Wild Bill

Well, China apparently doesn't agree with you! They're on their way to having a manned Moon base! And they intend to make a lot of money at it! You have to study the issue to realize that the expensive part is just getting up there (and even that is getting cheaper!). Once you're there it's relatively cheap to do all kinds of things that will make you as rich as Croesus! Things that I never imagined until I started reading about it. One is ball bearings! Apparently, you can make ball bearings in zero g orbits that are perfectly round - better by a factor of a 'zillion' than anything we can make on earth. Perfect ball bearings can make transmissions that are FAR more efficient, among other things! Those alone could make someone a billionaire! If companies like Bonam's SpaceX lower the payload cost to the point where a reasonable number of manufacturing companies can afford it I think we will see an explosion of enterprise in earth orbit, let alone based on the Moon. It would happen almost overnight. One constant about business is no one wants to be the first at something new. It's expensive and requires opening up your mind to recognize an opportunity in an unfamiliar area. That being said, no one wants to be SECOND!

Still no votes for Mulroney! HAHAHAHA :lol:

Waldo, I'd be the first to agree with you that there are many new designs for coal-fired power plants that are "green". That being said, doesn't that make McGuinty look even more inept with his energy policies, given his dismantling of our domestic coal-fired plants, without apparently replacing them with alternatives that are as cost-effective? I can't figure McGuinty out. It's as if he got all his input on what we should do from some vague article in MacLean's magazine. As a techie, to me it makes no sense!

Interesting. Votes for this or that PM but not a single one for Mulroney! :lol:

I dunno about you Jack but in my 59 years I've never seen a free market. Somehow, somebody's always got it rigged! In their favour too, of course.

Space enterprise could feed ALL the hungry and supply them all with clean energy! You would keep us in the trees, bitching that we're running out of leaves!

When I was a kid, back before the last Ice Age, Ontario was known as a source of cheap electricity. What with Niagara Falls and other hydro electric operations and later all the nukes up in the Bruce Peninsula Ontario was known as a good place for manufacturing. You see, manufacturers use LOTS of electricity! Aluminum, nickel and other metal smelting plants use a FEROCIOUS amount of electricity! So electrical energy is a BIG part of a manufacturer's costs! Today, we are no longer that source of cheap power. If it is cheaper to send the ore to China, have THEM use the electricity and ship the refined metal back here, then we must be totally uncompetitive with our electricity rates. Remember, shipping all that heavy ore is not cheap! It costs much more than just your Purolator parcel holding your Christmas gift to your Grandma in Pictou, Nova Scotia. Getting our electricity supply up and the cost down would help manufacturing a LOT!

Just a bump! It breaks my heart that no one seems to care!

If there was any racism towards missing aboriginal women, it was from the RCMP and not from mainstream Canada. My understanding is that there has been a large number of missing women in that area, mostly prostitutes. One thing I've never seen in the media is whether or not the authorities looked for ANY missing prostitutes! IOW, did they jump on any cases of missing white prostitutes and ignore ONLY those of aboriginal women? I think the answer would be necessary before we can lay a considered charge of racism. As for trusting the government, I for one would never advise the natives to do that. I don't trust our government myself! Why on earth would I tell anyone else to trust them?

This from the man who would blame Harper for bad weather...

You really do patronize natives, don't you?

Geez Manny, sure you got enough drama into your post? You make so many non sequiturs I don't know where to start! First off, you claim that many people despise natives. How many is many? There are always a certain percentage of bigots, in any culture. The most racist man I ever met was a Hindu! The important question is, what percentage are they? Is it enough to be significant? Most non-natives never think about the issue! As far as despising them, I think you are exaggerating. Perhaps if you take someone from a community that lives close to a reserve with grievous problems of alcoholism and crime he may despise any bad behaviour of those natives. He may also be such a shallow thinker as to believe that the natives on that reserve are "all the same". Still, that is hardly a mainstream Canadian situation. Second, cops often do stupid things to ALL people! Many are hired more for their toughness than their empathy skills. Those employed near reserves likely get jaded dealing with the natives that pose problems, just as a cop who works around Jane and Finch in Toronto gets jaded with the street people, of any or all races. Hell, I knew cops when I was young that despised all teenagers, white or not! In your feverish pursuit of placing all the blame on mainstream Canada, you seem to ignore any sense of self-sufficiency and responsibility at all. I'm reminded of a parable I've posted before. It was some time ago so perhaps many here have not heard it: A set of twins were born to a drunken, lazy and violent father. One twin grew up exactly the same, shaped by the abuse. The other became a model citizen, getting well educated, finding a good job and raising a fine family. When the first twin was asked "Why did you turn out the way you did?" he replied "Well, with a father like mine what would you expect?" When the second twin was asked the same question he gave the same answer!

There's hope! This could be a giant shot in the arm! http://sync.sympatico.ca/news/contentposting.htm?newsitemid=15590525&feedname=cp-science&show=false&number=10&showbyline=true&abc=abc&pagenumber=4 "SEATTLE - The tycoons of cyberspace are looking to bankroll America's resurgence in outer space, reviving "Star Trek" dreams that first interested them in science. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen made the latest step Tuesday, unveiling plans for a new commercial spaceship that, instead of blasting off a launch pad, would be carried high into the atmosphere by the widest plane ever built before it fires its rockets. He joins Silicon Valley powerhouses Elon Musk of PayPal and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. in a new private space race that attempts to fill the gap left when the U.S. government ended the space shuttle program."

I've made this suggestion a couple of times before but it's obvious few or none have followed it. If you're going to take a stand on the Kyoto Accord, FIRST READ THE DAMN THING! Do what I did years ago. Google it, download it, print it out and READ it! Don't just scan over it! It is as obvious as the sun rising in the east! It totally lets the planet's biggest polluters off the hook, like China and India. I'm talking bigger by hundreds if not thousands of times! It IS just an income re-distribution scheme! The environment is hardly mentioned, except for the usual vague mom and apple pie stuff. It only gets serious with taking money from the west and giving it to the third world. So don't just wrap yourself in the green flag as some kind of symbol that you are a wonderful person who cares about saving the planet for our kids! Maybe you are, but the folks that put together Kyoto aren't. It's a scam and a flimflam job, pure and simple and it seems to have sucked in a good many of you! READ IT!

Good read, Derek! I can't help but think that the religious nutbars running Iran have no idea of how their martial technology is outclassed! I guess they think that Allah will provide victory for them.

Somewhere some Taliban-types are laughing at us! Hasn't anyone made the connection yet that veils and burkhas only started to appear in the 1970's, about the same time as the rise of mid-east terrorism? These practices are SUPPOSED to hide identities! There have been many incidents in the MSM of terrorists hiding behind veils and burkhas. Before someone demands a cite, let me tell you to google for yourself! I'm not wasting my time providing a cite that the sun rises in the east just because you're too lazy to change your mind. These customs only appear among the hard line, more primitive Islamic cultures. Women in Egypt today and during the Shah's reign in Iran never wore the damn things! They would have been insulted at the very suggestion! Muslim women all over the world do not wear them, by the millions! No, it's only the very same cultures that practice terrorism that created and now enforce the wearing of these identity-masking articles of clothing. This is much too black and white obvious to be mere coincidence! Meanwhile, there is no denying that the ability to be masked in public is a danger to other citizens. The ability to clearly see other citizens that you interact with goes back centuries, if not thousands of years, in our mainstream culture. Our governments' first priority is NOT the protection of religious rights of every minority immigrant culture! The first priority is to protect the majority of citizens that are already here! Anything else is secondary. Not to say that minority religious rights should be ignored! The use of such extreme arguments is a red herring. Only in clear cases of a conflict posing risk should a custom be banned. Clearly shown identity would be one of those cases. We are under no obligation as a society to accommodate any and everyone's claim to a religious practice. If the idea has sprung from a too liberal interpretation of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms that's only because when the document was written the issue had never been seen before! Unforeseen circumstances should mean revising old documents, not continuing to abide by them in inappropriate circumstances that put the public at risk. Some poster no doubt will type that we have only a few incidents of violence by terrorists hiding under a burkha. That's scant comfort to any victims, to consider their lives to be an acceptable price. I would sugggest that we execute a few of those who hold this view every year! If we satisfy the statistic then the rest of us should all be safe! I think many of those who choose to make this a religious rights issue are just looking for something to champion to make themselves feel more "holy", seizing on a symbolic view of the issue and not bothering to think it all the way through.

I can agree with some of that! Average Joe does tend to buy the cheapest, regardless of the source. However, a stroll through stores like Canadian Tire or Best Buy shows that when virtually everything is coming from China what other choice do you have? Also, the competitive picture is badly skewed with China artificially pegging its currency at a value giving it an unfair advantage and America having allowed itself to get so into debt that it can't force the issue. If in the future China's currency is allowed to float like that of any other country, coupled with the escalation of wages among the Chinese workforce and a portion of what was lost from North America may return. I'm not so much disagreeing with you as saying that the picture is not so black and white. There are a number of conflicting factors.

Eyeball, the world is not so simple as for all ideas on one side of the fence to be right and all ideas on the other to be wrong! Do you define a classic liberal like me to be rightwing and that's why you're surprised at the stand I take on some issues? Hell, if we had the chance to kill a few beers together you'd likely find my views to be all over the map! As I've said before, I'm also a tech which makes be a bit of a "Utilitarian". As times change situations change, which means old approaches may be no longer valid. The only reason you don't see more "leftwing" views from me is that so far I haven't found that many that can work!

There were posts earlier about how Suncor was exempt from the fed's sanctions against Syria. Today we see that the point is moot: http://news.sympatico.ctv.ca/home/calgary-based_suncor_to_withdraw_from_syria/848967e7 "Canadian energy giant Suncor Energy Inc. says it plans to suspend operations in Syria as a result of sanctions enacted against the embattled country earlier this month." "Suncor Energy had said in November that the company would stay in Syria until the situation in the country reached a point where it was no longer safe to operate. " "Earlier this month, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said Suncor had no plans to leave Syria. He argued that the Calgary-based company provided a much-needed service to the country. "If they ceased activities there, you'd have literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity, and that would be bad for the civilian population," he told a House of Commons committee on December 2." Something big must be about to happen to spook Suncor this way.

More simply, the threat to take jobs off shore is not much of a threat if you're ALREADY offshore!

There's an old saying that every general is prepared for the LAST war and not the next one! It refers back to when Hitler made the first large scale use of new weapons like divebombers and Panzers, while the Polish sent cavalry on horses to stop them. I wonder if perhaps the same sort of thinking applies to many economists and politicians when formulating government policy. They seem to keep believing things that might no longer apply to our modern situation. Consider, the idea of "trickle down" economics, where making things easier for the rich resulted in benefits flowing down to the average Joe, applied to a time when the rich invested in domestic manufacturing. In that and other fields they created businesses within their own country, resulting in more jobs for more of the country's citizens and keeping unemployment low, which meant a bit of competition for better workers and thus better wage scales. Is that true anymore? Far fewer of today's rich individuals and corporations are investing in Canadian or even North American enterprise. You give them a tax break and it allows them to set up in India or China. If the money isn't invested here, what is going to "trickle down"? Or am I missing something here?

Well GH, everything is risky! We still need the energy! All those expensive solar panels in Canadian Tire are NOT going to fulfill our needs! Like everything else, you have to mitigate the risk. The best way perhaps is to give people and corporations strong incentives to do it right in the first place! Stiffen up the laws to give anyone negatively affected some practical recourse. I mean, if we can set up Human Rights Commissions that allow anyone to file a charge for free, with no need to pay a lawyer then why shouldn't someone who had clean water from a well screwed up by some construction company digging a quarry be able to sue them for free? I forget which one but there's a Scandinavian country who implemented a very simple anti-pollution law for its waterways. Any company or person drawing water from a waterway had to put their ingress pipe immediately downstream from the pipe pouring out its effluent! That's a simple and strong incentive to clean up your mess!

CC, right now the Liberals aren't much of anything! We'll have to wait and see how they look when (and if!) they get their act together!

You're right, eyeball! Sadly, all too right! That seems to be the case in ANY industry these days!

Topaz, when you're standing at attention you're not supposed to grin!