tunetardis

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.

fwiw it does actually tell you where your polling station is, which I was confused about after finding conflicting info online.