You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction. Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Unfortunately, for many transactions the consumer has little choice. We don't get to choose to simply not eat, for example (and most working people don't really have the option of spending half their day fishing).
What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage. UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities -- that's simply corporate welfare. UBI needs to be balanced with a reasonable minimum wage to prevent these sorts of abuses.
Why would they jump? If they can capture the market of people who want "games that work even if the Internet is down" and "games that don't glitch out if it's raining" and "games that work even if gamecompany takes the online version down" then that's a pretty big market.
It's a bad statement in the first place, as Sony has already hedged their bets and has a cloud-based gaming service, PS Now, which is already part of the PS3, PS4, and PS Vita (and available for Windows as well).
It also ignores the reality that Sony's PlayStation is massive globally, but many parts of the globe don't have good high-speed (and/or high data cap) internet service. For many parts of the world, you still need to go out and buy discs to get your games. Sony isn't about to ignore this segment of the market, because as you say -- it's a pretty damned big market.
Spin, spin, spin. Admit it, the only useful purpose of 64 bits CPU on a watch is a bigger number.
As an end-user there may be no obvious benefit to you, but as I've mentioned it's of benefit to Apple, especially on the software development side.
watchOS shares code with iOS, tvOS, and macOS. There are big benefits for Apple by being able to keep all of these 64-bit from top to bottom; it makes little sense for Apple to keep developing 32 bit development, build tooling, and kernel and library code just for watchOS, when all of their other platforms are 64-bit.
You pay for additional registers with increased context switch latency. It's not really a slam dunk.
Agreed -- the potential for performance increases isn't linear, and isn't guaranteed for all possible workloads. But so long as the increase in context switch latency is less than a non-trivial programs full load/store set, you'll still see performance improvements.
I highly suspect this choice makes as much sense for bean counters than it does for technical reasons.
I suspect the bean counters see the biggest benefit from the software side, with no longer having to maintain parallel 32-bit and 64-bit codebases and/or build apparatus. An Apple developer fixing a bug in a system library currently needs to a) potentially write two different fixes (moreso for drivers, the kernel, and low-level libraries), b) build for both 32-bit and 64-bit (probably as an automated step), and c) test in both. And for a new feature, they may have to additionally write/build/run two sets of unit and/or integration tests. QA testing needs to be done for both 32-bit and-64 bit. It's roughly twice the work for the development and QA teams, and cleaving that in half is a massive win for Apple.
Keeping around old stuff just for the sake of keeping around old stuff builds up technical debt, and I can see Apple wanting to go 64-bit-only across their entire product line as a way to rid themselves of some of that debt, and free up resources for other tasks.
So will we all just abandon to the scrap heap all the very expensive Apple devices that already exist and are still working? You know, all the 32 bit devices?
All of the old software and development tools still work if you need to target a really old device.
Apple has been primarily 64-bit for a very long time now. 64 bit support for OS X came out in 2005, all new Macs had 64-bit hardware by 2007, and in 2011 64 bit became required with Mac OS X Lion (10.7). The iPhone has been 64 bit since the iPhone 5s (2013). AppleTV has been fully 64-bit for two generations now (since 2015), however it needs to be noted here that prior to the 2015 model, the AppleTV didn't permit 3rd party apps anyway.
And as this article indicates, bitness of the tvOS and Apple Watch devices matters less, as Apple accepts the applications as byte code from the vendors, and can compile it on the fly for specific devices in whatever bitness they support. As such, your device has to be quite old to need 32 bit support, and Apple for at least the last year has required all apps submitted to its app stores to be 64-bit.
If Apple is not supporting 32 bit OSs anymore, then are app developers going to have to keep a copy of XCode 7 or whatever that does support the vast number of legacy devices?
The number isn't as vast as you are implying. Unsupported Macs would have to be at least 12 years old now. Unsupported iOS devices are more than 5 years old at this point. The AppleTV has never had a revision that permitted 3rd party apps which wasn't 64 bit. It's only on the Apple Watch where there is a currently supported 32 bit OS -- and as the article indicates, Apple got around much of the issues between 32-bit and 64-bit versions by having byte code based apps which it can compile to the necessary architecture on the fly on your behalf.
So yes -- if you for some reason really have to target old 32 bit devices, at some point you'll need an older Xcode around. Presumably you're deploying these to the devices yourself, as the App Store hasn't permitted 32-bit apps for at least the last year. Next year macOS is dropping 32-bit application support altogether.
So other than addressing >4Gb of memory, what are the upsides?
64-bit ARM processors have more than double the number of general purpose registers than 32 bit ARM processors have. This can speed up code considerably, by reducing the number of load/store instructions needed when you have half the registers. And as decisions as to register use is done at compile time (and not at runtime), this benefits 64-bit code mores than 32-bit code (as the compiler has to presume the lowest common denominator, and all compile 32-bit code assuming the 15 general purpose registers found on 32-bit ARM CPUs).
The big upside for Apple of course is no longer needing to maintain or ship any legacy 32-bit codebases. All current Apple devices now feature a 64-bit CPU, so Apple can get rid of 32-bit kernel support. If all apps are required to be 64-bit, Apple doesn't need to maintain or ship 32-bit system libraries. Xcode will be simplified, as there won't the any need for 32-bit build tools or targets.
Not having to maintain the massive amount of 32-bit support code inside Apple's various OS's will be a big win for Apple -- but that win will also trickle down to end-users, as Apple will be able to put more effort and emphasis on common codebases for their entire product line, and can put development resources that were being used to maintain 32-bit support to other tasks.
The question I have is: how about the competition? Does Sony or Microsoft keep your cloud saves (that you need to pay for)? If they are not, then this article is FUD.
As the update mentions, Sony keeps them for 6 months, Microsoft apparently keeps them forever.
But more important is the fact that Nintendo doesn't allow you to backup your saves to local storage. The PlayStation 4 at the very least does -- you can take saves from local storage and/or the cloud, and write them to any suitably formatted USB device (and back to a PS4, naturally). So with Nintendo, you're stuck either using their service, or losing your saves altogether.
Way back in the day, I was affiliated with a BBS that had filters for "obviously fake" names. I wound up getting peripherally involved when a Mr. Bob Blow tried to sign up for an account, and kept getting an automated rejection accusing him of using a false name.
Some years later, with another BBS, it took two years before anyone suspected Mr. Mike Oxlarge was using a fake name. Everyone knew who this person was online -- it only came to light when someone said his name in the office one day after a tech support call.
Mind you, it wasn't a problem for Mr. Takeshita, although it probably should have been. An IBM system mandated a maximum of 8 characters username, and corporate policy was to just the persons last name, truncated to 8 characters. Oops.
For me, a microphone of camera, not in my home unless it is press to play (I do have a smart phone, it spends it's life in another room
You leak way more useful information through your smartphone than I do through my Echo. My Echo sits in one place. What does it matter that Amazon knows that I turn on my lights at night? Doesn't everyone do that anyway?
You smart phone on the other hand sends a beacon everywhere it goes. You are easily tracked and traced through your phone. Your voice communication isn't encrypted, and your IMEI can be cloned so people can make calls or send texts as if they were you.
I don't own a mobile phone of any sort. I too an old enough to remember the freedom of being out of communications when I step out the door, and vastly prefer things that way.
Do some people really try to do shopping like that?
Voice controlled home units are often significantly better at recognizing and parsing speech than phone menu systems are. For one, requests are processed in the cloud, where the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple have a lot more processing power than your typical phone tree system does. And secondly, unlike a phone tree system that has to try to understand everybody, a voice control unit like the Echo can be trained specifically for your voice (on the Echo, just say "Alexa, learn my voice" and follow the directions).
There is a third type -- those who use their Echos in combination with home control units of various sorts.
If you have home control hardware for things like your entertainment centre, lights, fans, shades, thermostat, etc. being able to control them via a single voice unit is really slick. If you have a complex home entertainment setup, or light switches in dumb places, having your guests learn to ask Alexa to turn things on and off is often much easier for them.
My 70yo mother can't figure out how to turn on our TV, as it requires turning on the surround receiver, the TV, and the DVR, and ensuring the surround receiver and TV are set to the correct inputs. But she quickly learned to say "Alexa, turn on the TV" and have all of that done for her automatically.
The Echo (and like devices) become a lot more useful if there are other things in your home for them to integrate with.
I am using the Tracking Protection feature of Firefox, not an ad blocker. I guess I can add one more to the list of sites that deliberately treat privacy tools no differently from ad blockers instead of falling back to different ads that respect viewers' privacy.
Just disable Javascript and reload. Problem fixed.
More and more I'm leaning towards wanting a browser that permits per-website Javascript white/black listing. Safari added some great per-website settings controls, and just needs to add Javascript blocking to be perfect.
My new motto is "just because I visit your website does NOT give you permission to run your code on my machine". This needs to become more embedded in the general web use and development cultures IMO.
I stand corrected. Most products do not get such exemptions, so adding duties on them would be, in effect, a violation of the treaty.
Agricultural goods are a real problem area when it comes to international trade, and are exempted all over the place because certain regions (like the US and EU) subsidize agriculture very heavily, which distorts the market for agricultural goods globally.
IIRC, there was an attempt during GATT negotiations to fix this global problem, but once the 2008 economic meltdown hit everyone just forgot about it and things remained as they have been for decades, with some countries massively subsidizing agricultural sectors, others putting tariffs and non-tariff protections in place, and others have seen their industries failing and disappearing.
It's a mess. I'm not trying to assign blame -- the US probably feels that they can't drop their dairy, corn, and other farm subsidies because (let's be frank) those are major voting blocs they don't want to piss off. And at the same time, it's an international problem beyond Canada and the US.
Where is the science that any of that is actually bad for either cows or humans? The FDA has some of the strictest regulations in the world, yet you say they're letting farmers poison the population with milk?
Fortunately, Health Canada puts their research online:
Executive summary: it's much worse for cows than for people, but there are still some concerns about immune responses in some people. So it's mostly about the health of the cows (and the milk produced by potentially unhealthy cows) rather than a direct effect of rbST in milk on humans.
a) the rights and obligations of the Parties under Article XI:2(c)(i) of the GATT and those rights as incorporated by Article 309 shall apply with respect to trade in agricultural goods only to the dairy, poultry and egg goods set out in Appendix 703.2.B.7; and
b) with respect to such dairy, poultry and egg goods that are qualifying goods, either Party may adopt or maintain a prohibition or restriction or a customs duty on the importation of such good consistent with its rights and obligations under the GATT.
Appendix 703.2.B.7 lists the specific items which qualify under this part.
Likewise, Article 712 states:
Right to Take Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures
1. Each Party may, in accordance with this Section, adopt, maintain or apply any sanitary or phytosanitary measure necessary for the protection of human, animal or plant life or health in its territory, including a measure more stringent than an international standard, guideline or recommendation.
Right to Establish Level of Protection
2. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Section, each Party may, in protecting human, animal or plant life or health, establish its appropriate levels of protection in accordance with Article 715.
Scientific Principles
3. Each Party shall ensure that any sanitary or phytosanitary measure that it adopts, maintains or applies is:
a) based on scientific principles, taking into account relevant factors including, where appropriate, different geographic conditions;
b) not maintained where there is no longer a scientific basis for it; and
c) based on a risk assessment, as appropriate to the circumstances.
Non-Discriminatory Treatment
4. Each Party shall ensure that a sanitary or phytosanitary measure that it adopts, maintains or applies does not arbitrarily or unjustifiably discriminate between its goods and like goods of another Party, or between goods of another Party and like goods of any other country, where identical or similar conditions prevail.
So in effect, dairy is exempt from most NAFTA rules, and setting human health standards for products is perfectly legal, so long as it is non-discriminatory.
correcting because your own farmers can't produce milk at the same price because they are more inefficient is very much protectionism
Canada has higher food quality regulations than the US does. We don't permit the use of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) in milk producing cows for one. We also don't permit the high levels of antibiotic use the US dairies are allowed to use in the US. The maximum Somatic Cell Count permitted in Canadian milk is nearly half that allowed in US milk.
So yes, in some ways Canadian dairy production is slightly less efficient, but only because we don't feed our cows growth hormones which are detrimental to both bovine and human health, and don't allow all the blood and pus and other non-milk cellular material the US permits in their milk products.
But again -- if US dairies are willing to meet our dairy requirements and stop with the subsidies worth more than the entire Canadian dairy industry is worth -- you'll find Canada ready to talk. Again -- the tariffs were in response to continued US Government subsidies, and not the other way around.
suspect it's more like they always built cars for the Canadian market in Canada, and with NAFTA, it makes economic sense to build one model in one plant and another in another. So the models built in Canada end up getting imported here and vice versa. But is there more to it?
There are a few reasons, including those that you've touched upon already: better educated population and universal medicare help, but so does cheap and reliable electricity (most of which is green in the main automative manufacturing centres due to our abundance of hydroelectric generation capacity), access to raw materials, and the lower Canadian dollar (which makes worker wages competitive). Automative in Canada actually has very strong unions, but even with that the manufacturers get highly educated talent that costs them less money to maintain.
Most automotive manufacturing in Canada tends to be mid-to-higher end lines; we don't have a wide variety of vehicle types, and don't make anything either compact or smaller, or in pickup truck form; Industry Canada has a list of passenger vehicles made in Canada in 2017 here (this list doesn't include military or commercial or mass transit vehicles, or anything that floats or flies).
One thing I will note, it isn't as if automotive manufacturers have been making a run on building assembly facilities in Canada. Most of the facilities in use have been around for decades. Thus, we can conclude that the value is sufficient to keep building vehicles with good sale values in these Canadian facilities, but not so much that manufacturing is leaving the US (or elsewhere) for Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
You're ignoring that both sides in the transaction gain from a voluntary exchange.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction. Indeed, chances are pretty good that the corporate entity is gaining a whole lot more from the transaction than the consumer is.
Unfortunately, for many transactions the consumer has little choice. We don't get to choose to simply not eat, for example (and most working people don't really have the option of spending half their day fishing).
What the article writer seems to miss in my mind is that UBI needs to go hand-in-hand with a reasonable minimum wage. UBI shouldn't be a way for government to simply provide cheaper labour for corporate entities -- that's simply corporate welfare. UBI needs to be balanced with a reasonable minimum wage to prevent these sorts of abuses.
Yaz
This just in from the BBC -- Argentina has invaded the Falkland Islands!
Yaz
They are just PCs from five years ago (or worse), with DRM and a different input device.
You missed "and with vastly better games".
Yaz
Why would they jump? If they can capture the market of people who want "games that work even if the Internet is down" and "games that don't glitch out if it's raining" and "games that work even if gamecompany takes the online version down" then that's a pretty big market.
It's a bad statement in the first place, as Sony has already hedged their bets and has a cloud-based gaming service, PS Now, which is already part of the PS3, PS4, and PS Vita (and available for Windows as well).
It also ignores the reality that Sony's PlayStation is massive globally, but many parts of the globe don't have good high-speed (and/or high data cap) internet service. For many parts of the world, you still need to go out and buy discs to get your games. Sony isn't about to ignore this segment of the market, because as you say -- it's a pretty damned big market.
Yaz
Will Wine then have to become actually an emulator?
I suspect you'll have to run it in a VM. 64-bit WINE exists, however there is a major incompatibility with 64-bit macOS that causes issues, where the only workaround appears to be using emulation.
Yaz
Spin, spin, spin. Admit it, the only useful purpose of 64 bits CPU on a watch is a bigger number.
As an end-user there may be no obvious benefit to you, but as I've mentioned it's of benefit to Apple, especially on the software development side.
watchOS shares code with iOS, tvOS, and macOS. There are big benefits for Apple by being able to keep all of these 64-bit from top to bottom; it makes little sense for Apple to keep developing 32 bit development, build tooling, and kernel and library code just for watchOS, when all of their other platforms are 64-bit.
Yaz
You pay for additional registers with increased context switch latency. It's not really a slam dunk.
Agreed -- the potential for performance increases isn't linear, and isn't guaranteed for all possible workloads. But so long as the increase in context switch latency is less than a non-trivial programs full load/store set, you'll still see performance improvements.
I highly suspect this choice makes as much sense for bean counters than it does for technical reasons.
I suspect the bean counters see the biggest benefit from the software side, with no longer having to maintain parallel 32-bit and 64-bit codebases and/or build apparatus. An Apple developer fixing a bug in a system library currently needs to a) potentially write two different fixes (moreso for drivers, the kernel, and low-level libraries), b) build for both 32-bit and 64-bit (probably as an automated step), and c) test in both. And for a new feature, they may have to additionally write/build/run two sets of unit and/or integration tests. QA testing needs to be done for both 32-bit and-64 bit. It's roughly twice the work for the development and QA teams, and cleaving that in half is a massive win for Apple.
Keeping around old stuff just for the sake of keeping around old stuff builds up technical debt, and I can see Apple wanting to go 64-bit-only across their entire product line as a way to rid themselves of some of that debt, and free up resources for other tasks.
Yaz
So will we all just abandon to the scrap heap all the very expensive Apple devices that already exist and are still working? You know, all the 32 bit devices?
All of the old software and development tools still work if you need to target a really old device.
Apple has been primarily 64-bit for a very long time now. 64 bit support for OS X came out in 2005, all new Macs had 64-bit hardware by 2007, and in 2011 64 bit became required with Mac OS X Lion (10.7). The iPhone has been 64 bit since the iPhone 5s (2013). AppleTV has been fully 64-bit for two generations now (since 2015), however it needs to be noted here that prior to the 2015 model, the AppleTV didn't permit 3rd party apps anyway.
And as this article indicates, bitness of the tvOS and Apple Watch devices matters less, as Apple accepts the applications as byte code from the vendors, and can compile it on the fly for specific devices in whatever bitness they support. As such, your device has to be quite old to need 32 bit support, and Apple for at least the last year has required all apps submitted to its app stores to be 64-bit.
If Apple is not supporting 32 bit OSs anymore, then are app developers going to have to keep a copy of XCode 7 or whatever that does support the vast number of legacy devices?
The number isn't as vast as you are implying. Unsupported Macs would have to be at least 12 years old now. Unsupported iOS devices are more than 5 years old at this point. The AppleTV has never had a revision that permitted 3rd party apps which wasn't 64 bit. It's only on the Apple Watch where there is a currently supported 32 bit OS -- and as the article indicates, Apple got around much of the issues between 32-bit and 64-bit versions by having byte code based apps which it can compile to the necessary architecture on the fly on your behalf.
So yes -- if you for some reason really have to target old 32 bit devices, at some point you'll need an older Xcode around. Presumably you're deploying these to the devices yourself, as the App Store hasn't permitted 32-bit apps for at least the last year. Next year macOS is dropping 32-bit application support altogether.
Yaz
So other than addressing >4Gb of memory, what are the upsides?
64-bit ARM processors have more than double the number of general purpose registers than 32 bit ARM processors have. This can speed up code considerably, by reducing the number of load/store instructions needed when you have half the registers. And as decisions as to register use is done at compile time (and not at runtime), this benefits 64-bit code mores than 32-bit code (as the compiler has to presume the lowest common denominator, and all compile 32-bit code assuming the 15 general purpose registers found on 32-bit ARM CPUs).
The big upside for Apple of course is no longer needing to maintain or ship any legacy 32-bit codebases. All current Apple devices now feature a 64-bit CPU, so Apple can get rid of 32-bit kernel support. If all apps are required to be 64-bit, Apple doesn't need to maintain or ship 32-bit system libraries. Xcode will be simplified, as there won't the any need for 32-bit build tools or targets.
Not having to maintain the massive amount of 32-bit support code inside Apple's various OS's will be a big win for Apple -- but that win will also trickle down to end-users, as Apple will be able to put more effort and emphasis on common codebases for their entire product line, and can put development resources that were being used to maintain 32-bit support to other tasks.
Yaz
That is why you have X.org and X386
The project was named XFree86. You were so very, very close :)
Yaz
The question I have is: how about the competition? Does Sony or Microsoft keep your cloud saves (that you need to pay for)? If they are not, then this article is FUD.
As the update mentions, Sony keeps them for 6 months, Microsoft apparently keeps them forever.
But more important is the fact that Nintendo doesn't allow you to backup your saves to local storage. The PlayStation 4 at the very least does -- you can take saves from local storage and/or the cloud, and write them to any suitably formatted USB device (and back to a PS4, naturally). So with Nintendo, you're stuck either using their service, or losing your saves altogether.
Yaz
Way back in the day, I was affiliated with a BBS that had filters for "obviously fake" names. I wound up getting peripherally involved when a Mr. Bob Blow tried to sign up for an account, and kept getting an automated rejection accusing him of using a false name.
Some years later, with another BBS, it took two years before anyone suspected Mr. Mike Oxlarge was using a fake name. Everyone knew who this person was online -- it only came to light when someone said his name in the office one day after a tech support call.
Mind you, it wasn't a problem for Mr. Takeshita, although it probably should have been. An IBM system mandated a maximum of 8 characters username, and corporate policy was to just the persons last name, truncated to 8 characters. Oops.
Yaz
For me, a microphone of camera, not in my home unless it is press to play (I do have a smart phone, it spends it's life in another room
You leak way more useful information through your smartphone than I do through my Echo. My Echo sits in one place. What does it matter that Amazon knows that I turn on my lights at night? Doesn't everyone do that anyway?
You smart phone on the other hand sends a beacon everywhere it goes. You are easily tracked and traced through your phone. Your voice communication isn't encrypted, and your IMEI can be cloned so people can make calls or send texts as if they were you.
I don't own a mobile phone of any sort. I too an old enough to remember the freedom of being out of communications when I step out the door, and vastly prefer things that way.
Yaz
Or you could spend $20 on a universal remote with a macro feature.
I have one. She still found the voice control easier.
Yaz
Do some people really try to do shopping like that?
Voice controlled home units are often significantly better at recognizing and parsing speech than phone menu systems are. For one, requests are processed in the cloud, where the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple have a lot more processing power than your typical phone tree system does. And secondly, unlike a phone tree system that has to try to understand everybody, a voice control unit like the Echo can be trained specifically for your voice (on the Echo, just say "Alexa, learn my voice" and follow the directions).
Yaz
There is a third type -- those who use their Echos in combination with home control units of various sorts.
If you have home control hardware for things like your entertainment centre, lights, fans, shades, thermostat, etc. being able to control them via a single voice unit is really slick. If you have a complex home entertainment setup, or light switches in dumb places, having your guests learn to ask Alexa to turn things on and off is often much easier for them.
My 70yo mother can't figure out how to turn on our TV, as it requires turning on the surround receiver, the TV, and the DVR, and ensuring the surround receiver and TV are set to the correct inputs. But she quickly learned to say "Alexa, turn on the TV" and have all of that done for her automatically.
The Echo (and like devices) become a lot more useful if there are other things in your home for them to integrate with.
Yaz
I am using the Tracking Protection feature of Firefox, not an ad blocker. I guess I can add one more to the list of sites that deliberately treat privacy tools no differently from ad blockers instead of falling back to different ads that respect viewers' privacy.
Just disable Javascript and reload. Problem fixed.
More and more I'm leaning towards wanting a browser that permits per-website Javascript white/black listing. Safari added some great per-website settings controls, and just needs to add Javascript blocking to be perfect.
My new motto is "just because I visit your website does NOT give you permission to run your code on my machine". This needs to become more embedded in the general web use and development cultures IMO.
Yaz
Was it ever a competition? What was was there to "win"?
Ever hear anyone talk about ATOM feeds anymore?
Yaz
The only Apple product I own is the White Album.
Whoa -- talk about being way behind the times there grandpa!
You should totally check out Abbey Road. Best. B Side. Ever.
Yaz
Great post Yaz. Very informative. Surprised someone is trying to mod you down.
It's okay -- it's not like a I can exchange Karma for a wheel of cheese anyway :)
Yaz
I stand corrected. Most products do not get such exemptions, so adding duties on them would be, in effect, a violation of the treaty.
Agricultural goods are a real problem area when it comes to international trade, and are exempted all over the place because certain regions (like the US and EU) subsidize agriculture very heavily, which distorts the market for agricultural goods globally.
IIRC, there was an attempt during GATT negotiations to fix this global problem, but once the 2008 economic meltdown hit everyone just forgot about it and things remained as they have been for decades, with some countries massively subsidizing agricultural sectors, others putting tariffs and non-tariff protections in place, and others have seen their industries failing and disappearing.
It's a mess. I'm not trying to assign blame -- the US probably feels that they can't drop their dairy, corn, and other farm subsidies because (let's be frank) those are major voting blocs they don't want to piss off. And at the same time, it's an international problem beyond Canada and the US.
Yaz
Where is the science that any of that is actually bad for either cows or humans? The FDA has some of the strictest regulations in the world, yet you say they're letting farmers poison the population with milk?
Fortunately, Health Canada puts their research online:
Executive summary: it's much worse for cows than for people, but there are still some concerns about immune responses in some people. So it's mostly about the health of the cows (and the milk produced by potentially unhealthy cows) rather than a direct effect of rbST in milk on humans.
Yaz
Actually, NAFTA does allow permit this for dairy products:
NAFTA, Annex 703.2, Section B, Part 7 states:
7. Notwithstanding paragraph 6 and Article 309:
a) the rights and obligations of the Parties under Article XI:2(c)(i) of the GATT and those rights as incorporated by Article 309 shall apply with respect to trade in agricultural goods only to the dairy, poultry and egg goods set out in Appendix 703.2.B.7; and
b) with respect to such dairy, poultry and egg goods that are qualifying goods, either Party may adopt or maintain a prohibition or restriction or a customs duty on the importation of such good consistent with its rights and obligations under the GATT.
Appendix 703.2.B.7 lists the specific items which qualify under this part.
Likewise, Article 712 states:
Right to Take Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures
1. Each Party may, in accordance with this Section, adopt, maintain or apply any sanitary or phytosanitary measure necessary for the protection of human, animal or plant life or health in its territory, including a measure more stringent than an international standard, guideline or recommendation.
Right to Establish Level of Protection
2. Notwithstanding any other provision of this Section, each Party may, in protecting human, animal or plant life or health, establish its appropriate levels of protection in accordance with Article 715.
Scientific Principles
3. Each Party shall ensure that any sanitary or phytosanitary measure that it adopts, maintains or applies is:
a) based on scientific principles, taking into account relevant factors including, where appropriate, different geographic conditions;
b) not maintained where there is no longer a scientific basis for it; and
c) based on a risk assessment, as appropriate to the circumstances.
Non-Discriminatory Treatment
4. Each Party shall ensure that a sanitary or phytosanitary measure that it adopts, maintains or applies does not arbitrarily or unjustifiably discriminate between its goods and like goods of another Party, or between goods of another Party and like goods of any other country, where identical or similar conditions prevail.
So in effect, dairy is exempt from most NAFTA rules, and setting human health standards for products is perfectly legal, so long as it is non-discriminatory.
Yaz
correcting because your own farmers can't produce milk at the same price because they are more inefficient is very much protectionism
Canada has higher food quality regulations than the US does. We don't permit the use of recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) in milk producing cows for one. We also don't permit the high levels of antibiotic use the US dairies are allowed to use in the US. The maximum Somatic Cell Count permitted in Canadian milk is nearly half that allowed in US milk.
So yes, in some ways Canadian dairy production is slightly less efficient, but only because we don't feed our cows growth hormones which are detrimental to both bovine and human health, and don't allow all the blood and pus and other non-milk cellular material the US permits in their milk products.
But again -- if US dairies are willing to meet our dairy requirements and stop with the subsidies worth more than the entire Canadian dairy industry is worth -- you'll find Canada ready to talk. Again -- the tariffs were in response to continued US Government subsidies, and not the other way around.
Yaz
suspect it's more like they always built cars for the Canadian market in Canada, and with NAFTA, it makes economic sense to build one model in one plant and another in another. So the models built in Canada end up getting imported here and vice versa. But is there more to it?
There are a few reasons, including those that you've touched upon already: better educated population and universal medicare help, but so does cheap and reliable electricity (most of which is green in the main automative manufacturing centres due to our abundance of hydroelectric generation capacity), access to raw materials, and the lower Canadian dollar (which makes worker wages competitive). Automative in Canada actually has very strong unions, but even with that the manufacturers get highly educated talent that costs them less money to maintain.
Most automotive manufacturing in Canada tends to be mid-to-higher end lines; we don't have a wide variety of vehicle types, and don't make anything either compact or smaller, or in pickup truck form; Industry Canada has a list of passenger vehicles made in Canada in 2017 here (this list doesn't include military or commercial or mass transit vehicles, or anything that floats or flies).
One thing I will note, it isn't as if automotive manufacturers have been making a run on building assembly facilities in Canada. Most of the facilities in use have been around for decades. Thus, we can conclude that the value is sufficient to keep building vehicles with good sale values in these Canadian facilities, but not so much that manufacturing is leaving the US (or elsewhere) for Canada.
Yaz