Month: December 2018

Above freezing temperatures and rain this week.  In December. …



Above freezing temperatures and rain this week.  In December.  In Canada.

Sounds like spring.  

Or Global Warming.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a government  clever enough to engage in #ClimateAction?  Instead, ours showered more than a billion dollars– 
Canadian tax dollars, by the way– on Fossil Fuel Companies.  

Not the workers.  

The lions share of Canada’s revenue comes from Income tax.  I think its been over half a century since Canada’s corporate tax income was about even with personal income tax.  And, of course, truly rich Canadians are more likely to hide their wealth  than pay tax on it.  And the biggest richest corporations are more likely to suck subsidies out of our government than actually pay in. 

It’s never the ordinary people who get enormous gifts from the government; it’s the ordinary people who pay the tax they owe. 

So now Mr Trudeau’s Government has succeeded in angering:

Albertan fossil fuel workers, who would rather get a new pipeline.  

The Fossil Fuel Companies, who would rather get a new pipeline.  

Fossil Fuel Company investors, who would rather get a new pipeline.  

And all the Canadians who understand Climate Change is an existential threat.

This after kicking all the strategic voters who voted for real electoral reform.

Its starting to look more and more like Mr Trudeau is going to be a 1 term PM.

#1yrago The scientists and innovators who invented the internet to the FCC: you really, really don’t understand how the internet works

mostlysignssomeportents:

A group of 21 of the internet’s most esteemed pioneers have written an open letter to the FCC’s Congressional overseers that critiques the agency’s foolish, self-serving description of how the net works in eye-watering detail.

The signatories including past chairs of ISOC and the IETF, co-inventors of TCP/IP, the inventor of the web, the founder of the first search-engine, the inventor of public-key cryptography, the creators of the world’s most widely used cryptographic systems, hypertext pioneers, and the co-founder of Apple, among many others.

The pioneers point out that they provided the FCC with a detailed, unimpeachable technical correction to its memo on how the internet works, and that the FCC – an expert agency legally obliged to consider expert testimony – failed to act on that correction.

The FCC has ignored 23,000,000 public comments endorsing net neutrality on the grounds that they don’t represent the “expert feedback” it is obliged to consider. But the FCC also ignores feedback from the world’s leading experts when it doesn’t suit the telcoms companies the agency is supposed to be regulating.

The pioneers call on Congress to order the FCC to cancel its vote on killing net neutrality and to only hold such a vote after observing the normal order, with hearings, a functional comment system, and a fairminded, reasonable consideration of expert feedback, as befits an expert agency.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/12/the-elders-of-the-internet.html

The Arctic has lost 2.6 million reindeer over the past 20 years

The Arctic has lost 2.6 million reindeer over the past 20 years:

currentclimate:

Since the mid-1990s, the size of reindeer and caribou herds has declined by 56 percent.

That’s a drop from an estimated 4.7 million animals to 2.1 million, a loss of 2.6 million.

“Five herds,” out of 22 monitored “in the Alaska-Canada region, have declined more than 90 percent and show no sign of recovery,” according to the latest Arctic Report Card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, out Tuesday. “Some herds have all-time record low populations since reliable record keeping began.”

Herds have lost hundreds of thousands of individuals, as measured by aerial photography of herds and counts in areas where caribou give birth. And their declines affect not just the landscape but the people who depend on it. The report explains that the declining number of animals are “a threat to the food security and culture of indigenous people who have depended on the herds.“