u/Accurate-Simple5662

Hi guys,

I'm right now a student, currently in Toronto, ON, Canada. I will be finishing my M. Arch in Boston, MA, USA next year.

In Ontario, I spoke with a professor who told me that she suggests I obtain my Working At Heights (WAH), Worker Health and Safety Awareness in 4 steps, and Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) certificates as it will make me somewhat more employable.

I have done some research and have come to the conclusion that these will not transfer when I move to Boston, where I will be studying and working.

I have tried searching for their equivalents, but am a bit lost as we have completely different organizations here in Ontario.

I am also studying to write my LEED GA at the moment, but from my understanding, that is a international certification.

Can someone from the USA tell me what your equivalent certifications are, and if there's any others that you recommend I acquire before applying for jobs as an intern?

Cheers!

IMO, Xi Jinping and Putin are in over their heads.

Chinese innovations are the Wests inventions. They will never win when they’re constantly 1 step behind the West. A lot of their “groundbreaking” designs across industries are portrayed as renders, with no actual drawings of how it’ll be executed or spec’d, or when it will even be released. And then you never hear about it again because it never happened and never will, unless America/the West paves the way for them to copy it later. Reverse engineering.

The only things they can do a bit better than the West are: EV’s (an entire nation of vehicles simply cannot run on electricity in 2025, due to power grid constraints) and Green energy supposedly.. (China is not exactly trustworthy and likes to exaggerate to its personal catering). Neither are contributors to raising the odds of winning a war, while things like superior AI/chips, as well as infrastructure and military tech are. The US, alongside the rest of the West leads in all of these areas.

Speaking of which, Intel Foundry is set to bring chip making home to America in the next 5 or so years. China threatening to take Taiwan/TSMC, or continue to reverse engineer their AI and chip inventions after the Golden Dome is built is just no longer plausible.

Depending on China or Russia was and is foolish. They use their dependency as their leverage. At least now they know. Ironically, the West is mostly the consumers and they’re mostly the producers. Unfortunately for them, they can’t create more demand for their supply, but the West could access more supply for its demand.

Russia uses uranium, oil and gas as leverage, while Canada/some European countries have lots of this, but the restrictions don’t currently allow them to either access them or refine them at the moment.

China uses “rare earth minerals” (pretty sure they made up this term because what does that even mean anyways lmao? What’s rare about a lot of them aside from the self-imposed restrictions from the West causing them current supply issues that can be reverted as soon as the infrastructure required is built? They’re simply not geologically rare and that’s all that matters) and its production capacity/pricing (which Mexico is a safer, cheaper and closer option that comes with higher quality/standards) as leverage.

Friendly alternatives, recently/already begun:

> Rare earth minerals - Australia, US, Canada, Vietnam, and Mexico ramping up.

> Energy - LNG terminals in Europe, new pipelines, Canada/Oz reserves.

Any country that trades with either of them, but more specifically China, not only is viewed as dependant to them, but they weaponize this “dependency” as much as possible.

China will try to use this leverage to cause Western nations to destabilize while it invades Taiwan, just like Russia tried to use its leverage against the West after it invaded Ukraine.

They’re trying to divide the West to weaken it before the next World War, and they think it’s working because the West is letting them inflate their ego beyond reality while it works on becoming independent. Meanwhile Japan, South Korea and Europe are rearming beyond belief (with some of the biggest economies in the world being Germany, Japan and Italy).

The EU and Trump (practically NATO) are obviously playing good cop/bad cop at the moment with Russia and China and they have been eating it all up for over a decade now. They don’t have anywhere near the stranglehold they sincerely believe they have on the West and I’m certain they will figure that out shortly.

Nukes will not be used in this World War but will obviously continue to be threatened. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is a thing. An elected national leader of a developed country would have to be truly suicidal, along with the people employed to oversee the use of them flipping the switch, in order for them to actually put them to use.

The population of China is also a mess and has a median age of 40 years old at the moment, with a birth rate of 1.0 children per woman. Thanks to their previous One Child Policy and favouritism of men, there were a lot of “gender associated abortions”, and there are now 120 men per 100 women. So 45% of their population are women. Of that 45%, only 39% are under the age of 40. So only 17.6% of their population is able to have children, today. The more time goes on, the less will be able to have children due to their low birth rate and rapidly aging women. Their rapidly aging population, 30% of it being over the age of 60 years old by 2040, is resulting in a crippling pension system as well, putting even more economic strain on China. They also have very concerning brain drain, as only 18% of their population currently holds a post-secondary degree, compared to 45% on average in Western countries. That is an extremely uneducated population, explaining a lot of what I said above relating to innovation and invention. Youth unemployment went beyond 20% in 2023, leading China’s Communist Party to stop reporting it entirely.

Which leads me here: they’ve got a lot to hide. One of the most overlooked threats to China’s own war readiness is its extreme censorship. The CCP controls all information, suppressing dissent, criticism, and even basic data—like the youth unemployment stat I listed above. This creates a dangerous illusion of strength both internally and externally. No one, not even their own leadership, has an accurate view of what’s breaking down beneath the surface—economically, socially, or militarily. In a major conflict, this lack of transparency will backfire, leading to poor decisions based on propaganda instead of facts. The West’s open, often chaotic discourse might seem like a weakness, but it breeds resilience. China’s tightly controlled narrative may look unified, but it’s far more fragile than it appears.

The Ukraine VS Russia war is really just a China VS USA proxy war. The US has been hiding their tricks up their sleeves waiting for China to act on its instincts and then the EU will step up to help Ukraine (enrolling it into NATO) to obliterate Russia while China’s busy, leaving the US to deal with China practically 1-on-1, with their over 3x higher military budget and lots of recent military experience, which China lacks greatly.

Keep in mind that all the while: Japan, South Korea and the Philippines are all in very close proximity to China.

This is just not going to end well for Russia or China. Russia is already weak from years of fighting Ukraine. They’re not much of a threat to the US anymore. I strongly believe they will lose the race against the West toward AI dominance. I don’t think either of these authoritarian leaders know what they have gotten themselves into, but time will tell.