Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 185 posts

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#131

Post by [deleted] »

hanniabu wrote: post #126
redthrowaway wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any given point in any given summer, a large chunk of the country is on fire. That's the reality of having a massive landmass covered in boreal forest. The consequence of that is that we have a well funded, professional forest fire service that is among the best in the world at what they do. If accepting American or Russian help would have helped save Canadian homes and businesses, we would have. The South African…

"This isn't the California wildfires. It's not threatening populated areas anymore. It's burning in a vast expanse of unpopulated subarctic forest. It's fine. The damage is done; now we wait for it to burn out while keeping an eye out for the next one." I hate this notion that wildlife and nature isn't important. Apparently only human lives and materialistic objects matter....

[deleted]

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#132

Post by rapind »

adventured wrote: post #99
DKnoll wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The value of the Canadian dollar right now is much closer to the historical norm than it was when at parity for a relatively short period. 2. The unemployment rate is marginally higher than in the USA. It's bad here, but it's bad over there too... the recession never ended. 3. That's true, and to be honest, I'm glad it's expensive. Expensive means there is something and/or someone there worth saving. I would argue…

> The unemployment rate is marginally higher than in the USA. It's bad here, but it's bad over there too... the recession never ended. That's blatantly incorrect. - The US unemployment rate is 9.7% on the U6. The Canadian equivalent would be closer to 13%-15% [1] (the Canadian R8 is not the equivalent of the U6). That's not a marginal difference, it's a significant difference. The US U6 rate peaked at near 18%, six y…

Not to mention Canadian household debt is setting records.

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#133

Post by walshemj »

zzalpha wrote: post #115
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city in Alberta that makes more sense for an software engineering industry is Edmonton. The University of Alberta is one of the top CS/engineering schools on the continent. I keep mentioning this to my coworkers at Google. A second Canadian engineering office in Edmonton would be awesome. And then I could move closer to my family.

Please no. With the oil downturn we can finally find qualified software devs to hire... the last thing we need is Google snapping them up!

Why you want to depress our wages ?

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#134

Post by danmaz74 »

hanniabu wrote: post #126
redthrowaway wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any given point in any given summer, a large chunk of the country is on fire. That's the reality of having a massive landmass covered in boreal forest. The consequence of that is that we have a well funded, professional forest fire service that is among the best in the world at what they do. If accepting American or Russian help would have helped save Canadian homes and businesses, we would have. The South African…

"This isn't the California wildfires. It's not threatening populated areas anymore. It's burning in a vast expanse of unpopulated subarctic forest. It's fine. The damage is done; now we wait for it to burn out while keeping an eye out for the next one." I hate this notion that wildlife and nature isn't important. Apparently only human lives and materialistic objects matter....

Fires are natural events and are part of the process that made our environment what it is. I recently visited Yosemite park and the giant sequoias, and it was explained that during the last 100 years or so there hadn't been any fires in the sequoias area because, to protect them, all fires were extinguished.

Then it turned out that fires are actually beneficial to sequoias reproduction, because they create an environment that is better suited to giant sequoias than the other kinds of trees. So, protecting them from fire was actually damaging their future...

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#135

Post by bryanlarsen »

hanniabu wrote: post #126
redthrowaway wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any given point in any given summer, a large chunk of the country is on fire. That's the reality of having a massive landmass covered in boreal forest. The consequence of that is that we have a well funded, professional forest fire service that is among the best in the world at what they do. If accepting American or Russian help would have helped save Canadian homes and businesses, we would have. The South African…

"This isn't the California wildfires. It's not threatening populated areas anymore. It's burning in a vast expanse of unpopulated subarctic forest. It's fine. The damage is done; now we wait for it to burn out while keeping an eye out for the next one." I hate this notion that wildlife and nature isn't important. Apparently only human lives and materialistic objects matter....

The northern forests of Canada are a large part Jack Pine, which require fire to open their seed cones and reproduce.

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#136

Post by MustardTiger »

redthrowaway wrote: post #121
vehementi wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how everyone else is just inventing shit about foreign policy. Folks y'all can talk good about hacking but it doesn't mean your armchair intuition is right about specialized issues in other countries

At any given point in any given summer, a large chunk of the country is on fire. That's the reality of having a massive landmass covered in boreal forest. The consequence of that is that we have a well funded, professional forest fire service that is among the best in the world at what they do. If accepting American or Russian help would have helped save Canadian homes and businesses, we would have. The South African…

>If accepting American or Russian help would have helped save Canadian homes and businesses, we would have

How do you know this? Because the actual firefighters wanted more planes. The prime minster, who knows nothing about fire fighting is the one who rejected the help. Note that this has been an especially dry, hot season with far more wildfires than usual. And despite this, the provincial government cancelled the deal that they had to get more planes. The firefighters were up in arms over this. And that's before the Fort Mac fire happened.

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#137

Post by MustardTiger »

dkn wrote: post #60
MichaelGG wrote: post #52

And yet, Canada turned down help from Russia and the US. Then went around and hired 300 firefighters from South Africa that have no experience with this type of fire or equipment (they said due to lack of water, they use sticks to beat the bush fires). I understand it's more of a social help program ("Working On Fire" job assistance), but still it seems bizarre. Or maybe I've been reading the wrong news sources and t…

Actually our airspace was saturated. We had more aircraft ourselves we could have put up but it would have been unsafe to do so.

No it was not, please don't repeat made up excuses for bad political decisions.

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#138

Post by MustardTiger »

dleslie wrote: post #19
wrong_variable wrote: post #3

Canada seems to be in so much trouble - I am wondering how things are there. # Massive flooring of the Canadian dollar. # Continued job losses months on end - Unemployment rate of 7.1% ! # Most expensive Natural Disaster in Canadian history. At least they got their Obama.

In a historical sense, Canadian dollar isn't particularly low, at least not so low that I would call it "massive flooring". [0][1] Canada's unemployment rate of 7.1% is normal. [2] 0: The 80s were turbulent: http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/map-history-dollar/ 1: There was a spike and collapse where you'd recently expect: http://www.profitconfidential.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12... 2: Historical unemployment d…

>In a historical sense, Canadian dollar isn't particularly low, at least not so low that I would call it "massive flooring".

There was only one period of history where we were this badly fucked. And that was when this idiot's father was PM and destroyed our economy. It took 3 decades to pay back the debt he created and have our dollar recover. And now it is happening again.

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#139

Post by clwg »

dogma1138 wrote: post #73
MichaelGG wrote: post #52

And yet, Canada turned down help from Russia and the US. Then went around and hired 300 firefighters from South Africa that have no experience with this type of fire or equipment (they said due to lack of water, they use sticks to beat the bush fires). I understand it's more of a social help program ("Working On Fire" job assistance), but still it seems bizarre. Or maybe I've been reading the wrong news sources and t…

Turning help from Russia was stupid they actually got allot of experience the great northern forests of Russia are probably the closest environment to Canada and if they go a blaze it can cause an extinction level event on a planetary scale so they are actually well prepared for that at least as well as anyone can be. They even have reportedly tested killing forest fires with nukes if a Siberian tundra fire goes out…

Here are the criteria for rating the risk of wildfires in Alberta http://wildfire.alberta.ca/fire-smart-landscapes/wildfire-th...

The fire presented a risk right at the beginning and seemed to spread into populated area's faster than could be responded to, once that risk was no longer present outside assistance was not required.

Re: Canada’s $6.9B Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware and Still Out of Control

#140

Post by cmrdporcupine »

zzalpha wrote: post #115
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city in Alberta that makes more sense for an software engineering industry is Edmonton. The University of Alberta is one of the top CS/engineering schools on the continent. I keep mentioning this to my coworkers at Google. A second Canadian engineering office in Edmonton would be awesome. And then I could move closer to my family.

Please no. With the oil downturn we can finally find qualified software devs to hire... the last thing we need is Google snapping them up!

Who is we and what are you hiring for?
Post reply on HN