Justin Trudeau hints at boosting Canada’s military spending

I'll believe it when I see it.

 

[Brad Sallows]

The US and the UK are losing money.

Money is just an exchange medium for wealth. The US and UK are creating wealth faster than they are "losing" it.

 

[rmc_wannabe]

How about Khalistanis?

The Khalistani diaspora in Canada...yes. That demographic is vote rich to all parties.

The Khalistanis in Punjab have a limited desire pursuing independence. They have actively said the Khalistan independence movement from abroad causes more trouble for them than it's worth within a united India.

Thoughts of the Troubles in Northern Ireland receiving massive support from Bostonian Irish-Americans who didn't have to deal with any of the retribution.

 

[Kirkhill]

Money is just an exchange medium for wealth. The US and UK are creating wealth faster than they are "losing" it.

How are you measuring "money"? How are you measuring "wealth"?

Dollars? Canadian or US? Gold? Oil? Carbon? Gigajoules? Hours of labour?

 

[OldSolduer]

How about Khalistanis?

We as a nation are sometimes far too tolerant and extremely naive in dealing with violent separatist movements. Air India - that event still irks me.

 

[Good2Golf]

We as a nation are sometimes far too tolerant and extremely naive in dealing with violent separatist movements. Air India - that event still irks me.

The poor misunderstood Khalistani-Canadians that made the bomb say they intended for it to explode on the ground at Heathrow, not knowing that the flight would be delayed, hence why it exploded over Ireland. That said, Rapudaman Singh Malik made amends with PM Modi and saying that the Khalistani movement in Canada was mistaken all those years ago, which angered the existing Khalistani militant arm the KTF (Khalistan Tiger Force)…which apparently led to Malik’s murder in July of 2022, eleven months before Hardee’s Singh Nijjar was gunned down in the same neighborhood in which Malik was gunned down. Interestingly, several question the motivation of Malik’s killers, including links between them and Nijjar, who was alleged to be the leader of the KTF in Canada, including ties back to his running a militant camp
In lower mainland BC in 2015 to train militants to conduct terrorist activities in India. The whole thing is a travesty of security, sovereignty and consideration of other nations concerns as well. For now, votes for LPC and NDP appear to mean more than harboring people with confirmed ties to scheduled terrorist organizations…probably not going to come close to being addressed until later in 2025…

 

[Brad Sallows]

How are you measuring "money"? How are you measuring "wealth"?

Dollars? Canadian or US? Gold? Oil? Carbon? Gigajoules? Hours of labour?

Money is the money supply. Wealth is everything we produce; somewhat more narrowly, anything someone is willing to make an exchange for. Example: 1 hour of a computer geek's time to fix a Windows problem in exchange for 2 hours of cutting his lawn, but the geek might just take $40 and pay it to someone else later to deal with the lawn.

There are some things people produce that no-one, or approximately no-one, will exchange anything for, but above zero it is simply a matter of negotiation - hence the idea that supply creates its own demand. I could build a model ship and price it at $20/hour of my time for 300 hours, but I doubt anyone would pay $6000 for it. Someone might pay $300, though. That just means my time was only worth $1/hr to someone else.

 

[Good2Golf]

Not everyone believes that BoT accurately determines who’s economically strong and who isn’t.

The So-Called “Trade Deficit” by Donald J. Boudreaux | Capitalism Magazine

The conventional tale of trade deficits fails so utterly to square with reality because tellers of this conventional tale never seriously bother to attempt to understand why foreigners are willing, decade after decade, to send to America more goods and services than they receive in return from...

www.capitalismmagazine.com

 

[Underway]

Not everyone believes that BoT accurately determines who’s economically strong and who isn’t.

The So-Called “Trade Deficit” by Donald J. Boudreaux | Capitalism Magazine

The conventional tale of trade deficits fails so utterly to square with reality because tellers of this conventional tale never seriously bother to attempt to understand why foreigners are willing, decade after decade, to send to America more goods and services than they receive in return from...

www.capitalismmagazine.com

Agreed. The US is economically strong partially because their internal economy is gigantic. They don't need external trade for wealth. Only 15% of their GDP is imports, and 10% is exports. Of those the vast majority is within North America.

 

[Kirkhill]

Not everyone believes that BoT accurately determines who’s economically strong and who isn’t.

The So-Called “Trade Deficit” by Donald J. Boudreaux | Capitalism Magazine

The conventional tale of trade deficits fails so utterly to square with reality because tellers of this conventional tale never seriously bother to attempt to understand why foreigners are willing, decade after decade, to send to America more goods and services than they receive in return from...

www.capitalismmagazine.com

Thanks, seen. Brad pointed that out to me a bit before.

Money is the money supply. Wealth is everything we produce; somewhat more narrowly, anything someone is willing to make an exchange for. Example: 1 hour of a computer geek's time to fix a Windows problem in exchange for 2 hours of cutting his lawn, but the geek might just take $40 and pay it to someone else later to deal with the lawn.

There are some things people produce that no-one, or approximately no-one, will exchange anything for, but above zero it is simply a matter of negotiation - hence the idea that supply creates its own demand. I could build a model ship and price it at $20/hour of my time for 300 hours, but I doubt anyone would pay $6000 for it. Someone might pay $300, though. That just means my time was only worth $1/hr to someone else.

This right here:

it is simply a matter of negotiation

If everything is negotiable then nothing is known. The sizes of the national economies are negotiable. The value of the national currencies are negotiable. The prices of oil, gold, carbon, energy, labour and lithium are negotiable. Ultimately I am trading barrels of oil for Ramen noodles. What is today's spot market value?

If the Balance of Trade is not a viable tool due to vagaries then neither is GDP or transnational comparisons of currency values.

1 meter is 10,000,000,000 Angstroms
After the redefinition of the meter in spectroscopic terms, the Angstrom was formally redefined to be 0.1 nanometers.

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle, so the Earth's circumference is approximately 40000 km. In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar. The actual bar used was changed in 1889. In 1960, the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86.

The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second. After the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs.

Did we gain anything over the days when we measured things by the length of Henry and Louis's feet or by Dutch Florins and Austrian Thalers?

Any comparisons are going to be based on a whole whack of assumptions and none of those assumptions, even the valid ones, are going to remain valid after the comparison is made. Hence constantly adjusting standards and definitions.

I like the Balance of Trade because for a particular country or community, when measured in their currency, describes one factor in the health of their economy.

Certainly an economy can sustain a net outflow, a net outflow of anything is sustainable, so long as you are creating more of what ever it is that is flowing out.

Canada can sustain an outflow of oil, gold, uranium, canola, coal and energy for a bunch of years. Not indefinitely. We could convert that stuff into smart phones, like Taiwan, Japan and Korea and add value that way. We could just be an entrepot like Singapore and charge for the service. Or an administrative center like Ireland. All of those things will counter balance the outflow.

But how do you measure their value?

I am not convinced that internal domestic measures that serve the national government of any country are particularly useful. Nor do I have much faith in government to government agreements on how to interpret the numbers.

In the absence of any useful measure I choose to look at the export and import values which are established by the global community at large and evaluated second by second.

If I am spending money (importing goods and services) faster than I am earning money (exporting goods and services) then I am draining my accounts and must do one of three things:

reduce spending (imports)
increase revenues (exports)
do more stuff myself (work harder - or as you would have it "create wealth")

 

[Remius]

What I am trying to say is that everything is related. Cuts in one area will affect eventually another.

So very true. When I was at DND during DRAP my director had a work objective to cut down on TD. We managed some FMT and OST and until that time paid for the travel costs for the various organisations under ADM mat. So her plan was to cut travel and have the DGs pay for it from their budgets. But they hadn’t forcasted that. So while she saved 10s of thousands of dollars in travel we had to cancel and pay for a pile of empty course seats since no one would pay for travel which meant losing hundreds of thousands for nothing…

 

[Good2Golf]

Agreed. The US is economically strong partially because their internal economy is gigantic. They don't need external trade for wealth. Only 15% of their GDP is imports, and 10% is exports. Of those the vast majority is within North America.

But some will parade USA’s huge trade deficit as a weakness. All too often the +/- trade % is judged without the relation to GDP. Numbers as you note above for the US are interestingly contrasted with Canada’s trade being on the order of 67%…much more tied to trade…which one wonders why our government seems intent on reducing trade, particularly energies.

 

[Czech_pivo]

Nothing good comes for Canada by inculcating a predisposition to beat on Canada within the Republican Party sense of who it is. Not even in cases where we should do better.

I’m getting to the belief that we deserve to be beat on, how else are we going to learn to do better? I feel like the father from the 1960s or 1970s seeing his kid about to put the butter knife into the socket, pausing to stop himself from telling the kid not to do it, figuring that the only way the kid will truly learn is to experience the pain from his own actions….

 

[McG]

I’m getting to the belief that we deserve to be beat on, how else are we going to learn to do better?

MAGA followers have already commented on invading Canada and “liberating” Canada. Feeding this nonsense in the Republican Party and making this country their go-to whipping-boy is not good for Canada. We do not want beating on Canada to become an element of any US political party’s identity.

If the US is going to comment on Canada, it should come from the executive. It should not (for our sake) be a partisan campaigning point. … and it would be foolish of any Canadian to want to see that.

 

[RangerRay]

MAGA followers have already commented on invading Canada and “liberating” Canada. Feeding this nonsense in the Republican Party and making this country their go-to whipping-boy is not good for Canada. We do not want beating on Canada to become an element of any US political party’s identity.

If the US is going to comment on Canada, it should come from the executive. It should not (for our sake) be a partisan campaigning point. … and it would be foolish of any Canadian to want to see that.

I think it would be taken more seriously if Democrats were the ones criticizing.

“Only Nixon can go to China.”

 

[Brad Sallows]

If the Balance of Trade is not a viable tool due to vagaries then neither is GDP or transnational comparisons of currency values.

Economists don't rely on one tool to assess economic health in the first place.

BoT isn't a poor yardstick because of the difficulty of taking highly accurate readings at any instant in time; it's a poor yardstick because its definition doesn't cover very much.

 

[Kirkhill]

Economists don't rely on one tool to assess economic health in the first place.

BoT isn't a poor yardstick because of the difficulty of taking highly accurate readings at any instant in time; it's a poor yardstick because its definition doesn't cover very much.

But it is a yardstick?

 

[Underway]

We could convert that stuff into smart phones, like Taiwan, Japan and Korea and add value that way.

No we couldn't. The reason smart phones are made in SE Asia is because of the huge disparity in labour costs and skill sets between countries. There are high med and low costs and skills in different countries all very close together. Like cars in NA parts are moved around to where its most cost efficient to be made. Canada can't effectively provide this mix of skills and costs at all. We're honestly not high enough skilled and we are also not low enough cost.

The only way that would work in NA is between Mexico and the US, though Mexico is getting higher pay by the year.

 

[Kirkhill]

No we couldn't. The reason smart phones are made in SE Asia is because of the huge disparity in labour costs and skill sets between countries. There are high med and low costs and skills in different countries all very close together. Like cars in NA parts are moved around to where its most cost efficient to be made. Canada can't effectively provide this mix of skills and costs at all. We're honestly not high enough skilled and we are also not low enough cost.

The only way that would work in NA is between Mexico and the US, though Mexico is getting higher pay by the year.

I didn't know that Korean robots were paid less than North American ones.

Inside the Factory Where Robots Are Building Your Next Samsung Phone

CNET gets a behind-the-scenes look at Samsung's assembly line.

www.cnet.com

Norwegian robots too.

And you too can manage your own robot. Hire one and have it sit on an assembly line for you.

Now your phone can become a robot that does the boring work

If any factory worker could program low-cost robots, then more factories could actually use robotics to increase worker productivity.

www.purdue.edu

I think we could.

 

[GR66]

I didn't know that Korean robots were paid less than North American ones.

Inside the Factory Where Robots Are Building Your Next Samsung Phone

CNET gets a behind-the-scenes look at Samsung's assembly line.

www.cnet.com

Norwegian robots too.

And you too can manage your own robot. Hire one and have it sit on an assembly line for you.

Now your phone can become a robot that does the boring work

If any factory worker could program low-cost robots, then more factories could actually use robotics to increase worker productivity.

www.purdue.edu

I think we could.

It takes more than robots to produce things.

According to the interwebs:

As of December 2022, 89,102 male and 31,725 female employees were working for Samsung Electronics under permanent contracts at the company's South Korean headquarters in Suwon. According to its annual report, there were 577 temporary workers that year.

By comparison:

The Canadian Armed Forces are a professional volunteer force that consists of approximately 68,000 active personnel and 27,000 reserve personnel, with a sub-component of approximately 5,000 Canadian Rangers.

 

[Kirkhill]

Looking at that Samsung factory and contemplating that, or a similar factory, cranking out electronic fuzes, navigation systems, EO/IR systems and servomotors. Attach to polystyrene aircraft filled with plasticized explosives. Batteries not included.

Similar process for rocket and jet powered craft.