First — stop giving them ideas! 🤣
Second, a small rock and some tape would likely defeat that.
Yaztromo
joined 2 years ago
EV charging doesn’t require you to stand around for 5 minutes holding a handle to fuel up. The charging times are longer, but once plugged in your need to stay anywhere near the vehicle is zero. And plugging in usually takes less than 5s.
So even if someone came up with a system whereby they expected you to watch an ad before the power would flow, you could always just plug in and walk away. How are they going to know you’re physically there?
As an EV driver I haven’t been to a gas station since I started driving it, but AFAIK this advertising hasn’t come to Canada — and hopefully it never does.
Trogdor was a man! I mean, he was a Dragon Man! Or maybe he was just a dragon! But he was still TROGDOR! TROGDOR!
Burninating the countryside, burninating the peasants, Burninating all the people in their THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES! THATCHED ROOF COTTAGES!
AND THE TROGDOR COMES IN THE NIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!
(I’m not ashamed I know it by heart after all these years 🤣).
That stat borders on being somewhat dishonest.
The three most populous Provinces in Canada (Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia) each have over 90% green power generation, either via hydroelectricity or via nuclear power. Manitoba likewise produces 97% of its electricity from hydroelectric sources.
Those four Provinces have a population of roughly 31 million people. Canada has a total population of just over 39 million — meaning “most provinces actually” only accounts for 20% of Canadians. 80% of Canadians get their electricity from 85+% green sources. By total capacity, nearly 70% of all electrical generation in Canada is from green sources, and thus “electric heat” for the vast majority of Canadians is not from coal and natural gas.
Agreed — I think replacing coal with natural gas is just a half-step that mostly benefits those with natural gas to sell, and just delays the overall transition.
But of course the people arguing for natural gas don’t care about that, so it’s easier to challenge them on the fact that they’re also inventing some pipe dream without evidence that if we could get gas to China that they’d suddenly be all for converting (or shutting down) coal fired plants — when there is _no evidence for that anywhere, and where they could be doing that today if they really wanted to.
There is always more that can be done, but the effects of the carbon tax go well beyond it being a “tax on life”.
Take for example Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario. They’ve been undergoing a major transformation from using constantly-burning coal to an Electric Arc Furnace — and they specifically call out carbon tax savings as one of the projects drivers.
That’s but one story of industry putting the investments into greener technologies to save from having to pay the carbon levy. I wish the media spent more time talking about such projects, because the levy is working.
You know what I love most about the levy? It’s effectively optional. I can’t opt out of making an income (not being born rich and not wanting to live under a vow of poverty), but I can opt out of generating carbon. We’ve been having the carbon discussion for 30 years now (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came out in 1992!), and at least some of us were paying attention and made a plan to decarbonize our lifestyles during the last three decades. And for everyone who has, the Carbon Levy might as well not really exist. If you don’t burn, you don’t pay. Simple as that.
As I mentioned in another post on this topic, that “might” is doing a TON of heavy lifting in Higg’s argument.
AFAIK, no countries have stepped up to say they’d shut down coal fired plants if only they could get hold of more natural gas. China usually comes up in this conversation, but they already have a pipeline with Russia that supplies natural gas, and AFAIK it isn’t even at capacity yet. If China really wanted to replace coal with natural gas, they’d be doing it now with Russian gas, and wouldn’t have to wait the decade-plus it would take to get the infrastructure built to ship Canadian natural gas to them.
If Higgs draws a dick on his forehead I might give him $100. I probably won’t, and have never discussed any plans to do so, but who knows? I might!
I feel like they’re not going to outright kill it, but quill instead let it wither on the vine; aka die the death of a thousands cuts.
There will likely be more new functionality that won’t be backported. Things that work okay now will stop functioning correctly. They’ll just stop maintenance and wait for everyone to leave — when it does get shut down, it will happen with a whimper rather than a bang.
Honestly, I hate these memes. As an old school hacker/programmer who has been doing this for many decades, I can usually just start thinking in code and start dumping out everything I need from my brain through my fingers to the keyboard. I never copy-and-paste code from online for something I’m coding (I don’t count something like copying a script to do a quick shell task of some-sort; for something like Amazon’s directions for installing Corretto I’m not going to type all that out manually; and I don’t really consider that “programming”).
But as a tech manager (and former University comp.sci instructor), I know this happens more often than I’d prefer. But some of the worst code I’ve had to review has been copy-and-paste jobs where the developer didn’t understand the task correctly and jammed in something they found online as a quick solution. I get that I started in a generation where you had to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch (because the Internet crutch wasn’t what it is today) — but the fact that so many younger developers revel in the fact they copy-and-paste code on the regular makes me sad.
Truth being spoken here.
Yes, housing is expensive in Canada. The primary villain here? The Provincial governments. But they’re getting away with it scot-free while idiots blame “Trudope”.
Similar with the Climate levy. The biggest complaining Provinces have had years to put in their own carbon-pricing schemes to get out from under the Federal backstop, but decided to do nothing. Indeed, Alberta and Ontario had their own systems, but scrapped them because apparently they thought it was better to “blame Trudope” than to actually help their constituents by implementing carbon pricing schemes that would work for their needs.
And voters are letting the get away with it. And their lives won’t improve under Pollievre, because their Provincial leaders will keep pulling the same crap, and voters will continue to let them get away with it.
A day later, Higgs and Smith put forward similar ideas — arguing that if Canada exported more natural gas, it might be used to displace dirtier coal power in other countries.
That word might is doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here.
Do we have any actual evidence that China (or anyone else for that matter) would actually offset any coal plants with Canadian Natural Gas, instead of just burning that natural gas in addition to coal? Retrofitting a power plant for natural gas isn’t free, and China can already get lots of natural gas from Russia if they wanted (the Power of Siberia pipeline can handle 61 billion cubic meters per year, but only delivers about 23 bcm/year). Nothing is stopping China from moving from coal to natural gas — but there appears to be no real will to do so.
This argument from the two Prairie Premiers sounds a whole lot more like wishful thinking than actual policy.
Got a T-Mobile eSIM while travelling in the US last year to get around this. The eSIM was a great deal (can’t remember the specifics, but pretty cheap with a decent amount of data). I was making two trips to California and Georgia in the same 30 day window, so it was useful to have.
The only downside was that I couldn’t activate the eSIM before getting to the US, and LAX didn’t appear to have any WiFi while we were there (not sure if that was generally true for the time, or if it was just offline). So I wound up having to roam to get the eSIM, and to get a text message from the shuttle that was picking us up from the airport (as I had to give them that in advance, and didn’t know what my US number would be until I got there).
Still saved us some money, but it was a bit of a PITA to activate with no WiFi available at the airport.