tl;dw?

Eventually there will have to be an equilibrium. We burnt something like 5-7% of all Canadian forests last year. You can’t do that every year and still have forests to burn. The burnt areas form natural firebreaks while regrowing, which also slows things down.

One day, in the near or distant future, we will look back at blood-based and ancestry-based self-identification as being rather quaint. In the same way that sexual self-identification has changed over time.

Have another. One of our tents is sneakily in this one, the a few white pixels in top right – to give a sense of scale.

Well, your eyes would be fried well before you reach 95%. Apparently the blueshift would make quite a lot of ionizing radiation. Hard to replicate on your phone ;)

I think “/pictrs/” is in the path for the image hosting. That might be rule-friendly.

If you’re using a web browser, just add the image host domains to your Adblock or ublock origin Blacklist.

Check if your instance is running 0.19 (scroll to bottom)

Yeah, that’s not happening. Not nearly as fun as tipping cows.

Thanks!

Tl;dw?

Raw Aluminum is way higher than anyone ever expects – cheap electricity means it’s refined here.

Sauce: https://oec.world/en/profile/country/can?yearlyTradeFlowSelector=flow0

A free trade agreement isn’t just about goods either. Professional mobility is a wonderful thing. Anyway, I digress. I hope we can work something out. Actually, I hope the UK reverses course and rejoins the EU, but that’s another conversation ;)

Trade goes both ways.

But also, it hurts the Brexit fans when they can’t bully their way through trade agreements. World is weird man ;)

The Feds don’t help much for northern mining communities either. The north just gets shafted in general. Short term planning.

It used to be that, when a major deposit was discovered, a community was established there to support the mine. We have a long list of northern communities established this way: Sudbury, Yellowknife, Labrador City, Thompson… I could list dozens of northern centres that were kicked off due to a mine. Yellowknife is a great example of the community surviving mine shutdown and continuing onwards.

But new mining communities don’t get established anymore – not since at least the 60s. Now it’s fly-in, fly-out, or similar rotations. No community gets established. No economic growth happens in the remoter regions. This affects more than just the mines – but also native communities – as it prolongs and reinforces economic isolation.

Actually, read into Thompson, MB. It’s possibly the last major mining community to be established in Canada. There was initially a work camp on site, but the workers had a strike and demanded that they could live with their families, and school and such be built. Thompson popped up almost overnight as a real community. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Sucks for miners. Sucks for economic development in the north. Sucks for carbon footprint.

I did some work in a community in NWT called “Fort Good Hope”. We hired some locals for labour and got to know them fairly well. After talking with them, we learned that they were sending their kids to Edmonton for school because there was no future for them in town (besides delinquency, arson, bootlegging alcohol, etc.). There was so little hope in the town that we started calling it Fort No Hope.

One of our labourers was particularly reflective, noting that sending his kids south to get educated was effectively the same intent as the residential schools. The difference being that he was their parent and not the government, and it wasn’t to a religious institution. Given the kids we saw running around outside at 4am banging on windows (lots of sunlight in summer that far north), it seemed like a wise idea.

This used to be a legitimate thing. Shack towns turned into real housing over time as people worked and accumulated resources. Rather than starting with a mortgage. Here’s a historical example in Toronto: https://www.jstor.org/stable/215635

You’re getting downvoted by the ACAB brigade. But you’re absolutely right. If there is zero enforcement of the Rule of Law, then the Rule of Law doesn’t exist. Granted cops are only a portion of that mechanism (legal system and legislators and general societal acceptance of these institutions also required.)

You could run an experiment – remove all cops from Calgary, but keep cops in Edmonton. The crime rate might be similar to background in the first year, but in the third year? Tenth year? I’d suspect that suddenly people would be clamouring for the police to enforce laws in Calgary again.

(I picked those cities because there was a remarkable experiment performed at one point where Calgary stopped fluorinating their water supply, while Edmonton continued. The cavity rates diverged rapidly until political pressure returned fluorination.)

Anyway, a background level of policing is required for Peace, Order, and Good Governance. Not zero police. Not a police state either.

This headline is written to maximize conflict between the police and society. Using the term “Land Defender” rather than illegal protester makes it seem like the police are at fault here – in the sense of Rule of Law. They aren’t.

If you don’t like the Law, then change it. Democracy in action.

CTV source of the same article (Canadian Press as author): https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/canadian-built-underwater-observatory-transmitting-data-from-around-antarctica-1.6731310

Looks sort of like my line of work. Scientific instrumentation! I’m going to cross post it using the CTV link to some science communities