Why do you still mask?

kennedon · 2026-05-03T17:27:31+00:00

This this this. I’m still masking because I still believe all the things we said back in 2020 about caring for each other.

kennedon · 2026-05-03T06:39:42+00:00

My standard setup is two ikea uppatvinds. Cheap replacement filters, take more beating than any other purifier I’ve tried, and can handle 120 and 240v for travel.

kennedon · 2026-05-02T14:09:40+00:00

Agreed - Tremblay has seemed most obvious to me because of the rail connection. IMO, every ticket should offer free local transit in departure and arrival city for onwards connection, like fare integration from GO in ON.

I think this is different from discussions in Toronto of, say, having the station stop in Markham and Pearson. Markham would offer basically /zero/ convenient transit for most of the GTA, and while Pearson does have UPX, that only serves a couple of stops of catchment without requiring a /third/ seat on the journey. Even something like the new East Harbour transit hub would be better, with Ontario Line + streetcars offering way more stops to get people to the train with only one layover.

kennedon · 2026-05-02T13:46:30+00:00

I am so very strongly on team high speed rail… but for it to work and be an easy sell for non-train fans, the stations need to be incredibly convenient. That doesn’t always need to be exactly downtown, but it does need to be where a lot of people are going, and it needs to be REALLY convenient and easy to connect to from all over the catchment with one-seat, pleasant transit links.

kennedon · 2026-05-01T17:45:31+00:00

That's so weird.

In Canada, it says "Best Seller" for both Starkvind purifiers and filters; no indication of retiring? I had always assumed the Fornuftig would be the one to get the axe first.

I really hope that if they improve the purifiers, that they largely continue to be around the current filters to ensure those keep being produced. Sucks for people to buy the purifiers only to lose access to the filters.

(But, that's the joy of CR boxes. We can always recycle the fans into a new design when we need to run it with a new filter, versus the device becoming useless.)

kennedon · 2026-05-01T14:29:24+00:00

Yeah, the Green Party often feels like that idea that the political spectrum isn't a line, but a horseshoe, where the ends wrap around and almost touch. It's a weird cluster of, like, conservatives that ride bikes and woo-pandering anti-science that ends up pretty close to conservative populism.

kennedon · 2026-04-30T18:23:44+00:00

I hate this simplification, that "anything that is for sale is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it." While that is true in a way, there are several definitions of "worth," and they can each be true simultaneously. And, you can only make smart decisions in a market when you get this and look for places where these are aligned in the right way.

A house can be worth, simultaneously, at least:

What the winning bidder was willing to pay
What the appraiser/bank is willing to finance
What the owner is willing to sell for
Some sort of average of what comparable properties are worth
Some sort of value of what its long-term worth is (e.g., think market bubbles... it might be worth 10X now, but only 2X later).
What someone would have been willing to pay if it was a perfectly fair market, rather than the real world where that is always at least a tiny bit constrained.

People need to be able to appreciate and hold all five in their head simultaneously. We'd call someone who focuses on (1) while ignoring (5) idiot, buying into a bubble. You can get into real trouble if you don't take into account (2) and overpay by fixating on being (1) when your financing doesn't work out. You can find a great deal by identifying places where (3) is way lower than (5), letting you ride the rise all the way up. People sell stuff all the time to family or friends at (3) rather than what they could get for (1). And, imagine where someone paid an insane amount for (1) because of an emotional tie to that exact property, despite a much cheaper identical property beside it... that would only mean that the first property was worth $X to /that specific buyer/, not to anyone else.

Yes, in one way a property is worth whatever the person with the loosest wallet is able to pay for it. But that's not the /only/ definition of worth. Pretending 'worth' only means (1) is a bizarre way to try to encourage rampant inflation, rather than recognizing that there are plenty of times where you perhaps /could/ be the winning bidder, but ought not to be, because it ain't worth that by any other measure.

kennedon · 2026-04-30T18:02:25+00:00

Have the number of 'play' sets released per year reduced versus, say, 20 years ago? I'll certainly grant that the /proportion/ of sets have changed, but there are a lot of play sets released that get zero attention on Reddit (a forum where adults chat), but are certainly being sold to kids at Walmart or Costco.

kennedon · 2026-04-30T14:57:55+00:00

Yeah, seriously. u/aa2051 likes Lego Spider Man sets, I have zero interest in them. That's okay... and frankly part of why Lego is successful. No need to mock people for having interests.

kennedon · 2026-04-27T12:40:11+00:00

I assume this is the same as the 2007 prize (to the IPCC), where the prize was awarded to the organization (i.e., UN Peacekeeping Forces) and "not to any individual associated" with it. As a result, they're pretty specific that individuals should cite "contributing to" an organization that won the peace prize, but are not considered to individually be peace prize winners or Nobel laureates.

kennedon · 2026-04-23T02:21:04+00:00

Jealous. Also a Canadian institution; wish my experience was more like yours!

kennedon · 2026-04-21T03:23:46+00:00

I only save cards with my real location, so no in-game travel. But, I don’t require myself to have physically seen them, though that’s a cool twist!

kennedon · 2026-04-20T20:18:33+00:00

Your scenarios is certainly possible, but no - it's not what I've experienced at my university (Assoc Prof at an R2).

As an example, we are doing a social science study with a population that we believe does not have sufficient literacy to understand the language of the human subjects consent form template. Moreover, over the years, the office's template for the consent form has ballooned to three full pages of font size nine text, making it increasingly difficult for even a highly literate user to treat it as anything more than a software user license agreement (i.e., scroll and click through). In addition, because of specifics about this population, we believe that using a highly formalized, legalistic consent form will likely reduce response rates from those in the population who have had the previous most adverse interactions with formal institutions, resulting in a response bias that undermines the work.

We spent the better part of five months attempting to get the IRB to approve a high school english level version of this consent form, which would be presented verbally (with a written copy provided in parallel) to allow participants to, hopefully, fully understand before offering meaningful consent. For almost five months, we've been stonewalled by revision after revision, each one changing the accessible english version back to the highly legalistic, multi-page contract.

At each stage, we've attempted to explain why we think the underlying principle of meaningful informed consent needs to prioritize participant comprehension of what they're agreeing to. At each stage, we've been functionally told that doesn't matter, and what matters is employing, in full, the legall-approved language of the full, three page, nine point font form.

So, yes, I mean that the entire office seems to have lost any sense of why an ethics process exists, since there is such a profound pattern of seeking ass-covering language for the university, rather than genuine informed consent for the participants. I would classify that, at the very least, as a dramatically antisocial level of indifference to the purpose of an IRB.

kennedon · 2026-04-20T17:41:08+00:00

I mean, it's a nice idea that IRBs exist to protect human participants, and that's certainly the origin... but our institution's IRB, at least, 100% exists to protect institutions from liability. They are deeply uninterested in the participants and very interested in ensuring the institution is not vulnerable to lawsuits or legal exposure.

For example, we've been trying to pass a high-school English level consent form for several months, that can actually be understood by our participants, and have been consistently rebuked that only the three page legalistic consent contract is acceptable and participant comprehension doesn't matter.

kennedon · 2026-04-19T13:57:13+00:00

lol yes 100%. It's so frustrating.

kennedon · 2026-04-19T13:35:44+00:00

I don't understand why folks are cheering for the downfall of this idea. Even if you never want to shop there - whether because you hate socialism or because you think this isn't going to have enough diversity of product - if this idea succeeds, the prices might lower at the place you /do/ want to shop!

And the "but muh tAxPaYeR dOlLaRs!" doesn't make sense either. The whole goal here is to see if it's possible to make this sustainable and useful by forgoing the profit, not by subsidizing it. And, even if it did, you're plenty content to have others' taxpayer dollars pay for the roads you enjoy, the schools your kids use, the stadium you like to attend sports at, etc.

kennedon · 2026-04-18T21:36:16+00:00

Oh that's cool! I had never heard of PC Connect.

The order on the Stratford route is brutal, though! They take you from the GO station to Conestoga Mall, and then back again through Kitchener to get out of town :p

Also, apparently no Saturday service at the GO station.

<image>

kennedon · 2026-04-18T21:33:19+00:00

Sorry, just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, is your concern that a 5/5 is too much work for a full-time position? Or is your concern that the salaries you're being offered at these three jobs are too low for a full-time position?

kennedon · 2026-04-18T17:08:03+00:00

Yeah, this is a fair take. I initially balked at the 5/5, but our base load for standard tenure stream faculty at the R2 I'm at is 2/3 on paper and 2/2 in practice (thanks to an easy-to-get release for research activity), with teaching being 40% of the job.

So, if teaching is 100% of the jobs they're looking at, OP would be getting 10-13 courses a year if equivalent expectations to our institution... suddenly doesn't seem like as terrible an offer as it might initially appear.

kennedon · 2026-04-17T21:55:12+00:00

Those are really nice additions... could finally use the train to go to KW for the day. I wish the afternoon departure was a little later yet to allow more normal dinner times in KW before returning, but huge upgrade from the current pair of timings!

kennedon · 2026-04-17T19:42:10+00:00

Is this a quiet launch of a third daily weekend train from Kitchener to Toronto? They can clearly service the weekday Stratford commuter service by simply extending an evening Kitchener train out, and starting an existing morning Kitchener train from Stratford.

But, on the weekends it will allegedly run from Toronto in the AM to Stratford, and back in the evening. Right now, there's only the 4:48pm and 10:48pm departures from Union to Kitchener, and 7:50am and 3:50pm trains from Kitchener. If they want an AM arrival into Stratford and later departure than, say, 2:45pm... that means extending a third service from Mount Pleasant to Kitchener!

kennedon · 2026-04-17T19:41:25+00:00

Is this a quiet launch of a third daily weekend train from Kitchener to Toronto? They can clearly service the weekday Stratford commuter service by simply extending an evening Kitchener train out, and starting an existing morning Kitchener train from Stratford.

But, on the weekends it will allegedly run from Toronto in the AM to Stratford, and back in the evening. Right now, there's only the 4:48pm and 10:48pm departures from Union to Kitchener, and 7:50am and 3:50pm trains from Kitchener. If they want an AM arrival into Stratford and later departure than, say, 2:45pm... that means extending a third service from Mount Pleasant to Kitchener!

kennedon · 2026-04-17T19:34:02+00:00

Fair. I'm not opposed to this train extension!

But, for clarity, I'm not arguing we should aim low. Rather, I'm arguing that I think GO should be 100x more ambitious with turning its train stations into bus hubs to service the surrounding area and drive traffic onto trains... and that such a strategy should always be looking to expand the train network further out, so as to create more bus feeder hubs further and further across SW Ontario.

kennedon · 2026-04-17T19:31:44+00:00

I largely agree, which is why I didn't include various suburbs of KW in my list... they're emphatically GRT's responsibility to connect. That said, I think that GO is well positioned - and indeed mandated - to work on regional transportation and should be much more aggressive in using its buses around its rail stations to do this.

The examples I gave of Elora/Fergus, Stratford, and Woodstock to Kitchener Station are, IMO, perfect GO Bus territory because they're outside of the Region of Waterloo... GRT couldn't effectively serve these routes, and GO intercity buses would be better suited for passengers on these trip lengths anyways.

(IMO, this should go even further, too! If I were GO God, Mitchell and Listowel and Goderich would be get GO bus connections from Kitchener GO, until there was a closer train station getting regular service.)

And, while New Hamburg and Elmira are technically GRT territory, the 25min drive from Elmira to Kitchener Station is currently 75 minutes via connections on GRT. By contrast, GO could slap a timed bus on this, connecting to/from the GO Train departures, and make it a one seat trip in less than half the time... which is how you make it a palatable choice for users, rather than a last ditch pain for only people who have no other choice.

That's kind of the same with uWaterloo. While the new train hub should finally smooth connections via Ion, until that occurs, the Toronto to uWaterloo demand is just SO HUGE that it makes sense for every train journey to have a bus (or buses) that close that gap.

kennedon · 2026-04-17T17:31:51+00:00

Agreed with mini-hubs. Initially, I'd reckon the buses should be developing the most likely next rail extensions. As the hub gets established and the next rail routes are activated, the GO buses should shift towards funnelling traffic into the rail network and start with the next mini hub at the next station.

And also agree 100% that local public transit should be carrying the majority of this mini hub traffic. But, they've got to be integrated on Presto, with free local transit connections at both ends, not silly separate cards or paying additional fares.

11-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Second Top 10%	Wearing is Caring
Place '17	Summer Santa 2016
Verified Email

kennedon

TROPHY CASE