Man that is depressing. I know people like this too, alas.

An election hasn’t even been called yet but I’ve already seen a Conservative attack ad. In it, they refer to “Carbon Tax Carney” as being a sneaky character with conflicts of interest.

I mean wth. Carney ended the carbon tax as one of his first acts in office. (Not that I had anything against it, but whatever.)

And let’s talk about conflicts of interest for a moment. Poilievre refuses to get a security clearance to get briefed on foreign meddling in Canadian political campaigns which was deemed urgent by CSIS. They decided to make an exception for him and offered the briefing regardless but he basically screamed LA-LA-LA I don’t have to listen to this!

The only conclusion I’ve been able to draw from all this is that he and/or his party are the beneficiaries of said foreign interference and he wants plausible deniability in case it surfaces. It would also explain his reluctance to have embedded press following him around digging into things.

I work with 32MHz microcontrollers at work and you can do plenty with them. It’s a different world from say general CPUs where speed is king. You’re often more concerned about timing reproducibility than outright clock rates. There are also considerations about power consumption, electrical noise, functioning in extreme environments, etc. that may inform your decision to go with one controller over another.

Trump doesn’t seem to understand that you can’t just uproot an entire industry and relocate it someplace else overnight. So really, the only choice aluminum-dependent industries have short-term is to pay the damn tariff and keep on importing. Ironically, Canada itself has to pay the tariff too because most canning plants are in the US, and we’re no more able to ramp up canning here than the US can ramp up aluminum refining. Changes like that take significant time and financial investment.

I think it was in the late 90s when a vicious ice storm took out power lines everywhere and the whole downtown core was plunged into darkness for the better part of a month. Fortunately, out where we lived in the suburbs, the power mostly ran underground and was restored pretty quick.

But then my wife got a panicked call from a distant relative who said she couldn’t reach her daughter studying at the university and could we look in on her? So we found her and offered her the guest bedroom for as long as she needed it.

At first, it seemed to be working out? Then it began to emerge that she was some sort of evangelical Christian who was frustrated that we were not eager to convert. I sort of thought taking in a refugee was a fairly Christian thing to do, but whatever.

Eventually, she demanded I take her back to the dorm. I told her downtown is still dark and cold, but she said “I don’t care. You guys are so boring!” So I carefully drove her back around downed trees and power lines and dropped her off.

I felt pretty bad about it and we prayed she’d be ok. A couple of weeks later, the relative called again and thanked us so much for taking care of her daughter and that we went way beyond the call despite how things turned out.

This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.

In Sweden, about 40,000 users have joined a Facebook group calling for a boycott of US companies – ironically including Facebook itself – which features alternatives to US consumer products.

The Made In Canada Facebook group now has 1.2 million users, which is pretty insane considering the population of the whole country is 41 million.

He seems to have manufactured quite the crisis. Is this what he meant by bringing manufacturing back to America?

Lately, I’ve been listening to The Martian. I’m kind of a sucker for synthy orchestral compositions and that soundtrack is just so hauntingly beautiful.

Living in Ontario Canada, I immediately think of things our premier Doug Ford has done or is trying to do. Right out of the gate, he tore down a wind farm near me that was 90% complete and had to pay millions in legal fees for breaking the contract on the taxpayer’s dime. More recently, he’s on a rampage to tear out bike lane infrastructure and build some giant tunnel under an already huge highway to expand its capacity.

Is it not a net benefit to China in that the US drawing inwards expands their global influence? And they must be laughing at what carnage Trump is inflicting on the North American auto sector at a time when China is surging ahead with EVs.

This highlights the folly of trying to lock down the Canada-US land border. If you really wanted to cut down drugs and human trafficking, you’d focus on ports of entry to the continent. The border is just way too long. Only an idiot would try to police its full length. If you think it’s only the 4000 miles from Maine to Washington State, you’re forgetting that extra 1500 miles with Alaska.

Oh, we’ve been metric for most of my life, though I vaguely remember when the big push happened in Canada. It was in the late 70s and iirc was supposed to be a coordinated North America-wide transition, but then the US backed out. Canada largely followed through.

I remember getting fresh new textbooks at school with metric everywhere and all the road signs switching to kph. The weather forecasts switched to Celsius. There was a period there when I related to temperatures around freezing better in C and indoor temperatures in F because our thermostat still read F.

Some units involving cooking measures, building materials, and paper sizes remain non-metric in Canada. This is likely because we still need things to be interoperable with the US. One funny thing I remember though is that even before our switch from gallons to litres, we still had to do a conversion because we used imperial gallons that were slightly larger than the US ones!

As repulsive a notion as this is, I think if there’s a lesson to be learned from the likes of Putin, it’s that Trump can be bought. Even Tim Cook realized this in throwing a token million bucks his way just to get him off his back. Whatever his price is, it’s less than the cost of an international trade war.

I think it’s worth keeping the communication channel open? Trump 2.0 is definitely less mentally there than in his first term, and he may well forget some ultimatum he levelled only a couple of days ago.

This is not to say that Canada or any other country (or even US state or federal agency, for that matter) should pin their hopes on him coming to his senses in a brief moment of clarity. Absolutely keep up whatever efforts are already underway to resist, stymie, and work around what he dishes out.

I only tried Beyond Meat once when A&W came out with their Beyond Burger. At first I thought “Hey this is not bad?” But then after a minute or so, I noticed a kind of aftertaste I didn’t care for.

I guess these days, they make other things like sausage and chicken substitutes, and I haven’t tried those. But there are a lot of other non-meat burger options these days.

The “Made in Canada” labels typically say “from domestic and imported ingredients”, though they rarely specify the country of origin for the imported parts. That’s a bit annoying, but I’ll buy it anyway. At the end of the day, I guess my motivation to support fellow Canadians outweighs that to boycott and wish ill on Americans. I’m just too tired of vindictive people to be one myself.

I do agree with you that summer is overrated. I don’t hate it per se, but feel it not up to the hype. There are things I dread about the summer. The bugs (particularly ticks with their lyme disease which seem to be everywhere now), the allergies, the heat waves with their oppressive humidity and crappy air quality, the anxiety-inducing state of my yard, and in general, just becoming a sweaty mess after performing even the most minor of errands.

It’s not all bad though. I appreciate the longer daylight hours, the improved fresh produce, the better motor control when not having to wear heavy clothing, and not slipping all over the place on the ice.

I guess I feel every season has its pros and cons, yet somehow summer in popular culture enjoys this vaunted reputation above all the others which may be undeserved?

Oof.

Or oeuf, as we sometimes say in Canada.

Thanks, I’ll give that a shot.