Tea drinker. Urban dweller. Classical guitarist. Grounded pilot. Pantheist. Jane Jacobs fanboy. Language nerd. 25-year vegetarian. 30-year Linux user. Disabled. Open-* and 🇺🇳 humanitarian aid person. Former medieval philologist (Ph.D, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, 1993). Living on unceded Anishinabe Algonquin territory.
Header picture: Large reddish-orange letters spelling “Hintonburg”, some lying flat on the sidewalk for use as benches.
@FaeDrifter @Smatt I read Tolkein’s books more in the light of his experience serving on the front in WW1. There’s this terrible thing that you have to leave your cozy, safe home to do, and it damages you so much that even after “victory”, you can never really go back.
@cheese_greater @Banzai51 LOTR isn’t very Christian; Tolkein was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, at a time when Old English studies were focussing more on the pagan elements that they thought were more “pure” and corrupted by the arrival of Christianity.
C.S. Lewis’s books were allegorical Christian (very high church), but fundamentalists don’t go for that kind of thing; for them, Jesus has to be Jesus, not an anthropomorphic lion inspired by the story of the crucifixion.
@markr Very true. Ideally, the city would have managed taxi plates (medallions), increasing the supply every year so that it approximately matched the number of drivers the market would support, instead of freezing it at an artificially-low level so that plates were selling for $500K+ on the secondary market (before Uber and Lyft wiped out their value).
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don’t sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
@ajsadauskas @technology The one thing I don’t sympathise with in that list is the taxi services — at least here in #Ottawa, they were even more exploitative than Uber or Lyft, with a small number of plate holders acting as feudal lords for the drivers, and extracting rent from their vassals even on a bad shift with few fares.
The city could have fixed that by issuing more plates, but the plate-owner lobby was too powerful.
@socsa @SVChucko This isn’t personal experience, but women have told me they feel far safer in Uber or Lyft than they used to in hailed taxis. One younger woman told me she didn’t know of a single female friend in Toronto who hadn’t been harassed or assaulted in taxis.
It can happen in an Uber or Lyft, too, but it’s much rarer because there’s always traceability and consequencies for the driver.