malomick.bsky.social
36 posts
38 followers
149 following
Regular Contributor
Conversation Starter
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The leaves don’t even change colour or fall off the trees in autumn. Because we’ve replaced them all with plastic ones and stapled them to the branches. That’s how committed this neighbourhood is to never changing.
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Tfw you're skimming thoughtlessly through your feed and you suddenly ask yourself "When did R2D2 ever rob a train?"
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Toronto also happens to have a ring of natural and artificial barriers/bottlenecks (ravines, the harbour, rail corridors, etc.) roughly encircling its downtown that could make implementing the toll infrastructure relatively cheap and easy:
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*to compensate
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I’d probably also throw in photo-enforced bus/tram gates at all of those upgraded stops as a replacement for the oft-ignored restrictions at the intersections, so local car traffic would have to U-turn to avoid a ticket.
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That’s pretty clever, to be fair.
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Further reading: marianamazzucato.com/books/the-bi...
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tl;dr:
- Conservative spending = foolish, transactional, fiscally irresponsible, not interested in solving underlying problems
- Progressive spending = smart, strategic, path to fiscal responsibility, invested in solving systemic problems
</rant>
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The fiscal benefits of these spending priorities can take multiple election cycles to come to fruition; and in the meantime conservatives typically point and shout—and spread disinformation—about runaway spending. But in the long run, spending to save is the only real path to fiscal responsibility.
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Meanwhile, progressive agendas—take your pick from the NDP, Green, and (less so) Liberal platforms—invest in public health, harm reduction, complete communities, early childhood nutrition, etc. to shrink that 40% by reducing the *underlying demand* for healthcare.
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For example, Ford's PCs have no plan to significantly shrink the ~40% of our budget we spend on healthcare delivery. They might eke out some "savings" by squeezing healthcare workers' salaries and privatizing certain services, but this inevitably leads to worse/more expensive care.
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Progressives, on the other hand, know how to spend money to save money. They focus on making *progress* on systemic issues, investing in programs that significantly reduce the size of the biggest budget items by actually changing the underlying structural dynamics.
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Conservatives can't see past first-order effects, so their budgets are mostly transactional and hyper-focused on individual impacts. The only "strategy" for fiscal responsibility on the right is austerity: harmful cuts and deferrals that always come back to bite us eventually.
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If you're brave enough to engage them on the issue, I'd stick to one point: bike lanes don't cause congestion (construction does), and removing them won't get cars moving any faster.
I find that one persuasive because a) evidence, b) appeals to drivers, and c) focuses them on wasted spending.
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Like, I get the larger point, I just don't think "you should adopt net-zero commitments *and* btw you can't just fake it" is an entirely unreasonable position for ECCC to take.
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And it really says something that @spaikin.bsky.social appeals to "empirically provable facts" but won't himself rebut or clarify talking points that have been so thoroughly debunked by mountains of empirical evidence on congestion and road design.
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Not even touching the mountain of good arguments on health, safety, equity, climate, business, public finances — the list goes on — Dougie doesn't care about solving congestion.
In fact, he's cool with making congestion worse if it means he gets to settle old scores with City Council.