Rue Merlot

For building things. Against decline.

[Joe Bishop-Henchman 🗽💸⚖️🚆 @jbhenchman]

Russia complains about alleged biolabs in other countries meanwhile they're synthesizing airborne plague

[Eddy Elmer 🇨🇦 🏳️‍🌈 🇩🇰 📸 @Eddy_Elmer]

CBC Marketplace: The dangers of e-bikes and e-scooters

"It's on riders to follow the rules of the road." Good luck with that. I was walking across the bridge the other day and a person was traveling at very high speed, weaving between the bike lane and the pedestrian lane, with no care in the world that seniors and a person with a baby stroller were right in front of them. Being a pedestrian now feels like playing dodgeball.

https://t.co/AAe0t2giXC

[Rue Merlot @EtRueMerlot]

@akhivae @stillvesterge A high school friend who went to Ottawa joined a sorority; it seemed similar to Western's (the aesthetics of an American org, but smaller and disconnected from actual campus life)

Mac had at least one frat, but... it wasn't people who were popular in high school joining iykwim

[Joseph Steinberg @jbsteinberg]

Higher immigration would be a tremendous economic boon if we refocused the system to attract high-skill immigrants, and stopped trying to plug supposed holes in the low end of the labor market and placating Quebec with more French speakers.

There should be no limits at all on immigration of high-skill people. If you have an MD or a technical PhD from a world-renowned university, you should pretty much automatically get PR. If you are a foreign student and you earn one of those degrees from a Canadian university, PR should be stapled to your diploma. Otherwise, the bar should be extremely high.

The TFW program should be shrunk back to focus solely on the agricultural sector.

Student visas should be increased again, but granted only for 4-year universities (not colleges), and there should be very tight quotas on fields of study with low earning potential. If you want to come here to study engineering at UofT, great! If you want to study business at a stripmall college, forget about it.

[Rue Merlot @EtRueMerlot]

@stillvesterge @akhivae It exists at plenty of schools here, but its nothing like the US. They just aren't a big part of campus life, and unless you're personally involved in them you might not even know your school has them

(But definitely a non-zero amount of skeeze in the ones that do exist)

[constans @constans]

Apparently this guy was ranting and raving in the train before he stabbed someone

I’ve always said that 99% of crazy ppl in the subway are harmless. But we don’t know who the 1% is and the police need to stop giving crazed people the “benefit of the doubt”. Immediate removal

[Jamie Sarkonak @sarkonakj]

Never forget that superior court judges, like Murray, hold their seats on the condition of good behaviour. They are removable.

You know what's not good behaviour? Praising drug trafficking. This kind of contempt for basic order can't come from a judge.

[Murtaza Hussain @MazMHussain]

Fukuyama says he has been asked “several times a week for the past three decades” whether he regrets his famous End of History book by people who haven’t read it. Brutal:

[Nicole @nicolegelinas]

Ebikes and other e"devices" have added to existing danger, not subtracted from it, on the streets. And for no purpose other than that a few people and two commercial interests want to go fast.
https://t.co/yaigHyzzPE

[Keith Humphreys @KeithNHumphreys]

I'm glad population aging combined with less violent crime among the young is shrinking the prison population. But don't misread me: I agree with @Rafa_Mangual that it is a failure of duty to let an offender walk dozens of times until they do something too horrific to ignore. We can incarcerate very dangerous people like this and still shrink the prison system over the next decade.
https://t.co/taEIKSWEvN

[Cestui Que Takes @CestuiQueTakes]

Even if the BC Court of Appeal tosses this acquittal, Parliament should use the notwithstanding clause here, as a sign of its commitment to a sane Canada.

[PhillyCaralho @CaralhoPhilly]

Personally, I think it's bad to be a leftist that advocates for public transit to both be defunded and be a de facto free crime zone that anyone can do anything on

[Keith Humphreys @KeithNHumphreys]

The prison population shrank over the past 15 years. Over the next 15 years, it's going to shrink a lot more. Shawn Bushway, Jason Robey, and I explain why in our new paper in Annual Review of Criminology.
https://t.co/sf1njmEYln

[Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman]

Prisons are significantly safer for their occupants than is the outside world. This is in some substantial part because they are heavily surveilled.

https://t.co/dY1lcxh0Am

[Rue Merlot @EtRueMerlot]

@akhivae Working in healthcare is soul crushing overall; and other parts of the public sector (PSE, civil service) tend to be a lot more pleasant

But at the same time, the fact that there are real stakes does lead to dealing with less BS of other forms, so I've always ended up back

[Rue Merlot @EtRueMerlot]

@akhivae Which is even weirder because I've also mostly worked with psychiatrists and they tend to be above average chill on stuff like that, and often tell patients to call them by their first name. I haven't worked at CAMH specifically though

[Rue Merlot @EtRueMerlot]

@akhivae I'm about 10 years in healthcare both clinical and non-clinical, across 3 different research hospitals, and I've never been corrected while calling physicians by their first names in every (non patient facing) interaction

[Rue Merlot @EtRueMerlot]

@akhivae This was in Ontario?

Research hospitals don't really have that many MD-PhDs, and while you might get corrected for Mr over Dr (where its not just a title, but a clarification you're not misunderstand the role) nobody cares if you're using their first name

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Our default assumption should be that it will, or has, but we won't hear about it.

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

The safety data for Waymo gets better and better.

Comparison w/ human drivers on rate of crashes with serious injury:

Latest data: 270M miles, 20X better
Mar 2026: 170M miles, 13X better
Before that (forget exactly when): 10X better