2,896 karma · joined January 2, 2019
American re-elected him, despite the cronyism, jan 6, mental decline, etc. Combined with the democrats are so self defeating and they also repeatedly poked at trade issues (the loooooong running softwood lumber disputes, Keystone XL, "buy American" provisions that ignored NAFTA/USMCA for projects that were going ahead w/o the provisions, etc).
We know what populism is (we've experienced and are experiencing it ourselves) and know that it is usually fleeting, but we don't trust another "smarter" nativist president to come along and screw us again.
Also, there's an internal game going on here. Canada has (institutionally) took the "easy" way out of controversial projects, often due to our proximity to the US. This has meant that when some projects run into a greater than normal amount of political resistance (eg environmental fights against pipelines or LNG terminals), the default has usually been to back off. But Trump has in a way given cover to actually move forward.
I don't expect the next president to "cave" so easily. Even before he was sworn in, republicans had their messaging in full swing against Obama about the deficit. I fully expect the same thing to hammer the next president on trade if they're a democrat.
Any "savings" I would have moving to the suburbs would be cancelled out by the thousands in commuting costs (I'd have to buy, maintain and insure a car, which I only now use car sharing and the occasional old school rental). All being equal, a larger home would be nice, but then I'd be in a position where I go out less.
I'm not saying urban life is for everybody, but you make it sound like a choice between dystopia and utopia (it was awful during the height of COVID, though). The fact that the American cities that are closest to the urban ideal are so expensive does signal that people would like to live like that, but for very various reasons (ranging from zoning to historical gov't mortgage insurance only applying to houses) has not been expanded much elsewhere.
Despite having since remodelled the kitchen (again spending more than expected as one does when renovating), I kept the fridge...it's still working fine 20 years later, though the plastic drawers are starting to degrade. Next to higher-end German appliances it looks a bit well worn and out of place in an otherwise very nicely renovated kitchen, which my wife and I semi-seriously joke gives the place character.
Every once in awhile I'll wander through an appliance aisle and sigh. Similar fridges feel cheap and are much more expensive. In fancy fridges, I just see more components that'd fail. I'll I really want is a freezer and a fridge. I want need an ice maker (especially after learning how gross they can get). Ideally I'd have a standard old-fashioned sized fridge that had a good separate temperature control for the freezer and is common enough that I can get replacement parts 20 years from now.
The kicker was I now realize the old 26 year old fridge probably just needed a coolant top up. Maybe that wasn't possible as I'm not sure when freon was banned and if it would have been possible to do that.
What I did notice is that colours, even on cheap TVs, always looked relatively good on PAL. Its colour system was unequivocally better.
As for Snowden? I dunno. The NSA was pretty much breaking the law and everybody knew it. I really want to like and believe in the romantic notion of his actions. But something just doesn't add up with him...
The 2nd bomb? I can be convinced either way. Japan needed to know they had more than one, but it probably didn't have to be a city. That being said, this is a lot of presentism (looking at the past with modern ethics). World War Two was a brutal, total war and the long term effects of nuclear weapons were not fully understood. Remember that there was carpet bombing with incendiary bombs happening against Japan's wooden cities for the year leading up to this. A non-nuclear end the the war would almost certainly have involved a land invasion and many, many more deaths on all sides.
Japan (as a country) was also not innocent in all this. They started the war - both with China and the USA. The Japanese military IN COLD BLOOD slaughtered more civilians than the Allies did in all their strategic bombings, let alone just nuclear. Even the nuclear bombs had military targets in mind...
This is the perfect description of most legacy telecoms everywhere.
Much more likely is looser employment visas and maybe allowing Canadians have an easier time moving for things like retirement, etc. I'm not holding my breath, though.
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).
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.
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).
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'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.
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?
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.
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).