• 13 Posts
  • 338 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • When I go to do road reconstruction, enormous amounts of effort (and money) are spent avoiding underground utilities. In the event they can’t be avoided, the municipality is on the hook for (generally) half the relocation cost.

    And they dont have to pay to have their stuff there in the first place.

    The key part in this argument -

    Guelph Coun. Leanne Caron says many of those agreements were signed decades ago, when natural gas was treated as a public good and Enbridge was still a Crown corporation. Today, Enbridge is a for-profit company and Caron says the old rules no longer match current economic, environmental or planning realities.

    That basically sums it up. Turn back to a Crown Corp and continue gaining free access, or pay like the private corp you are.

    Locally, as discussed in the article, they can use it to prop up small scale green infrastructure grants/loans which help further reduce the use of those gas pipelines, and reduce upsizing or new installation requirements.



  • NYC has ~3.75mil housing units.

    Based on your 5amp draw, thats 600w, which a bit on the low side, but we can use it as an average. Assuming most (75%) of residences have AC units, 2.775 million AC units try to run at the same time, using 1665 MW.

    Also, please stop using that 150MW usage of times square, particularly if you’re taking it from GoogleAI. I cannot find ANY data supporting that (see possible originating claim for its use here).

    Data instead suggests ~35MW draw for the billboards, using a huge overestimation of the draw (since it assumes all buildings in times square have the same number/size of billboards as times square tower, which is false). This is ~2% of the energy required/used by AC units (not including starting draw), which is tiny.

    Its worth us pushing for, but lets be clear about what kind of impact that will have on the grid.



  • I appreciate you finding that article - interesting one.

    I’m very much amateur curler, and can’t see how that tiny touch would impact it, but maybe it does at that level of competition.

    Using a perfect shot to stop on the button with no spin, and energy= all kinetic (1/2mv2) =friction energy(F*deltaX), we get a release speed of 1.8m/s (with a .006 coefficient), and a 2.98m/s speed (with a 0.016 coefficient).

    Using the same equation, I go ahead and rerun the number, but adding a distance of 0.1m, a value I used as a good approximation of a reliable accuracy of an Olympic throw, and a time of 0.2s (the approximate time I estimated based on the video), which means a deltaX2 of 0.36m, or 0.596m.

    1/2mv2+fapplieddeltaX2 = ffrictiondeltaX Fapplied comes out to 0.326N to 0.526N which is a miniscule amount.

    That seems to indicate that a tiny touch DOES have the potential to make a significant difference. Some sources say 0.25 to 0.5N is required for a keyboard press, so its roughly on par with that

    But, how much of a difference does the sweeping make on stone speed? Its easy to say that tiny change can impact things, but how does it compare to, say, sweeping hard vs not sweeping?

    This study shows a sweeping change of 45+/-8mm. Thus a change of 25% on top of that is not insignificant.

    So the last question is, does it make sense for someone to train specifically by cheating this way rather than doing it right and just pushing off with a more accurate force? That’s likely going to be subjective, but seems difficult to me.

    Who knows, maybe this is a crutch and it is making a difference. Sounds like they need to stop doing it any case, whether a way they’ve trained or not. Or wear a camera showing they don’t touch the rock and just hover their finger behind it.


  • The problem I have is with how productivity is measured. Either GDP or GNI are both negatively impacted by positive planning and bureaucracy, but are driven positively on paper by cheap, breakable goods requiring regular repairs and replacement.

    For example, City/designers of a road take an additional 500 hours to do design work which provides an increase of 10 years in lifespan. Now that doesn’t need to be repaired for longer, meaning less future costs (driving down the cost side), while at the same time increasing the hours spent. This has a negative impact on GNI, but is actually a GOOD thing by any rational persons view of the situation.

    Or someone produces a set of clothes at a reasonable price that lasts twice as long. If people all move to that product, our GNI would drop despite that being a positive change.

    Or thousands of frivolous or stupid lawsuits due to problems avoided by proper planning and/or bureaucracy show up as a benefit to GDP/GNI despite being a waste of time and money.

    Using productivity as an end measure misses a lot of important points and measures that a modern society should be aiming for.




  • I can’t say I’m too surprised. I’m not involved in the auto sector in anyway, but the media I’ve seen about it with respect to Canadian manufacturing has been all negative - US companies or US owned companies pulling their manufacturing out of Canada despite deals made (looking at you Stellantis). If our auto sector is diminishing/pulling out, what do we have to protect?

    That being said, I’d like to see more manufacturing jobs here as part of that deal, but I’m entirely uninformed on how that would work or what it would look like.







  • This reeks of the same type of stuff as “just get outside to cure your depression” or “have you tried just not thinking like that?” for mental health issues.

    If someone could be reached by telling them “just reach out, its that simple”, they weren’t the ones we need to be reaching. For sure it’d help, and there may be some people this resonates to. If so, great for them. But we have a major problem with isolated men, and those usually aren’t ones who this will be helpful for, any more than an article addressing the mental health crisis by saying “just try more” solves that problem.

    I think we need to be reaching out, but IMO the focus isn’t on using words that are incredibly loaded, particularly for those people we’re trying to reach and connect with. Those of us who are doing better should be reaching out, like the author said, and making those connections, but that won’t solve this loneliness crisis.