swordgeek

Nope. @JohnnyCanck has a good explanation of what just happened, but some other info to add.

We're heading into a federal election soon, and the Conservative Party (right of the Democrats, and infused with a handful of Trump-level nutbars) held a solid lead for several months. When Trudeau announced he was stepping down, followed by Trump's tarriffs, the lead shrunk to roughly the margin of error.

Carney is fairly conservative for the Liberal party - he was appointed to lead the Bank of Canada by a (very!) Conservative PM, and then went on to head the Bank of England. He's a money manager for the rich, which is concerning, but also might draw some of the centrists back from the extreme right.

There's a fair chance that our next government will - again - be a minority, which will require the collaboration of parties, and often is when the most good gets done. Or we might get a CPC/Poilievre majority, in which case we'll be sucking up to Trump like a vacuum for four years.

Ambassador for Canada to the USA. :-D

But they look so good on raised, coal-rolling trucks with balls. /s

I'm Canadian, and I plan to never visit the USA again.

Ever.

There is no "...until" for me. The world without the US is easily big enough for me.

Two places I always wanted to see were New Orleans and Hawaii. The latter might end up breaking away, but New Orleans is probably off my list forever.

So we've apparently committed to buying 88 of these things. What direction out of the contract we have, and what are the consequences?

I get your point, but what is needed is for Canada to be the adult in the room.

True enough, but we can get stopgap gen 4.5 fighters at about half the price of the F-35, and with a vastly lower operational cost.

Get a fleet of Gripen Es, and run them in parallel with our existing Hornets, replacing the Hornets as they age out over the next decade or so. By then the new GCAP fighter should be in full production.

A lot of people - including me - instinctively say "good, let's make it the four eyes and exclude the US."

But really, we need to do away with the x-eyes program entirely, in its current form.

Shared intelligence is great, but the biggest advantage to 5Eyes has always been that it indirectly allows countries to spy on their own citizens. It's invasive, illegal bullshit that needs to stop.

Screw this "waiting another 10-15 years." We need to join the GCAP program, and get seriously active.

Lead time is necessarily immense, but we could both shorten it and improve the end product.

"Waiting for someone else to develop" has been a symptom of Canada's Aerospace industry since the Arrow was shitcanned, and has crept into our national subconscious stream. We need to attack that attitude.

He'd be OK with that.

Sell them to Cuba.

I think Canada needs to accept a stopgap measure - the Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale, or Super Hornet - and dive headfirst into GCAP. FCAS is tempting as well, but GCAP is farther along and the countries are probably closer in goals to Canada.

Gen-X guy with possibly too much interest in the subject.

Shaving it bald for women started to become normal about 15 years ago. Trimming it was more common then, and going back to end of the 1980s, shaving was a rare and weird fetish in the western world.

As for why, I'd say it's because porn normalized it - and porn did it because as mainstream content became more explicit, shaved pubes were both easier to keep clean for the actresses, and (more importantly) showed more.

I find it funny that now that it's become mainstream, hair is becoming a growing fetish.

As an aside, since pubic hair is a sign of sexual maturity, some of the generations that grew up with hair down there have a subconscious connection between bald and sexually immature, i.e. children.