Takes quite a while before the article has anything positive to say about high speed rail, telling of high costs and then net negatives. Then you discover that the core of the network would seem to generate a net profit - not the loss predicted by adding extensions to Windsor and Quebec City. "However, a project between Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto only could generate a positive net economic benefit at both 200 and 300 km/h." Quebec City to Montreal is the only time that I've ridden Via Rail though so I'd be a bit sad not to see it upgraded.
"individual investors should take control of their financial destinies, educate themselves, avoid sales pitches and invest in a well-diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds, like those offered by Vanguard, which operates on a not-for-profit basis. (Even [the research investment firm] Morningstar concludes, in a remarkably frank study, that low costs do a better job of predicting superior performance than do the firm’s own five-star ratings)."
The shocking (*gasp*) tale of area in Calgary in which kids might be allowed outdoors without direct adult supervision. "'You have to come to grips with the fact that even though things feel scarier than when we were growing up, they're actually safer,' she says by phone from her home in New York City. She rattles off some stats: Since the 1980s, child abductions have gone down and the number of children hit by cars has decreased."
Would be nice to have cheaper chicken / dairy though the Canada/US border is quite a drive away from my current location, but I've got my doubts. Of course Canada has some other types of restrictions on milk production that the US doesn't have, with Canada (and quite a few other countries banning bovine growth hormones
One sentence that I found interesting: "Unlike in the U.S. and Western Europe, childcare, for example, does not pose the same career challenge; a robust network of relatives combined with inexpensive domestic help give BRIC/UAE women multiple shoulders to lean on." What happens to that "robust network of relatives" as time wears on and more women enter the workforce (and likely have fewer children)? It seems like the sort of short-term productivity boost that you might expect - not something sustainable over the long-term.
"Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students ... are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors." The article suggests that part of the problem might be attributable to a "proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences" which it argues doesn't exist to the same extent in the sciences. Another issue is the highly theoretical focus of numerous classes as well as their cumulative nature. Would more projects solve this or is this to some extent sort of inevitable?
"France, which gets more than three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear energy, would need to invest somewhere in the vicinity of $544 billion to build new fossil fuel power plants to replace lost generating capacity if it shut down its reactors. That, he said, would have to be financed by a doubling of the price of electricity and would bring a 50 percent increase in France’s greenhouse gas emissions." (And, of course, those fossil fuel power plants seem more likely to kill you than nuclear)
Doesn't sound like a bad idea although how cooking "encourages students to treat each other respectfully" any more than any other subject might is something I'm a bit confused about.
