… on the Toronto transit system.

This is part of the Toronto visit series.

A TTC transfer with the date and route printed, and marked for 12:30 going uptown. July 1st is the 182nd day of this year.

TTC streetcar fares are CAD$3. They give you this transfer, with the intention that you can catch another route to complete your one-way trip “within reasonable time allowance.”

The rule for TTC transfers is that you can only make transfers at a “transfer point,” basically where two routes meet. You’re not supposed to get off at one stop and do anything else before resuming a trip, and that includes walking around the block to another stop, or doing a stopover to pick up something quick, or backtracking (i.e. return trip), or some other complication. This intention is justifiable but utterly unenforceable except in the most obvious case of same-route continuation or retracement. In almost all cases, the only information on the transfer of value to the conductor is the day of the year — and that’s all they have time to check for anyway.

In the Seattle Metro system, it doesn’t matter what you do with the transfer, as long as you do it in the allotted time. This time-based system is quite a bit more sensible than the Toronto system and is actually fair. However, the Toronto system in practice degenerates to a time-based system, too, except that you are forced to embark at transfer points. Beyond that, what you did in between (getting off transit and getting back on later) nobody knows for sure — could have been multiple transfers, could have been something else. So it just reduces where you can get on with a transfer to a subset of the stops, which is silly and causes confusion.
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Ages ago, when somebody tried to explain to me the concept of “capital”, it was the version probably most people have heard of: a factor that creates more productive value, or maybe some good that is used in production of other goods, something along those lines. Then you get some examples of “capital” like a tool, a machine, a car… then you hear it’s contrasted with consumptive raw material, non-productive land resource, labor, etc. etc. I always thought it was completely vague and incomprehensible. What things are capital? Why is a tool capital, for example? I’ve got plenty of tools sitting around doing nothing of value most of the time, and when I use them I never produce anything.

Later I realized this was a stupid way of explaining it (or I was just stupid at the time). Capital isn’t a “thing”, it isn’t the physical object at all, it is the usage. Whether something is capital is completely determined by intention, that is, how it is intended to be used, hence the vague definition.

For example a $100 bill, depending on how it is used, can be a consumptive good, a store of value, or capital. If you burn the paper money as offering to the gods, it is a consumptive good. If you keep it under the mattress to buy stuff later, it is a store of value. If you invest it by putting it to use in a productive venture or lending it to somebody whom you expect to do so, then it becomes capital. It’s the same $100 bill, the only difference is intention…
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