City
Morning Brew: Porter Breaks Landing Curfew, Wavedeck Hurts, 170 on the 404, Coal Phase-Out
Photo: untitled by Carl W. Heindl, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
What's happening in the GTA (and sometimes beyond):
Residents on the Toronto Islands are really upset that a Porter plane that came in after curfew (when the control tower at the Island Airport wasn't staffed) was instructed to divert to Pearson but landed at the island anyhow. In related news, the Toronto Port Authority is being accused by city councillor Adam Vaughan... of amending meeting minutes to hide certain truths.
Toronto 18 terror plotter Saad Khalid was sentenced to 14 years in prison for his involvement in the scheme. But he's been credited with 7 years because he's already served time (39 months). If I return a $1 chocolate bar to the store, why don't they refund me $2? Either our justice system is bad at math, or the world is so unfair.
The lovely Wavedeck at the foot of Simcoe Street is visually stunning but also potentially treacherous... and it has claimed its first victim already. A Toronto man is taking the City to court after he tore a tendon while walking on the flashy boardwalk.
A driver was clocked doing 170km/h on the 404 last night, and then allegedly ditched the car in Scarborough before police caught up with her. The headline ("Abandoned Car Clocked Doing 170") could use a rewrite, I think, given that all abandoned cars should be clocked at 0.
And four dirty coal-fired units running at two plants in Ontario will be shut down next year, since the province continues to bring in arguably better energy sources like gas. This brings us closer to the goal of eliminating all coal-burning plants in Ontario by 2014.
Discussion
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The truth about the province being able to close the coal plants is that the decimation of the manufacturing industry has made this possible: much less power is needed in a recession. Some silver lining. Now if humans would have stopped putting 40% of their industrial capacity to tools of warfare, we would have bought our industrial civilization another century. Alas.
Tsk tsk to Porter for breaking curfew, but there's absolutely nothing unsafe about CYTZ when the tower is closed and traffic is handled remotely. Medevac flights use it 24 hours a day, never any issues.
Oh, and that Wavedeck accident. I am surprised it took so long. This sculpture is going to look moronic for 5 icy months of the year, cordoned off and marked as unsafe. Not all that well suited to winter use, is it?
I have no sympathy for the island residents with their holier-than-thou attitude. They've also complained about many summer concerts in past years at the Docks and now no concerts are held there anymore. The waterfront, with an island airport or not, is for all citizens to enjoy and not for a select few to enjoy.
I live in Brampton and I hear planes flying by all the time, sometimes even as late as midnight but you get used to it. And the planes that land at Pearson are much larger than those that land at the island airport. The noise is noticible for about a minute or so and then it goes away.
I really wish the city would get these people to leave so we can all enjoy the islands and waterfront without having to give in to their every complaint.
I hope the island residents enjoyed Motorhead the other night...HA HA...
You live in a city. Noise means activity and action is happening in the city like it should.
When I lived on St. Clair it took a long time to get used to:
1. The streetcars
2. Planes inbound and outbound from Pearson
But I got used to it, just like I'm used to the CommunityScare activists and Island Residents whining about everything that intrudes on their tax subsidized utopia.
And Adam Vaughan is a knob.
Agree with you 100%. We shouldn't just shove airports and dumps into outlying areas, like we have shoved all our dirty industry to China.
Note that closing the coal plants doesn't means that we're reducing energy capacity... a number of smaller natural gas plants are opening up around the GTA to compensate. And unlike Nanticoke, these will all be in some GTA resident's proverbial backyard.
And we'll still be buying dirty energy from the US.
Re: Wavedeck injury... far be it for that guy to LOOK to the side and see a FLAT SIDEWALK! And has that guy never walked up a hill? Money grubbing idiot.
@jamesmallon: "Now if humans would have stopped putting 40% of their industrial capacity to tools of warfare"
You do realize our world would probably be in worse condition than it is now without the tools of warfare? Hell, technology would also be stagnant if not for the war machine.
As we saw with the trash sites in parks during the strike, Torontonians don't like it when the evidence of their wastefulness is put in front of them. Instead people in Bruce and Nanticoke produce our power out of sight out of mind. Same goes for 905ers based on what's playing out in York and Peel at the moment.
Island residents are a bunch of whiny crybabies. Expand the airport, and get rid of adam vaughn.
"You do realize our world would probably be in worse condition than it is now without the tools of warfare? Hell, technology would also be stagnant if not for the war machine."
Now that is the dumbest shit I have heard today, but rather than argue the point with you, I'll give you a challenge: go live in a war zone as a civilian, preferably as a teenage girl of an ethnic minority.
Torontonians don't even like freakin' windmills. Heaven forbid their delicate eyes must witness such atrocities.
Thankfully, though, the local opposition to new gas powerplants have been completely overridden. It is the only way to shut down the coal plants.
Given that the military developed the precursor to the internet you're arguing on, I think you don't have much of a leg to stand on in this debate. The vast sums of money that the military can throw at R&D has always had broad reaching positive (and negative, unfortunately) technology implications in the civilian world.
No one has a leg to stand on in debates involving massive changes to history. There is no way to know how the world would be had such a massive change been made in allocation of labour resources, especially since it's to an unspecified target.
Humans could still be in caves.
Humans could have a galactic empire.
Squirells could have a galactic empire.
It's a pointless debate.
Re: Wavedeck idiot,
I hope the city sues him for wasting their time and money on this ridiculous and obvious cash grab. If it was a hill in a park, would he still have tried to sue the city, most likely not! Its people like him that ruin future city projects and take the fun out of city development.
That Wavedeck lawsuit guy could lend legitimacy to his claims if he didn't wear his company URL t-shirt in every photo and interview.
And who can't go to work at a board game company with a broken leg? Unless the board game is Twister, maybe.
Your math is pretty bad Jerrold.. if you steal a $1 chocolate bar and get caught, you don't get paid $2: you give back the chocolate and pay a penalty, which in this case is halved. So you lose $1.50 instead of $2. You don't gain $2.
I know it's a funny headline but plz proofread your comments - they give the wrong impression of the justice system. Sloppy.
Internet, GPS, digital imaging, jet engines, Kevlar, silly putty, night vision, radar, microwave, thermal imaging, basic road system, modern aeronautics, highways... and a whole lot of other stuff.
And as 'Sean Galbraith' stated, no one else has the R&D capability like the military does (maybe NASA, and whadaya know... they're responsible for a lot of stuff too).
Yes war is a terrible thing, but as history has proven, because of war we've made huge advancements.
Now shush!
no pain, no gain! urk.....
War sucks, I think we can all agree on that, but that is only a modern, social revisionist interpretation. However, having said that, a strong argument can be made that it was the competition and warring factions of Europe that catapulted the Euros ahead of the Persians and the Chinese, 5-600 years ago. Had the Hapsburgs, the French, the Spanish and England not been at each other's throats, we might very well be speaking one of the Middle Eastern tongues right now. (Heck, we may even be speaking Chinese one day!)
Darwin is all around us, it's just that perhaps these days he is wearing a military uniform. I grew up on Star Trek, too, but even in shiny, utopian views of the future, war has merely moved 'off-world.'
I long for the day when war is no longer necessary, but you can only imagine what the world would look like today if Germany had got the atom bomb first or really got their U2 rockets perfected, or if Russia had gotten more of the German rocket scientists at the end of WWII....
This list goes on, but the trouble with social liberals is that they expect the world to sit around the campfire, holding hands and singing songs - as long as someone else pays for the wood and builds the fire!
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