I agree. I'm also not a huge fan of rebranding "military conscription" as "national service". There have been people talking about "national service" in ways that specifically excluded military service. This feels like yet another case of the right stealing a term from the left and redefining it to suit themselves. It's something they have been doing with national and religious symbols and slogans forever as a way to hide their true intentions.

One thing I find particularly concerning is that military conscription has generally been reserved for invasion or active defense. What are they not telling us?

When I think about all the truly public services we should have and the level of service that should be available, it makes me think that the public sector should be the largest single employer at every level. Sure, maybe you end up with an auto factory or an Amazon warehouse in a specific location, but on average, there should be more public works employees, bus drivers, nurses, care workers, and policy experts than pretty much any other single industry sector. And probably by a large margin.

Does anyone have a good estimate for what minimum wage would be if this had been implemented in 1970?

This site has a good explanation of sovereign citizenship. Specifically:

In the 18th-century colonies, nouns were usually capitalized, although the practice was going out of style by the time of the Revolution. Based on that, sovereigns see secret meaning in the use or non-use of capitalized letters. For example, a "citizen" is a sovereign citizen imbued with all natural rights, whereas a "Citizen" is a 14th Amendment citizen subject to the rules and regulations of government.

While that is specifically American in context, I think the principle is the same. It's basically a kind of numerology but with the conventions of written language.

Speaking of numerology, I can't wait for them to discover that, in ASCII, adding or subtracting the value of a [space] (decimal 32) converts between upper- and lowercase. (A=65, a=97; B=66, b=98...). Surely that gives the [space] a special magic, but is it good magic or bad magic or can anyone use it? And the fact that lowercase uses bigger numbers than uppercase must also carry some significance, right?

For a fun time, use the phrase "sovereign citizen capital letters" in a web search.

Well said!

Whenever I read something like that, I can't help thinking of my son, who has paid zero attention to any advance since first hearing about the EV-1 or some shill with an agenda.

Personally, I'd love to have a business taking batteries no longer fit for purpose in cars and building off-grid wind and solar systems. That'll never happen, though, because at 67 I'm too old to ever see used batteries in enough volume to justify trying it.

My personal opinion is that the need for large scale recycling is still decades away. If a vehicle's battery pack isn't completely physically damaged, it is more likely to end it's life in use for stationary power or split into smaller packs for short range, occasional use vehicles, like boats, ATVs, small farm and yard equipment, and, of course, golf carts and "city cars".

Most of us have heard the expression "money is the root of all evil." That's close, but not quite right. It's selfishness to the point of greed. "I want it and you can't have it." That's what is destroying the world. Spending money to gain power over others or to get rid of them is just par for the course.

Unless we find a way to solve the problem of greed, whether for resources, money, or power, we will never solve anything.

Missed the swing bike and the skatebike.

I don't know where Dad dug these things up, but he started supplying us with strange and wondrous ways to hurt ourselves on 2 wheels, starting with a home made small penny farthing in 1962, an early banana seater, and a circus trick bike (20" wheels, vertical fork tube, and 1:1 fixed gear).

I've never understood carbon capture and storage. I never went past high school and that was about 50 years ago. But I still remember the key principles behind why perpetual motion will never be a thing.

Unless there is an energy producing reaction that binds CO2 or separates the carbon from the oxygen without producing nasty byproducts, carbon capture and storage cannot work without pouring more energy into the project than what we gained from the release of the CO2.

Just imagine what anything else looks like. For every fossil fueled power plant that has ever existed, we need to build at least one larger non-carbon plant to power the capture and storage. There are several ways to reduce the fraction of our power that goes into capture and storage:

• Take more time to remove than it took to add
• Remove less than we added
• Find a less energy intensive method of binding the CO2 (that is we don't need to turn the CO2 back into a fuel; is creating calcium carbonate an option?)

But no matter how you slice it, removing enough quickly enough will still require a large fraction of our power generation capacity.

The initiatives cannot be anything other than a shell game designed to hide the underlying perpetual motion machine.

There was a time when I would have agreed with you. I now think that the problems we have in this world are because we've let the "small stuff" go until they've built into big balls of shit. Now our eyes are so focused on the big balls of shit that we not only don't see the other "small stuff" building up, we no longer recognize the "small things" at the centre.

We are not going to ever fix the big problems or prevent new ones without tearing things apart to get at the core. Selfishness, greed, and the desire for power over others are behind every major problem we've got, so everything we do to root those things out gets us one step closer to a better world.

The things you set aside as unworthy of attention are in fact the biggest problems we have. They are why the world is turning (has turned?) into a big ball of shit.

So this is not just a distraction, but the exposure on one of those who prefer us to keep our eyes covered. We need more of these investigations, not fewer and the investigations need to start earlier, before the ball of shit gets too big to handle.

We may have no more important social project on our plates than that of sorting out our colonial past and present to create a future for all, and this strikes at the heart of that project. This is not an entertainment story or a criminal story, but a story about deep, ongoing social injustice.

This may not apply everywhere, but around here (Saskatchewan), retirees are the lifeblood of service and community organizations. From the quilting club that generates revenue for brain injury research and food banks to the senior centre that helps people age in place, retirees are a critical component of the glue that holds us together.

Even if you have a fairly narrow economic view of what it means to contribute to society, there is no question that retirees are making those contributions. While actual money is required for most things, nothing happens without people putting in time and retirees have plenty of time and aren't shy about using it.

This is something I became aware of as my older relatives retired. Now that I'm retired myself, I'm more active than ever in the community, despite having also retired from the volunteer fire and rescue service.

Not from BC, but I've long thought that existing hydroelectric dam sites are perfect locations for nuclear plants.

• Lots of cooling water, if that's still required for the newest designs.
• Not just a ready connection to the grid, but one designed as a power source.
• Geologically stable (at least I hope nobody is building dams in earthquake zones!).
• Normally pretty nice places to live with plenty of outdoorsy stuff to do that also typically have room for at least small communities to develop.

I'm retired now, but I'd have jumped at the chance to work in a nuclear plant or supporting industry at Gardiner or E.B. Campbell Dam and live on the shores of the associated lakes or in a nearby community. Saskatchewan is already a major source of uranium and could stand to add refinement, use, and storage (put the waste right back into the geologically stable mines it came from).

On that last note, done right, the waste storage could be right on-site. That's what's happening in many cases anyway, and most hydroelectric dams are located away from major population centres and are geologically stable.

My thoughts on the matter are that the only parents who absolutely insist on being informed by someone other than their own children are the ones who it needs to be kept secret from.

Yes, I would want to know, but only so that I can provide proper support and I hope I've made that clear enough that my children see no need to keep me in the dark in the first place.