Montreal City Weblog

Kate 11:51 on 2023-02-02 Permalink Reply  

• jeather 12:04 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  “As a substitute, “we tried coffee grinds, it smelled good, but it was not a success,” Sabourin added.

  Beetroot juice has also been tried, which is less corrosive than salt, “but it stained floors a lot, people were not happy,” he said.”

  Who knew.

• carswell 12:11 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  They’re not wrong but I do take issue with the following: “Some 3,000 employees and 2,200 vehicles go into action day and night every time it snows…” (emphasis mine).

  Eventually electrification will take care of the emissions. Road salt’s a different issue and, with the CAQistes in power and car addicts, especially suburban ones, holding great political clout, the necessary lifestyle changes mentioned in the article won’t be happening anytime soon.

• Kate 12:29 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  jeather, here’s a piece from 2015 about Laval using beet sugar to melt ice, although this piece says it doesn’t stain. I remember blogging about Montreal trying this out, but can’t find any postings about it in this recension of the blog, so it must have been around the same time. (There are no posts available from before October 2017.)

  Never saw anything about coffee grounds.

• Blork 12:40 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  I feel like that article was written by an AI bot. It implies that the salt issue is unique to Montreal, when in fact most cities in the high northern hemisphere salt their roads. It’s not like if Montreal switched to another abrasive then yay, the world is saved.

  Also, what does this mean? “In Montreal alone, the equivalent of 150,000 tons of salt is spread on roads and sidewalks over the winter.” What is “the equivalent” of 150,000 tons? Does that mean SOMETHING ELSE is spread that would be the same as 150,000 tons of salt? Why not just say “In Montreal alone, 150,000 tons of salt are spread…”

  And what about this one? “According to Barbecot, the city should simply use less salt, but that would require changing “the way we live” by limiting urban sprawl and driving less. / “That’s a societal choice,” he said. / In the streets, locals do not seem ready to embrace such a massive shift.”

  Well, yeah, but this implies it’s just a matter of saying “OK, no more urban sprawl!” and all those sprawling suburbs will just melt into the earth and their residences will be magically teleported to condos in Griffintown. Oh, if only we had that magic button! Plus “In the streets, locals do not seem ready to embrace such a massive shift” implies that IN THE STREETS OF MONTREAL, people don’t want to stop urban sprawl. Um, no, it’s the sprawlers who don’t want to stop urban sprawl!

  Chat GPT article FAIL.

• CE 13:05 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  This is content farm writing. I’ve known people who work for these places. They find click-baity topics and churn out articles on them which are sold around to different properties, sometimes with minor changes so Google thinks they’re different stories. They’re written to maximize SEO and are vague enough that they can be published over and over for years. Editing is minimal, if it happens at all which is why you see all those weird sentences and structures that a good copy editor would weed out. Sadly, a lot of what you read on the internet is made up of this stuff. It exists to get you on websites where you’ll then be redirected to “native advertising” which is just sponsored content that looks enough like a news story or editorial that you won’t really notice that you’re being sold something.

• carswell 13:23 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  The original French article (on Yahoo! and with no mention of AFP):
  https://fr.news.yahoo.com/montr%C3%A9al-co%C3%BBt-environnemental-ramassage-neige-051215903.html?guccounter=1

• Blork 13:28 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  @CE, yes, exactly. And even if this one wasn’t written by an AI bot (probably wasn’t, I was just making a joke) it’s just a matter of time (and not much) before such content farming is totally in the realm of such bots.

• carswell 13:30 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  The only mention of equivalency is in reference to the length of the streets and sidewalks being equivalent to the distance between Montreal and Beijing. So the English article is sloppily translated (maybe an attempt to cover for salt being measured here in metric tons?).

• Kate 13:54 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  Oh dear. OK, will look out for these in future.

  I sort of thought Barron’s was legit, but I don’t know that much about business publications (obviously).

• mare 14:29 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  @Blork ‘equivalent of salt’ because AFAIK they try to not use NaCl (table salt) too much because it’s bad for concrete and we have enough bad concrete already.
  From a casual internet search I found roadsalt can be Calcium Chloride (CaCl2), Magnesium Chloride (MgCl2) Potassium Chloride (KCl) or some combination of any or all of these as well. It depends if it’s used preventative, before an ice storm or snow, or has to melt existing hard ice and also what temperature. I think that when it’s very cold, NaCl works best.

  @kate Coffee grounds were used in our park on a corridor of ice between the hockey rink and a skating circle because it’s less abrasive as sand for the skates but still ‘dulled’ the slipperiness of the ice for crossing pedestrians. (Info from leaflets stapled to trees, I’ve no idea if it worked well.)

• Blork 14:40 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  @mare, road salt is still salt. The problem is not “what equivalent is being used.” The problem is the pointless use of the word “equivalent.” As Carswell points out, the original French version just flat out says “150,000 tons of salt” (no “equivalent”). Specifically: Uniquement pour la ville de Montréal, ce sont 150.000 tonnes de sel qui sont étalées sur les routes et les trottoirs au cours de l’hiver.

  So: sloppy translation.

• Blork 14:48 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  Regarding coffee grounds and beet sugar, that falls into the “be careful what you wish for” category. Given the scale of road salting across North America (and elsewhere), you can’t change it all to bio materials, nor would you want to. They’re potentially useful in small scale situations here and there, but not at large scale.

  It’s a bit like all the folks who think biofuels solve all environmental problems. No, they only solve political problems regarding oil drilling and trade, and to some extent solves some environmental problems around drilling sites. But you’re still burning stuff and creating greehhouse gases. And while the world is full of hungry people, there you are growing massive amounts of edible plants to be used as fuel for cars instead of food for people.

  That’s not just posturing. During the brief biofuel boom a decade or so ago, vast stretches of the US mid-west were used to grow corn for biofuels. As a result, the price of corn around the world spiked, which caused a lot of problems in places like Mexico where corn is a food staple.

• Andre W 15:02 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  The piece’s author is a trainee journalist — and it’s her first for AFP (according to her Twitter), produced in Paris. She probably never considered it would be held to such high standards, or that it would get a middling translation by AFP.
  That said, it snows in parts of France, and that could have been an easy add for some contrast or comparison.

• Blork 16:09 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  I give a lot of latitude for trainee writers. In this case the culprits seem to be the lack of good editing and bad translation. Unfortunately, when it comes to content creation “trainee” often just means “underpaid” and they don’t even get properly trained (i.e., they don’t get proper editing and mentorship).

• Jake 17:18 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  I really don’t understand some of the criticisms of this piece from the commenters on here.

  This is an interesting, original, story that involved real reporting. Clearly, the writer did multiple interviews, which is not something that AIs can do, nor something that “content farms” (if such things still exist) do.

  Yes, there are some issues with the translation — the switch from metric tonnes to the “equivalent” of Imperial tons is an odd one– and this is written primarily for an audience in France and other francophone countries outside Quebec, which seems to have caused some confusion here (there may not be a lot of outlets in Canada that publish AFP stories, but it is the world’s third largest news agency, after Reuters and the AP).

  AFP does excellent work and its correspondents in Canada are probably the highest-paid journalists in the country. Barron’s is a fine magazine that publishes decent reporting — much of what it publishes is behind a hard paywall and it appears to be operating with a business model based around the idea that people will pay for original, quality reporting.

• carswell 18:59 on 2023-02-02 Permalink

  Couldn’t agree more, Andre W and Jake. The original article is a decent if lightweight overview of snow removal in the city and some of the issues it raises and the author appears to have done some legwork, getting actual quotes from a city official, a prof and a “snow man.” I’m sure readers in France will have learned a thing or two. Here, though, column inches of verbiage yet next-to-no discussion of the relevant issues raised.

  FWIW I’ve often seen AFP-credited articles in English-language North American publications.