Wild Bill

I've noticed over the years! Under that alias MUST be somebody I once voted for...

When I was an on the road salesman I didn't have a single account in old Toronto. There were none! Everything was in Mississauga or Pickering and north of the 401. Not surprising, considering first taxes and then under amalgamation you need a helicopter to go to work in old Toronto, unless you are fortunate enough to live in the core and can take public transit. If you have to come in from outside in a car you're screwed! I would suggest that the idea that Toronto's wealth comes from the 416 area comes from school textbooks likely over 40 years old! For practical purposes, it's ALL from the 905! Old Toronto is where they COUNT money, not MAKE it!

Cite please? Rude and arrogant crankbag! See, I can be just as childish as you!

Or she's trying to cover their asses for such a long response time to an emergency call, even if it wasn't for the mayor! If Ford called her the second time 10 minutes after his first call it's a damn good thing he wasn't bleeding! All this brouhaha is about Ford's character, as a weapon against his actual approach to running Toronto. The Left knows that he must be popular with the majority of Toronto's citizens, since he won the election. He won because of what he promised to DO, not how he promised to handle CBC ambushes! That leaves the Left with no effective weapons in those areas, so their best tactic is ad hominem attacks, hoping to make him look like a dork. That way, next election he can be beaten easily by someone like George "Snuffleupagus", the "hip" CBC interviewer, who LOOKS cool but doesn't have a practical bone in his body! I sincerely wish that Toronto would get a whole string of mayors like David Miller. That way they would go bankrupt. As long as the rest of us don't have to pay taxes to bail them out it would at least eventually shut up their perpetual whining.

First of all, unless someone invents a Star Trek space warp drive it is impossible to travel at light speed. Einstein's simple equation of E=MxC^2 means that Energy equals Mass times the Speed of Light Squared! If you understand this and dig a bit deeper you realize that this means that the faster you go the more your Mass increases, which means you need more energy to accelerate even faster. You may start at 100 lbs of Mass but at 20% of light speed you may have 130 lbs. The rate of increase is also not linear but follows a curve. When you get close to the speed of light your apparent Mass becomes so great that there is no longer enough energy in the Universe to make you go any faster! But for purposes of argument let's assume that your model is real. If an observer were traveling at light speed and measured the speed of light he would get the exact same value of any other observer traveling at any different speed. This has been stated over and over in this thread but you either just can't or won't accept it or you are just trolling us! If you think about this long enough you will come to understand that there is only one way such a thing could be true. The observer's time rate must be FAR slower than ours! To him, everything is perfectly normal but to US he is moving so slow as to look like a fly in amber. The speed of light hasn't changed! It is still exactly the same value as measured by any other observer traveling at any other speed! The CLOCKS move faster or slower! The rate of time passing is different for each observer but there's no way for any observer to be able to know that. To him, it takes the same time to boil water for a cup of tea as anybody else, anywhere. I can't comment on your suggestion stating that the speed of light is infinite 'cuz I have absolutely no idea of where that came from or how it is relevant! No one, including Einstein, has ever said that the speed of light is infinite! You're breaking new territory here, Pliny. You should marry Betsy.

I used to play a lot of folk guitar - Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy, James Taylor and such. Still blow a little blues harp. I make my living repairing and building guitar amplifiers. Long ago I had to accept that I was never going to be a great guitarist, since I spent more time on soldering. We all have only so much time in our lives and with time taken up by making a living, chasing women and eventually having a family I just couldn't practice enough AND keep learning and soldering amps! It's like how many people can become great racing car drivers but how many can also find the time to become master racing engine mechanics? Few of us are like Buckaroo Banzai, being a musician, a brain surgeon and a racing car driver setting land speed records. However, knowing a bit of guitar, with my barre chords for party riffs and such, helps me immeasurably with both working on amps and understanding my customers' descriptions of fault symptoms with their gear. When one complains "There just isn't the "graunch" that there used to be I know what he's talking about!

Most likely, that's the whole idea! It would be a safety feature. Consider that the recent Japanese disaster came about not from inadequate containment of the radioactive core but from a catastrophic loss of cooling, which then caused explosions that THEN released radioactive emissions! No doubt the Russians have learned a thing or two since Chernobyl. If they design things properly, if something goes wrong you end up with a sealed lump of nasty stuff sunk in deep, cold Arctic water. This would keep it too cold to compromise its container. I like the idea! Especially since they intend to operate the reactors for only a relatively short time anyway, switching over to fuel from the gas and oil they are farming.

I think you are confusing gravity with centrifugal force. They are NOT the same thing! Gravity is an inherent attraction between two masses. Even two pebbles have "gravity". A dropped book falls because of the attraction between the book and the earth. Sometimes we are confused into thinking that only the Earth has gravity, simply because it's gravity is so huge compared to that between two pebbles. Put those pebbles far out in airless space and they will be attracted to each other, since there are no other and larger masses around to affect them. Centrifugal force is generated by whirling a mass around a centre, while anchored. Like with a rock on a string or that big wheel of a space station in 2001. Really, it's just ordinary linear acceleration held in check by the action of the "rope". With objects in an orbit, like the Moon around the Earth, gravity is the "string". When you release the rope, the accelerated object no longer is held by any anchor and immediately flies away at right angles to the force of the anchor, in a straight line. The energy came from the velocity of the orbiting object. Objects on the outside of larger spinning objects tend to fly off simply because they are not anchored against the centrifugal force. That's all! If the spinning object is big enough to exert a sufficiently strong pull of gravity that exceeds the centrifugal force of spinning, the objects just sit there. You're starting to stretch more and more and more, Pliny. Have you been drinking?

I think YOU are missing a fundamental point, August! As I had said previously, I'm NOT clamouring to stop change and innovation! I spent my career riding the hightech wave, starting by selling the world's first computer chips. As a techie, I love seeing new inventions! Yet I keep talking about effects of what I see are mistakes in approaches and you keep seeing this as some kind of Luddite attitude! You just don't seem to want to acknowledge any negative effects at all! You MUST have a secure government job! All I'm saying is that like so many others, you seem to be so impressed by the gee whiz factor that you are totally blase about how technological advancements have caused some major sociological problems. What do you think all those buggy whip makers who have lost their jobs are going to do, August? Do you think they will quietly sit back and just die off, so as not to be any trouble to anyone? Sooner or later they are going to discover the magnitude of their numbers. When that happens they will become a political force and some politicians are going to cater to them. There are going to be effects, possibly violent at times! My point is that perhaps with better social and political planning much of these negative effects could have been mitigated. Capitalism doesn't have to mean that vast numbers of people can lose their incomes for the rest of their lives. Certainly, any businessman who believes that is a fool! Even ignoring the thought of riots and vandalism, possibly at the businessman's own operations, how can there be a strong market for products when too many people are on social relief? What do you do when you have aystem based on (hopefully!) increasing consumption when so many consumers don't have any money? I'm just saying that capitalism doesn't work in a vacuum. There are many factors that cannot simply be ignored or they WILL come back and bite you in the profits! With a little common sense and vision, things could work out better for all! I'm predicting that in the next decade we shall see the problem of a society too poor to buy enough products to keep our economy healthy grow into something obvious to all!

August, YOU shifted the model to one about eyeglasses and doctors! I didn't and I didn't see Dre do it either. You don't need to keep harping about "zero sum". I've believed in laissez-faire since I was a kid. I saved my coffee money every day for a month to buy Bill Gairdner's book "The Trouble With Canada" when it first came out. You're the only one talking about "zero sum". Nobody's arguing with you! As a generalization it's true! As an academic viewpoint it's true! As a philosophy for economics it's true, for a population in general. However, that doesn't change the fact that the rapid rise of new technologies that REDUCE THE NUMBER OF JOBS IN CERTAIN LARGE SECTORS has had a very negative effect on those people! Effects that the people often can't mitigate for themselves. You can't get laid off from making buggy whips and land a job making cars if the factory is highly automated and employs very few people! August, there is a Japanese car company plant here in Southern Ontario that consists of a HUGE warehouse the size of several football fields. Shelves after shelves after shelves of parts. They have ONE employee! The ENTIRE warehouse is automated! They even have machines that can break down shipping pallets of bar-coded boxes. Just how many 'greeters' do you think WalMart can hire, August? Along with our technological advances we have not only reduced the number of jobs but we have exported a large portion of what remained to other countries. I have this mental picture of some guy 55 years old, standing in a lineup of several hundred guys just like him, laid off from Ford or GM with a mortgage not yet paid off and 2 kids in University. The poor guy is feeling so much financial stress he's considering suicide if he can make it look like an accident so the insurance will be paid to his family. As he's standing there August1991 walks by! He looks at the man's face and exclaims "Why so sad, my man? It's not a zero sum game, you know! At least you've got eyeglasses!

You really couldn't care less about his daughter, could you? Try it on one of my daughters and I'll be looking for a convenient length of 2x4!

No August, I think it is YOU that is missing the point! I agree that with a long-term perspective inventions tend to make us better off. What you seem to be ignoring is that in the short-term large numbers of people suffer damage - without any way to mitigate it! You are arguing from an academic standpoint and Dr. Dre is describing the "real world". Nobody is trying to claim that curing cancer is an attack on employment for doctors, August! It is YOU who seems to be implying such criticisms of your premise! You're moving the goal posts. As I said, a hundred years from now you may look correct in expressing an overview of today's times. Even today, anyone who has a reasonably secure job would likely agree with you. However, your POV offers NOTHING for that older displaced worker! It offers NOTHING for those who's innate talent level or lack of opportunity from birth leaves them ill-equipped to be a lawyer, teacher or accountant! As I also said, you use previous times of technological change as examples, when today's times have many radically different factors. To be fair August, you're in good company. So far it seems that NO ONE, especially those in positions of authority, sees the growing problem of displaced workers and a lack of jobs for those less capable, more suited to general labour. Those people will NEVER be re-trained to be a physicist! What are we going to do with them? Henry Ford created HUGE numbers of new jobs with his new automobiles! Every buggy whip worker who wanted to could be hired at Ford and thousands of others besides! That bubble carried us for about 3/4 of a century but in the late 70's and early 80's it burst. Your model fails totally when the number of available jobs keeps shrinking, not growing! At least, it fails for a lot of us as individuals. Again, I'll grant you that people a century from now will be better off! A lot of us today get bubkiss!

Ah, NO! In your example we are simply timing the echo! We know the speed of the radar signal. We send it out and start our timer. If we have an echo come back we simply divide the time in two and that tells us how far to the point of origin of the echo. At this point nothing can tell us the DIRECTION of the reflection! Steve McQueen is sitting in his POW camp cell, throwing a ball against the wall. If we know how many feet the ball travels in a second and we time how long from the initial throw till it returns to his catcher's mitt, we can divide in half and figure out how far away is the wall. Steve knows the direction because he has EYES! We tell the direction of a radar echo quite differently. We measure it's amplitude, or signal strength. This is after we've used a BEAM antenna to send out the signal, that focuses it in one direction. If we rotate the beam antenna until we see the maximum signal strength we will then know the direction. Where the hell does the Doppler Effect fit in?

Next time there's a blackout (and there WILL be a major blackout!) I'm going to tell everyone who complains to just go home and conserve! Man, talk about huge numbers of Darwin Awards being issued!

I have mental picture of you stranded on an island, with Gilligan and the Skipper! You and the Professor are trying to make a battery out of coconuts to power your Iphone! Meanwhile, the Skipper is using his jacket and a flaming torch to talk with Morse to a ship cruising by the island, telling them they need a rescue!

August, you and the good Dr. Dre are at odds because each of you is right in a different context! You are talking about the effects and benefits on our society in general. Dre is relating to the effects on us as individuals. The problem is not so much that our wealth-creating activities are changing, as with the usual example of service jobs replacing manufacturing employment. True, service jobs tend to pay a LOT less, which means a decline in living standard but that's not the major factor in any living standard decline. No, the major factor is that these changes tend to displace workers in older and specialized categories, where the chance of getting a similar paying job or even ANY job is poor, even after re-training! The factors affecting us today are unique in our history. The Digital Revolution is transforming the world far faster than anything that happened in Henry Ford's time. The rate of change has simply become too fast for many workers to be able to adapt. Even decades after Ford brought us cars we still had horses delivering milk to peoples' houses. We all saw typewriters and adding machines almost completely disappear in less than 10 years! Hell, engineers abandoned their slide rules en masse in less than 5 years after HP introduced the pocket calculator! The median age at car factories and steel works has been going up for several decades now, mostly because these businesses have been contracting and not expanding their workforce during that time. Since these are virtually always union environments the new workers are let go first. Keep doing this long enough and your workforce becomes top heavy with older workers, If a 52 year old man who has banged bumpers on minivans for a lifetime is let go, odds are very strong that no one will want to hire him. Certainly not at anything like his former rate of pay. There are often government programs for retraining but they really don't do much besides extending EI benefits for an extra year or two. Sooner or later that worker will have to go for a job interview. He may have fresh papers to show he's a certified welder or air-conditioning technician but as soon as the interviewer sees his face the resume goes to the bottom of the pile. You see, unemployment has not been truly low for decades now! Modern technology has reduced the number of workers needed at most firms. The steady decline in demand adds to that. The steel company here in Hamilton employed nearly 20,000 workers back in the 1970's. Now the number is down closer to 900! In the early 70's EVERYBODY was hiring! You may not have been able to get that super job you specifically wanted but certainly getting something to pay the bills was easy! As a young man back then I held a number of jobs. With virtually all of them I was hired on the first interview, that same day. At one place that I worked the boss literally pulled a man from the lineup to apply and immediately put him to work! The poor fellow was so rattled it was a few hours before he worked up the nerve to tell us he had left his girlfriend out in his car! So in most areas it is a hirer's market, not a worker's one. That interviewer looking to add a welder or an air-conditioning technician would prefer a young man, not an older one. True, age discrimination is illegal but so what? Enacting such legislation makes for a good photo-op for a politician but in the real world it's useless. No interviewer would ever ADMIT to age discrimination! He had a choice between someone fresh out of school with his certificate and an older worker with the same one. How could you prove he discriminated by hiring the younger one? So instead of unemployed older factory workers we end up with older, unemployed factory workers with re-training certificates! Doesn't help pay the bills any better! So you may be quite correct when you say that technological change brings new jobs to replace old ones. If we don't need people to build buggy whips anymore it's not a problem to the overall picture if we have a new demand for workers to build Model T Fords. However, that's not an accurate picture of the world today. We need less people to build Fords than we did for the buggy whips! And the buggy whip workers tend to be in their 50's or older! Dre's POV targets individuals, you are talking about overall trends. Young folks starting out can choose the new type of jobs. This doesn't necessarily and automatically help older displaced labourers. I've been following the talking media heads and personally living through these trends since the late 70's, August. If you were writing a textbook describing these times a hundred years from now, I think your text would be very accurate as an overall summation of the changes in our time on our national economy. If you personally were an older displaced autoworker you would have a very different perspective! I'm not arguing that we should try to stem the flow of advancement, just that we should recognize that different times bring different problems that we should try to solve, rather than just refuse to acknowledge their existence.

Apparently, they scared the hell out of his kid, setting it to crying. Marg should be ashamed of herself! If the CBC crew had had half a brain cell and were not just totally self-centred on their own interests they would have not ambushed Ford outside his home, with his kid! They could have picked a parking lot, where if anyone was with him they would likely be adult. Scaring his kid into tears was unnecessary and frankly, unforgiveable. No doubt the lefties will cry that since it was Ford's kid the poor rightwing tyke deserved it! Marg and her CBC crew were just unfeeling bastards and that's the long and the short of it.

I've been a ferocious reader since before kindergarten and I have never been able to read a Margaret Atwood book. Every time I pick one up I get overcome with an immense feeling of fatigue! If I force myself to open it my eyes immediately close and from what friends and family tell me, I begin to snore! I'm not sure what causes this. It can't be her politics. I've read Farley Mowat and enjoyed his stories. Whatever it is, I just can't count myself as a member of her readership. However, she has no reason to care if just one person like myself doesn't buy any of her books. Enough government grant money is floated for schools and libraries to get copies, not to mention outright grants and endowments that require no actual sales anyway! Give me a Robert B Parker or if you insist on being Canadian a Charles Lint anytime! Even Spider Robinson would do, since we Canadians adopted him.

Please excuse this brief personal msg in the thread, folks! Apparently, BC can't use the PM system! I tried and it told me "No can do!" Good question? That's as far as I got. It's not my ears, it's my eyes, BC! Used to hearing morse, not peering at dots on a screen! I learned about 35 years ago, when I got my Canadian advanced ham radio ticket. That meant 15 wpm with no errors. I got up to about 20 wpm or so before dating girls ate up my hobby time! Then I got married and my key went silent for about 20 years! The wife was a master at discouraging anything SHE didn't like! Now I'm freshly separated and one of the first things I did was drag out my old gear, throw a wire up in a tree and see how much I remembered! It's like typing, or bike riding. I can still copy over 15 wpm and with only a few contacts seemed to be getting better than I was before! My original instructor back when I was a young teen was ex-Cdn Navy. I don't know how fast he was - 70wpm? 80? I once saw him in a tent full of ham radio operators on a Field Day weekend operating two different transceivers at once, while saying to a ham on the other side of the tent "Aren't you going to answer that Georgia station that's calling you?" To him it was just like sitting in a living room with a couple of conversations going on at the same time. He was impressive! My dad started out in Navy Signals but he kept falling asleep at his typewriter with his headphones over his ears, from late nights courting my mother! He got transferred to the quarter master corps. The Canadian Navy used to be excellent at teaching Morse, as long as the sailor stayed awake!

Do they still teach them Morse code? -. --- - .-.. .. -.- . .-.. -.--

I read both cited articles completely and since I'm also not a lawyer I can't say as to whether or not Ontario is contravening federal law. My sense was that there were laws made that were useless in the real world. An inexperienced or simply dumb and gullible store clerk can allow an opportunity for a criminal to exploit, as in leaving a record book out on a counter. Meanwhile, some inexperienced or simply dumb and gullible politicians enact a law that is useless in the real world, like the Liberal gun registry in the first place and whatever Ontario did in the second. Certainly I would believe that McGuinty and company were inexperienced, dumb and gullible. Lots of examples of that while they've been in power!

Here's a cite: http://www.excaliburcrossbow.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12279 It quotes a January 23/2006 article by Mark Bonokoski, which I assume came from the Toronto Sun. You'll find a few articles which are a good read on these gun issues but click down about 5 pages to the second article of this date. "Even the most well-intentioned of laws can go off the tracks, as one man shows when he makes a not-quite-legal ammo purchase By Mark Bonokoski When it comes to gangs and guns, where there's a way there's a will -- whether it's casing, stalking or buying information that leads to legitimate gun owners. " "It also pre-dated -- by a year -- the Baylis Bill, a piece of legislation that was quickly passed following the shooting death of 25-year-old Metro Toronto Police Const. Todd Baylis. And both, in their own way, and despite the best intentions, aided and abetted the gangs of today in their quest for both guns and ammunition." From the next article, dated January 22/2006: "What made the political bullets truly fly, however, was the high-profile story of a well-known Toronto gun collector and firearms instructor named Mike Hargreaves whose North Toronto apartment broken into while he was away visiting his son in Florida. Thirty-five high-powered weapons were stolen -- from Glock handguns to machineguns." "Hargreaves admits to being "devastated by the news" that the gun had been involved in a homicide and almost as devastated by the fact there is now a warrant out for his arrest for unsafe storage of those weapons -- despite the fact they were stored in a 771-kilo concrete-and-steel safe and that it took the industrious thieves two days using blowtorches and sledge hammers to gain access to it." You'll likely want to read the entire page of stuff, Derek. Quite illuminating!

You might be interested to know that there was a scandal in the GTA a couple of years ago over that very thing! I confess my memory is not perfect but it had to do with signing for purchasing ammunition. Apparently it was common practice for criminals to legally buy some ammo just to see the signature book, which would show all the names and addresses of those who had signed in before them. Once you've garnered the addresses of people buying ammo, you also of course have the addresses of those owning the guns! All that was left was a simple matter of burglary! If I also recall, one of those addresses was of an ex high ranking military officer who had his home burgled as a result of the ammo info. He had gone to immense lengths to build not just a normal locked firearms container but had built a concrete room to house it. The thieves literally knocked down the concrete and dragged away the entire metal gun locker! The reason it made the papers was that despite the more than normal lengths he had gone to protect his firearms he was still charged with storing them in an unsafe manner! Obviously, the government was embarrassed and tried to make him the sacrifice. The newspapers in Toronto had a field day with the issue and I do believe they were shamed into dropping the charges against the victim. Anyone who trusts the integrity of a government data base or information system is naive at best! Too many stories of computers being trashed with their hard drives still containing Canada Revenue files of citizen tax returns, or laptops with Defense Ministry info left with girl friends that had had history with motorcycle gangs, or many other such examples. I would not be at all surprised to know that some high level criminal gangs possess digital copies of the entire Liberal Gun Registry.

Well August, as far as problems, petty crime to feed the habits of crackheads would be greatly reduced if drugs were legal. At the serious crime level, drug lords would take a HUGE kick in their income. Some would say that they would only turn to other forms of crime but hey! They're already into those other forms and have been for centuries! You ask "how many more problems would we create?" I would ask "How many problems does any form of Prohibition create?" Prohibition gave Al Capone the money to become a gangster.

Topaz, no doubt Quebec will be ticked but there's no way they even had a working shipyard to build the ships! Here's a wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davie_Shipbuilding "After the warship project was finished in the early 1990s, MIL-Davie Shipbuilding, along with the Davie yard in Lauzon went into receivership. After being bought by the Quebec government, Davie was sold to Dominion Bridge Company for $1. In 1998, the parent Dominion Bridge Company went into bankruptcy and the Davie shipyard went into trusteeship in 1998. It was sold again in 2000 and became Industries Davie, Ltd. In 2006, the shipyard was sold to TECO Maritime ASA of Norway which saw it restructured into a new company called Davie Yards Incorporated. In early 2011, TECO announced that Davie Yards Inc was in receivership and announced a bid by Fincantieri – Cantieri Navali Italiani of Italy and Fincantieri subsidiary DRS Technologies Canada to purchase the shipyard from TECO.[3] This deal fell through in July 2011. After the Fincantieri deal fell through, the yard underwent financial restructuring in July 2011 in order to qualify to bid for a portion of the $40 billion contract known as the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy which will see ships built for the Canadian Coast Guard, Canadian Forces and Department of Fisheries and Oceans.[4] This procurement strategy had its bidding deadline extended by 3 weeks specifically to accommodate the Davie restructuring." So the place has been basically a deserted graveyard for a decade, after being passed off from owner to owner for a $1 a transaction. They would have lost a year or two just cleaning up all the old junk and getting things in shape to start building ships again! This is why Harper did the right thing by keeping the politicians out of this. The contracts went to REAL working shipyards! Only a politician would waste time and money giving a contract to a deserted dump just to kiss Quebec's ass for some votes! If Quebec had have won a contract, it would have been the F-18 maintenance contract fiasco all over again, when Mulroney gave the deal to a Quebec firm that had a higher bid and less expertise and experience, just as some pork for his Quebec base. That cost him the West, especially Manitoba that should have gotten the contract. It was the proverbial 'last straw' that gave the Reform Party it's spectacular launch! I think the days of Quebec getting undeserved federal contracts are gone for a while. Not to say that there won't be any contracts, just that they will get them for having the best bid like anyone else and NOT from any threats of separation!