I've thought the same about containers in general (plastic, glass, metal): standardize sizes and sell goods in reusable containers. Buy your Oreos in a standard reusable container same as any other cookie, eat em, bring it back to the store for a deposit. Companies will hate the reduced branding potential of a cardboard sleeve around a standardized container, but... tough.

I find it so tiresome hearing about how cyclists are supposedly more entitled than motorists (or the other way around, since cyclists say the same things about drivers).

Drivers routinely roll through stops, jockey for position, move erratically or dangerously, block crosswalks or bike lanes, distract themselves on their phones, get upset when mildly inconvenienced by having to underspeed behind a cyclist taking the lane for safety, etc.

1. Being entitled and breaking the law to get places faster is universal; I think uou're just acclimated to drivers doing it.

2. The infrastructure is so car-oriented and bike-hostile that following the law often disadvantages cyclists or puts them at risk. That doesn't justify, say, biking fast across a crosswalk, but sidewalk-riding on a 4-lane road without bike lanes? IMO it does.

3. There's bias here in treating the worst cyclist behaviour as being something condoned by cyclists at large. Kind of like if someone said "drivers just want to drag race around town".

It's hard not to see this as ignorance given how easy it is to look up the great safety record of these laws (i.e. right there on the Wikipedia page).

The "Idaho stop" (red as stop, stop as yield for cyclists) is a thing in several jurisdictions, and research shows it is as safe or safer that way.

Still ought to follow the laws, but there's reason to want those laws to be different.

The Straight gets over 300m deep in proposed crossing areas, and has hundreds more metres of sediment before hitting bedrock. That depth makes for unprecedented engineering challenges for both tunnels and bridge supports; not necessarily impossible but certainly not financially feasible. A floating bridge in a place with so much wind and waves is similarly unprecented and probably a non-starter due to the shipping traffic.

The BC government has a good overview page about it. They basically suggest that the only thing that has even the slightest chance of working is a submerged floating tunnel, something which has never been attempted.

0%: anywhere the payment happens before the service is provided, or for outright bad service

10%: for service that is just taking and serving an order, for mediocre full service, or for lesser service at a place I just really like and want to support

15%: for good "full" service (multiple orders, repeatedly checking in, etc)

That's what I go by and it seems very fair to me.

Like the Toronto teacher who was wearing those gigantic prosthetic breasts, this seems like one of those things that at surface level sounds unjust to the employee ("what they do outside of work is their own busoness" etc), but when you know the details it becomes clear that the employee has been doing a number of things to justify firing and has just been trying to spin a story of persecution to the media.

Nothing inherently wrong IMO with a teacher doing porn so long as those two jobs are completely compartmentalized, but that's also a very fine line, and I don't get the impression (from the admittedly incomplete info of the news articles) that this person was doing that properly and in good faith.

I think that makes sense from a purely financial view, but that it's not viable overall because it won't sufficiently incentivize transit.

Buses are ultimately stuck in car traffic, because it's politically difficult to put dedicated bus lanes everywhere given that the reason buses get chosen is usually to minimize the cost and the impact to cars. Given that transit is inherently less flexible that a car, and that this cuts out yet another potential advantage over cars... this kinda cements transit as the "inferior option for poor people" like it's already viewed today.

I really think you need to overinvest in transit with something like LRT, both because it's high-capacity for the long-term future and because it makes people feel like transit is a comfortable, efficient and classy way to travel, thereby increasing ridership. My hometown of Kitchener-Waterloo did it recently and quite successfully, at a similar population and size to Victoria.

As far as "the density isn't there yet", there's also the angle that building high-capacity transit will create it there by skyrocketing the property values near it.

Anyone know how a 4-category scale is different than letter grades? Not saying it isn't, it just isn't clear in the article.

Hopefully it's a step toward having fewer grades at all. There's a lot of research showing how harmful extrinsic rewards are to children's motivation to learn.

I'm an IGH convert who I think has just flipped back to the derailleur camp again. I have a 2013-ish Montague with a Nexus 8 that I love, but it lacks the gear range for the steep hills here. So I've been looking at more performant ones, but I want to be able to lock up the bike, which rules out Rohloff. I also want drop bars, which rules out the Enviolo (which at 380% gear range is still kinda at the edge of what I'd like for the hills here). So the Alfine 11 is the only candidate, but word-of-mouth is that they're less reliable than I'd like...

I also just got a rear flat the other day, which reminded me how it is more of a pain with an IGH. I was able to slide the tube in without detaching (or even misadjusting) the shifter cable, but... still. It also makes keeping multiple wheelsets much less feasible, which I'd like to do as a compromise to avoid needing to have more than one bike to do both roads and gravel.

I guess what I'm coming around to is the difference between "low maintenance" and "serviceability". An IGH (particularly with belt drive) needs no routine maintenance, but servicing it is a big hassle. A derailleur needs regular cleaning/lubing, but, any part that wears out or breaks is one I can easily replace myself. Now that I don't commute and I live somewhere it's trivial to hose down a dirty bike before putting it away, the routine maintenance seems fine, and I'd rather have a bike I can fix myself no matter what happens. If I weren't intending to sometimes (and super securely) lock up the bike in public, the alternative of saving up for a Rohloff would probably have me undecided again.

That said, I have an Enviolo and Gates belt on our family e-trike and it is fantastic there.

Mullvad is dropping support for port forwarding as of July 1st (a lack of which cripples torrenting), so this actually no longer a good option. I'm miffed about it since I just set it all up a couple weeks ago. I haven't done my research to see if there are any trustworthy VPN providers left which offer port forwarding.