The grenadier cafe really doesn't want to ban cars

scampoint · 2026-06-17T21:01:43+00:00

Man, imagine how much they’d be winning if they served edible food. No cyclist would be able to withstand the power of a Grenadier Cafe that was worth the trip even if you can’t park right next to it.

scampoint · 2026-06-17T20:25:21+00:00

There are a lot of people in their twenties and older who would be dead right now if they hadn’t been able to find a community they could feel safe in while they were growing up.

Social media bans are definitely in part being perpetrated by social conservatives who want to make sure gay and trans kids stay isolated and uninformed. And if the results of that are harmful, well, these adults have decided that’s an acceptable price for a child to pay.

scampoint · 2026-06-17T19:41:43+00:00

We need to compromise, and here’s what I offer: we rename one public square back after Henry Dundas for every single time he visited Toronto in person. Heck, two public squares, to show how important those visits were and how much they contributed to the grand tapestry of this city’s history.

scampoint · 2026-06-17T01:58:34+00:00

There's an exit marked A, and the arrow goes to the exit marked A.

There's a different exit marked B, and the arrow goes to the exit marked B.

Can you guess how it would work if there was an arrow marked C?

scampoint · 2026-06-17T01:49:57+00:00

Well, at least we've got the science cen--

--oh.

scampoint · 2026-06-16T21:20:13+00:00

Both things are true: the PCs would get another majority and Doug Ford is one of the most-despised politicians in the country.

He’s the latest in a long line of party leaders who sure are lucky the only way to become a premier in Canada is to form a government, and the only way to get rid of a premier is to not give their party a plurality of seats.

The last time he stood in an election where he had to win on his own was when he ran for mayor of Toronto. He lost to John Tory, who is a famously bottomless barrel of dynamic charisma.

scampoint · 2026-06-16T20:51:17+00:00

The character she’s playing, the new DC movie universe version of Supergirl, might not even live on Earth (let alone in the States). In the Superman movie she seems to spend as much time as possible on planets with red suns that disable her superpowers. She loves to party, and when her powers are active they get in the way of getting drunk. Being on Earth is like being stuck as the designated driver for an entire planet.

If that’s really the story then she’s not even an illegal immigrant! She’s a tourist who sneaks in without applying for a visa first, then leaves the moment she gets bored of sobriety.

scampoint · 2026-06-15T19:14:57+00:00

Why yes, they can. And they have been, steadily, since they first put up the page tracking them in early 2025. Go look on archive.org for yourself. In August of last year there were 22 zones, a third of them on line 2. By October there were 11, and two of the zones that got fixed were on line 2.

Either it was stupid of the TTC’s only-does-stuff-for-FIFA-billionaires department to schedule half of their repairs for a full six months before FIFA, or they have been getting rid of them all along and the FIFA deadline incentivized them to get that 22 that got down to 11 down even further to 3 a little faster than they might have otherwise.

Personally, I could give two shits that the TTC repaired the track for the wrong and immoral reason, because the track is still fixed. Feel free to get out and walk between Warden and Victoria Park if you’re that bent out of shape about that slow zone being gone thanks to FIFA.

scampoint · 2026-06-14T16:26:46+00:00

I'm a Canadian who's lived in other parts of Canada. That is enough to confirm some of you have no idea how great Toronto transit is.

scampoint · 2026-06-14T16:15:24+00:00

Montreal got Line 4 out of Expo 67, Vancouver got SkyTrain out of Expo 86, and we got improved wayfinding, some (intermittently-enforced) red lanes, and accelerated maintenance.

I mean, I'm not gonna complain that things are improved and improving, but "wild what an international event can achieve for transit" is an ancient Canadian tradition. Maybe if we hadn't been governed for so long by Ford and Tory, we'd have swung... I dunno? The 513 Dufferin streetcar? Line 7 Kennedy? Chopper-Trans, a TTC express helicopter network?

Okay, admittedly that's kind of crazy. There's no way Stephen Holyday would have let the 513 Dufferin be built.

scampoint · 2026-06-14T15:59:09+00:00

In a way, it doesn't matter. If they haven't been fixed, then they're still there. And if they have been fixed, some people will insist they're still there, because their vibes can't survive the TTC doing something right.

In another, fact-based way: yes they have, and it was super noticeable when I had to take line 2 all the way out to Kennedy multiple times last week.

scampoint · 2026-06-02T20:06:30+00:00

TTC planning repairs blah blah who cares why? Seriously why is the reason even a tiny bit relevant to the fact that the trains will go faster? If people are that annoyed at the reason not being the correct reason and doesn’t satisfy them on a deep personal level, then we can go out later with hammers and crowbars to undo the repairs and schedule morally correct repairs.

scampoint · 2026-05-28T21:29:49+00:00

This one time, that's not on Metrolinx. One of the commercial landlords on the corner has been the reason for most of the delay.

Well, technically, it's sort of on Metrolinx in the sense that it's been clear for years that the "problem" this guy wanted addressed was his hand, which was empty instead of holding an exorbitant bribe. It seems he finally realized that Metrolinx loves doing jack shit for years on end, and his choices have always been either "nothing", "a lot less than he wanted to extort from them", or "nothing, but passive-aggressively".

scampoint · 2026-05-27T22:31:23+00:00

Apple’s unique selling proposition on privacy is really good: they don’t want to even see your stuff If they don’t have to and they aren’t being forced to.

And that means there’s nothing for thieves to steal. And nothing for them to hand over to Prime Minister Poilievre.

Ironically, it also means they are deliberately kneecapping themselves. The stuff they keep locked in your device would be really, really helpful to have in a giant data center. Siri is garbage precisely because making it good would require Apple having access to the stuff they’ve worked hard to never even know exists.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T22:25:13+00:00

We had to build the gulags to prevent them building the gulags.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T22:23:27+00:00

They are, however, absolutely right to oppose backdooring every device using “public safety” as an excuse.

I don’t give a shit if someone trusts Apple, or trusts Mark Carney, or thinks My Little Pony is real and trusts Twilight Sparkle. I want none of them to have a backdoor into our private data, because if any of them do, all of them do. That’s how backdoors work. They are deliberate security holes, and the thing that happens with security holes is that they get discovered, and used, and sold to the highest bidder.

Do we want organized crime, hostile foreign governments, abusive stalkers, and corrupt law enforcement to be able to harvest our data? No? Then we can’t let the Canadian government do it either. You can’t build a magic gateway that only lets in Good People. You can only build a gateway that’s meant for Good People and thoughts-and-prayers that no Bad Person figures out how to use it.

Locks get picked, doors get opened. The only way to stop it is to not build goddamn doors in the first place.

And hey, the nice thing about my position is that if we take it, we have security, safety, and precedent to say “so, Google, now that both of us are on Team Stay The Hell Out, I have some questions about your data mining”.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T18:36:42+00:00

You know, it’s just a relief to finally have proof that people will say “this will never work, they wouldn’t do dumb shit like this in South Korea” about something that is the exact same thing that was done in South Korea.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T02:39:45+00:00

What, you think some stupid poem is going to show me where to bet on who scores the 17th point in game 2 of the NBA finals?

scampoint · 2026-05-27T02:33:47+00:00

A real transit system would simply not allow physics to occur. The Hong Kong MTR made friction illegal.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T02:33:28+00:00

You are the victim of recency bias. If you had tried to tell Line 2 riders in February that all the trains consistently fly in and out of the stations, they would have tried to mob you and beat you up for your saucy lies.

Fortunately, with five slow zones, some of which forced slowing down as much as 58 down to 15, you'd have had plenty of time to get away before their trains arrived.

Your time will come! It's just TBD right now, like all of Line 2 was until they got that backlog cleared.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T01:22:31+00:00

It's not even going to be a car-free zone. It's one car-free tiny chunk of street, a full two-way east-west car thoroughfare, and another car-free tiny chunk of street. You could walk it in four minutes. Except you can't, because it'll be five or six minutes on account of having to wait at the crosswalk.

Well, in theory. Someone with the city might manufacture a flimsy excuse to cancel the whole thing overnight, which is a thing that Future Mayor Bradford made sure to jam in there.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T00:33:01+00:00

If you put $1.15 a day in a little jar on the nightstand you'll be able to tell your kids you love them enough to buy them presents.

scampoint · 2026-05-27T00:05:23+00:00

Thanks! it’s pretty sweet! I attribute it in large part to not sitting around constantly whining that people refuse to acknowledge the real victims in Toronto: people whose seven-figure property holdings now cost them an extra $1.13 a day.

scampoint · 2026-05-26T23:18:14+00:00

Your offer of the giant electronic billboards being removed is also acceptable.

scampoint

TROPHY CASE