As you correctly point out, it’s probable that Canada’s associate membership will result in an EEA-lite relationship with the European Union. I can see the engagement being sectorial.

It’s going to be very hard for the Canadian economy to escape Washington’s regulatory power (Quebec’s French language consumer regulation being actively disputed by the US in trade negotiations is illustrative of this), but an associate membership will set up pathways of closer integration with the EU than having a simple bilateral relationship. It will probably also give Canada more leverage in future talks with the United States (and Mexico).

Obviously, none of this would have happened had Trump not pursued maximalist trade war aims coupled with an inflammatory rhetoric about Canada’s sovereignty. Canada ending up closer to the EU as a result of this (“integrated” within the EU!) is no doubt among the worst American soft power debacles of the postwar era

Hopefully you’ll one day reach your goal of having to send physical mail to sign online petitions.

Because getting third parties to be more competitive requires getting a better system than a Westminster/FPTP electoral system.

Right-sizing cars is the cheapest, most rational option for space and public money. There is no reason not to do it other than wasting precious public and private resources into building more parking spots and repairing road infrastructures more often.

The Russian impulse to centralize makes Dead Hand a certainty.

“In that case, someone other than the pencil ought to do that job, don’t you agree?”

Removed by mod

Good. Social media addiction rates are five to ten times those of gambling, and yet we protect those under 18 from accessing those. There is also a strong correlation between heavy social media use and suicidal ideation.

Just FYI, big tech opposes this. Meta is flooding European digital advertising with “Instagram for teenagers”, posturing that parents can implement parental controls on who teens can communicate with, as if that were the issue we’re trying to fix.

Age verification is fine but it needs a proper e-ID public platform (similar to the ones used in Europe for e-democracy) which can limitedly share whether you pass the age check or not.

The reason for this is that social media has similar addiction rates as gambling, where you you should be asked your age at the door if you do.

What a beautiful success story. It brings me so much joy knowing there are so many good, determined people doing so much work like this in the world

It’s fair to point out that distribution has its own dilemmas, as does storing excess energy. But those are secondary in my view. As far as public policy goes, given that nuclear energy are big public expenditure endeavors, in my view the economics need to make sense to the public to justify nuclear power generation.

Another factor is, of course, time. Is it worth investing in nuclear if the objective is to cut GHGs by X year, when we know a nuclear plant would take Y years to come online?

One big unknown is the total amount of electricity consumed. If the assumption is a relative decline or stable amount of global demand in the future, then nuclear makes limited sense, whereas a spike in demand, possibly caused by unmitigated AI energy demand, could warrant recalculating the cost-effectiveness of nuclear energy.

How so? Shouldn’t our societies aim to produce the most cost-beneficial energy? Also, my opinion is based on a range of economic indicators, including Australia’s CSIRO’s calculations for nuclear energy prices in kWh vs other renewable prices per kWh. I am of course excluding fossil fuels (obviously nuclear energy beats that with respect to GHGs, but drops the ball when matched against scalable renewables like solar and wind).

Did you pick that up from the Russian state media you share everywhere or from Western conspiracy websites?

Nuclear energy is expensive to generate compared to its green competitors. Therefore, it’s a waste of time and money to focus on it at a time when renewable energy is currently cheaper to produce, knowing that the gap between nuclear and energy is projected to widen even more.

Even the original quote isn’t from Twain. He misattributed it to British PM Disraeli, but the saying originated after Disraeli’s death.

A bit ironic given the quote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/06/22/lies-statistics/

Toy Story 5 is on track to earn $1.2B theatrically worldwide compared to $1B for Toy Story 4. Not sure what downward trend you’re talking about, given that movie theatres never fully recovered from the streaming rise + pandemic double whammy.