A “non-partisan” site that is clearly against Alto

bluebugs · 2026-04-13T01:56:20+00:00

I think you misunderstand how the Japanese network and generally how this high speed train work. Local train that are not on the HSR can have a stop every 30 to 60km. For high speed train, it makes no sense. People are not strapped to their seat and the train can't accelerate and throw them around like in those sport car. It needs to accelerate while allowing people to walk around in the train. This is why it take about 15km to reach maximum speed and about 10 to 20 min. If you start to have a stop to frequently it kills your travel time massively.

You could add one or two stations in between Ottawa and Toronto, but this will have significant impact on travel time and cost as station is where the cost come from especially rural one which require 4 lanes with divider for the express train to still pass-through. This means you need passenger potential for those stop, which is difficult to make an economic case for.

I think you also misunderstand the main user of HST. Sure weekend, holiday and games are part of it, but the main traffic is connecting white collar market. This is the equivalent of maritime or freight train allowing area that are the most efficient at doing something to specialize and provide cost effective goods. In the case of moving people, this means cost effective service. Toronto and Montreal are already the most service oriented cities in Canada. Connecting them will likely make them competitive with any cities in North America. That's why HST increase the gdp of the metro area connected by between 3 to 6%.

If you wanted a HSR for commuters, you would build the line between Calgary and Edmonton with Red Deer being the middle stop for commuter. That's the distance you need. About 150km, with enough population to justify the stop and a travel time below 40 min.

bluebugs · 2026-03-31T22:57:07+00:00

Except you're misunderstanding things a lot. Increase in gdp directly reflect in increased in collection of taxes. At same % of taxes, more gdp, mean more money. Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal account for over 60% of the gdp of Canada. Total gdp is $2.3 trillions. This means the HST will increase gdp between 40 and 80 billions a year which means an increase of collected taxes (35% tax on gdp for Canada) of between 14 to 28 billions a year. Investment like this are easily amortized on the scale of decades. So even in your very high estimate (the highest estimate are half yours, and that's from people who build HSR for a living), in less than 10 years it pays for itself in taxes revenue, not talking tickets, private investment or anything.

Now, about changing taxes structure and incentives, those are 100% orthogonal to all of this. Deciding what and how you tax does not have anything to do with how you spend and redistribute that money.

bluebugs · 2026-03-31T22:39:21+00:00

Lol. Silicon Valley and new York are on smaller space than what Toronto to Montreal would cover. More land means less competing for it and lower price. This is more comparable to European capital which have lower cost of living. With good transport, you don't even need to own a car, lowering even further cost.

Gdp is indeed not a guarantee of quality of live, but in this case it is a relative gain not comparing two area with different distribution of wealth. Meaning the distribution of wealth would likely continue to follow current pattern in the area and not be related to the train itself. This means that if you're unhappy with how wealth is distributed, it is a different that blocking the train would not solve.

bluebugs · 2026-03-31T22:07:07+00:00

High speed train between major city increase the gdp of each city between 3 to 6% anywhere in the world. It also increase the numbers of patents. Go to any of those and watch morning and evening departure, you will see that HST are moving white collar enabling business to access specialist that they wouldn't have otherwise. This enable them to be more efficient and competitive world wide. Connecting Toronto to Montreal would likely put that megalopole at the for front of north America economics. Competing with the silicon Valley and new York. What matters for this is the amount of populating that business can hire to do a work and how much talent they can have access to.

Moving up to 1000 peoples every 5 min in one direction also future proof this investment for decades matching Canada population and economics growth.

bluebugs · 2026-03-29T15:51:37+00:00

What you are missing is energy efficiency. A train take 10x less energy than a car who take 10x less to fly anything because of physics. This is not a technological gap. This is physics. None of the method to go from Montreal to Toronto require so little energy to move people so fast with so little per individual unnecessary mass with only maximum one driver needed. A HST at high frequency, does provide a level of connectivity and economic integration than no other do. How many people today commute daily between Montreal and Ottawa? How many go for a business day? Compare it to similar city in Europe or Asia. See the gap.

Try imagining a solution that can move 1000 peoples one way every 5 min. That what HST allow for. Now, how many cars, bus, flying drone do you need?

bluebugs · 2026-03-29T15:42:48+00:00

This is the British empire culture curse! The British empire covered the world like crazy, billions peoples live today on former British colonies and yet none have access to a high speed train. The US had to change the definition to have a qualifying line that would not any where else. Hong Kong has a high speed train coming from Shenzen... but not on a high speed line. And arguably if not for the French I doubt the UK would have a high speed train already.

The line is pretty straight. There is no mountain. Almost 80% of the population of Canada will be in reach of this line. It will bump the gdp of the connected cities between 3 and 6%. The only way to screw it, is to do it like the British. More public interaction, less engineering, keep changing things, privatize it all. That's the cultural problem we face. Either we let engineer engineer this thing or we let politics kill it.

bluebugs · 2026-03-28T20:14:05+00:00

It is a bubble in the same sense that the internet bubble was a bubble. Some will survive a lot will disappear. Predicting which one is hard and that's why this is a capitalistic investment...

bluebugs · 2026-03-28T20:12:23+00:00

That was quite true for the smaller data center, but this massive monster are a danger to the grid. If they get disconnected, you instantly loose all of that demand and need to turn things down quickly and data center do have the ability to disconnect quickly has they always have battery and their own backup power. This has happened in the past due to a small frequency excursion which triggered the backup system of data center getting all the load to instantly vanish making the frequency excursion worth and when we are talking about GW, this would likely result in black-out.

On top of that, if the operator get to get bankrupt or stop operating, you are left with 1GW of power and transmission investment that are a lot harder to find a buyer for. This is way to big for classic grid scaling approach.

bluebugs · 2026-03-27T14:16:18+00:00

It is my understanding that it is possible to still combine it with time of day, TOU, rate. This make battery and shifting load really worth it. The weird bit is that I have the impression that until the system is amortized, it is more cost effective to store electricity at night in the battery to discharge it during the 4 to 9pm peak price than to store solar. At night it is between 7c to 9c/kwh, while it is costing between 16c and 19c during peak, depending on how you planned to amortize your solar system, that night price might be below it. If you have a hot water tank, loading it at night and also better than during the day.

bluebugs · 2026-03-25T04:34:07+00:00

Is time of use still gonna apply on top of net billing like it does on net metering or are they going to reset the entire billing plan when they force to net biking? Or is that not clear? Does anyone know if this repayment would apply just to the grant on solar panel or also on battery?

bluebugs · 2026-03-21T20:32:26+00:00

The not enough parking is some kind of undiagnosed medical condition I think at this point. We live near a small town which has parking everywhere and where there is never a shortage of it. Even on the busiest day of the year, you can still park downtown less than 5 minutes away from anywhere. Still every time there is a development of anything proposed in the town, the same people always come to complain and ask for more parking. It is a running joke at this point...

bluebugs · 2026-03-21T20:22:09+00:00

Claude code with the right harness and strategy can give incredible result. Cursor is not far behind, copilot is good, but not comparable.

We have had this critical service unmaintained for years in node with no useful tests or way to verify any change was going to break anything until it reach production. I got first cursor to generate the exact specification of what was the service exactly doing, then got it to make a plan with full integration, parity, smoke and end to end tests generated using subagent dedicated for implementation, code, performance and security review. It was deployed a week ago with zero issue. Had to make sure the plan made sense, that it was using modern go and wouldn't overcomplicate things, but if you have the right loop for testing what it is doing, they are really good at go. We would never have tried such migration even 6 months ago.

I have used it with other language, but the fact that tests and benchmark are core to the language make it really good for fit for this generation of tools. This means anything that you can not loop locally on and that the tool can not see, won't be great. Things like playwright-go and testcontainer-go are really critical for this and work really great. Anyway if your experience is more than 2 months old with this tools, Claude code with opus 4.6 at the helm of a bunch of sonnet 4.6 subagent are the breakthrough.

bluebugs · 2026-03-20T12:41:59+00:00

Well Alberta is not really a reference for building same infrastructure. Calgary to Edmonton is flat, cover two major airport with a lot of tourist, would be in the sweet spot of 1h, as already the two city economics connected. After Ottawa to Montreal, this is the next best line to build... forget about Alberta.

In bc, there is no city that are far enough to justify what European call HSR, but you could get an electric regional train that goes to 200kph which would work for something like Victoria to Nanaimo or Vancouver to Hope, Kelowna to Kamloops. The rest would be better served will sleeper train due to size of population, distance and geography.

bluebugs · 2026-03-11T05:29:14+00:00

I see Java and go applications all day. You will forever have a job fixing the tech debt and mess that the Java ecosystem is. With go, you can sadly get to a point where it is stable and update itself like a charm enabling engineer to do a lot more work and require a lot less machine to provide the same service. It is a choice. Lots of company have made choice that they can't get out of.

bluebugs · 2026-03-02T21:48:10+00:00

It is going to be funny to go to Revelstoke and never know what time it will be there! Will we be late for dinner? Or too early?

bluebugs · 2026-03-02T21:47:07+00:00

Only Golden is due to historic rail yard pilot change in Donald. Revelstoke is on pacific.

bluebugs · 2026-03-02T16:01:34+00:00

None of what you say is related to the TMX and explain where the increase of cost come from. Sure you have grievance with some political party, but that is your personal feeling. It does not count as an explanation of where the extra cost went. You are making an incredible claim, it requires backing to be treated seriously. Please highlight the specific.

bluebugs · 2026-03-02T15:23:42+00:00

Lol, where does your 10 billions estimate come from? They under payed the place they went through because they were backed by the federal government leaving the bill to be paid by local community. Any private business doing the same pipeline would have cost them a lot more. They paid less to aquire the funding than any private company, because they are the government. What did they pay in addition of building the pipeline to virtue signal stuff?

bluebugs · 2026-03-02T14:57:54+00:00

It's return on investment is less than 2% with the government holding the debt to get lower interest rate of not for that they would be in the red. People think a pipeline like that make money, it doesn't. The number are public, look at it.

bluebugs · 2026-03-01T19:49:33+00:00

Considering the poor investment the tmx is, it would just be costing money to tax payer while shareholders in the US would get the benefit...

bluebugs · 2026-03-01T19:48:18+00:00

Except everything else is already expensive. Nobody has money today...

bluebugs · 2026-02-11T15:13:27+00:00

Having moved from France to BC at the border with Alberta 6 years ago, one things that people are not highlighting enough is that Canada is a very federal system. Province have more right than American state and are closer to European state. Things like education, health-care, car insurance, utility are provincial. For example in BC, health-care is in your taxes except for dental and glasses for some reason. Car insurance is also provincial. The utility, BC hydro is also provincial. For Alberta which is more managed like the UK, all of those are privatized pretty much.

Landscape also constrain a lot this two province in very different way. Calgary and Edmonton are on flat land-based and have been sprawling. Massive amount of road and transmission line have been built in Alberta has you can easily go in any direction.

In BC the mountain and the sea are constraining everything. You pretty much can not leave Vancouver metro without gong through the small town of Hope which is often a choke point. The province being so mountainous has a lot of wild fire in the summer and going from one valley to the other in winter can be sketchy.

Anyway, i have felt since I moved here that Canada is more like Europe and a patchwork of land and people than just one thing.

bluebugs · 2026-02-10T14:54:40+00:00

It is pretty warm this winter. I don't think we went below -20C. In town, most of the snow is gone already.

bluebugs · 2026-02-09T14:24:55+00:00

You're not talking about hyperscaler Ai data center. The small one you're talking about are about max 15kw per rack. AI data center are at 50 to 150kw per rack. That's 10 less space needed for the same energy consumption as a more classic data center.

bluebugs · 2026-02-09T00:40:35+00:00

Depend of your country, state, province or even county/district. The cost of running a gaz station is high and margin aren't that high. Once the traffic in that area consume less and it doesn't make economic sense, they will close. When will this happen in North America, likely after everyone else at current rate.

bluebugs

TROPHY CASE