• 4 Posts
  • 66 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Via Rail is a complete disaster imo. They take the bad from air travel and bring it to rail. They act like their service is a premium luxury one, with huge numbers of staff per train, multiple checks of your tickets, etc.

    One example of how bad their operations are (not to get into reliability which is a whole other problem) is that when arriving at a station they ask that you remain seated until the train is fully stopped, and then slowly help people get off. Contrast this with trains in Japan as an example, where the announcement says a stop is coming up soon, please be ready to get off as soon as the train doors are open.

    In my opinion we don’t just need politicians riding Canadian trains. I want them to travel to Europe and Asia and then come back and suffer on via rail. It’s not just new dedicated tracks that are needed, it’s a complete restructure of the passenger experience!


  • You’re (and some of the people in the post) are conflating the colloquial and actual definition of historical revisionism.

    Colloquially it just means lying about history, but the real definition is just reinterpriting history in a way that challenged the orthodox view. A great example is the dark ages, which from studying non Latin texts, many authors argue that the lack of knowledge and learning associated with the dark ages is actually just a lack of source texts in Latin from western mainland Europe.

    So as you can see the definition of revisionism in an historical context is value neutral, it would depend on who what and how things are being revised.





  • I think you’re misreading it. In the same way as there are people that need to ride on planes (for example for their job, or to move to where they have a job, etc), there are people that need to use social media.

    For example, if you own an online store you really need to have a social media presence. Same if you are an artist, and live off of commissions. I’m sure there are plenty more examples.












  • How about they make the monthly pass a more compelling option for people by making the break even point 20 trips? Even before the pandemic I would have to evaluate if I wanted the monthly pass because I wouldn’t be going in to the office enough days to make it worth it.

    In an ideal world we would have a system that just caps fare usage when you get to certain breakpoints, with a daily, weekly and monthly caps so you never have to try to guess how much transit you use, you just use it and if you use enough it just stops charging you (because you’ve paid enough for a monthly pass for example).


  • I would disagree with a big part of this characterization. Specifically that prices are out of control beyond housing (which is completely fucked), but outside of that Canada has done better than most comparable countries when it comes to inflation over the last few years.

    Taxes are not that crazy unless your only comparison is the US, which is a bad comparison.