Sir_Osis_of_Liver

The only other book I struggled with was Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The travel-log sections were entertaining, and the relationship with his son was interesting, but the discussions on the nature of quality were completely lost on me.

I did get through Zen on the second attempt because I thought it was worth it. I saw no value in Atlas Shrugged at all.

Very early on in my career in consulting engineering, I had an architect tee-off on me for changing the ceiling heights of the office space she’d designed.

I’m electrical, all I was concerned with was circuiting her lights, that was it. I had documentation showing that I’d worked off of exactly the same ceiling heights she had sent me. Heights that she’d apparently changed somewhere along the line without informing the client, who was an international conglomerate, and notoriously picky to work for.

That could have blown over, had she not berated me over email while CCing the client, my management and just about anyone else involved with the project. I made sure to “reply all” showing where the change had happened. She was replaced on the project the following week.

After that I stuck to industrial projects, where the buildings were non-descript concrete and steel boxes with no architectural involvement.

I remember not picking up another book for some time after finishing Shogun. I wanted to hang onto it as long as I could. It’s epic.

Dad had an interesting career. Started as an office clerk for a railway with only high school education. Then he got into using an IBM 650 (IIRC) for doing freight rate calculations. How he managed that transition, I have no idea. He didn’t care for being cooped up all day flipping switches, dealing with punch cards and tapes.

He switched to marketing and got on there very well and retired after 37 years as a regional director.

He always has a book on the go, even now at 83. He has an eclectic pile of them that he kept, from Zane Grey to an early history of the Civil War written around 1870.

Back when I was in junior high in the early 1980s, I found a copy of Atlas Shrugged on my father’s bookshelf, and started reading it. I can’t remember how far I got into it, but I do remember thinking it was just awful in just about every way: story, writing, pacing, everything.

I asked Dad about it, “Oh, that. It’s terrible, isn’t it?” A friend had given it to him. Neither one of us finished reading it and after that it ended up at a book reseller.
On the plus side, he’d gone through his books and gave me James Clavell’s Shogun to read, which was an awesome novel.

Facebook et al want the advertising dollars without any of the costs of reportage. This is a ham-fisted attempt to rectify the situation. I’m fine with it.

The government should up the ante by making Facebook “publishers” under the law. Make them responsible for all of the libel, slander and defamation posted to their sites. Make them responsible for their lack of moderation, and the fallout it’s been causing.

Two things would work:
-Fix the fucking restrictive residential zoning regs. This is provincial turf.
-Build more public housing. This is also provincial turf, but the feds had been involved in the past.

The difficulty with point 2 is that there has to be an agreement between the feds and the provinces. If the provinces don’t want to build public housing, that’s the end of it. The federal government can’t just barge into provincial jurisdiction because they feel like it.

In the article they’re talking about the peak of federal involvement in housing being the 1970s. That’s not coincidental, as it was prior to the patriation of the constitution. If zoning doesn’t allow for the typical 1970s 3-floor walk-up apartment blocks, the feds don’t get to overrule those restrictions.

No sense of context. The BoC prime rate was right around 5% or higher from 1960 until 2008 or so. The all time high overnight rate was a bit over 18% in 1981 IIRC.

The rates are “high” now only relative to the record low rates we had prior to covid.

Just going from the website, an F150 Lariat is $68k in Canada, and the Lightning XLT is $69k. If you wanted a more comparable Lightning Lariat, it’s $80k.

Both the gasser and sparky version can be optioned up to well over $110k, which is insanity to me.

We see what happens in healthcare: the provinces have their hands out, the feds eventually cough up money, some provinces use it for healthcare, others pocket it and cut provincial taxes. Rince and repeat.

This is basically true, however, since ratification of the constitution, the feds are more limited in their ability to intrude into provincial jurisdiction.

The government should up the ante. Facebook should be treated as a publisher. Make them legally liable for all of the libel, defamation and slander etc being thrown around on their sites. Now THAT would throw a monkey wrench into profitability.

Having said that, even my 83 year old father can navigate his way to CBC, CTV and Toronto Star without issue, and he still gets a paper home delivered. He’s only ever gone to FB for family stuff, never news. I’m not sure how much effect Zuck’s hissy fit is going to have on most people.

This is the same douche canoe who used to work for Peter Nygard

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/nygard-winnipeg-councillor-kevin-klein-1.5901405

He’s absolutely corrupt and a complete political opportunist.

I’d worked on and off in the US for 10ish years at one point. Whether it works out financially depends entirely on where you end up. Sometimes wages are higher, sometimes a fair wash. Housing is likewise. Reading Pennsylvania is cheap, San Fran isn’t, and so on.

It’s the same in Canada. Want to live in the GTA or Vancouver? You’re gonna get reamed on housing. Okay living in Regina, Winnipeg or Moncton? You’ll be fine.

You also have to take a very close look at benefits. Employers like to play a shell game with benefits. At one place the health coverage may be better, but retirement contributions worse, or fewer days of paid leave etc. That salary can get chewed up pretty quickly with additional healthcare costs, not to mention school and property taxes, and, in places like Florida, home owner’s insurance.

Can it be beneficial to work in the US? Absolutely. But it’s not necessarily beneficial.

@ LonelyWendigo

What? That’s a rationalization for your preferred system.

Depts of Winter -35C
Spring/Fall 0C
Heights of Summer +35C

In Fahrenheit that would be:

Winter -31F
Spring/Fall +32F
Summer +95F

Which is completely arbitrary.

China Three Gorges Corporation announced that the 16-megawatt MySE 16-260 turbine had been successfully installed at the company’s offshore wind farm near Fujian Province on July 19. The behemoth is 152 meters (500 feet) tall, and each single blade is 123 meters (403 feet) and weighs 54 tons. This means that the sweep of the blades as they rotate covers an area of 50,000 square meters (nearly 540,000 square feet).

Many of them have been 2-3 years late, but Taishan-1&2 was 6 years late. Instead of less than 4 years, it took a bit over 10.

But you can’t realistically compare construction projects in China to those in the West based on labour and environmental regs alone.

It’s no great mystery. 3500MW Darlington cost the equivalent of $23B in today’s money. OPG just couldn’t afford to replace something like Nanticoke (~4000MW) with reactors at the time.

Point Lepreau cost $3.8B in today’s money, and needed an extensive refurbishment 28 years later. The refurbishment was supposed to take 18 months and cost $1.5B (2010). It ended up taking almost 5 years and cost $2.5B ($3.1B in today’s money). For only 660MW, that’s some expensive power.

Edit: There was supposed to be a Unit 2 at Lepreau. Some of the concrete work was done for a second reactor at the same time as work on the first unit started. After all of the construction delays and overruns, they decided not to go ahead with it. It’s been brought up a number of times since, but the economics kill it.

When the identical reactor at Gentilly was due for refurbishment, Quebec Hydro was “Naw” and decommissioned it.

The sale of AECL to SNC-Lavalin by Harper, and their change to emphasize support and maintenance rather than new reactor sales means that utilities would be looking at reactors like the Westinghouse AP1000 or Areva EPR/EPR-2. They’ve got a really bad track record for massive cost overruns.

Boot device not found. Please install an operating system on your hard disk

I graduated high school in 1985. This movie spoke to me at the time.