More capable than Carpetian France is a low bar to clear.

I would also caution about attaching too much capacity to the Roman Empire. Government there was still rather patrimonial.

“We fall behind by standing still”: Transit riders warn provincial transit cuts set up fiscal cliff February 17th, Victoria BC Transit advocates are warning that proposed BC Transit funding cuts tee up a disastrous scenario for transit services across the province. Budget 2026, released Feb 17th,…

The 2026 Budget freezes transit funding and forces service cuts. Write your MLA and tell them to protect transit funding! At the minimum, the BC gov should allow local governments to make up for lost funding. #yyj #bcpoli

bettertransityyj.ca/2026/02/17/2...

Plus for most of those you do not have to go all the way to Langford

I remember some of the regional services from Stockholm (Arlanda Express, Mälartåg) hitting 200 km/h using EMUs (variants of Alstom Coradia and Stadler KISS respectively)

What the British banks are looking to do is not have their own credit card brand but have their own version of Interac.

Trudeau a Thatcherite? No, but I could see a case made for the Liberals in the 1990s with the budget cuts and privatizations under Chrétien.

The Platinum Collection (Queen album) - Wikipedia

I have to admit I am more familiar with the first disc or so of this version of Queen's greatest hits en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pla...

Fewer cars, more buses

We really need to do something about speeding up the buses on Douglas in downtown Victoria. Bus lanes will help but I think we need to get rid of a lot of traffic signals on Douglas #YYJ

In the case of Kiril Petkov, he was born in Bulgaria

I think the honest answer for our school is Pierre Burton.