theluketaylor

Multiple exits is a great way to protect people in the event of fire, but it's not the only one.

In the US and Canada where the 2 stairway rule is in use there has been a huge unintended downside of dictating the form of all low-ish and medium rise apartments for decades.

When you need 2 stairs the natural, efficient form is a wide building with a long central corridor with stairs at both ends. Building something that wide generally requires assembling multiple parcels of land and a long, drawn out planning process and large amount of capital investment. Small apartment buildings on a single parcel can't ever pencil out due to the space required to be dedicated to stairs.

Combine in the additional code requirement for bedrooms to have windows (for both quality of life and safety egress) and you get the vast majority of apartments having a limited number of bedrooms with windows only on one side of the living space. 3 and 4 bedroom units that could economically efficiently amortize the high per sq ft cost of kitchens and bathrooms waste an enormous amount of space, so they simply don't get built. Anyone who wants to raise a slightly larger family, live with multiple generations, or split costs with multiple roommates has no apartment options, they are forced to look at high cost, low density urban sprawl.

We currently have prescriptive requirements that dictate things like multiple stairs. We need to switch to outcome driven requirements that require fire suppression and safety over a given period based on occupancy and building size to give firefighters a big safety margin to respond. Then develop those outcomes into tested wall structures with a combination of fire suppression and prevention techniques that developers can adopt. Multiple stairwells might be part of the fire plan for a building, but it also can include things like sprinklers, concrete stairways, and automatic fire doors.

True, but even a hallucinated explanation of where things went wrong added to the context can force the model down a better path over the next few inputs.

This will catalyze efforts to build more east-west energy infrastructure here in Canada, both oil and electricity. The last time the US made a serious run at Canadian sovereignty we built the Canadian Pacific rail to connect the country end to end. The same thing will happen this time, with pipelines and HVDC grid connections.

Short term the US needs the energy we sell as they don’t have sources to replace it with. Long term the pieces are already moving into place for more O&G exports via the pacific and selling electricity to ourselves with stronger grid connections.

Our reliance on US trade will diminish slowly, then all at once.

There are dozens of local CBC news broadcasts all over the country and they all feature someone with similarly strong enunciation and clipped pauses for emphasis. She certainly has one most aggressive forms I've heard, but that's absolutely the CBC news anchor 'voice' and has been for decades. No AI trickery here, just weird Canadian public broadacaster-isms.

I'm hugely in favour of adding non-market housing anywhere it can be added, but the author declaring it a different fix to the housing crisis from zoning is naive at best. Non-market housing is subject to the exact same complex local regulations as market housing, plus all the complexity of government projects, a patchwork of subsidies, grants, and loans to get funding, and even more intense public scrutiny. Trying to get social housing done is playing an exceptionally hard game on nightmare mode.

The single lever he points out is itself a ton of local, regional, and federal regulations and laws that all need modernizing or abolishing, which is far from a simple, single lever at all.

A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note".

The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.

There is at least some truth to induced demand with new housing driving an influx of new residents, especially in cities with economic opportunity.

Just like transportation induced demand, the solution is different style of infrastructure. High capacity metros, bus lanes, and regional rail to get people out of cars and use limited transportation corridors more efficiently than single occupancy vehicles. One more lane bro doesn’t work, but adding new forms of more efficient transportation does.

New, denser housing with mid rise and high rise buildings and a mixture of unit sizes in walkable neighbourhoods with good transit access absorbs new residents and drives down housing costs for everyone. Single family sprawl doesn’t work, but density can.

We have under-built for decades, so it’s easy to misunderstand the signals. More housing gets built and prices still go up, and many people are concluding more housing just increases prices, leading to people with good intentions decrying “luxury housing”. There are plenty of nimby actors in the mix too, tossing in all sorts of misinformation and bad faith arguments, muddying the water.

The reality is areas with strong economic growth are all failing to add enough new housing and demand continues to outstrip supply, leading to higher prices. Many studies have shown even new high end housing helps manage prices, as someone rich enough upgrades, leaving their unit empty for someone else to upgrade into. That chain continues all the way down into the lower cost units, each time freeing up space someone else can afford. Large migration into a region can mess with how much prices can be affected, but studies still show even high priced new units do slow down growth in prices. Supply and demand does apply, we have just massively underestimated how far behind supply is for the demand and need to add so much more housing.

Taxing unrealized gains is a terrible idea, but I do think we need to expand the definition of realizing a gain.

0.1%ers borrowing against stocks and others assets and paying little more than minimum interest is a system-breaking loophole that has exploded the wealth gap. It needs to stop. Taxing unrealized gains isn't the fix. Leveraging an asset needs to be a realized gain.

People should be paying capital gains on the delta between book value vs the asset valuation at loan time. They are gaining from the asset appreciation to have access to more leverage and that gain should be taxable. This would re-set the book value so people don't pay capital gains multiple times on the same gain, but they shouldn't be able to defer the gain forever while using debt to avoid tax.

There should probably be a lifetime exemption of around $1 million to allow the middle class to leverage their home and other key assets in a way the richest have benefitted from for so long, but once you use up your exemption no more tax-free leverage.

> A truck and a tank have a lot in common

Maybe in 1942. Modern tanks cannot be built on highly specialized production lines that build road vehicles without years-long re-tooling. M1 Abrams tanks don't even use piston engines, they have turbines.

A older, but well documented example how specialized modern automotive production has become is the Mercedes Benz 500e. In the 90s Mercedes wanted to build a more powerful, wider version of the E class. They added 56 mm to the front fenders and discovered it wouldn't fit through the production line properly. MB contracted for Porsche to handle the low-volume 500e on a different production line.

Another option is just stick to a smaller circuit.

80% of 15A x 120V = 1.4 kW

80% of 20A x 240V = 3.8 kW

Just going from a standard 15A outlet to a 20A/240V nearly triples the amount of power, and many homes that would need a new panel for a 50A charger have room for one more 20A circuit. Cars typically spend 8-16 hrs per day stationary in their own driveway, so 3.8 kW translates into tons of range.

While 40A or 50A is nice to have, it's far from necessary.

30K would be on the higher end for air source. My install this year was 25k CDN including a lot of duct work.

40K is also on the low end for geothermal. I'm guessing you were able to trench instead of drill?

If you can afford ground source it's by far the best option in cold climates. Steady ground heat means you get the same efficiency all year round. The install can be eye-watering though.

There are many passenger vehicles with brake-by-wire, but only one I'm aware of with steer-by-wire: cybertruck

We're already there. Emmanuel Clase is under investigation for fixing pitches and can't play right now.

I don't love sports betting in general, but I really hate betting on short term events like specific pitches or a strikeout. There is way too much incentive to fix.

I'm a huge fan of the automatic balls and strikes challenge system baseball is going to adopt.

Awful calls need to be struck from the game and this should do that. Tonight my Blue Jays had a double taken away on a foul call and a ball 2 inches off the plate called a strike in the same at bat with the bases loaded. Between this and the horrible reviews last week it feels like the fix is by MLB to keep us from winning the division.

Unlike tennis where in and out have always been strictly defined and we just didn't have the technology to enforce it, baseball has always involved the human element to the strike zone and some umpire judgement on whether the pitcher hit the spot or just got lucky and what a given batter's zone is. I want some of that to stay, with catchers holding game-long discussions about the zone with umpires, and batters having their own sense of the zone.

I don't want full automatic balls and strikes, so I like the challenge. There is some new strategy on when to deploy it and who can be trusted to recognize a missed call. It leaves some room for a pitcher and catcher to work a corner over a few innings to expand little by little.