Victor Villas @ villasv @lemmy.ca

mostly inactive, lemmy.ca is now too tainted with trolls from big instances

---

Read more

Posts

19

Comments

677

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

I'm in agreement that we need systemic solutions, and those involve improving road design, so we agree for the most part on the most important aspect of this.

punishing people for being successful.

But issuing bigger fines for breaking the law is very, VERY far from punishing people for being successful. It's a correction of an unfortunate truth: if you're wealthy, you can afford to drive recklessly.

What does the top speed of a car has to do with how safe it is to go 10 km/h over the posted speed limit?

So let's push for that instead of pushing to remove cameras. In fact, proportional fines would probably increase the revenue, which would bring the funds to improve the road design so folks don't get the wrong impression of the speed they're supposed to be in. Also let's push for better transit so poor people are not forced to drive and risk getting fined.

doesn’t feel fair

Why? Why does it feel unfair to follow the speed limit?

If only we had real world data showing that there are several examples of speed cameras having a positive effect on driver behavior... Even if it was "just a cash grab", it's still a productive thing to do, as it can be used to fund the infrastructure changes of actually designing roads to their desired speeds.

poor people

a sports car that can go like 100 in second gear

lmao ok

JFC, a new low for The Walrus.

I donate monthly, but will pause my donations for the rest of the year and I sent them an email explaining why. I hope this partnership costs them dearly, though of I course I hope they survive it and learn the right thing from this.

Maybe some day in the distant future our policy-makers will understand that updating a few signs doesn’t make a damn difference.

Yes it does, even if compliance is low, and the reason is what you yourself is saying

You need physical speed reduction methods such as speedbumps, roundabouts, raised crosswalks, etc.

Traffic engineers won't do these road diets on 50km/h streets. Changing the speed limit is an important first step that enables further changes to road infrastructure to help enforce the updated speed limits. This sweeping change is a MAJOR victory, that has been argued for many years. That we were able to pass this for so many neighbourhoods at once is great news and should be celebrated.

This was discussed at length during the council meeting, including later in the same day where another vote was passed to update the commitments and plans for the municipal Vision Zero initiative, which are in fact going to require infrastructure projects.

Sometimes, though I have been prioritizing CBC originals lately I'm still finishing Handmaids Tale

I don't really think cloud compute is a social good deserving of a government agency to be honest. I think the government should build out its datacenters and use it to build stuff, like a federal instant payment system that replaces Interac. But I don't really buy the argument that the government should bother to sell some of its capacity.

Whatever the government tries to sell here is going to be akin to IBM Cloud platform. It's going to be clunky, evolve slowly, with lame support. No sane business should choose that. It makes more sense to pick a non-US company with Canadian-located datacenters. Who should choose a slowly moving bureaucratic provider? The government itself. So just keep it private.

Wouldn’t they just move their money over a place that would hide it?

Moving the money shouldn't make a difference, though. You pay taxes regardless of where you the money comes from or goes to.

Hiding income is illegal already. So more enforcement and steeper fines are about the only things left to do in that case.

Evidence really is sparse. Nonexistent, even

You might be reading too much into what I wrote. Saying it’s a pointless discourse is not the same as saying that I believe a peaceful resolution is forever impossible.

I don't understand where you want to go with this and I think it's better we stop here but one last thing to note is that autocracy and church-state separation are different things. We started this off with secularism but you're now talking about autocracy so I'm a little confused, but regardless of semantics nitpicking I think what matters the most is that we want Israel aggression to stop and we want Carney to plainly demand so.

I think you might be jumping to conclusions on what I think and understand about what's happening. I don't think the term "zionist Palestine" is acceptable. I think it's unacceptable for slightly different reasons than you do.

I'm just saying that defending a jewish state is not necessarily at odds with Canadian secularism if the state in question is not Canada. The point is that defending secularism is totally orthogonal to the whole discussion. And yes, obviously if the Prime Minister is indifferent to a Jewish Israel, they should be indifferent to an Islamic Palestine. Just like they are already indifferent to Islamic Saudi Arabia - we don't see the PM giving interviews saying that Saudi Arabia should become a secular state.

Extremely poor choice of a loaded word if so.

Totally agree. And tone deaf too. I imagine how ridiculous would it be to call for an "American exceptionalist" Canada.

Very braindead to hope for a future empathetic view of the agressor if the aggression hasn't even stopped yet.

When i heard a zionist palestine i understand that he advocate for an ethnostate which is completely against canadian secularism.

Maybe? I think one thing is defending Canadian secularism because it's what we believe it's right for us. Another thing is a Canadian official claiming that a different nation should be secular. I don't think he's in a position to do that, even if, like me, he believes that secularism is the better and most humanitarian choice.

They’re welcome to try to take it.

Are they, though? I suspect you don't really mean "welcome" honestly here, but in the passive aggressive sense of a tough guy ready to defend his property despite saying that they rightfully belong to someone else... talk about cognitive dissonance.

International Law is just a set of agreements between sovereign powers

And? What's circular about it? Nations arise from self organizing societies, and these nations come together to define international laws. And then they define the right of self affirmation, and if the main powers recognize a state it is assigned the right to exist. And if the core powers of this world decide that a country does not matter, they'll look the other way as those rights are bombed. It's an emergent property of international politics.

It doesn’t spring from seafoam, fully formed.

No rights do, so I don't understand where you're going with this.

I guess he means a state that’s ok with illegal settlements and apartheid treatment.

Why would he mean that?

I think it's more likely that he's idealizing a future where Israel and Palestine forget their history and trauma and suddenly become best buddies who root for each other's success because no one is interested in inflicting any more pain on the other. This is a pointless exercise in imagination but it's probably what he's going for with this statement.

My philosophy is this: I’ll answer truthfully, and if my country gets to the point where I’m worried that being truthful in my census questionnaire will put me at risk, this is no longer a country I want to be living in and I’ll move.

I know this is coming from a place of privilege but I can afford it, and I believe that everyone that can afford it should do it too.