Dearche
Adding to this, CANDU reactors actually consume the fuel much more efficiently than american style high pressure reactors. The waste only lasts under 400 years, not millions. And the only reason why American nuclear waste lasts so long is because they made recycling waste fuel illegal due to “nuclear proliferation concerns”.
Even here in Canada, we can reduce our waste even further using newer recycling techniques if we just spend the money to build the latest generation reactors that can actually use our existing waste. CANDU reactors were originally designed in the 50s, and horribly obsolete, yet only produce a few tons of high level waste a year. And this is combining the waste from all our nuclear reactors that produce like 17% of our entire nation’s electricity.
As much as I hate the Fords for all the shit they’ve pulled over the years, I don’t think they’re the core of the problem. Virtually NONE of the leaders are doing any net positive in this country this last decade or two. At least of the ones I’m familiar with. Every single election as a Torontoian has zero good prospects when it comes to viable candidates, and it’s been this way for a while.
We need a shakeup on the top three parties on every level to the level of severe shock therapy. They’ve become so complacent lately and only squabble about personal interests while not caring about investing in making the future better.
But the thing I don’t get is that while office space is good revenue, retail is far better. And investing in mix-use buildings is quite a perfect way to get exactly that while reducing the issues with housing. You don’t need to worry about “living where you work” if people naturally want to live in Toronto due to being close to everything you want. Toronto is only one of three cities that is easy to live in without a car, even more so if you want 95% of everything you want within walking distance.
The turnaround, and hence tax revenue, of retail and entertainment so close to such dense housing boarders on the obscene, whereas suburbs tends to lean towards actually costing tax dollars rather than being a revenue source for the governments. Hell, the numbers are easy to collate, so the leaders are obviously just ignoring real data and instead just doing whatever they want and only paying lip service.
Who cares about tech oriented office space when 80% of that can be done from home, and you can just make those workers want to live in Toronto due to the amenities rather than transit to work.
On the other hand, if you think you’re dealing with a dangerous criminal that can pull out a gun and shoot you and a buddy dead in the time it takes your squad to react and shoot him dead, I don’t think it’s reasonable to politely ask to see three forms of ID before tying up the target just in case you got the wrong house.
Sure, it’s bad on them for getting the wrong place, but having to apologize to one person because they got the wrong house is far better than triple checking and asking the suspect to make sure they got the right place only to risk turning a quick one and done incident into a lethal shootout.
I think the lack of requirement for enrichment is quite the tradeoff for a lower fuel efficiency, especially considering that not only is uranium quite plentiful on Earth, but Canada is the top three producer of the stuff as well.
That said, I might be wrong on some of the details I mentioned, as I’m working from memory and I’m not nuclear physicist, but I’m sure that the physics for a fast neutron reactor is pretty different from high pressure reactors the US uses.
I haven’t heard that the US had ever rescinded the law on recycling nuclear fuel, though I have heard about how much cheaper it is to mine and refine more than to recycle used fuel. Those are the sort of stuff that market regulations will never address, and is why government regulation and intervention is so crucial.
And I also do understand that the amount of high level waste in the US isn’t really a significant amount anyways. Most numbers that people throw around include low level waste, and I think they’re only marginally dangerous for a year or less? It’s all burned or thrown in regular dumps after about that long as things stand anyways.
Maybe it’s because things are so expensive in Toronto already, but the prices hasn’t gone up as much as people talk about here.
Sure, things have mostly gone up 20% or so all-round, but the sales are just as cheap, if not even cheaper than they were 5 years ago. If you properly take advantage of sales, your bills shouldn’t be any higher than before, and maybe even lower considering that 50% off sales happen pretty much every month, when before you’d only get them like twice or three times a year.
That presumes that mayors have any actual power to change anything. Maybe if she can convince the council to raise property tax all-round, then there’ll be leeway to actually make the changes needed, but I won’t hold my breath for a miracle. Not when the only mayors we have that managed to make a difference in the last decade have all made ones that made the city demonstrably worse.
I looked a bit closer at the article, and it said that the man was the one who came out of the building first, so the police wasn’t even storming the building yet when he showed up.
When you’re expecting an armed criminal, you think it’s better for the police to politely ask for the person’s ID to confirm that he has nothing to do with the operation, or remember that being within 7m of a man with a knife is being within killing range, and not take any unnecessary risks to their lives since they don’t know yet if he isn’t some armed criminal until they can safely examine him?
His own testimony states that the police hadn’t even started storming the building, so for all you know, they were in the middle of confirming they were at the right location when he suddenly came out face to face with the officers who were expecting a dangerous criminal.
From a societal standpoint, the lack of children is harmful on quite a few levels. The obvious is the lack of population growth, and an aging society. But the issues that stem from that are pretty serious. On the top level, most of millennials won’t be able to experience retirement like how the boomers are, as there isn’t enough young people to support the aging population, and few millennials will 20mil in the bank when they reach 65.
On the other side, the GenZ and future generations are inheriting a world that’s been ravaged by rampant consumption, and they themselves don’t have the numbers to do much about it. Entire towns are being abandoned with the environments around them being left as messed up as ever because nobody is around to even notice that abandoned factory from 30 years ago had tons of toxic chemicals left over when the company left the town and never got cleaned up. And even if it is noticed, the potential to clean any of that up is evaporating as there’s just less people to do something about it.
And that doesn’t even get into how there’s fewer people doing essential jobs. And I’m not just talking about the blue collar void. Do you remember how much the farmers were complaining that they didn’t have enough hands to harvest their crops during the worst of COVID?
Hell, I’ve seen entire neighbourhoods that’s had help wanted signs posted for more than a year straight. We’re already starting to see the early onset of labour shortage, and Canada’s one of the few top tier countries that has managed decent population growth thanks to our immigrants. Imagine how bad it is in Europe and East Asia?
That said, from an individual level, the governments, on every level, are really failing to create an environment where people can decently have children in the first place. When you work full time and constantly worry about making your bills, you have significantly less leeway to think about something that’ll add massively to your payments.
Even dating is difficult under those circumstances, not to mention hookup culture that basically treat long term relationship as a thing of the past.
Marriage, and then having a child instead of a pet? Forgettaboutit. Not when a significant percentage of the population is already living paycheck to paycheck. One wrong move, and they’re heading right into bankruptcy. Not the sort of environment to have children.
That’s right. If I remember right, one of the top ways that the 1% earn their wealth is by taking bank loans with things like stocks as collateral. Since they never cash in the stocks, they technically have zero income.
If you don’t directly tax assets, or otherwise broaden the definition of income to include assets (though that’ll take some serious lawerying to make ironclad), no amount of taxing the wealthy will make a serious difference. Only those that have shitty accountants.
Even then, you’ll always have to watch out for those wealthy just fleeing the country selling off any asset they can’t take with them, screwing over the entire country.