jadero

Your "installer financed" system is sort of like what is available from some solar panel installers. I don't know if it's just a plain lease or rent to own, though.

A not so minor correction. The heat pumps are not free. The maximum payout is $5000. That has to cover the equipment, installation by a certified professional, and any necessary electrical upgrades. A ballpark estimate for my place comes in at over $6000. If I hold the total cost to $5k, the system will not be fit for purpose under the requirements of the program, making me ineligible for anything.

In addition, your dwelling must be eligible. That sounds easy until you realize that mobile homes must have the axles removed. Hitches, too, but axle removal is the big one. For me, that's another couple of grand to remove skirting, shift blocking, pull the axles out, and replace skirting.

The fact that those axles are useless because of other modifications and additions doesn't change the official designation as a mobile home. I suppose it might be possible to appeal that designation, but I'm not sure that would be less expensive.

For the heat pumps to be truly free, they'd have to nearly double the current subsidy and allow for non-electrical expenses like axle removal.

I'm not sure about guarantee. That implies perfection which is never attainable in anything. But requiring transparent evidence of due diligence is certainly doable. As are penalties for failure to meet some kind of standard.

It's past time to institute "grading standards" on large datasets. I have in mind the same kind of statistical standards that are applied in various kinds of defect and contamination analysis. For example, nobody ever guarantees that your food is free of animal feces, only that a fair and representative sample didn't find any.

So the McCarthyism playbook?

The biggest difference I see is that this time it's running as a mostly decentralized and possibly grassroots initiative. But people are still losing their jobs and possibly their entire careers for opinions and activities that have literally nothing to do with their employment or education or even legitimate constraints on their freedom of expression.

Let's face it, Hamas wouldn't even exist if the Israeli government wasn't being a big dick about sharing or at least caring.

I retired from our volunteer department one year ago. I encourage everyone to look into what's involved. Most people see firefighting as this dangerous activity. While it can be, the training is spectacular and reduces risks dramatically.

More importantly for the risk averse, there are many tasks that have very low or even negligible risk by nature. Communications, logistics, pump operations, driving, equipment and hall maintenance, extinguishing hot spots after the fire is over, traffic control, IT support. In a decade of service, I never once found myself on the front lines, because I focused on support roles that would have otherwise taken less risk averse people off the front lines.

And for the women out there, our department has had female members continuously since the mid-1980s, many of whom have served on the front lines.

Yes, that is how the law works. I think, that within limits, that is how it should work. Where I have difficulty is in figuring out those limits.

For another example, Canada has gone many decades explicitly prohibiting consecutive sentencing. There seems to be some movement in at least softening that prohibition. I can see why that might be a good idea in some cases, but I don't want Canada to just go all-in on consecutive sentencing.

The letter I'm sending to my MP:

I urge you to fight against this proposal on moral grounds. That might sound like an odd point of view, but hear me out.

One of the greatest challenges facing us with online activities is not what we or our children have access to, but how companies are handling critical permanent identification. Every day there is a new report of some entity that has lost control of information that has a major negative impact on those whose information was exposed.

There are ways to effectively manage such information and there are companies and government departments deploying those systems. However, there is currently no legal or regulatory framework making those systems and methods mandatory. Until that legal and regulatory environment exists, it is not just a bad idea to expand data collection requirements, but immoral.

To be clear, I'm not talking about the possibility that some person is exposed as a consumer of pornography. I'm talking about those whose incompetence and/or low standards of care allow criminals to gain access to the identifying data for use in criminal activity.

I don't know about you, but the porn industry is the last industry I would ever trust to properly secure and manage identifying information.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

This cannot work safely in the current legal and regulatory environment.

In principle, there seem to be ways to securely, anonymously, and privately handle age verification. To the best of my knowledge, no such system has been deployed or mandated.

Thus, we are left with only the requirement to hand over critical documents to those who have no "standards of care" that make it safe to do so.

Have none of these people ever heard of any company or government agency losing control of personal information? How about they put some effort into fixing that first.

Canadian here, with 50 years in the workforce. I've never once been paid semi-weekly or bimonthly. Here, biweekly is every two weeks semi-monthly is every half month. Obviously, that latter is often spoken of as twice a month, which just adds to the confusion between "bi" and "semi".

The reality is that these words, like most words (at least in English), mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean and consensus can be hard to reach.

I give you the phrase "table the discussion". Sometimes it means to formally bring something up for discussion. Other times it means setting the discussion aside for future consideration.

Or, my favourite from my childhood, "fat chance" which means that something is even less likely than if it had a slim chance. Granted, that might be more in the line of idiomatic slang, but it stands as part of at least the era's Canadian English that did have broad consensus and still does, I think.

Basically, the Saskatchewan playbook. We no longer have provincial liquor stores, and it shows in staff knowledge (lower), service levels (lower), and pricing (higher). To my eyes, selection has gone downhill, too, but that may actually be larger market forces. (I like a wide variety of beers, but detest the fruit-flavoured ones. It's getting harder to find variety packs and especially variety packs that don't include the fruit-flavoured ones.)

"Semi truck" is not half a truck, but a truck designed to carry one half the weight of the cargo it is hauling. A semi trailer is one designed to have half of its load (by weight) carried by the tow vehicle. A standard trailer gets difficult and possibly dangerous to tow if the weight carried by the tow vehicle (hitch weight) strays too far outside the 8%-12% range.

And just to add to the confusion, Dodge popularized something called the "hemi engine"--an engine with a "hemi head", not half an engine. And "hemi head" refers not to "1/2 an engine head" but to the approximately hemispherical (1/2 sphere) shape of the combustion chambers cast/machined into the engine head.

My biggest problem with this whole thing is the legal framing of his actions.

If the bus had instead been a car with a single, middle-aged occupant, I think everything would have gone quite a bit differently.

If that single occupant had not been killed, but made a full recovery, it definitely would have gone a lot differently.

If it had been merely a cop observing the infraction, he would have escaped with just a ticket. At worst, I suppose he might have got a temporary license suspension.

I have difficulty accepting that the identical behaviour should have such radically different punishments just because pure chance leads to radically different outcomes.

Note that I'm not saying that someone who kills someone else should be getting off scott free, regardless of the behaviour that led to the death. But maybe there is room to increase the penalties when dangerous behaviours have little or no consequence as well as room to move on how we handle behaviours that rarely have devastating consequences. Let's face it, the vast majority of those who even deliberately blow through rural stop signs will never even get a ticket, let alone kill someone.

Personally, I don't see this person as a threat to our society, so I see no reason to deport him.