It is strategic for Canada to invest in its air force because:

1. Hmm, what happened in that far northern area? We should go check it out. Oh wait, we don’t have planes to do that.
2. Russia attacks Finland. Finland calls for help from its NATO allies. Canada sends its air force.
3. Every single flight from Europe to the US west coast flies over Canada. Even flights from Europe to Mexico City pass over Atlantic Canada. One of those flights stops responding and there’s a fear it was hijacked. Oh well, I guess the USAF can check it out once it crosses the border… if it crosses the border.

You can see some of the absurdities of not having a proper air force in Switzerland. They used to have an Air Force that only operated during daytime business hours. In 2014 an Ethiopian Airlines pilot hijacked his own plane and landed it in Geneva. Italy and France scrambled to escort the plane through their airspaces. Switzerland had to just let it do what it wanted because their Air Force didn’t operate 24 hours a day.

In fact, for a huge and nearly empty country like Canada, the air force is arguably the most important military branch. Since prehistoric times, the size of a country / kingdom / empire was defined by the region in which it had a monopoly on the use of force. If Canada wants to claim sovereignty over the entire North, and not just the Montreal to Toronto corridor, it needs to be able to notice an invasion in the north, attack anybody there tying to claim its territory, and transport soldiers up there if necessary. That’s all Air Force stuff.

A modern Air Force might not mean fighter pilots in supersonic planes. As things in Ukraine have shown, it might instead be mostly drones.

The demo would be a lot more impressive if the questions you were asking weren’t longer than the extremely simple SQL queries it generates.

Let’s be real, oil / petroleum / gasoline / aviation gas are going to be part of the economy for decades. Countries are going to get by with less oil, but not without oil. There are things like planes that really require a very energy dense source of energy. There are other things like buses and local delivery trucks that can do fine with batteries, but where vehicles are an investment that is paid off over a decade. The new ones might be electric, but the old ones won’t be replaced soon. This might have accelerated the transition in a significant way, but oil is such a big part of everything that it’s still going to be around for a long time.

What I hope is that there are countries, say in Africa, that never really fully industrialized with an oil-based economy. Hopefully they can skip right past that and start with clean energy right from the start.

What do they mean “touches $100 a barrel”? It has been at or above $100/barrel for almost 2 months now.

It’s hard to know the future. People’s habits are hard to change. But, sometimes there’s a change that’s significant enough and people don’t go back.

In the current world where people were already switching to photovoltaics and EVs before the crisis, it’s easy to imagine that a lot of people who switch because of the crisis won’t be going back if oil gets cheap again.

Also, from what I’ve read, each week that the Straight of Hormuz is closed will take about a month for things to get back to normal. So, at this point, we’re already talking years before things could go back to normal. Plus, if this results in another major recession, by the time the economy comes back it might look completely different.

I don’t think a lot of Canadians or Mexicans are going to be able to afford to go to the games in their own countries. They may be hosting, but the ticket prices are absurd.

If the World Cup has a lot of half empty stadia, I’d be happy.

It might be interesting if the Mexican and Canadian stadia were full though.

F1 races are also hotbeds of human trafficking.

According to some Russian propaganda conspiracy forum?

There may be some races, but ladies, that’s not why your husband is there.

Sure, nobody who goes to a race goes to see cars drive quickly…

Rights are rights until they are outlawed. So you can’t justify making a law to take away someones rights because after the law they will be criminals.

Exactly. People have a right to murder other people, until the damn government trampled all over their rights by making it illegal!

“Rights” are just things that aren’t outlawed. Do you have a right to commit murder, and are upset that the government has outlawed it?

If a law is passed making what they’re doing illegal and they continue to do it, then they are committing a crime.

A blanket ban is much more reasonable in the UK where health care is publicly funded than in some place like the US. Someone may think they deserve the right to smoke if they feel like it, but that doesn’t go well with the idea that someone should also get healthcare for free when their bad decision results in the natural health consequences.

Banning something that’s highly addictive is almost certainly going to lead to a black market. But, maybe that’s better than the alternative? It doesn’t sound like it though. Australia’s cigarette black market has not only resulted in black market cigarettes, it has also resulted in gang wars over territory to sell those illegal cigarettes.

It seems to me like high taxes are a better idea. If someone wants to kill themselves slowly and inconvenience anybody around them while they indulge their disgusting addiction, make them pay everybody for that privilege. But, if it’s just super high taxes, that’s also going to result in a black market. Apparently in the UK nearly 90% of the cost of a cigarette is taxes already. Maybe they could have an effect with different tax levels for different ways of obtaining cigarettes. For example, a convenience store could have the highest tax rates, serving people who were truly desperate. Or, you could order from a heavily regulated delivery retailer that would deliver a monthly supply. Maybe a low-ish tax rate if you were ordering only 20 cigarettes per month through this site, and a high rate if you were ordering 60+, but not as high as the corner store rate. That would encourage people to keep their consumption low, and discourage them from buying extra cigarettes on top of their regular monthly supply.

A ban doesn’t sound like it will work. In particular a ban that only affects some people based on a lottery on when they were born. Especially if that lottery means they’ll never legally be able to do something that someone born days earlier who might be part of their friend group can legally do. I don’t think that’s ever going to work out. If they wanted to ramp up the age, it would make sense to either make it slower or faster. If it were slower, (like, people born in 2008 could legally start smoking at 20, 2010 -> 21, 2011 -> 22, etc.) then people might decide to follow the law and then realize that they don’t actually want to smoke when their year comes up. Or make it faster so at first it’s people born in 2008 and after who can’t legally smoke, then people born in 2005 or earlier, then 2000 or earlier. If you’re a smoker and you want to avoid that ban, you’ll know it’s coming and have time to try to quit before your year rolls around. Then it’s not just generation 2008 that has fewer rights, it’s just that their year came up first.

Plenty of people make their own bullets/shells

For very, very small definitions of “plenty”.

Wow, I’m impressed, you actually managed to mention one city that isn’t either in the far north or on the beach. (And it’s not Mexicali, even though you mentioned it twice). It’s almost like you’ve actually visited Mexico before!

When a public utility or something is sold off, then yes, as soon as the privatization happens the service has to get shittier.

But, I don’t think it’s true that the moment there’s a private alternative the public version stops working. I think it’s often just that the public version starts to decay because it doesn’t get the investment it needs.

For example, if you sell the postal service to a private company, it’s going to get either more expensive, or not work as well, or both.

But, if you allow a private parcel delivery service to compete with the post office, for a while you can have both working fairly well. The private service might offer much faster delivery that you can track, while the post office offers slower delivery for a much lower price. For a while the two services can coexist, and people can choose which one they want based on their needs. But, over time you’ll get underinvestment in the public postal option. People will demand that it be run as a business and won’t take into account that it acts as a public service and does things that are unprofitable but good for society.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, I meant to say that if the public system and private system were equal but you had to pay for the private system, nobody would use it. Sure, if the private system is faster then people will use it even if the public system is free.

In places that allow a mix of private and public, the private system basically finds some flaw in the public system and allows people to pay to bypass that flaw. Things like wait times are one of the main issues. But, it’s sometimes something like certain expensive tests being hard to get in the public system (CAT scans or something). In the public system they might only order those when they’re obviously needed. The private system can let you have one whenever you want, so if your doctor says “well… it could help, but it doesn’t meet the threshold the public system sets” some people will pay for it out of pocket. Or it can be more privacy, or more luxurious hospital rooms. Even if the treatment is otherwise identical, some people will pay for that.

If the private system is allowed to exist, it will always exist. Someone will find something that isn’t done quite as efficiently as the public medical system and charge privately for doing it. Anywhere the private system exists will be better than the public system by definition. Nobody would pay to use the private system if they could get their needs met for free in the public system.

Because of that, if there is a private system, some people will use it. Those same people will vote to try to limit the taxes they pay for the public system, because they’re not using that system. People who can pay for the private system are going to be the richer people, and so their decisions about where their tax money goes has more of an impact. So, eventually, the public system starts to crumble. When that happens, more people use the private system, and the problem gets worse.

I’ve been to Mexico City. It’s absolutely huge. There are probably neighbourhoods where “nomads” are pricing out the locals, but the vast majority of the city isn’t affected. What’s driving up rents in Mexico City is that it’s Mexico City. Most of the people moving there are Mexican.

As for other tourist destinations, yes in tourist destinations there are tourists! Wow. But, there’s a lot of places in Mexico that aren’t tourist destinations, or are destinations only for Mexican tourists. There are entire cities with millions of inhabitants where you’re very unlikely to ever see an American / nomad.

Mexico already has a constitutionally guaranteed right to healthcare:

Every person has the right to health protection. The law shall determine the bases and terms to access health services and shall establish the competence of the Federation and the Local Governments in regard to sanitation according to the item XVI in Article 73 of this Constitution.

In practice, this has meant a bare minimum level of health care is theoretically available to everyone, but most working people have private insurance on top of that, or see private doctors. For the poorest people it has often been very difficult to get the care they need, even if it’s theoretically available and constitutionally guaranteed. It’s also different from American / Canadian / European hospitals in that family is expected to play a major role doing things that in richer countries are done by nurses or orderlies.

IMO, universal healthcare only really works if the middle class / upper middle class and the poor are all in the same system. If the people can pay more and get better care, they’ll do it, and the system used by the poor will be underfunded. You can’t do much about the truly rich. They’ll always just fly to other countries. If this is just filling the gaps between the various reasons people can use the state system, it’s not going to help that much, even if that kind of fix is necessary.

Mexico is hardly gentrified. There are some areas where there are a lot of immigrants, but the population is about 130 million, and less than 1% are foreign born. That’s significantly lower than both USA and Canada.