Pharmaceuticals, plastics, and a fairly large amount of high-end electronics and machinery are directly imported. The bulk of Canadian goods still come via US ports, even adding a couple is unlikely to change that. The real sting is on the other end though. Canadian trade in things like lumber, metals, cereal grains and finished goods would struggle to find export markets anywhere near the size of the US.

In general, large trade barriers between a small nation and a much larger adjacent nation don't tend to go well for the smaller nation. If you believe otherwise then you should talk a bit to British folks about how Brexit has treated them so far.

It would be better to just sort this out, it's unlikely US trade policy doesn't shift in 3 years when Trumps gone. Remove the dairy tariffs to give him an ego boost and call it a day, most Canadians won't buy those products anyway currently out of spite.

There is the argument that this is functionally a tariff, which Canada is just calling a tax. And frankly it is. The thresholds were calibrated to hit foreign (mostly US) companies, and the implementation is designed to make those companies the "bad guy" when they inevitably raise the price of goods in Canada to cover the tax. Other places also have a digital services tax, and it's always designed to target US companies because they dominate the space. I mean, apply the same logic to Canadian aluminum... if Trump had announced a "big, beautiful" tax of 50% of American derived revenue from Canadian Aluminum refiners would that have been fine, while the the current tariffs aren't?

There are many, many protectionist measures instituted globally that are functionally tariffs, or at least are accomplishing the same thing as a tariff. It's pretty common in agriculture to have "health and safety" rules tailored to keep out foreign products, which conveniently get waived if there happens to be a shortage of a particular agricultural product. There are the kinds of tailored taxes on foreign companies discussed in this article. Or even something as simple as an artificial bureaucratic layer that holds up delivery of foreign goods too long for them to be useful. As stupidly as Trumps trade war has been executed there were legitimate gripes that protectionism and trade barriers were unfairly applied to US goods and growing in number.

In the end the Canadians can do whatever they want, its their country. But lets not pretend this isn't the same thing in spirit that Trump is doing, and it predates his election.

You should google/chatgpt "ELCC", and how it relates to wind, solar, and batteries. Anymore it's a multisurface calculation of what a type of resource is "worth" to the grid from a reliability perspective, both in isolation and in conjunction with multiple other intermittent technologies. ELCC values for small penetrations of wind/solar/batteries can be "ok", say 60% of rated capacity, but rapidly drop with increased build out. We're talking low single digits %. Versus nuclear, thats rock solid at 90+% by and large. All that to say, no, wind and solar do not provide baseload equivalent power. If they did, the ELCC math wouldn't work out like it does.

The reality is the power market structures are warped, and were designed by basically grain commodities traders (power is "perishable" by a certain logic, like grain) who didn't appreciate the idiosyncrasies of the energy industry. That reality has really become understood in the power industry, but changing those structures is hard and controversial. Which is why you see states in the US "subsidizing" nuclear power. Stories like this are examples of people "in the know" navigating what the experts are telling them is the reality, while balancing public perception.

The only way I can rationalize such an outwardly dumb decision is he legitimately doesn't know what the company will look like a year from now. So they're going to remove as many of the outside layers as they can to expose the core buisness, then as that reconfigures its the contractors headache to manage the impacts. Eventually when you hit a stable buisness model you can bring the work back in house.

Or... its to enable easy scrapping and selling of the company for parts if he can't get market traction. Less baggage and uncertainty in a sale.

Wildly undervalued if you don't know much about highly technical work. As someone that tried to manage humidity in a non-semiconductor lab to within the tolerances of the machines in the building, it's a fucking nightmare if the outside climate is humid. You run into issues like if you run too much air through the dehumidifier setup it makes drafts that fuck up the scales. Substantially easier to add water to the air IMO.

A very dry climate is kind of like having a natural vacuum... yeah you can manufacture an environment like that, but if you have it naturally it sure makes life easier.

Which... isnt true. And youre ironically proving why people should be skeptical of AI "news."

The Iranians have claimed damage to three hospitals, but have themselves stated it was secondary damage from attacks on nearby "workshops." Presumably for weapons or electronics components. Israel has not been accused of directly targeting hospitals in Iran, nor has the Israeli government stated they consider Iranian hospitals legitimate targets. That could change of course, as the Iranians blatantly targeted an Israeli hospital and the Israelis are not above a tit-for-tat.

Your AI seems to have mixed up attacks in Gaza, where hospitals have been considered valid targets by the Israelis due to the claimed presence of combatants in or under them. There's legitimate questions of proportionality in some of those strikes, but there's also hard evidence of fortifications under Gaza hospitals and video of firefights with militants in hospitals. Regardless its an entirely seperate issue from Iran.

And these are the kinds of mistakes AI makes frequently. I had a friend of mine try to prove to me AI was perfectly fine for reading the news by having claude summarize for him a long article (really blog) I had sent him, and posted the bullet points to "prove" he didn't need to read the underlying piece. It got about 60% of the basic premise, missed the core premise entirely (it actually concluded the opposite of it), and added a bunch of general internet discourse on the underlying topic as though it was in the article. It basically spit out something plausible that lined with what he expected to hear, but wasn't right.

That's not really how refiner credits work, it's just the popular narrative pushed by anti-farming interests. There's a very wide array of groups that would like to see commercial agriculture end in the US, for reasons as simple as "why don't we just take all that land and make it a national park!" Vegans in particular hate US farming, as they see it as enabling the consumption of animals. Unfortunately one of the giant reasons there is so much climate change skepticism in the American Midwest is the same old groups that were attacking rural people as evil for decades changed their messaging from "animal cruelty" to climate change, and the reflexive reaction was to discount it. Had the message been delivered from less adversarial sources with a plan for involving those communities instead of attacking them you might have seen a broader embrace of climate-positive policy. But I digress.

The US has some of the lowest agricultural subsidies of any industrialized nation. Subsidy for agriculture is fundamentally necessary: crops are perishable, and their production varies wildly based on environmental conditions. If you don't have some mechanism for subsidy during times of overproduction then people go bankrupt and land is fallowed, and suddenly in times of underproduction (drought, pests, whatever) you don't have enough food to go around. And since crops can fail very suddenly, sometimes well into a growing season, these effects are very unpredictable. The worst case scenario is people starve, and that was fairly routine in most nations prior to about 100 years ago.

The way the US manages this is not via explicit subsidy (typically), which is what most countries do (Look at Europe for example, the tv show Clarkson's Farm is a goofy look at this but the last episode of the first season really hammers it home). The US initially tried to manage production via mechanisms that took land out of production, sort of calibrated to what the government thought the country needed. Think payments to make marginal land into wildlife habitat rather than plow it. That practice was deemphasized under President Regan, where the idea shifted to production-maximalism and the government just bought and used surpluses. The idea there was basically to drive small farmer under in favor of hyper-productive megafarms... you know, because efficiency is all that matters /sarcasm.

Biofuel mandates really became an outgrowth of that production maximalist approach to agriculture (as are things like government cheese production to deal with milk surpluses). Ethanol and Biodiesel are ways to eat surplus. The "mandates" are actually extremely flexible, which is why fuel at a gas pump in the US will often say "UP TO 10% Ethanol." Why the "Up To?" Because sometimes that gasoline has very little ethanol in it. What ends up happening is blending requirements are routinely waived by the government depending on the price of the crops in question. If prices are below the cost of production for farmers the government will use ethanol blending to raise the prices to nearer to break even. If prices are very high already, the blending requirements get waived. It's a shock absorber. Unrelated, but functionally animal agriculture works the same way... when grain gets expensive animals are fed less grain, slaughtered earlier, and fewer young animals are raised, which takes meat out of production but increases the supply of staple grains.

Biofuels may very well be the answer to things like aircraft de-carbonization. There are many environmental interests that hate the idea of that, and would rather just see air travel decline entirely. When you look into the arguments against using biofuels they’re extremely cherry-picked. Typically they’ll reference that fossil fuels are used to power agricultural equipment, which is true but also not something intrinsic (there’s no reason you couldn’t transition agriculture to battery-electric production eventually, probably with smaller autonomous equipment rather than giant human driven machines). They’ll reference fertilizer use, which again is not intrinsic to producing grains and could be supplanted with cover-crops and non-fossil derived fertilizer. And finally they’ll complain that fermentation produces CO2, which is true but perfectly manageable. It’s not like it creates carbon atomically, at worst it’s a closed net-zero carbon loop and at best it’s an active carbon sink (you capture the CO2 off-gassing during fermenting and inject it into the ground). Ironically there have been attempts to create large CO2 pipelines from ethanol refiners that would run to North Dakota to inject into old oil wells, but “environmentalists” have fought it tooth and nail. Environmentalism has many, often competing, factions and goals.

Ultimately for things like aircraft there is a certain energy density required. The same with heavy equipment, rockets, whatever. Chemical fuels have a very high energy density, and are an obvious solution. Growing those fuels isn’t an unreasonable way to manufacture them. I’d guess that ultimately biofuels would be produced primarily from things like switchgrass, with grain biofuel filling the same role it does now: a sink for excess grain production.

Im not aware of anyone that keyed a tesla and got any serious charge. I am aware of people who set fire to teslas getting arson charges. The Trump administration tried to spook people protesting and blocking tesla dealerships by threatening domestic terrorism charges, but of course nothing came of that because its fucking ridiculous and a transparently corrupt abuse of power meant to try and save the buisnesses of a high profile ally.

If we start seeing mass job displacement from AI and robotics come too quickly without other economic avenues opening to take those workers, I have little doubt you'll see mass vandalism of those machines. Probably even attacks on datacenters and AI infrastructure. Probably won't change the outcome, but it'll be an outlet for rage.

Its wildly incorrect. California has about 40 GWh of batteries.

Mark Johnson, for the record, isnt a good source of information. He has made his career advocating shit other experts find laughable: 20 years ago he was claiming the wind technology of the day could power the US affordably without issues, which still isnt true today. His grad students regularly churn our what I'd consider highly misleading papers on reliability. I'd call him part of the new wave of "science advocates" who have a policy position and use their credentials to try and advance it on moral grounds.

Im glad California is blazing this trail, it saves other states the headache. But the batteries they have are really only useful for load shifting under ideal conditions, not for reliability. Displacing peaking gas will help a lot for global warming, but its far from a panacea. And dispatching those batteries is still an area of active R&D, its a legitimately hard problem to solve.

Teacher salaries vary wildly by state and location in a state. There are places where teachers make a perfectly fine living, and places their pay is mediocre. But in virtually every state the average teacher makes cash salary above the median household income for the area. Then theres the benefits (typically a very good pension/healthcare, decent amount of paid leave, extremely high job security), and the summers (mostly) off. It's not a bad gig at all.

Everybody thinks theyre underpaid, always. Im all for teachers making cash money on par with industry, provided they get the rest of what comes with that: year round work expectation, no pension, 3 weeks vacation, and constant job insecurity. You don't get high pay AND keep all the good benefits. And make no mistake, its this way on purpose. Because of the way the benefits are structured it heavily discourages industry people from switching to teaching later in their career. Tear down those barriers and the teacher shortages go away overnight... but a lot of existing teachers would suddenly find themselves competing with some extremely competent professionals for their jobs.

The real issue in my opinion, based on people I've known who left teaching early, is kids and parents suck. They're shit to interact with on average. People get into the profession thinking its one thing, and its a different thing. That happens in a lot of fields. The only super noticable disparity ive seen is if youre a math or physics teacher the starting salary gap is massive. If you get a degree in math and go teach high school, and your buddy gets a degree in math and goes into industry, the industry guy will make twice the cash money easily. And when youre 23 with student loans you notice how you cant afford shit while your buddy just got a new car. Thats a specific issue though, and not true of most other degrees. I've known chemistry majors working as chem technicians that made less than a teacher made when you factor in benefits.

Thats nonsense. Copyright was conceived on a fundamental level to protect and advance creative enterprise. It's not an archaic notion that need updating.

The real question is "should the creators of an LLM be allowed to profit on human creativity to the detriment of the humans doing the creating." Because that's what's happening. No LLM exists without human works. And most of the value comes from recent work. These kinds of things were fraught even when humans read a work and changed a few words to "transform" it, copyright has always been hard to quantify.

But it seems to me the line here is clear: if you use non licensed data the LLM cannot be monitized, and products of the LLM cannot enjoy copyright or be commercialized. Why should someone else profit on the backs of others without permission or compensation? And why should the weeping that "if you dont let us our business wont work!" be any more compelling than the guy selling unlicensed T-shirts outside a sports game?

And to the morons that say "well thats how humans learn why shouldn't an LLM do it" I say great! The LLM now owns it's outputs, no humans can. When you can convince humanity at large that the LLM is sentient and capable of licensing its own creativity you can purchase its output. Until then its a tool. And tools can't incorporate copyrighted material without licenses.

The AP1000 was supposed to be more standardized, but really just the reactor itself. At least when I was still dialed in to Vogtles construction one of the wildest sources of delays was outside of containment none of the building layout had been finalized. At one point when they were trying to figure out how to lay things out some genius had the idea to put the count room (the place you didn't radioassays on reactor samples) directly adjacent to containment. When the Radiation Protection folks found out they flipped, because there's more than enough flux through the containment wall to fuck up detection equipment and make life hell. So everyone got to go back to the drawing board to put the counting facilities on the other side of the building.

Add on top of that all the "learning experiences," like the reactor vessel imported from Japan literally blowing out the railroad bed it was so heavy during transport, and it makes perfect sense why that project ran so long. Vogtle and VC Summer were really prototypes. Unfortunately the knowledge gained will probably never be used. Cheap natural gas basically assured that.

Natural gas, especially in the east and central US, is absurdly cheap much of the time. It is weather dependent due to heating demand and pipeline constraints, but it's not at all uncommon to see gas prices dip below $2 per mmbtu. At those prices natural gas power generation with a combined cycle unit, even with all construction costs, is wildly cheaper than renewables with batteries, and usually cheaper than straight variable renewables with no batteries. Much less efficient peaking units are still in the ballpark of batteries however, partly because often when you need significant peaking capacity you're going to be in a higher gas price environment.

Anyway, for perspective about 10 years ago existing nuclear units attempted a modernization to compete with $3 per mmbtu gas, because at that time that was considered the "normal" price of gas in the US. Thats where the gas producers would like to be: really they're overproducing currently because shutting down production is costly and they're all trying to ride this environment out.

Natural gas power is the cost benchmark in the US. It's so cheap that Ive seen estimates that even if carbon capture was mandated on new CCs they would still be competitive in cost terms. Which is wild given the costs that technology would impose. Coal is currently surviving in the margin, being utilized heavily when gas prices spike (usually during a hard winter) and running close to breakeven most of the rest of the time.

There's actually one step further than this that I enjoy thinking about. All these big tech firms had erected moats of technical complexity around themselves, it was part of the logic behind paying for developers you didn't need just to keep the away from "the other guy." There's two possibilities out of this AI hype: either it's not real, and they're squandering huge amounts of resources, or it is real and they're now entirely exposed. If, for a few hundred dollars, I can hand requirements to an LLM in plain English and have it spit out mostly functional software, why would I bother paying for whatever non-tailored vendor garbage your company is producing? Maybe you can justify it on something that needs a bit of ubiquity like Excel, but shit like what Salesforce produces? Why bother paying them?

In the world these companies seem to be hyping it seems far more likely that any major player will begin to bring staff in-house to protect their (incredibly valuable) data, and develop their own tools since the development will be trivial. It'll just be one more competitive advantage, rather than something ancillary to the core business. I don't know if that means more or less developers overall, but it should scare the living shit out of anyone that makes software that doesn't involve substantial domain knowledge.

One thing to remember is even if the wage paid is $15/hr in the US any full time employment comes with a host of other taxes and obligations that are invisible to the employee but real to the company. When I've been involved in hiring the rule of thumb I was given was take the base salary and assume total cost to the company is 150% to 200% of that.

It's one of the reasons gig work is pushed so hard, you can circumvent a lot of that and push it back on the employee.