Wild Bill

Hey Max, my Nova Scotian grandfather used to vote for whoever would give him a bottle! It was a point of honour with him to not cheat and vote for someone else. He had integrity - he stayed bought! Me, I'm not much of a drinker anymore but hey, if a politician will make booze cheaper I have to consider him! Cheaper beer is a damned sight better than anything McGuinty has ever done for me. I can't even trust him to keep me under the protection of the law, after what he did in Caledonia! If it were expedient for him politically, I would be toast in an instant!

We've been through this before, Topaz. He CAN"T just get rid of it! For about the tenth time, McGuinty agreed to an HST deal that has a "poison pill" in it. If Ontario backs out, it has to pay a zillion dollars as a penalty! The most Hudak can do is to play with exemptions on certain things, like maybe electricity bills.

GWiz, perhaps you don't realize it but you have a very confrontational debating style. Actually, it's outright rude! If you actually read the rules of this forum, you have broken them many times. Don't feel bad, you're far from the only one! Still, you shouldn't be surprised if a moderator gives you a warning sometime, or even more. This board has tried very hard to keep things civil and lower the level of sarcasm and personal attacks. Anyone who has seen the profane chaos of boards like "rubble.com" is well aware of how a good board can be ruined. If this board ever gets that bad I know I won't be the only one to leave. Anyhow, take it for what it's worth. I'm no cop myself and it's not my board. I just thought that perhaps you weren't aware. Perhaps you are and just don't care! Whatever, when I find someone too rude and obnoxious I just put them on the 'ignore' list and I rarely see any posts of theirs again, unless it's a quote within someone else's post. Just FYI. Do what you will.

Betsy, I think by now you should have realized that you are never going to change any minds here. That's because the minds involved are too different! Back in my hippy days, we used to call them 'head' people and 'heart' people. Most of the posters to this board appear to be 'head' people. This doesn't at all mean they don't have hearts but it does mean that they tend to think in a more logical, cause and effect manner. Head people can NEVER accept Christian fundamentalist views, Betsy! They (and I include myself) are hard wired to need explanations that are logical and make sense, corresponding to the available evidence and not causing contradictions. These types of minds don't accept much of anything just on faith! It makes them feel very insecure, because they feel the need to cope with any and all contradictions that come along. What's more, since they tend to be bright and well-informed, the more they learn the less they will accept on blind faith! Unfortunately, Christian fundamentalism offers little or nothing else but blind faith. It may be easier for someone like you, since I can see by your arguments that you are indeed a 'heart' person. Heart people make wonderful friends but very poor engineers and scientists, as a rule. I think the reason that debates such as this thread can provoke such agitated responses is because many people feel inhibited about dealing with the Witness who bangs on their door early in the morning face to face. It seems to be a common approach to pretend not to be home and not answer the door! An Internet venue is faceless, so they vent their energy on someone like you, hiding behind the anonymity. Myself, I'm old enough to have gone beyond that. I often will invite those Witnesses or Mormons in for tea, treat them as civilly as I can but refuse to change my mind in any way. I explain to them that I am more of a scientific type. I won't accept anything from their Bible because I don't accept that it is Gospel just because they say it is. That usually leaves them with little or nothing to say! I had one nice Witness lady come back one morning with one of her magazines in hand, triumphantly boasting that "It has a big article on Darwin! There's something with a scientist!" "My dear lady, I replied. " Darwin has been dead for well over a 120 years! Couldn't you come up with somebody at bit more contemporary?" The problem for her is that she can't! Her faith has chosen to accept what knowledge they had in their brains at the start and they are at odds with anything that might contradict that, forevermore! Can you name any scientist at the level of a Feynan, Mullis or Hawking that believes in Christian fundamentalism? NOT just believing in God but believing in the literal truth of the Christian Bible? I don't think you could find even one! That's because their brains literally don't work in a way that would allow that. They don't believe just because that's what they're told by some authority figure like a minister or priest. They need explanations and evidence that they can examine for themselves FIRST! So really, these threads are pointless. That being said, if you were to happen to bang on my door some weekend morning, rest assured I'd give you a cup of tea. Perhaps some shortbread cookies, as well!

Hey, anything would be better than downtown Hamilton!

I've said many times before Molly, I'm NOT a smoker. Still, back when it was allowed in bars and clubs I always sat with the smokers. I found that too many non-smokers are a preachy, cheerless lot! If you get bored and find yourself with some free time you might try to google up a study done by two McGill med students about a decade ago about the true cost of smoking to the taxpayer. They had noticed that in the MSM they constantly saw and heard 'experts' making the claim that smokers cost more in medical costs than the taxes collected on cigarettes. Like true scientists they were offended by the fact that this claim was NEVER substantiated! It was just dropped like the Ten Commandments on Moses' stone tablets. No one ever challenged the claim. So they decided to make it a project! The results were quite interesting. Apparently, governments at all levels earned a net profit of several billion dollars per year on nicotine! I don't have the exact figures since I'm going by memory here. The reason why seemed quite obvious. Smokers tend to die younger! Also the time between the symptoms of lung cancer showing up and the inevitable death (lung cancer recovery rates are sadly still extremely poor) tends to be rather short, a matter of months and not years. Meanwhile, non-smokers tend to go on for years and years, getting knee and hip replacements and gobbling up mega-dollars worth of drugs to keep them fit and healthy. In many cases they live more than 30 years longer than a smoker who got cancer! It doesn't matter how one feels about smoking. Math is math and money is money. That's a huge pile of money, that would have to come from some other source if nicotine was made illegal. To further roil the waters, I can't help but wonder what the contraband cigarettes from the native reserves are doing to the equation. The OFFICIAL figure admitted by the government is that at least 50% of cigarettes smoked in Ontario are contraband! That's ZILLIONS of tax dollars that will never be pumped into the medicare budget!

Well, we could consider what made people pioneers before. Certainly space habitation could provide lots of 'elbow room' and isolation. There are always citizens who chafe at living in too crowded an environment, with all its urban rules and restrictions. Resources are virtually unlimited. There's lots of asteroids to mine and "free" solar power. We've already learned about all the minerals available in lunar soil if we want to colonize there. In the early days we could probably make a good living with zero g manufacturing things like medical sera and ball bearings. I never knew what a big deal ball bearings were to an economy until I read how ball bearing factories were key bombing targets in WWII. Zero G ball bearings could double or triple the life of a transmission. Zero G also lets you make alloys of metals that just can't be mixed down here on the Earth's surface. Nobody knows just what these alloys could do but everyone is certain that there would be MANY profitable uses! It's hard to predict the personal choice of citizens as a whole but surely there are more than enough people who feel unfulfilled living here who would cheerfully sign up to colonize space! If I were younger I'd be gone in a heartbeat! I still might, considering that living in even a lunar gravity might add decades to my life, having reduced a huge strain on my heart and such. We've already advanced our technology that once we get living in space we can be self-sustaining and capable of expansion. A hundred years from now that may no longer be true. We will have depleted our "easy to get" resources to the point where we may not be able to afford to make the move off the planet. Or maybe not. We've hardly touched mining the sea bottoms, or even electrolysis of seawater, for that matter. I'd likely be proven wrong for sure if I made the assumption that technologies to extract resources will improve by major leaps as well. No, it really seems to be a question of will. Would we have enough people willing to leave, enough to create self-sustaining colonies? Hell, if we can get 10,000 people into a convention centre for a StarTrek Convention I think we won't lack for prospective emmigrants!

Not enough data points yet, I'm afraid. We've only seen one month of bills so far. We don't run central air so that's not a factor. All we've been able to do is make "guesstimates" based on previous bills. That's how I can see the electricity savings on the new DC motors. Formerly we had an 18 year old mid efficiency gas furnace, one of the early models. It had a big honkin' half horsepower traditional style motor in the bottom for blowing the hot air up and our the vents. The very type of electricity hog motor I've been describing in my comparisons to CFL savings. Incidently, if you figure you're saving $7/month then obviously all the other things you've done are much better advice to achieve the most bang for your buck. That has been my point with CFLs. We've been conned into doing one of the least important things, perhaps because it's a simple thing to sell. Anyhow, comparing bills for gas which show the last half of Dec and the 1st half of January is not very accurate since I'd have to research the temperatures we experienced last year. Obviously if last year was colder we would have burned more gas anyway and vice versa. However, we all know that it HAS been friggin' cold this past month! We would expect to have burned a lot of gas. Yet just comparing the numbers this recent bill was lower by about a third than last year's! We formerly paid $220 and this new bill was for about $150. I'm sorry I can't be very accurate but hopefully this will give a useful "guesstimate". The furnace's installed cost was $4000, including 13% HST.

How can you possibly tell? According to your post, you did a whole PILE of stuff! How much of your savings came from the CFLs? Seems pretty obvious that the only way to tell would be to do ONLY the CFLs and then see your bill! Anyhow, my laundry dryer has an Energy Star rating of typically 111 KWHs per month. The typical CFL is 11-13 watts. So simple math says that I would have to burn 111,000 divided by 13 = 8538 CFL bulbs! Tell us again how much CFLs save on your total bill! As I said in my previous post, the lighting portion of a typical homeowner's monthly bill is mice nuts! What gobbles up the watts and kilowatts is stove and oven burners, dryers and anything with a motor, like a refrigerator/freezer or a furnace blower. The math is pretty indisputable. Light bulbs are not a big deal, of ANY kind! Now, we just got a new high-efficiency gas furnace that uses modern DC motors inside. We checked out our latest electricity bill. Looks like in addition to the gas savings we also save about $20/month on electricity. If you want to use the new fangled bulbs because it makes you feel you've saved the planet that's fine. If you want to make the claim they save you significant amounts of money the physics and the math do not back it up.

Topaz, have you not been paying attention? It's been mentioned many times that there is NO other plane anywhere near the capabilities of the F-35! So how can you have a competitive bid? It's like bidding between a Ford Pinto and a Corvette Stingray! What's more, the Liberals back when they were in power spent a pile of our tax money to get us enrolled in the design program for the F-35. This guaranteed us a better price and a higher place in the delivery line. If we back out now we throw all that money away, just like when the Liberals canceled the EH-101 helicopters. So what you suggest sounds simple but has some pretty strong and complicated details involved. Many of the critics posting in this thread are not really talking about a competitive bid for a better deal on another plane. They KNOW about these details! What they are really trying to do is to make sure we don't spend any money at all and who cares if we have a useful plane! Otherwise they'd stop deliberately ignoring these important details.

My good doctor, apparently you are unaware of the sweetheart McGuinty deal with his MicoFit program! This takes your premise and sails it into the stratosphere, not as a disproof but as even more of a fact! McGuinty is paying people in Ontario 13.5 cents per KWH for wind generated power. If they put up a solar generating array they get 80 cents per KWH! What's more, they NEVER have to throttle back their output! The government has guaranteed to pay them for all their power, no matter what, for at least 20 years! I think McGuinty's people got a bit scared when the reality of the huge number of applications came in. They promptly changed the deal so that only rooftop solar got the full amount. Ground mounted systems got about 20 cents less, still a GREAT deal! However, that only served to enrage those farmers who had spent time and money on their business plan for a ground mounted array based on the full price, only to be denied even though they had applied long before the deadline but had just been caught in the backlog the government had generated itself! So we pay 80 cents per KWH even at times when other producers might have to shut down and we are paying other jurisdictions to take out surplus power! No doubt you can easily see even more things wrong with this picture!

It seems no one wants to admit WHY the Americans worry more about their northern border. The reason is US! Many Americans have an impression of Canada as a country that is very liberal. To these Americans that means soft, gullible and a little lazy about making hard decisions. They view Canada as about as effective as Ellen DeGeneres at running border security systems. This makes it very hard to gain their confidence. Even when we catch a terrorist redhanded it seems we want to let him out of jail early, depending on "anger-management classes" to reform him! Until and unless we start to look a bit more hard-headed and practical I think we will always have problems with the USA over border security issues. They just don't think we can be trusted to keep them safe!

You're doing it again, Betsy! YOU defined 'nothing' as 'the spiritual realm'! Then you spin an argument from that self-defined premise to claim to prove God exists and atheism false! You did nothing to prove your statement that 'nothing' is the 'spiritual realm'. You just pulled it out of your butt! Until and unless you can prove your premise, your argument is worthless. It doesn't even merit being called a theory!

Betsy, few if any on this board 'hate' you. Still, if we set up a voting poll as to how many people would agree with Kimmy and how many would agree with you it would be no contest. I doubt if you could pull 10% as many votes! Christian fundamentalism, creationism, Intelligent Design are all very much minority views. Not that numbers indicate truth. There was a time when the numbers were highest for those who thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. That isn't true. Most people once thought the Earth was flat. That isn't true either. If we went by numbers, we'd all be Buddhists or Hindus, who outnumber the Christians. Keep in mind however that just because we don't hate you doesn't mean that we consider your views harmless. I and many other people would always fight to keep your views out of any school our children attended. Your beliefs would harm them for life in anything but a simplistic, 'Amish-style' career path. You would end all hope of new gene-therapies that could help seriously afflicted children, or new varieties of food that would keep the hungry from starving. Your beliefs would make it far more difficult if not impossible to develop the technology to get us out into Space, where there are almost infinite resources to improve the lives of everyone.

Bonam, wouldn't an ion rocket get us to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light? And what about a light sail? Or a Bussard ram jet? Are they still scifi or is the technology there yet?

There's a BIG difference between Bill Shatner and Celine! Most of us LIKE Bill Shatner! Celine garners her support from folks that like their music cheesy, as in sappy Disney movies for kids and old refugees from ABBA concerts.

Exactly, Tim! Some folks don't understand the difference between 'faith' and 'confidence'. 'Confidence' is a result of experience and examination. 'Faith' is simply a blind choice.

Didn't the white mice have something to do with it? As they muttered "42!"?

There were a lot of good things in Meech Lake. Not all, but a lot. The problem was that Meech was basically a backroom deal cooked up by a bunch of guys in suits, at a time when populism was starting to become a more powerful meme in the Canadian electorate. There were dark rumours of different promises being made in the French translation from the original given to English Canada. In effect, too many people in TROC lost faith in the integrity of Mulroney and the Tory Party of that time. They didn't feel they properly understood Meech, especially since it was rushed so fast at times that the ordinary people couldn't get a good look at it. So in the end, they went with their gut. They felt they were being conned so they rejected it. Meanwhile, it was Elijah Harper, the Manitoba aboriginal MLA who put the final torpedo into Meech, by refusing to allow unanimous consent to the deal. It is a telling point that rather than put the blame on the aboriginals, which would be "politically incorrect" many people today blame Clyde Wells, the Nfld. premier for accepting that the Manitoba action meant Meech was already dead so he canceled a vote in the Nfld. House for being unnecessary. Ironically, Harper has become a hero to much of Canada for killing the deal. It was perceived as not just wrong for native peoples but for mainstream Canadians as well. I consider Meech Lake to be a classic case of something being oversold by 'suits' who appeared just a bit too slick, losing the confidence of their 'customers'. Most of this can be blamed on Mulroney personally. He was elected to two consecutive majorities, the largest the country had ever seen. Yet towards the end of his second mandate he no longer appeared to be an agent of change. He looked like more of the "same old, same old" - the same as the Liberals we had rejected, only slicker!

Sez who? Trudeau and Chretien did it all the time! Do you think we decided to have a new flag, a Charter of Rights and a new Constitution by means of a referendum? Hell, stuff like that wasn't even in the campaign! Trudeau was in power and suddenly these things are happening! So we never even had the chance to indicate our preferences by voting for his party and giving him a mandate. Look at what Mulroney tried to do with Meech Lake! Damn near got away with it, too! Thank God we DID get to vote on that one!

I have no idea what you are trying to argue here. If corn and wheat prices were so great, that makes it even stranger that so many farmers chose to put up solar and wind systems under the MicroFit program instead. The only logical explanation is that the MicroFit program is more profitable than anything else. That was the major point of my criticisms of what McGuinty has done.

Absolutely right, Dr. Dre! What's more, if Saipan's arguements about how we can't afford to clutter farmland were correct then why the hell did so flippin' many farmers sign up for McGuinty's MicroFit program, to the point where he had a huge backlog of applications? Seems to me that if their farmland was profitable they wouldn't have been interested. Saipan is obviously not an Ontario farmer.

I won't argue with you about what they do in other parts of the world. I will agree with you that other countries seem to be much more sensible. You see, Ontario has it's own twist on the situation. Those who signed up to provide wind and solar power get a HUGELY inflated price for it! What's more, Ontario has signed contracts with them to GUARANTEE to take their power ALWAYS, NO MATTER WHAT, FOR 20 YEARS! So if you are a supplier under a FIT or MicroFit program, you will NEVER have to throttle back or take your generation offline! You will always be paid the maximum! I'm not arguing that many alternatives aren't practical, or can be made to be practical. I am arguing solely and only with the way McGuinty and his people have done things. Is it your position to defend McGuinty's choices?

No, you told yourselves that He told you! YOU make the claim that the word of your Bible is divine truth! Of course, you're welcome to believe this if you wish but you certainly have no right to expect that anyone else must accept this with no supporting evidence.

No, they don't! However, in order to take advantage of that, we need a much more modern, "smart" power grid. Guess what? We don't have one! It will cost billions! And we can't build it in a few weekends, either. So who cares if there's wind and solar power in an area that can't send it to us, or at least send it in a controllable fashion to prevent power surges and equipment blowouts. You have to be a techie I guess to understand that you need more than a giant, long Canadian Tire extension cord to deliver your power. Power grids are rather complicated things. Since they've first been built a huge amount of engineering and constant monitoring has been going on to make sure our power is steady and reliable. To the average consumer this has been an invisible, "behind the scenes" activity that he has not been aware of in the slightest. This does not mean it doesn't exist. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't have long term goals, of course. Just that we only betray our ignorance and set ourselves up for expensive costs when we try to implement short term solutions that don't satisfy all the real world details.