Answering the Questions Nobody Asks Urbanists

Published at 20:00 on 25 August 2026

These are my answers to the questions asked in this video.

Do you own a car?

Yes, a small pickup truck (19 year old Toyota Tacoma).

Why a car?

I like exploring wild places and there is not much transit service to the backwoods. I seldom use my vehicle for in-city trips (basically, only when transporting large, awkward items).

Rentals? Car share?

Used to, before I bought the truck. They can be a good option.

Is car-free living a sacrifice?

Mostly not. It saves a significant amount of money! And urban driving is often stressful and unpleasant. I lived without a personal motor vehicle for about 10 years. What made me return to car ownership was the desire to spend more time camping in the woods.

Cycling?

Yes. It is my default means of getting around. Has been for most of my life, since I was a child.

Transit?

Yes. Typically when the streets are icy and treacherous (which doesn’t happen often in Vancouver, but occasionally does). Or when the trip is unusually long or unusually late at night.

Kids?

Don’t have ’em. As a kid, we were in a suburban car-centric family, but once one car was in the shop and Dad had driven the other car to work and Mom decided to take us into Chicago for the day. Commuter rail to city buses, worked just fine. And this was in the 1970s, during the peak of the urban decay era.

Can you be a good urbanist and own a car?

Yes, I think so. Mostly giving up my interest in the outdoors would be, as Reece put it, living a less fulfilled life because of ideology.

Catalyzing experiences?

When I was about six years old, my family took a day trip into Chicago on a weekday (it must have been one of those teacher-training days when there is no school). On the return trip to the suburb we lived in, we got caught in traffic. I thought something was seriously wrong, but my parents explained that this was a normal thing called “rush hour” and most of the people I saw in the cars around me drove in traffic like this twice a day. It was at that point that I decided I wanted to have as little to do with car dependency as possible.

Why the pushback?

Most people grow up in car-dependent households and most people do not question the norms of the culture they grew up in. Plus North Americans are heavily propagandized that cars equal freedom. A logical examination of the facts often concludes the opposite, but again, most people do not question the norms of the culture they grow up in.

About Hasan Piker

Published at 09:31 on 25 August 2026

I think the best way to think of the guy is as the Rush Limbaugh of the left. Or perhaps the Joe Rogan of the left. Both things that many Democrats have wished for, for many years. And now that they have it, they are complaining.

Of course he says things that sometimes don’t play well in Peoria. He’s an entertainer, out to entertain his audience. He’s not a politician, out to win office. And yes, he’s an entertainer, not a serious political analyst. Just like Limbaugh and Rogan.

He spends a huge chunk of most days, on average about seven hours, streaming on Twitch. He doesn’t have a script; it’s just one long stream-of-consciousness rant. So of course sometimes some things come out of his mouth that he probably shouldn’t have said. The only surprise is that it doesn’t happen even more often.

So far as the quote that is causing all the recent brouhaha, here it is:

If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action, not against the State of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.

I don’t know how people don’t recognize how dangerous this predicament is, how dangerous this is for Jews.

You’re running around basically tying your entire identity to a country that inevitably will be seen as Jewish Isis, and you’re saying, as Jews, this is all we care about. You’re making antisemitism worse.

Not, overall, an explicit call for violence against Jews. Sure, if you parse it out and think about it, it does carry the at least the whiff of an assertion that if Jews stand by Israel, they deserve what is coming to them. But, critically, it stops short of explicitly saying that.

And yes, there is a bad history behind such insinuations. Hitler once said:

If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

Still, if you leave a bundle of $100 bills on the dash of an unlocked car parked in a questionable neighbourhood, and come back some hours later to find it missing, saying that it was only to be expected that your money vanished is not the same thing as saying that you deserved it and the thief did nothing wrong.

This is, in other words, consistent with my thesis above that he is an entertainer who streams for a huge chunk of his waking hours and who sometimes (and inevitably) lets loose something that looks bad out of rhetorical context, and this case bad in historical context. Not so consistent with the one that he’s a left-wing extremist slavering for the blood of his adversaries, a latter-day Pol Pot or Mao Zedong.

Which is not to say that Abdul El-Sayed is wrong for distancing himself from Piker. The two are in entirely different businesses. Piker only has to sustain a loyal audience, and audiences need not represent the population as a whole. El-Sayed has to appeal to a swing state electorate, and, as Ronald Reagan (whatever you or I think of his politics, a highly successful politician) once observed: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Publicly distancing himself, is, in other words, probably the optimal course of action for El-Sayed.

The Changing Face of Quebec Nationalism

Published at 13:48 on 23 August 2026

Quebec nationalism has historically been identical to Quebec separatism, the quest for Quebec to become a fully separate and sovereign nation. This seems to be changing, most likely into some set of guarantees and protections for Quebec to exist within Canada as a distinct society.

On the latter point, as much as there has been controversy attached to that phrase, any honest assessment of the situation has to conclude that Quebec is already a distinct society, with its own unique majority language, legal traditions, religious proclivities, and history. It’s mostly arguing over how (and how much) to acknowledge this.

But I digress; back to the changing face of Quebec nationalism. The Parti Québécois has already announced that, if it wins the coming provincial elections, the new PQ government will not hold a sovereignty referendum, at least not so long as Donald Trump remains president of the USA.

It is not hard to understand why. As unpleasant as it is for Canada to have to confront Trump, it would be even worse for Quebec to have to do so alone. A united Canada is larger, more powerful, and more likely to prevail. A bigoted fascist government will have even less respect for Quebec than it does for English-speaking Canada (at least English-speaking Canada shares a common language and legal heritage).

It’s not just hypothetical, either. One of the reasons Carney walked away from the trade deal is that the Trump regime was insisting that Canada abandon its commitment to bilingualism and protections for the French language.

The Rules of Democratic Party Primary Politics

Published at 15:58 on 22 August 2026

So far as I can determine, these are the main rules of Democratic Party primary politics, according to that party’s ruling gerontocracy:

  1. If a left candidate runs as an independent or in a third party, the left is at fault for splitting the electorate in the general.
  2. If a left candidate runs within the Democratic Party via the primary process, the left is at fault for attempting a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.
  3. If a centrist candidate prevails in the primary but fails because of a lack of support from the left in the general, the left is at fault for failing to support the party’s candidate.
  4. If a leftist candidate prevails in the primary but fails because of a lack of support from the centre in the general, the left is at fault for fielding a candidate with insufficient centrist appeal.

So It’s a Trade War… for Now

Published at 21:51 on 21 August 2026

This is Trump we are talking about negotiating with, so none of this is a surprise. And it also won’t be a surprise if, in a week or three, Trump goes into TACO mode, suddenly becomes a lot more reasonable, and a deal gets made after all.

Also, if Trump is being unreasonable (and I have no reason to doubt Carney’s assertion that he was), the best way to deal with it is the best way to deal with any bully: by showing strength. Whatever the short-run costs of that strategy will be, they will pale in comparison to the long-term costs of failing to show strength.

Back from a Long Camping Trip

Published at 22:00 on 8 August 2026

Can’t really call it a “road trip” because a lot of ferry segments were involved. Per which, I learned about this site, which I found extremely useful when all sailings of interest were fully booked. I simply entered the list of timings and routes which were suitable, and within five minutes got texted that someone had cancelled their reservation on one, meaning it was now up for grabs.

I also managed to get in a full tour of one of the many limestone caves on Vancouver Island. This is something I have been wanting to do ever since learning some years ago that there were limestone caves on the Island. Riverbend Cave is not a particularly large cave, nor are its formations world-class, but what I found noteworthy was the great variety of them (this one cave contains most of the classic formation types, including some rare ones like boxwork and unusual ones like helictites). Plus it is a wild cave (no lighting or tourist trails), so you get a more authentic caving experience. There is sadly, as is often the case, some vandalism in the parts of the cave closest to the mouth, but after the first serious crawlway, everything is mostly intact, including a fair number of very nice soda straws. Finally, the limestone itself the cave is formed in is unusually attractive, with the appearance of a veined marble in many places.

COVID-19 Excess Death Update

Published at 08:41 on 25 July 2026

Back in 2021, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the excess COVID-19 death rate in the USA, compared to Canada. I came to the conclusion that it was around 60%, at the time around 380,000 Americans.

Given that most of that was caused by conspiracy-mongering aided and abetted by Trump fascists, it seems fair to give them the credit for the deaths. Similar logic is used to add numbers to Stalin’s and Mao’s death counts, after all. They are so high not because either dictator directly and deliberately ordered the execution of so many victims, but because of policy choices (primarily agricultural policy) that led to such deaths more indirectly (via famine). Almost nobody gripes about this accounting being unfair to Stalin or Mao.

Anyhow, now that the pandemic has settled down into a routine global endemic disease situation, similar to colds and flu, I figured a retrospective was in order.

The data are here and a quick look shows that although the raw numbers are higher, the basic ratio is almost exactly the same: roughly 60% of the deaths in the USA are excess deaths compared to Canada. That ends up raising Trump’s COVID body count to around 740,000.

Buntzen Lake Parking Reservations Suck

Published at 08:29 on 10 July 2026

They suck because a) they are free, and b) there is no easy way to cancel. So what happens is that people who think they might want to go make reservations well in advance, just in case, and then often become no-shows as their plans change. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no real downside… for them, that is.

The downside comes for the rest of us who like to embrace the moment. Yesterday, there were no all-day parking reservations available, despite the parking lot looking like this:

And that exercise in bureaucratic stupidity settles it: from now on, I forget about Buntzen Lake and continue past practice of just going to nearby Sasamat Lake (which has more sensible policies, and has a shuttle bus from the nearest SkyTrain station) instead.

A more reasonable situation would be paid but fully refundable reservations. Charge, say, $10 to make a reservation, then refund the $10 if you either explicitly cancel or if you show up. No-shows lose $10. The park remains free, overcrowding remains controlled, and those who make reservations have an incentive to cancel them and open up their slots to people who show up same-day.