I’m glad CBC still does fifth estate investigations. I can’t say I’m surprised that the farms claims don’t hold water - anyone promising “countless health benefits” from a single product should be viewed with heavy skepticism.

The pivot from Big Pharma to Big Govt for stealing or suppressing their research is kinda sad. Imagine how their life must look if they genuinely believe this.

Canada Post pension maxes out at 35yrs, and you get hit with major deductions if you retire before 60 even with 30 years. Otherwise its 65 yrs for retirement. https://www.cpcpension.com/homepage/triage_glossary-e.asp#Pensionable-age

This is not dissimilar to any other DB pension.

The pension value is, again, similar to every other pension I’ve seen (AMAPCEO, OPS, etc). If someone can retire early and"like a millionaire" (which is a super outdated valuation), either their spouse has a good pension too, they made smart financial choices, or they got lucky with choices.

In comparison to every other modern country, our nationalized mail service does extremely well and is run **very **efficiently. Like top 1 or 2 in the world well. Source

We shouldn’t be simping for multinational corps who manage to get away with rock bottom delivery pricing by underpaying staff and claiming “this is efficiency”.

For sure- I think house size does need to scale with family size. But no family is big enough these days for a 3k sqft house, especially not a typical nuclear 4 person one. 12 or 1500 is sufficient for most 4 person families while still maintaining standards theyre used to, though obviously layout can make a big difference.

Tbh its not even that we need to sacrifice quality at this point. we have the knowledge to do good builds.

Build lowrise or duplex townhomes that are big enough for families, in the 800-1200sqft range, and save on building costs. Save on the space, so land costs and servicing costs stay low. Sure its not as appealing as a suburban house with a huge backyard and no shared walls, but its a lot cheaper, and it’ll alleviate the housing crunch.

I’ve said it before, but my firm works with municipalities as the external engineer to review development plans. Those have all dried up the in last 6months, despite the housing crunch still being here. Know why? Costs have come down since people can’t afford it, which means developers are willing to sit on vacant land and/or approved plans and hope that costs will rise again before building. They’re hoping this dip is a short term correction.

This isn’t sustainable. We need a nonprofit or govt funded builder providing supply regardless of what the financial feasibility of doing so is, based on the required demand for housing. Housing should not be a commodity, nor should be it a retirement plan.

I guess the question is, what price would you require to drop down one or two bedrooms?

We used to have much smaller homes. Our enormous houses aren’t helping our cost, for sure, but its a difficult sell for many. I had to convince my wife we didn’t need a huge house when we moved, and managed to get her to look at sub2k sqft houses. The amount of space we STILL don’t use is ridiculous, but she wasn’t willing to go below 1750.

Super weird when someone posts what is likely a random stock photo of a place you went to school.

Atoa’s initial mid-December arrest followed police finding…

I mean, who moves before looking at rental prices though??

Reading it, it looks like they’re stuck on this point “This municipality urges the province of Ontario to work urgently with key stakeholders to develop limited liability legislation, including enforceable contractor training and a single set of provincially-endorsed standard BMPs for snow and ice management; and…”

I’m guessing liability reasons mean the first one to take a step and suggest we use a little less salt and increase our risk of injury is opening themselves up unless the provide sets mandated standards or direction.

Must be related to temperatures, or I’m misunderstanding.

In Canada most people get dual furnace/heatpumps, where the furnace is usually NG or propane.

When I go to do road reconstruction, enormous amounts of effort (and money) are spent avoiding underground utilities. In the event they can’t be avoided, the municipality is on the hook for (generally) half the relocation cost.

And they dont have to pay to have their stuff there in the first place.

The key part in this argument -

Guelph Coun. Leanne Caron says many of those agreements were signed decades ago, when natural gas was treated as a public good and Enbridge was still a Crown corporation. Today, Enbridge is a for-profit company and Caron says the old rules no longer match current economic, environmental or planning realities.

That basically sums it up. Turn back to a Crown Corp and continue gaining free access, or pay like the private corp you are.

Locally, as discussed in the article, they can use it to prop up small scale green infrastructure grants/loans which help further reduce the use of those gas pipelines, and reduce upsizing or new installation requirements.

I mean I dont understand why they keep doing this. This is the third or fourth city I’ve seen get into it.

For those who dont read the article, there was JUST a court case in the last few months where Mississauga lost over this exact issue.

I dont see this precedence being upended UNLESS they can prove this poses a danger to residents (think poison sumac, etc). Otherwise its a waste of taxpayer money and time for a non-issue.

Yeah, I agree. I think its extremely unlikely that this was intentional in the sense of cheating. It’d be a weird way to cheat.

I appreciate you finding that article - interesting one.

I’m very much amateur curler, and can’t see how that tiny touch would impact it, but maybe it does at that level of competition.

Using a perfect shot to stop on the button with no spin, and energy= all kinetic (1/2mv2) =friction energy(F*deltaX), we get a release speed of 1.8m/s (with a .006 coefficient), and a 2.98m/s speed (with a 0.016 coefficient).

Using the same equation, I go ahead and rerun the number, but adding a distance of 0.1m, a value I used as a good approximation of a reliable accuracy of an Olympic throw, and a time of 0.2s (the approximate time I estimated based on the video), which means a deltaX2 of 0.36m, or 0.596m.

1/2mv2+fapplieddeltaX2 = ffrictiondeltaX Fapplied comes out to 0.326N to 0.526N which is a miniscule amount.

That seems to indicate that a tiny touch DOES have the potential to make a significant difference. Some sources say 0.25 to 0.5N is required for a keyboard press, so its roughly on par with that

But, how much of a difference does the sweeping make on stone speed? Its easy to say that tiny change can impact things, but how does it compare to, say, sweeping hard vs not sweeping?

This study shows a sweeping change of 45+/-8mm. Thus a change of 25% on top of that is not insignificant.

So the last question is, does it make sense for someone to train specifically by cheating this way rather than doing it right and just pushing off with a more accurate force? That’s likely going to be subjective, but seems difficult to me.

Who knows, maybe this is a crutch and it is making a difference. Sounds like they need to stop doing it any case, whether a way they’ve trained or not. Or wear a camera showing they don’t touch the rock and just hover their finger behind it.

The problem I have is with how productivity is measured. Either GDP or GNI are both negatively impacted by positive planning and bureaucracy, but are driven positively on paper by cheap, breakable goods requiring regular repairs and replacement.

For example, City/designers of a road take an additional 500 hours to do design work which provides an increase of 10 years in lifespan. Now that doesn’t need to be repaired for longer, meaning less future costs (driving down the cost side), while at the same time increasing the hours spent. This has a negative impact on GNI, but is actually a GOOD thing by any rational persons view of the situation.

Or someone produces a set of clothes at a reasonable price that lasts twice as long. If people all move to that product, our GNI would drop despite that being a positive change.

Or thousands of frivolous or stupid lawsuits due to problems avoided by proper planning and/or bureaucracy show up as a benefit to GDP/GNI despite being a waste of time and money.

Using productivity as an end measure misses a lot of important points and measures that a modern society should be aiming for.

Sounds like the “loophole” we need to address is our lack of funding courts and justice systems - a problem seen Canada wide. Seems like a very easy and popular way to solve the issue.

Ontario only just allowed speed cameras at all, and specifically only in community safety zones recently, which would be why you haven’t historically seen them. Most municipalities only had a few so cycled them through their CSZs.

I can’t say I’m too surprised. I’m not involved in the auto sector in anyway, but the media I’ve seen about it with respect to Canadian manufacturing has been all negative - US companies or US owned companies pulling their manufacturing out of Canada despite deals made (looking at you Stellantis). If our auto sector is diminishing/pulling out, what do we have to protect?

That being said, I’d like to see more manufacturing jobs here as part of that deal, but I’m entirely uninformed on how that would work or what it would look like.

Problem is people aren’t good judges of what is, in fact, a safe speed.

Edit: the second problem is that making it feel unsafe while not being unsafe (or unfeasible to maintain or prohibitively costly) leaves very few options.

Studies done up and down streets and in areas with rotating speed cameras show a long lasting impact in the areas most likely to have children crossing the roads.

Its not a fix-all solution for everywhere, but its sure as shit better than what we have, and the revenue from them was legislated to be used TO create those traffic calming measures you want.