Derek Howard

@RM_Transit Good thing Dougie is building a giant parking garage by the lake for the spa. I'm sure that will pay for itself

Its really nice seeing a parking garage that just will never get finished. Reminds me of GO transit kind of committing to stop building them a few years back as well. Change is a coming.

@RichardDias_CFA It would be interesting to see a better breakdown of these groups. I believe the "ex public admin" is mostly healthcare and education roles. It feels surprising to me that they have grown at such a rate. Am I missing something?

Public Sector & Public Administrative Employment as a share of Total Employment is at a 30-year high.

Nothing can satisfy this Leviathan. This would be funny if it weren't so sad. *To be clear*, this is because Private Employment has dropped off over the last few months (see below). Nevertheless, Public Employment at a 30-year high amid a productivity emergency, record deficits, and anemic private-sector investment tells a story of an economy that is heading in the wrong direction.

@dognell1 @ronmortgageguy @danielfoch just tax land

@ronmortgageguy @danielfoch Asset based taxation is the worst idea ever. No way to do it without taxing unrealized gains. They just need to stop increasing the OAS income threshold and let people slowly roll off.

It feels like this could actually happen given how much credible attention it gets: “Canadians, including retirees, support trimming OAS for well-off seniors: poll Under the current rules, retired couples with incomes exceeding $180,000 may qualify for the full $18,000 annual benefit” I wonder if it gets protests like France’s changes to entitlements? nationalpost.com/news/canada/ca…

We need a tax on self-driving cars. Beneath eight states of the American Great Plains lies the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest bodies of groundwater on Earth. For centuries, extraction was constrained by the modest capacities of wind and hand power. At that rate, this 'fossil water' resource was effectively limitless. Farmers could draw as much as they wanted without ever running it down. worksinprogress.co/issue/escaping… But in 1949 Colorado Farmer Frank Zybach invented centre-pivot irrigation. Combined with electricity and the centrifugal pump, farmers could now draw thousands of gallons per well per minute, enough to irrigate 40 acres at a time. Since then, the aquifer has gone down 10%, losing a Lake Erie's worth of water. It is down 50% in the dry parts, where it recharges just 0.02 inches per year. Without intervention, modern pumps will bring about the total end of irrigated farming in the arid parts of the Great Plains in 20-30 years. This is what I call the Ogallala Trap. Technological change can create a new tragedy of the commons. The telegraph enabled the destruction of the passenger pigeon; sonar, radar, and diesel enabled the industrial trawling that devastated the North Sea cod in a decade; chlorofluorocarbons came close to destroying the ozone layer. Self-driving cars are about to do the same thing to roads. When you can sleep, work, or drink with friends in a moving vehicle, you will take many more journeys by car. Roads, which are free at the point of use almost everywhere, will grind to a halt. People who have to go to the office or the hospital will be stuck sharing the road with people having beers, working remotely, and taking naps. There is a fix, but it depends on acting now, before autonomous vehicles go mainstream. Voters balk at being charged more for something they already depend on. The tax needs to come in as soon as possible. Waymos are already in dozens of cities and do millions of journeys per month. We have very little time left. If we want to save our roads from omnigridlock, we must introduce road pricing for autonomous vehicles.

@TalentedTargets @tobi @yacineMTB @HarryBingus Seems to have worked in a place where the population has decreased over the last century

@tobi @yacineMTB @HarryBingus What do you think about Vienna's success with social housing? x.com/askperplexity/…

No hanlans point ferry, no affordable housing in the portlands, but this bald albino reptile can catch a direct flight to the bahamas at everyone else's expense 👍🏻

what every day feels like now

i taught my claude to start each conversation with a Stolen Data Acknowledgement

@RM_Transit Do you have thoughts on how to best prepare?

I'm pretty sure Toronto will have robotaxis in the next few years and that we are not at all prepared for them.

@sassal0x Great work! How has your sleep changed? Do you have measures of that with Whoop?

In April, I started taking my physical fitness extremely seriously. It began with 8 hours of zone-based cardio a week (riding a bike outdoors) which then turned into 4 hours of cardio and 4 hours of weightlifting a week around 2 months ago. My diet is also tuned to maximise necessary macros and I track absolutely everything that I eat (as almost all of my meals are cooked by me). This is honestly the most important part of any fitness journey - especially in today's world where so much of our food is incredibly unhealthy for us. I also used the Whoop fitness tracker to keep me accountable - not a shill but it changed the game for me - I treated it like a 24/7 personal trainer. Here are the results after 7 months (height is 172cm and age 33): Weight: 84kg/185lbs down to 69.6kg/153lbs Body fat: Over 25% down to ~19% (I get a DEXA scan every 3 months to track this) Resting heart rate: 60bpm down to 50bpm VO2 Max: 54 I have never felt better in my entire life and pretty much all of the pains/aches that I felt as I entered my 30's have disappeared. I have more energy, I sleep better, I'm never tired during the day, my mood is stable and I'm just overall much more happy. I also look very athletic/toned and I can see my abs for the first time in probably 20 years! Of course, the journey isn't over - my goal from here on out is to get my body fat % down to at least 15% and build much more muscle while still maintaining a healthy dose of cardio. Now, given this newfound energy, I took on a new project 2 months ago. It's completely unrelated to crypto and Ethereum and I haven't been this excited to work on something in a very long time. I'll announce what the project is once I am close to finishing it :) Anyway, I highly recommend taking your physical (and mental!) fitness seriously if you aren't - the results after even a couple of months will shock you!

Awesome & wholesome: Slashdotters were dunking on @stevewoz for selling his Apple stock… then he showed up in the comments with the most grounded reply. Gave away his Apple wealth, funds museums, pays his taxes, and measures life by joy: “Happiness is Smiles minus Frowns.”

Remember this the next time you hear some right wing dingus complain about money going to research on mushroom enzymes or whatever

So happy someone (@marcelsalathe) did the work and put an end to the stupid take that ChatGPT etc. require a ton of energy 🙏🏼

My most radical belief is that a lot of people would love to live in a neighborhood with great cycling and transit infrastructure:

@peterhartree @michael_nielsen @A1Mish @alexalbert__ I like using this extension from @HamelHusain which allows saving to gists or you can just copy a conversation to clipboard github.com/hamelsmu/claud…

@michael_nielsen @A1Mish Claude doesn't have a print stylesheet so printing to PDF is a pain (cc @alexalbert__). You get just one page's worth of stuff and some is obscured by UI. I'd just CMD+A on the conversation screen then copy-paste?

If I switch to Claude 3.5 Haiku because I've exhausted 3.5 Sonnet's capacity for a few hours, will I be able to switch my chat back, later? (I don't want to lose the context!)

City of Tokyo released a 3D digital twin of the entire city in high resolution point cloud, free to download. It’s an inevitable trend that more and more cities, houses, and factories will be transported into simulations. Robots will not be trained in isolation. They will be simulated as an “iron fleet”, deployed in real-time graphics engines, and scaled across a huge cluster to produce the next trillions of high quality training tokens. The majority of embodied agents will be born in sim, and transferred zero-shot to our real world when they are ready. They will share a “hive mind” that sends latent embeddings back and forth to coordinate a multi-agent physical task. Fun fact: NVIDIA’s Santa Clara Headquarter buildings are designed and rendered in Omniverse, a GPU-accelerated graphics platform, before materializing in atoms.

Paris proves bold leadership transforms cities. 🌍 From suffocating smog (2007) to clean, green & livable streets (2023): 🚴‍♀️ 100s of km of bike lanes 🌳 Tens of thousands of trees 🚗 Car-free zones & 30 km/h limits Millions now breathe clean air. When will we dare to follow? 💪

@amibiswasmd The only true justice for the land is global Georgism, but people aren't ready for that argument.

Councillor Paula Fletcher has made reference to letters by Hospital CEOs supporting the University Ave bike lanes in 2020. Here are a couple of those letters, from CEOs of Sick Kids and Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai CEO says 63% of hospital staff bike to work.

@dennisknodt @jeremyphoward en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-sy…

@jeremyphoward As in potential downsides? Or 2nd order upside?

2nd system effect.

@erikbryn How does it compare to Claude's projects?

I’ve been using Google‘s new AI assistant called notebookLM. I am blown away. I can upload research papers and then have a conversation, asking for key points, limitations, extensions, etc. This will significantly change the way I do research. notebooklm.google