Rents in central Montreal are going sky-high, which makes me wonder what the Régie du logement is doing with its time.
Updates from November, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Les Valoristes, who collect and redeem used cans and bottles, can now use a space borrowed from the city in the old Voyageur bus terminus. They’ve got access for two years, while the city ponders what else to do with the site; a bicycle-based delivery service also uses some of the space.
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Kate
Major networks are finally calling it.
It feels like somebody here is going to want to go out and celebrate the end of the Trump era, but who?
Chris
End? He’ll just move to Fox News and/or keep tweeting. We haven’t seen the end of him.
Kate
Yes, but he won’t have power and nobody will be obliged to listen. Big difference.
John B
I’ve heard a theory that he’ll announce his 2024 run during his concession speech, assuming he even does some sort of concession. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Kate
Five bucks says Trump will be dead by 2024.
PatrickC
It’s a relief more than a triumph, when you see that Biden won a bare 50.6% of the popular vote. Whether you can trust any poll these days is questionable, but it’s sobering to see the results of this one:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/exit-polls-president.html
Still, the relief is real.Matthew H
I dunno about dead, but five bucks says Twitter bans him in January, if not before.
Matthew H
PatrickC, Biden’s share of the popular vote is expected to grow – they’re still counting votes. From MSNBC: “If Biden ends up with around 52% of the popular vote, which is what some are projecting, it would be the second best performance by a Democratic presidential nominee in the last half-century. … he’s also a challenger running against an incumbent president. With this in mind, it’s worth emphasizing that Biden’s popular-vote win is likely to be the largest for any challenger since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s victory over then-incumbent Herbert Hoover in 1932.”
Kevin
My American neigbours have informed me they’ll be using the backyard for socially-distanced launching of soft wooden projectiles from bottles of highly-carbonated alcohol.
DeWolf
I was on St-Denis today checking out the new REV and a very happy looking guy drove by in a black sedan with an American flag attached to the window, honking his horn as we went by.
Uatu
Now that he’s not President he loses immunity from prosecution and can be sued or federally charged so most likely he’ll be in court or prison
Max
I was fully expecting to be all “rah-rah” and “par-tay” when and if this day came, but now I’m just depressed. My bullshit-o-meter has been well and truly broken. It’s frankly heart-breaking to face the fact that 40+ percent of our neighbours to the south are still die-hard full-on fucktards. I’m still hoping that the American electorate will install a Democrat majority in both the House and Senate, but it’s getting harder and harder to hold my breath. With any luck, orange-tard will be either dead or behind bars come 2024.
Fuck off and die, 2020. I’ve had my fill of you.
Tim S.
With Max. Worth noting that 10 million more people voted for Trump this time than in 2016.
I did laugh though at an email from an activist group that said “now we can go back to criticizing and protesting the US President in a normal, sane way.” Exactly.Kevin
Remember: more Americans than you can possibly believe pay no attention to politics, the world, or anything outside your county.
This SNL skit *is not a joke*
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Kate
La Presse gives complete Covid numbers for the day. There have been 1234 new cases diagnosed in Quebec over the last 24 hours, and 29 new deaths.
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Kate
Thirty years ago, a UFO was sighted over Montreal – specifically over Hotel Bonaventure. Video from CBC.
david223
I vaguely remember knowing about this, but definitely didn’t know that one of the officers on site described it at a round metallic object. That’s sort of neat.
It’s been flying under the radar with everything else going on over the past year, but the Americans have confirmed that UFOs (or UAPs – unidentified aerial phenomenon/a) are out there.
Over the past year and a half, the Americans have been declassifying materials, including incident reports and even a trio of videos, that clearly describe/depict incidents involving US military aircraft and what appear to be UAPs. This after it became known that there was a secret program tracking and assembling all these reports. They’ve now created a special Pentagon unit to investigate the incidents that were made public, and all the other hundreds of others that weren’t. https://www.space.com/ufo-sightings-pentagon-task-force.html
Don’t let the focus on equipment malfunction misdirect you, the US Senator who runs the Intelligence Committee (basically, overseeing the CIA, NSA, military intelligence, the works) said this just a few months ago, after multiple briefings on the file:
“We have things flying over our military bases and places where we’re conducting military exercises and we don’t know what it is and it isn’t ours,” Rubio said.
“Frankly, if it’s something outside this planet that might actually be better than the fact that we’ve seen some sort of technological leap from the Chinese or Russians or some other adversary that allows them to conduct this sort of activity,” Rubio said. “That to me is a national security risk and one we should be looking into.”
Who knows what that thing was in Montreal but, by now, it’s pretty clear that UAPs are real, at least as far as the US government knows and has communicated to the highest elected overseer of such matters aside from their president. Whether they come of out of an advanced research lab in Massachusetts or planet K2-18b, there’s something happening.
Kate
david, I know a man here who’s studied UFOs for years and has written a book about them, but whenever I’ve talked to him about it, or think about them, my brain shorts out a bit. Why would extraterrestrials come this far (we’re a small planet on the outer arm of a pretty ordinary galaxy – basically in the sticks, as far as the Milky Way is concerned, where, if there’s any great planetary confederacy, it won’t be around here) but, instead of making contact, are content to mess around buzzing people in cornfields? Why, now that almost everyone has a pretty good camera in the device they’re holding in their hand most of the time, are we not getting more and better pictures of them? Why does the supposed evidence so often depend on the unreliable nature of human perception and memory? And so on.
CE
Apparently planets that have regular solar eclipses like we do are pretty uncommon; someone mentioned to me that if aliens were to come to Earth, it would probably be to check that out. Probably extreme tourists, like people on Earth who go to remote places that are hard to access to see weird geological phenomena. I imagine that if they have the technology to get here, they likely have the technology to go undetected by our primitive surveillance.
Michael Black
I don’t think anyone’s denied that UFOs exist. But the phrase is about “unidentified”, not flying saucers. When I was in Vancouver in 1986, I saw somwthing one night (I can’t remember exactly what) but tge next day there was a brief story in the paper.
david225
I can’t really fathom the idea of extra-terrestrials. It’s probably some super secret tech that hasn’t filtered its way out of the labs to the Pentagon people and their briefings for the politicians. Which is probably what a bunch of these sightings are and have been over the years, at least the credible ones. But if so, that means there really are UFOs and have been all this time!
I suppose if wanted to go crazy and theorize about extra-terrestrials, I guess I could imagine an alien intelligence would send probes of some sort, like how we (well, the Americans) send missions to Mars?
david225
In fact, the best bet is that this is the tech: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30499/the-truth-is-the-military-has-been-researching-anti-gravity-for-nearly-70-years
In this form: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29232/navys-advanced-aerospace-tech-boss-claims-key-ufo-patent-is-operable
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Kate
I’m a bit late reporting this because I only found it on Facebook, but a bike ride to inaugurate the REV on St-Denis is meant to start Saturday at 11:00 in north-end Parc Jeanne-Sauvé and go southward toward Roy.
Radio-Canada talked to the mother of Mathilde Blais, killed on her bike six years ago in the St‑Denis underpass. Geneviève Laborde is delighted with the REV – and it’s refreshing to read a piece that isn’t about how much people hate it.
DeWolf
I’ve been using it a lot lately as it’s nearly all finished (except for the stretch on St-Denis between Jarry and Jean-Talon). It’s not perfect, but it’s very nice, and it’s great to have a consistent north-south route for cycling that doesn’t require a million zig-zags. And beyond its utility for cycling, it really has improved the atmosphere in the commercial district, thanks to the calmer traffic and the extra pedestrian crossings. There will be new greenery planted next spring, too.
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Kate
An 18-year-old was shot early Saturday in Rivière-des-Prairies. Nobody has been arrested.
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Kate
Radio-Canada ponders who Valérie Plante may face in the city election to take place exactly a year from Saturday. The only person to have expressed any intention is Guillaume Lavoie, whom Plante defeated in 2016 to become Projet chief, and who subsequently left the party. Several other possibilities are mentioned here, but nobody has spoken up yet.
Seb 18:31 on 2020-11-07 Permalink
Going through a name change.
https://www.tal.gouv.qc.ca/
mare 11:51 on 2020-11-08 Permalink
If apartments are not rented for a year, the landlord can ask any price they want. The Regie has no influence on that.
Apartments that were previously on AirBnb fall in that category and their owners are used to a much higher ROI, so they feel entitled to ask a high rent. If the market bears that price and they find tenants you can’t really blame them, that’s capitalism. Another upside for them is that tenants don’t stay super long —since they can find something else that’s cheaper— and are less likely to transfer their leases to someone else so the apartments are empty every x months, and available to (illegally) put on Airbnb again when tourism is back in full swing.
(I’m a landlord but have only long term tenants and they sometimes do pass on their leases, but one picks up some of these ‘tips’ on the grapevine.)