GDPR is the acronym for Europe’s “General Data Protection Regulation” which is the toughest set of personal privacy regulations in the world. You can see from the GDPR Timeline on the right that companies have had about 3 years to get their systems into compliance, and it comes into full […]
Unless you live under a rock, you have heard of Self Driving Autonomous Vehicles (Uber, Waymo, GM Cruise…) and Governments around the world are scrambling to:
Modify existing legislation to allow self driving vehicles
Be the first in their region to allow self driving cars, because of the amount of R&D money / jobs involved
Consider new legislation to curb some the top level autonomy (level 5), where the vehicle is 100% responsible for the driving and it does not even offer a steering wheel or break peddle
Those are all important things to do, but Level 5 full autonomy is much further away than the public and many pendants think. Many people have already figured out that the algorithms used to drive on:
Below is an 11 minute interview with Dr. David Maenz about his new book The Price of Carbon. Unlike all climate change books we have reviewed in the past, The Price Of Carbon is the first one to pull together the serious science of Global Warming from Earths formation until today, explain the three likely outcomes of Global Warming, and then detail the PRACTICAL solutions to the issue.
This book is definitely not a casual read but for the educated person that is still open to thinking about this critical issue, it will be an eye opener:
At the heart of the Canadian Federal Governments announcement today about fixing the process that determines if a large scale project is in the best interest of Canada or not, is a desire to limit ability Provincial, Municipal and interest groups (like ‘First Nations’) to stall approved projects. The idea is to:
increase consultation so everyone’s voice is heard
set firm and visible rules for industry so that “goal posts” are not being moved after the fact
determine what is in Canada’s best interest, when that interest is at odds with local interest
These are clearly admirable goals. To achieve those goals there are now going to be three structures that industry must pass through to get Federal Government support:
A new ‘Impact Assessment Agency of Canada‘ will do the preliminary investigation to determine the environmental effects of a project
The existing ‘National Energy Board’ is demoted and renamed ‘Canadian Energy Regulator‘ but still be responsible for determining the technicalities of a project
The ‘Federal Minister of the Environment‘ will have the final say if a project is viable and in Canada’s interest
So now the questions are, will these changes allow:
Industry to decide that spending many millions of dollars to go through an elongated approval process that will have a definitive outcome be worth while?
Provincial, Municipal and interest groups (like ‘First Nations’) to be heard and listened to?
There has been much debate over the process and all agree something big had to change:
When industry works on large scale projects deemed to be in the Canadian national interest after years of consultation and vetting that are still blocked by local and regional interests, there is a big problem.
When interest groups (i.e. some ‘First Nations’, Municipal governments (i.e. Vancouver) local and Provincial governments (i.e. BC) feel empowered to block large scale projects that adversely affect the rest of the country, there is an even bigger problem.
Dennis McConaghy, a former senior executive at Trans Canada Pipelines thinks these changes will not achieve the desired goals:
Canada already had several Gold Rushes that left environmental devastation and abandoned towns. China’s BitMain is opening a server farm in Quebec and others are trying to open in Manitoba. Manitoba is thinking this could be another path to destruction that they do not want to participate in.
There is a debate over what REVENUE NEUTRAL means. The NDP claims that spending new money makes it revenue neutral. Most everyone else, thinks revenue neutral thinks raising one tax will reduce another.
Famously negative on Tesla, Gordon Johnson from GLJ Research explains what’s wrong with Tesla and why it’s uninvestable. In a nutshell, Gordon Johnson says that Tesla is just a car company that is now burning cash and has a leader that can’t be trusted in Elon Musk. Tesla is not […]
As someone who held a Fisker preorder, I was truly saddened to see that on March 27th 2024 Fisker published this ominous press release which almost certainly signals an impending bankruptcy: Fisker Inc. (“Fisker”), driven by a mission to create the world’s most emotional and sustainable electric vehicles, today announced […]
Before we dig into this hydrogen hype, we want to remind you that we are still big believers in hydrogen powered vehicles, but we are not blind to the state of the technology today and how that is reflected in real market conditions. We just finished listening to an interview […]
Tesla considers itself to be a tech company first and a car company second so it is no surprise they have a robust bug bounty program that rewards hackers for finding flaws in their code. Much to the surprise of many Tesla fanboys, Tesla does frequenty pay these whitehat hackers, […]
Just a week ago Nissan disclosed that sales in China had dropped by a massive 30% year over year (February 2024). The drop is explained away by Nissan executives as being caused by Chinese New Year, but two Nissan statistics also caught our attention and made us wonder how Nissan […]
Have you ever wondered who is the biggest most successful auto manufacturer in the world or what region of the world makes the most cars? We regularly hear about Toyota, Volkswagen, GM, Ford, Stellantis, Hyundai and Tesla fighting it out for automotive supremacy but then we hear of companies like […]
If you are wondering how some people value Tesla hundreds of billions of dollars higher than other intelligent people do, this is the video for you. This video examines how one institutional investment agency (Tom Narayank, Lead Autos Analyst at RBC Capital Markets), rationally comes to their stock valuation. These […]
You can tell all of these clean one liner jokes in church, at school, to seniors and not offend anyone. They are safe for the office jokes too: … and this golden oldie for bonus points: