JamisonM

There were lots of arrests, lots of convictions, some fleeing to Cuba and subsequent detentions. Nobody in the Chénier cell the precipitated the crisis was let off on entrapment or, as far as I know, ever alleged entrapment. They regarded themselves as patriots and I believe they would have found the idea very offensive.

None of this of course has anything to do with Justin Trudeau and the fact that the FLQ members negotiated passage to Cuba seems to undermine this weird Castro thing too.

A sincere thank you for this reply.

It matters in terms of if you shift the argument from "volatile instruments cannot be used for pricing" to "volatile instruments have prohibitive costs that make using them for pricing very impractical" too, right?

Your example that you could price in bitcoin and then structure your sale offer in a way that 90% of the proceeds translate to a particular USD amount and the remainder are at risk to Bitcoin volatility is interesting to me because I think of it in terms of a Real Estate transaction. I offer my house at a price that translates to $100k USD in bitcoin and, for simplicity's sake let's say someone instantly purchases it. Now the deal is done but there is a time for all the paperwork, land title transfer, bitcoin is held in escrow, etc.. so the instant the deal is signed I buy some kind of option that ensures that the 90% of the bitcoin amount will be 90K USD when the transaction is consummated. That has a cost, right? And then if the deal falls through that cost and more is lost, right?

So those costs lower the value of my asset, so it is more than convenience is my conclusion. You agree with this, right?

If you price asset X in crypto in the market and then buy options on USD to ensure that your sale price will be redeemable for a certain amount in USD in the future if it sells then aren't you really just pricing in USD? And then suffering a loss on your USD options if the asset doesn't end up selling?

Please explain, sorry I did not hear about this.

My recollection is that we had that once incident in Germany with 02, but never really heard how much was lost and it was the result of a bad policy at 02 that they fixed and was particular to 02.

I am aware of attacks that state/very sophisticated actors can use to intercept SMS messages but that's a serious edge case for a normal person, right?

I dislike this being spelled out in terms of "increasing yield" as it is actually more about managing quality. Pre-harvest applications of glyphosate are mostly a thing of the past in wheat anyway, the varieties dry down better now - it was mostly a artifact of the Canadian transition from drying crops in windrows to leaving them stand. The genetics have caught up now.

The article linked does highlight a very important point without really enlightening readers about the history, GMOs were never about higher yields. Higher yields have always come from conventional plant breeding. The common misconception is that plant genomes are simple and we can manipulate them at will but the truth is that plant genomes are way, way more complex than animal genomes and we mostly have no idea how plants work.

GMO's are about specific pathways that we can understand that dictate the reactions is specific conditions, very narrow manipulations of a plant's metabolism, that we mostly discovered by accident.

The incredibly complex genomes of plants coupled with the incredible variety of plants out there to cultivate means that it will take a giant leap of technology geared towards understanding plant genomes that will in turn allow the effective application of technologies like CRISPR for manipulating plant genomes.. and that is decades away at best. I hope to live to see it!!

There are no varieties of Wheat, Oats, or Barley registered in Canada that a resistant to glyphosate.

Roundup is a lot cheaper than Axial Extreme + MCPA or Velocity M3 or Tandem or Rexade.. and, TBH, Roundup isn't tha good at killing a lot of the weeds that those other products kill very well. It's just not as simple as you might think.

If farmers don't want to grow GMO/glyphosate resistant crops they have options, I personally grow mostly non-GMO crops and make plenty of money doing it. Basic economics applies to GMOs like like it applies to microchips or flip-flops and the capital owners (in this case land owners) have agency in this process.

I would be extremely interested in the research that validates that because it is not consistent with my experience.

Greening up the energy sources for vehicle production should just be next on the agenda!

I feel a lot of sympathy for the officers referenced in the article and their personal stories seem very genuine and troubling.

I have no idea how to "solve" the more general problem that seems to be the thesis of the article. Anyone can see that the political valence of modern police forces in the US as expressed by their unions is now so hostile to a majority of the people being policed it seems entirely untenable. And in places like New York City that is despite the force getting better at reducing violent incidents with residents over the last decade or so. The very extreme bunker mentality expressed by police unions likewise make them bad-faith actors in any attempts to improve the relationships involved here.

The Newark success story seems like the solution: https://www.nj.com/news/2021/01/newark-cops-with-reform-didn...

Of course that sure makes it seem like my original position that "larger forces" would probably be better look quite incorrect, it would be hard to imagine implementing a reform like Newark's if a regional police force were in need of reform with multiple stakeholders across jurisdictions to convince and satisfy. I do think that I would really love some journalism that goes deep into what other forces think of the Newark reforms and the results at a union & officer level.

Back to the original article, some of the numbers here are bit misleading, I found this article:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/18/us/police-reform-year-of-reck...

"The retirement bubble is bursting

There's another, older, reason behind so many officers leaving the force: the 1994 Crime Control Act, a controversial law overseen by Joe Biden in the Senate and signed by Bill Clinton, which provided $7.6 billion in federal funding for tens of thousands of police officers.

"All these cops are coming up for retirement now," said Ivonne Roman, one of those so-called "Clinton Cops" who retired as police chief of Newark on April 1. "This past April alone 200 cops retired in Newark. This was always coming regardless of Covid or the protests.""

Nearly 10% of the officers in the US are apparently eligible for retirement in the US as of the end of 2020, and with the risks of COVID-19 I can see why you would see a large uptick in resignations regardless of any other circumstances. Not that this takes away from the very real experiences that other officers are finding pushing them out of the policing earlier than they would otherwise like.

Still lots of natural gas heating though.

There is a lot of room for greening at the point of service through geothermal and the like, lots of room for efficiency improvements too. The economic incentives are aligned as well, every ounce of savings in-province means export dollars in on green energy exports.

I made the absolutely correct assessment that the balance of probabilities was strongly in favour of the idea that mixing vaccines would be at least as effective as getting the same shot twice. A really good example of taking a most obvious path.

There are lots of jurisdictions that have done a very good job doing just very obvious things that work. Pretending that recent challenges or flare-ups negates the enormous areas under the death and hospitalisation curves to this point for these places is another example of obvious dishonesty in your arguments. This is like when Trump said "South Korea I hear isn't doing that well anymore" when the epidemic was raging in the US and SK was trying to get a daily case count in the hundreds under control.

As well citing the powerful flouting the rules as some excuse to not have rules is doubly dishonest and silly.

Australia's "draconian" rules look pretty good to me, under the draconian rules I am living under I can't go to a comedy club - I could in Melbourne. And if my neighbour lived in Melbourne I presume that the gall bladder surgery that he's had delayed 3 times because the hospitals are full would be done already. I live in place that effectively cancelled Mother's Day on the Friday in a bout of such stupid incompetence that seemed almost perfectly designed to bankrupt restaurants after weeks of warnings from the doctors and the media that the hospitals are literally filling up. The correct path in that instance was obvious, the government refused to take it and now I am in fact still living under draconian rules that could have been relaxed weeks ago if timely action had been taken.

If you want an example of a jurisdiction that has hardly any advantages and many, many disadvantages I would point you towards Atlantic Canada - a highly import dependent economy that is very integrated with the US and the rest of Canada, strained healthcare system at the best of times, and a very old population. Look at their results, moderate travel restrictions, reasonable enforcement, high levels of public engagement. It wasn't even very hard for them to do it, they just had to make the choice and did so.

Most governments actually haven't followed the most obvious path in much of anything to do with this virus, that has been the source of most of the ruin.

Go get vaccinated.

Go ahead and wait for "absolute proof" or some other absurd standard to believe something about a novel virus to make up your mind, whatever. You concede in your comment "as well as some amount of reduced transmission", give it up already!

All along following the most obvious path that evidence has lead towards proven to be fruitful, here is another case.. in case you have missed it.

If you think that the hospitals just magically emptied out and the virus is still circulating at the same rate as before vaccinations started in every jurisdiction that has significant vaccination rates you are hopelessly lost.

But I know you are not hopelessly lost, you are just not engaged in an honest discussion.

Look ay the case numbers in the nations that are vaccinating at a high rate, if you don't know how to draw appropriate conclusions from that data then obviously you are not interested in forming an honest opinion.

The evidence is just sitting out there, everywhere, you don't even need a proper study.. although there are also many of those!