🇨🇦 If you can't change the world, be entertained by it.
Edmonton
Joined May 2008
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Norman Lorrain retweeted
The entire polling industrial complex spent billions and got beaten by people trading on their phones.
Three months out.
Skin in the game beats an army of PhD's 😎
Norman Lorrain retweeted
Permanent Daylight Saving Time is a government mandate to wake an hour earlier than Standard Time all winter, against natural health. Repeal and replace with permanent Standard Time!
Norman Lorrain retweeted
Almost all of Canadian leftism is just dim rich kids aping American grievance tropes they heard on a podcast.
Norman Lorrain retweeted
Open and proactive communication is how you assure faith and trust in institutional capacity and capability. It's how you tamp down panic, misinformation, and conspiracies.
Norman Lorrain retweeted
Lina, you don't know the honest truth.
In the military, you got your POGs... Person Other than a Grunt. Guys who don't shoot anything. You need them, because you need all sorts of specialties, but you can't trust their big-picture judgement, because the overall mission of the military is shootin' people, and they don't do that.
In civilization, we have POMs.
Person Other than a Maker. Dudes what don't build things. You might need them. But you shouldn't take them too seriously, or listen to them too much, because on some fundamental level, they are never going to get it. They are never going to understand. The fundamental task of civilization is making things, and POMs don't do that.
"This is just a mash-up of existing technology" is the most POM-like typing you could ever hope to see. It's a tell that someone has never done a significant engineering project in a technical role.
Experienced engineers not only understand differently, we eat, sleep and breathe the basic reality that 99% of engineering challenges are "get mechanism to work with other mechanism". Without breaking, shaking itself apart or blowing up.
Every basic scientific principle behind the internal combustion automobile was understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
And yet they were not only unable to harness those principles to make a primitive steam-powered automobile, they were unable to conceive of the very idea, because their ability to implement and integrate wasn't advanced enough.
If you look at everything that Elon Musk has ever done, every company he has ever built, every technology he has ever brought to market, none of it was a purely new invention.
It was ALL taking stuff that already kinda worked, and making it do new things. And not just do them, but do them so well that they actually became practical.
SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. They made it reusable.
Tesla didn't invent the electric motor or the battery. They made them practical for ground transportation.
Neurallink didn't invent electrical nerve interfaces. They made them control a computer UI.
This shit is incredibly hard. If you try to use the known principle of a cold-gas thruster to make a car fly, you're going to crash and blow up a lot. You're going to have to make mistakes, and fix them, one by one, until you run out of mistakes and the thing flies.
Real engineers, real makers, know that this is what the word engineering means. POMs don't get it. Lina doesn't understand what she saw.
She thinks she saw a publicity stunt to impress yokels.
No. That was a publicity stunt to impress engineers.
It wasn't a demonstration of a flying car at all. It was a demonstration of the engineering capabilities of team.
It was a flex.
"Look," they said, "we can reify the Gernsback continuum. Give us your silliest, low-effort science fiction meme tech, and give us enough time, and we'll make it real."
The purpose of making a flying car isn't to let you do a jetpack leap over traffic. It's to learn all the little implementation details and balancing tradeoffs and gotchas that you have to master to make a car fly.
It's not the big scientific discoveries that build civilization. By themselves, they are nothing but curiosities.
What builds civilization is all the little discoveries that you make when you try to get the big ones to stop crashing and blowing up.
When someone does that on a unprecedented level, you either help them, or you stay out of the way and keep your ignorant POM opinions to yourself.
I'm not an Elon hater.
I'm just telling you the Honest Truth:
This is a marketing stunt.
The technology is quite old.
Just nobody ever thought of bolting it on a car.
Because it's pointless.
Porsche or Ferrari could also build something like this if they wanted, but they don't, because it's not worth it for them.
It's worth it for Elon though, because his entire brand is all about having the halo of futurism.
His marketing scales especially well with tech gimmicks like this, which is why he is financially incentivised to do them, while others aren't.
Again, I'm not hating, but actually educating yall.
This is not engineering genius.
It's marketing genius.
Norman Lorrain retweeted
“He could have solved world hunger instead of building a flying car”
My brother in Christ,
In 2021 the UN claimed they could solve world hunger with $6 Billion.
Elon offered them the $6 Billion if they were transparent with where the funds were going.
The UN never took his offer.
Norman Lorrain retweeted
As a YIMBY who's becoming more of a NIMBY with age, I think there are a few things going on here:
1. Alberta infills are notoriously ugly. Boxy, weird colour palettes (only grey, white, and black, with occasional neon accents), and odd exterior cladding choices that everyone knows won't age well. There's rarely any connection to neighbourhood vernacular, and they're disproportionately being built in our few pre-war neighbourhoods, where historic character homes that are torn down to replace them. I'd be very annoyed if one went in right beside the home I spent all my life savings on.
2. The rental infills -- i.e., most four- and eight-plexes -- change the socio-economic character of neighbourhoods. I don't really think that's a bad thing in and of itself. Poor people deserve nice places to live. But because we've kind of given up on policing and maintaining public order, people are understandably leery of welcoming new neighbours who are more likely to bring crime, littering, and disorder to their block -- and poor people are disproportionately involved in all those things. So the way we preserve public order is by making our neighbours' houses too expensive for all but the upper middle class. Not really defending it, but it just is what it is.
3. The broader urbanist agenda doesn't work when people don't want to bike or walk or take transit because of crime and disorder. The back wheel of my bike was stolen last night and I have a visceral feeling that I should drive everywhere and especially that I kind of hate downtown. When most people feel that way, you're never going to get compromise on parking minimums, and that's before you even get into the challenge of an Alberta winter.
Ultimately, YIMBY policies will only work long-term if people believe new developments will make their neighbourhoods better, not worse. Alberta infill developers and municipal governments dropped the ball here, and this is the consequence of that.
Over the past few months, endless Albertans have told us the same story.
They saved for years to buy a single family home on a quiet street. They picked that neighbourhood on purpose, because of the park at the end of the block or the school two streets over or the neighbours who watch out for each other.
Then one morning the house next door came down, with no notice, and later a 16 unit complex went up in its place, with nowhere for anyone to park and no consideration for the neighbourhood.
Those are not complaints. They are people describing the place they built a life in with their family.
So today we are acting. Edmonton will return to the density and height rules that were in place before 2024 and common sense minimum parking requirements, utility and water infrastructure considerations are coming back. Calgary will hold the line it set when it repealed blanket rezoning. Both cities will take a hard look at their bylaws and come back with something more balanced.
Alberta needs more homes. We are building more of them than almost anywhere in Canada. But a home is more than a house, and a neighbourhood is more than a supply of lots.
Norman Lorrain retweeted
I will not be petty I will not be petty
...
I can't help myself
nationalobserver.com/2026/06…
Norman Lorrain retweeted
On paper, I’m in my 50’s & it’s really confusing…
In my head, I’m 35.
At a concert, I’m 25
After 10pm, I’m 72.
Getting up off the floor, I’m 93.
When someone makes me mad, I’m 2
BUT-
When an 80’s song comes on,
I’m 17, drunk in a field, & my mom thinks I’m at a sleepover
🤪
Norman Lorrain retweeted
This will be an unpopular opinion on the Right but I think this is kind of dumb, even as a troll. Lake Ontario was given that name on maps by European explorers long before the Canadian province of Ontario was named. There are several cities in America called Ontario -- at least one of them predating the Canadian province by like 100 years -- because the word originates with native tribes in North America. It's not a Canadian invention. Canadians never uniquely owned the lake or the name. So in effect all you're doing here is actually giving them credit for a thing that wasn't theirs to begin with. Yeah it's funny when Canadians are upset I guess or whatever, but Lake Ontario, the name itself, is *American* history dating back many centuries. Not sure how you own Canada by deleting your own history.
Norman Lorrain retweeted
British Authorities Arrest St. George For Brandishing Bladed Weapon At Dragon buff.ly/2n1NXXW
