Greg Davis

There are some really neat ideas emerging about the future of cities that for me make old ideas around New Urbanism interesting again.

This Econtalk podcast episode is a great discussion around the future of inner city driverless cars and the possibilities for taking back some of the space used for today’s average car size and parking.

And this is a quote of a quote from Alex Tabarrok but is nuts. From his post explaining how Google may be one-upping Amazon and considering building a city from scratch.

The world is building more cities, faster than ever before. China used more cement in the last three years than the United States used in the entire 20th century.

Exciting times to come.

My love for RSS goes back to using Google Reader + Yahoo Pipes to do some very cool things and so I was stoked to see this feature request marked completed.

Sounds like they’ve already soft launched this:
https://blog.feedly.com/mute-filters/

Some examples of why this is useful- makes boolean search triggers possible on sites with rudimentary search functionality like Kijiji, you could pair down all kinds of feeds that have way too much noise to pay attention to like local events feeds, and this essentially compliments Google Alerts by allowing you to do the opposite of using search triggers.

I’ve always been a reluctant consumer of twitter and social media in general, with a strong preference for RSS feeds that allow for batching incoming information. This was a very practical discussion of implications of social media addiction in the business world. Apparently the average American adult between 16-64 spends 3 hours / day on social media sites! At the very least the author is spot on suggesting one of the easiest decisions to make is to at least remove social media apps from your phone..

Check out TwitRSS.me if you’re stuck wondering how to get off the Twitter escalator but not lose some great content that gets posted there.

Agree with this:

Tweet from Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias)
It’s an unfashionable view but I don’t think the rise of prestige cable drama compensates for the decline of movies.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/782608548861775872

I’m seeing some pretty good shows like Narcos, Kingdom, Sillicon Valley, and a host of other shows I hear people talking about that I haven’t checked out. The ones I’m familiar with are good tv… but aside from comedies (Sillicon Valley) I’d almost always rather see a quality movie and that’s increasingly rare in my opinion.

Why does everything always need to be either 2 hours long or 1 x 12 hours long? Vote here for 3-6 hour movie format films. Give me all of Kill Bill in one shot.

I don’t normally retweet anything and this is at the risk of being very politically incorrect (in my circles) but I think it’s important to speak out against this new climate change sinkhole of a plan from the Ontario Liberals. We do not want a repeat of the disastrous Green Energy Act. There are good and bad investments in environmental protection spending by government. To pull one recent example of something reasonable, here’s a recently announced federal government investment in ocean and freshwater science. By contrast, the Ontario climate change plan looks ludicrous.

The $7b spending is bad enough but worst part is the Maoist central planning https://t.co/gVGAOuV53m

— Ross McKitrick (@RossMcKitrick) May 16, 2016

Ross McKitrick is on the money in his ongoing analysis of spending on climate issues.

Update: Globe and Mail chimed in a week later echoing the same sentiment again. Apparently Ontario’s Auditor General estimates we’ll pay $170-billion extra in Green Energy Act premiums between 2006 and 2032, not even including these latest ideas. Can you imagine what we could do for our forests, wildlife, waterways, and fisheries, with that kind of money? Sad.