Wild Bill

Again MCC, I'm not a religious man or a Christian so what do I really know about how Christians think? I was really just objecting to the idea that YOU can define acts of good character as SOLELY the province of socialists, according to a definition YOU had created! Believe it or not, there are kind and charitable conservatives, libertarians, marxists and probably even some fascists! Look at how many people totally misunderstand Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, being totally unable to understand how someone from her camp could help out a friend in need or contribute to some charity that improves society, or at least the neighbourhood. Self-interest is not exclusively about greed with money. It also means doing what makes YOU feel better! If you care about a friend it makes sense to help him. If you would rather have well behaved kids in your neighbourhood instead of juvenile delinquents then contributing to a community centre might make sense. The important factor is that it is the individual's choice, not something imposed on him. We should have the right to choose our charity! Not have our pockets picked by some nameless collective group that usually isn't even audited to make sure they're honest! When someone keeps resorting to building straw men I say they must live in a dream world. Even more, they simply lack tolerance!

Thanks for the info on the filtering! I didn't realize that a filter on the main lines in and out would be enough. I'll keep that in the back of my mind for when I might need it. Plasma TVs are worse, by the way! Let's hope the LEDs win out in the market. As for a bi-directional meter, it's never been a technical problem, I agree. It's a political decision not to do it that way. Such a meter means that it's possible to run your own needs from your system and only put excess onto the grid. If it turned out you didn't need the grid anymore you might go off grid. This means no more electric bill and you no longer pay those fixed charges to pay off the debt your goverment had accrued. As far as the tech level of the grid, that's a separate issue from the meters. Sure it's easy to log the flow of current both ways but the grid still has to be able to react to the power being taken and given to it. You can't just have bi-directional feeds working willy-nilly. The grid has to be able to compensate almost instantaneously for current surges and increased demands at all points along the network. The present system for the most part is just not sophisticated enough. It's not the measurement, it's the control!

We've made some big mistakes here, Dre. When I was a kid Ontario was known for really cheap power and was a major exporter. Now the cost to the consumer keeps rising and we import so often I'm not sure if we are an exporter or not overall. We made the choice to go nuclear and from a technical side it was probably a good choice. We had safe and reliable designs that we've sold to other countries and they've worked out well. Here at home however the politicians couldn't resist meddling to get their snouts in the trough. They appointed their "buddies" to VERY highly paid executive positions. During the years of construction they paid the workers and especially tradesmen extremely well. I had friends from school who worked at the nukes as electricians and they ALL drove very expensive cars! During the 80's I used to make sales calls at Ontario Hydro's offices in Toronto. Often the buyer would take me down to their cafeteria. I was amazed at the food and the pricing! They always featured at least 2 entrees, like a steak dinner or even lobster! How'd you like to buy a sirloin steak dinner for $2.00?! Even a sandwich was under a dollar! A bottle of Pepsi that might have cost you 75 cents at the time in a store would cost you maybe a quarter in their cafeteria. So everybody was living high off the hog and everything was subsidized to be cheap for the staff. After years and decades it was pretty obvious what was really happening. Ontario Hydro ended up with a debt load of about 35 BILLION dollars! Of course, the anti-nuke people seized on this to make the claim that nuclear was too expensive but they were ignoring the "snout" factor. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we could see the real numbers that the actual power generation was cheap! Certainly, none of the other countries running the same reactors seemed to have any complaints! Here in Ontario people should have gone to jail for sucking money out of our nuke budget! The debt problem had been public knowledge since well before Mike Harris' term but nobody had wanted to tackle it. Politically it would have been suicide to expect the citizens to have to pay huge increases on their bill. Eventually, they pulled some chicanery by splitting the former Ontario Hydro Corp up. Now when I get my bill I see a charge for the usage to go to my local provider, a charge for the transmission lines, a couple of other fixed charges for god knows what and a small charge to go towards retiring that stranded $35 Billion dollar debt. I live by myself in a small house, with gas for my stove, dryer and furnace. My typical bill will be for maybe $40 for what I actually consumed and over $50 for all the other fixed charges! If I successfully managed to consume zero electricity I would still get a bill for over $50! And forget about putting solar cells on the roof! McGuinty's program is so backed up they've halted letting people hook up, especially in areas where the grid is not advanced enough to handle it. There are companies that will install it all for you and take their cut off the top, amortized over some years but they want to deal with people who have a large amount of roof square footage. Most older homes in the city core are just too small. The provincial program is deliberately set up so that the power you generate is on a totally separate meter as it feeds the grid. Your own consumption stays the same and you NEVER get any power from your own solar roof! This is totally different from what is done in many American states. They use 2-way meters that do the math and deduct what you gave the grid from what you had taken, giving you a credit or a debit on your bill. With McGuinty's setup, because you still use the traditional system for your own needs you will keep paying all those fixed charges. The last thing the provincial government wants is for too many people to get totally off the grid! By installing systems that are separate that have no battery bank of their own, the homeowner would never have a system practical for his own needs. He would have that large expense of a battery bank to consider. Worse yet for me, you are not allowed to build or modify any of the equipment yourself. It must be approved equipment installed by approved technicians. No opportunity at all for a do-it-yourselfer to save some money. This forces the creation of those "green jobs" McGuinty kept promising. I'm not at all confident that a system where the pricing is artificially inflated by a government will work well long term. Ontario is already involved in lawsuits from countries with which we have free trade agreements with these installations. I have a specific wrinkle that most folks don't have, Dre. The inverters that are used in these solar installations generate a great deal of radio noise. I'm a ham radio operator and I've talked with other hams that are too close to one of these systems. The noise is so bad that they can't hear any signals through it! They no longer can pursue their hobby! Hams have coped with noise problems for years and usually have successfully fixed them. A small capacitor across a neighbour's furnace blower motor or light dimmer can work great! Not with the solar equipment, I'm afraid. Only approved equipment with only approved techs, remember? And the techs are not really what I call techs. It's really an honorary title. They know enough to bolt the blocks together. They usually know nothing about what's inside and could never actually work on one of the circuits. If a 10 cent transistor blows on a board they just throw the entire unit away and bolt in a new one! They would not know how to "noise suppress" their units. I'd just like to see the cost of solar panels drop enough that an average joe like me could afford to put his own installation on his roof, be able to buy an affordable battery bank so I could go off grid and tell my government to get stuffed! Unfortunately, I don't believe it will be possible before I die.

Your problem is one of definitions. Those are NOT specifically socialist traits! People of all political persuasions can still show good character. It is not exclusive to socialism, except perhaps in YOUR book! I might add that most people who call themselves socialists rarely do anything themselves to help the poor. Rather, they call for governments to do it for them! Money never comes from their own pocket. It comes from the collective pockets of all their fellow citizens, never asking them if they approve either! There is no virtue in donating OTHER PEOPLE"S money! It is interesting that Canada's level of PERSONAL charity contributions is embarrassingly low. Even the "evil, greedy Americans donate FAR more than we do out of their personal pocket! I'm stopping here, as I don't really feel I have the right to defend Christians. They can defend themselves. I'm actually a devout Agnostic! I just had to take exception with your rather unfair trick of an argument.

Gandalf has been captured? When did that happen? Was it Sauron? Sauruman? Oh, sorry! GADDAFI has been captured! Damn these old eyes! I need to get my bifocal presciption overhauled. Never mind!

Funny you should mention pumped storage, Dre. I was listening to a talking head on the radio the other day who mentioned this very thing. I don't know if he's correct or not in what he said - perhaps you've already covered this ground and can tell me. Frankly, he was on the "denier" side and although I guess I am too I found this guy to be a bit of a grandstander. Anyhow, his claim was that Ontario has almost no pumped storage capacity, since it has virtually no dams involved in its hydro electric generation. The term he used was "stream generation". Apparently we lack suitable dam sites and it has always been FAR cheaper to use flowing water, as we do at Niagara. If this is true it takes away a cost effective option for us, at least as far as the megaprojects that add oodles to the grid at one blow. No dammed lakes into which to pump water at night! (pardon the pun!) Giant water tanks would be out of the question - they'd be a spit in the ocean. Of course, there's always the decentralization approach, where we use much smaller, local generation - perhaps even a lot of individual solutions. This has always been my preferred approach but I have to admit it will take a lot longer to fully implement, requiring massive improvements to the grid and a lot more technology development. As I had said, there may be some physical limitations that totally blocks this style of generation. However, it has the advantage that when you go a bit slower things tend to be a LOT cheaper! When you try to do something brand new in a few weekends it always cost you MUCH more! This is what I don't like about the McGuinty approach, shared by most politicians. They want a quick photo-op for the next election so they support what amount to expensive crash programs, not being willing to plan for something that might take a decade or two. They just don't give a damn what it costs the average joe - we've all known that all our lives!

You seem to be making a huge assumption. Nobody has said that wind and solar will NEVER be competitive! Especially me, who would dearly love to get off the grid, both for my budget and for my techie pride! The issue is whether it will be competitive in the future, IN A USEFUL TIME FRAME! This is the great unknown. The subsidies for these alternatives under McGuinty's MicroFit program are far higher than anything gasoline ever received! I agree there's been corporate welfare to the oil companies for too long but we have to judge both factors in perspective. So first of all, are the necessary improvements in cost and performance even possible? There is a naive belief among the "technically challenged" to assume that techies can do anything, it's just a matter of will and money. This idea is total crap! Many things have been found to work and others found to never work! Others have take a helluva long time to be discovered. We have no choice but to follow Mother Nature's Laws and SHE tells us what will or will not work! We can be more aggressive in trying to discover what can work but if we assume that we ALWAYS will we will be doomed to constant disappointment! I still have a Popular Electronics book from the early 1960's making claims that cheap solar power would be available in just a few years. Yes, there have been improvements but not enough yet to make solar competitive and it's been 50 YEARS, not less than 5! Even assuming that wind and solar CAN reach the necessary performance and cost levels, how long can we afford to keep up the subsidies? A few years? Decades? Centuries? That's a long time to impose painfully high fees on citizens! So to make YOUR kind of conclusion would be like someone in 1940 saying that at the rate of increase from the time of Christ to 1940 the speed of transportation had increased at such a rate that by extending the curve we should be able to travel faster than light by the year 2000! Guess what, Dre? That prediction WAS made! What's more, it was WRONG! So far, the speed of light has seemed to be one of Mother Nature's unbreakable Laws. Do you really think that if we throw some major subsidies at the problem that by 2025 we'll be travelling at warp 6? Meanwhile, some European countries that have invested far more of their citizens' tax money into wind farms and such, with heavy government subsidies, have decided to bail out! From their POV, the rewards are taking too long and they just can't afford to wait. Why should we repeat their mistakes? Besides, if we stopped the subsidies the R&D would continue! We can see that someday alternatives will be cost-effective. Budgets will still be made to explore the possibilities, just at a more reasonable and affordable rate that doesn't come from the taxpayers. IF there are solutions and a company sees a chance to make a profitable product then and only then should it happen!

Good point, PIK! The usual suspects were jumping all over themselves to dump on Harper, totally ignoring any role of Ontario's provincial government. Those figures released show that the big problem is in Ontario. Harper gets no credit for anything good in the rest of the country and is expected to take all the blame for Ontario, while Dalton gets off scot-free. Can those "suspects" spell "partisan"?

Well, I've never had a problem understanding east-coaster accents. When I get drunk or too excited I tend to lose my Ontarioan accent, myself. Some folks just want to slam Crosbie because he's a Tory, nothing more. These folks tend to be politically correct, like most leftwingers. Crosbie grew up in a time when we all actually had a sense of humour! The lefties, not having one themselves, use political correctness as a tool to stamp humour out! Their substitute for humour is high-school level ad hominem crudities against anyone who is non-left. If they succeed, we will live in a very cheerless world. The lefties won't understand this, of course. They will simply be at a loss as to why people in general never smile anymore! After all, the social engineering was done for their own good! Perhaps they'll pass laws making laughing mandatory. Imagine Ned Flanders given absolute power over all his neighbours! Where no joke can be uttered that might offend Rod and Todd! If it ever came to pass, the suicide rate would skyrocket!

Actually, I agree with much of what you say although to me it seems a bit simpler. Today's status quo really formed after WWII, in the 1950's. Before that, taxes were a much lighter load on people's backs. The majority of the population was rural. This meant that they could live on their land and afford to keep it! They were much more self-sufficient for their food and the "100 mile Diet" was more the normal way of things. Refrigeration was done by ice boxes, if you had ice and also cold cellars dug out beneath the houses. Of course it was nowhere near as good as what we have today so families canned and preserved what they had grown for the cold seasons. Cash money was only needed for store-bought goods. There was usually some work available to earn this, even if just part-time. City folk lived on a cash-money economy but because the majority were rural that set the tone for wages, prices and most of all, taxes! The war had greatly expanded industrialization. Afterwards factories retooled from tanks and guns to consumer goods. People moved off the farms into the cities in droves! Work was easy to find and pay scales were high, compared to working on a farm. In 1960 my father started work at a steel company. He was paid well enough to afford a house, a car for transportation, some luxuries like a TV and raised 4 kids. By this time, the expense side of peoples' budgets was beginning to take advantage of the higher disposable incomes. TV ads preached consumption. Buy! Buy! Buy! A LOT of working families could afford a cottage in northern Ontario! Today, such a cottage is usually an asset passed down as an inheritance. The new ones are MUCH fancier and therefore, much more expensive. Taxes kept rising, with the curve really getting steep by the end of the 80's. Municipalities recognized that the growth in new homes was driven by the new middle class - working folks with some disposable income, with children. So the tax base was changed. No longer could you buy a single lot just outside of town, build a house and commute to work, enjoying a more rural living rather cheaply. Instead, we were already in a new status quo - suburban development! By now, no more single lots. Farmers were not allowed to sell them. Instead, developers would buy large tracts of land and build a lot of homes all at once, with streets, sidewalks and sewers in place from Day 1. Of course, the cities had raised the minimum building codes, so that every house had to be a 3 bedroom (the majority of buyers never noticed, since they were raising or intending to raise a family) and a minimum square footage. So as people moved in they were immediately being taxed for a large home on a developed lot, complete with city water and all the amenities. The tax return to the cities was great! Governments tend to learn how to tax their citizens to the maximum they can afford, where they bleed but not enough to die! This was the new status quo, the new equilibrium. Not much over 25 years earlier, many people were used to living without electricity. Now, not having to pay an electricity bill every month was unthinkable. Then some severe economic shocks came. In the mid-70's OPEC hit us with a HUGE increase in the cost of oil! In only a couple of years gasoline at the pump went from 25 cents a GALLON to over a dollar! By the time Canada switched to metric it was around $1.57 per gallon, as I recall. It's far worse today, per litre. Before, single income families were the norm. Now, moms were going back to the work force in order to have the family keep what it had. Nowadays, the double income is the norm, at the penalty of Mom not being home to mind the kids and look after the house and do the shopping and driving running around. We began to see large interest rate hikes. There was a period in the 80's where mortgages were 22%! These changes were coming faster than people could comfortably adapt. Everyone thought that the problems were temporary. Yet it seemed that every time we lost jobs in a recession when we came out of it we never got as many back. A lot of older workers would fall through the cracks. Meanwhile, taxes kept going up like they were running on automatic! To be fair, governments were trapped by having had several decades of new and better services being delivered to the people, paid for by those 1960's style disposable incomes. Politically, they couldn't start cutting back so they had to keep raising taxes to deliver them, either directly or with the new technique of service fees for virtually everything a citizen wanted or needed from his governments, particularly the municipal ones. A "death of a thousand cuts", as it were. So our income paradigm changed with our tax and living expense burdens lagging far behind. Today, most families are much smaller than before and DINKS or couples with no kids and a double income are the new norm. Yet has anyone seen a new housing development built with two or even one bedroom homes? Such homes are almost impossible to find except for the resale market, usually in much older and less desirable parts of town. Even if a developer wanted to appeal to the smaller home market, he can't! The building codes haven't been changed so he simply is not allowed. I could write a book or we could all come up with examples all day long but everything boils down to change coming faster than most people could recognize or adapt. Sure people over 60 years ago could make do with much less money but not only have our lifestyles changed but our infrastructure today is such that we can't go back! Almost all of us have no family farm and can't afford to buy one. We pay taxes and fees as if we all make a very good income with both partners working, even though the economy is such that more often than not one or both partners has either lost their job and not working or has a poorer job at a reduced rate of pay. And the changes keep coming, even as we still can't see what they are very well. I don't have the answers as to how we can cope. Maybe someone else on the board has the answers. Somehow, we have to start recognizing the new status quo that has been formed and society has to adapt. It had better happen quickly because those shadows of change coming towards us don't look that positive for the typical working Canadian who fishes for a living or works in a factory. We can't all work in the oil fields!

Michael, I suspect that you are not married, or in an equivalent relationship. That to me would explain your POV. If you ever are seeing someone and contemplating making it permanent I suggest you NEVER reveal to her the POV you've expressed in this thread! I'll bet you a bottle of the Glen Livet any thought she had of marrying you would be gone! If I am mistaken and you ARE in such a relationship, it would be prudent to make sure she never reads what you've written here! I don't mean to insult you - just giving you some unasked for advice that I SINCERELY believe is true! But as always, it's YOUR life and you have the right to do whatever you want! I would help you try to fight anyone who would attempt to take that right away. After all, I'm the CLASSIC Liberal, remember?

Well, all good things come to an end, I guess. I've just erected a 40'tower, both to hoist up a dipole antenna for my ham radio station and also to have a Digital TV antenna at the top, so that I can get my TV over-the-air, or OTA. The OTA works great! I get over 20 channels, all totally perfect and in HD (if they broadcast HD), with all the networks. All I miss is the cable/satellite specialty channels, like Space, History and Discovery. Still, it's a fair trade considering that when I was on cable in order to get those particular specialty channels it seemed I had to buy "packages" that would have 1 channel I wanted and then a bunch of stuff that bored me silly, like The Shopping Channel or whatever. I got a video card with an HDMI output to feed my flatscreen LCD TV from my computer and I can also pull lots of shows from the archives at the websites for most of those specialty channels. Along with a BlueRay/DVD player I figure I'd doing ok, while saving a BUNCH of money! However, as another poster warned me a few months ago, as of Nov 1 the OTA coverage of SunTV ended. They are now on cable and satellite and while I understand that it's a better venue for them it means that I am no longer one of their viewers. Oh well, life is change!

Not really, Michael! Let's not get too anal-retentive about the rules, lest the board become as rigid and "no-fun" as a leftwing bureaucracy.

Yeah, they democratically elected religious leaders who murder gays and lash women! Mind our own business, indeed! We have every right to be appalled at the actions of cavemen religious barbarians!

I KNOW that it's low! My point was that you can't take professional associations being excellent wardens of their flock as gospel. Some are better than others, since they are made up of fallible human beings after all. As for my moral character, using my model I would say that my choice would be very moral - putting feeding my children over my pride. Finding another job is not always as easy for everyone as you imply. You have given this impression before - that's why I asked if you were used to a secure job. Most people aren't, these days. Bully for you if you're ok, Michael! You of course are entitled to make your own choice. We all have to manage our own lives so that we can sleep at night.

Professional associations? Well, that's the official line, I agree. BTW, have you ever looked into how many teachers in Ontario have ever lost their licence to teach? The number is so low as to defy the Laws of Statistics! It would probably be easier to win a lottery for a few consecutive weeks. If I were dependent on research grants for my income I would never be a whistle blower as long as I had a dependent family. Especially with something like climate change. If I were to lie or at least, sign my name to whatever politically correct petition was put in front of me in my work environment the chances of being caught at it are extremely small. First off, the entire mainstream would have to stop believing in the alarmist credo before they would ever investigate such things. Second, they would likely only challenge the most noted scientific champions. Third, one can always plead ignorance and having made an honest mistake! To do what you suggest would almost certainly have me unemployed very quickly! An easy choice, even if a morally difficult one. I know that most husbands who took your approach would likely be divorced very quickly. Women tend to look at such matters in terms of security first and feeding the kids, not your professional honour. I think you minimize the real world consequences, Michael.

So they've lost almost all their nuclear reactors. So what? Couldn't they just layout a few solar panels and put up a couple of wind turbines? I'm sure Dalton McGuinty would be willing to work as a consultant!

Cartoony? Michael, I would not expect you to tell us what you do for a living but I suspect you have always had a relatively secure and safe job. If so, we should have you stuffed and mounted to put in a museum, just as proof that such workers exist! I would venture that today huge numbers of jobs depend on "toeing the line". It's easy to insist that people should stand on principles without considering how they will feed their kids. Many if not most of the people in 'science professions are contract workers. They are exceedingly vulnerable to having their funding cut. With the mixing of politics in the climate debate and the fact that so much of the funding comes from politically controlled sources I'm surprised that you find the idea of a scientist 'keeping his head down' 'cartooony'.

Exactly! It's not enough to bail Greece out, again! If the Greek people have a culture of not paying taxes and having extremely low productivity then bailouts are futile. Repeated bailouts to try to fix a structural problem are not solutions. They are welfare! The productive countries in the EU would have a very hard time selling that idea to their citizens! Why should they work hard to subsidize an easy life for the Greeks? Now there's going to be a referendum, apparently. If the Greek people vote 'No', how on earth will the politicians be able to sell the idea of perpetual bailouts? True, the usual political move would simply be to lie, and use different ecobabble terms to describe the same thing. The problem is so blatant that this isn't likely to work, at least not for long. People are not THAT stupid! Greece has to FIX it's problems! Or at least, demonstrate that they are moving in that direction, FOR REAL! Otherwise, even if it triggers another recession the bailout money is going to be stopped! The Greeks and the lefties can try to blame the bankers all they want for loaning the money in the first place but the fact remains that the Greeks eagerly took the money, with apparently absolutely no intentions of ever paying it back! Yet they expect to remain in the EU! These people need a reality check, not as an aggressive act by "the Illuminati Who Control the World's Economy" but simply as a refusal by working people to be taxed any longer to help those who refuse to help themselves. Where is it written in the sky that Germans should be taxed so that Greeks don't have to be?

Yeah, and that ain't the most important factor! The people who made the claim never said that they had proof! They subjected their own data to the best scrutiny they could accomplish and then published it for the rest of the world to examine! If they had missed something, they WANTED the scientific community to find it! They were only interested in discovering a new truth. They had no ego problems with someone proving them wrong. They were not interested in founding a new "religion", as we've seen in the climate debates. They are deserving of their community's respect, for acting according to it's most basic values!

Hey, I agree! I'm an old hippy, remember? Still, the question is unanswered. What will they do if America no longer kicks in the money? Love expends calories. It doesn't provide them!

You seem to believe that Greece could default and there would be no repercussions. Suppose you had been living off your credit cards for months. They were all so maxed out that you had nowhere near enough money coming in to pay your rent and food, let alone your card payments. So you say, screw it! I'm not paying the bastards! First thing that happens is - all your credit is cancelled! Aren't you going to get rather hungry rather quickly? If Greece were to default half of her businesses would go bankrupt and close overnight. Those that remain would have severe financial problems if they had to import anything from outside the country. There would be no current account type of paying - foreign suppliers would insist on COD terms only. Greece would have to hope that it could produce internally ALL it's food! Any factories that needed foreign materials would likely have to close immediately, in today's "Just In Time" economies. So half the people would be unemployed and most would be getting very hungry. Is Greece energy self-sufficient? If not, cars would come to a halt. Fortunately, they have a warm climate so they wouldn't freeze. Perhaps you would suggest they simply build some windmills. As a long term solution there may be some merit to the idea. However, could they implement such solutions within a couple of weeks? How long could the people hold out? Your dream doesn't seem to be very practical...

Eyeball, it seems if we have unseasonably hot weather the alarmists say it's proof of global warming. However, if it's unseasonably cold that is also proof of global warming. Now if there's any change at all that apparently also means proof of the same thing. This has gotten ridiculous! Now some Russian scientists are predicting a 50 year cold spell. That also is considered proof! What it boils down to is that some are demanding we accept their premises as fact, knowing that we'll all be dead before they are proven wrong in the light of what actually happens.

It will hurt to lose the American funding but hey! The other members have always been good for it, right? And who needs money anyway? They can live on love!

Well, the problem is usually that it's hard to feed and educate them when their governments and war lords are shooting off AK-47s at our doctors and teachers, while firing Stinger missiles at our planes and helicopters. Just how do you suggest we do this, Topaz?