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Pateris

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  1. Simply increasing mortgage rates to 7-8% would have the same effect.
  2. You cannot legislate technological advancement. If battery technology does not dramatically improve (to energy densities approaching that of chemical fuels), with improved safety (high density batteries tend to have significant fire risk, thus far), this will need to be rescinded. Further, the source of the electricity must be on demand, so intermittent solar/wind won't work. Without fossil fuels, the only option will be massive expansion of nuclear power. Unfortunately for Germany, they have shuttered their nuclear plants. It is much like the US government legislating the use of cellulosic ethanol in gasoline, even though no one has figured out how to make cellulosic ethanol at scale.
  3. Ethanol as fuel has driven up food prices. Much of the corn acreage in the US is now feeding ethanol production, and the price of corn based products has risen dramatically. This has been well documented for the impact it had on Mexico, because the price of tortillas doubled after the RFS came into being. Feed for animals also got more expensive, so the price of beef and pork rose quickly too. Ethanol is also not a net CO2 reduction, vs. Gasoline. The energy input to make fertilizer, fuel for machinery, losses in fermentation, etc, and the lower fuel economy (since the heating value of ethanol is low), results in a breakeven, at best, on CO2 emissions. In the US, the RFS is largely a subsidy to corn farmers.
  4. The issue is that they said teaching these things is not a crime. Therefore, nothing to see here. Unless I had evidence of an IMMINENT terrorist act, there is nothing they can do. The fact these schools are creating a generation of potential terrorists is perfectly legal in Canada.
  5. Funny thing happened in Washington after the city of Seattle raised the minimum wage (which went to US$13/hr in 2016 and will rise to US$15/hr in 2017): https://www.scribd.com/book/321992619/Seattle-Minimum-Wage-Final-Report Interesting. As expected, higher minimum wages increase unemployment.
  6. Funny that. I did contact the RCMP. The response I got was essentially "we don't investigate these claims because we might be seen as discriminating"
  7. If you spoke Arabic, try attending a mosque in Canada or a madrassa where many muslims send their children on Saturdays for "education". The imams and teachers regularly tell the people (and the children) not to associate with infidels, and to work to impose Sharia law in Canada. They tell them to be patient and have many children and petition for immigration. They tell them it is forbidden (haram) for women to have sex out of marriage, but fine for young men - in fact they tell them to "practice" on infidel girls but do not marry them. My wife and I pulled our children out of a Saturday Islam school BECAUSE of these mindsets. The teaching materials are all published in Saudi Arabia and provided free of charge to the schools.
  8. Diluted bitumen is not a semi-solid slurry. It is a liquid. It is diluted so it is a pumpable liquid at ground temperature. Without the diluent (which is basically unrefined gasoline) it would be nearly solid at these temperatures. A filter placed in diluted bitumen does not collect the bitumen - it might collect a little sand (crude oil is allowed to contain up to 0.5% water and solids - and that is ALL crude oil). As for toxicity... well, bitumen contains a number of chemical species that are toxic. But so do gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, mineral spirits, charred meat, fried potatoes and the pits of apricots. We are surrounded by toxic chemicals all the time. Diluted Bitumen is no more toxic than other crude oils. Bitumen has been naturally leaking into the Athabasca river for millennia, just as crude oil leaks into the Gulf of Mexico from natural seeps on the sea floor. And the world survives.
  9. In the 19th Century, Britain got rich while much of Europe did not, largely because Britain opened it's borders to trade, in many cases reducing tariffs unilaterally. Bastiat comments on this in his essay around 1850 as France put up more and more walls to trade, yet the people got poorer and poorer. Just look up Bastiat's petition in support of the candlemakers: http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html. This is a ridiculous basis, but it clearly shows how protectionism does not help a country.
  10. But since "renewable energy" is not stable, scalable or economically viable, oil is must be!
  11. It's worse than that - 1% of 90,000 is only 900, not 9,000.
  12. Inflation from 1950s to 2010s is about that. So in real terms, the cost of concrete has not gone up that much. Labour has gone up, largely because of labour shortages and unionization. The fact we struggled in North America to convince young people to go into the trades instead of seeking university degrees in useless fields is part of the problem. We made blue-collar work "unattractive". A bigger problem is labour productivity - the on tool time for workers on large project sites has fallen from 50% to 20% in the last 25 years. There are numerous reasons for this, but many major construction sites have lots of people standing around waiting for instructions or materials. It is unfortunately that industry has gotten so bad at planning how to execute major capital projects, but the asset owners bear a lot of the blame.
  13. The number of people hoodwinked into supporting the Council of Canadians is irrelevant. Millions of Germans joined the National Socialist German Workers Party too. You believe the economy should be controlled by the government? As if that has worked anywhere it has been tried.
  14. That was his problem. Anti-americanization. He had a nearly fictional view of what Canada was and where we came from. He fully bought into the post-war socialism of Tommy Douglas, Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and others. He and Maude Barlow first became voices in the political scene after Mulroney was elected, because they couldn't stand the idea of the free market.
  15. The Chevron GORGON LNG project in Australia has cost somewhere between 56-70 Billion dollars. So it dwarfs these costs. Nuclear plants should be cheaper than they used to be - because the technology has improved. But regulatory timelines make it impossible to be economic. Think about it. Right now, if you wanted to build a nuclear plant in North America, you'd better plan on 12-20 years to startup, and construction won't start for 7-14 years. Why? Regulatory requirements. The first nuclear reactors built at Hanford were designed, constructed and started up in about 18 months between 1943 and 1945. And those were done when we weren't even sure how it would work... Hanford was a horrendous design, to be sure, but it worked. A lot of the construction can be automated - this is already happening in other industries. Materials haven't gotten more expensive. It's all about time to market and the amount of money wasted to do paperwork. All because people get "scared" of something they don't understand. Only two nuclear plants have had catastrophic accidents that affected the environment outside the fenceline. One was a bad design with bad operators (Chernobyl), the other was a decent design with a couple of flaws exposed by a natural disaster (Fukushima). Nuclear SHOULD have a far great ROI than it does, but it falls down because the time to first revenue is too far away.
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