Toronto Electricians and Electrical Contractors

If It Doesn’t Have Paper Backups and Automatic Audits, It’s Not an Election Security Bill Right now, the U.S. Senate is debating an issue that’s critical to our democratic future: secure elections. Hacking attacks were used to try to undermine the 2016 U.S. election, and in recent years, elections in Latin America and Ukraine were also subject to cyber attacks. It only makes sense to harden the security of U.S. voting machines, which are perhaps the most direct route to impacting an election’s results. But the current bill that’s advancing in the Senate, the Secure Elections Act , is no solution at all. If it isn’t strengthened dramatically, senators should vote against this deeply flawed bill. The best solution to stop a possible hack of voting machines is clear: all machines must use a paper trail that’s regularly audited. Many states with voting machines already use paper, but more than a dozen are using at least some machines that provide no paper trail. In five stat...

Energy is at the heart of our civilization. As far back in history as we can trace, major economic developments have emerged each time new sources of energy were discovered. A few striking examples: the first industrial revolution in the early 19 th century was propelled by steam and coal. The second industrial revolution at the dawn of the 20 th century saw the rise of electricity and oil. On both occasions, major opportunities arose to do things better and faster, and more importantly to do new things that were unimaginable before. We live today in an energy system which was discovered during the second industrial revolution. This energy system consumes around 150,000TWh of energy yearly, with 80% of it coming from fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal). A century ago, this was 10 times less, an indication of the tremendous economic developments that this new energy system has enabled. Today, a large chunk (40%) of this “primary” energy is used to produce electricity, the rest bein...