Justin Trudeau hints at boosting Canada’s military spending

I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[Brad Sallows]

There are lots of things (capabilities, facilities) that could be purchased without hand-wringing over whether we are getting exactly the most useful capability at the least cost for the next 30 years. No-one is likely to guess the future that well, and chasing "what capabilities should we have" becomes a never-ending "safety concern" that can be thrown up as an eternal impediment to doing anything.

 

[daftandbarmy]

We should get rid of most plastics, especially single-use plastics. Unlike basically everything else, plastic does not truly degrade in the environment, it turns into microplastics which infiltrate the entire food chain and corrupt everything, ourselves included.

The papr bag scare was a whole lot of nonsense. Trees are easily renewed.

Speaking of taking plastic out of the food chain...

... this is simple genius in action IMHO

https://www.fastcompany.com/1662462/almost-genius-water-in-milk-cartons-rather-than-plastic-bottles

 

[Spencer100]

We should get rid of most plastics, especially single-use plastics. Unlike basically everything else, plastic does not truly degrade in the environment, it turns into microplastics which infiltrate the entire food chain and corrupt everything, ourselves included.

The paper bag scare was a whole lot of nonsense. Trees are easily renewed.

As a packaging engineer I totally disagree. Plastics have made modern life much better. NA food waste from farm to table is the lowest in the world because plastic packaging. Africa wastes huge amount of food before it gets to the table.

Plus I just said we should be using the molecule twice. One for plastics use then end of life as energy.

Mirco plastics is a problem but one that can be fixed. Plus Biodegradable is not what you think it is. Given a long enough time scale everything biodegrades.

Modern landfills are engineered to be inert as they can be.

 

[rmc_wannabe]

I would have agreed with your last para when I joined pre-9/11. I distinctly remember my dad saying “you won’t fight - who would attack us?” when I joined the Reserves.

That changed about three weeks after Basic.

I joined the RegF 2 months out of high-school in 06. We were in the thick of it in Kandahar and I had delusions of doing my bit for Crown and Country.

I've luckily made a half decent living out of it, but the initial drive was placed in romanticism and delusion. I just don't see it today with this new generation and that is both a good and dangerous thing.

People under the age of 25 have very little to look forward to. They have no way to get ahead in a job market plagued by talent saturation and low wages. They have no hope in home ownership unless their parents die off and will them the family home. They have very little leisure time to enjoy pass times and the thought of having a relationship or having children is laughable.

This is the person you want to recruit, now show them the crap situation the CAF has created:

-mediocre wages (not great, not terrible)
-inadequate living conditions (if any, good luck getting a PMQ or a Barrack room that isn't falling apart)
-short staffed and over tasked
-working with kit that is older than you are

The CAF used to be a way to get ahead. Now it's trading bad for bad. Unless we fix this, we aren't going to be able or retain or recruit folks and that comes entirely on Strategic vision.

 

[Spencer100]

Speaking of taking plastic out of the food chain...

... this is simple genius in action IMHO

https://www.fastcompany.com/1662462/almost-genius-water-in-milk-cartons-rather-than-plastic-bottles

That reads like an advert for Alfa Laval

 

[YZT580]

We should get rid of most plastics, especially single-use plastics. Unlike basically everything else, plastic does not truly degrade in the environment, it turns into microplastics which infiltrate the entire food chain and corrupt everything, ourselves included.

The paper bag scare was a whole lot of nonsense. Trees are easily renewed.

but it burns well. Properly engineered incinerator units can provide heat for entire neighbourhoods, don't need to give off any toxins and allow us to continue farming on the land being turned into permanent do not trespass zones. Countries such as Sweden don't have the luxury of wasting good land so they burn: it works

 

[daftandbarmy]

I joined the RegF 2 months out of high-school in 06. We were in the thick of it I Kandahar and I had delusions of doing my bit for Crown and Country.

I've luckily made a half decent living out of it, but the initial drive was placed in romanticism and delusion. I just don't see it today with this new generation and that is both a good and dangerous thing.

People under the age of 25 have very little to look forward to. They have no way to get ahead in a job market plagued by talent saturation and low wages. They have no hope in home ownership unless their parents die off and will them the family home. They have very little leisure time to enjoy pass times and the thought of having a relationship or having children is laughable.

This is the person you want to recruit, now show them the crap situation the CAF has created:

-mediocre wages (not great, not terrible)
-inadequate living conditions (if any, good luck getting a PMQ or a Barrack room that isn't falling apart)
-short staffed and over tasked
-working with kit that is older than you are

The CAF used to be a way to get ahead. Now it's trading bad for bad. Unless we fix this, we aren't going to be able or retain or recruit folks and that comes entirely on Strategic vision.

And it's a tough audience these days, apparently

Why are young people so miserable?​

They tally lowest life-satisfaction scores among all age groups of those 18 and older in Harvard-led study, reversal of results of past surveys​

Twenty years ago, life satisfaction surveys of those 18 and older showed the highest readings among America’s younger and older adults, with those in between struggling with jobs, families, and other cares of middle life.

Now, a Harvard-led study examining a dozen measures of well-being show younger adults tallying the lowest scores of any age group. Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and senior author of the study, said the results reflect not just a longer-standing mental health crisis among younger Americans that predates and was worsened by the pandemic, but a broader crisis in which they perceive not just their mental but also their physical health, social connectedness, and other measures of flourishing as worse than other age groups.

VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that should grab policymakers’ attention.

Why are young people so miserable? — Harvard Gazette

A Harvard-led study examining measures of well-being showed younger adults had the lowest scores of any age group.

news.harvard.edu

 

[Lumber]

Your post makes a lot of sense if you completely ignore the whole NATO piece…are we not a NATO member?

That's what I mean about a "major war". We have NATO responsibilities, but there will never be "enough" political well power to become the military power that everyone is talking about. There will be enough willpower to achieved level where NATO is not happy, but is also not trying to get us thrown out, and no more than that. Anymore would have the domestic population complaining: "Why are you buying more ship and a/c to defend Hungary when we have homeless people here everywhere?"

There’s no “tin foil hat” needed.

That was directed at those insinuating (I'm hoping jokingly) that Canada is no longer a fully independent nation, but has been so deeply infiltrated by the CCP that we really are just playing to the tune of their fiddle.

 

[Lumber]

Although Canada is huge geographically, we should not expect to be a world power. We just don’t have the population to justify the expenditures for a large sustainable military to handle any threats. Yet we do have an economy that ranks us as having perhaps the10th largest GDP in the world (depending on how you measure it). When you take that into account there’s no reason why Canada’s military could not or should not strive to be a respectable middle power.

Yes, there is a reason: average joe Canadian doesn't give a shit about being a "respectable middle power" if the cost of living is high. It's a gradient: enough people currently see the value in maintaining a strong military and having a say (to some level) in international affairs for us to be at our current level of military spending, but no higher than that. If we wanted more spending the gradient would have to be such that there are more people (than currently) who see these as important issues, but they don't exist because of the lack of existential threat to Canada. International trade effects the whole world; why is it on Canada's shoulders to protect SLOCs?

I'm the kind of person who would pridefully like to see Canada have a bigger military, but if I found out the government planned on doubling DND's budget and buying us a bunch of assault carrier/amphibs, I'd have serious concerns about 1. where is that money coming from, 2. what's it going to do to inflation, and 3. is that really more important than dealing with doctors shortages, housing prices, food and gas costs, etc...

 

[FSTO]

I gov just gave Volkswagen access to 13 B CAD to build batteries for the zero emission future, but:

Where is the plan to build up the energy sources to the required increase in demand? That needs to happen now to be on-line for 2035
Where is the plan to upgrade the energy infrastructure so that each home can charge a car (even in off peak hours which will cease to exist in this clean energy utopia) . That should have started yesterday..........No plans that I can see.
Where is the plan to increase and upgrade public transit (trains and buses) for those who cannot afford a car, or don't want to drive? If the Ottawa LRT, Greyhound's abandonment of rural Canada, and the never-ending plans to build HFR/HSR is the corridor are any indication we are years eons away from any tangible advancements.

What does this have to do with Defence Spending? Our country can't get moving on critical domestic infrastructure needs that has all levels of governments full attention and nothing is really getting done. Who thinks that they could really get anything done right for defence even if they were given all the money in the world.

 

[Eye In The Sky]

That's what I mean about a "major war". We have NATO responsibilities, but there will never be "enough" political well power to become the military power that everyone is talking about. There will be enough willpower to achieved level where NATO is not happy, but is also not trying to get us thrown out, and no more than that. Anymore would have the domestic population complaining: "Why are you buying more ship and a/c to defend Hungary when we have homeless people here everywhere?"

The government’s job is to inform the voters about commitments such as NATO. I believe they also have a responsibility to meet those commitments even if voter support is low.

Governing in this manner isn’t the main focus of this government though IMO.

That was directed at those insinuating (I'm hoping jokingly) that Canada is no longer a fully independent nation, but has been so deeply infiltrated by the CCP that we really are just playing to the tune of their fiddle.

Ahh. Ok I get that and would agree. Attempting to influence isn’t quite the same as that at all.

 

[Eye In The Sky]

why is it on Canada's shoulders to protect SLOCs?

We’re so incapable of doing that on our own, I hope no one in the world thinks we could.

I do think we should be able to provide a component of a TF that can do that, though.

 

[TacticalTea]

As a packaging engineer I totally disagree. Plastics have made modern life much better.

No denying that. But convenience should not be equated to necessity.

NA food waste from farm to table is the lowest in the world because plastic packaging. Africa wastes huge amount of food before it gets to the table.

Plus I just said we should be using the molecule twice. One for plastics use then end of life as energy.

@YZT580 says they can be properly burned, is that the case? If so, why don't we just burn it all instead of collecting garbage in landfills?

Mirco plastics is a problem but one that can be fixed.

How?

Plus Biodegradable is not what you think it is. Given a long enough time scale everything biodegrades.

Hardly relevant. Given a long enough time scale, planet Earth gets engulfed by the Sun and nothing matters.

 

[CBH99]

And it's a tough audience these days, apparently

Why are young people so miserable?​

They tally lowest life-satisfaction scores among all age groups of those 18 and older in Harvard-led study, reversal of results of past surveys​

Twenty years ago, life satisfaction surveys of those 18 and older showed the highest readings among America’s younger and older adults, with those in between struggling with jobs, families, and other cares of middle life.

Now, a Harvard-led study examining a dozen measures of well-being show younger adults tallying the lowest scores of any age group. Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science and senior author of the study, said the results reflect not just a longer-standing mental health crisis among younger Americans that predates and was worsened by the pandemic, but a broader crisis in which they perceive not just their mental but also their physical health, social connectedness, and other measures of flourishing as worse than other age groups.

VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said that should grab policymakers’ attention.

Why are young people so miserable? — Harvard Gazette

A Harvard-led study examining measures of well-being showed younger adults had the lowest scores of any age group.

news.harvard.edu

I’d argue this was the predictable result of a few years of absolutely not knowing if you’d wake up and society would be locked down again, the 24/7 blatant fear mongering of the media, etc during the pandemic…

And the 24/7 extreme partisanship of the media as a whole, an extremely high cost of living, home ownership being guaranteed to be out of reach for most ppl unless they inherit a house or have serious help, and a society that seems fixated on catering to a noisy 1% that creates new problems while ignoring the problems we already had.



If we (as a collective society) just focused on the core basics of what a healthy society should look like, and stopped in wasting resources on noise & nonsense, I think that would have a huge impact on the mental well being of everybody, including the young adults.

 

[YZT580]

@YZT580 says they can be properly burned, is that the case? If so, why don't we just burn it all instead of collecting garbage in landfills?

How?

Simple answer is optics. If you go back several decades they started to build incinerators (the first in Brampton, I believe) but the environmentalists screamed blue murder and the press pushed the pollution notion even though the plant emissions were practically zilch. The other problem is positioning. In order to take advantage of the heat, the system must be located close by where the heat is to be used and nobody wanted an incinerator in their backyard. The heat could also be used to generate electricity but at the time Ontario had an abundance of cheap reliable power and more systems in the works.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Another throwaway hypothesis: young people are miserable because modern technology shoves the best of modern living in front of their noses every day, as if it were something every high school graduate could immediately aspire to. Also, the gulf between what one starts out with and what one reasonably achieves by the end of working life is greater than it used to be.

Expectations exceed reason.

 

[Furniture]

Another throwaway hypothesis: young people are miserable because modern technology shoves the best of modern living in front of their noses every day, as if it were something every high school graduate could immediately aspire to. Also, the gulf between what one starts out with and what one reasonably achieves by the end of working life is greater than it used to be.

Expectations exceed reason.

Don't forget that large numbers of them are also told that they should be ashamed of their country, their culture and their race...

 

[TacticalTea]

I’d argue this was the predictable result of a few years of absolutely not knowing if you’d wake up and society would be locked down again, the 24/7 blatant fear mongering of the media, etc during the pandemic…

And the 24/7 extreme partisanship of the media as a whole, an extremely high cost of living, home ownership being guaranteed to be out of reach for most ppl unless they inherit a house or have serious help, and a society that seems fixated on catering to a noisy 1% that creates new problems while ignoring the problems we already had.



If we (as a collective society) just focused on the core basics of what a healthy society should look like, and stopped in wasting resources on noise & nonsense, I think that would have a huge impact on the mental well being of everybody, including the young adults.

For the youth, pandemic yes, politics to an extent, but I think much more has to do with social media and the climate panic.

 

[rmc_wannabe]

Oh yes... Its the social media! Damned internets and bleep bloops ruining the youth. Let's lump in Rock n Roll music and the Gutenberg press while we're at it.

Could it be that previous generations were able to enjoy growing up in Post-War prosperity, got educated without incurring monumental debt first, developed systems and barriers to help maintain their wealth that they themselves weren't subject to (Credit scores came out 5 years after my folks bought their first home on a good word from my mom's banker father), sold off union jobs to cheaper markets like China and Mexico, and all while they made a wage that would be equivalent to 320K in today's money.

Bootstrapping your way to the top helps when you're starting off halfway there already. It also is impossible when the bootstraps you're trying to pull up are on concrete shoes; shoes fitted by design to keep the status quo .

Its not an unreal expectation to make enough money to afford a home after a few years working. Its not an unreal expectation to want to have luxuries like food or leisure time. Its not an unreal expectation to want a chance to enjoy a similar quality of life to what you enjoyed as a child, as an adult.

Its a peasant mindset to believe that it's anything other than greed that has the majority of Canadians suffering in our current economic climate.

Translate that to the CAF, and yes... Folks aren't flocking to CFHD or Economic Increase wages because...well...they moved the bar from under the joists to the subfloor. This Recession isn't filling uniforms because people aren't desperate anymore: they're apathetic.

We as a country have given up on making a better lives for ourselves because it's no longer attainable. We as a CAF no longer offer that as an avenue either, so why are we so shocked as a CAF when we are down 16000 pers.

 

[YZT580]

Simple answer is optics. If you go back several decades they started to build incinerators (the first in Brampton, I believe) but the environmentalists screamed blue murder and the press pushed the pollution notion even though the plant emissions were practically zilch. The other problem is positioning. In order to take advantage of the heat, the system must be located close by where the heat is to be used and nobody wanted an incinerator in their backyard. The heat could also be used to generate electricity but at the time Ontario had an abundance of cheap reliable power and more systems in the works.

For those who are interested, look up /smartcitysweden.com. It shows what can be done