City
Morning Brew: December 23rd, 2008
Photo: "Cellist at Spadina station" by Miguel Navarrete, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
If you're driving along in this winter mess, and you hit black ice, spin out, and strike a bus shelter, utility box, or city owned tree, should you be held responsible and be expected to pay for the damages? OPP commissioner Julian Fantino wants individuals (not insurance companies) to pay up when unsafe driving results in single vehicle crashes during adverse conditions. If this were to pass into law, I think it'd be difficult to police. The number one excuse would be "a driver cut me off and I had no choice..." but to plow into the snow bank and take out the parking meter.
A missing Hamilton-area woman was discovered by a search dog three days after her disappearance - buried in snow and barely clinging to her life. It's rather miraculous that she made it through the ordeal. I'm still not entirely clear how she ended up in the predicament though.
Businesses along Bloor St. between Avenue Rd. and Church St. are dealing with their second consecutive holiday season of construction fence mayhem. The city's revitalization project has hit a few unexpected snags that have caused delays (water main issues, telephone line issues, and perhaps a little government bureaucracy), leaving shop owners battling to keep their businesses alive.
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Detroit has been siphoning and drinking Canadian water without paying for it since 1964. And it's expected that they will be allowed to continue to do so, with the public being offered the opportunity to "comment" on their proposed exemption until January 31st, 2009. I guess it's a fair deal... since we've been helping ourselves to their industrial pollution for even longer.
Cabbagetown residents are looking seriously at the possibility of pursuing a project that could result in a number of neighbourhood homes converting to geothermal heating and cooling, relatively affordably. They need a wealthy sponsor, and for the landscape to be deemed suitable before this can be realized.
Discussion
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If Fantino's hare-brained plan passes, should we all expect a significant cut in our insurance premiums? The man clearly doesn't have enough to do. Redesigning uniforms and police cars, catching speeders on his own...maybe OPP chief should be a part-time job?
And the city does NOTHING about it.
For this reason, the province has insurance policies to pay for damages resulting from its own negligence. Good luck to drivers suing the province for compensation for their damages, though. That's when the province brings forth a police "expert" who, despite the fact that they weren't around to actually witness anything, swears to the fact that the driver must have been driving too fast.
Furthermore, it's already common practice among police to report those accidents they deem "preventable" to the drivers' insurance companies. This leads to another common practice among insurance companies: raising those drivers' rates to the extend that they pay several times over what the actual damages would have been.
Anybody know where I can find a copy of Julian Fantino's accident record?
As to geothermal heating - like all "green" technology it is unaffordable and the permitting process is a nightmare. Ethanol isn't economically viable at 140/barrel oil and windfarms are set up solely for the subsidies. Greenpeace and all other enviro freaks just want mass genocide, their green technology is a fraud and will always will be thanks to 2nd law of thermodynamics. Easy way to tell if people want genocide or people with a better environment is whether they support nuclear power on a scale larger than France. If not, they just want the extinction of 95%+ of the population.
Enwave works thanks to the topography of our part of Lake Ontario (very deep very near shore), and is awesome, but is very location specific. Green tech just doesn't scale, of which Enwave and geothermal are two examples.