Jay Angler

Our car insurance is Provincially mandated. When we renew it, we are to take a photo with a date stamp to show them. We get a discount on our insurance if we are below a certain number of kilometers since our last renewal.

If the genuine goal of the surcharge on electric cars is for maintenance, there are multiple sides to the problem:
1. Yes, the gas is taxed to do the same thing, so it's not an "extra tax" it's just being taxed a different way.
2. The roads need to be maintained whether you drive on them daily or monthly. Much of the maintenance is weather related, so more hours of traffic doesn't directly relate to the costs - but it is a factor.
3. In my province, the reality is that a pile of the money from gas taxes doesn't go to road maintenance. A specific amount goes to subsidizing public transportation, and I believe a bunch goes into "general revenue". Public services require someone to pay for them. There tends to be a lot of whining if property taxes go up, so hiding them in gas taxes is one way to do it. So if the electric tax seems a bit high to you, you need to look into where that revenue is really going.

Using odometer readings to make these sort of taxes as fair as possible is easy to do. Even if an individual doesn't have a camera, all it takes is a friend with a cell phone to help them out once a year. If you look into it and still feel it's particularly unfair to people who drive minimally, I would propose a mileage based system and see if they show interest. It does make sense to me that people who drive more, should pay more for roads.

If you believe our Inuit, that's snow's adding some extra insulation. (0.5/inch or a bit more if it's fluffy, if you can believe the internet)

Burra Maluca wrote:My dog eats sheep poop, goat poop, chicken poop, donkey poop, duck poop, cat poop, probably any other kind of poop he encounters...

Most domestic animals are fed well enough that their poop contains all sorts of slightly digested fibers, and a whole lot of good nutrition that the host animal didn't absorb.

There are a few foods, and a pile of seeds, that are only digestible, or capable of germinating, after going through a digestive tract. Unfortunately, this practice is also a great way to pick up things one doesn't want, such as internal parasites!

I suspect this is one of those, "not just black and white, but many shades of grey" situations. I have observed chickens being very wary of a new food and only eating small samples Day 1, and then hoovering it Day 2 now that they've decided it didn't kill them.

I'm also aware of some plants having a degree of toxicity, but having medicinal effects that animals will seek out when needed.

Then there are plants where even small quantities can kill certain animals which I think humans have a degree of responsibility to manage. Using my friend's dogs as an example, hers were raised by mother dogs, but in an extremely safe environment, so they never got the opportunity to learn that dark chocolate and small pills in pill bottles could kill them. They didn't even get the opportunity to learn how to determine if a food was safe to eat.

One needs to remember that in the wild, many animals don't survive long enough to reproduce. Most humans aren't wanting that outcome in their domestic animals, so need to balance letting them learn survival instincts vs protecting them.

Cécile Stelzer Johnson wrote:  I started putting some around my fruit trees but the ducks and the chickens, and at night the rabbits too, I suspect, completely demolished my patch. I had to replant. Yep: Ducks and chickens know good forage when they see it!.

And deer if you're in deer territory. They ignored them the first two years, as the leaves are fuzzy. But then there was a drought and the deer decided they were quite fine to eat. They haven't killed the plants, and I'm hoping they're well enough established that they can cope with the deer, but it means that I'm not cutting them back for my own benefit now.

Gina Capri wrote: I have tried in the oven so at least there are no drafts, and I preheat it for a minute or two at a low temperature then turn it off so it’s warm enough. That works okay but not reliably.  

We're doing an overnight no-knead rise, but our house can be pretty cold at night. I microwave my hot rice pack that I use for injuries, set my metal bowl of dough on top with a kitchen plate as a lid, then put a towel or 3 over the whole works.

Adding some heated thermal mass to your oven might make it more consistent - hot brick comes to mind.

R Scott wrote:Calcium deficiency isn’t the only cause for shell less eggs.

A friend was told that her chickens who did so, had a virus that was spread by ducks but affected chickens and that the chickens wouldn't recover.

However, her chickens did recover, although it took several months to do so.

This is just one report - don't know anything more about it.

Most of my Khaki Campbell ducks have been hatched out and raised by Muscovy moms. Most Muscovy aren't keen on slugs, although some of them will eat them. However, that's led to some of my Khaki's hoovering slugs at any and every opportunity, and some looking at them very suspiciously.

Even more interesting though, when I've had to put chickens in the with the ducks, they've learned from the ducks how to eat slugs. Mine won't eat the huge Wet Coast slugs, but the small garden slugs don't last a second.

In my dreams, I want a garden with a fenced dry moat around it so I can safely run my ducks in the moat. I think it would really help keep the slugs down, but we've go too many aerial predators to let Khakis free range as they're a smaller duck. If I needed to, I'd catch slugs and put them in their water pan to teach them to reliably eat them.

Austen Shackles wrote:

That's a total of 12 signals on that one junction, and all of them have 1 light illuminated 24/7* for an ongoing consumption of 72KWh per day, or 26,280KWh per year for just ONE road junction.

The technology already exists for vehicle activated lights. I wonder if that technology used to only light up the signal light when there are cars approaching from that direction, would use more or less power?

Maybe not in big cities with traffic round the clock, but in many smaller communities or housing development areas, I suspect you could manage a net gain. We appear to have already done that with some of our people lighting for paths in my area. The people paths are also making more of an effort to keep the light pointed downward to minimize light pollution.

I truly wish we would do more publicity about the damage of light pollution to all living creatures, including humans, and work on reducing it. One downside I have observed about the supposedly 'cheap' LED's is the proliferation of outdoor lighting when none is really required.

Thanks for all the work up front, and all the work staff are currently doing to test that everything is working! I can't imagine how much effort went into this whole process!