On 2026-02-23 7:50 p.m., The Horny Goat wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:07:30 -0500, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

It may well have been at some point. I think we were originally more
British in our terminology than we are now. For instance, I was looking
at an article on the Toronto Police before we got independence in 1867
and they were getting paid in shillings, not dollars. And I still
remember when we used miles and gallons instead of meters and liters; we
only started going metric in 1979 and some of us still think and speak
of imperial units rather than metric ones.

Part of that was probably due to the federal government pushing hard
on the metric system but a large part of the conversion happened
around the time the price of gas first went over Cdn $1.00 per gallon
as converting gas pumps from cents per gallon to cents per liter was a
lot cheaper than converting from cents per gallon to dollars per
gallon. (Of course it's now over a dollar per liter so they had to
eventually convert their pumps and I'm sure the customers paid for
that too somewhere along the way...)

I bought my first car just as we changed to pumping liters instead of
gallons. This was the first week of May 1979. Gas prices had been
hovering at 99.9 cents per gallon for a while and the signs only had
capacity for two digits in front of the decimal point so I was wondering
how they were going to handle the next increase in gas prices. The
change to liters solved that problem INSTANTLY and for many years:
suddenly, the price went to 19.9 cents per liter. By the time prices
went over 99.9 cents per liter, all the gas stations had signs that
could handle the extra digit. (They weren't all digital displays but
some were.)

--
Rhino

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 2026-02-23 7:42 p.m., The Horny Goat wrote:

On Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:18:02 -0500, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

Officers have been accused of giving information to organized crime to
both enrich themselves and to help organized crime, such as the crooked
tow truck industry. They're even accused of helping criminals murder
their enemies. It's so bad that Doug Ford has created (or energized) a
province-wide investigator whose team is going to look at ALL of the
police services in the province to - supposedly - root out corruption. I
haven't heard a timeline yet but I have to expect that such a mission
will take *years* to conduct.

For those unfamiliar Doug Ford is Premier of Ontario which has about
38-39% of the Canadian population. No state governor in the US is as important to Washington as the Ontario provincial government is to
Ottawa. Most policing in Ontario is done by the Ontario Provincial
Police though there are important local forces in major cities.

In Canada Ontario and Quebec have their own province police services
while the RCMP provides police services in much of the rest of the
country minus local police forces in major cities. Thus in BC Surrey
and the city of Vancouver (the 2 biggest components of Metro
Vancouver) have their own police while almost all of the rest are RCMP detachments.

Small correction. One other province has policing that ISN'T by the
RCMP: Newfoundland, which has the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary as its
main policing organization. I once said what you said in front of a
retired OPP officer and he corrected me :-)

--
Rhino

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.12
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)