Canada and the World

[evandyk]

I think the evacuation plan right now is that the Canadian government is blocking seats on commercial flights but someone who actually takes the flight has to pay for the cost of the ticket (generally speaking, though there is a separate program that can provide loans to people in need).

But the flights don't necessarily go to Canada, they're just flights out of Lebanon to stable places. So they still may not return to Canada!

 

[Admiral Beez]

I think the evacuation plan right now is that the Canadian government is blocking seats on commercial flights but someone who actually takes the flight has to pay for the cost of the ticket (generally speaking, though there is a separate program that can provide loans to people in need).

I do very much hope that's the case.

Operation LION in 2006 cost Canadian taxpayers almost $100 million, only to see many of these same people soon return.

Operation LION - Canada.ca

Historical information about Operation LION.

www.canada.ca

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/94m-for-lebanon-rescue-but-canadian-evacuee-grateful-1.627646

 

[lenaitch]

From this GoC page:

"Expenses, including meals and accommodation and required onward travel to Canada from a safe third location will be at your own expense."

I have heard Cyprus as a likely safe third country.

I'm curious why there are an estimated 45,000 Canadian citizens and permanent residents in Lebanon. Must be a helluva vacation spot.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Must be a helluva vacation spot.

It’s da bomb.

 

[kEiThZ]

So the US has a lot of juicy Intel on India's going ons.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1848539329015988544

 

[kEiThZ]

I could paste this in Climate Change. But I think the long term economic implications are profound for fossil fuel exporting nations like Canada. If you're under 50, you might like to see this change.

 

[afransen]

I could paste this in Climate Change. But I think the long term economic implications are profound for fossil fuel exporting nations like Canada. If you're under 50, you might like to see this change.

Anyone who has heard Tony Seba speak has known this was coming for almost a decade. Lots of folks in Canada's oil and gas sector are still in denial.

 

[kEiThZ]

Anyone who has heard Tony Seba speak has known this was coming for almost a decade. Lots of folks in Canada's oil and gas sector are still in denial.

Big fan of Tony Seba. But he's got his blind spots. He's missed the mark on AI (mostly because he bought into Tesla's hype and insinuations). And he's really missed the mark on bioreactors (treating a biological process as scalable like chip manufacturing is some wacky stuff). I love his battery predictions. And he's been bang on when talking about the changing energy market.

I find it really interesting how biased Canadians are towards even the idea of EV and Renewables adoption. There's this idea that the developing world can't advance without oil. It's so ignorant. And is the self-projection only an exporter would make.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1849469880019394898

 

[afransen]

And he's really missed the mark on bioreactors (treating a biological process as scalable like chip manufacturing is some wacky stuff).

I'm not sure I fully agree. They may understate the difficulties in scaling bioreactors, but there are bioreactor milk protein companies coming to market, as they predicted. The cost scaling has progressed from $1m/kg down to $10-$20/kg. The last order of magnitude will be the hardest

He's missed the mark on AI (mostly because he bought into Tesla's hype and insinuations).

They have some more recent work on the impact of AI and robotics. I'd have to go back and see, but AI is kind of an inevitable result of Moore's Law (just being able to throw more compute at the problem), the tricky part of predicting the 'when' is that it also relies on advances in computer science/algorithms. Anyone who's been paying attention noticed the step change in rate of progress since convolutional neural nets disrupted image recognition in 2012. The idea of convergence is that technological disruptions arise right around the time they become feasible from state of constituent technologies.

 

[kEiThZ]

The cost scaling has progressed from $1m/kg down to $10-$20/kg. The last order of magnitude will be the hardest

This is an understatement. Seba made a fundamental mistake here. He assumed that there's very similar learning curves for bioprocesses. To a point there are. But where with batteries they can just literally make the plants bigger to drop cost, biological processes have certain limits. You can't make cells reproduce substantially faster. And that's why you see that a lot of the talk from 2-3 years ago of synthetic agriculture just dying off. Investment in this space is actually stagnating.

They have some more recent work on the impact of AI and robotics. I'd have to go back and see, but AI is kind of an inevitable result of Moore's Law (just being able to throw more compute at the problem), the tricky part of predicting the 'when' is that it also relies on advances in computer science/algorithms. Anyone who's been paying attention noticed the step change in rate of progress since convolutional neural nets disrupted image recognition in 2012. The idea of convergence is that technological disruptions arise right around the time they become feasible from state of constituent technologies.

I don't doubt we'll have AI at some point. I think Seba is wrong on where AI is, what is needed for full automotive automation. If you look at his presentations, he extrapolated from Tesla safety data. But this ignores the fact that there's a human in the loop and is in line with theories that computers + humans will always beat computers (I forget who theorized this).

He's not wrong on the general direction. But his idea that by 2030, autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) would completely kill the case for conventional ICEVs and nobody will own a regular car, was obviously wildly optimistic.

To the topic at hand, we don't need all new cars to be automated or even fully electrified to have an impact on the oil market. This is a point Seba misses. For example, the real EV revolution in the Global South? It isn't fancy autonomous cars. It's electric Tuk Tuks.

In many ways both the optimists and pessimists from the West are projecting. They assume that developing countries are going to develop just the way we did. And it's clearly not happening. This means the demand for fossil fuel exporters will move in ways that a lot of western based prognosticators can't predict.

 

[kEiThZ]

 

[afransen]

I encourage people to watch this. I was expecting a doozy and it is worse than I feared. I knew that there were big problems with defense procurement but this lays out just how bad the situation has become. Essentially, Canada regularly is paying 10x what is should cost to procure new equipment, and has now built up such a huge backlog of equipment to replace, it will require a concerted effort and spending to dig ourselves out of that hole. It also sounds like we need to make tough decisions around domestic sourcing of equipment. Frankly, things have gotten so bad I'm not sure we should allow Canadian shipbuilding industry to build any equipment for the RCN for the next couple of decades. Something has to give, we simply cannot spend 10x what it should cost for a ship just to make the Irvings richer.

We need to pick a few critical areas to specialize our defense industry in and buy mostly off the shelf from foreign suppliers for everything else. We simply can't afford to do anything else.

 

[Admiral Beez]

They assume that developing countries are going to develop just the way we did. And it's clearly not happening. This means the demand for fossil fuel exporters will move in ways that a lot of western based prognosticators can't predict.

We’ll produce the fossil fuels until they’re no longer wanted or economically viable, and then we’ll produce something else. There was a Canada before oil and they’ll be one after it. People and national economies adapt.

Everyone always wants to think they live in revolutionary or epoch times.

 

[kEiThZ]

We’ll produce the fossil fuels until they’re no longer wanted or economically viable, and then we’ll produce something else. There was a Canada before oil and they’ll be one after it. People and national economies adapt.

Everyone always wants to think they live in revolutionary or epoch times.

A Saudi Oil Minister once famously said, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones. The oil age won't end because we run out of oil."

Till today, demand for oil has only ever gone in one direction. And this has created things like cartelisation (OPEC). But the day that we have real confirmation that oil demand is stagnating, the economics change completely. Who knows whether OPEC survives. And if everybody just decides to pump as much as they can, the price tanks. Long before that, investment in new oil dries up. We're seeing that now, both in Canada and globally. And it's a lot of that investment that creates oil jobs, not just pumping and shipping it. If investment stagnates, we'll still be pumping oil but it will be far less beneficial.

 

[kEiThZ]

I encourage people to watch this. I was expecting a doozy and it is worse than I feared. I knew that there were big problems with defense procurement but this lays out just how bad the situation has become. Essentially, Canada regularly is paying 10x what is should cost to procure new equipment, and has now built up such a huge backlog of equipment to replace, it will require a concerted effort and spending to dig ourselves out of that hole. It also sounds like we need to make tough decisions around domestic sourcing of equipment. Frankly, things have gotten so bad I'm not sure we should allow Canadian shipbuilding industry to build any equipment for the RCN for the next couple of decades. Something has to give, we simply cannot spend 10x what it should cost for a ship just to make the Irvings richer.

We need to pick a few critical areas to specialize our defense industry in and buy mostly off the shelf from foreign suppliers for everything else. We simply can't afford to do anything else.

A lot of this is crticisms that many serving members and several auditor generals have picked up. It's unfortunate, how much these issues get ignore in Canada. It's kinda like how development charges have 10x in the last three decades because cities use that to pay for everything. Federal governments treat defence projects more as a jobs slush fund than vital national security investments. That results in the insane overruns mentioned.