City
Morning Brew: January 19, 2009
Photo: "Who, me?" by a_mandolin, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Doors closing opening. While the train's in motion! And one rider nabbed video of the debacle. Now that's a good reminder to not lean on the doors.
Toronto is putting the finishing touches on its PanAm Games bid, and is touting the associated projects as good for the economy, but not everybody is buying it. Unbridled optimism for the games seems a bit unwise while Vancouver struggles to build the Olympic Village. Not to mention we haven't exactly won the games yet, and until we do there won't be one penny of economic stimulus from them.
The latest contract offer at York U - which the union has said it doesn't like - will be voted on by the union today. And after this offer is rejected they'll be back to the bargaining table, I suspect, just in time for York to cancel the rest of the school year.
After glossy dreams of street tacos, kebabs and other ethnic delights were squashed by City Hall Bureaucracy I kind of lost track of what was going on with the ethnic food carts. Well now the city is accepting applications, and potential vendors are crying foul thanks to the costs and fees that they say are outrageous. Getting started can run nearly $45k, not counting food costs, which means you better be sure you're gonna sell a lot of empanadas.
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Toronto police raided a west end home looking for drugs. They found cocaine, weapons and... and alligator. No word yet if it was a boots or purse business as the front for the drug trade.
Apparently the fish are hungry on Lake Simcoe, much to the delight of a Unionville man and his daughter. The fishing huts are around +20C, so it may be the next best thing to deep sea fishing off the Florida coast this time of year.
Hey, did you notice we've been getting a lot of snow? At least it warmed up yesterday, but the white stuff outside just keeps on a coming, potentially at record levels. Oh, and it's made for a big mess on the roads.
After basking in the Argentinian sun for a few weeks, Jerrold is back in town, so he'll be handling the Morning Brew again tomorrow. Unless the cold and snow ran him right back out of town.
Discussion
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Re: Food cart red tape: I'm so tired of this. It's embarrassingly overly paranoid, and makes us look like idiots.
They SHOULD just host videos on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-LjnkBm2s
What is different is that the train is 30 feet above the ground.
We're getting a new video player in March. We do host a lot of stuff on YouTube at youtube.com/CitytvToronto. The TTC story will be posted later this morning.
Want to see what a REAL selection is?
http://www.streetgrub.com/faq
Take a look at this database of some of New Yorks' streetfood.
Remember, New York is the city where Rudy Giuliani cracked down on pandhandlers, turnstile jumping, jaywalking, and instituted a dictator-like approach on all aspects of citylife.
And despite putting immense pressure on various businesses, they left food the hell alone.
2) 45K to sell food? How hard is it to pick 100 spots to put vendors on, charge just as much as a hot dog vendor's stand, let them sell and then inspect?
Its just like the insane taxi license fees. We need city politicians who possess more brain cells than a CUPE 3903 member.
With media (mainstream and blogs) in this market being as zealous as anywhere on the planet (think rats in Chinatown and the blame many tried to associate with Toronto Public Health), and law suits more frequently being a first resort for people who feel wronged, it's no wonder the city is putting forward a program that'll cover its ass.
And $45,000 doesn't seem like an excessively large start up cost for a business that will likely see profits of 10 to 20 times that investment over a 10-15 year period, especially considering the limited number of permits for competition that will be issued.
The real issue will be the need for operators to prepare food in a restaurant kitchen that is already inspected by public health. So what we will likely see are established restaurants that can afford the start up cost setting up food carts.
So our dream of delicious street tacos will in fact be more like "Pickle Barrel On the Go".
A hot dog for $2.50 doesn't sound so bad now does it?
What would we, the citizens, get out of it? A monorail leading to Downsview Park?
Actually, what's sad is that everyone needs to have their own custom video player, and that each one is based on a crummy, proprietary technology like Windows media (not cross-platform at all) or Flash (incredibly poorly ported).
Not everyone who wants to access online content is using a 32-bit Windows desktop, or even a Mac. Flash still has major instability issues with 64-bit Linux, not to mention consoles (PS3 and Wii have ancient Flash players) and most mobile devices (nothing at all).
At least using YouTube makes your content accessible to some platform-specific players, like mplayer and the iPhone's YouTube player.
When HTML 5 puts video support in the browser, will all this madness finally end?
If the ratification vote fails, York won't cancel the year. Even if they didn't lose their provincial funding, they'd have to refund around $300 million in tuition. Given that York and CUPE differ by only about $3 million a year, that doesn't make sense. (Also, in York's list of reasons that CUPE should sign they never threaten to cancel the year. They say that the summer term classes are in jeopardy, but say nothing about the fall/winter.)
As for Paul being pissed with CUPE - I'm pissed with York, myself. 80 days of strike and York has agreed to meet for an entire 7 days and only improved their offer on a $66 million/year contract by half a million dollars. Their entire strategy was to wait CUPE out because a) some of CUPE's members can't afford a long strike and b) they know that the undergrad students will come back anyway. (A decrease in applications? That just means they'll decline fewer people.)
So by that logic, am I going to have a shitty experience and get food poisoning if I go any other restaurant where the owner works less that 70% of the time?
Badbhoy, the point of the rule is to make sure that the same thing that's happened to hotdog vendors and taxis doesn't happen to these new vendors. Basically most licenses get swept up by a handful of people so that limits the opportunities for less monied people to start their own business. Instead the license holders just lease them out to poor saps and pay them as little as possible while collecting the profits.