Sir_Osis_of_Liver @ Sir_Osis_of_Liver @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

It's a waste of time on their part. Selection of the GG is a federal power exclusively, and made by the monarch based on the advise of the PM.
Language doesn't enter into it, beyond the convention of alternating between anglophone and French GGs.

Edit: I remember the hoopla when her appointment was made and a number of complaints made to the Commissioner of Official Languages, who investigated the complaints at the time.

Here's the preliminary response:
https://www.clo-ocol.gc.ca/en/newsroom/2021-11-26/statement-commissioner-official-languages-canada-preliminary-investigation?wbdisable=true

One of the important bits:

Furthermore, the Prime Minister, who is not a federal institution subject to the Act, has full authority to appoint any person to the position of Governor General and is not bound by any recommendations issued by the Privy Council Office. For all of these reasons, the conclusions in my preliminary investigation report on the process that led to the 2021 appointment of the Governor General are that the complaints are unfounded.

Free, cheap or otherwise, I'm not watching ads. The only streaming service I have is Prime, and that only because of the bundling with Amazon Prime for the shipping.

The referendum on Berlin expropriating 240,000 residential properties from corporate ownership. Something to consider.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/berlin-vote-landlords-referendum-corporate

I moved to Winnipeg 5 years ago. You're right.

The place would be a lot better if the provincial government would stop putting barriers up for anything that would benefit the city. As it is, we might as well not even have a mayor and council as the province regularly overrules decisions they make.

Gentilly is near identical to the 660MW unit at Point Lepreau in NB. It needed a refurbishment after 28 years of operation. The estimate for the project was $1.5B and 18 months. It ended up taking $2.5B ($3.1B in today's money) and close to 4 years to complete (2008-2012). Just for reference, original construction costs were $3.8B in today's money.

With a 70% lifetime capacity factor, it's been more of a liability for NBPower than anything.

When Gentilly was due for refurbishment, Hydro Quebec decided to decommission rather than going through the expense of refurbishment. Costs to put it back into service at this point are going to be very high. They already have solid baseload, so they'd be better off looking at more wind/solar.

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.

That was a marketing campaign by the petrochem industry to get plastic bags into stores, and it worked.

The carbon foot print is debatable, but plastic in the environment is basically there forever, where a paper bag breaks down relatively quickly and natural processes can deal with cellulose.

I'd moved into a house and noticed a plastic bag stuck on a branch high up on a tree. When I moved 11 years later, the bag was still there, showing essentially no signs of deterioration, even after 11+ years of exposure to sunlight and seasons that vary from -35C to +35C.

Paper bags can be used as garbage bags as long as the garbage isn't soup. Mum did it back in the 1960s and 1970s until plastic bags replaced the traditional paper bag. We're both back to using paper bags for garbage.

The last plastic bags that my grocery store used were so thin that they almost always had holes in them and leaked, so there weren't appreciably better in that respect than paper.

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.