cannuck

There is one hell of a difference between the typical teen who listens to the music, wears the clothes and speaks the language and one who acts out that perceived culture by comitting violent, armed crimes. No different from the thousands of accountants and lawyers who buy Harley-Ferguson "motorcycles", dress like hells angels and speak like some kind of thug. BUT: that does not MAKE them into a Hell's Angels member dealing in drugs, prostitution, etc.

Our two kids spent 21 years at University (9 for one, 12 the other - so far) and your questions/concerns are something we dealt with a number of times. Our deal for them was that as long as they wanted to go to school, we would gladly pay their bills. One is a DVM (bio/languages/med school) - very much a vocational course of study - and the other...well she has 4 different degrees, so we really don't know WHAT to call her. She did several things and grad school simply because she loves the whole process of learning and research (as well as teaching). What kind of ruined her experience in academia of the U was finding that very few students had any interest at all in learning anything - except what it took to pass the next test/exam. What I can tell you that you WILL find is that whatever you choose to do, IF you are truly passionate about learning, you will be one of the few that might cash in on being taken under the wing of a few good profs. You will get out of University exactly what you put in. I agree very much that Universities SHOULD be about academics, with less of a focus on vocation (except of course those disciplines that by their very definition are extremely vocational - medicine, engineering, etc.), but since HR people seem to run a good chunk of policy in business, everyone seems to think they need a University education to get a job - many positions have job descriptions written that will require at least baccalaureate standing. If just employment and income are your big worry, go to a community college. One company I have worked for/with for the last 28 years does electrical engineering, testing and field service. We grab the best of work term kids from EE Technologist schools and after two years at school, and another one learing the ropes in the field, they are all into 6 digit paycheques (lots of work, though, not a walk in the park). We also put the engineers in the field at least one full year before sending them upstairs - where they can earn LESS money than the tech guys in the field - but do work a lot fewer hours. THERE is where your career choice can make or break you in the future. Once you get the white picket fence and family, the long hours, travel, etc. from a high earning - but high demand - career means that one or the other has to give. If you see yourself there in 10 or so years, go the professional route and think about some kind of unionized job. BTW: if you ever want to make SERIOUS money, it doesn't really matter what you study - no University can make a businessman out of you - ESPECIALLY if you take "business" courses. (on edit) sorry, I was interrupted by a few calls, did not make the point I was trying to: IF you are one of those who take learing serisously, once you are out (if ever) in the world of business, you will carry that with you and you WILL be given responsibilities, challenges and opportunities that others will not. (BTW, that will NEVER happen in government).

Kardashian...priceless...accurate.

Believe it. Since she is a smokin' hot babe, Hollywood could not have cast her any better as the "girl next door".

You are referring to Catherine McKay - who killed the Van de Vorst family (who happened to be personal friends of our children) at about the same time as Colby Heid killed one man - both Saskatchewan citizens, both drunk drivers, both killed innocent people by their actions as severely intoxicated drivers. Only difference is that the white kid is in PA Penitentiary and the aboriginal woman was removed from penitentiary and given a holiday at a "healing lodge" (essentially a resort for aboriginal criminals so they don't have to suffer the indignities of paying for their crimes). There IS a huge problem with racism in Canada, but it is not what the media and bleeding heart idiots claim it to be. Before anyone starts using the standard offensive defense from the world of political correctness and claim I am therefore a racist (I am, as is every other person on this planet I have met) my children are elibible for status in this country.

Checked with the pros. Even though that handgun was a cheap piece of junk, it would very, very unlikely be the cause of the hang fire. The 65 year old ammunition is highly suspect. I also got some information regarding the situation on that day. This is heresay, and I am not at liberty to cite the source, other than to say it is highly credible. Let me just say that the crimes committed by the people in that SUV on the Stanley farm and in the farmhouse began long before the shooting and were extremely violent and as far away from "looking for help with a flat tire" as you could get. Hopefully, the others will be charged and/or fireams charges might be laid against Stanley and the real story will come out.

I would expect that if one's expression is inciting someone to fly that airplane into a building, it is indeed terrorism. Pretty tough to find where that line is between merely exercising a right to free speech and inciting an illegal act - after all, many people are inspired to do a lot of illegal and immoral things being spoken by texts such as the Old Testament, Quran, Tora, etc. Now that I think of it, we need to lock up God (whatever the hell THAT is supposed to be).

I am not a weapons expert, but one will be sitting beside me at Sunday dinner as he does most weekends. I will verify my understanding with him later today. From what I have been told, a great deal of the heavily discounted ammunition for sale around here (and "around here" is probably where Stanley purchased his) is as far back as WWII and is NOT very reliable. Most is from former USSR states or old Chinese (or even new Chinese - not spoken of very highly for AK47 ammunition). A missfire of 1 in 80 is a very high amount and would make the probability of irregularity high enough to pose a credible argument. What I don't understand is if the probability of missfire/hang fire was due to the poor quality ammunition, the extremely poor quality of the handgun, or some combination of both. I have personally fired many thousands of then-current military rounds and NEVER experienced a missfire. My family expert many, many times more (range officer) and will get some idea of frequency in detail. BUT: as our voice of reason (?Impact) would point out: the acquital is based on some amount of reaonable doubt as to culpability. The key in the whole decision was no doubt the credibility of this one single salient point, and I can see where a jury WITHOUT PREJUDICE could come to that conclusion. We may have to hold our nose when reading that verdict, but this is the justice system working EXACTLY as it is supposed to - and such a defense is available to EVERY Canadian, red, black, white, brown, yellow or albino.

My bad - posting in the middle of tax time, not getting all thought down on keyboard. I meant those who would provide leadership since they were already seen as well established figures. I have met several of those people, and they usually have the means to simply walk away and earn a living or run their business from outside, but ALWAYS with the fear for their families and associates who remain. I see the domestic opposition mounting, and I just hope it is as you indicate about to reach critical levels required to overthrow the theocratic regime. Problem is: I have been in Islamic states just long enough to be doubtful if it can ever be shut down (i.e. the/a theocracy).

Will quote your complete post, as I feel it is very much on target. IMHO: the big problem is that in the theorcracy, pretty much ALL of the moderates who could mount a credible opposition are no longer in the country. That seems to include much of the business and academic component as well as the political faction.

That's quite a statement from an American who must spend several hours a day, 365 a year on a Canadian political website. Beyond compulsive, obsessive I would say.

One earlier comment was about the sincerity of politicians. I have encountered literally HUNDREDS of candidates from several parties, and what was mostly true was that their motivation in getting involved was indeed to do something of service to not just their party, but to their fellow citizens. These can be clearly labelled poltical newbies. They usually start off that way, then find out that they are poltical newbies/outsiders and really haven't got much clunk. Then, there are the hard core party members - who are the source of ultra-partisan stuff (although I would agree with Argus, in the Conservatives, the source of ultra-partisan babble, not action). Finally, there are the really dangerous ones - those who are put there by the back room gang. They get into politics to further their backers' dreams of dispensing privelege...usually to their backers. There are not a lot of the latter, but they are definitely a constant presence as they are the real "insiders". My preference for the future of ANY of the latter is to end up where they belong - in jail. Where Canadians (hardly just conservatives) always come up short is failing to look at "the big picture" and see what is happening overall. Instead, people tend to concentrate on the issues that either effect them or what is hand picked by the media (Colten Boushie a perfect example).

I did not infer a billion possibilities, I just cited one fact: they all were involved in committing a violent crime - the DIRECT result of which was the death of one of the criminals. I would not pretend to know diddly squat about criminal law, and I assume that there is some sort of legal dictionary definition of what "direct" is supposed to mean, but in the English language, that is what would apply. My inference is to the LEOs and crown prosecutor, not the trial of Stanley - which I agree reached their verdict exactly as you say. The rest may be politics to you, but to those of us preyed upon by the "First Nations", it is reality.

The death of Colten Boushie was the direct result of Colten Boushie and four other aboriginal criminals on a drunken crime spree coming onto the private property of a farmer and conducting criminal activity including use of deadly weapons (both vehicle and rifle) that could reasonably be construed as a threat to the life and property of the farmer and his family. Now explain to me why the other four in that SUV were not charged with culpable homicide? (see (a) and (c) above) Let me answer that for you...THEY WERE ABORIGINALS WHO CAN DO NO WRONG. (atl least that is precisely what the CBC and Liberal government are clearly saying). I happen to have a rural farm in SK, and the occurence of aboriginal (and non-aboriginal) thieves observing property for the sole purpose of identifying when the property owners are not home to break into homes and shops to steal everything and anything they feel they could sell, drink or smoke. That alone is a constant concern. When you escalate that to intoxicated, armed thieves you can imagine what your options might be - you going to call the RCMP who are at least a half hour away? Yeah, right.

They certainly do if you are one of them.

Every time I think the little Tur....er....Prime Minister Trudeau has hit rock bottom for personal stupidity and embarrassment of the nation, he lowers the bar another few notches.

In fairness, it is not all about economics, it is also about highway safety. There certainly are huge economic benefits: reducing the driving labour to zero is one. Keeping the truck on the road for full tank of fuel if needed is another (drivers have to stop by law fro break and after 11 driving hours in US and 13 in Canada). What is not so obvious is the HUGE reduction in capital cost - drivers are very inconvenient things because they have to sleep and have days off - but you need to provide each one a truck, so to cover those things, you need almost 3x as many human driven trucks as you could autonomous 24 x 7 vehicles. The safety payoff may come if and when autonomous vehicles really can be autonomous. Milking impossible amounts of work for the lowest possible time results in a lot of cheating in the truck driving world. On top of that, reality is that there are definite limits on just what people can do without making mistakes, and mistakes in 40 to 60 tonne trucks are not a good thing. The question is: can the automation work better than the people? Ultimately, it can, but as we have learned from aviation, it takes time to perfect that automation, and it doesn't always work (thus why we still have pilots on board). BUT: if you are going to supervise the automation, all of the economic benefits are gone, and once more, as we learned from aviation, when you take the driver out of the constant involvement part of the equation, they don't always perform very well when they have to step in mid crisis. Sadly, regulators and legislators are not very good at understanding these things from real life, and when you build a cabinet around political correctness instead of vocational experience, things go even worse when policy is turned into leg and reg than is reasonable or acceptable.

I am afraid driverless vehicles are not to far off in the future. I don't think that politicians are anywhere near ready for the issues that will crop up as a result. There are some precedents: commercial aircraft have been very highly automated for some time now. In fact, when a Cat III or IV ILS approach to minimums is flown, it is forbidden for the pilot(s) to have ANY control - as the computers on board must execute the entire landing. Reason is: the cockpit would be still in the cloud when the wheels touch down - or no vision at all since these can be "zero-zero" landings (no visibility, no ceiling) no way to visually land the airplane at all. Landing an airplane might seem complex, but it is actually a lot easier than driving a truck. Airplanes have considerable separation from others, but trucks can be a few feet away from everything around them, including other trucks coming opposite direction. Automation on big airplanes has become so pervasive, there have been a fair number of major crashes that resulted in an automation failure (either systemic or pilot induced) that left the pilots to hand fly the airplane, and they couldn't do it. Now, these are very highly trained "experts", working to very precisely defined standards using mega-million dollar avionics to fly an airplane that is in a very well controlled environment. Now apply that to trucking with barely drivers that are barely trained, hardly tested and seldom supervised providing the backup to the automation (as at least during some long transition phase, all full automated stuff will have a "safety" driver - who will be bored to tears as there is seldom any reason to intervene. Now think of some mindless drama teacher being entrusted to regulate these activities, and you can see the train wreck coming. No question that at some point, drivers will lose their jobs, but that is still off in the future. Now, why would we WANT this to happen? Ever notice the huge number of obviously "new Canadian" drivers out there? I was visiting a fellow in the Golden Horseshoe at his truck repair company a few years back. Writing up the week's safety inspections on a fleet of gravel trucks, he said to me: "Look at this, I have 50 different trucks, 50 different drivers and only one driving license!". Truck driving here is seen as some kind of "knights of the road" occupation, but in some countries, it is one of the lowest on the totem pole. The industry is rife with all kinds of schemes to circumvent the law. The Dec 18 US reg that requires EDL (electronic data logging) is causing pure havoc because it will make cheating on hours of service impossible - and as a result, will dramatically alter the entire US industry. The cost of doing business was already based on severe abuse of drivers that forced them to fudge the logbooks in many cases to earn a decent living or pay for their truck. I would much rather share the road with a computer driven truck than a probably illegal immigrant who has fraudulently obtained a driving license (or simply forged one, as I saw at the repair shop). Now, if our government(s) can not even police something as basic as immigration and licensing, how the hell are they supposed to set and enforce a regulatory environment as complex as what we will see with automated and ultimately autonomous trucks mixed in with cars, trucks, school buses, etc.??.

yeah, but it's like humour: leave a good straight line on the table and someone will make a joke out of it. I just couldn't resist. You should know by now not to take me too seriously.

Exactly what I mean by following or leading. They really were influenced by US music - far more than just R&B and most of which came into ports in the UK from US and other sailors. But they were hardly just repeating what they heard, nor did that part of the US scene really frame the psychedelic part of the British scene. One fed the other and reciprocated to where the lead/follow thing to pop culture became very obscure. BUT: it sure as hell made for some good music. and, like all other good music, it really gets into your head....mind control.

Music has ALWAYS been about mind control. If it wasn't, it would not be appreciated. The real question is the proportion of how much popular music leads vs. how much follows popular culture. Pop music is, as is any other music, something that has a definite shelf life, UNLESS it is actually good music. My kids grew up with gansta-rap as well, but never, ever played it on electronic devices or obviously on any musical instruments. Both are classically trained, but when summers came along and there was no classes or competitions to deal with, they would often request sheet music from my boomer youth. Lenon-McCartney, Stones, a lot of the folk rockers, etc. seem to have withstood that test of time (at least for the first half century), but even having been there, I could not really say they lead or followed.

Standard knee jerk reaction from the left fence of the ballpark. Anyone who is not slave to political correctness, or anyone foolish enough to tell the realistic truth just gets shouted down as racist. Avoids the unpleasant need to deal with reality.

They already HAVE huge tracts of land and conduct themselves as sovereign entities - all paid for from ROC taxes. Sweet deal: get conquered by a far more advanced civilization, do diddly squat except bitch and moan, and get handed back the dirt and all of the resources beneath that no other people in Canada can get for free, and get paid a shitload of money to stay home and drink, screw, fight and shoot up while you are waiting.

My US companies are located in WY and NY and our largest client has 12 offices scattered all over the US. I do exactly what you suggest: accumulate small purchases in my WY office and bring stuff home when I am there, or if moving equipment or myself in and out of US client offices and projects, have large purchases shipped to meet my transport and import myself. Here is a good article from a camera shop in US: http://fortune.com/2017/12/20/abbey-inn-indiana-katrina-arthur-350-fine-negative-review/ I agree that the Fedex, UPS, etc.people take advantage of consumer ignorance, and one should indeed read the fine print before using them. If we send those capitalist pigs "back to where they belong" we would lose the price advantage that the idiotic federal rules on transborder traffic that SHOULD give the public mail systems a business advantage. The real solution is to get the feds to back off on the highly restrictive and totally bungled protectionist regulations that set up the opportunity for carriers to screw over Canadian consumers.

Good point, and I will chuckle about that all day. Thanks.