BorealOne

Scott, why so serious? The Koch Brothers have announced that they are going to spend $900M to buy the next election. America will be free!

Pretty sure that means "Hope you have an alternate" Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Aye. The lad should have stuck with his first Beaver.

You boys ever get to ride in/drive a Tesla? These reactions are hilarious:

I'll take the Twin Otter on floats.

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Any recent updates from the field, Kevin?

Another use for foam is to cut some plugs to fit the side vents. I run all winter like that.

Aha! Timmy - people don't fly airplanes anymore because they all have cool cars, too!

Toyota brought the diesel Land Cruisers into Canada for a few short years from 83-87, then decided the market was too small to bother. Mine is a Canadian-spec, LHD model from that golden era. We also have a 25-year exemption allowing importations from Europe, Australia and Japan, so there's a small industry that specializes in buying 25-year old RHD-spec'd vehicles at auction, mostly from Japan because of low-mileage and little real off-road. Those guys deal with the importation and registration into Canada. There's quite a bit of Japanese-spec'd stuff on the road up here - not just Cruisers and Rovers, but other diesel vehicles that were never marketed to North America.

Several years ago, shortly after the 'blue juice' started to come into vogue, I came across a group of hunters near the Yukon/NWT border crawling along in their new GMC. They couldn't figure out what had happened - one minute they were cruising, the next they were locked down to <20km/h. I suspect it was a long, long drive back to Whitehorse. Nearly 1M km on the 6-cyl turbo diesel in my 1987 Toyota Land Cruiser HJ60...suspect someone will still be driving that truck when they shut off the pumps for good.

Damn, John - I'm agreeing with you. I must be a conservative after all. I've long considered diesel to be the best available transition fuel for transportation. Gimme Jet-B for my Mooney and a decent biodiesel blend for my Land Cruiser, but let's also keep the eyes on the prize of getting the transportation sector off carbon-based fuels and into renewables. It's early in that game, but it's one we should be trying to win.

Dave - you must not have been paying attention when BK was purchased by the Brazilians, or when they called Obama's bluff and proceeded with the merger. They expect to save some $275M through their "tax inversion" strategy. From last weeks Financial Post: http://business.financialpost.com/2015/01/23/tim-hortons-inc-planning-significant-layoffs-at-head-offices-next-week-sources/ But the upside is that you might get to enjoy a double-double and a maple cream down your way.

I'm confused - so 'regulated' means 'socialist'?

Just saw the video - that parachute assisted belly flop looked like it hurt!

Maple Leaf fans always complain that its so much harder to play hockey in Toronto than the rest of the country, too. I have no idea why Big Pharma needs rabid fans, but I'm sure they are happy to have you rooting for them, Dave. Most of the basic R&D in pharma is tax-payer subsidized. If it's not an outright grant, it's a hefty tax-deduction. Most pharmas spend twice the amount on marketing as they do on R&D and product approvals. Because you should go see your doctor and ask for drugs that you saw on TV. Oh, and much of the R&D these days doesn't actually go into innovative development, but into patent protection. The National Institute of Health Care Management estimated that 85 percent of drugs approved by the FDA between 1989 and 2000 were modifications of existing drugs. Light, D. W., et al. concluded that 1/2 of the more important new drugs are being discovered by R&D in other countries and later marketed in the United States. (Am. J. Bioethics 4(1), 2004) More inconvenient facts here: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223

You seem to think policy is like cheering for a sports team - pick a side and stick it to the rest. We have folks like that here - most of them are Maple Leafs fans. But most of us look at the stats. And when the stats don't look good, maybe it's time to change the lineup. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Dave, you guys are nowhere close to "fixed" when it comes to healthcare reform. A single payor system would make far more sense - but it seems politically impossible for ya'll to achieve. I guess a big part of being so free is being free to pay so much more to big HMOs and big pharmaceutical firms for something that the rest of the West regards as a public service.

Thanks for your concern! As a Canadian (!) D'Artois would have heard countless stories about other Canadians being bankrupted in the event that he needed health care in the USA, so doubtless had plenty of private insurance. I don't recall ever saying that US health care was lousy - in fact quite the opposite - but it's still extremely and unnecessarily expensive because so many middle-men have to get paid.

The only thing I've been able to follow on this thread today is Dave's post about the French skiier nailing the 1/2 pipe at X-Games.

You keep talking about Iran like it is a monolithic society, incapable of change. I'm arguing for regime change. Clearly business as usual under the ayatollahs isn't a benefit - not to us, not to Iranians. But the benefit of a democratic, progressive Iran joining the community of nations as a trading partner would be huge for the region and good for the West. A market of 76 million people in an oil rich nation isn't something that most trading nations would turn their noses up at. We got over our little disagreements with Germany and Japan after a little regime change, and there used to be this thing called the the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. Things can change, and sometimes for the better. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

What I find crazy is the belief that the best way to fight the regime in Tehran is through military threats. All that does is play into the "Great Satan" narrative the ayatollahs use to hold on to power. Economics creates far more leverage. The West crashed their currency in 2012, although it came too late to support the progressives who were very close to effecting an internal regime change. The current global oil price is also taking a heavy toll on their economy. I doubt that anyone in Tehran will ever wear an "I love America" T-shirt, but as Andy notes, we aren't talking about brainwashed, starving and globally isolated North Koreans. Many young Iranians are worldly, well-educated, and fed up with the fascist/religious regime that runs their country. Unfortunately, our policies--including unwavering support for the brutal, fundamentalist religious sect that runs Saudi Arabia, and let's not forget to mention the Israeli right-wing--help to keep the ayatollahs in power.

Not as much as it did last year, that's for sure. We don't have fuel oil tanks in my part of Labrador - big hydro projects in our neighborhood keep our houses humming on electric heat at about 0.03/kWh. Funny thing is that Iran, Canada and the USA are all net exporters of oil these days - we just can't produce the stuff as cheaply as the Saudis, so they are dumping it onto the world market, which has dramatically cut the price and knocked out some of their higher-priced competition. The fact that they can do this at all seems like a good argument to re-invest the trillion/year spent on "defense" in good o'l North American know-how so that we can get big parts of our economy off oil entirely and get our boys and girls out of harms way. Then the Saudis and a lot of other of our unsavoury "friends" can go back to being in charge of sand dunes and religious sites.

One could say that of most great powers, both secular and religious. You were dead on when you talked about acting in accordance with "our interests". What has always been hard is figuring out what "our interests" really are, and how to best achieve them. Being Team America: World Cop hasn't worked out so well, so perhaps there's a better way.

x2 on Fox and agitated masses...that's some scary s@#t they spin. But one can never have too many guns. My wife just took off hunting with her girlfriends, and took my favorite little semi. Now what am I going to go out and shoot ptarmigan with today? Could use a shotgun, but that's got no class.