cannuck

IMP strike is a genuine threat, but not to the extent you might think. Let me start by saying I do not know the threshold level of device that it would take to completely cover the whole continent, but I believe it is far greater than a 120KT device. Yes, we have had some troubles on the grid with EMP strikes from solar events, but what is very true is that power transformers are very well protected from high overvoltage line conditions. Ever see a thunderstorm? Well, that lightning strikes power lines with great regularity, and the resultant voltage in the line is many times what the transformer is designed to tolerate. The little poletop transformer in your back lane that may be fed from a 15kV local distribution circuit will have a BIL (Basic Insulation Level) over 100kV, so it is able to take SOME of the surge, but a very close by lightning strike will probably take it out. It is important to realize that the electric grid is HUGE and has a lot of capacitance and resistance, so can store a tremendous amount of energy from lighting strikes, mitigating the voltage at the millions of places it is dissipated through loads. Hold these thoughts. Where an EMP strike is different, it is inducing its voltage and current into the entire grid, or at least a very large area at one time. BUT: large transformers are the issue. Old ones have (or had) archaic protection devices that can see the rise of line voltage above BIL of the device being protected, but can not respond fast enough to protect from causing an insulation breakdown (end of life for the transformer). Bank in those "good old days", EEs knew that, so pretty much ALL large transformers have surge arrestors - essentially a big leak-to-ground device that will bleed off any and all charge at a level safely below the BIL of the device. Next: newer equipment is no longer protected by electro-mechanical devices that take many cycles to open, but electronically measured and triggered circuit breakers that are open in a few cycles. Most will be off line before damage can occur. I think the EMP pulse would be grounded adequately by bonding on the steel case before it could induce enough into the windings (that I will query our EEs about today). What is really at risk is that the EMP will trip out several devices at one time (not necessarily destroying them) taking down the entire grid - at least to the critical grid tie points. This happened several years back with around Lake Erie and took down much of the region on both sides of the border for weeks. Reliability committees have worked overtime ever since to figure out how to handle these kinds of events (still a way to go to find ultimate solutions and implement broadly). The upside is there is a good chance to be able to bring regional segments back fairly quickly (but hardly the little blip we see with reclosures taking place). Sorry for the long post, but it is something I deal with (high voltage devices) but now will investigate the system reliability implications since this post brought it up.

Nice graphic. What it is showing me is that the average in Canada is 40%ish, and the average in the US is 4% ish - and with 10:1 population ratio, it means the average American is about as dependent on Can/US reciprocal trade as the average Canadian adjusted for population density *(i.e. trade is close to in balance, we just have fewer people) But, you were very right: Trudeau is pretty much useless and totally ineffective at doing anything except screwing up Canada.

If you want to be a dairy farmer, you have to buy a cream quota. That is a huge barrier to entry. If you were a dairy farmer and had to survive in the real world, you would have no idea how the market works - since it is "supply managed" by the government. Dairy farmers who HAVE a cream quota think it is just dandy (you might notice that the majority of said privilege to be able to farm dairy is granted to Quebec). Under supply management (yet another government bureaucracy that costs us billions just to screw up marketplaces) the Feds determine prices and production. They never even come close to getting it right, so skim milk, butter, eggs, powdered milk are are regularly dumped in the tens of thousands of tons. Guess who picks up the tab? Yeah, you and I. Same people paying double to triple what our American counterparts are for milk. As I said: the business of government should be to govern, regulate and enforce. It totally fricks up at anything else it does, and doesn't do a great job of the former either.

Yes. Consumers pay more money for products, but if you ever bother to research, you would find that butter and milk powder are hoarded by the government, mostly to be dumped at a massive cost to taxpayers. Producers are removed from the marketplace (as prairie farmers were under the CWB) thus there were barriers to entry, barriers to free markets developing, barriers to developing the knowledge and investment base to participate effectively in free and productive markets. ANY time that government sticks its inept, bungling nose into ANY market, it will screw it up - and EVERYONE stands to lose. It is all about dispensing privelege: government instead of regulating and enforcing becomes the distributor of privilege, and only those chosen by the government to be the privileged individual or class benefits, and all at the expense of the rest of their industry or the country.

I was once invited to be the token real business person at a ministerial announcement of something or another. The 6 bureaucrats and lawyers at our table had the horrible misfortune of sitting with two business guys who did NOT take or seek any government money. You should have seen the look on their faces when we explained to them how we could make their jobs accountable and performance based for remuneration (mostly NRC types). It actually IS possible, but you would need someone on the government side who had the balls and brains to pull it off - and Eric was the last person I can think of who fit that requirement.

There are hundreds of examples, but let me deal with things I know very well: What about the CWB? This was done to farmers in the West to screw them out of the marketplace so that politicians and bureaucrats could play politics with food. Yeah, that was what Canadians needed. No need to get into supply management, as Canadians are DELIGHTED to spend $6 for four litres of milk when you can buy 3.89 in Chicago for $1.62US. We needed that. We needed to mine uranium, drill for oil, build airplanes. We "NEED" the effing buggerup dumbass development bank to come into the marketplace and steal tax dollars from us to set up competitors in our marketplace based on political expedience. The list just goes on and on. The business of government should be to govern - regulate and enforce. Our government does far, far more things that IMHO it has absolutely no business doing - and it is particularly inept and doing them. You are not part of the solution, you were part of the problem.

I think of that more like Erik Nielsen did: there are more than 1,100 programmes and departments of the Federal government, and I forget how many employees, but the vast majority of things that these people do are hardly "NEEDED" by people, but often wanted by many groups of freeloaders. If you happen to be one of the very few who do some of the the work for the very few departments that really ARE "needed", that could be true. But the odds aren't very high that that would be the case.

I keep looking for that kind of position, but what I see is not quite the same. Sorry...just realized this is the protester thread, not the immigration one. Have not had much time to catch up.

Where we differ so greatly is that you seem to imply that people in the rest of the world have a certain set of rights to simply wander into Canada and live as THEY see fit, and the rest of us are supposed to be thrilled to accommodate them and pick up the tab. In my experience, that is simply not the case for people who do not live as dependents (i.e. liberals and Liberals) in this country. Makes me want to paraphrase from Churchill that a socialist is someone who will gladly give you the shirt off of their back...as long as it is not THEIR shirt.

think you are missing my point. We can base entry requirements on ANYTHING we wish, no need to be "fair" to anyone. Immigration is not some international human right, it is a very specific privilege to which we as a sovereign state can specify EXACTLY what we will and will not accept as it suits us...just as every other nation does.

The question is to whom do you wish to be fair? The taxpayers and citizens of THIS country, of someone from a different country who seeks to come here? and, yes, you wish to destroy the culture of this country as it stands. Inviting radical Islam, and for example Caribbean drug criminals galore for instance is a perfect example.

THIS is where those on one side of the political spectrum deviate so strongly from those on the other. What makes you think we as a country and society have ANY obligation or even reason to be "fair"???? This is OUR country, to define as WE see fit, but sadly the two polar opposite political ideologies have one side that wishes to protect the culture of Canadians and one that wishes to destroy it.

I believe our best bet would be to add NO RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION OR BELIEF to EVERY immigrant who can qualify otherwise as having skills and qualifications VERIFIED and enough cash to prove they are not losers. Everyone else should just stay at home a pray to their God for better luck in the next life.

It seems peculiar to me that on a political website, few seem to know what political terms mean and from where they are derived. "Left" vs. "Right" goes back to the French Revolution, when those who sat on the right of the house wanted to maintain the Monarchy, and those who sat to the left wanted to revise the political system. Those who would "conserve" and those who would change. Simple as that. BUT: once the house had been divided in seating, what ideologies and policies each side of the house favoured changed constantly. Now, fast forward another couple centuries, and shift the discussion to other parliaments, and you can really attribute anything to either "leaning", and pretty much choose your own definition. From an earlier part of this thread, for instance, Nazis (the National Socialist Workers' Party) could be labelled either "left" or "right" depending upon which part of Nazi policy one chooses to compare with our rather fluid definition of left and right today. Being both workers and socialist, it had strong elements of ;what we today usually call the left. Being based on the idea of the Herrenvolk, that is nothing but purely racist, but here the new left uses that to try to hang that on the "right". Nazis were totalitarianists, which is as far from what I believe we mean today by "right" OR "left", as conservatives on the right tend to believe in and wish to maintain democratic institutions. Communism - which I think we can all agree is "the LEFT" is usually a totalitarian state of government, even though most have some kind of shadow of representative body shoved up front. Over the years, the terms right and left have been offered up under this very flexible system of inclusion based on the political expedience of creating an "us vs. them" over-simplification of any issue. Reality is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle with an array of detail within policy that makes actual programmes acceptable to modern standards.

Predicably, your paranoia sees only "whitey the enemy" in a world full over people of every race who do all of the same things, all of the time. The answer would be roughly the same proportion of whites in MacDonald cabinet as blacks in Habyarimana cabinet, whites in Joe Stalin's inner circle, yellow in Mao's and on and on it goes. BTW: ALL of whom claiming the moral, religious and cultural high ground that excused their behaviour and deeds.

Once again, you demonstrate your pahtological racism.

IMHO, you have an extremely accurate view of what foreign aid is and does, vs. what is needed. Worth repeating your post. Ancedotally: my best friend has been wildly successful in business, and his wife feels obligated to distribute a significant proportion of their wealth to "disadvantaged" in other countries. She is no fool, and will not send money or food, but had prided herself in sending literally thousands of bicycles, most of which got distributed directly to those who could use them (we think). I carelessly made a disparaging comment while adding a pair brand new, multi-thousand dollar 3 wheelers to the mix while stuffing a container full of hundreds of bikes gleened from police auctions. They were shocked and it fell upon me to explain my disdain: the cost spent on way overpriced new bicycles in the container could have bought enough tooling to set up to manufacture their OWN bicycles. Giving them finished goods might have made my friends FEEL better, but they just fostered a society and culture of dependence. The now send tools, tubing, gearsets, etc.

That may be the most racist thing I have ever seen written on the internet. All of those things can be accredited to white people, red people, black people, brown people and yellow people. The ultimate racist view held by you is that white people committed these crimes BECAUSE they were white. You realize that you are exhibiting pathological behaviour - the kind that is exhibited and required by extremists who actually COMMIT these crimes!?

These statues are still part of the history of the US - for better or for worse. They are just statues, not people

I respectfully disagree. Unfortunately, what I believe you and I can agree upon is that it takes a serious disaster before the ignorance and complacency are replaced by some introspective thought. 1929 did just that, as did WWII. Unfortunately, the salvation of the US economy (and by extension, that of the world) came when the excesses of greed and financial malfeasance SHOULD have crashed the speculative house of Casino Capitalism, the success of letting Goldman Sucks own the policy platform meant rewarding the perpetrators for the crimes, not letting them go broke as they so richly deserved (broke and jailed, that is). The country CAN recover, but not until it suffers the long overdue disaster to get people to look at the real problems instead of choking in the smokescreen.

I regard this as no different from ISIL destroying antiquities in the Middle East. To try to connect politics of the day with historical artifacts is nothing short of F...ing STUPID. The "alt right" and "looney left" nonsense has become about as idiotic and destructive as radical Islam.

What they have created is a smokescreen. The Uniparty delights in the left/right battle as it completely obscures what they have done - hijacked the economy. The US (and many other nations) were built by creating wealth. Wealth can ONLY be created by adding value to a resource, or delivery of services required to add value to a resource. ALL other activities merely re-distribute wealth that was created by employing capital to be productive. Doesn't matter if we are speaking about social services, crime or speculative "investment". Since the Fed members literally bought and paid for several administrations, they have continued along the path to legislating a laissez-faire financial regulatory system that allows the "market" value of equities, and the assumed value of derivatives to inflate beyond any responsible range. ALL of that activity is nothing but exactly what the "right" has been duped into believing the "left" thinks it does differently - simply redistribute wealth. Problem is, when you can multiply the "value" of an equity 1000x by trading its market value vs. book value, or you can take literally nothing but a bet on a bet (i.e. a derivative, or as Wall Street calls them: ""synthetic instruments"), you de-fund Main Street (where ALL wealth is - WAS - created) and with it goes all of the blue collar jobs...you remember them? The ones that CREATED all of the wealth upon which the speculative economy preys. And, ALL of that increase in the money supply that has to be printed to cover the massive inflation of speculative economic activity is nothing but a liability to the taxpayer (both as cash debt, unfunded future liabilities but most of all, pent up inflationary forces behind the greenback). Why would they do this? Simple: there is only one place on the planet where private interests own the central bank and can cash in personally on everything that takes place in finance and currency transactions. As with so many other things, it's not about the politics, its all about the money.

from your link: A key motivation for the paper was to increase awareness among policy makers and the public of the large subsidies that arise from pricing fossil fuels below their true social costs—this broader definition of subsidies accounts for the many negative side effects associated with the consumption of these fuels. By estimating these costs on a global scale, we hope to stimulate an informed policy debate and provide renewed impetus for policy reforms to reap the large potential benefits from more efficient pricing of fossil fuels in terms of improved public finances, improved population health and lower carbon emissions. Yes, in Russia or China, you COULD make these claims, but to say the US is at the lead on "subsidizing" energy by controlling prices is absolute total bullshyte. You can expect that everything else the authors wrote is similarly biased BS. BUT: it is dimwits in the media that propogate this kind of BS who influence dimwits in governments that in turn put pressure on industry to do really, really stupid things. Eight years from now, big oil will still be producing big amounts of oil, and big auto will be installing big guzzling internal combustion engines in a significant portion of their production. EVs make sense for commuters in cities, I will grant that. Being IN the energy business, though, I can tell you there is no where near the infrastructure to support significant numbers of EVs. In an intelligent society (that we sadly have never seen) one would realize that the real problems are more related to population than anything else. Further, cities for the most part produce very little of any importance, and why would you have all of these people driving petro OR electro vehicles to do essentially nothing but waste resources trying to bilk the rest of the world out of their wealth and well-being>>????

Thank you. That was very well put.