Yonge Street was designated as such in the 1790s. Bloor is equally old. If you're expecting the modern traffic level and thoroughfare status to be reflected in a name given more than two centuries ago, I'd like to know exactly how your time machine works.

And anyway, as far as I've ever been able to tell, the difference between a street and a road is that a road was probably outside the municipal limits when named. Assuming that it didn't just get designated "road" because someone on the urban planning committee was tired of "street". There's no generally respected hard-and-fast rule for anything except "crescent", "highway", and "freeway".

I expect that's pretty much what's going on: trying to determine whether William Jones has living descendants and, if so, which of them owns the property.

One wonders about the property tax records—if no one's been paying up, maybe the city could seize it for a century of back taxes without doing the detailed search.

I don't care whether we pick Standard Time or Daylight Savings Time or create a new timezone that splits the difference, but we should choose one and stick with it.

Part of the problem is that the timezone boundaries have been distorted out of their proper geographical shape by politics, so one or the other edge of each distorted timezone always has some desynchronization between wall-clock time and sun position. Which edge it is varies depending on whether ST or DST is currently in force.

Or, we could just completely decouple the wall clock from solar time and put everyone on UTC. It makes synchronizing long-distance travel and communications much easier, and if the clock happens to say "5:00PM" or "7:00AM" when the sun is high in the sky and you're eating lunch, what does that really matter? Unfortunately, there are some people who seem unable to accept that the number on the clock is arbitrary.

We already have a Canadian Governor General doing the actual job, why not just formalize it and do away eyes the crown.

The Governor General is appointed by the Crown as its representative, technically. You can't have the former without the latter.

We could move to having an elected President as head of state as well as a Prime Minister who tends to the day-to-day business of government, as some other countries like France do, but it wouldn't really change much of anything . . . except adding the trouble and expense of another federal election. Seems like a lot of work for nothing to me.

Then again, I have no Indigenous ancestry and no bad history with the Crown, and I can see why people in the Yukon might feel differently about it.

The governments involved are convinced it's a cheaper way of raising their approval rating than, y'know, actually fixing anything anyone wants them to fix.

Very few of Ford's policies seem to be evidence-driven or respectful of reality, so why should this one be any different?

But even when arguing from a practical standpoint it’s next to impossible to find a job that will hire a person with no address and possibly no government ID (need an address to get documents!)

There are ways around that part, if we cared enough to implement them. There's a street in—I think it was Italy?—that actually has no physical existence. Addresses on that street are used to give people with no permanent housing something to write on forms that ask for an address, so they can collect mail, including legal documents and government support checks, or apply for jobs. That doesn't solve the problem of living space directly, of course, but it might be enough to provide a starting point for some people. Or it would if we had enough reasonably-priced housing.

"No evidence of foul play" just means there's no proof that anyone set out to kill her on purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no evidence of negligence, although the police may not think they have enough to bring criminal charges in that vein, either. The burden of proof in a criminal court is high, and there's no point in wasting the court's time if there isn't enough evidence to convict anyone.

Civil court has a much lower burden of proof, and I hope the victim's family sues Walmart's pants off, because it really does look like there was an issue either with the equipment or with employee training that contributed to this.

We've known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.

Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That's (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).

I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They'll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.

Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We'd be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn't have that specific issue.

Would everyone who is surprised by this please raise your hand? . . . That's what I thought.

Y'know what's worse? When there's no dot. Worse than that, it's an undotted directory used to store a single config file. Ugh, unpleasant memories. 😒