Not really obscure or useless, but you can request a flag that has flown above the parliament buildings in Ottawa. Currently the waitlist is well over 100 years.

In the 1990s, Britain had the Cones Hotline, where people could phone in to report improper deployment of traffic cones

Actually, HAM radio saved my life!, really I am not joking. Even specifically HAM broadcasts from Canada. I was crossing the Atlantic ocean from New York to Europe on a small sailing yacht and for long-distance communication, we had only the HAM radio because the normal VHF or mobile phone has a much shorter distance and is already useless after you sail about 24 hours away from land. Also, satellite communication is pretty expensive and we didn't have the equipment. So this HAM radio has also a free protocol that allows getting maps of naval weather forecasts and we kept receiving it using a station in Halifax, Canada. One day I watched the forecast and saw a hurricane storm heading straight to us in a few days. We immediately changed course and put full power. The storm finally hit us pretty bad but we were far from its center and the damage to the boat was minimal and the happy ending is that we finally crossed safely the ocean and repaired the ship. So never underestimate HAM radio because one day it might save you life.

The Heritage dept will be somewhat confused at the sudden influx of orders for Canadian promotional material in the next couple of days 😁

Please have an indoor flag regulation special for 200k

Just discovered your videos (from the States) and I’m digging them! I studied color science in college and thought this might be of interest. The CIELAB color system is used to describe the color of physical objects, hence the specifications on light source. The color of fabrics is dependent not only on the dye/pigment you apply to them, but also the fabric’s underlying color, texture, and shine, and under what conditions it’s viewed. So, that’s why digital color systems like RGB or CMYK aren’t very useful for physical objects, and the CIELAB system must be used to describe standard flag colors.

Person who works in optics and has had to do a lot of color science here: chromaticity coordinates are way better than RGB colors because it works regardless of luminance. It’s not just the government being obtuse, it’s a very useful description.

I think swimming pool lights and artificial heart valves are some of the best examples of things that definitely should be well regulated...

The German Flag regulation says (translated): The Federal flag has 3 horizontal stripes with the colors black, red and gold

In California, Prop 65 warnings! California requires posted warnings that things may cause cancer or reproductive harm; It requires this if anything anywhere at the facility causes cancer or reproductive harm. Pretty much every starbucks has it, I think because of the cleaning products? Anyway, it ends up being ubiquitous and therefore completely ignored.

I wish the US had a phone line with a terrifyingly dead voice on it 😪

We in Russia also have a time-telling hotline, and I occasionally use it if I want to know the exact time without using the Internet, so it is useful imo.

So the Canadian flag has to adhere to a code written by the AMERICAN SOCIETY of TESTING MATERIALS.

The Philippines has PADC (the Philippine Aerospace Development Corporation) a state-owned aerospace company that for 46 years of its existence has not mass-produced any viable aircraft beyond prototypes.

This guy: "shortwave radio is obsolete" Me a communications technician: "AcTuAlLy"

In Iceland there is both a law about the speed that the national anthem can be played at and a committee that approves names.

I have to defend the standards board as being useful, it’s the whole reason ISO exist as well. You want to keep consistency for research and industry throughout a nation. Let’s say you’re running an experiment that involves a cup of tea, how do you make that tea to be replicated on repeat experiments? You reference a standard in the experiment! Many pieces of infrastructure are also referenced standards. Shipping containers are standardized to fit on any railway car, or boat or truck. Imagine if you ship a container and it doesn’t fit on the boat because you didn’t follow the standard size! There’s many scopes where standards are important in the STEM fields and it’s not really something built for average person to utilize. Just because you don’t get use from it, doesn’t mean it’s not useful! It can be redundant with ISO though

Chromaticity is used for measuring the visual representation of colours. RGB or CMYK are standards used for displaying colours on current technology, not a timeless standard of colours.

Fun fact: Sir Mix a Lot is a licensed ham radio operator.

Alternate title: "Your Tax Dollars at Work!"

We used to (still might) have a “time” phone number in the US. My mom used to make me call it to set clocks after power outages.

The Canucks were unable to determine the play in Tampa sadly

I’ll be honest that Department of Heritage thing is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, I wish we had that in Taiwan or the US

Sweden have the time telephone service as well, we call it "fröken ur" meaning "miss clock" because it's voiced by a lady. It has been around since 1916.

5:30 In Russia we've UVB-76 radio station. It's well known as mystery government radio that transmits weird buzzing and sometimes a voice. And someone even built a whole conspiracy theory, but as far as I know those voice messages it's just encrypted code for military staff.

Time hotlines are a time-honored way to look busy at work when you’re really just reading Cosmo at your desk.

@3:35 NOOOOOOO What do you mean we can save the excitement of Indoor Canadian Flag Regulations for another day.... you only post a video once a week bro! I can't wait that long!

We have that time hotline in the UK - it's called the "Speaking Clock".

IMO, the chromaticity thing *not* being in RGB/CMYK is a good thing. There's no way to guarantee consistency between different devices using these color formats, which means it's even harder to compare these colors on an electronic device with those in the real world. Color is hard.

And here I was hoping we were going to get a video all about Trudeau's new beard.

You can still hear the RCI broadcasts via shortwave in central europe through a small relay station in Germany every saturday at 9am and 11:30am UTC on 6005khz and every sunday at 4pm and 6pm UTC on 3985khz

My favorite redundant government service is how in the USA, there's a body who's job it is to regulate how government forms are written. Which has, you guessed it, their own oversight committee regulating them.

Much like the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Australian Government gives away free Australian flags, recordings of the Australian anthem AND portraits of the Queen. Most Australian don't really knew/cared about this service until 2018 when a Vice article brought it to light. There was a sudden influx of request for portraits of the Queen, for a while there was a long wait list but thankfully the Australian Government have now restocked their inventory of Queen portraits and Australians can obtain one by writing to their local representative.

Something that I do while watching your videos JJ is compare your background to your latest video just like that 7 mistakes games, today I found a constitution...

RGB and especially CMYK are relative color measurement systems. What CMYK looks like depends on printing process and paper. CIE on the other hand can give accurate measurements if you need to calibrate.

In addition to the "weatheroffice" the federal government maintains a vast network of gauges that monitor river flow across the country, these can be accessed online at the "wateroffice" where real-time flow data is available. This is obviously useful for predicting where flooding may occur and managing water levels on dams, but it's also very handy for whitewater paddlers who want to know what rivers are "in play". It's not that obscure but most people aren't aware of its existence. I use it and consider it to be one of the few truely visible benefits I am getting for my federal tax money. :)

Your video brought back a large part of my teen years. I lived in New York City and was a shortwave listener. I listened to RCI all the time, it was one of the first stations I ever heard. I was a subscriber to the station and remember the first show I ever heard on shortwave. It was from RCI, and called The Royal Canadian Air Farce and it was very funny. Shortwave stations usually would broadcast a few notes of their theme music 5 minutes before the programs started. You played the first few notes for RCI which were the opening notes of the Canadian anthem, and I was back in the 1970s. It was a fun hobby and something that nobody really can enjoy anymore as if you wish to listen to any of these stations you can just get them online. But it was very exciting for me sitting in my bedroom in New York at 3 a.m. hearing through the static, This is Radio Australia. Or Radio China or Radio Moscow. It was very exciting to be international at a time when communication was very restricted. I still have the little Canadian flag and button that RCI sent me along with their schedule. I was on many, many mailing lists and even tried to take some language courses from Radio Netherlands and Radio Germany. I really do miss listening to the world when you are one of the few who are able to do it. I'm also sure that somewhere the FBI has a file on me as I used to write to the Soviet Union, communist China, and other countries that I'm sure my government wasn't too thrilled to have me writing to. As for the time signal telephone number, I would hear that from station WWV, the same voice, but this time from the US Bureau of Standards.

I got my Ham radio license when I was in highschool, around 2011. It's super neat stuff, but sadly I never had the money to get a real setup. Thankfully now it's very easy to get a Software Defined Radio. If you have a license, you are allowed to broadcast on many of the allocated bands, from shortwave on up to terahertz, frequencies. It's even possible to transmit video signals on some of them.

One of the obtuse federal government documents that might actually affect one's life is the document detailing submissions of bids for government contracts. They even specify what size and weight paper you need to use.

brb, gonna order some Canadian Heritage swag.

I'm in Canada and I used to get free physical portraits of the Queen and her family every few years, but apparently since 2019 they don't do it anymore, but they do offer free images online - still it felt nice getting something physical. I have tons of those rolled-up posters unopened, maybe my legacy will sell it for some money, I've got some George VI coins too 😁

JJ can you do a video about popular video games from each country, like for example the Koreans with Starcraft or the Russians with Counter-Strike?

Thank You J.J. for making the radio “Radio” from “The Brave Little Toaster”

We had a similar service where I lived in the South. You'd call the number and it would give you the time, local weather, and school closings.

So fun story, my wireless microphones at the church I ran production had their radio frequency sold to cell companies. So they lost their legal status. Somehow. Which sounds pretty ridiculous that was allowed to happen to under 20 year old microphones

The first regulation for cellphones on airplanes was with the FCC and was to prevent rapid changing of cell phones between cell towers which was feared to overwhelm the network.

The thing about the internet is that it's incredibly fragile compared to short wave. It would be quite difficult for hackers (or anyone) to disable communication by short wave. Disasters - both natural and man-made routinely take out cell and internet service. Also short wave can be used pretty much anywhere - believe it or not cell and internet are not universally available even in the best of times. You should talk to someone who knows about it instead of automatically taking the rather lazy "I have no use for it therefore it is useless" position. Sorry 'bout that - I rather like your channel. This also goes for time signals - if ships at sea for example lost GPS signal they could still navigate the old fashioned ways - if they had a very accurate time value.

That time radio broadcast would make for an interesting torture device.

I live in Montreal and I called that number, I got a middle aged lady, the second I heard that voice my ass got scared.

Breaker breaker to JJ; I just found out the Royal Canadian Mint offers a “coin recycling” program, whereby you submit your old coins for cash and they re-mint them. Over.

Fun fact: depending on the range of that final existing radio station you mentioned at the end, it could easily cost hundreds of dollars an hour in electricity to run. I learned this from Reviewbrah who runs his own shortwave show and he said it cost him about $150/hr in electricity.

I actually live really close to the RCI transmitters at 9:28 . RCI has always been of interest to me because of it. They are re-developing the site. Great Video !!

The most interesting thing the Canadian Government does to me is subsidize cartoons via the Film and Tax Credit

Reminds me of your 2015-2016 videos where you talk about obscure stuff, good

The first SOGI reminds me of how we did the same thing using/spelling POPCORN (767-2676) on the phone's numbers to find out the exact time of day. Fun in the '80s...

Speaking of differing radio bands I saw an interesting documentary on Netflix that it was actually the actress Hedy Lamarr who discovered this during WWII and without which we would not have cell phones today.

Oh my god I just ordered random Canadian memorabilia I AM SO EXCITED 😂

I just went and ordered everything i could from the department of heritage. Cant wait for my free canadian flag posters and flag etiquette book!

An interesting Gov. 'Service' here in the US (its more just a particular law) is that taxes on bullet sales often go towards funding National Park programs. The idea was mostly hunters and outdoorsy folk use National Parks, and those same kinds of people buy guns, so they will buy ammo, so that's how you get the Bullet Tax. I actually think its a neat little tax we have here in the states, assuming the money is allocated properly, as its a way to tax individuals that use a particular service so that they fund the service they use.

We in Brazil have TV Câmara and TV Senado, two government TV channels focused mostly on broadcasting the discussions being held on the Chamber of Deputies/Senate live.

5:55 Hey, it’s Radio from “Brave Little Toaster.”

Ireland has just removed Eirtel (our state broadcaster’s teletext system)

The thing about the colour specification is that while RGB is appropriate for RGB displays, and CMYK for printing, they don't cover nearly the whole spectrum of visible light (at least not standard gamuts). The models used here do cover the whole spectrum, which makes them suitable for general purpose applications.

If in addition to obscure services obscure taxes count as well, Finland used to have a dog tax until a couple of years ago. Each municipality could decide to collect a tax of up to 50 € per dog per year but recently there were only two municipalities (Helsinki and Tampere) that had a dog tax. It was abolished entirely in 2018. Before that, it was estimated that only about 15%-25% of the people who should have paid the tax actually paid it.

the phone number you dial to know what time it is seems to be pretty popular around the world. I remember there was one in Kuwait. It's kind of useful if you are absolutely desperate and it hardly costs anything

Brazil has a time telling hotline as well! It also tells the day of the year, day of the week and national holidays too!

The hours I spent as a kid (c. 1970s) listening to Radio Canada International, (and Radio Quito, Radio Havana, Radio Moscow, Radio Netherlands, . . . ) I was such a geek! Thanks for reminding me, and thanks, Canada, for funding something that trained me to think internationally. I guess it did contribute to my worldview and my life today.

As I recently learned, the actual reason that cellphones used to be banned on airplanes did not have to do with interference of the airplane, but that the ground stations got into problems with strong signals (because they were not interrupted by anything) moving in and out of reach within seconds or even a fraction of a second (because planes fly so fast)

Thanks JJ, you made my day. It's fun knowing my Canadian gov't does weird and dumb stuff

You know from my experience living in an Eastern European countries i have to say these things change very frequently....

Quite possibly my favourite video of yours ever. Well done.

Most of these things were absolutely essential services before widespread access to broadband internet. Canada has a lot of territory; much of it not covered by cell signals or land line services--let along broadband. Even as late as 2012 there were small communities whose only internet connection was via satellite (at prohibitive cost). There are plenty of people out in remote areas at any given time (indigenous people exercising harvesting rights, resource industry scientists looking for mineral resources, etc.) and sometimes the only reliable connections are satellite and shortwave, if you're North of 60 there might not even be a lot of satellites above the horizon. Canada is big. Really big. And outside that long, skinny strip of dense population near the US border, sometimes these old fashioned means of communication are still the best bandwidth there is.

2:47 Illuminati confirmed

“The Department of Awesome Wonders of Awesome Awesomeness.” Ebnic.

Back in the 1970"s my dad had a shortwave radio and I remember we used to snicker at the ridiculous stories on Radio Moscow - English language service.

You quickly mentioned the CGSB when talking about the flag colours. This body is very vital to the infrastructure we have today. I am a GCSB certified inspector. There are many types of inspectors that the CGSB certifies but basically we go around and check everything from welds of bridges to the amount of corrosion inside a pipe line or maybe check the rails that a train rides on.

In Petropolis, a Brazilian city, people have to pay 2,5% of their property tax to maintain the old royal family. Even though Brazil is a republic and the monarchy isn't recognized anymore.

8:21 He is listening to Lincolnshire Poacher, a station used by British spies in the U.K. administered UN buffer zone between Cyprus and Northern Cyprus

I love this channel so much.

The United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN). The Board was created first by Executive Order by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890, and approved later in legislation by Congress and President Grover Cleveland, in 1893. The purpose of this board is to maintain names of geographic places and to approve new ones, or approve naming the unnamed. Any individual, company, organization, or group can request a name change to any geographical location or feature. The BGN has to approve it and if they do, the Department of the Interior (which the BGN reports to) will carry out making signs and ordering maps to name or change the name of said place. You can go to their website right now and request a name change (Note: It's only Geographical Locations and certain places (The Grand Canyon) have their names protected by legislation.)

At one time in the US, many local entities (telephone companies, for example) provided call-in hotlines that would give you the local time. Most have since stopped. However, at least one Federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), still provides call-in service (as well as radio broadcasts) to announce the US official time. The time they provide is actually Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which you would need to convert to your local time zone, and is read every minute, with little tick sounds every second in-between. The call-in numbers for these broadcasts (303) 499-7111 for WWV (Colorado), and (808) 335-4363 for WWVH (Hawaii). (If outside the US or Canada, be sure to add country code "1" before the rest of the number).

7:32 - It's a pity that the Canucks clearly didn't dictate the play that night in Tampa. 9-2? Ugh....

In India the government has a channel on the radio called akashwani and depending on where you live news songs and current affair quizzes will be broadcasted in your language.

CHU actually has 3 frequencies. My mother says it sounds like a truck backing up.

I live in the UK. Let me call the Canadian time thingy. I will also get the Canadian patriotic posters and memorabilia.

Please do a video unboxing that stuff, I’m curious to see what kind of packaging and information comes with them.

"We can save that excitement for another day" really got me 😆😆😆

In the 1980s and 90s the New Zealand government went to war on what they called "quangos", usually small elected bodies for a specific purpose, like rabbit control boards and harbour management boards. These things all got disestablished and then suddenly rabbits got out of control and harbours started silting up. Eventually local and central government took on these roles. Just because something is obscure doesn't mean it's useless.

I gotta stop watching JJ videos. I fall more in love every time haha. Who else can make government outdoor flag regulations hilarious? Haha. My heart.

You are my favorite Canadian.

In France, we have the GEIPAN (Groupe d'Études et d'Information sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux inexpliqués / Group of Studies and Information about inexplicated Aerospatial Phenomenons) which is the only governement service in the world entirely dedicated to... Searching and studying... UFOs... Yes, the french governement is actively studying UFOs since 1977...

the government in the tri state area of indiana, ohio and kentucky have a emergency broadcast system for rain. though everyone in the tri-state by the time this goes off is experiencing the rain by about an hour or so and the warning is specifically to warn you about the upcoming rain.

There’s a number too in China to tell the time, and even a number to tell you the local weather.

I started dying when the shortwave did the official time

Thanks JJ this was a very good video

Now I know where all of those posters in my grade school classrooms came from, saw most of them at 4:52

You need to make a video about Justin Trudeau’s beard.

6:01 That radio is from The Brave Little Toaster. Thought I recognized it!

I love the expression change when J.J. listens to the phone or radio. He looks so confused suddenly. Lol