#Canadian transportation

[inc-immigrationnewscanada]

High-Speed Rail Corridor Announced by Trudeau from Toronto 2 Quebec

In a significant stride towards modernizing Canadian transportation, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced the development of a high-speed rail network from Toronto to Quebec City. This project aims to redefine commuting within Canada’s busiest corridor, offering quicker travel times and promoting sustainable transport solutions. The AnnouncementProject Details about High-Speed RailImpact…

[tommytofu]

also taking trains places is sick as hell

Do you feel that our domestic travel flights are unnecessarily expensive? Do you feel that government should subsidize these flights to spur interest to travel domestically?

Yes, its sometimes more expensive to fly across Canada than it is to fly to Europe.

I think a lot of it has to do well with a smaller population density in Canada using these inter-country flights, making it less efficient compared to the higher volume flying to other countries.

Even so, the government could subsidize flights within Canada or otherwise give funding to smaller air companies so that they can actually compete with the bigger airlines, and drive costs down that way.

[coulsonlives]

[nocternalrandomness]

Canadian C-130 flying low level through Star Wars Canyon in Death Valley, California

[aryburn-trains]

D&H passes MN at Spuyten Duyvil, NY

September 2, 2005

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Business can't stop its illegal, fantastically lucrative gossiping

Seven years ago, I called Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows “the perfect anthem for our times.”

Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That’s how it goes Everybody knows

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/11/11/leonard-cohen-wrote-the-perfect-anthem-for-our-times/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/16/compulsive-cheaters/#rigged

That was just after Cohen died, and while the world seems to want to settle on Hallelujah as his totemic song, Everybody Knows keeps inserting itself into the discourse, in the most toxic, hope-draining way possible. Whenever some awful scandal involving the great and the good breaches, we’re told that “everybody knew” already, so let’s move on.

This current has been running through our society for decades now. Remember when the Snowden leaks hit and a yawning chorus of nihilists told us that they knew already and so should anyone else with the smallest iota of sophistication? Back then Jay Rosen coined a rejoinder to this counsel of despair: “Don’t savvy me”:

https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/344825874362810369

Everybody knows. It’s what we heard after the Panama Papers. Swissleaks. Luxleaks. The Paradise Papers. Everybody knows! It’s what the nothing-to-see-here crowd said about Propublica’s explosive IRSLeaks, back in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/15/guillotines-and-taxes/#carried-interest

The leaks revealed the tax-dodges of the richest and most powerful people in America, which were jaw-dropping in their audacity and shamelessness. Sure, maybe you suspected that the 400 richest people in America paid less tax than you — but did you really guess that the means by which they did this was through taking massive deductions on their elite hobbies?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/13/taxes-are-for-the-little-people/#leona-helmsley-2022

Maybe “everybody knows” that the game is rigged, but did you know how? Like, did you know that REITs — a tax shelter for mom-and-pop investors who buy an income property for their retirement — have become a primary vehicle for gutting unions at hotels, slashing wages and imposing brutal, dangerous working conditions?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/01/reit-modernization-act/#reit-makes-might

The leaks are cumulative. By combining data from one leak with another, we can build out a far more detailed picture of the conspiracy — and it is a conspiracy — among the utlrawealthy and their Renfields in the law, real-estate and accounting trades to duck their responsibilities and mound ever-more treasure on their hoards.

Take the Jersey Offshore leaks (2020), comprising the internal memos of La Hougue, a fantastically crooked firm of fixers on the Isle of Jersey, one of the lawless tax-crime jurisdictions that the UK pretends it has no control over. La Hougue has a playbook, 11 tactics for lying about your taxes. The remarkable thing about these 11 tactics is how flimsy they are, how easy it is to penetrate their lies. When Parliament says it can’t possibly do anything about the criminal havens in the Channel, remember the Jersey Offshore leaks and remind yourself that not even Parliament is that credulous. They know. Everybody knows:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/20/la-hougue/#complexity

Why do working people think the Democrats are just another party for the ultra-rich? Maybe it’s Pelosi’s relentless opposition to meaningful curbs on insider trading. Or maybe it’s the kinds of politicians that the Democratic Machine likes to rally behind — like Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who raised millions in 2021, in large-money donations from Democratic finance-sector donors in her bid to become the DA of Manhattan. Farhadian Weinstein and her husband have more than $100m in annual income, and yet, paid no federal tax in 2013, 2015 and 2017. In 2014, they paid $6,584:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/17/quis-custodiet-irs/#trumps-taxes

Propublica isn’t done with the IRS Files. Today, they published a long investigation into ultra-rich corporate executives who buy and sell their competitors’ stock for massive profits with suspiciously precise timing. The data comes from 1099-B filings, which brokerages file with the IRS with each trade, but which the IRS doesn’t share with the SEC:

https://www.propublica.org/article/secret-irs-files-trading-competitors-stock

Here are some examples:

Ohio billionaire August Troendle, CEO of Medpace, repeatedly bought and sold shares of $Syneos — his company’s archrival, timing the transactions with a management shakeup that dropped the stock by 16% in one day, and an SEC investigation that crushed Syneos’s stock by 25%. His precision timing made him at least $2.3m in profit.

Isaac Larian, CEO of Bratz-maker MGA, made $28m trading shares in Mattel, MGA’s nemesis and frequent litigant — during a period when Mattel stock crashed by 57% (!). Larian boasts that “I made a LOT more money shorting Mattel stock than they did running a $4.5 billion toy company.”

Larian’s trades also involved some very precise timing. Sometimes, he took positions just before his own company announced its upcoming products, and others positions immediately preceded major disclosures from Mattel. Larian’s subordinates told Propublica that he is “is a boss with an endless appetite for information about his company and its competitors, constantly grilling subordinates on minutiae about the industry.”

Larian couldn’t explain the timing of these trades. His lawyer told Propublica that it was “false and defamatory” to suggest that he “possessed material, nonpublic information that Larian knew was obtained in breach of a duty.”

Next up is Gerald Boelte, founder and chair of the massive oil company LLOG. LLOG partners with other companies for its oil drilling. Companies like Stone Energy. Boelte bought a huge position in Stone the day before the company’s 2015 earnings report, in which they revealed an increase their reserves’ value, pulling in a 65% one day profit. He’d never bought shares in Stone before.

Boetle told Propublica, “I do not and have never traded on any material, non-public information of competitors, business partners or others… Any implication that I was investing based upon advance knowledge is therefore clearly false.”

Jim Sankey is CEO of Invue. He bought $3.2m worth of shares in his rival Checkpoint, while checkpoint was in secret negotiations to be acquired by CCL Industries. Sankey was already thoroughly connected to Checkpoint, having sold a $150m product line to them in 2007. There’s no record that he’d ever traded Checkpoint before. He made $2.3m. Sankey says “he did not know Checkpoint was going to be acquired.” He says that his company was not approached by Checkpoint as a potential acquirer.

Barry Wish was a board member of Ocwen, a company he co-founded. After the Great Financial Crisis, Ocwen bid unsuccessfully to buy $215b worth of Bank of America mortgages. The winning bidder was Nationstar. Three weeks before Nationstar’s winning bid was announced, Wish bought $600k worth of Nationstar shares. After the bid was announced, he sold them for for a $157k profit.

Wish told Propublica that he never traded competitors’ stock: “No, not at all.” Propublica read him the details of the trade from his leaked 1099-B. He said “You might see it, but I don’t have any recollection” and hung up.

Steven Grossman is a cardboard heir — a nepobaby who inherited Southern Container Corp from his grandpa. After he sold the company to Rock-Tenn for $1b in 2013, he stayed on as a senior exec. Over the next 5 years, he traded large blocks of shares in Rock-Tenn’s competitors, companies like Temple-Inland, a company that he made a 37% profit on after its acquisition was announced in 2011, one week after Grossman started buying its shares.

Grossman falsely told Propublica, “I haven’t traded stock since then.” IRS records show that Grossman continued to trade. Grossman also told Propublica that he had no role with Rock-Tenn, despite being on their payroll for five years. When asked about his extremely lucky timing buying and selling Temple-Inland, he said “That was 10 years ago” and hung up.

As Propublica’s Robert Faturechi and Ellis Simani write, Securities regulations have their origins in the crash of 1929, and the subsequent collapse in confidence in markets and capitalism, the sense that the system was rigged for the wealthy and political insiders. That is a pretty good summation of sentiment today:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/15/mon-dieu-les-guillotines/#ceci-nes-pas-une-bailout

It’s not just that corporate executives are corrupt, it’s that they’re lavishly, shamelessly, endlessly, incorrigibly corrupt. Take Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern, the sixth- and seventh-largest Class I railroads in the USA, whose merger was just approved by the Surface Transportation Board.

There are plenty of good reasons for the STB to have blocked this merger. The rail industry is already excessively concentrated, and its top execs are so convinced that they’re both too big to fail and too big to jail that they’re rendering entire towns permanently uninhabitable in order to eke out a few more points in profit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

But there are specific reasons to have blocked this merger, starting with the whistleblower report about CP and KCS executives illegally coming together for a three-day “retreat” at The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, a notorious site for Republican operatives to collude with the business lobby:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2023-03-16-canadian-pacific-kansas-city-southern-rail-merger/

As Luke Goldstein writes for The American Prospect, both companies spent millions in 2020 and 2022 on campaign contributions to “grease the skids�� for the merger — in particular, ensuring that the combined company could transport Alberta tar sands oil (the filthiest, most energy intensive oil in the world) to US ports.

Though the STB was informed of the illegal meeting — in which the two companies behaved as though the merger had already been finalized — STB chair Martin Oberman told Goldstein that the Board did not write to the companies for an explanation before waving through their merger.

Instead, Oberman dismissed the complaint on the grounds that “Railroads have to be able to talk to one another to function.” Typically this takes place over a free phone call, though — not on a three-day executive junket at a hotel where the rooms run $1,500/night.

Oberman knows what happened at that meeting.

Everybody knows.

It comes as no surprise to learn that before FTX imploded and destroyed the savings of its depositors, it paid out $3b to its top executives, including the criminal Sam Bankman-Fried:

https://gizmodo.com/sbf-ftx-crypto-sam-bankman-fried-1850232043

It comes as no surprise that Silicon Valley Bank paid out bonuses to its execs and employees hours before it collapsed:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-employees-received-bonuses-hours-before-takeover.html

Everybody knows.

It’s comforting to think that the tax code loopholes that the ultrawealthy exploit are an epiphenomenon of complexity, an unavoidable consequence of the technical requirements of a big regulation that spans 300m+ people. But the truth is, the loopholes in the US tax code were inserted by politicians who got massive campaign contributions from donors who directly benefited from those loopholes. Senator Ron Johnson got $20m from the owners of Uline (Dick and Liz Uihlein) and roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, then he blocked the Trump tax bill until his fellow lawmakers inserted a loophole that produced $215m for the Uihleins and Hendricks, in just the first year:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory It’s not even surprising that a sitting US Senator amended a bill to give hundreds of millions of dollars to billionaires who gave him tens of millions of dollars.

Everybody knows. It’s weirdly comforting to think that everyday people vote for demagogue wreckers because Facebook hired a legion of evil sorcerers to fashion a mind-control ray out of Big Data and AI, but Facebook lies about everything, and everyone who ever claimed to have a mind-control ray was a liar.

Maybe people vote for demagogue wreckers because they believe the system is rotten, and maybe they believe the system is rotten because the system is rotten. Maybe the self-described evil sorcerers of Big Tech aren’t “hacking our dopamine loops” — maybe they’re just helping opportunists target people who are justifiably angry:

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

The problem with this explanation is that it requires “progressive” parties to actually do stuff to demonstrate that they are on the side of people, not the side of paperclip-maximizing immortal colony organisms and the corporate executives who pretend to run them:

https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1184004730722217984

I try to have hope — that is, I try to believe that if we can only make changes to our material circumstances, however small they may seem, that we might attain a new vantagepoint that reveals more possible changes within our grasp:

https://gen.medium.com/hope-not-optimism-943e88291b

Some days, it’s hard to have hope. Some days, it’s so obvious that everybody knows, all that I can muster is fury. Fury is not a full substitute for hope, but it’ll do. It’s a far superior alternative to the fatalism that “everybody knows” and thus nothing can be done.

Some fights you win, and other fights, you just fight, because surrender isn’t an option. Everybody knows, right? If everybody knows, then everybody might just decide to do something about it.

Next Monday (Mar 20), I’m doing a remote talk for the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Speaker Series.

[Image ID: A smoke-filled room lit by candles. Around a large formal table sit various 19th century gentlemen-type people. One of them stands and reads from a memo. The shadow he casts is in the shape of a dollar-sign.]

[sbs-expedited3]

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[celestialcass]

Finished system collapse! I put tags on some moments I’ll need to reference for fan art as well as the best, funniest dialogue moments.

I really loved it! I still think Network Effect may be slightly higher in my preference but every Murderbot Diaries book makes my ♡ happy so!!

ART continues to be my favourite non-Murderbot character and there is an extremely funny dynamic that ART has with another ship that I won’t spoil, as it’s only really shown at the very end.

Ratthi and Iris get a lot of focus, which is just wonderful because they’re delightful in every scene. We also get a new character Tarik who is charmingly awkward and probably the human most similar to Murderbot, which is funny and the contrast of how the humans razz Tarik constantly but are so gentle with MB… it makes me feel things. Ouch. But yay!

MB’s trauma is NOT minimized at all and is developed realistically and with the characteristic charm you might expect. There is no instant cure but we find MB looking more optimistic at the end than it starts out as.

The action and plot are similarly fast paced as the other books in the series! I would absolutely recommend this book and shall be rereading it shortly.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk book review!

[dcthreepainter]

That's Fifty Done.

Progress through the Buffalo fleet is slow, but they are a detailed lot, with tons of good photos to analyze and emulate.

dcthreepainter.com/douglas-cc-129-with-msn-13028

As a reward to myself (and maybe someone else?), I'm taking a break to design my first abstract t-shirt. Partly for the fun of seeing my own art on my own bod, and partly to review the quality of the next shirt manufacturer/model I'm selecting --the Bella+Canvas 3001.

[oligiroudd]

fkn hate that the tickets to the canadian gp are affordable if you really don't care where you sit or what kind of access you have but because the country is so big and air travel here is garbage, even flying to MTL and staying one night is unaffordable

and thus going to the race is actually completely unaffordable unless you prepared and saved a shit ton of money way in advance

[containerization]

LaGrange, IL - 1991

John David photo

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

The terms “suburbs” and “suburbanization” often bring to mind the period after the Second World War, defined by rows of bungalows on tree-lined streets. Another image of the suburbs are the more recent stucco McMansions in far-flung areas of the city with garages standing guard over sidewalk-less streets.

In fact, the process of suburbanization emerged far earlier in Canadian cities and was deeply tied to the emergence of the streetcar as a revolutionary form of public transpiration.

Up until the late 19th century, there were no effective means of mass public transit and most people’s main form of transportation was walking. The lack of transit set real limitations in terms of where people could live. ...

The period saw Winnipeg as the main industrial and wholesale base for western Canada. With three railways crossing the city and the grain exchange being moved from Toronto to Winnipeg in 1890, Winnipeg was considered the “Chicago of the North.”

In 1910, Winnipeg accounted for 50 per cent of all manufacturing in western Canada. A massive industrial working class was created in Winnipeg, and those workers needed to get to work somehow.

Yearly streetcar paid fairs increased from 3.5 million passengers in 1900 to 60 million in 1913. The areas of the city that gained the most new residents in this time were west and south Winnipeg.

Streetcars were not only the most effective option for public transport but also used as a tool for land speculation that drove the creation of new developments and suburbs.

In many cases, streetcar lines were built into less-developed areas to spur on development and used as a promotional tool to attract homebuyers.

Land and subdivisions that had basic municipal services, paved sidewalks, sewers and piped water, were still the most desirable to homebuyers and developers – but by 1900, streetcar service was a requirement." - Scott Price, "The streetcar emerges," The Uniter. Volume 78, Number 06. October 19, 2023.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

In a first for Canada, freight traffic on its two largest railways has simultaneously ground to a halt, threatening to upend supply chains trying to move forward from pandemic-related disruptions and a port strike last year. In the culmination of months of increasingly bitter negotiations, Canadian National Railway Co. (CN) and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ltd. (CPKC) locked out 9,300 engineers, conductors and yard workers after the parties failed to agree on a new contract before the midnight deadline. The impasse also affects tens of thousands of commuters in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, whose lines run on CPKC-owned tracks. Without traffic controllers to dispatch them, passenger trains cannot run on those rails. Pressure from industry groups and government to resolve the bargaining impasse has been mounting for weeks, with calls to hash out a resolution likely to ratchet up further now the work stoppage has begun.

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[susiecards]

Canadian Pacific: travel the Canadian: the scenic dome route across Canada; beautiful Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies

Jack of spades

[annabanannabeth]

i see your Big Drink, and i raise you: using time to measure distance

“where are you from?” “i’m from massachusetts, like 30 minutes outside boston”

“how far away do your cousins live?” “about two hours”

“the store’s not far right? these shoes aren’t that comfortable” “yeah it’s only a 10 minute walk from here don’t worry”

“you got enough gas to make it there? it’s an hour drive and it looks like your tank’s getting kinda low” “yeah i can make it, an hour and a half would be pushing it though”

i didn’t even know that this wasn’t a common thing in other parts of the world until i was talking to a tourist about culture differences and she brought it up, but apparently most cultures would say the number of kilometers/miles in all of these instances.

so yeah i think THIS is what binds all americans: using time to communicate distance

truly the most american thing is Big Drink. more than late stage capitalism, more than an unparalleled cultural focus on individualism, more than 9/11 jokes

what binds all americans together culturally is Big Drink

and you might be saying "is this fat shaming" or "but mayor bloomberg outlawed Big Drink in nyc" or "gays are so annoying about their iced coffee" or some other dumb comment but no open your minds, Big Drink isn't just sugary or caffeinated beverages

every day i see one of you hydration bitches (affectionate) on the train with a water bottle so big a toddler could drown in it. that too is Big Drink. we literally invented a bigger beer can (tall boy) in wisconsin in the 60s in the service of Big Drink

anyway i never feel more american then when i have Big Drink in my hands

[sadmezcalita]

I dont know its just so weird is it a westerner thing it's like they're inconvenienced by the mere reminder that ppl other than them exist sometimes.