Avro Arrow – The record-breaking jet which still haunts a country | Hacker News Reader

Avro Arrow – The record-breaking jet which still haunts a country

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238 pointspseudolus280 comments

Interesting to contrast with Sweden, a country of 10m people, having a domestic fighter program to this day.

Though at least the current Swedish fighter, the JAS-39 Gripen, uses a lot of 3rd party components like the engine and most of the armaments. Still, an impressive achievement from such a small country. Will be interesting to see whether they will create a follow-up to the Gripen, or will instead opt to participate in some next-generation common European thing.

Also similar to the Avro Arrow story is the British TSR2.

No disrespect to Sweden or the Gripen but the UK makes 30% of its parts(mostly electronic warfare) which is a leverage it used to ban its sale to Argentina.[1]

If a foreign country owns such a major part of your domestic fighter then your fighter is on a very short leash.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_JAS_39_Gripen

Huh, I had no idea, thanks.

I guess that goes some way to explaining the announcement last year that Sweden might join UK/Italy to develop a 'sixth Generation' fighter, the so-called 'Tempest'.

Not knowing any better, I simply assumed it was Brexit-related and we in the UK expected to burn bridges with our French and German industrial partners.

I think the reason is they're realizing that developing a high end next generation jet fighter is incredibly expensive, and is only getting more so. So partnering with allies (even if not formally in the sense that Sweden is not part of NATO) makes all the sense in the world.

As to why there are two next generation European fighters planned (the Tempest you mention, and then there's another French/German/Spanish(?) effort), no idea. It doesn't make sense.

> As to why there are two next generation European fighters planned (the Tempest you mention, and then there's another French/German/Spanish(?) effort), no idea. It doesn't make sense.

It makes total sense. Dassault doesn't play well with the other children and Germany won't pay for aircraft that it ordered (Typhoon and Atlas).

The UK hasn't gone it alone in a air-to-air focused fighter since before the Arrow was cancelled (The English Electric Lightening, I think). Every more recent fighter that was primarily about air-to-air has been multinational.

> No disrespect to Sweden or the Gripen but the UK makes 30% of its parts(mostly electronic warfare) which is a leverage it used to ban its sale to Argentina.[1]

> American microchips, Union microchips, all made in Taiwan

It is kind of ridiculous how big of it the part of defence electronics using off the shelf civilian parts these days.

Even Russia who spends god knows how much money to keep its 10μm fab running just to make military electronics, is only said to make them for their strategic level ICBMs to assure absolute secrecy, and nothing else.

They have other options soon. See

[1] https://minimalfab.eu/ and notice the address.

Progress!

[2] https://minimalfab.eu/news/jaxa-aist-paving-pathway-minimal-...

[3] https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2019/05/20190510a.html especially Figure 3

> Using a practical SOI-CMOS which was developed by National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in 2018, JAXA has designed an IC which contains around 1000 transistors (4bit shift resistor and an I/O circuit) and manufactured a prototype chip (Figure 1) whose operations has been demonstrated successfully (Figure 2).

That seems a little…unimpressive?

Maybe it's only intended as proof of concept for rad-hard ability? I see it in the context of first mention of this minimal.fab thing from a few years ago. Maybe they are not showing all they can, or have? Of course a full CPU would be more impressive! What it does prove is that this system is progressing towards finer structures, as can be seen in Figure 3 when you zoom in.

edit: sorry, first mention on HN (that i can find) was 10 months ago. First blips in the media were a few years ago (which i only learned of because said mention on HN), but not much of them.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14623812

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20657753

The leash is more economic than defence - the main impetus of Gripen is to defend Sweden and for that it should serve well enough. Of course, it would be nice to spread the cost around by selling to other markets, but it's a trade off.

Developing all the tech in-house would enable that but procuring a domestic engine was deemed too expensive.

Small nations can occasionally do surprising things when they feel like it. Israel successfully developed nuclear weapons when they only had two million people in the country.

I don't think most small countries are as pressured towards an arms race, compared to Israel! Doesn't detract from their achievement, of course.

Israel's development of nuclear weapons owed a lot to France, Germany and the US.

From here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-...

"In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.

By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."

Seymour Hersh's book 'The Sampson Option' goes into more detail.

South Africa was in the same boat in needing a weapon of absolute last resort ... instead of Arab armies we had to contend with soviet supplied cuban troops on our border.

We had 4 devices by then and developed with help of Israel an intermediate range ballistic missile based on their Jericho-2.

Fortunately sanity prevailed in the end and the bombs and missile program got scrapped when a political settlement was achieved.

> weapon of absolute last resort

At least when Israel was developing its nuclear bomb, its neighbours were not particularly minded to compromise. Contrast, for example, the Freedom Charter (a fifties document!), which was so studiously nonracial that the PAC had to split off:

> South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief

At this point the possible threat was clearly domestic blacks, not nearby colonies, and compromise with them was clearly quite possible. CODESA didn't happen earlier because the Broederbond took so long to change its mind—had it, it could have happened decades earlier.

The SA army was also in conventional terms quite sufficient to prevent any foreign invasion. Even Rhodesia with P.K. van der Byl and the other ludicrous types who congregated in Salisbury hotels could manage for over a decade. Armscor on the other hand was world-leading, and none of SA’s neighbours had anything like that.

> soviet supplied cuban troops on our border

They were on the Namibian border, which was from 1966 was no longer really South Africa’s. In any case SA militarily held its own—it inflicted far more casualties than it suffered and maintained control of Namibia. It seems to make much more sense to interpret withdrawal as a political decision to cease the indefensible occupation of Namibia, instead of evidence that a nuclear bomb was strategically necessary.

>... instead of Arab armies we had to contend with soviet supplied cuban troops on our border.

I know Africa's colonization/imperialism and cold war politics were inseparable, but the fact that South Africa's apartheid government was the sole remaining minority-led government in the region[1] seems material here

> Fortunately sanity prevailed in the end and the bombs and missile program got scrapped when a political settlement was achieved.

Sounds like someone didn't want a black-led government in charge of the nukes[2]. I agree with the end result; but I question the motives.

1. Neighboring nations gained majority rule through armed conflict - excluding Namibia, which was effectively a client state of South Africa after being ceded by Germany in a world war.

2. Which would have been destabilizing, considering the white secessionist sentiment (minorority, but significant). There was a legitimate concern over right-wing separatists who were agitating for an autonomous white homeland/territory.

The swiss and israelei don't suffer from the resource curse.

That was hardly independent development though, so not a great example.

> Interesting to contrast with Sweden, a country of 10m people, having a domestic fighter program to this day.

That's mostly driven off Sweden's postwar neutrality. Were Sweden a NATO member it's hard to imagine the country deciding to pay the almost prohibitively expensive cost of maintaining an indigenous aircraft industry, instead of buying from a larger ally. The Netherlands and Italy are among those NATO members that once produced their own fighter aircraft but no longer do so, instead joining multinational alliances or buying from elsewhere.

On that topic (compared the Avro Arrow with the SAAB Draken, developed at the same time):

http://bestfighter4canada.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-tale-of-two...

> Still, the biggest difference between the Arrow and the Draken were basic design philosophies. The Arrow was intended to "best in the world"... While the Draken was simply intended to be the "best for Sweden".

> Sometimes "good enough" is more than enough, and "the best" is too damn much.

That also ties to the overall Swedish culture of lagom [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagom

The issue with expecting small countries to field indigenous aircraft is that jet engines are hard. The Gripen relies upon the GE F404 engine, and this gives the US leverage in preventing exports. China has been trying for decades to build its own high performance jet engines, and hasn't succeeded. They still rely heavily upon Russian engine designs.

If China really wants to, I think it's just a matter of time. Their (PPP-adjusted) GDP is 6.5 times larger than Russia, so they can afford to spend a lot of resources on it if they wish.

Damn, I didn't know Russia was even that big.

It's not a matter of time, since Western (and Russian) engine manufacturers aren't standing still. The WS-15 has been in development for over 25 years, and still isn't ready for primetime in the J-20.

Sounds like it's a matter of a lot of time

No need to wonder, the new Gripen is already here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjTT6PSK2Yc

Yeah, the USA shot down a lot of competing aircraft projects in the 1960's.

This a good summary of the TSR2 https://youtu.be/PhXcd-881xA

The F-104 is also a similar story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_bribery_scandals

The Avro Arrow was a cool plane, but contra my Canadian aerospace nerd pals, it really wasn't all that impressive. It was a pretty typical interceptor design of its day; interceptors basically fell out of fashion for obvious reasons -the Soviets never really developed a proper intercontinental bomber fleet, let alone a supersonic intercontinental bomber fleet, and the ICBM and SAM kind of made bombers expensive and irrelevant anyway in comparison. The last US designed interceptor ... arguably the A-5 Vigilante[1] (otherwise the F106 Delta Dagger[2]), and arguably pretty equivalent to the Avro Arrow. The F108 Rapier[3] concept was also interesting; many of its guts ended up in later planes like the Vigilante or SR-71.

It's amusing that the Soviets kept development of the interceptor for their PVO-Strany; coming up with very impressive aircraft which have no equivalence class in the West.

Anyway too bad Canadian aerospace didn't continue, but had they developed the thing, it wouldn't have been very useful.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_A-5_Vigilante

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_F-106_Delta_Dart

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XF-108_Rapier

The Dart showing that tapered area rule bottle body

The biggest contribution by interceptors was arguably the MiG 25 which was badly misinterpreted by western analysts, prompting the creation of the F-15 to counter the perceived threat.

Wouldn't the last US interceptor be the YF-12? Even if it was cancelled, it at least made it through flight and missile testing... (The YF-12 took the missile and radar developed for the XF-108 and stuck it into the CIA's new recon plane, the A-12, which worked well enough for the USAF to ask for a production run)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_YF-12

See previous discussions, e.g. [1, 2].

The Arrow was extremely ambitious and many of the technologies it used didn't exist and wouldn't for decades (e.g. fully active missiles, pulse doppler RADAR). The era of high-and-fast bombers was followed by low-level nap-of-the-earth flying and ICBMs, so the Arrow might have been an incredibly expensive white elephant if it had even been finished.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989392

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256068

Russia's nuclear strategy still relies upon flying Bear bombers to the launch box and deploying cruise missiles. NORAD still sorties fighter aircraft to intercept these bombers somewhat regularly. Obviously not bombers actually launching cruise missiles, but ones doing test runs of the same.

It would have had a critical role for decades.

Cool, but the Tu-95 now carries missiles like the Kh-55 with a range of 1600 miles while the Arrow was expected to have a range of 360 nmi. The Bear could have dropped its missiles and been long gone before the Arrow got anywhere close to it, never mind that the Sparrow II never worked.

The KH-22, with a range of 300 miles would be a more fair example, as it would have been a contemporary of the Arrow (1960-1980). The KH-55 was first produced in 1981.

Yeah, I was going to mention the Kh-20 (similar period, 240-370 mi range) - the Kh-22 was used (AIUI) in an anti-shipping role so probably wouldn't have been used in a scenario where it would be intercepted by an Arrow.

You're correct, I meant to put in Kh-20, and made a mistake, but will leave it as-is. Here are the Wiki pages for any other readers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-20

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-22

No chance the fuel hog Arrow could intercept anything that wasn’t flying over it’s airfield.

One of my profs used to say that when it came to science Canada had a bronze medal mentality. We also cancelled a supercollider program in because it was more politically expedient to spend the modest grant required on low income housing for the more politically influential eastern provinces and did absolutely nothing to protect Nortel as they were slowly picked apart by Chinese intelligence.

https://www.bcbusiness.ca/ubcs-particle-accelerator-what-cou...

https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-dow...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

The US has one too.

Hey cancellation of the Supercollider enabled me to hire my best engineer ever. So not a total loss.

Story?

He was a Japanese nuclear physicist working in the SSC, who had written some amazing graphics filters in his spare time. We hired him (cost $25,000 in legal fees to get him a work visa IIRC) and he instantly became one of our most valuable engineers. His products sold millions of dollars and supported probably a dozen of our employees.

Funny part is his English wasn’t very good, so I never even had a full conversation with him. Great guy tho. Makes me want to tell my republican friends, do you want super talented people making things in Asia, or here?

I knew a guy who worked on the SSC. I was a teenager, and he was a friend of the family, so it's not like we got into depth or anything. He was of the opinion that cronyism killed the project. People brought their unqualified friends on board and drove up the cost.

It was pretty cool to see some bits and bobs from the project, like flat braided wire.

I also worked on some relocated houses that were moved off of the track of the SSC. They spent a LOT of money preparing the area.

I remember reading about the ITER project and that Canada's bid was quite strong. Would have been a big project, not only for construction but attraction of academic talent from around the world. If I recall correctly, one level of government wasn't willing to hold up their promised funding of the project so the bid was pulled.

What haunts Canadians is that we developed world-leading aerospace capability, which was discarded in an instant.

These engineers and technicians scattered to the wind, becoming leaders in dozens of successful aerospace projects, worldwide.

Canada returned to being hewers of wood an drawers of water. The specific details and capabilities/problems of the Avro Arrow are secondary.

I think a small (in terms of GDP) country developing major weapons systems is an impossibly difficult position to be in. The R&D costs are stupendous, so you need to sell a lot of units to make the per-unit costs bearable. Since you're a small country, domestic demand isn't enough. Superpowers buy lots of gear, but they also very strongly prefer their own domestic technology. So you basically have to sell to a lot of other small countries, in competition with the superpowers who are also eager to get export income and political influence.

It’s like saying the US lost when it canceled the Space Shuttle. Both projects were massively expensive failures that never met operational requirements.

at least Canada canceled theirs before it drove the cost of space access through the roof and killed 17 people.

The difference is, US is replacing the shuttle with (privately made) US rockets. The transition is not complete yet, but ultimately both the manufacturing capability and profits are staying in the US. Can't say the same for Canada.

I can capture all the wild stallions I want, but as soon as I open the pasture gate they will be gone.

The idea isn’t to temporarily feed them with some completely uneconomic project. You want to give them reasons to stay long term. So why is Canada such a poor place to build technology companies?

Canada purchased questionable Bomarc missiles and used Vulcan fighters with a fraction of the capability from the US — which ultimately cost more money than completing the Avro program — while simultaneously losing their aerospace capabilities.

To say this was a “win” for Canada is pretty far-fetched. It certainly was a win for the US military-industrial complex and their lobbyists!

This is Canadian culture in a nutshell, especially politically: it's better to aim small or not to try at all than it is to really go for it and fail.

I recall seeing some documentary (probably on YouTube) that noted the number of Canadian aerospace engineers who ended up working in the US space program after the cancellation of the Avro Arrow. Sorry I can't provide a link.

Perhaps this Vintage Space episode is video you were thinking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5g9AglBmSI

Sadly, this story continues to have a modern day version in the form of poor government support for domestic firms. Canadian education and talent is incredible and arguably world class but with greater opportunity in the south, many choose to leave. Perhaps some may have come back with the US politics but I doubt there's a mass migration back to Canada.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ibm-shared-services-contrac...

You can say the same about Europe generally having a great and free education system but the best and brightest move to the US.

I honestly don't understand or know anyone who would move to the US now. I have a few friends who were considering it but it's a very firm no at this point, and they all had offers from the big firms in Silicone Valley. Sure, your compensation in UK or Germany won't reach the stratospheric levels of US programmers, but as a competent engineer you can easily reach very comfortable levels of living, buy a house, brand new car, afford to have a couple kids and save some money for fun. And you won't have to deal with the insanity of American healthcare, immigration or politics.

I grew up thinking that my dream would be to move to US one day - nowadays there probably isn't an offer that would make me move there.

>[...]Germany[...]buy a house

Unless you get financial support from your (grand)parents, you can forget about that as houses in the nice areas are closing in on the million euro ballpark and IC salaries there are a joke for such a purchase.

I don't know why people immediately assume that when I say "buy a house" I mean "buy a house in the middle of London/Berlin/Paris". Can your average SF programmer afford to buy a house in the middle of SF?

I know people working for instance in Stuttgart - buying a house in the smaller towns nearby is not an issue at all according to them. I personally live in the UK and sure, London prices are insane - but we don't live in London. Me and my wife bought a house after saving just for a few months[0], the prices are very achievable for an average programmer.

[0]mortgaged, obviously. But since the prices are lower it was "easy" to save for a deposit and get a mortgage. We're literally paying £600/month on a mortgage for a 3-bed house with a large garden and double driveway. That's an almost insignificant part of my salary.

No disrespect, but houses in Germany are a lot more expensive than in the UK. If you own a 3 bedroom house and two driveways in Germany you're basically a millionaire.

And by "nice house" I didn't mean a house in the center of a major city but a house in the suburbs in a quiet, green area with good schools.

Right, that's fair enough - I'm just saying what I know from my family and friends who live around Stuttgart, in both CS industries and out of them. They own houses without being millionaires, maybe it's something about Stuttgart specifically.

Average prices for a house in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: Between 250k and 500k, depending on housing type. Position is king, even here in Germany.

Can your average SF programmer afford to buy a house in the middle of SF?

If you define average as a FAANG programmer, then yes, the average one could buy a house in SF.

  If you define average as a FAANG programmer,

But that would be silly, as the FAANG pool is far from the average. Average SF programmer salaries are still in the low 100s from the last numbers I saw (a few years out of date). Even with two of those in a household, you aren't buying in SF.

Isn't housing in the major EU cities (London / Paris / Berlin ) all very expensive and comparable to SF / NY in terms of multiples of average programmer salary? The healthcare is definitely a big advantage though.

Berlin is a lot cheaper than any of Australian cities, from what I saw. There are a lot more expensive cities in Europe though, like even Münich if you want a German example.

Hahaha, I literally just addressed exactly this point in my other comment - sure, London is insanely expensive, as is SF. There is more to any of these countries outside of the capitals, just like there is more to US outside of SF.

Why is European healthcare an advantage for people in professional software engineering jobs? All such people have health insurance in the US.

Because it's not all about you. It's about your parents, your friends, your family who are not :gasp: software engineers, and it's nice not having to worry about them going bankrupt or homeless if they need x life-saving medical procedure or they loose their job.

It can be impractical to take your parents, your friends, and your extended family along with you to another country. It's certainly far more difficult than getting a job there as a software engineer, particular because of countries preferring to allow highly skilled, educated, and/or paid people in preferentially.

I personally wouldn't want to contribute to such system, simple as that. But also - in (almost all of) EU you're always covered no matter what. You don't have to worry about what happens if you lose your job, or move jobs, or need extra time off work, or accidentally go to the wrong hospital or call the wrong ambulance - it's just not a concern for your average citizen at all. These concerns are obviously worse for immigrants coming to work since their insurance will be very much tied to their employment.

About 10 years ago I knew a guy who had to turn down an amazing opportunity at another company because one of his kids had a pre-existing condition. This boggled the minds of us non-Americans where healthcare is not linked to your employer. I don't know what it's like today as I have not kept up with what ACA built and what the Republicans have dismantled piece by piece.

I've never heard of a company making pre existing conditions a problem to get health insurance. If you didn't have coverage through your job you had problems, but if your coverage came from you job there generally weren't restrictions like that.

I know enough people who've ended up with long-term illnesses that have put them out of work… and sure, their professional software engineering job provided them with healthcare for a number of months after the employment ended, but then… then they had almost nothing and in all but one case ended up bankrupt.

Every single software job I've seen include several disability insurance offerings for free.

For example, if I can't work, I get 70% of my salary in long-term disability

Does that typically cover healthcare costs as well?

> nowadays there probably isn't an offer that would make me move there.

I concur. For a start, here in Europe, I don't have to worry each day that someone is going to run amok in my children's school with semi-automatic weapons. You can't place a value on that.

That is an exaggerated fear to have, school shootings are not the norm there.

That would be like saying you're afraid of the Islamic terrorism amok on the streets of Europe.

You're right, they're not the norm. But is it not correct to say that mass shootings very much are?

> That is an exaggerated fear to have, school shootings are not the norm there.

Nearly once a week in 2019 (https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/15/us/2019-us-school-shootin...). March 2020 was the first March since 2002 to pass without a single school shooting thanks to the 'rona lockdowns (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-first-march-without...).

> That would be like saying you're afraid of the Islamic terrorism amok on the streets of Europe.

Whole Europe has had 1 incident in 2019, 7 in 2018 and 10 in 2017/2016. Even with record 17 incidents in 2015, five years of Islamist terror together don't even come close to one average year of school shootings in the US, and are a blip compared to one year of mass shootings in the US.

Please don't use CNN as a source. They are intentionally inflating the number.

We included accidental discharge of a firearm...

We included injuries sustained from BB guns...

Neither of those would scenarios would fall under what most people view as a "school shooting".

It's not literally as low as the risk of falling victim to a terror attack in Europe, but statistically the risk is pretty much negligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

Of course, morally the risk is unacceptable. I would consider one school shooting a year too high. Let alone the 17 deaths due to guns in schools in 2019.

And as was pointed out previously, the security theater (shooter drills, etc) are traumatizing. I am appalled at this aspect of America.

But, despite what you see on the news, most Americans are not exposed to guns on any kind of a regular basis.

As far the school deaths, they are appalling but I am sure many more children die each year due to asthma attacks, food allergies, etc. I do not excuse our gun situation but it should be viewed in perspective. Again, I do agree that one gun death is too many.

I know fears are irrational, but the probability of your kids being killed by a mass shooter at school in the US is extremely low. Logically, if you’re worried about that level of risk, you should never leave the house, even in Europe.

The sibling commentator mentioned Islamic terrorism which I think is a good analogy. You would probably think it was ludicrous (and I’d agree with you) if someone said they didn’t want to move to Europe because they have to worry about being run down by someone in a truck.

So I wanted to offer my view on this - I know that the risk of actual shooting is so low that it's not worth worrying about. But what I'd definitely have an issue with is the entire security theatre that American kids are subject to - the fact that many American schools have metal detectors at the doors, the fact that their bags are searched when entering, the fact that many schools have armed security or even policemen on campus - that's crazy to me and I wouldn't want to subject my kids to any of that. It normalizes something that's very very wrong in my opinion.

Metal detectors and bag searches are not the norm in American suburbs. Post school shootings, the changes made in my district were that the front door is locked by default and you need to ring the bell and be buzzed in.

What is the norm though is a "do something, anything" mentality that has led school districts to dump billions into unproven initiative after unproven initiative, from macbooks to netbooks to SROs to anterooms and buzzers on a neverending keeping up with the times treadmill of pointless education reform.

My wife is Canadian and I'm American, and we've spent time in both countries. She summed it up very well: the US is a great place to live if you make above a certain amount of money. I.e., it's better for the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes.

My image of the US has changed substantially over the last few years. I never saw it as a issues free country but nowadays it just looks worse than ever.From aside it looks like a family where it's members reached middle age crisis,told all their neighbours to sod off, kicked children in the teeth and trying to tear each other apart.

The US hasn't changed. These issues were always here. We're forced to confront them in a very direct way now, which rips off any facades built up about being "issues free." This is the "pain" part of "no pain no gain." Hopefully, as a country we're able to grow and become better the same way we did in the 60s, the last time it seems we had an equivalent/stronger "bandaid ripping off" moment. From personal experience, I vastly prefer a country like the US where these issues are being dragged front and center and exposed than other parts of the world where these same ugly facets of humanity exist, but people pretend they don't.

This may be true in parts of Europe, but it's not so clear cut in Canada. We have a decent tech job market in our 3 major cities (Montreal/Vancouver/Toronto), but it's mostly bad elsewhere. There are a few lower-tier Canadian cities which are OK (Waterloo, Ottawa), but as cities they're grossly limited compared to where you can live in Europe.

Of the 3 major Canadian cities, only Montreal could be considered affordable to software engineer. Vancouver/Toronto are extremely expensive vs. local pay. Unless you want to sign yourself up for a punishing daily commute or bought your house a long time ago, it's hard to describe the standard of living as "very comfortable" other than compared to lower earners in the local market.

Tellingly, when you look at the data more than 100% of Toronto's population growth comes from international migration. Which makes sense, it's a very welcoming place. But without immigration, the city would have shrunk by 50k people last year (~1.5% of population).

As a Canadian looking at how the UK government is willing to work with smaller, domestic firms for government services and how much is being spent to help with the startup ecosystem, it's no wonder Canada doesn't really have the same ecosystem. For Canadian businesses to be successful, they generally have to look elsewhere. Speaking to a Canadian AI startup, their business comes from Europe.

> looking at how the UK government is willing to work with smaller, domestic firms owned by friends of members of the government for government services

FIFY.

Not exactly. There are fewer linguistic, cultural, and immigration barriers when comparing Canada/US vs. Europe/US.

Yup, this is especially bad in BC where at least half the CS/ECE grad moved to Seattle or SF the year they graduated. All the best talent leave unless tied down by family.

It seems there just wasn't enough graft or cheap political points to be had nurturing anything complex. The payoffs if any aren't quick enough. It's much easier to go after logging, mining, casinos (money laundering for Chinese donors), film or some quick jobs program to appease unions and claim impact for the next election.

My understanding is that the current administration has made it easier for Canadians to come to the US since they started to be more strict on what's accepted for H1B. But I could be mistaken.

You know what haunts me even more? That 60 years later, we still spend time and effort talking about this instead of doing anything.

Sadly, Canadians don't have the appetite for ambitious projects, whether military, civilian, terrestrial, space etc. Even when costs are reasonable (think of putting up $1billion in prize money to spur private investment X-Prize style) people will not tolerate attempts at risky things.

Yup. Another good examples are Nortel and BlackBerry. The government in Canada needs to be supportive about developing global leaders in expertise. Healthcare, once considered a world’s top, isn’t really today, but many Canadians still retain to the idea it is.

As a Canadian living in the U.S., I noticed a subtle thing that comes up when we Canadians lament the lack of global leaders in business. We often instinctively say "the government ought to do this or that" (I do this too). Whereas Americans tend not to bring up the government at all -- they go straight to private capital and get it done.

I'm a big government person (especially for society-wide services like healthcare, public health, education) but in business, I've come to realize that it's not helpful to have the mindset of relying on the government. (exception: defense, which almost always needs government funding. But almost everything else does not.)

I had a friend who was running a nascent high-tech commercial business and he spent a large chunk of his time writing proposals for government grants. Money is money, of course, but it's a little strange to me that even business people in Canada rely so much on the government instead of just going to the capital markets. And what's worse, a lack of government programs in a particular area is interpreted as a constraint. This should not be.

The 2nd largest company in Canada by market cap right now is Shopify, and it succeeded with no significant government support. We need to shift our people's mindset to not default to invoking the government -- instead we need to encourage non-risk-averse capital investment into bluesky projects from private parties. It is true that we are not awash in capital, being a small country and all, but we have enough (we're 16th in the world in GDP/PPP). Much smaller countries in northern Europe with smaller GDPs have done better than we have in establishing global business leaders.

> instead we need to encourage non-risk-averse capital investment into bluesky projects from private parties.

The problem is that said "non-risk-averse capital" usually comes from previously successful founders at least in early stages, and when you look at the startups there, a lot of their founders or key staff have relevant prior startup experience too.

The US has a massive advantage there in networking, which is insanely hard to replicate in other areas or countries.

Right. That's why we need to be outward looking and tap into US capital markets/ecosystems [1] -- and also beyond, into untapped ecosystems in growth markets like Southeast Asia (which has a very active VC/startup ecosystem, but most Canadians wouldn't know this). There are many parts of the world where we just don't have a presence because we like orderliness and like to focus on developed markets. [2] We need to evolve to be more than just hewers of wood and drawers of water.

Global companies in smaller European countries didn't look domestically to grow -- they either have had to have an EU/global business model from day 1 or in the case of older companies, had to evolve in that direction. When you're small, you have no choice.

[1] If you look at YC lists in recent years there are usually a few Canadian companies in there.

[2] Most Canadians have an affinity to Europe because they think the setup similar to ours, but unfortunately Europe is heavy on regulations, not a growth market and not a good bet

I think we might not bring up the government in america because our government has not really had a problem getting big things done and has helped us lay the foundation for what the private sector has since built on. For all its faults, the government helped drive nuclear power, the space race, the internet, and biotech. I dont know where the US would be without the bomb, apollo, arpanet, and the human genome project. We had a private sector able to pick up from there to carry on the next steps, but our success is rooted in literal moonshots by out government as well. And we can argue all day about whether the private sector could have done all that more efficiently or whatever, but the fact of history is that the government did it. And, it did it in a way that involved the private sector through contractors etc that seeded talent outside government agencies and gave the private sector a good launching off point.

I think GPS also belongs in that list of government-developed revolutionary technologies.

I grouped that with the space race

That's, ironically, what Hydro-Quebec did when it nationalized in the 60's.

The Federal Government wouldn't load a single penny (they maintained for 50 years that these projects were the scope of the Provinces until they bailed out the Muskrat Falls project in Newfoundland) and neither would the Canadian financial elites of the time. So the capital injection came in US dollars straight from Wall Street.

we Canadians lament the lack of global leaders in business. We often instinctively say "the government ought to do this or that" (I do this too). Whereas Americans tend not to bring up the government at all -- they go straight to private capital and get it done.

But there are things that only governments can do, that actually are necessary. The Canadian government, as another poster has mentioned, failed to protect Nortel from IP theft from a rival nation-state. The Americans are much more willing to do this (I say willing, not always able).

The government has a role to play. To be sure even American businesses recognize this — this is why there are lobby groups. That’s not my contention though.

My point is more about mindset. The government is not responsible for competitiveness and expansion of businesses into new markets — that’s on the business. But I think many people in Canada default to feeling the government ought to take a bigger role in those areas in order for us to have the next Blackberry or Nortel. I’m like, maybe we shouldn’t rely on that (or let lack of government involvement hold us back) and instead take our own risks?

Just look at how the Federal Government ignored Bombardier when it was slapped with tariffs (that were later ruled out to be illegal).

Could you imagine the United-States or the European Union not supporting their respective aerospace industries in that type of situation?

> told to destroy the blueprints

What on earth compelled them to order that? That's just so barbaric. As if they were trying to destroy evidence of a crime.

Surely it makes more sense to preserve them?! You might even try to sell or license the design to recover some of the $250m invested?

When you live next to a giant, you do what the giant says.

You didn't read the article, which explicitly disclaims against conspiracy theories of the US ordering the Arrow's cancelation.

What on earth compelled them to order that?

To stop someone trying to reverse the decision and restart the program? Guns or butter, it may have not been the worse choice.

Yup, same reason why all the plans and tooling was torched for the Saturn V.

The Saturn V plans were not lost. NASA still has them at Marshall.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20302/were-the-sat...

> told to destroy the blueprints

Same thing happened to the British TSR2; a program that shares a lot in common with the Avro Arrow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAC_TSR-2

My understanding is they weren't actually destroyed, the order was given but not obeyed.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saved-avro-arrow-bl...

The article we're commenting on specifically mentions the blueprints being saved.

The question was why the order was given at all.

My father was in the RCAF and was in the running to fly the Arrow if it was built (he did see prototypes). IIRC, he said the Americans wanted the designs destroyed because they feared the Canadians were not secure enough and so it might be stolen by the Soviets. It was during the coldest parts of the cold war after all.

This is the reason. One of my mentors was part of this effort; the Canadians were riddled with Soviet agents.

EDIT: downvoted for facts. Here's a reference:

But until then his assignment was to become Soboloff so convincingly that nobody would ever suspect he was a Soviet spy. Eventually, he was given responsibility for managing five recruited agents, including a Communist Party of Canada member from Toronto who worked for the company developing the Avro Arrow and provided its engineering schematics to the KGB.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-spy-named-gideon-bo...

I wonder if Russia might have the best-preserved schematics now?

An engineer actually smuggled out a set of plans out. And it only recently came to light. The plans were being exhibited in Winnipeg (I think) just before this whole covid thing happened.

Dunno. Dief sold out the Canadian people and their heritage in return for... something....

For US aerospace contracts, one of the standard provisions is the disposal and destruction of any remaining products and tooling. This is done for compliance with ITAR regs, to prevent advanced technical information from reaching other countries. No buying a booster prototype at auction for you!

What was bizarre about (aboot) the Arrow program is that the entire company staff were fired, and the Canadian military was sent in to destroy all records, drawings, test data, and of course the destruction of the six flyable aircraft. The program was replaced with US made BOMARC missiles, so there's one clue.

Because the primary threat identified by American counterintelligence, correctly, was the cost of the Soviet Union taking the Canadian work and running with it (See, among others, agent LIND in the Mitrokhin Archive) was greater than any defense gain from the airplane.

It is a backhanded compliment that the material was destroyed.

> “The Arrow was an extremely high-performance, hi-tech fighter,” says Coles. “Its designers had made very few compromises to keep its costs down, and it was very much the 'gold-plated' solution.”

Sounds like this is a cautionary tale of what happens when you do what some people here suggest; doing everything the 'right/best' way, instead of realising that being engineer means making compromises.

I remember our high school history teacher taking us to an aviation museum in Toronto. They had a section of the plane out on display and it was a beautiful piece of work.

But I'll never forget the way the tour guide described the story of the arrow and the hurt in his voice as he recanted the decision to scrap the plane.

For that generation of Canadian aviation geeks, it was truly a gut punch.

There's currently a full-size Arrow replica on display in Toronto, at the Canadian Air and Space Museum. I haven't gotten a chance to go there yet, but the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa currently has an original nose section on display, which I believe is the largest surviving piece. I can attest to the later being a very good aviation museum all around; I recommend it to anybody who's interested in that sort of thing. The nearby Diefenbunker museum is also very cool if you're interested in cold war stuff.

Amy of YouTube 'Vintage Space' fame was who the BBC went to for the nuts and bolts of the article. She is Canadian and more into space than aviation. She is not a fan of the Space Shuttle so that isn't 'vintage Space' as far as she is concerned.

Her YouTube channel and book are recommended.

Something I'm not seeing a lot of mention of was the fact that the Canadian aerospace program was absolutely riddled with Soviet spies.

I don't have references in front of me unfortunately, but if you choose to believe me, a good amount of the American resistance to the Arrow program had to do with direct technology transfer to the Soviet Union via their thorough penetration of the Canadian aerospace program. The Arrow represented a conduit of American aerospace knowledge directly to the Soviets, and had to be stopped.

Source please

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-spy-named-gideon-bo...

That said, as noted I don't have references I can share for what I learned. Believe it or not.

Yes, as Canadian, Avro Arrow does leave a "What if..." thought in my mind but having said that, I am proud of my countrymen as we have achieved quiet a lot since then (given our tiny population and difficult logistics):

Canada Space Arm, Blackberry (RIM), Bombardier aircrafts/subways/streetcars/trains, de Havilland aircrafts as well as other aircrafts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_of_Canada%27s...).

As to why was Avro Arrow scrapped - sure there are explanations and the leading ones tend to indicate external political pressure coming from USA but I am not bitter at the reasons behind it because it is one thing to be cross at the decision but I don't have any clear idea as to actual reasons and the thought process of our leaders at the time.

Let’s not be too proud of Bombardier, eh?

It was scrapped because it was doomed to be a bad fighter plane. Speed isn’t everything. The Vigilante, Delta Dart, etc all were expensive failures because you need a lot more than speed.

Interestingly the cessation of Arrow development presented a huge opportunity for the Apollo program which actively recruited these highly trained engineers for the moon landings (this is discussed in detail in Charles Murray's fascinating history of the Apollo program).

How about Canada funding Geoffrey Hinton's research in machine learning. https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/04/17/how-a-toronto-...

Arguably, one of the most improtant breakthroughs of recent history, funded by Canadian citizens/taxes. This has much bigger social/economic impact, especially since we can outsource the job of overspending on military to our neighbours, and attempt to build a more socially just society on money saved.

Oh, and let's not forget about Hydro-Québec's innovation with an all electric motor-wheel(early 90's!). Way ahead of it's time, and canned for suspicious reasons.

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=https:/...

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moteur-roue_d%27Hydro-Qu%C3%A9...

The usual problem with wheel motors is unsprung weight, and the 90s was before batteries had decent energy density.

It sounds like something like a Prius, but with serial hybrid instead of parallel hybrid like the Prius was.

This is not true. Wheel motors have a ton of advantages in applications where unsprung weight isn't a big issue - electric bicycles and motorcycles for instance.

Wheel motors can also be surprisingly light as they can use the rotation in order to create cooling, and reduce a lot of rotational inertia which can be almost as bad as unsprung weight.

The prototype was also a plug-in hybrid, which was very doable at the time.

There is a reason why hub motors are so amazing in so many applications right now.

The context was clearly conventional automobiles. Nothing going over ~30 mph will ever be economically competitive with wheel motors instead of inboard motors. The physics are such that this will forever be true. Any materials advancement will improve both technologies and wheel motors can never catch up.

I really don't understand where you're getting that from. For economy cars up to ~130kph hub motors are a very feasible alternative.

There are hub motors+rims right now with which you could build a ~150hp car, that will weigh less or comparably to old-fashioned steel rims, including axles, rotors and superfluous suspension components (around 30-40kg). For example, the QS Motor 273 with a power of 28kw (per wheel) given appropriate cooling, at a mass of 43kg. This is for a mass market, aluminum motor/rim. I assure you that with magnesium wheels and glycol cooling you can get this down under 43kg. These motors have a wholesale price under 2000$, too, and have been run at 180v 600A for short periods of time.

Here is also an actual study with data about the feasibility of hub motors in four-wheel vehicles: https://www.proteanelectric.com/f/2018/04/protean-Services3....

Yes, hub motors will always have a disadvantage as far as unsprung mass as improvements affect both sides of the equation. However, hub motors have very significant handling advantages that you cannot feasibly get any other way, such as per-tire regenerative braking, a perfect fully dynamic differential, perfect torque vectoring, optimal weight distribution, allows far superior suspension design, and so on. As a result, hub motors are still a very serious contender, and as the gaps narrows and investment ramps up we might see very high performance hub motors become a reality.

Another technology that will have to be evaluated is fully active suspension, which eliminates almost all of the disadvantages of hub motors and keep all of their advantages. Indeed, fully active electromagnetic suspension is entering limited mass production right now.

But yes, in the 1990s hub motors could not have made for anything more than an economy car with a top speed around 130-140kph economically. Which is exactly what they were meant for.

In-board motors, one per wheel, have all those advantages you state for wheel motors, but none of the disadvantage of excessive unsprung weight. Additionally, a bad pothole means only replacing a cheap wheel and not an expensive motor.

Steel wheels on a 112kW car do not weigh near 43 kg. Don't fall for the empty promises.

(Random first hit: 23 lbs for a steel wheel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MA3OFTN)

They'll never be cost-effective for freeway-capable cars. I'll make a long term bet on it with anybody.

EDIT: your linked study says you can add features to somewhat make up for the excessive unsprung weight. Sure, which is why I'm pointing out not that it can't be done, but that it costs more for the same performance and always will (at Earth gravity and freeway speeds).

Steel rims alone? No. Brakes, plus axles and various power transfer components, as well needlessly complex superfluous suspension? Yes.

A very important distinction is also that the moment of inertia of a hub motor is not much bigger because the weight is concentrated in the center vs the extremities.

In-board motors, one per wheel, have the issues of still needing all of the weighty unsprung mass of a car but adding additional mechanical complexity in the transfer mechanism as well as just adding mass and taking up space in general, plus needing more cooling. I am willing to bet that the braking system alone in the average car is more than 28kg.

Besides, cars with hub motors that have less unsprung weight that the original car they were based one have been built, for example this one : https://web.archive.org/web/20090318173319/http://www.causec...

The prototype they had was on a modified 90's Intrepid.

https://youtu.be/er8ufDV87nQ

https://youtu.be/jHmxJPTWD-M

It had comparable of not superior acceleration to it's original combustion engine.

And cost more and had worse handling. There's no advantage.

Except being electric and costing essentially nothing in maintenance?

Also, the handling characteristics were really not as bad as claimed from most all experiments conducted.

For a moment I thought this is about some combination of Apache Avro and Apache Arrow for data serialization purposes.

exactly!

> In a move which shocked Canada, the cutting up of the Arrow prototypes took place in front of the silent factory. The moment was captured in a grainy black-and-white photograph which continues to haunt Canada.

Is it just me or was this photo not included in the article? I tried a quick search but didn't see anything obviously it, either.

You can see it in this article https://www.thesilo.ca/canadas-original-black-friday-cancell...

Thank you!

Cancelled in 1959. Many of the Canadian engineers moved to the States and worked on the space program.

As is tradition.

They still have their own CANDU nucleur technology which is impressive for a country their size. Britain basically have up on theirs.

Well actually, we started selling that off to SNC and it's rotting now..

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/aecl-sold-for-15m-to-snc-la...

at least we still have a few SMR startups like Terrestrial

https://www.terrestrialenergy.com/

There are no military applications to CANDU (heavy water allows it to use less-refined uranium fuel), so I imagine America wouldn't have felt the need to interfere.

Not exactly true...India used plutonium produced by its CANDU reactors for the development of their first nuclear bomb.

http://www.ccnr.org/india_press.html

...a lot of the people who made the critical decisions in the Apollo-era were Canadian.

Was it easier for non US citizens to work in Aerospace in those days? e.g. I hear people gripe SpaceX can't hire internationally.

This story reminds me of the British space programme which Tony Benn cancelled because he couldn’t see the point of it.

...that was just before people started launching communications satellites.

Just me, or is that Starscream?

I don't remember any pure delta-winged Starscream, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

All of the Starscreams I remember have prominent horzontal tail surfaces (the one I owned as a kid was very F-15ish but he's also been patterned after the Su-35, the F-16 and the F-22.

> The record-breaking jet which still haunts a country

That's no exaggeration. For English Canada, the destruction of those planes was a trauma that lasts to this day because the Arrow represented the height of national pride, and their destruction the deepest low.

Similar but lesser feelings for the A220, sold by Bombardier for $1 to Airbus because Boeing lobbied for a 219.63% tariff on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/26/news/companies/bombardier-b...

Canadians are polite, but they can kick ass when they want to.

Based on the number (220) I thought this was some ancient Airbus model. Well.

Not how airbus numbering works, in general. The A400 is older than the A350, for instance.

The first was the A300, and at that point the number was supposed to mean the passenger number, though as it turned out there wasn't much demand for a 300 passenger wide body at the time and it was scaled down. After that, the numbers became more or less random.

The A220 was the plane that not many folks wanted. Purely due to union / regional scoping rules.

It was too large for regionals, too small for mainline. For example many airline union scoping contracts require planes with more than 70 or 100 pax go to mainline which means it will cost more to operate. Airlines don't want to do that. If it's going mainline, they want more seats (think 737/a320 ranges) which the A220 doesn't have.

There's a somewhat famous post from a Bombardier product manager on the internet detailing the history of the aircrafts evolution that played out like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in The Pentagon Wars. Despite marketing data and customer feedback saying don't build this they kept pushing ahead and the Quebec tax payer footing some of that bill.

A lot of folks seem to want it now, though...

> Purely due to union / regional scoping rules.

These aren't significant outside of the US market. And okay, the US market is a significant market for aircraft, but by way of comparison most of the major orders of the larger E-Jets have been non-US airlines.

The A220 has a very big order book for an aircraft of its size.

Indeed, they're surprisingly fuel efficient and have crazy range for their size. You can fly a CS3/A220-300 across the Atlantic from the east coast without any trouble.

It has 52 billion dollars worth of orders right now, interestingly.

I don't have any trauma from the Arrow but I do have resentment on the amount of corporate bailout $$$ given to Bombardier with no return.

     For English Canada, the destruction of those 
     planes was a trauma that lasts to this day because 
     the Arrow represented the height of national pride, 
     and their destruction the deepest low.

I'm neither Canadian nor Japanese, but there may be parallels to how Japanese felt about the loss of the battleship Yamato (and her sister ship, Musashi) in WWII.

An underdog nation, with pride in "punching above its weight class", placed a lot of hope and pride in a single piece of military hardware.

It was the largest battleship ever built, key to the Japanese strategy in WWII. American battleships' guns and armor were limited by the need for American battleships to fit through the Panama Canal. Knowing this, Japan built the much larger Yamato class with armor impervious to the 16" guns on American battleships. Her 18" guns could cut through any American battleship with ease. The Yamato was really a marvel.

Of course, it was utterly useless in battle against the American navy. Its WWI-era fire control systems were decades behind those of American battleships, especially the Iowa class, and of course more importantly WWII showed the world that battleships were helpless against naval air superiority. The Yamato was sunk by American planes, having never fired a shot against an opposing battleship.

The Yamato has remained in Japanese imagination, though, most notably in the long-running anime Uchu Senkan Yamato / Space Battleship Yamato / "Star Blazers".

Was that the one where the captain let’s out a big sigh, pushed a button, and the ship takes off into space?

After being buried under a dessert for who knows how long

I dunno about the sigh, but you're spot on with the desert. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1jsrOqlGSk

dang it mispelled ahh, started noticing that happening I'm aware of differentiation between the homonyms but yeah I still use affect/effect correctly at least.

That doesn't really narrow it down. They do take off into space.

Something similar happens in the original Macross as well.

You mean initial SDF-1 liftoff and the gravity generators rip from the fuselage?

Yep, that's what I mean. :)

Followed by using the barely understood jump drive, resulting in SDF-1, two nearby aircraft carriers and the entire island being transported behind the orbit of Pluto. :D

I also really liked the part where a couple of the main characters got stranded in an isolated part of the humongous ship right after the jump & had to fish for a frozen tuna floating in front of airlock to get some food while waiting to be rescued. :)

> Of course, it was utterly useless in battle against the American navy.

It was useless with the overly-complicated battle plans and bad luck of the IJN. (Yamamoto dictated such complex maneuvers that the captains lost track of the objective at both Midway and Leyte Gulf.)

Had the Yamato and Musashi not been distracted and just turned into Leyte Gulf as planned, the American landing craft were sitting ducks. Instead, the Yamato went home, and the Musashi was swarmed and sunk.

> Had the Yamato and Musashi not been distracted and just turned into Leyte Gulf as planned, the American landing craft were sitting ducks.

That's overstating it a bit.

Six battleships, seven cruisers, and 21 destroyers were prepared to meet the Japanese force, and they'd have been under air attack either way.

WWII showed the world that battleships were helpless against naval air superiority.

I would say that causality is backwards. Radar existed in the 1930s but was never seriously developed. But imagine a world where it had been and that battleships had radar-directed AA guns, perfectly do-able in the 1940s. It would very early on in WW2 have been "proven" that aircraft couldn't touch a battleship at sea and so noone would have bothered to invent carriers. Air superiority became a thing because battleships were helpless against it, not the other way round.

Radar directed AA guns were totally a thing in the 1940s. The US developed the Mk37 director (using the Mk4 radar), and had it in service before Pearl Harbor.

Carriers were invented well before this. And would have been invented regardless, as they were useful for more than just sinking battleships. The fact that they could sink battleships resulted in them becoming the preeminent surface combatant.

But carriers were useful for scouting, for land attack, for defense against enemy aircraft, for anti-submarine warfare, for killing smaller surface combatants (like destroyers).

Canceling the Arrow was probably the best thing to happen to Canada. Why tie up huge resources and your top engineers building a fighter that was far too expensive and poorly designed for battlefields of the future?

Yes, much better that these engineers and technicians mostly departed to other nations, or went on to build canoes or pots and pans, as good Canadians should.

Or now work for Pratt and Whitney Canada, for a wage inferior to that of US engineers, making engines that we then buy while the profits go to the US.

I don't see why they simply wouldn't go work in the US if that was the case. Unless they aren't qualified enough.

I can think of a number of good reasons why someone would want to live in Canada and not the US

"just move", basically. This is an absurd argument at the scale of a country, and even more absurd at an international scale.

If they weren't qualified the industry wouldn't have been poached. Rather, this suggests that at least at some point they were significantly more qualified than those in the US.

They better get used to it: the current government had no problem pitching to Amazon that Canada was a cheap offshoring destination for engineers[1].

[1]https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver-criti...

If you want them to stay in Canada and use their skills to the utmost, lower your cost of capital. Do everything that you can to make it easier to save and invest in Canada, and look to Silicon Valley and emulate their good attributes, such as banning non competes.

Fairchild Semiconductor fathered a thousand companies. How many did BlackBerry?

Don’t rely on a committee of bureaucrats shuffling tax money to their idea of the best companies (The ones that their brother works at or the ones that best wine and fined them).

Take the money from those government schmoes and use it to cut taxes on and barriers to investment. Make it easier for entrepreneurs to stay and build, and to raise money.

Buy your weapons in the open market, and save.

Silicon Valley is an excellent example of decades long government funding and commitment spawning a world leading ecosystem.

See e.g. https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ for a nice overview.

Well, many went to work on Apollo.

The regrettable purchase of 66 CF-101 VooDoo shortly after suggests otherwise. The CF-101 were pretty much DOA and replaced rather quickly. The Arrow would still be flown today by the Canadian Air Force had the program completed.

> The Arrow would still be flown today by the Canadian Air Force had the program completed.

They absolutely would not still be flown today.

The Arrow was a relic of the pre-ICBM cold war. When the USSR was expected to field fleets of nuclear bombers over the north pole. The Arrow was designed to go fast, launch an unguided nuclear air to air rocket, turn around and fly home. It was great at this, but in the ensuing years, the Soviet Union put a lot more effort into its ICBM capability than its intercontinental nuclear bomber capability. It would have had difficulty adapting to other roles. As a delta wing, its energy management was likely terrible. Its thin, delicate wings would be ill suited to hanging a heavy bomb load from.

It is comparable (though slightly worse) in era, role, configuration, and performance to the F-106, which was retired in the '80s. The Arrow was designed to do something that was simply unnecessary.

If the program had been completed, it still would have been replaced in the '70s or '80s. The only difference is that it would have likely been replaced by an Avro Canada designed aircraft rather than an American one.

Robert Mcnamara made a similar point about Concorde - but that wasn't cancelled. A vast amount of talent and capital was effectively lost on it. The point that Mcnamara didn't ever make though was that a great deal of Concorde's troubles can be pinned on the oil crisis.

There is a lot of randomness and counter factuals to be considered in these stories.

Given how much the knowledge from making the Concorde later made it into Airbus and their planes, I don't know that the talent and capital was "effectively lost".

I was under the impression that the vast bulk of the engineering effort for Concorde was targetted on making it a viable supersonic aircraft. Airbus has never built a supersonic aircraft...

On the other hand, a lot of engineers left to work on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo in the US.

Maybe for your generation. For younger generations, it only haunts us as something every student learns in grade 10 Canadian history class. The same way Mary Pickford haunts us as "America's Sweetheart".

> Similar but lesser feelings for the A220, sold by Bombardier for $1 to Airbus because Boeing lobbied for a 219.63% tariff on it.

It's arguably worst. The Avro was a cool paper project (it is ultimately unknown if it could even achieve the projected performance since no flights were performed anywhere close to the claimed speeds), while the A220 was a complete airliner project with a production line. The Avro didn't serve any purpose, it was rendered obsolete by ICBMs and 50's soviet technology, while the A220 has $52 billion dollars worth of orders as of 2020.

While there was very little the Canadian government could do to save the Arrow, other than maybe building it as a training aircraft, it was 100% possible for the Government to save Bombardier and the A220 program. Of course, the company being headquartered in Quebec made it politically impossible.

Playing devil's advocate for a bit, would the A220 have accumulated so many orders had it not been backed by Airbus? The program was clearly in trouble when Airbus took over, which may have discouraged airlines from taking a chance on a great aircraft, but whose manufacturer ran the risk of running out of money to keep the program going.

> Playing devil's advocate for a bit, would the A220 have accumulated so many orders had it not been backed by Airbus?

Yes, totally. Delta alone had ordered 75 CS100's [1] and were deeply involved in the tariff dispute as a result. It's a unique plane -- in size class, in passenger comfort and in fuel economy. Airlines realized that and were buying it up like hotcakes. Neither Airbus nor Boeing had competitive aircraft, and neither really did Embraer. It's closer to the Sukhoi SuperJet and some of the Comacs, but reliable [2], and domestic.

The only reason Airbus got it was they offered up their Mobile, Alabama assembly plant as a way of skirting the tariffs that never materialized.

> The program was clearly in trouble when Airbus took over, which may have discouraged airlines from taking a chance on a great aircraft, but whose manufacturer ran the risk of running out of money to keep the program going.

The program wasn't itself in any trouble except for the later-ruled-illegal tariffs the US tried to impose at Boeing's request.

[1] https://news.delta.com/tags/bombardier-cs100

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-18/mexico-s-...

> Playing devil's advocate for a bit, would the A220 have accumulated so many orders had it not been backed by Airbus?

Of course not! But that's not seeing the bigger picture: It's always safe to buy from Boeing/Airbus because you know that these two companies are backed by their respective governments. Same thing goes for Embraer.

The government already shoveled a lot of money into Bombardier to keep it going as a company, many times, in the years prior to the C-series program's sale to Airbus.

Google "bombardier bailout"

Hold on, that aside, the C-series wasn't "sold" to Airbus, it was gifted, for $1. That was entirely due to the US governments attempt to step in at the request of Boeing. The tariffs initially issued scared the pants off of Bombardier who gave the program away in lieu of seeing it wither and die by virtue of being locked out of North American aviation.

The US ended up backing off the tariffs because they were garbage and totally unfounded.

No further bailouts were needed. And in fact, in Canada, only Bombardier really lost. Investissement Québec retains a 25% stake in the A220 [1].

Globally, Boeing ended up the biggest loser for their inane meddling, as they don't have an aircraft that competes with the A220 -- and they gave one to Airbus free of charge. They then tried to cover their bumbling by trying to buy the regional jet arm of Embraer -- which fell through due to the COVID crisis.

Losers: Bombardier, Boeing.

Winners: Airbus, Investissment Quebec.

[1] https://www.investquebec.com/international/en/press-releases...

And Canada as a whole. The profits from the A220 will finance a new generations of planes and groundbreaking engineering work... from Europeans engineers in Europe!

Canada will be left out as a sub-contractor. It has about 650 total orders, and Airbus estimates 6'000 planes throughout the plane's 20 years lifecycle. All that because the federal government simply wouldn't intervene.

Are you sure? The plane is viewed as being advanced, next gen of sorts, and could influence future Airbus efforts a lot.

And anyway, Bombardier was doing some operations outside Canada, like the wing in Northern Ireland.

Bombardier operates globally (it has operations in a few provinces, the United States and Europe), but my understanding was that the A220 program's engineering was mostly done in Canada.

I'm afraid it might stop being the case.

You aren't wrong.

The aerospace sector has a long history of getting subsidized through either government help or military contracts. That's been true for Airbus, Boeing, Lockheed, Embraer. It's a strategic choice and investment that the Canadian government simply wasn't willing to make.

Canadian developed Ebola vaccine was sold for $150K to middleman, who turned around and resold it to Merck for $50 million.

"but they can kick ass when they want to.

Obviously not when it comes to Arrow, Bombardier, and getting salary parity with US workers.

I say this unsarcastically as a Canadian.

If you get paid 20% more but spend 20% of your salary on services you wouldn't need to buy otherwise - isn't it parity already?

If you're salary in Canada, you're probably paying that 20% (at least) in taxes.

Why do you assume that the hordes of Canadians who migate to the US for work are stupid? There are about three times as many Canadians living in the US than Americans living in Canada. The US has about nine times as many people as Canada, so a Canadian is about 27 times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Canada. Are they all unable to calculate correctly whether doing so benefits them?

My very narrow observation based on being an American living in Scandinavia and trying to explain to my brother who's very red-blooded American why I believe the high taxes are a net benefit is that Americans (speaking very generally, of course) are hung up on money in the bank account over basically every other consideration. So when an American with that mindset looks at a place like Canada or Scandinavia, they'll nope right out of that because there's no way it'll put as much money into their bank account.

I, on the other hand, think that high taxes end up benefitting everyone through greater services for those down on their luck which seems to translate to less desperation, less resentment, less classism, less crime. Basically overall far better peace of mind for all involved even though getting filthy rich isn't as much a thing. It's totally possible there are other circumstances at play here like the relative homogeneity of Scandinavian countries relative to the US so this is just a working hypothesis at the moment.

Theticket issue that comes to mind with social safety nets is healthcare and no country comes even close to spending as much on healthcare per capital as the US. We're talking double the amount spent by nearly every other country. Our issues do not seem to be rooted in a lack of funding.

>I, on the other hand, think that high taxes end up benefitting everyone through greater services for those down on their luck which seems to translate to less desperation, less resentment, less classism, less crime.

That's a perfectly reasonable decision.

That said, far more Scandinavians have calculated that they would rather have the US approach than the other way around. Whether on an absolute or (especially) per capita basis, far more Swedes and Norwegians move to the US than follow your lead and move to Scandinavia.

Your argument made more sense when it was between two basically identical cultures (America, Canada). How many Americans (who largely only speak English) are going to leave the country to live in another one?

But the per-capita ratios in favor of people from a given country moving to the US, versus Americans moving to said country, are massive regardless of country and regardless of whether that country speaks English. Australia as of a few years ago was the only country on earth in which more Americans on an absolute basis lived there than Australians in America, but a) the difference wasn't that large, and b) on a per-capita basis the ratio was still 20:1 in favor of an Australian choosing to move to the US compared to the other way around.[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4rcl0o/til_a...

More like you get paid 1.5-3x more in the US and most things are cheaper, except for housing in SF. Unfortunately, it's not close to parity. Maybe for some jobs.

There are also career issues - there are just very, very few places in Canada where you can go on to earn 'mid/late career big bucks' in tech.

I'd review healthcare too...

Daycare and college too.

In Canada, all the expensive stuff is cheap but the cheap stuff is expensive.

> If you get paid 20% more

I think you are possibly massively underestimating how much it is possible to get paid as even an average software developer in the US. Like literally off by an entire order of magnitude.

I would guess it's more like 100%-400% more for equivalent jobs, and many people at. Plus your US job covers your healthcare etc.

That's really about location and specific skillsets. An "average" developer can be hired in 2nd tier cities for $70-90k salary.

Long time ago I worked in the US company based out of the Toronto area that ended up with IT ops people in call centers all over the US and Canada. It worked really well -- the Canadian developers were awesome, and IT type people are easy to train. They seemed to be able to attract well educated graduates with locally competitive salaries that were below average by US standards. Over the years I've dealt with a few smaller Canadian consultancies and they always seemed to punch above their weight.

If you can provide good work, there is alot of Canadian talent that wants to work in Canada.

Likewise there is a lot of US talent that wants to work in some place that isn't the Bay Area.

That statement often gets eyerolls on HN because there's a very high concentration of users in a few specific places!

The weird thing is that all of the players have significant people investments outside of the US. These often start as support and maintenance operations but often grow into more over time.

It's legitimately surprising to me that companies don't "offshore" to Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Tampa. IBM used to have success doing that, for example. Defense contractors too, although obviously there is a political and a "be close to the customer" element to having engineers next to an air force base.

doesn't that depend on where you live, though? A Software Engineer in the bay area gets paid a lot more than a Software Engineer with equivalent experience in the mid-west.

But there's almost nowhere in Canada or Europe where you can get the kind of $750k packages that you see fairly routinely for normal developers at ultra elite companies like Google in the Bay Area. How can Canada or Europe really compete with that?

In no small part by not being the US. Currently, no salary would be enough to motivate me to move there, f.ex.

$750K is a lot in almost any context for non executives. There are literally thousands upon thousands in Europe who could have those jobs because of the skills they've got,but they choose not to because: they'd rather live in their own country,family dependencies, existing social networking,lack of purely financial motivation and etc.

By being a much more pleasant place to live.

I live in one of the less wealthy EU countries. Almost everybody have 26 days of paid leave a year here. If I'm sick it's additional paid leave. University education and healthcare is free. Retirement is handled as well (but you got to save something yourself additionally if you want quality time on retirement).

There's a combined year of paid maternity/paternity leave for each kid. Cities are clean and safe, police shoots like 100 bullets a year nationally and usually it's warning shots. There were no mass shootings, ever. Last time police killed someone without obvious explanation it was a huge scandal and it's still discussed 4 years later on national level.

I use a car once a month at most, usually I ride a bike or just walk everywhere. There's also public transport that's cheap, clean and dependable (not so great during the pandemic though). There's no social stigma associated with walking/biking or using public transport.

Property tax is almost nonexistent, if you work as a senior developer you can buy several flats in a big city, rent them, and live from that, if you wish.

You can buy a flat in a big city for about 5 years of average developer's salary. All the costs of living are set for people who earn less than 1/5th of what you earn. You have all the interesting countries right there, you can visit them by bike, car, train, or fly (if you are flexible with the date usually you can find 2-way flights for less than $100 between any 2 places in EU).

I mean it would be nice to have millions of USD but if I have to deal with the paperwork, no holidays to speak of, spend hours in traffic every day, and afterwards the only significant difference in quality of life is a few more 0s on my bank account - nah, I'll pass.

It would probably be different if I wanted to start a global business.

Looking up average software engineer salaries in Vancouver BC gets you numbers between 70 and 100k CAD.

That's about what I was making in a medium (~100k) midwestern city over a decade ago and less than the average software developer there makes now.

I'm pretty surprised by how big of a difference it is honestly. Even companies like Amazon and Microsoft in Vancouver were only averaging 100k CAD salaries. (Stock helps, but that would be an extremely low salary just a few hours away in Seattle)

Picking MI to stand for the midwest, the median wage for a Software Developer, Applications there is $89,460 vs a US median of $107,510 and CA median of $130,440. https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/15-1132.00?st=MI&...

There's a much greater spread of wages in the US than in other comparable countries, so it's attractive for those of us towards the higher end of the scale. Coming from the UK though I do miss the feeling of freedom from being able to take a long break between jobs and not having to worry about healthcare.

I'm currently a software engineer in a midwestern city and the average salary for a software engineer here is only ~75k USD.

Like what? Anyone with a professional-class job in the US (what I assume we’re talking about here) has health insurance paid for by their employer.

> what I assume we’re talking about here

Why?

Because at least in the US, it’s very hard to get a visa for a blue-collar or working-class job, so there isn’t even a possibility of moving countries to work one.

Those are where the US excels in compensation compared to other countries.

Those are what you generally need to be able to consider working in other countries.

Those are largely what the readership of a software VC firm forum are going to have.

But are those the majority of Canadian workers?

My American colleagues make substantially more that I do, plus a good health insurance plan.

When I graduated from school, I was under the impression that the difference was ~20%. I wish I had known that I would actually have qualified for compensation about 400% higher in the US. I realized that eventually.

The A220 is a certificated airliner. Neither China or Japan has done that.

And don't forget the Avro Jetliner. Interestingly, in terms of missed opportunities, this may well have been bigger than the Arrow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_C102_Jetliner

Wow and they cancelled that for the arrow!? Yikes.

No, they cancelled that to focus on the Canuck as per the article.

False. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAMC_YS-11

That's a turboprop...Aren't those much less safe than jet engines?

No. My understanding is that they are generally even safer. The public doesn't seem to like them as much, though.

A turboprop is a jet engine. The propeller moves a large mass of air, increasing efficiency ... like the current turbo fan engines! lol.

Pax hate turboprops because of the noise and a misconception that they're not jet engines.

There's no inherent safety difference, except that there used to be regional airlines flying with inexperienced pilots like cough Colgan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407

There’s more moving parts, since each prop has to rotate on its own axis in addition to rotating in line with the aircraft. Jets are stupidly simple, but turboprops are more complex due to these requirements of the props. Turboprops also can’t go as high or fast as jets, because they need a certain amount of air density to operate.

They can provide fine-controlled reverse thrust, so they have that going for them. And they’re less complicated (and lighter) than a traditional piston engine, making them a win over normal engines in mid-sized aircraft.

EDIT: "Jets" in the above is a poor reference to turbofans, as pointed out by replies. Thanks for the clarification.

A Turbofan still has a turbine being powered by a jet engine, similar to a turboprop, but it does not have the complexity associated with being able to change the pitch of the props.

Is there any modern airliner plane that still uses jets? IIRC all modern passenger plane engines are turbofan engines. Turboprops win at slower speed, while turbofans excel in the fast-but-still-subsonic range.

There aren't any modern planes still using turbojets. I think the Concorde might have been the last (ceased operation in 2003.)

Combat jets often have very low-bypass ratio turbofan engines though. A true turbojet has a 0 bypass-ratio; a lot of turbofan fighter jets have bypass-ratios under 1, while the engines on a 787 have a bypass-ratio of 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_ratio#Engine_bypass_rat...

I should clarify, when I'm saying "jet", I do mean turbofans. And turbofans still include a jet engine, but the output turns a turbine which rotates the fans.

Turbojets, turbofans, and turboprops all use gas turbines. The "jet" in this context refers to the action of the exhaust, not the mechanism creating the exhaust (which is the gas turbine.) Turbojets and Turbofans both create jets of hot exhaust gas to produce thrust. Turbojets produce thrust exclusively with this jet of exhaust gas, while turbofans produce some [often most] of their thrust by using some of the turbine's output to turn a ducted fan. Turboprops don't produce any meaningful jet of exhaust gas, instead using the output of the gas turbine to turn a propeller.

Related to turboprops are turboshaft engines, which turn a power transmission shaft instead of a propeller directly. In some cases, like the V-22 Osprey, the line between a turboprop and a turboshaft is blurred. But some clear examples of turboshaft engines are in modern helicopters and Abrams tanks.

There are some kinds of jet engines that don't use turbines. Ramjets and scramjets don't use turbines, but have 'jet' in the name because they produce their thrust using a jet of hot exhaust gas. Rocket engines produce jets of hot exhaust gas, but aren't called jet engines because.. reasons.

> jet: A collimated stream, spurt or flow of liquid or gas from a pressurized container, an engine, etc.

(Note that this makes turboprop engines not jet engines, but turbojet and turboprop engines are both gas turbine engines.)

"Jets are stupidly simple" Haha :D I don't know where that comes from. Jet engines are fiendishly complicated.

If they are so simple can you explain to me how interlaced rows of stator and rotor blades turn pressure into gas speed? That one always stumped me. Or how do I make monocrystalline blades, and how can I QA them? Or what exactly a FADEC do during startup, and how do the controlled parameters change depending on atmospheric conditions? Also I heard that the injectors and the air flow in the combustion chambers is designed such that there is an outside layer of incomplete combustion creating a colder laminar gasflow to protect the chamber wall itself. How do I go about designing that? How do I cool the bearings? How does one get the rotational energy out from the centre shaft to drive an oil pump on the side of the engine?

I mean these are just the first questions which pop up in my mind when I think about jet engines. And I'm not even a jet mechanic. If you truly think that jet engines are simple, then I envy your intellect.

I was referring to the operational complexity of the final product, not in the design or manufacturing. They have two main moving parts - the jet turbine, and the turbine connected to the fan (or prop). This is in comparison to the hundreds of moving parts your average ICE has for the drive train alone, not including the electrical system that lives alongside it to facilitate timed fuel ignition.

Jet engines are used on some older oil pumps because they can run for decades with minimal maintenance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geared_turbofan

This Genius Invention Could Transform Jet Engines, 2015, 3m51s, Bloomberg QuickTake Originals

[2] https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=8aPIEsnKb6o

Rolls-Royce UltraFan technology, 3 shaft geared turbofan jet engine, 2018, 2m29s, MDx media

[3] https://www.youtube.com./watch?v=6zD4uEdCkAk

The initial comparison was turboprops vs. turbojets, so switching the comparison to the undoubted complexities of internal combustion piston engines is beside the point.

The 'jet' engines used on oil pumps etc. are actually not jet engines: they are gas turbines in which an additional turbine or turbine stage is used to extract rotational power - in other words, they are more like turboprop engines than jet engines.

Nevertheless, I do disagree with the suggestion that turboprops are much less safe than turbojets, and I suspect that the author of that comment was confusing them with piston engines, which also (almost always) use propellers (increasingly, we are seeing turboprop singles replacing piston twins.) Finally, piston engines themselves have become much more reliable since the days when they were the only option.

> each prop has to rotate

Pedant.

Turboprop/turbine engines are quite reliable. Will gladly put my trust in a single engine Pratt and Whitney (Canada) PT6. Piston on the other hand.

It's a fair point and simultaneously does a disservice to what China is very obviously about to accomplish with the C919.

There is every reason to anticipate China taking a big share of that industry away from Boeing and Airbus. They only need to buy their own supply (which they will) to do that.

Further, Japan is also very obviously about to successfully unleash the Mitsubishi SpaceJet.

It's like people that were still pointing out up to the last moments in May that the US had no human space launch capability, trying to wring that last bit of satisfaction from the context.

Here how I've been told the story of the C919 by people working at Airbus. Airbus wanted to sell planes to China. China said OK, but you must build a factory in Tianjin and assemble the planes there, with Chinese workers and engineers. So Airbus did that.

They then built the factory for the C919 in Shanghai, and there went most of the people who previously worked at the Airbus factory. :)

> about to accomplish with the C919.

not certified, a decade late

> about to successfully unleash the Mitsubishi SpaceJet.

wasn't that cancelled last week?

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/mitsubishi-pulls-back-sp...

Canada has even been pitched as a cheap labour hotspot for tech.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver-criti...

don’t worry we spend all that extra salary on medical expenses

and then come to the US when you need the operation in a timely manner. The number of Canadian plates in the GF, ND hospital parking lot is amazing.

We spend a lot as well, it's just we pay it in taxes and the government pays the $13,300 per household. In some provinces you also have to pay monthly for a medical plan. It's cheaper than the US system but it's also not as good because there are waiting lists for most things and people die on those lists. The cancer may have been treatable when the person was added to the list, but cancer doesn't wait for anybody. What it is is fair though, available to all regardless of if they're working or not.

It's likely my mother would have died, for different shortcomings of the medical system if she had still lived in Canada. Fortunately she's in the developing world now and received affordable, correct, and timely care.

If you have an urgent care situation in Canada, you can walk into an emergency room or clinic and yes, your care will be triaged, but within a reasonable period (a few hours at most for most issues, e.g. a new persistent pain in your arm) but more typically within about an hour or less for most issues, (like a broken limb would be near immediate) you will be able to see a doctor and recieve first line assessment and treatment.

If you need additional imagery or specialist study, you then do have to schedule these things. I've gone through this process in the last year and had multiple kinds of medical imagery done, as well as a procedure by a specialist in response to a doctor's initial findings. The appointments for imagery and specialist work were completed within the week following my initial appointment. In the past for far less urgent issues, I've had to wait up to a month.

All of this was comfortable, timely, and safe, and I did not ever have to wonder what expenses might arise. In the United States, this would have certainly destroyed all of my savings.

I'm glad your mother received the care she needed and is well, and I don't have personal experience dealing with cancer diagnosis and treatment here, so it may of course be different! But my own small issues could have destroyed me financially in America, or I would have more likely just never had them dealt with, and I am ostensibly in the relative financial elite as a decently paid tech worker with some actual savings.

Please, don't snidely smear this system, in a post about airplanes for god's sake! And certainly not on the basis of "death lists", and certainly not in comparison to America, because the United States has plain old deaths at home to far outweigh them, where no one was even waiting for anything.

The health care system here has issues, sure. Big issues! But in comparison to the American system it is an unmitigated good, at the absolute least for everyone with less than say, a million dollars in liquid savings.

Its certainly not "completely uninsured" but I'm not sure I'd say it's an unmitigated good.

If you want a sleep study and it's not life threatening, 1 year. If you want a consult with an orthopedic surgeon, 6-12 months followed by a surgury in 6-12 months. If you want a liver specialist consult, 6-12 months.

Sure, living in the US without insurance is definitely hazardous but I wouldn't compare having insurance in the US with healthcare in Canada.

A close family member of mine requested a sleep study in the past year and had one scheduled about a month out.

edit: clarifying to add, not for a life-threatening issue.

I'm not snidely smearing anything. I'm saying what is good and what is bad about it, and pointing out it's not free, we pay for it in taxes - on average $13,300[1] per household per year.

Both Canada and the US have suboptimal systems that are dysfunctional in different ways. I'd rather the Canadian system if those are the only two options. It's a false dichotomy of course.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/health-care

"But in comparison to the American system it is an unmitigated good, at the absolute least for everyone with less than say, a million dollars in liquid savings."

This is a little bombastic, and your anecdote is just a data point, not a reflection of the 'system'.

The US system is very expensive, but if someone is covered it's generally much better. I'm not quite sure if it's a very good deal, but the quality is high.

The Canadian system is highly rationed for many things. While in the US you might wait a few weeks for an operation, in Canada it could be months, years - or never.

In Ontario and Quebec - you literally cannot get a 'doctor' anymore, they are forcing people into clinics because it's more economical, meaning one's medical history may be not be integrated into diagnosis. When people have 'serious things' obviously they get care, but I personally had a 'difficult to diagnose problem' and the doctors at the clinics just didn't care - I had to go to the 'Cleveland Clinic' in Toronto, a 'private practice back door' to get someone to pay attention.

Almost nobody in the US has a 'million dollars in liquidity' and so this statement is really unfair.

The US system has 'major pitfalls' that regular people can fall into when they are not covered, and of course, a ton of people that are not insured.

It's a more existential problem than mere private/public discussions can address, that said, the lack of real private practice in Canada severely limits how much people can spend if they want to in the area, and it means an otherwise huge chunk of the economy lives in the socialized system, which means money doesn't get into so many things we might like it to. Canada and other nations end up depending heavily on the US for a lot of medical innovation.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537568)

Canada is a joke and will continue to be a joke until the economy collapses under the weight of a government run by sissies. (Edit: to be clear, that's all of them. Not just the current one. The culture of Canada's government is to be a leech.)

Yikes! Please don't post like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537637 here.

I'm well acquainted with the effect that the Avro Arrow has on Canadian feelings, especially Canadian engineering feelings. But let's not go overboard.

Proof is in the pudding :-)

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