Blog

Road tolls are a barrier to complete streets

I took my bike out of hibernation yesterday and rode from my home in Kitchener to the University of Waterloo. The commute was refreshing, after a season of being beholden to the bus schedule. Along the way, I stopped off at the bank and ran a couple errands in uptown Waterloo. This is the kind of …

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How strong is your keychain?

Password strength is always relevant, with security vulnerabilities being exploited all the time. Nobody is immune to attacks: within the past 9 months,  Twitter, ABC Australia, Yahoo, and LinkedIn have all had their passwords leaked. Of course, there are many factors at play beyond the strength of …

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A cost-of-living tax system

Taxes are an exercise in income redistribution that every society goes through. It's a way to level the paying field and invest in the public good. But the system we have in Canada is terribly over-complicated, with loopholes that favour the rich. When filing your taxes becomes so time-consuming …

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The West ain't what it used to be

The role of language in constructing a worldview has always interested me. Terms like "Western society" and "the global North" are common ways to juxtapose the lifestyles of rich people with an often romanticized notion of Noble Savagery. "Our Western culture focuses so much on excessive …

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