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https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat/status/690546464511098880 Ok cool. How can I help?
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# ? Jan 24, 2016 21:44 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:25 |
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Eej posted:I'm actually kind of curious as to what Canada could/should have done to diversify it's economy. I know there's the old story of Toyota preferring Canadian workers over American ones because we don't need a picture diagram on how to assemble cars or whatever but aside from big bulky things like cars (which has been gutted due to our currency being highly valued for such a long time anyway) what niche are we supposed to occupy manufacturing? You've got China making basically making everything from mundane plastic parts to iPhones and high tech manufacturers putting all their new fabs in South East Asia. We got brain drain because software dev is so much more lucrative across the border. It doesn't seem like there was anything we could've done anyway aside from make the pain less by lowering reliance on oil. At this point the best we could hope for would be to incubate some new manufacturing that might be globally competitive in the coming decades. You can't just snap your fingers and create an innovative economy over night. A quick look at Germany or other northern European economies indicates that at least in theory it is possible to have a 21st century economy with high wages and globally competitive manufacturing. Of course Canada is really different from Germany both in terms of our trade relationships and our domestic economy, so the comparison only goes so far, but the fact is it's possible to be a globally competitive manufacturer without paying poverty wages. Honestly though, our biggest problem is that we have a branch plant economy and a completely servile and cowardly political elite. Most of our manufacturing comes from foreign companies who stick a few factories in our territory. This provides jobs but it means that most technological innovation happens in countries like Japan or America where these companies are headquartered. Meanwhile our politicians make zero effort to encourage your companies to be more innovative or globally competitive. There are all kinds of export oriented strategies we could conceivably borrow from Germany or South Korea or Japan but it would require a comprehensive vision of economic development that our government just doesn't have. The fact is that while Canada's "national champions" have never been particularly impressive corporations, it was utterly stupid of our country to let them all fold up or be bought out. If you look at the history of Korea or Japan it took them many decades before their companies were globally competitive: nobody in the 1950s would have imagined that Japanese cars would be considered better than American cars. So while Nortel and Research in Motion and Alcan weren't anything to get super proud of, they were something we could have built upon. But instead the Liberals and Conservatives drank the free market cool aid and handed away control of the Canadian economy: quote:Olive: Innovation out of our hands in a branch-plant economy There was a moment in the 1970s when a left wing NDP (which was itself being pulled to the left by the existence of The Waffle as a leftist faction within or on the periphery of the NDP) pulled the reigning Liberal government into a more economically nationalist direction. But the West had a freakout and Trudeau eventually burned enough bridges that Brian Mulroney came into power, and after Mulroney we got the Chretien / Martin liberals (probably the worst post-war government we've had, in retrospect). And the result is that we're locked into an economy that relies on a mixture of Finance, Insurance Real Estate and raw resource extraction. None of those are sectors that are going to innovate or produce any usable spin offs. And rather than address this problem our politicians time their economic policy to match the electoral cycle, and mostly end up wasting money on boondogle projects like the Ontario Liberals throwing all that money as Samsung.
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# ? Jan 24, 2016 21:48 |
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Well one thing to consider is that Germany and Japan are 3-4x as populous as Canada and crammed into a much smaller area. Would protecting our Nortels and RIMs really have led to an innovative industry? Or would it have just led to a Bombardier situation where the only company that our population could support is so clearly inept at surviving on its own? I guess what I'm saying is, do we have the population to support multiple companies with global reach? Or is the idea that RIM could have encouraged other tech companies to form in Canada and then those ones would attract skilled workers from outside the country and then actually been a good company that can fend off predation by Silicon Valley and also not be poorly managed?
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# ? Jan 24, 2016 22:03 |
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Looking at Bombardier specifically, it's clear we have the capability to have world-leading aerospace companies, and they are just very poorly managed. My own namesake is a wonderful piece of Canadian technology, valued and used the world over. The DHC-6 Twin Otter has re-entered production because it's so capable, too. The problem is that Bombardier's recent products are wretched piles of poo poo trying to compete in extremely crowded markets.
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# ? Jan 24, 2016 22:12 |
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Cultural Imperial posted:https://twitter.com/jen_keesmaat/status/690546464511098880 Throw it back in the autoclave, clean it out and re-inoculate?
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# ? Jan 24, 2016 22:19 |
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Eej posted:Well one thing to consider is that Germany and Japan are 3-4x as populous as Canada and crammed into a much smaller area. Would protecting our Nortels and RIMs really have led to an innovative industry? Or would it have just led to a Bombardier situation where the only company that our population could support is so clearly inept at surviving on its own? We were actually part way there before the late 1990s / early 2000s double whammy of NAFTA coming into effect and the commodity / housing booms sucking up all the investment capital. Check out these graphs Taken from this paper, an extended exerpt of which I'll post: Jim Stanford, STAPLES, DEINDUSTRIALIZATION, AND FOREIGN INVESTMENT: CANADA’S ECONOMIC JOURNEY BACK TO THE FUTURE, Studies in Political Economy, Vol 82, 2008 posted:Without much fanfare, Canada’s economy is experiencing a profound structural change that will define and limit our national prospects for decades to come. Canada’s economic trajectory has become increasingly dominated by the production and export of unprocessed or barely processed natural resources — especially petroleum and other minerals. Higher-stage export industries (especially manufacturing, but also tradable service industries, such as tourism) are declining rapidly. This structural regression largely originates with extremely high global prices for natural resources (including energy, nonenergy minerals, and agricultural products). Those prices partly reflect growing world demand, especially from rapidly industrializing regions like China and India, and concerns about the adequacy and reliability of future resource supplies. The dramatic rise of resource prices may also reflect the influence of speculative financial pressures and the growing involvement of hedge funds and institutional investment vehicles in commodity markets. Record prices for natural resources have had multiple and complex impacts on Canadian financial indicators, exchange rates, and the sectoral allocation of real investment and production. The resource-led restructuring of Canada’s economy has been ratified and facilitated by the laissez-faire stance of neoliberal economic policy in Canada, the reinforcing role of free trade agreements (especially the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which explicitly assigns Canada a special role in the continent as energy supplier), and the daunting political influence of Canadian resource elites (especially over Canada’s Albertan-led Conservative federal government). Our own past record indicates we could be doing a lot better than we currently are doing. It's really astonishing that we don't even discuss these issues any more. We could blame the political establishment in general because they're all complicit, but really that's how we should expect the Liberals and Conservatives to act. So mostly I blame the NDP because they should know better.
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# ? Jan 24, 2016 22:32 |
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You need a lot of people in a dense area for good innovation since 99.9999% of people are worthless and you need a critical mass of non-worthless innovative people in the same area to really start cool poo poo.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 00:37 |
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You are aware that most Canadians live in a few concentrated areas right? I'm pretty sure that if Norway or Finland or various other countries in Northern Europe that have populations roughly the size of the GTA can develop globally competitive manufacturing then Canada can as well. Or at least, if we can't, then the barrier is politics and history, not our population's size or density.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 00:45 |
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Yeah worrying about population density as a factor for innovation makes it sound like it's transmitted like a respiratory disease
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 01:24 |
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Tochiazuma posted:Yeah worrying about population density as a factor for innovation makes it sound like it's transmitted like a respiratory disease No, that would be conservatism.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 03:50 |
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Rime posted:We produce some of the best software devs, they don't stay in Canada. There are no incentives for high tech outfits to operate in Canada. Btw, how do software engineers get across the border? I was under the impression that the TN visa specifically excludes em.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 08:21 |
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#FeelTheKwan
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 09:10 |
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tekz posted:Btw, how do software engineers get across the border? I was under the impression that the TN visa specifically excludes em. It excludes programmers, not software engineers. I'd suggest finding a good immigration lawyer. Crafting a successful application for a TN can be a little complicated.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 10:45 |
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And if your employer fucks it up, you're banned from entering the US for several years without a whole lot of hoop-jumping. Friend of mine found that out the hard way.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 11:12 |
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You get a lawyer to draft an application that says you're definitely not going there to program computers pinky swear. Good software companies will be able to refer you to one who specializes in getting programmers across the border.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 14:48 |
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Hahaha lawyers are coyotes for white collar gringos.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 15:06 |
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EvilJoven posted:Hahaha lawyers are coyotes for white collar gringos. This is especially true for people with criminal records, who are ordinarily banned from entering the US but can hire predatory and incompetent lawyers to get themselves a pardon or US entry waiver so that they can visit their kids or whatever.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 15:09 |
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Also, you don't "program", you "analyze computer systems."
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 15:24 |
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Im a former Bombardier employee. I confirm that the company was ruined by MBAs. Once Laurent got too old to run the show his son ran the company into the ground. The rot in that company is institutional and thorough. They suppress young talent and keep them from making any reasonable change and managers run their departments like their own private fiefdom in rivalry with other departments. Everyone is trying to cover their own asses, hide their incompetence and avoid responsibility by pointing their fingers in opposite directions. I'm not gonna mention any names but there's guys that used to just sleep all day in my office and they hauled in 100k+ salaries while I got a measly 45k with minimal pay raise or training opportunities. There's other people who are apparently engineers but their job is clerical in nature. In fact any real engineering talent that bombardier hires end up leaving because their job basically consists of writing product documents and making clerical changes to documentation. They don't get paid well either which stirs up serious resentment. The only people left in Bombardier are the "lifers" who've been there since the 80s-90s and are "disabled" from years of not using their engineering skills and are there for the paycheque. There's also some true believers who fight the good fight and understand the significance of what Bombardier represents but they're repeatedly frustrated by poor decisions from the business end. We've gone through so many changes to executives and management and nobody has gotten anything done. They all just talk the talk but no one has balls to make any serious change. There was an incident where a plant worker got transferred to another work centre and when he reported this to his new boss, his boss told him he had no knowledge of it. As a result he would spend months walking back and forth between two work centres being turned away from both. The only reason he was discovered was because he bumped his head and when the accident report was filed nobody knew who his manager was.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 16:45 |
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having gotten caught up on the last 10 or so pages, it seems clear to me that the only succinct answer to "how do we fix our transit/economy woes" is "we need a transit/economy stalin"
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:04 |
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Kraftwerk posted:There was an incident where a plant worker got transferred to another work centre and when he reported this to his new boss, his boss told him he had no knowledge of it. As a result he would spend months walking back and forth between two work centres being turned away from both. The only reason he was discovered was because he bumped his head and when the accident report was filed nobody knew who his manager was. So he was on payroll but was essentially unassigned to any team, sounds like a well managed company.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:10 |
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jm20 posted:So he was on payroll but was essentially unassigned to any team, sounds like a well managed company. Bombardier also has this "high potentials" list where particular employees who perform well and show initiative are put on it so they can get fast tracked into key positions. In practice all it means is you get a ton of extra responsibility for the same pay and no promotion. Those things are more decided by who you know and your connections rather than your merits. Most people on that list ask to be taken off it because they know it's bullshit. It's still a good company to work for because you get the highest pay for the lowest effort if you get in.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:16 |
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https://twitter.com/CP24/status/691655047084638208
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:22 |
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http://www.cp24.com/news/federal-government-to-sign-trans-pacific-partnership-1.2750826quote:OTTAWA - The federal government says it will sign the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal at a meeting next week in New Zealand. lol yeah you guys we're totally signing this but fingers crossed we might not ratify it in the end!!
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:23 |
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What a crock of crap, just set fire to canada now were done.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:33 |
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jm20 posted:What a crock of crap, just set fire to canada now were done. I'll bring the marshmallows
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:37 |
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Ikantski posted:I'll bring the marshmallows To be fair, that's a parody Gerald Butts account (note that it's gmbutts_, not gmbutts).
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:50 |
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Dallan Invictus posted:To be fair, that's a parody Gerald Butts account (note that it's gmbutts_, not gmbutts). Oh I feel silly, totally fell for it.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 17:54 |
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You didn't think that it was maybe a bit over the top for a politician? At 3 in the morning, sure, they're drunk, but during the day ...
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:13 |
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It's almost as if confirmation bias is a real thing.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:19 |
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vyelkin posted:http://www.cp24.com/news/federal-government-to-sign-trans-pacific-partnership-1.2750826 Oh man remember when the Liberals promised real change and they totally arent like the CPC. These chucklefucks backed both this and C51 up when Harper was in power and I dont know why anyone at all thought they suddenly wouldnt once in power. I eagerly await their election "reform".
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:43 |
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Liberals libbing
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:49 |
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Remember when Canadians got sick of that corrupt liberal sack of poo poo Jean Chretien? I love how you loving retards lionize him for being a great pm for having the balls to choke people in public
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:49 |
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Forcillo chat: Guilty on attempted murder Not guilty on manslaughter Not guilty on 2nd degree murder http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2016/01/21/judge-interrupts-forcillo-jury-deliberations-to-correct-legal-instructions.html quote:THE POSSIBLE VERDICTS Risky Bisquick fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Jan 25, 2016 |
# ? Jan 25, 2016 18:59 |
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jm20 posted:Forcillo chat: Guilty of attempting to murder a man who subsequently died, but not guilty of killing him. Good thing that first volley of shots was a freebie.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:03 |
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Beats the alternative of not guilty on anything.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:05 |
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The first round of shots was justified, the second was not. If the first killed him, the second did not and therefore the only crime was that Forcillo intended to kill someone, unjustifiably, but did not actually do so. Seems like the correct verdict.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:06 |
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PT6A posted:The first round of shots was justified, the second was not. If the first killed him, the second did not and therefore the only crime was that Forcillo intended to kill someone, unjustifiably, but did not actually do so. Seems like the correct verdict. Assuming you take that first premise for granted, yes. Some people don't. Evidently, including the other police brought in to testify on Forcillo's behalf, because they all lied about the incident multiple times, while under oath.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:09 |
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It may have been a hung jury on that specific charge, but they agreed on the intent of the 2nd volley and just went with what was unanimous. He is still facing up to life, however there is no mandatory on parole ineligibility.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:09 |
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# ? Jun 5, 2024 04:25 |
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infernal machines posted:Assuming you take that first premise for granted, yes. Some people don't. Those people are wrong. He was a whacknut who was brandishing a prohibited weapon and failing to follow police instructions. You can't do that and then be surprised when you get shot; at best, you should be extremely thankful if you don't get shot.
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# ? Jan 25, 2016 19:12 |