Category: Toronto

Exciting reading material

I am still job-hunting, but life has given me a bit of a treat to work on between those efforts. I have two new books from professors I know at U of T to read.

Already published and available to everyone, there is Steve Easterbrook’s Computing the Climate: How We Know What We Know About Climate Change.

Still in the works, possibly for another year, are Peter Russell’s draft memoirs, which he has been kind enough to let me read.

I will be working on both before today’s Critical Mass bike ride, which I expect will be the last with decent weather before spring.

Some documents from the history of fossil fuel divestment at the University of Toronto

Back in 2015, during the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org fossil fuel divestment campaign, I set up UofTFacultyDivest.com as a copy of what the Harvard campaign had up at harvardfacultydivest.com/.

The purposes of the site were to collect the attestations we needed for the formal university divestment policy, to have a repository of campaign-related documents, and to provide information about the campaign to anyone looking for it online.

The site was built with free WordPress software and plugins which have ceased to be compatible with modern web hosting, so I will re-list the important content here for the benefit of anyone seeking to learn about the campus fossil fuel divestment movement in the future:

Of course, U of T announced in 2021 that they would divest. Since then, the Climate Justice U of T group which developed out of the Leap Manifesto group which organized the second fossil fuel divestment campaign at U of T (after Toronto350 / UofT350) has succeeded in pressuring the federated colleges of St. Michael’s, Trinity, and Victoria University to divest as well.

Uber Eats bike delivery — break-even time in downtown Toronto

I have not been able to find another job, I love cycling, and I know the city — so I have been trying out working as food delivery rider for uber.

The lesson from 19.5 hours in is that it pays far below miniumum wage, even before considering any expenses.

At JJ International Inc at 438 Spadina I bought a large two-shelf insulated backpack for food deliveries for $84.76.

Since my total revenues, revenues per hour, revenues per delivery, and revenues per kilometre were all dismal in the first few days, I took a Smart Serve course in order to be able to carry deliveries with alcohol. The course took about 3 hours and cost $44.95.

Just now, I had to take a break from a Saturday night shift to go home because all my external phone batteries are dead.

In sum, so far:

  • I have been online for 19 hours and 18 minutes.
  • I have ridden 153 km.
  • I have earned $150.04 ($116.55 in fares and $34.39 in tips).
  • That works out to about $7.69 per hour, which is a considerable over-statement because it doesn’t count the riding time required to get into the high density zones with many restaurants or to ride back home.
  • It took basically 17 hours of work to pay for the carrier bag and Smart Serve certificate.

All told, a person would be far better off working at the Ontario minumum wage of $16.55 than doing deliveries for uber eats by bike.