Moonbox

Unless you're burning coal/coke, the EV's are still probably greener. I don't really know for sure but I have to assume that power generation to grid-scale is more efficient than a vehicle's ICE, even if you account for transmission and then battery production. You're right though. They're probably a marginal improvement unless the batteries are being fueled by renewables or nuclear or something. That's why it kills me to see activists protesting so hard against nuclear when it really is the viable clean solution we have today. The new builds and refurbishments are expensive and they're always overrunning on cost, but if we embraced it we'd probably end up with the proper skills and infrastructure to expand capacity efficiently and on budget.

We will not run out of oil anytime in the foreseeable future. There are huge untapped reserves all over the world. We can switch to synthetic if things get tight. Switching away from coal/oil for cars and electricity is a pretty obvious necessity over the coming years. We just have to make sure that we don't let special interests rape us like the Ontario Liberals allowed with the Green Energy shift or whatever it was called years ago, which sent billions to Samsung etc and resulted in negligible amounts of actual power being generated. There's no secret as to why Doug Ford resoundingly won this year's election.

QE as a vehicle for monetary stimulus was pretty new in the 2009 recession, owing to the fact that they really couldn't lower the overnight rate any further than it already was. Beyond that, they had to find other ways to maintain market liquidity, so they start a large-scale purchasing of bonds and other financial instruments from the financial institutions etc. I oversimplify but the TLDR is that the central banks aren't actually just printing money out of thin air and giving it to their friends like some of the geniuses here think. The QE from the last recession was mostly tapered off. This is an interesting summary of policy decisions relating to it: https://www.yardeni.com/chronology-of-feds-quantitative-easing/

Monetary policy and quantitative easing probably accounts for inflation at 4-5% and that's something that can be sorted out with a reversal of the policies that led to it. The numbers beyond that are more supply-oriented (especially gas and food) and the Ukraine conflict made it way worse. The problem we have to avoid is entrenched inflation, where the embedded expectation of inflation actually perpetuates it. That's why it's becoming increasingly likely that the central banks will shock the economy into recession (on purpose) to break this negative-feedback loop. The inflation numbers I'm posting are from a head economist and some chief investment officers at large Canadian FI's.

You guys are making this forum a joke. It gets pretty boring.

The Supreme Court isn't trying to defend intoxication and has not ruled out subsequent legislation to deal with what you're talking about, going so far as to suggest and recommend the federal and provincial governments table other (better) legislation. The key issue here is one of intent. The Court confirmed that it was unconstitutional to deprive someone of the right to defend themselves against accusations of criminal intent when they are so tripped they aren't even in control of themselves. This isn't just getting drunk, this is black-out auto-pilot cracked out messed. That doesn't mean they can't be held responsible and the Court explained that "drunkenness is never a defence for certain crimes, including manslaughter, assault and sexual assault, a clarification Owens said was valuable "given the many ways in which we see the criminal justice system fails survivors of sexual violence." https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/law-barring-use-of-extreme-intoxication-as-criminal-defence-unconstitutional-scc-1.5901881 They have also explained that if you get high on mushrooms or meth or get black-out drunk, a reasonable person should foresee consequences and offenders can be held accountable for their actions in this regard. They just have the right to defend themselves against claims that they intended to commit a violent offense.

Who cares? Whether it was "whoopsy the pills and condoms didn't work" or "I got drunk and made a bad decision", I'm not sure why you think that women shouldn't have control of what grows in their own bodies. Some of the women who seek abortion are already raising 2+ young children and can't afford another. This can sometimes be confusing and jarring to me as well. As you say, however, it doesn't affect me. Where I feel there are legitimate concerns maybe is when trans athletes compete against females or whatever where there are some fairly obvious muscular-skeletal advantages. Maybe. I don't know too much about this but it's hard to gauge another person's suffering. If you have 4 doctors pleading on behalf of the woman to find her safer accommodation and it's for naught and she decides her best outcome is suicide, that's pretty sad. To me this sounds like a mental illness issue and as you say but that makes it really complicated.

They think it's worth defending. They're doing it every day defending it from ignorance, stupidity and incoherent anger. They're defending it from people like you.

How can we trust this? The info coming from Global News. 🙃

Double post

Not may. You are. You're way off in the deep end.

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. Relating to your point about China and it's plans for global hegemony, Lithium isn't going to get it very far. It's not a resource required in enormous amounts. It's not particularly scarce. It's replaceable with other battery tech alternatives. The worldwide Lithium market is something less than $10B. This is not something we need to be peeing our beds over.

Sure, but they do that with all of their exports, just like everyone else does. Lithium isn't really noteworthy.

It's not even close to 20x. I don't think we're even double China, though India it's probably something like 10x. Regardless, considering the population difference is more than 25x, Canada's footprint here is insignificant by comparison and doesn't really provide any argument against increasing density in Canada itself. Nobody said it will immediately solve the problem, but it at least provides marginal improvement and helps rather than hinders long-term.

That's not really true at all. Maybe you can say that first-world consumers harm the environment more per-capita, but Canada's footprint is quite a lot smaller than India's. They can challenge the theory that leads to the necessity, but not really the necessity itself. We can't support pensioners and health care costs of Baby-boomers with a shrinking population.

On this I agree with you. A lot of our carbon taxes are little more than an outsourcing of pollution to places with lax environmental and human rights law. The carbon taxes themselves aren't really the problem though. It's rather the lack of tarrif/tax on the imports coming from even dirtier sources. If we were all on a level playing field here, the carbon taxes would incentivize cleaner production. It's just...we're not.

I'm saying it doesn't really matter. Everyone knows China has the biggest Lithium reserves, just like they control most of the world's Rare earth supplies. The point is that there are alternatives to Lithium batteries (some of them new and better technology which will replace them) and so China can't use this as clout or blackmail. It's the same with rare earths, which aren't actually rare at all and are in abundant supply elsewhere. China profits from their near-monopoly, but only because they can mine them cheaper than anyone else. As soon as they start flexing and bullying around these things, they'll scare their markets into diversification like we've seen with Russia and oil/gas.

What's funnier is how anytime a news story doesn't conform to your foolish worldviews, that's all fake news. I'd say this is the pot calling the kettle black is an understatement. What's really funny and interesting about all this, however, is how quickly you mooks will rush to Vladimir's defense and how much time and energy you spend trying to justify his actions. This isn't coincidental. He's a smart man and understands that there are legions of ignorant and angry fools to tap in hostile nations. Thankfully you're still a small minority, clueless as you are.

Yes. They're not going to gain it with Lithium batteries. I don't doubt this either. Watching us penalize our own businesses outsource their dirty business and energy with no import restrictions etc has always been a fool's errand. No, but the idea that renewable energy or lithium batteries are a play for global hegemony is pretty dumb.

loool okay fair enough. That's the first time I've actually seen a politician promote it specifically anywhere.

We can sustainably feed/employ/occupy far more people globally than we do already, but not the way we're doing it now. There's no game about it. Overpopulation is a mainly third-world problem. Birth rates in the first world are low and mostly don't even sufficient for replacing the population and so that's why we need immigration. If our population shrinks then our economies and infrastructure will crumble long-term. The "problem" is a matter of perspective. Globally, there are certainly problems with overpopulation. Locally though it's not so cut-and-dry.

Not everything is a conspiracy, though I know you really want it to be. There are lots of alternatives to lithium-ion batteries, both older and newer tech coming online. The idea that China's going to take over the word with their lithium reserves is really, really silly.

Critical race theory is a farcical strawman that ignorant fools hold up and argue against and little more than that. You'd be hard-pressed to find someone in politics actually promoting critical race theory, but that doesn't stop the MAGA window-lickers from fantasizing about this bogeyman. As for PP, he'll not win an election. He can certainly win the leadership of the the CPC based on the voting membership, but he's dead-on-arrival for winning PM.

but that's not true at all, at least not in a country like Canada where demographics require more babies (or more immigration) to replace and grow the existing workforce. Our population growing is an economic imperative. It falls apart without that. We're not China or India.

The input costs are up but it doesn't explain the scale of costs increases right now. Contractors barely need to be competitive on their bids and will offer bullshit rates to you simply because they have better and more lucrative projects lined up if you refuse - the insurance work or the pocket-mansions and upzoning I was talking about earlier. I know tons of local contractors (some of my clients, and my brother-in-law is a carpenter) and the market is hot where I live. I built a deck in my backyard last year and though timber prices were pretty high the rates the contractors quoted me were retarded. IIRC the best estimate I got for a 440 square foot deck was $12,500 for labor. Other than the post-hole digging I contracted ($1600) I built the damn thing by myself over 5 weekends with a bit of help from a friend for the heavier stuff and all-in it was maybe 65 hours. Considering I only sort of knew what I was doing and had to rent some extra tools I was unfamiliar with, I imagine actual contractors could have done it much faster. Napkin math would therefore conclude these dudes are charging +$250/hr for labor which is absurd. I agree with a lot of what you say here. The upgrading and upzoning is busying contractors on higher-margin work that doesn't do much other than fuel the asset bubble, but the economic reality is that immigration is required. Canadians aren't having enough babies. Solve that problem and then we can talk about immigration.