jeffmori7

I used to play video games a little when I was a teeenager, but I don't play anymore, too time consuming. But I am more and more into board game nowadays. My favorite is Carcassonne, Cathane is great also, and Ticket to ride. I recently played Patchwork, was very interesting also. The old Diplomacy is also nice, but time consuming too!

And if you like to follow the polls: http://www.tooclosetocall.ca/p/canada-2015.html and http://www.threehundredeight.com/

I would like to see a coalition personally. Unfortunately, it is not in our culture, but I think that with three parties scoring this high in the polls (even though NDP is sliding a little recently), we see the limitation of our strange parliamentary system. And I always like some representation from a party like the Green, and a more proportional system could let them play a more important role as a watchdog. Also, no matter what is our political view, I think Harper's Conservatives have been there a long time and have been through their political agenda.

OK, I'll respect the rule, one for each category. Love: Patagonia Hate: Bell Canada (though hate is too strong a word, just don't like them)

I used to read a lot of sci-fi also when I was younger. Those 3 Banks'novels are some of my favorites too :) Now, I'm trying to return to good sci-fi (so Stehenson) and I try to alternate between fiction and non-fiction, so a good polar, a biography of Musk, a good sci-fi novel, a book on investing, and so on.

I just started Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle yesterday! Another one to add to the pile then.

No matter what are anyone's political views, I would say that no one deserve to govern during 44 years in a democracy. This election really is historical, will be interesting to see how it could affect the federal elections this fall.

I would be curious to see the stats for Alberta alone... I think the diversified economy comes mainly from Ontario, Québec and BC.

I just saw that. Brings back great memories. So sad Banks is gone. I should read the Culture books I haven't read yet, but I think those pointed out by Liberty are the best choices for anyone who would like to discover this sci-fi space opera universe.

1-years return: 25.81% this year. Pretty happy with that, I had help from the exchange rate between $US and $CAD as most of my stocks are in $US. Big contributors were BRK, ATD.B, APPL,AIG-WT. No leverage used. I stayed away from the O&G and will continue to do so.

A good read in Nature on fracking: http://www.nature.com/news/natural-gas-the-fracking-fallacy-1.16430

Oh lucky you, enjoy Costa Rica, it is a wonderful country! I went there 2 years ago, and as much as I like discovering new places, I would also really like to return there someday!

Thanks for the Grantham letter, I had missed this one. Really a great lecture on oil.

I rather not take the chance, as we have other options

I'm confused as to what your position is here (and the general position of that Facebook group)... Does my position matter? :) Apparently, to many former classmates, it did. I received PMs asking when I became a Republican. (For the record, before moving to DC, I owned a Prius & tried to get my dad to buy a Nissan Leaf because he doesn't drive much anyway. My parents now drive my Prius. My position is in accordance with the stereotype of Prius drivers.) Yale's Business School (the group was set up for the 2014 & 2015 classes to communicate) has a lot of students who are joint degrees with their Forestry School and the entire school leans fairly eco-friendly. Amazingly, or perhaps predictably, once I revealed my personal position, the rhetoric toned down a notch. And yet, should it have? Nothing had changed in what I had said -- only the perceptions of who was saying it. Highly disappointing since we literally had a required class on avoiding these biases. I'm chuckling because your clarification is as clear as Alan Greenspan! Parsing all of the above, I guess you're on my side. Not that it matters, as you say! That was intentional. :) A more clear statement of my position would be as follows: Clearly, the world is warmer than it used to be. (Surface & Ocean.) It's stupid to claim otherwise. However, it's unclear whether this will necessarily lead to calamitous outcomes. It's similarly stupid to claim otherwise. The question I posed to the group, which went unanswered, and I guess I'll pose here as well is the following: Imagine a completely flat surface and a machine that drops grains of sand onto it one at a time. Over time, you'll build a bit of a sand pile. At some point, each additional grain of sand will either (a) do nothing or (b) cause a landslide. It is difficult to know (1) which grain of sand will do it, (2) whether a landslide will happen and (3) if a landslide happens the general magnitude of the slide. (In mathematical circles, this is an Abelian sandpile problem.) Now, this is a sandpile that exhibits self-organizing criticality with only two variables. Sand and gravity. If we can't figure this one out -- what makes us think that we can figure out the exact future states (or even probabilistic future states) for a much more difficult complex dynamical system, e.g. the climate? It's lunacy. The less sophisticated question (in the same vein) is that if a meteorologist can't tell me if it's going to rain 365 days from now, then what makes anyone think that a climate scientist can tell me what the world looks like 100 years from now. OK, I know this kind of debate rapidly become sterile, but still, I can't refrain myself to dive in one last time. I will try to answer merkhet question first and then adress my point of view on the subject. It would be so much easier for me to discuss about this in French, but I will give it a try, although it won't go as fluently as I would like. On merkhet landslide question, I must admit I personally know people who do this kind of modelling using GPU and that is fascinating to look at soil particles interacting together..anyway.. I think in this case, we know for sure that there will be at some point, a landslide, and that by keeping adding sandgrain, we make pretty sure it will happen. The faster we add sandgrains, the faster we get a chance to get into big trouble. With our idea of continuously pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, we are doing the same. But nobody forces us to keep adding CO2. The idea is not to know when there will be a landslide, by which grain, but to get a good overview of the probability of the landslide according to our action and to estimate what this landslide could look like. Knowing that, we can take an informed decision to mitigate this calculated risk and why not revert it if possible. That could be a reasonable approach, no? To everyone, my personal position on this matter is that considering everything we know so far about greenhouse effect, climate change and so on, I would rather not take the risk. I know the models are not perfect at all, but we can first look back on what we know. , So far, we have seen that greenhouse gas (let's simplify to CO2, or Co2 equivalent) are rising at a rate never seen in ages, we know there is great correlation between CO2 level in the atmosphere and average temperature in the atmosphere. So on a long term trend, there is quite no doubt that temperature will rise according to the increase in Co2 in the atmosphere. We also can measure quite accurately how much Co2 we pump in the atmosphere form our energy production, deforestation, transportation, agriculture, etc. We can then get a good estimate of Co2 emitted since the industrial revolution. So we know what we pump into the system, we know that this lead to a rapid increase in Co2 and we know that Co2 is quite well correlated to temperature. For me, this is quite dangerous just looking at this to pursue our action without questioning our habit. There are a lot of complex models out there looking at what could happen with this increase in temperature, but one thing is that they more or less all point toward the same direction. This should lead us to an increase in temperature, increase in the sea level, acidification of the oceans (already going on) and an increased probability of extreme events. Of course some change cold be positive, of course some will be negative. I'm not at all saying that the time we know is better and I just want to keep it that way. All I am saying is that observation and prediction from experiments and models show us an uncertain future, because everything else is changing at a timescale never seen before. There has been a lot of cycles in the history of the planet, but nothing happening at this rate. That is the great danger! Do we want to take the chance to wait, to be sure that nothing will happen if we don't change anything? We as a species have a formidable capacity of adaption, but what will happen to the biodiversity from which we got everything, no matter what you think. It could change all the food chains, all the landscape, deteriorate oceans so fast, etc. And, if we can tackle this big challenge could be a side question, because anyway, we will have to end our dependancy on fossil fuels as they are finite resources, like many resources we use in an incredible amount, and this is causing much more problems than GHG emissions like major healthcare problems, major environmental damages locally on site or elsewhere like in the case of oceans acidification. I would lie us to stop using petroleum as a way to produce electricity or move cars to keep it for plastic use and stuff like that. It is not like we can't do otherwise, today and in the future years. Why wait till it is too late, that the cost is incredibly high, because anyway, even if we stop emitting GHG today, there will be a lot of probable dangerous impact in the future according to today's models? All I am saying is that by trying to get out of our fossil fuel dependancy, we solve a lot of problems and in the meantime, we are reducing the risk of a high probability complicated future.

From Skeptical Science here : http://skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm Don't forge that climate is not weather guys, these are long term trends which are quite different.

Scott, I would think you make an error here. It is not because it worked out well for you than it would for everyone. I tend to think that statistically, people who drop out of school so young won't really succeed, they would proably have many problems just dealing with simple real-life situation because they would miss important skills like reading, writing and counting a bit. Education is statistically better for the whole population, even though there always will be some people that would have done better otherwise.

A decade or so ago there were volumes of articles expounding on the tectonic shift of jobs and entire industries being outsourced to emerging economies such as India, China, etc. Many of the changes indicated therein have come to pass, but the magnitude and impact of the “shift” has been more muted than was spoken of back then. Should the cost of solar power, as indicated in this article, achieve price parity with conventional electricity (and, subsequently, become more cost effective than conventional electricity) then the ramifications would look to be immensely more far reaching than the outsourcing trends noted a decade-plus ago. Major industries will shrink and others will grow. The influence on the world geo-political stage will be massive…a true game-changer. -Crip I concur. Its good to see you here again Crip. The price parity argument is nuts. The externalities of fossil fuel development and use are never taken into account whereas all the costs involved in solar are included. Take this example. A small city in Africa can only be reached by dirt roads, there is no pipeline, no decent fuel tanks, no pumping infrastructure, no transmission wires, and the oil/gas need to be imported. Whats cheaper in that situation? In the developed world we paid for the infrastructure over 3 generations for O&G. I have also read that it takes about a generation for a new energy technology to upset the old paradigm. Solar in PV, and concentrated mirror form has been around since I was kid. We are on the cusp of the point where it will become a much more significant power source very rapidly. That is not to say that other energy sources ever disappear. Wood still exists, as does coal. They just get overtaken by the newer source. Even the oil states are adding solar capacity. What would really work is for government to get out of the way and stop subsidizing the coal, and O&G industries. A good first start would be removing the tax benefits given to E&P companies, and charging coal companies the real cost of use of the infrastructure provided by society. +1

I will just answer with that: no one has ever said there wasn't local benefits to climat change. But the disadvantages are far more than the benefits, on a global scale. And there is a huge opportunity cost in not tackling those challenges right now. Just reread that please: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml

What have you been selling and why? This is much more interesting!

I just need a product like this: http://www.solarreviews.com/news/colored-solar-panels-address-concerns-of-aesthetics-historic-preservation/ Something like this might work for me, if they can get it to look more like roofing shingles. It is still pretty noticeable. http://www.dowpowerhouse.com/ Another style again, depending on your roof! http://soltechenergy.com/soltech-system/

I would have thought they would renovate an old Sears or Kmart store to get nice headquarters :)

One thing is for sure, it is that they talk a lot about this here in Quebec!

And the blog post from Elon Musk: http://blog.solarcity.com/silevo/

Yep, I think it makes sense when the brand is not strong. There was no need to preserve MidAmerican name, while See's or Dairy Queen, as pointed in the article, should keep their respective names. Which brand do you expect them to convert in the next few years?