cannuck

I HOPE we will follow true to history and follow the law to the letter. Now, given the current leadership and government, there is a chance that they will simply cave in to China. The whole world should be jumping up and down to thank Trump for being the first world leader to stand up to the predatory criminal behaviour of the Chico gov't and its co-conspirators. Trudeau et al should be beaming with pride that the US placed their trust in Canada to do the right thing. Now let'e see if we do.

I agree with the rest of your post, but THIS is taking quite a big leap.

If you wanted to make me happy, it would also include ONLY synthetic crude going down the pipeline, not dilbit.

I agree with your assessment, but not that he wasn't very bright. He understood some things about economics that manage to evade many today, even with the advantage of hindsight.

He carried a Communist Party card while he studied at the Sorbonne. Let's just leave it at security background checks while he was an elected politician note "walking trips in Eastern Europe" at that time as well. Trudeau suffered from the same disease as Marx - silver spoon syndrome. Since he was raised within and largely by the Catholic cult, he was no doubt pretty screwed up and accustomed to living the lie. I don't doubt he did a lot of things to Canadians and Canada with the best of intentions (in his screwed up mind) but always with the safety net of never having to wonder where HIS next meal (or Mercedes) was coming from.

In fairness, the pollution in parts of China has become so bad that the central government is now requiring all new plants to go natural gas. I thought this meant they will convert existing coal, but not the case. I assume they will retire the coal plants, but since the infrastructure to receive LNG and distribute CNG is simply not there, it will take a while for this to show results.

I have visited Quora dealing with topics I am very familiar. I am far less than impressed.

Yes, Marx was a gifted economist, but had very poor grasp of human nature. Not unusual in an idealist - who expects other idealists to share at least some of his ideals - such as integrity. There simply hasn't been a Marxist system that actually worked as he envisioned since people are so greedy and corrupt they do what greedy, corrupt people with extreme amounts of power from the privilege of office will do. Yes, Trudeau Sr. was fairly bright, but extremely communist (i.e. screwed up mentally). Yes, you can be smart but in the wrong direction. Trudeau Jr. I don't think has the intellectual gift to even be a good WalMart greeter - but I wish he would pursue that opportunity.

Of course, how that plays out is good with YOUR money, or someone else's?

At the top of the list (but missing from almost every discussion) is the idiotic idea that you can have hundreds of "nations" within a nation. Have to fix that first, and that will be difficult after 40 years of every Canadian politician getting into this "first nations" mindset. There was NO "nation" there were some distinct tribes divided into several bands of aboriginals who sometimes got along, and at other times tried to slaughter each other into extinction. And, there were about a half million of them at the best. They didn't "own" any land, they simply occupied it - and were displaced. End of story.

Smith, Keynes, Friedman and Hayek didn't do much better - they failed to teach the difference between wealth being created vs. wealth merely redistributed.

Funny you should mention that. I have been told the same thing. Problem is, existing rate of growth WILL actually destroy the world as a sustainable habitat.

Yanks are hated for reasons of envy. That, and their vocal support of their version of freedom, foreign policy, economic management and government. BUT, we have missed the really big reason: the largest export of the USA is entertainment, so the ability of Hollywood to communicate rubs the nose of the rest of the world in US pop culture and overall wealth. As has been mentioned, everyone hates. I love the US for most reasons, but hate it for being the home of the most egregious of human activities - speculative finance. That and giving the authority of the de facto central bank to private interests. Similarly, I love Canada for most reasons, but hate it for its wimpy deferral to the left and lack of entrepreneurial spirit and infrastructure.

Very true. Our biggest problem as it relates to energy (other than unsustainable development due to overpopulation) is that we expect CHEAP energy and by lack of regulating and enforcing full life cycle costs up front, we end up with the need to clean up the mess on the taxpayers' backs. Coal for instance is viable - IF we simply insist on full scale Clean Coal Technology that becomes nearly zero emission. CCT is BTW more expensive than nuke, but until one of two things happens that is in limbo. While storage of nuclear waste is critical, reality is by going to thorium fuel (still evolving technology, but demonstrated and somewhat commercialized) and sub-critical mass inert gas cooled reactors it is viable. This makes fision reactors viable until sustainable fusion is achieved. The other big technological hurdle to ANYTHING is the realization that many cultures don't exactly embrace the truth. Fuck-up-ushima is a perfect example. Virtually NO Asian culture actually follows the rules, but puts up a great face claiming they do - something Western politicians seem to embrace without any questioning.

In full scale CCT, the greenhouse gasses are sequestered in subterranian reservoirs - as can be done in Europe in North Sea oilfields, and as is done here in many places. Many oil production areas are near coal deposits. One can burn the coal to generate electricity, and inject the stack gasses into the oil bearing zones (EOR - enhanced oil recovery). While horses were replaced by ICE powered vehicles, that happened because it was a superior technology. Try using electric, solar, wind to move 400 passengers 12,000 kms. a mach 0.8 - or load your B train up to a gross weight of 63,500 Kgs and tell me how your "superior technology" is working. This crap is happening for political reasons under heavy subsidy, not because it makes any economic or technical sense. The real issue with ANY of this stuff is the one thing nobody seems to have the brains or balls to deal with - population. We spend all of our effort looking for more efficient or "greener" ways of doing a bunch of things we shouldn't be doing in the first place. And, at the top of that list is breeding at an unsustainable pace.

Hydrocarbon based energy is going to be around for quite a while not because we are afraid of change (although we are), but because the infrastructure to produce, refine, deliver and use them is in the tens if not hundreds of TRILLIONS of $$$. I have heavy equipment, for instance, that has been in service for over 40 years. Why would I replace perfectly useful and long, LONG ago paid out equipment with something costs many orders of magnitude more to do the same job? The answer of course is when I could make better money with the new equipment - but since fuel is an almost negligible part of the operating costs, I can not. Also, solar and wind are only cheaper than coal under some conditions. If you compare at matching scale (at the utility level) they are not. BUT: if you were to regulate coal properly to cover full life cycle costs and have appropriate emissions, it is even more capital intensive than nuclear. (intersing sidebar: the ONLY full scale CCT = Clean Coal Technology plant on the planet is the Sask Power Boundary Dam CCT project, conceived by a Saskatoon engineer while working for SNC Lavalin.

Let's think about some of those "good old days" technologies and technological devices. The fastest air breathing airplane in history was conceived in the late '50s and flying in '62. Now, it SEEMED very simple, but if you look at the science behind (and used extensively) to solve all of those "simple" problems - you come to realize that those simple components were extremely complex. People in general were less aware, I guess, but the whole business of making a simple 3,000 mph airplane was incredibly complex. Yes, it COULD be done today with computers (but it has not been) but the cold hard work that gave us the technologies to write the programmes today came long before the digital revolution. You think these basic things were easy when the technology seemed simple? Ever set up a lineup of Weber carbs on a new installation? The skill and experience required to select choke tubes, mains, air corrections, emulsion tubes, pilot jets, accel jets, velocity stacks (or air cleaners) was quite considerable - as each one of those things interacted with the other, and there were literally thousands of possible components with millions of permutations and combinations to make the car run right. Today, I can buy a dirt cheap ECU (megatune) and build a very simple fuel injection (and ignition) system that anyone can be taught to programme in a few hours - and it will run rings around even a perfect set of Webers and distributed HV ignition. Ever tried FEA calculating by hand? That's how we used to do it, and the odd bridge that fell down tells you it wasn't all that exact a science. Today, any goofball can whiz up a CAD drawing and feed it to an FEA programme (or in the case of aerodynamic stuff, some CFD programmes) and very quickly and simply get results that were almost or literally impossible a half century ago. Now, let's think about some of those very simple devices: power transformers and their protection gear (circuit breakers). The science behind them is exactly the same, and just as complicate as it ever was. Once again, those "simple" parts are just the expression of some very complex design work. BUT: in the "good old days" a voltage excursion (spike) that could and often DID take overcome the BIL values of the insulating system would simply blow the thing to bits. The reason is that those simple breakers took time to heat something up to cause them to disconnect (as happens in the panel in your house). Today, modern electronics can look at the sine wave in real time and spot a difference in value for voltage to ground or phase to phase and operate a very fast switch before the insulation system of the multi-million dollar "simple" transformer is destroyed. It just goes on forever. ANYTHING simple that was designed long ago might have had some extremely good science behind it - and definitely did if it was well designed. The only difference today is that the technologies we use as tools are right under our noses, not hidden away in some ivory tower. You see, ignorance really was bliss.

I may have a headache with my cell phone or my computer once in a while, but in the meantime, I can pick either one up and speak with my counterparts in UK, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America for next to no cost (avoiding what I once had to do in the "good old days" of having multi-thousands a month in telephone costs and the much greater financial cost, time waste and multiple risks of flying all over the world to do what these "headaches" allow me to clear up from my couch at home. The cell phone also allows us to run companies with highly skilled and experienced people all over North America who encounter technical issues trying to do our job (literally keeping the lights on in heavy industry and utilities) and solve them in seconds or minutes by being able to call those within the organization who can best solve such problems - 90% of the time in a single, brief call. Those damned computers are what allow me to pull my diesel truck up to a pump and fill it with a fuel that in the good old days would smoke you off of the planet. Instead, the air going into my car or truck is now dirtier (in large cities) than what is coming out the tailpipe. And on it goes.

I will always come back to the same argument regarding this subject. "Globalism" is just a phrase that people have grasped onto because they know SOMETHING is drastically wrong, but they don't bother to understand what it is. Globalism, corporatism, crony capitalism and my own choice of descriptive phrase, Casino Capitalism are all something we as the ignorant electorate enable by empowering our respective governments to grant the privilege for some to increase the money supply causing massive pent up inflationary forces, inequitable redistribution of wealth all without adding a single penny of value or creating any wealth. The world watched the global economy crash in 1929 when speculative trading/"investing" took the orgy of greed to the extreme, and passed legislation to limit the power of financial institutions to be so abusive of their very special privileges to do so. Once those protections were stripped away, it has once again returned to being the status quo. When it got so far out of hand (it is at least 1,000 orders of magnitude greater today than in 1929 - even corrected for inflation) instead of paying the rational price for their treachery (i.e. going bankrupt and having legislation put BACK in place to limit their power/privilege) finance had identified the weak spot (the US government) and bought control locks, stock and barrel - resulting in "too big to fail" bailouts to the tune of TRILLION$$$$ of impact on the US and by extension all other taxpayers within the "global" economy. 2009 should have been a crash that correct these excesses. The 1% rallies once again KNEW something was wrong, but did not bother to try to understand WHY there was such a problem. Easy solution: tax speculative gain. I mean TAX it. My version would be 99% of first month, 95% first year, tapering down 5% per year until matching the nominal tax rate.

Giving people "money for nothing" is not helping them, it is creating a culture of dependence and entitlement. I would much rather reduce real world costs to have the same effect. Investment would stop with big tax on speculative gains, it would simply go back to where it belongs - investing in productive enterprises than can earn a profit and pay a dividend. Once you kill off speculation, you kill off the main driver behind inflation.

Economics fails virtually every test as a "science". It has become a tool for the banksters to train people to nod their heads mindlessly and calculate shit that is NOT part of the actual economy (i.e. speculative activity). The only thing more intellectually dishonest than an economist would be a civil engineer dumb enough to put steel in concrete. Helped how? Do you mean just throw money at the problem? The real issue is how much housing costs have increased - mostly be cause we give a free ride on the tax system to the speculative gains of real estate activity. Tax the shit out of such gains, and all of a sudden real estate costs will subside into reality that people might be able to afford.

There have always been professionals, technologists, technicians and labourers in every manufacturing process. The difference is: so many of the "worker bees" were demanding to be paid better than the queen bee that they killed off the hive. Now that automation is taking over so much, the jobs have simply shifted to one of building and maintaining automation. Yes, this brave new world needs a LOT more skill and education for participants. As I said: you must either move up or move out (to WalMart greeting jobs).

In private business, we dump the ones who are non productive, screwups, thieves, etc. In government (and much union) they are promoted and protected, even celebrated. The real issue is that the vast majority of things government does they have no business doing (reference Erik Nielsen). As far as troubleshooting technology: that is my "day job" for largest client. Our "techies" are not in cubicles, they are out in the field keeping the lights on for industry in North America (until the "white picket fence" syndrome - i.e. marriage and family takes them out of the field). In most industry, the time spent fixing the technology is what makes the productivity and infrastructure services that provides incredible lifestyle we all get to enjoy.

Being courteous is VERY different from diverting the wealth of multiple potential export clients and countries to a privileged few in Quebec - and using the resources of the state to do so (and thereby delivering often far substandard goods and services to the detriment of our national reputation). Also, denying employment to possibly more capable people because they haven't subscribed to the same "courtesy" is a racket. Truthfully: the best thing that could happen to ANYONE (and everyone) is to not work for government, but that's another issue.

The government's job SHOULD be to provide a stable, equitable and fair set of rules and enforcement, NOT to interfere in the marketplace by picking winners and losers by interference - which is what our government (and the US, I should add) does constantly. Unions of course are the antithesis of free markets. Just as do government employees, they believe that they should be entitled to a free ride by the granting of privilege (by government) to forcibly keep their jobs. Bass Ackwards. Government employees are largely the least ambitious, most entitled people in the workforce. By their very nature they are the LAST people in the world you would want running anything but the shithouse - and they would probably make that prohibitively expensive and totally non functional. People in today's increasingly more technical workplace need to realize that the need for unskilled assembly workers is not great and decreasing daily. Either move up or move out. There should be no special provision to accommodate those who believe the are owed a job and a living. Most of all, there is no place for envy of those who have had the sense and made the effort to be able to meet modern demands in their industry.