The only “conservative” belief they adhere to imo is the want for smaller government … because they do in fact want a dictatorship.

Don’t believe it for a second. Conservative “smaller government” is always about getting rid of some long-term bureaucrats who know what they’re doing and government programmes conservatives don’t like, and then growing Government by massively increasing internal security apparatus (police, border control, military, prisons, etc.).

Every conservative government always want to go “tough on crime” or “expel (il)legal immigrants” — and that always winds up with a massive increase in government size and expenditures. You don’t get those things without a significant number of boots on the ground, and once you have those boots on the ground they’ll find every excuse to use them — just like how ICE is terrorizing blue cities in the US, or is being used to supplant airport security.

“Smaller government” is just conservative code for “wielding more control over citizens”. Every time.

I work across timezones — and the fact that I’ll no longer be changing my clocks in the fall (living in BC), but my employees in EDT will be changing back to EST will be a problem.

With the un-until-now changing of the clocks twice a year, I’ve always been 3 hours behind my Eastern Time employees. This was easy to keep track of, and meant that our 1100 team meetings were at 1400 for them year round. Clocks changed here, clocks changed there, everything stayed in sync.

But now that we won’t be changing the clock here in BC in the fall, that 1100 meeting I book in PT is going to suddenly become a 1300 meeting for them. That wouldn’t be a problem if this was everyone’s only meeting, but as we’re part of a big multinational corporation they have other scheduled meetings with various teams already scheduled for 1300, so they’re going to be in conflict. I can fix them by bumping the meeting back an hour after the fall time change — but that means my BC based employees are going to have to attend a meeting over lunch (something I am very loathe to do — I know there are a lot of shitty managers out there, but for my staff I work very hard to ensure they get all the time off they are owed, they get time off when they want/need it, that everyone gets time off and flexibility for medical issues, and that I don’t ask them to work after hours or during lunch breaks unless agreed upon beforehand, and even then only for emergency situations).

In essence, if I keep that meeting at the same time in PT it’s going to change in ET, and that change is going to cascade as other meetings suddenly overlap. Or I change it here, and have a similar issue for my staff in BC. And that’s not even saying anything about my one team member in California (where they’re still changing time twice a year). Now — this isn’t the worst thing in the world to happen; we’ll work our way around it — but if everyone stopped doing twice-yearly time changes it would certainly make the situation easier. Twice a year I’m going to have a scheduling PITA.

Still worth it to no longer have to change all the clocks twice a year!

Sure — as with every tool. Hammers are great for many things, but don’t do all that well driving screws. Money is one of the most used tools humans have ever devised, but you can’t use it for everything.

AI in coding may only be good for a finite set of situations — but that set is massive. You’re dealing with regular languages that can be mathematically proven to be correct (in the sense that they will generate a working program, and not in the sense that they program will in fact function the way the user intends). This is a less open-ended scenario than something like an AI generated video, and so it’s easier for AI to excel at it, especially for non-novel algorithms.

But if you use it like an idiot, you’re going to get burned — and this guy was an idiot who doesn’t understand what he’s doing, or the tools researchers in software development have made over the last few decades. AI shouldn’t be touching your production environment — at all. And it shouldn’t have to — code needs to be stored in a versioning source repository of some sort (and backed up so you are unlikely to ever lose it), deployment needs to be fully scripted and should be able to rebuild your environments from scratch (from code right to production), and developers and development tools (like AI tools) should only have access to development environments, and not production environments.

So unless you’re a total dumbass, an AI agent (or even a shitty human developer) should never have the kind of access to do what happened here. They violated some pretty basic principals of software development, and got burned. This guy sawed his own hand off because he misused the tools to take a bunch of shortcuts, without building in any backups or reproducibility. The AI isn’t the proximal fault here — trusting it when you have no way to reproduce your environment when things go wrong is the problem, and that’s 100% on the human sitting at the keyboard (PEBKAC).

AI is like a circular saw. Are circular saws useful?

Of course.

Can you cut your entire hand off if you don’t use it correctly? Absolutely.

That’s a pretty reductive take, and doesn’t really account for how emissions are generated.

I don’t disagree that burning fossil fuels to generate electrical power doesn’t happen, nor that it’s not great for the environment (coal in particular is evil in that it contains radioactive particles that get concentrated in the waste ash — decommissioned coal plants are more radioactive than decommissioned nuclear plants).

However, your take misses these basic facts:

1. Power plants are giant buildings that can burn fuel at extremely high temperatures, and which can burn that fuel right at peak efficiency. They extract the maximum amount of energy from the fuel, and thus produce more energy per emission. You can’t do that in something the size of a passenger vehicle.
2. EVs are roughly 95% efficient. ICE vehicles are typically under 30% efficient (although HEVs can get up to 35% efficient). So for every kWh your fossil fuel power plant generates, EVs are going to be able to use it with very high efficiency. Coupled with #1 above you ultimately burn less fuel in your power plant to get the same amount of motive power than you would with an ICE vehicle.
3. While I’m not personally a “true believer” in the technology, a fossil fuel based power plant could theoretically implement carbon capture technology to reduce their pollution output. You can’t do this in an ICE vehicle.
4. And most importantly, when your power utility eventually phases out their fossil fuel based power plant, and ideally replaces it with green energy production, your EV gets that upgrade for free, whereas an ICE based vehicle will still need to burn fossil fuels.
5. Lastly — I can generate my own clean electricity at home. I can buy a pallet of solar panels that can generate 10kWh of power for around $5k. I can never make my own gasoline at home.

FWIW, I live in a jurisdiction where the electrical supply is 85 - 90% green already (primarily hydroelectric, with wind and solar) — so your concern doesn’t apply to me personally. However, even in jurisdictions that are burning 100% coal for their power, driving an EV is still overall better for the environment over driving an ICE vehicle.

One of the absolute best things I ever did for our household finances was to ditch virtually all of our gas-burning devices/vehicles. We’re down to one HEV (my wife’s car) as our only gas burner. My BEV replaced both our old ICE vehicle and our portable gas generator. Ensured our lawn mower and yard tools are all battery operated. That one HEV is the last gasoline albatross around our neck, and so we only use it for my wife’s commute.

We’re closer than ever, and I look forward to the day her car is paid off and we can replace it with another BEV, and get off the gasoline trampoline forever. If I never have to buy another litre of gasoline in my lifetime, it will still be too soon.

The problem with this analysis is that the “EV mandate” was never an “EV mandate”. It didn’t stipulate that only EVs could be sold after 2035 — it always also permitted other forms of Zero-Emissions Vehicles (and PHEVs with a minimum battery-only distance (80km IIRC?)) — including Hydrogen vehicles.

And Hyundai’s interest in hydrogen is just hedging its bets. They have one hydrogen model (the Nexxo), but multiple EV models. And if the number sold in Canada isn’t zero, it’s likely pretty close. They can be as interested as they want to be, but global sales are abysmal, hydrogen availability is low, the hydrogen is expensive, the hydrogen isn’t always green, and storage and transportation are significant challenges.

It doesn’t matter who is “interested” in hydrogen — it’s still not happening. But it was always allowed by the “EV mandate”, so it wouldn’t need to be cancelled for any MOUs.

Hydrogen isn’t going to happen. So stop holding your breath.

Beyond all of the other problems with hydrogen (production, transportation, storage, dispensing, etc.) the economic truth is that hydrogen vehicles are, at best, 60% efficient. And hydrogen production either relies on fossil fuel production (for “grey” hydrogen), or electrolysis (“green” hydrogen). Electrolysis itself is only about 66% efficient.

This efficiency matters in this comparison because when you put 100 units of energy to get 66 units of energy out, and then put that into a vehicle that can only transform that into around 40 units of motive power, you will always do better putting that energy into an EV which is 95% efficient (you put in 100 units of energy and get 95 units out). In terms of cars, you can charge more than twice as many cars with this input energy as you’d be able to with hydrogen. There is no world where that makes any sort of economic sense for anyone.

With hydrogen vehicles, you get a vehicle that needs a lot more energy to go less distance. It’s the worst of all worlds. And that’s just discussing the efficiency values — and not all the losses that occur during all the transfer stages. Hydrogen needs to be kept cryogenically cold (which also requires more energy to maintain) — in effect, there is no possible work in which hydrogen replaces a modern EV.

What the fuck is a guy living up in Nunavut supposed to do with an electric vehicle?

Nothing - which is why the existing mandate ALLOWS THE SALE OF PHEVs PAST 2035.

Your whole post just screams “tell me I didn’t read the mandate without telling me you didn’t read the mandate”.

Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).

That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.