The city has paid out thousands of dollars over damage caused by snow clearing mishaps – $700,000 over six years, according to this piece. And this is only for issues caused by its own workers. Damage caused by contractors is not covered by the city.
Updates from December, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Quebec health officials are worried about avian flu, although this piece also mentions other communicable diseases at a time when vaccination is under attack.
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Kate
The SPCA is overwhelmed with pet surrenders at a time of year when there are typically fewer animals being given up.
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Kate
I was going to do this in the new year, but it can’t wait: this blog will no longer direct a feed to X. I’ve just deleted my account on ifttt which linked the feed to X.The content on X will remain there for a little while, as I decide what to do with it, but will no longer be updated.
Posts will continue going to Bluesky, and there’s an RSS feed of the posts as well as the comments for people who prefer to roll their own. Links to those feeds are also permanently available down the sidebar in the website version of the blog, which remains its primary home as always.
Ian
Good for you. Xitter is a cesspool. At my place of work we are also abandoning them, and will probably switch to Bluesky. Are you still on Meta?
Kate
The blog was never on Facebook for long, and hasn’t been for years. It’s never been on any other Meta property.
Tux
Kate, I urge you to join the Fediverse. kolektiva.social is a decent server that’s got some Montreal area folks on it – there are many other servers to choose from too.
Kate
Tux, I created a Mastodon account for the blog in February 2023.
Every time I posted a link to a new blog post, the blog was inundated by so many bots that it went 503 and couldn’t be reached, sometimes for an hour or more.
I don’t know why this happened, but it was bad for the blog so I stopped it.
I do have the Enviromontreal account on both Bluesky and Mastodon, although I can’t promise to post every day. But I put any relevant local environment news on both feeds. That’s different – they don’t call back to a WordPress blog but are simply ongoing posts of media links with little or no commentary.
MarcG
Anyone interested in the Mastodon issue can follow this Github issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20188
Nathaniel
Good for you!
Ian
@Marcg that looks precisely right, good to know.
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Kate
A bulk carrier ship is stuck in the river off Verchères, and the Coast Guard is trying to free it.
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Kate
The Rialto theatre is 100 years old.
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Kate
“I am still ready to pay Wikipedia $1 billion if it changes its name to Dickipedia,” says Elon Musk.
This makes me so angry. Musk is now virtually in control of the most powerful nation state on the planet, and he wants to buy and fuck up Wikipedia like he did Twitter – just to show he can.
I sent Wikipedia a donation not long ago, but I’ve bumped them some more money today and you should too, if you ever use it. It’s a pathetic gesture in the face of Musk’s billions, but it is what we can do.
MarcG
Thanks for the reminder, Kate. I meant to make a donation yesterday but forgot.
Ian
Let’s see the money first, ol’ Scrooge McDork made similar dick-wagging overtures about other things in the past. In any case, welcome to the new administration – Trump’s sovereignty trolling, Musk’s broligarch shenanigans… the US is now Troll Nation™
EmilyG
I wish Elon Musk would go away.
I hope for a day when global society has reached a point where large parts of humanity aren’t affected by one rich guy’s whims.Nicholas
Because the Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, it doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to sell itself if a very high offer comes along. Real ones remember when he offered the UN $6 billion if it made a plan to solve world hunger, which it did, and then he reneged. They also remember that people who are really secure with themselves and rich really really care about what other people think of them, and sometimes that’s a thing money can’t solve, even if you’re obsessed with it. When you can’t control something so someone, you make fun of it.
Janet
Glad to hear other people donate to Wikipedia too. But then folks on this list are the type of people who care.
dhomas
On Christmas Eve, Elon tweeted that we should stop donating to “Wokepedia” (https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871443771424116954).
I decided right then and there that I would be donating to Wikipedia.Seriously, fuck this guy. I used to make excuses for him in the past up until around when Covid hit. Until that point, I thought that, despite his shenanigans (which I considered rich guy eccentricities), he was a net positive on society with his contributions to the popularity of EVs and space exploration. Since then, he has tipped the scales into net negative. He’s really approaching caricature comicbook supervillain status now. He needs to go away. He is the definition of an oligarch at this point. (I really like the “broligarch” term Ian used, actually)
For anyone else donating, keep in mind that donations to Wikimedia Canada are tax deductible: https://www.wikimedia.ca/2021/03/21/wikimedia-canada-receives-charity-status/
EmilyG
Donated.
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Kate
This kind of story has been a theme for a few years now: a disused school has been rented at a favourable rate for years to community groups, but now the CSSDM wants its premises back and there’s nowhere the groups can afford to move to. This version is happening in Ahuntsic right now.
If you wrote a satire of Quebec politics showing a food bank being evicted in favour of a centre de francisation, it would be criticized as Quebec‑bashing, but in this case it’s true.
The province, or the city, needs to make premises available to groups like this.
Update: Thirteen organizations are refusing to leave.
Uatu
Gotta keep people from starving en anglais. That’s what’s most important.
Ian
Welp, they’re refusing to leave.
« Oui, on nous demande de quitter à 17 h aujourd’hui. Non, on ne partira pas. » Évincés par le Centre de service scolaire de Montréal (CSSDM), treize organismes communautaires du quartier Ahuntsic, à Montréal, ont refusé de plier bagage vendredi, faute d’autres locaux où s’installer.
Good for them.
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Kate
It’s an odd weekend coming up, socially speaking – sandwiched between the excesses of Christmas and New Year’s. Media that usually list weekend suggestions are going instead to New Year’s Eve and its parties. Also an open and closed.
Instead, the weekend is likely to host some freezing rain and ongoing smog.
Ian 21:13 on 2024-12-27 Permalink
While I was briefly living in Little Burgundy in 2001, a sidewalk plow took out a fire hydrant in front of my place. I wondered who would be on the hook for that. In the Southwest it was a running joke that all the sidewalk jockeys were drunk, but it wasn’t entirely a joke.
Living back in Mile End a few years later, a sidewalk plow took out my car’s side mirror. 311 basically told me to forget about it unless I wanted to go to court about it, and even then, good luck.
Kate 00:19 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
Was there a geyser when the hydrant was hit?
Nicholas 00:12 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
I’m surprised the amount is that low. Given how narrow the sidewalks are, and all the stuff on the sidewalk and the street, and the rushed timetables, I’d have figured it was in the millions per year.
Ian 00:40 on 2024-12-28 Permalink
The sidewalk plows are all contract and so is most of the alley and residential street clearing. I’d be interested to see the breakdown.
@Kate it happened overnight so I don’t know, but there was a lot of ice – so probably. I’m sure it was a heck of a shock to the chenillette driver when he hit it full tilt.