?Impact

The biggest problem with signs in Montreal is the bloody parking signs. You can have a short stretch of road with dozens of parking signs and it takes hours to figure out all the arrows, days of week, time of year, hours, handicapped only, local resident permit required, etc. to know if you can park, and for how long. It's almost impossible to read them while driving along, so you have to go hunting for a spot and then walk up and down the street reading a dozen or more signs before you know if you can park or not. One of my pet peeves is the use of the dash '-' instead of a comma to separate a list of weekdays. There may be no parking on this side of the road on Mar-Jeu which means Tuesday & Thursday, not Tuesday thru Thursday.

The kind of adaption you are thinking about is better suited to frogs.

The question is how will we adapt? Reducing consumption/emissions is a way of adapting. I agree that population is at the root of the problem, but I don't know how that is addressed. Long ago draught, famine, disease, and war kept things in check. Today it is the advanced countries, the ones that solved those issues (ie. got rid of the balancing factors), that are the biggest consumers and emitters. It sound like the best solution is to get rid of the advanced societies as it will reduce more per person, and help restore the natural order of things. Who's in with me on the movie script?

Would you like steak or chicken for dinner?

So who are the two lawyers who get to pick from the random sample? They get to look at you, and perhaps ask you a question or two. They can either then say "content", or "challenge". They are only given a limited number of challenges they can offer, so say we have 325 legislators (or whatever, I used the current number of elected ones) then the pool would probably be a thousand or so. Who decides? Who decides who decides? What questions do they ask?

I think I will be more influenced by the big money on TV ads then some government education program. Yet again the monied status quo wins.

So seat warmers, no qualifications needed.

Why not, a few weeks ago it seemed that every topic somehow drifted into a Trump discussion so now we can have Trump topics drifting into Quebec politics.

Yes, a lot of rice production causes a lot of methane production and solutions need to be adopted there as well. A good example of a solution would be instead of the traditional flooded rice paddies used in many places, farmers could switch to the method used in the Sichuan province of China where they have raised beds and flood the furrows. Another method is to regularly flood and dry out the paddies so as not to give the methane production a chance to build up. It is not only cattle farmers that need to make changes, agriculture in general is a huge contributor to green house gases.

Wrong, the only economy that will take a kick in the teeth is the criminal black market. If BC has the best climate, then it will continue to be a lucrative legal farming economy. If competitors jump in, then so be it. I suspect the indoor competitors will be large, but today they are numerous and cause significant damage to the residential real-estate market.

You mean the Alberta Conservatives with their back yard bar-b-ques. Access for cash is a Conservative strategy, yet you don't seem to recognize that. When the Liberals copied that strategy you stuck the label on it and only applied it to Liberals. That is your partisan thinking. I ask again how do expect to fund the political system in this country? You say you are against any government funds, although the Conservatives are the latest beneficiaries to the tune of tens of millions a year. You say you are against fund raisers, unless they happen to be in Conservative back yards. What exactly do you want. Make clear rules that are non-partisan.

Cows are ruminants, so yes they are very different from us in digesting their food. The diet the cow is fed also has a lot to do with their methane production, as I mentioned above. Finally it is their addition to the food chain that really is responsible for the increases (methane, C02, etc.).

No, I mean exactly what you said but in a non-partisan manner. The rich should not have special access, where you are saying only rich Conservatives should have special access. What exactly do you want to fund the political process in this country?

We have police forces to do that job, lets not misuse our military forces or even threaten to use them for domestic law enforcement. While I am not one of those overreacting and clamouring for Carr to resign, he needs to take responsibility and retract his threat and apologize for his words.

The cash cow will come from reduced crime and enforcement. There is a lot of criminal activity associated with distribution of marijuana, take away that opportunity and the costs associated with it will go away. I expect we will come out way ahead. Yes, responsible consumption of cannabis is always a problem. Availability has never been an issue, so will making it legal have any effect (positive or negative) on responsible use?

If it is raised to the same level, does that mean that Federal employees will need to be trilingual?

That is a very bad choice of words from Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr: “If people choose for their own reasons not to be peaceful, then the government of Canada – through its defence forces, through its police forces – will ensure that people are kept safe,” The threat of using the Canadian Forces on Canadian citizens is not to be taken lightly. Mr. Carr needs to take responsibility for his words.

Yes, understood but as I was alluding to before the Navy is looking at this seriously. Google CBARS. Yes, there are some advantages of a human gas attendant but there are many advantages that the machine has as well. Depth perception is much better on machines as you can put cameras further apart than the 3" of the human eyes. You can also have other cameras and sensors on the boom itself all feeding the control software. The react time is much faster than the human, and the computers in both aircraft can coordinate as well. Finally if you are refuelling a manned aircraft, it would be easy to display all signals, including video, to the pilot of that aircraft and hand over control as well.

You`re right, once you add up all the smaller numbers it comes to 12,334 and an additional 210 in the Coast Guard. I`m using the wikipedia source, assuming they have kept that page up to date. You need to be careful however they include UAVs in their list as well. I didn`t bother to compare fixed wing to helicopters, that would be interesting but need more work to calculate. Airforce: 5207 Army: 3735 Marines: 1227 Navy: 2165 Coast Guard: 210 Yes, I can see where my wording might have been confusing. By airborne gas stations, I was referencing refueling tankers. I know the navy wants to get tanker drones for carrier operation because the Hercules tanker is not designed or safe for that environment. They did some trials years ago and were able to do landings and takeoffs, but decided it was too dangerous. They need an aircraft with a grab hook for landing and catapult compatible for takeoff. I wonder if they will look at a similar drone to replace the C-2 Greyhound when only cargo is involved.

957 (Airforce) + 26 (Navy) F16s for a total of 982 1565 (Army) UH-60 Balckhawks

Except even the studies you cite don`t say that. They clearly say that 42% reach advanced level, and a lot of the rest reach a lower level but far more than a few words in a sentence here or there. I have 3 kids that went through French Immersion, and they all have different levels of fluency. My eldest son dropped into a regular program in Grade 10, but is still highly fluent and can and does converse regularly with friends and strangers in French. My other two both completed the entire curriculum and have excellent skills. My daughter is practically indistinguishable from a native speaker. She did a job interview for a part time job when she was in university that required bilingual skills and was interviewed by a francophone in Quebec. The interview started in French, and progressed very well. Half way through the interview they switched to English and that also went very well. At the end of the interview she was complemented on her English skills. Sorry, I can`t agree with that. None of those languages have official status in our country. I have no problem with someone setting up a private school without government funding, or meeting the demand for special language classes, but not special schools. Grade school curriculum doesn`t include language education beyond English/French, but high school does allow electives. After school programs are a possibility at the elementary level, but if on school property then they should be non-profit (ie. run by the school for a cost, and teachers paid and materials purchased, but no outside for-profit).

While I don't think it is quite 10,000, they certainly have several thousand. The largest fleet of a single aircraft are the Army's Blackhawk helicopters. The Airforce has around 450 airborne gas stations alone.

The situational awareness you talk about is really only applicable to fighter aircraft, and even there the F35 changes that dramatically with automation anyway. Capacity I addressed above, it is an issue of need not function. Yes the US has huge expenditures and look at multiple systems. They already are flying huge fleets of unmanned drones, in the order of 10,000 UAVs currently. Most are small and used for surveillance, but there are still many that are capable of delivering ordinance as well.

Mid-air refuelling of a drone already done, and the navy is looking at mid-air tanker drone as their first standard carrier based drone. Also mid-air drone to drone refuelling has already been tested with smaller UAVs. Carrying capacity is simply an issue of need. Today it is all about precision, not capacity. You can easily get more by having multiple drones, the real question is about bigger is what you want to deliver. Remember that most large aircraft today are capable of performing all the functions of flight automatically, it is a matter of regulation, communication, and acceptance. Communication is the only technical challenge, and it is already solved for smaller UAVs.

It is not about the plane, it is about the missions. What percentage of missions could be replaced by various drones? Certainly ordinance delivery and recognizance are areas where drones are superior to manned fighters. We might need a fleet of fighter aircraft for some time into the future, but that could be a vastly reduced force.