hylaride

> How? I do remember the big protests in the 90s quite well, certainly, but that was 30-some-odd years ago and when, as we saw earlier, there were 300% more diary farmers. Pressure doesn't last forever, especially as you grow into insignificance.

They have an organized lobby that straddles a lot of important ridings in eastern Ontario and parts of Quebec. It also includes a lot of the broader dairy industry. I could accept the argument that it is no longer as powerful as it once was, but I haven't met many non-industry people who care either way. All being equal, Canadians would prefer lower prices, I think. I don't think the general public would have cared, especially if Europe flooded us with cheaper gouda or brie. There has always been a dose of anti-americanism that bounces from healthy to unhealthy and back depending on the geopolitical climate, though.

> when this occurred it was framed as being necessary for the sake of the entire Canadian economy and to preserve Canada's reputation as a trustworthy supplier. The message sent was abundantly clear that it wasn't being done to appease farmers. How do you translate that into farmers having political sway?

CN and CP were already moving records amount of grain that year (IIRC almost 40% above previous records), so to argue that it put Canada's reputation at risk rings hollow. It was because farmers were getting squeezed storing it as well as paying for higher freight costs, on top of the fact that many grain companies and farmers held onto grain from the previous harvest for a variety of reasons. Many grain farmers, who used to have to sell their wheat to the wheat board, got caught flat footed when trying to go out on their own due to then recent deregulation (I'm not convinced this last argument effected things as much as some claim, though).

> Again, the largest component is crop insurance, which is modelled essentially the same as it is in Canada. ~60% of the premium is paid for by the government in both cases. The payout is dependent upon acres.

Only if you look at it from a permanent funding point of view. The US gov'ts portion of crop insurance in the USA amounted to $14B in 2026, but ad hoc/disaster spending (which is separate from insurance) is $26B and an alphabet soup of Farm Bill programs is $15.6B. And the bulk of the farm bill's spending (70-80%) is indirect via SNAP and other programs that Canada doesn't really have (though measuring how much if this is an actual farming subsidy is very difficult).

> And 74% in Canada, for what it is worth.

I was basing my statement on numbers I saw off of American stats (which go back further easily obtainable data), but the Canadian/US numbers I can directly pull up comparisons are from 2018 to 2025 (raw statistics Canada data is hard to come by, something the USA does much better on):

Canada: 10,679 → 9,048 = −15.3%

USA: 37,468 → 23,609 = −37.0%

The exit experience is different, though. A CA dairy farmer leaves with a capital asset in their quotas as well as any land/equipment/herd value. A US dairy farmer is liquidating just the latter. Anecdotally, I grew up in Winchester, Ontario which is a dairy hub - a lot of the farming kids I grew up with didn't want to get into farming and a lot of the family farms were sold off and a lot of them are quite comfortable. A lot of farms closer to Ottawa also got gobbled up by suburbs.

> I am not sure I would say that. Co-ops with quota-like systems are not uncommon in the US. What their system does allow is that one guy who thinks he can undercut the prevailing market to slide in, while Canada has a legal path to put a halt to such behaviour. Maybe that's something favourable, but why only in dairy, poultry, and eggs? Isn't that something that every market would want?

Again, I'm not defending supply management, but the dairy farmers are holding onto it and it's been a major pain in almost all of Canada's trade agreements. The fact that Canadian politicians are fighting so hard for it isn't because it's a better system. The one advantage of the Canadian system is that it costs the government little and you don't really contribute to it if you don't consume milk, though. But I'm for free trade and fewer subsidies all around.

> I do remain a Canadian farmer, though, so I would love for you to expand upon that thought.

Dairy farmers have put enough pressure on politicians across the political spectrum that they vigorously defend supply management that, due to its inflexibility, is a major trade headache for Canada from an industry that makes up a very small portion of economic output in Canada; it almost cost us the USMCA renegotiations and caused the CETA negotiations to last much, much longer than necessary.

Awhile back, the nominally free market federal Conservatives forced CN and CP to have minimal grain shipment numbers to deal with a bumper crop because the farmers were fuming at higher freight rail prices against other commodities (mainly oil at the time).

> This is quite a deviation from the bulk commodity/farming practice explanation before. Why the change in tune?

I don't see it as a change in tune. My original comment was that "Agriculture is always the hardest due to a variety of factors, including standards, but also farming is among the most subsidized and/or protected businesses in the developed world. Creating a fair and level trading system around it is difficult." Agriculture made up ~90% of the economy when most modern countries were founded and the political weight is often historical (and arguably constitutionally baked-in in the USA which gives smaller predominately rural states equal numbers of Senators, of which in the USA are very powerful). It's been an American political joke for ages that kissing babies is less important than kissing corn during the primaries that started in Iowa. Also, the Canadian farmers were very upset at the very limited expanded access USMCA provided us dairy farmers.

The US unequivocally supports corn production, which feeds (pun not intended) into cheaper feed for livestock. But these subsidies can be labelled as "strategic" energy independence (ignoring if that's actually the case or not). Is that fair? Should Canada then have to encourage corn production the same way? How would/do you untangle this? It's a political problem.

Untangling these into a fair trade (in the free sense) would require political capital that some countries or parties may or may not have.

I'll finish that I think we broadly agree on how things SHOULD be, but I see the barriers to getting there as not politically feasible. If it was, supply management would already be gone. It causes higher prices and the benefits are highly marginal.

> It's essentially the same system

No it's not. For bulk commodities, the US subsidies are largely commodity-specific and acre-based; Canadian support is whole-farm and income-based. US subsidies trigger when income margins fall below a set percentage; an Iowa farmer with base acres gets a price loss coverage payment whenever the national corn price is low, good year or not. A Canadian prairie farmer with a good year gets nothing regardless of wheat prices. In the US, most of the money goes to row-crop growers on large acreages, increasingly through discretionary ad hoc payments. In Canada, most money goes to prairie grain and oilseed farms through yield-triggered insurance. If you excluded dairy, US subsidies account for about ~9% of farm receipts (plus or minus a quarter percent depending on year) and Canada ~5% (long term average; payouts tend to spike in bad years).

Swinging to dairy, the US actually sets price floors for wholesale dairy and transfers revenue across processed dairy types. The US system also pays out directly to farmers if margins fall too much (the calculations of said margins is complicated, but it essentially encourages production even if prices fall due to oversupply). These subsidies have historically encouraged overproduction and consolidation and the issue has become acute as the rates of dairy consumption hasn't matched population growth due to a variety of reasons (eg veganism, milk alternatives, etc). One reason Trump has been complaining is because the US would love to have somewhere to dump said surplus.

The Canadian dairy system (which I want to make abundantly clear I'm not defending!), basically links pricing against a hard quota. The result is higher prices for consumers, and tariffs that make unique foreign cheeses very expensive.

> Neither is milk from other animals (e.g. goats), other types of meats (e.g. pork, beef), but none of these have the same system. Moreover, until 2009 tobacco was also supply managed under the same system and it is a bulk commodity that is shipped around the world. So I'm not sure your theory, as fun as it is, holds.

> ... this doesn't explain what is special about the three (once four) agriculture categories.

Because it's political! Tobacco farmers used to be a force to be reckoned with, but when smoking rates plummeted they lost a lot of said power. Other forms of dairy were niche enough not to matter. Bulk meat (beef, pork, etc) are a relatively recent phenomenon and were part of a world trade market by then, whereas chicken, milk, and eggs were considered a staple.

If you're a Canadian dairy farmer, the US system looks like it encourages production above all else and the subsidies are structured enough where a large one-off issue (herd sickness, serious equipment breakdown, etc) will wipe you out. The number of US dairy farms is down almost 80% since the 1990s and it's been driven by low margins. Canadian farmers have a lot more of a direct influence on their government (again for better or for worse).

This is what I meant when I said "Creating a fair and level trading system around it is difficult" because you run up against these interests. I would much prefer a theoretical fair trade system where Canada didn't protect its poultry/dairy and the US didn't protect its sugar (which has a lot of similarities to CA dairy supply management, though the foreign import limits are proportionately less).

> Changing the diary, poultry, and egg system doesn't mean giving up subsidies, if the people want to continue to offer subsidies.

The US subsidies tend to be more indirect, meaning that the large agri-corporations capture most of it. Farmers in the US have been struggling for years and the Canadian farmers know this (and for better or for worse have political capital at their disposal).

The reason dairy, poultry, and eggs are under Canada's system is because they are not bulk commodities that ship around the world like grains do. Canada also doesn't allow a lot of the farming methods (including hormones) that the USA does. The original aim of supply management was to smooth out the market, but of course has morphed into a cartel.

For the record, I'd love to see the dismantling of supply management the same way New Zealand did (and became an export powerhouse of processed dairy products after). I do love me some cheese and I wish the EU cheese was more economically available.

I suspect it'll be expanding the current trading agreement to allow more direct investment. Canada and Australia both have lots of raw materials the EU needs. I suspect you'll see more types of worker visas (similar to the old NAFTA T1 styles that allow relatively easy sponsorship of employees).

I'd love to have full rights to live and work in the EU, but I'd be happy just being able to visit the EU as a Canadian and use the EU customs lines. I don't think Canada would go for full mobility. We're just now dealing with the backlash of too many immigrants from South Asia, a "flood" of poorer Eastern Europeans would probably rekindle that.

Agriculture is always the hardest due to a variety of factors, including standards, but also farming is among the most subsidized and/or protected businesses in the developed world. Creating a fair and level trading system around it is difficult.

A good example is the dairy protectionism in Canada that Trump so bitterly complains about. The issue is Canada manages its system with production quotas, but the US directly and indirectly subsidizes production. Who's being more (un)fair? How do you create a trading relationship around that?

Nuance is always a thing. Native apps are faster and better most of the time. Electron and React Native wouldn't annoy me so much if they were used with small apps where it's not worth over-optimizing.

However, it's now the default for Multiplatform apps that are used constantly, including IDEs, chat apps, etc. They gobble up memory and cpu cycles and are constantly getting updates due to the shitshow that is the javascript dependancy ecosystem.

For awhile under Balmer, Microsoft implemented a lot of Jack Welsh management philosophies. This included stack ranking, but also encouraging "internal competition" under the idea that it'll drive people to excel. In real life that caused friction, politics, sandbagging, and other problems that were not in the company's best interests. It's fine to be competitive, but in some competitive situations (team sports, companies, etc), the whole point is for the team to win, not individuals.

Sadly, even though most of these philosophies have been discredited over the long term (stack ranking can be fine if you do actually need to do layoffs, so long as you realized there are exceptions to the rule), other bad management practices have also taken over. We're now squarely in the depths of all the worst aspects of "product driven" development, where nebulous metrics are measured for success (such as the bad VSCode decision to append copilot in commit messages, which makes it look like copilot is more heavily used than it is).

It's mostly historical and a combination of security from the WW2 and Cold War eras as well as how the gold standard worked before Bretton Woods.

Most countries held gold reserves as their currencies were backed by it. When money needed to move because of trade, the ratios of currencies backed by gold would shift as money got converted to other currencies. However, constantly moving physical gold back and forth with the ebs and flows of trade was impractical, so ownership of gold in central bank vaults usually just had its legal ownership marked on ledgers. Physical gold moving was more part of reconciliation. This description is an oversimplification as in practice, countries didn't always play by the rules of the gold standard (revaluations, going on and off the standard, etc), but you get the general idea.

This mostly ended as Bretton woods came into effect and the new system was basing the US dollars on gold, then other countries held direct US dollars and traded that instead. Countries could then convert those US dollars into gold. This ended when Nixon closed the gold window when he refused to raise interest rates as there started to be a run on gold as countries rushed to convert. The backdrop was that high spending on the Vietnam was and new social programs was driving inflation, but Nixon knew that would cause an economic slowdown he wasn't willing to do. Jimmy Carter then took a lot of the political flack for allowing the central bank to raise rates to kill it. This is why central bank independence is so important.

During times of geopolitical risk, countries would physically move their gold to be held in trust in friendly and/or rule of law countries. The USA was seen as this between ~1914-now.

My understanding is that the encrypted military-level GPS is much more robust against jamming and spoofing. There's probably a lot of capabilities we don't know that's classified, too.

> If you want to talk about closing schools, because there aren't children for them... then great! Build new high density where the school used to be. Build a school into the building, put a subway under the school with a connecting mall.

You realize the same people in those neighbourhoods fight things like this for the exact same reasons? These people (much like London/Paris) are externalizing housing costs onto others. Now those people in far out areas need enormous infrastructure to move them to work, etc.

> Then at least the surrounding neighborhood that has been paying 70 years of taxes doesn't have to deal with the extra traffic/parking of the new construction. Maybe they'll even enjoy the new mall, and foot traffic will help support existing commercial infrastructure.

(In Toronto at least) the lower density areas are subsidized by the higher density areas (much of which is also commercial). It costs more per capita to lay sewer, pave roads, police, etc these SFH areas. Also, they would fight the same conversions of schools in their neighbourhoods for the same traffic/shadows/etc reasons. And you can't economically build a subway to a smallish "dense" footprint in a former school ground, and even if you could you'd be recreating the same "ultra dense" problems that Toronto already has.

Look at this image: http://images.unoapp.com/boxdata/asset52207/images/4800Yonge...

There is essentially only expensive SFH and relatively expensive to build high rises with almost nothing in between. You're saying that to protect (and continue to subsidize) a bunch of people's lifestyles that new residents should only be expanded into the outskirts of urban zones?

If you have an oven light or a resister, you can use it to almost fully discharge the Lipo battery. Doing that will mostly render it inert, but if it's already swollen, you'll want to do it in a metal bucket/container outside. It can take awhile depending on the capacity of the battery. (This is how I dispose my FPV drone batteries).

I'm no MBA (insert joke here about that being good or bad), but my general opinion is that leaders should delegate and then be held responsible. Details (beyond enough for the higher leadership to be effective) should be relatively minimal. Having some cross-functional accountability (eg security/financial audits, etc) is fine, but in my experience the vast majority of corporate dysfunction comes from micromanaging. This gets compounded when middle management also has to interpret and implement said micromanagement. Obviously people need to learn and make mistakes; mistakes are fine so long as they're not repeated! There is a reason that some of the best, most effective leaders I've ever worked under shield those under them from the politics of the organization.

I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.

> But why does the high density housing have to be where the SFH are?

It depends on where said SFHs are. Cities need to eventually grow upwards! If we never allowed land-reuse Manhattan would still be 2 stories on the whole borough.

I live in Toronto and the harshest NIMBYs are adjacent to downtown and/or subway stops. They fight tooth and nail against even 6 story condominiums on the major high streets (Margret Atwood, who lives in a large SFH close to downtown was among them recently-ish). The ultimate result is that we have a handful of extremely dense clusters of condominiums centred around a few subway stops that then super-concentrate people and cause extreme crowding on transit, amenities, etc. It would be better if you had mid-rise multi-unit dwellings more spread out.

It's actually become an acute problem in so many ways. The people who own the SFHs tend be over 50 and childless. The result is that many schools in these neighbourhoods are at barely 20% capacity, while the condominiums (where most younger families can afford to live) are causing the schools near them to be overflowing with kids.

> This is how it's done in the rest of the world, certainly Korea, Japan, and China. I see this in England and France as well.

The countries broadly speaking default to higher density than North America for historical and economic reasons. They have their own issues, but the majority of Koreans live in high rises and Japan rebuilds their buildings constantly: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

Can't speak for Italy, but there have been some consequences in many EU jurisdictions. The EU has been pushing HARD for competition, etc, but it has left many European telecoms in debt-heavy financial situations that has caused issues around future investment and in some countries the (mobile) coverage is good on paper, but the networks are themselves actually terrible (looking at you Germany).

But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.

I can't recall who said it, but "The biggest problem with golden ages is that you never realize you're in one until it's over".

There were several golden ages of tech for most people who went through them: - the pre-internet run-up of personal computing (~1975-1995) - the early internet (~ 1990-1998) - the big post-dot com crash tech boom (~ 2003-2020, but more of a golden age for employees)

However, almost all golden ages (including non-tech ones) end for the same reason (the ranges above I'm excluding the last phase). Early adopters (tech enthusiasts), early implementations that focus on them, then mass market appeal that "dumbs it down", then the financialization as accountants and grifters start showing up. Same thing happened to Hollywood, the music industry, etc.

We're now squarely in the last phase of the post-dotcom boom.

(I'll also note that the timeframes are arguable - I'm not going to get into quibbles over minutiae)

The BSDs were so clean. With the exception of Slackware, Linux distros at the time (late 90s/early 2000s) tended to be bloated with everything installed and enabled by default for "ease of use" reasons. I was an OpenBSD guy, and the way they made loading things so cleanly and straightforward in /etc/rc.conf was a delight.

I had an IT Helpdesk co-op term in the early 2000s that had the exact same problem of marketing emailing huge powerpoint presentations around...but we were on exchange (in the middle of migrating from NT, too!). Exchange...couldn't handle it very well. I couldn't even be that mad as PPT was (still is?) a terribly inefficient file format.

Same solution, though...

To be fair as a percentage of exports, Canada (and Mexico, in different ways) is at a completely different level of economic integration than pretty much any other country. We have no choice but to take a unique stand. That being said, we are so lucky to have Carney at this moment. Canada hasn’t exactly had flexible, informed, and eloquent leadership in a long time that has been willing to think and work for the long term.

There’s not a lot of irony in trade politics, but more ignorance. It’s perfectly fine to have a trade deficit with individual countries. The layman’s example is that most of us have a trade surplus with our employers, and deficits with retail outlets. It all balances out.

The US trade deficit is mostly balanced out by service (often not counted) and investment flows. The US could theoretically end most of its trade deficits if it balanced its budget, thus reducing demand for treasuries. However, that would come with other pitfalls. It would either entail tax increases, spending cuts, or both at the government level and it would then bleed into the standard of living of most Americans as foreign investment slowed down.

It doesn’t surprise me at all to see yields go up as foreigners invest less into the US as they get dinged sending goods here. So maybe that’s ironic…

I have mixed feelings in this debate, too. The big issue with GUIs is that they’ve become so bloated, especially as the default framework is now often electron apps. Web based frameworks tend to start keeling when large amounts of data need to be handled in the DOM, etc. When I use slack and discord, I sigh when I start seeing UI rendering lag when I switch channels and projects.

Though there’s been some recent progress in alternative models, the fact is native frameworks have some catching up to do. Some in particular (SwiftUI) are downright awful

Yeahs ago I remember when my big bank switched from a TUI front end to a web front end for their front line staff. What originally took a few quick keyboard/tab combinations that was hard wired into employee muscle memory immediately took 2-3 times longer. Fortunately, the need to go into a physical bank doesn’t matter as much, but it’s still a regression…

Years ago I chatted with a border guard from another country about their job (while they were not working). Not having a phone nowadays would be considered "strange" enough to flag you. If you're not a citizen of said country, it could even dramatically increase the odds of disallowing you entry. Often this would prevent you returning for a set number of years.

At the end of the day, it's always best to just not have anything "bad" on your devices. People have been caught up for all numbers of "innocent" reasons (pictures of their kids in the bathtub, ancient photos in their albums of themselves doing illegal things such as drugs or underage drinking, text messages or browser history disparaging politicians the border guard may support, porn in your history) that can give a border guard in a bad mood good reason to ruin your day.

I personally don't want my phone data hoovered in and analyzed or marked, even though I don't really have anything to hide. I don't care enough to do anything about it, but if I did I would probably have a second travel phone with a curated amount of data, apps, accounts, etc.

Fun fact, there is a long standing exemption to the unreasonable search and seizure protection laws if you're out on a boat (it may only be on the open ocean and Great Lakes, though IANAL). One of the earliest Supreme Court rulings essentially said that without it, it would be impossible for the US to enforce tariffs, which were the main source of revenue at the time. Anybody who boats often enough has been boarded by the coast guard for various safety checks that allows them to poke around and there's little you can do about it.

It's a tragedy that most English classes don't have field trips. Going to an actual Shakespeare play would probably change many people's minds than having to direct it in book form.

What clicked for me was after being forced to read The Merchant of Venice in grade 9, I suddenly saw all the cultural references ("I want my pound of flesh" or "All that glisters is not gold") in movies, music, etc. I remember watching Strange Brew and somebody mentioned that it's basically Hamlet and you can't unsee it once you realize which movie character is matched to which Shakespeare character.

Over the years I've been to several adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it was a ton of fun every single time.

I'm not saying the noise pollution concerns aren't real, but these are often the same people who had "concerns" with 5G.

Most datacenters I've been to around the world are barely noticeable. Most of them are in warehouse districts and the AC chillers are barely noticeable over the chillers on other nearby buildings. Often, they WANT to be nondescript.

That being said, I've not been to any of these new ones which are both significantly larger and also can have onsite turbines that run all the time and not just during power outages.

More than the raw speed was the fact that the error checking, buffering, and compression on dialup added anywhere from 150-400ms to your ping RTT. You could disable a lot of it, but results could be mixed depending on the quality of your lines.

It can be a demand problem. People/companies aren't going to spend the time optimizing (including compilers/code) if there's no payoff that's greater than the delta for an arm chip.

That being said, demand from and via China (which has a geopolitical case for wanting to see risc-v succeed) will probably end up being what drives it forward.

My understanding is that RISC-V needs both economies of scale AND chips that are manufactured at the bleeding edge fabs (smallest dies, etc) which is a lot more expensive. It's a chicken and egg problem as there's not (yet?) demand. The architectural limitations will remain until there's incentive to work on it.

In many ways it's not much different than Linux was in the 1990s. It was cheap and useful, but often not as performant as commercial OSes (UNIX or even windows) until big corporate money came in and started piling resources into it. Distribution fragmentation was also an issue, which could still cause headaches for RISC-V (especially if some companies start adding proprietary performance extensions that others can't). So I think it remains to be seen how RISC-V will pan out (eg will the cloud vendors see enough of an ROI supporting it for higher end computing than buying ARM licences).

Solar panels don't necessarily get the most power at noon, as it can depend on what angle they're at if they're static (eg on a roof). Ideally you would want it facing the sun in the afternoon (especially if you don't have batteries and are trying to cut into your AC bill) or morning as you'll get more direct sunlight. It would also depend on how far on the horizon the sun is, which will depend on latitude. So peak generation will depend on how much exposure you'll get.

IMO, this plays into how solar is used. An individual household would have different goals than a grid-level solar/battery project depending on how they consume electricity. A grid is going to optimize (ignoring any desire for extra capacity for days without sun) for the peak that tends to happen between 4-6 for most western grids.