We've known about this for decades. An example: heating causes permafrost to melt releasing CO2 and methane, which cause more heat to be trapped, which melts more permafrost, which releases more green house gasses, etc.
Positive feedback loops tend to be very unstable, and can lead to runaway situations.
We are faculty at Harvard who are deeply concerned about the events in the Middle East, as well as the safety of our students here on campus. On October 7th, Hamas launched a premeditated attack on the Israeli population. Hundreds of terrorists infiltrated Israeli towns and houses. Children were killed in front of their parents;...
It makes it sound like these attacks are out of the blue with no justification. The Israelis have been bulldozing civilian homes and stealing their land without repercussion since 1967, not to mention a long history of summary executions and random shootings. This is the type of asymmetrical warfare that should have been predicted.
The IDF response has been targeting civilians in far higher numbers with completely indiscriminate retaliatory rocket, artillery and airstrikes. The blockade of all humanitarian aid to the West Bank and Gaza, including food, fuel and medical aid will result in widespread civilian deaths. It's the same tactics used in the Holomodor and in the Warsaw Ghettos, and most definitely war crimes.
A report commissioned by the Alberta government says the province would be entitled to more than half the assets of the Canada Pension Plan - $334 billion - if it were to exit the national retirement savings program in 2027.
Canadian businesses invested 55 cents per worker for every dollar invested per worker in the United States in 2021, down from 79 cents in 2014, according to a June report by the Fraser Institute think-tank.
That's good to hear. I was out for a walk at lunch and went past the Legislature. From my vantage I could only make out the nutters, which was depressing. I didn't have time to really investigate.
Late Tuesday, the U.S. vehemently denied the idea that it has been reluctant to speak publicly on Canada's behalf amid allegations by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the Indian government participated in the extrajudicial killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil.
This was after a report in the Washington Post said Ottawa had tried and failed for weeks to get its allies to publicly condemn the murder.
A senior U.S. administration official reached out to CBC News to dispute that characterization.
"Reports that Canada asked the U.S. to publicly condemn the murder and that we refused are false and we would strongly push back on the rumours that we were reluctant to speak publicly about this," the official said.
"In fact, we very clearly and very publicly have done the opposite by expressing deep concern shortly after PM Trudeau made the announcement."
This is no different from the widespread adoption of electric clothes dryers, water heaters or domestic home air conditioning. Electrical distribution is never static.
New Brunswick had a program in the 1970s/80s to get people to switch to electric home heating due to the oil shocks. That was far more ambitious than what is being proposed here.
Edit. I was curious, so I looked up recent numbers for home heating in NB, as it's the area I'm most familiar with.
From 2000-2020, the number of residences increased by 46,000 (285,000 to 331,000). Overall, 72% of which are detached houses. The market share of electric heating went from 57% overall to 79% in those 22 years.
New generation was limited to ~400MW nameplate of wind and one 250MW combined cycle natural gas plant, while several older coal/heavy oil units were mothballed, so overall output hardly changed.
There are a lot of places that grew a lot faster. Yet, the power stayed on.
It's exactly the same. You're adding one 30-50A circuit to residential that will be used intermittently, and primarily during off peak hours. Very, very few vehicles will need a full charge every night, and the software on the charger side typically meters in current at much less than capacity if it's on a schedule, as the lower the current, the less heat, and less stress on the battery . Large charging stations are on par with commercial/light industrial, and we add that sort of load all the time.
I've worked for power utilities for 25 years on the generation side with some on the T&D side. The planners spend a pile of time on analysis to determine where additional load and/or sources are being added and triage based on that. When old stuff is scheduled for replacement, sometimes an upgrade is warranted, sometimes not, based on that analysis.
A lot of electrical equipment currently has long lead times. I've got quotes for up to 70 weeks on some stuff. It's been a side effect of relying on dodgy suppliers overseas. It has been improving.
We had entire neighbourhoods go from oil furnaces and either 50A or 100A services to electric heat with 200A services. Yeah, equipment got upgraded, that's how it works. Where did I say otherwise?
And you certainly can plan for that. People are doing it as we speak.
No mention of the fact that house sizes have almost doubled since the 1960s, while families are smaller than ever.
If it takes as much material to build 2 houses now as it used to for 3-4 houses, that's not going to help affordability.
The biggest factors still revolve around zoning and other restrictions imposed by the municipalities and by extension the provinces.
Housing isn't as much of a big deal in Winnipeg, but our dingbat premier is still pushing tax cuts that "will fund themselves by stimulating growth". Meanwhile she's not even considering rolling back the healthcare cuts that had crippled the system here even prior to Covid.
In theory? Sure. In reality, nope. No one is going to spend the political capital on this.
We'd still need an executive, even if only ceremonial. Getting consensus on that would be almost impossible.
IF we somehow managed to get to some sort of negotiating framework, we'd still need agreement from the feds and all of the premiers. You can bet that each of them will bring a laundry list of things they want to change in the constitution, and at least some of them will be 'poison pills' to kill the proceedings.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault must unblock Rebel News founder Ezra Levant on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, under the terms of a court order.
👋. I was a member of the federal PCs back in the day. I worked on both Mulroney campaigns, voted for him once, and even voted for Kim Campbell. I continued to support the party until the Reform takeover. Moderate PCs were very much made to feel unwelcomed, and I didn't support most of what became policy.
I've been voting Liberal since. Which was a big jump for me. But the CPC aren't conservative. They're right-wing, populist reactionaries.
Rising numbers of wild pigs and macaque monkeys in Southeast Asia pose risks to native forests and could lead to disease spread among livestock and humans, reveals a study led by The University of Queensland. Dr. Matthew Luskin, affiliated with UQ's School of the Environment, alongside his team,
That's just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It's what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.
In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren't. Large assemblies that don't fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It's how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.
The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.
I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.
There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Thursday that the Supreme Court is working on “concrete steps” to address ethics issues at the high court amid an array of recent news stories on justices’ travel and relationships with political donors....
KTM did a thing on some models where electronic features, like cruise control, would all be unlocked for the first 1500kms as a trial mode. After that they'd stop working. If you wanted to keep them, you'd pay and the dealer would unlock them.
I don't necessarily have an issue with that, as it's a one time fee, and you only pay for those features that you want. I think people do get upset when they've had something and it's taken away.
Any sort of subscription is an absolute dealbreaker though.
Edit. LOL at the downvotes. Reddit will never die.
Previously KTM had those features behind a paywall. If you wanted them, you'd go to the dealership and they'd unlock them. At least this way you had 1500kms to figure out if they were useful or not. The other option was to just include everything and bump the price up accordingly. KTM were going to get paid for their development work, one way or the other.
I know you know that's not how pricing works. "What the market will bear" and all that. On the luxury end, there's even more latitude for that sort of thing. Porsche are masters at padding the Monroney with things that would be considered standard on a Kia.
It's not much different than packaging a sunroof with something like Magnaride or leather seats. A person might not care about the leather or Magnaride, but do want the sunroof. People might squirm at a $3000 package, but they REALLY want the sunroof, and figure they're getting a couple of other things in the package, and the monthly doesn't change THAT much so what the hell.
It's all marketing. Some pencil-neck has gone through the data and determined an angle to package things, electronic or mechanical. Sometimes it works and they make bank, and sometimes sales tank and the company backtracks.
Dunno where she found a house for $45k ($160k in today's money) in 1980. Dad bought a new, three bedroom, split-level in Moncton in 1979 for $79k ($310k in today's money). Moncton at the time was really struggling with the recession. Prices in the GTA were much higher.
Housing prices were rapidly increasing in the GTA, and did so through the 1980s, finally flatlining at the end of the decade, before taking off again around 2000.
Also, prime mortgage rates at the time hit 16% in 1980 and peaked at 21.75% in 1981.
I just sold a 2500 sq ft, 4 bedroom house in Regina for a bit under $390k a few years ago. My current place in Winnipeg is a 1000 sq ft, two bedroom, two bathroom unit. and it was $260ish.
I purposely avoided transfers to the GTA or Greater Vancouver. There is no way I'd give up my free time and disposable income to be that miserable.
So don't move to Vancouver or the GTA? Simple solution. I'm from the Maritimes. We'd always been told by Upper Canada and the West to "move to where the work is." Fair enough. How about moving to where you can afford to live?
Dad bought a house in 1979 that was $79k, in Moncton. In Toronto it would have been much more at the time. That's about $310k in today's money. Median income in 1979 was the equivalent of roughly $60k today. Dad made good money, had done well on previous houses, and Mum was an ER nurse, they could swing it. But a lot of people were really struggling. Especially those people who saw their fixed rate mortgage jump from 14% to almost 22%.
I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New. (www.nytimes.com)
Open letter to the Harvard community (docs.google.com)
We are faculty at Harvard who are deeply concerned about the events in the Middle East, as well as the safety of our students here on campus. On October 7th, Hamas launched a premeditated attack on the Israeli population. Hundreds of terrorists infiltrated Israeli towns and houses. Children were killed in front of their parents;...
Alberta deserves more than half CPP assets if it exits program: report (calgary.ctvnews.ca)
A report commissioned by the Alberta government says the province would be entitled to more than half the assets of the Canada Pension Plan - $334 billion - if it were to exit the national retirement savings program in 2027.
Analysis: Canada's losing productivity streak adds to inflation problem (www.reuters.com)
Anti-LGTBQ “Million March For Children” outnumbered by “Billion March For Not Being Bigots” (www.thebeaverton.com)
India urges 'utmost caution' in Canada travel advisory as bilateral crisis escalates (www.cnbc.com)
Canada’s allies rebuff its requests to join in accusations against India (www.washingtonpost.com)
Archive: [ archive.ph/ZmRbZ ]
A Toronto landlord is banning electric vehicles on its property. Tenants' advocates say that's 'unreasonable' (www.cbc.ca)
Opinion: It’s not that we have too many people. It’s that we have too few houses (www.theglobeandmail.com)
Increasing number of Canadians want to reconsider ties to monarchy, survey suggests (www.winnipegfreepress.com)
Non-Paywall Article
Environment minister must unblock Rebel News founder Levant on X under court order (www.ctvnews.ca)
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault must unblock Rebel News founder Ezra Levant on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, under the terms of a court order.
‘Social’ issues distract from Poilievre’s focus on economy, affordability (globalnews.ca)
The Conservative grassroots voted overwhelmingly to restrict gender-affirming care for trans youth under the age of 18 on Saturday.
Canada will ban aerosol WD-40 in 2024 (www.westernstandard.news)
Almost every Canadian has a spray can of WD-40 in the garage, but that's about to change....
“They Were Everywhere” – Exploding Monkey and Pig Populations Pose Human Disease Risk (scitechdaily.com)
Rising numbers of wild pigs and macaque monkeys in Southeast Asia pose risks to native forests and could lead to disease spread among livestock and humans, reveals a study led by The University of Queensland. Dr. Matthew Luskin, affiliated with UQ's School of the Environment, alongside his team,
Demand for uranium for reactors seen jumping 28% by 2030 (www.reuters.com)
Nuclear capacity is expected to rise by 14% by 2030 and surge by 76% to 686 GWe by 2040, the report said...
Brett Kavanaugh says justices are working on ‘concrete steps’ on ethics (www.cnn.com)
Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Thursday that the Supreme Court is working on “concrete steps” to address ethics issues at the high court amid an array of recent news stories on justices’ travel and relationships with political donors....
BMW Drops Controversial Heated Seats Subscription, To Refocus On Software Services (www.forbes.com)
BMW has made a U-turn on a controversial subscription service that saw drivers pay a fee to activate the heated seats fitted to their car.
Canada ranked as 2nd best country in the world. (www.cicnews.com)
Despite what Canada’s nation hating extreme right would have you believe.