RJN

No corner coffee shops: Toronto committee waters down neighbourhood retail plan It’s the second time in less than a year councillors balked at allowing certain businesses to open on some residential streets

"Neighbourhood interiors were never intended for commercial activity", says one letter writer. To be fair, this is true, if you toss the entirety of human history and modern day Earth outside North America in the trash, and think that urban planning less than a century old is ironclad natural law.

Single stair bldgs have lower occupant loads, shorter travel distances, and more compartmentalization vs the two-stair buildings we're familiar with.

The two-stair building might have 5x to 10x as many people crowding down a stair.

(Perhaps that poor design is what drives the fire dept angst).

Something this large & powerful combined with the certainty its operator has problems with emotional self-regulation - terrible combo

the meta ai video slop TikTok is I think the first tech thing where I have been 100% on the side of the Luddites (vernacular usage, I know the actual Luddites were more complex than that, nerds). Usually I think there's a little too much of that reflexively on the left tbh, but no this shit sucks.

Limberlost Place: Toronto’s timber tower aims high Limberlost stretches building codes and gives architects and engineers a new system of open-sourced solutions

My review of Toronto’s new Mass timber tower: a quiet triumph.

www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/artic...

Thomas Hochman & @ThomasHochman I Follow Hey look, we got a profile • INC. PREMIUM TECHNOLOGY Meet the Rave-Throwing Think Tank Shaping the Tech-Right The Foundation for American Innovation started as an obscure Bay Area libertarian advocacy group. Now it's influencing federal energy policy, staffing the Trump administration — and still throwing parties.

right wing “abundance” is funny to me because everyone involved has to constantly dance around the fact that their entire political party is a cult dedicated to the most anti-abundance politician of all time who is doing everything possible to destroy American state capacity.

good luck with that!!

This came to me in a vision

Them: “Paris is only nice because it was built before cars and they protected all of the beautiful historic architecture.“
Paris:

There is no such thing as non-market housing Last month, my employer, Vivre en Ville, hosted its annual symposium in Montreal. Since this year’s theme was efficient land use, of course…

In which I go to war against the term non-market housing.

medium.com/@AdamMongrai...

I see a lot of people on here debating the merits of having a Popeye's in Evanston, but IMO the real point here is that discretionary permitting is a bad system and progressive political candidates should not be explicitly endorsing it.

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

I'd have made room for 1 or 2 US cities if not for... everything right now.

Montreal, Tokyo, Paris, Marseille, Halifax

We can (and do) adapt things we've seen and liked elsewhere, but wholesale - not really. Zoning flows from the city's official plan; different cities, different OP frameworks to obey.

"Decades of jank." I love that.

In part I think it's that planners can be so fond of demonstrating their virtuosity with needlessly prescriptive or complicated regs that deliver, near as I can tell, nothing but development friction and public mistrust. So many planners just don't see the problem.

It's a frustrating tightrope to have to walk when reformers are bound by the commitments and prejudices of a previous generation of planners.

We've been writing a comprehensive new zoning bylaw and easily 3/4 of the effort has come from trying to make sense of decades worth of old planning decisions (and non-decisions!) just left laying around.

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time. For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual. As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone. Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism. No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get: The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts.

Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment
crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

I have to wonder of AI-users: what task is important enough that they would not have a machine do it?

Wild that so many people are immediately comfortable relying on a thought and self-expression simulator as if these things were a stupid chore & not central to human agency and consciousness

🎯

The café from Ronin is still there in the old Nice harbour

Hmm. Anyone else feel like a little seafood linguine? This seems like a safe and quiet spot...

So not only is non-profit housing alone not enough to clear the housing backlog. Any suppression of market rate housing supply directly sabotages the effectiveness of non-profit housing by overwhelming it with lower-middle class renters who, in a functional housing market, could afford market rent.

A good way to think about the housing crisis is landlords pocketing essentially all the consumer surplus the last 40 years

Isn't Ram reliably the #1 brand for DUIs?

Portland is fun because if you talk about permitting changes in the abstract people will say “this neoliberal deregulatory agenda will only hurt the poor”

But if you talk specifics everyone will agree that it should not be so hard to open a damn hot dog cart.

everything is housing or gender, and go deep enough the two are one and the same

Nearly got one through CarVia in Stuttgart, but something came up. Toured the Black Forest in a 992 instead.

A friend of mine in Switzerland rented an A110 through Sixt, I believe.

I have a pretty varied palate, but I like my seafood cooked, and gold ice cream just falls into the "what kind of asshole...?!" category as far as I'm concerned.

The rise of people like Lander and Walz, whose ideologies don't exactly match mine but have the exact right combination of "love thy neighbor" and "fuck you, asshole" attitudes, is massive positive for people who care about left of center politics

all i want is to one day own a modest sized home in a walkable neighborhood and raise money for shelter animals. wear an outfit i like, walk to the grocery store, buy some nectarines, feed cats, and live in peace. just don't understand why achieving this is so hard