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explain this you lying delusional moron:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

it's because there are a lot of hammers in the usa?

the country with the sky high gun ownership rate is the country with the sky high homicide rate

no connection whatsoever

hurrr durrr

you even admit it in your propaganda addled inaccurate lies, and then think it makes sense: "well half..."

half you say? LOL. that doesn't matter apparently?

it's like some sort of demented quasireligion: "easy gun ownership makes us safer, ignore all fucking obvious evidence and simple logic and reason to the contrary to that moronic belief"

you are telling me that because of easy guns, the usa will have far lower burglary rates. right? if a country in europe has no guns, burglars have no fear, and rob as they please, correct? so burglary rates should be sky high in europe, right?

and because americans are heavily armed, burglars are afraid, and don't rob, right? so burglary rates should be very low in the usa, befitting the deterrence of high gun ownership, correct?

do i understand the moronic propaganda properly?

reality:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

wait... i don't get it. where is the magic protection?

maybe guns don't protect us at all. maybe easy guns means burglars have guns too. and since perps always have the element of surprise, what protection do good gun owners really have?

so if burglars have guns... and people are heavily armed... what do we REALLY get with so many easy guns?

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

this is what easy guns in the usa gets us: tons of death. not just perps! because apparently morons like yourself think it is better to be dead than robbed. because that's all owning a gun does: escalate a situation like robbed/ not robbed, to dead/ not dead

why do you fucking morons think it is better to be dead than robbed? you own a gun, you escalate the situation to life and death. you are not guaranteed to be on the winning side of that exchange. own a gun, increase chance of death to you and your loved ones. that's it

welcome to reality, moron

you are telling me that because of easy guns, the usa will have far lower burglary rates. right? if a country in europe has no guns, burglars have no fear, and rob as they please, correct? so burglary rates should be sky high in europe, right?

and because americans are heavily armed, burglars are afraid, and don't rob, right? so burglary rates should be very low in the usa, befitting the deterrence of high gun ownership, correct?

do i understand the moronic propaganda properly?

reality:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

wait... i don't get it. where is the magic protection?

maybe guns don't protect us at all. maybe easy guns means burglars have guns too. and since perps always have the element of surprise, what protection do good gun owners really have?

so if burglars have guns... and people are heavily armed... what do we REALLY get with so many easy guns?

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

this is what easy guns in the usa gets us: tons of death. not just perps! because apparently morons like yourself think it is better to be dead than robbed. because that's all owning a gun does: escalate a situation like robbed/ not robbed, to dead/ not dead

why do you fucking morons think it is better to be dead than robbed? you own a gun, you escalate the situation to life and death. you are not guaranteed to be on the winning side of that exchange. own a gun, increase chance of death to you and your loved ones. that's it

welcome to reality, moron

it's like a shell game. you move the basic fucking simple facts around, out of context, in pieces to suggest alternate reality conclusions, hand waving and smoke and mirrors, etc. and avoid the fucking obvious:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

do you perhaps see a fucking problem there?

i do

the rest of our social and economic peers do

that's what we fucking get with easy guns

that's what we get

now bloviate and obfuscate like a climate change denier or a creationist, to preserve your obviously insane, wrong belief against all simple reason and simple facts

why do you believe your gun gives you some sort of protection?

it's simply a source of extra danger in your life. situations can escalate to death that don't have to, or wouldn't, if a gun wasn't around, for you and your loved ones, not some bogeyman perp

besides, easy guns in the usa mean perps have guns. perps have the element of surprise. you don't draw faster than their trigger finger. the protection you believe in is an illusion

meanwhile, the usa is not a utopia of low rape, robbery, or murder due to all of our extra guns. in fact, we have higher rates of those things. why is that if guns are supposed to protect us? why aren't guns providing the magic protection you imagine they do? because they don't

this is all we get from extra easy guns:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

that's all easy guns in the usa means: extra pointless death

own a gun, increase your chance of early death. that's all it means

now we hear the delusional talking points, similar to creationism or climate denial, and the made up "facts"

why do we have so many guns but still have rape, robbery murder, etc as high as if not higher than countries with common sense gun control?

isn't the gun supposed to protect you?

isn't the mythology that owning a gun makes you safer?

so where's the increase in safety?

there is none

what there is is an increase in death:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

having a gun in a tense situation simply means death may come where death does not need to come. and just not for the perp. in fact, with easy guns, the perp has a gun, and also the element of surprise

guns are just an increase in accidents, miscommunication and confusion, escalation unnecessarily, body bags instead of bloody noses

guns do not make us safer

easy guns are the actual threat to our safety

the numbers are as clear as day. no matter how much smoke and mirrors and subject changing they make: the usa has far higher homicide than our peers because of easy guns. not increase in safety. that's a lie, a mythology

dealing with gun proponents is like dealing with climate change deniers or creationists: they plug their ears and deny the simple evidence

"hey! good news! we used to have 100 million termites. but today, we have 95 million... please ignore the houses next door with only 20, 30, and 15 million termites"

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

explain that chart. go ahead. good luck

we will have adherence to the second amendment. as the founders intended: sensible control and training. not as the second amendment has been rewritten by constitutional activists in the last 50 years who think irresponsibility with guns is a virtue for magic reasons

do you own guns? then you believe responsible gun use is mandatory to own a gun. right?

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

look at this chart

do you see a problem?

maybe we should control guns better, like all of our peers? what is the big hang up?

all easy guns in the usa means is far more homicides

does it mean lower rape? lower robbery?

then how come our peers with far fewer guns have the same approximate rates of rape and robbery as us?

why aren't societies with strong gun controls drowning in rape and robbery like your hysteria says?

extra guns does not mean less crime

it means extra unnecessary homicide

the simple facts are clear on that

in fact in the uk, they have SLIGHTLY higher violence rates than us

which i would love to have if it meant far lower homicides!

because violence is a broken arm or a broken nose. homicide is a body bag

all people like you mean to me is: you think every single altercation has to escalate to someone being dead. why? why is this a better society in your opinion? it's not a better society. it's just extra death for no reason

the current intepretation is a product of late 20th century judicial activism in an era of increasing crime and bernie goetz/ dirty harry style anger. it has to do with handguns, individual action, and urban environments

but the second amendment is about long guns, community action, and rural hinterland

as crime declined and continues to decline (due to the waning of the crack epidemic and better policing like COMPSTAT, not handgun ownership) we are at a crossroads where a loud minority insists hothead douchebags walking around half cocked with guns in civil society is good. it's fucking stupid, it's a recipe for unnecessary death, and doesn't impact crime at all

our social and economic peers control hand guns far better, and are not cesspools of rape, murder, and robbery. in fact, they are a mostly equivalent on crime measures as us, but a lot lower than us on measure of murder. because we're the morons with all the extra pointless easy guns

so we shall return to the original intent of the founding fathers: long guns, community action, and rural hinterland (no one wants to take away your shot gun, farmer/ hunter, and you deserve it), and do away with this late 20th century judicial activism about handguns, individual action, and urban environments

you get trained, tested, THEN you get a gun. and we will cut down on the USA's absolutely insane sky high homicide rate compared to our social and economic peers

do you see a problem here that needs correcting? the majority of americans do:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

in London, you get in a fight and you get a broken arm or a broken nose

in New York City, you get in a fight and you get a body bag

whenever the homicide rate of the USA is compared to other Western countries, NRA propagandized morons change the subject and counter about *violence*. as if *violence* is the same as *homicide*

frankly, i'd love the violence rate in the usa to go up and the homicide rate to go down. because a broken arm is not a body bag

and you get that with better gun control

but too many of my fellow americans of the low iq and propagandized variety believe for some fucking ignorant reason that every little misunderstanding or conflict has to escalate to death

and that's exactly what we get:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

rape? robbery? violence? about the same as our social and economic peers

easy guns do not protect us from those things. they just mean tens of thousands of extra body bags every year

if anything, owning a gun increases the chance of mortality for you and your loved ones, because you've raised the stakes in every little act of confusion/ misunderstanding/ anger/ accident/ etc. to death

the USA's social and economic peers without this "ARM EVERYONE TO THE TEETH" delusion aren't suffering from massive crime, massive death, massive rape because criminals are somehow therefore unopposed. because easy guns = more mayhem. not protection from it. easy guns is the problem, not a solution

we need to be more like germany, japan, uk, australia, etc. we start that by telling people who think more guns is good that they are delusional psychotic nutcases and do not deserve to be in civilized society. YOU are the threat to civilized society. your attitude that more weapons in society is good is the actual problem in the usa. you are no protection for society. you are the enemy. your attitude sucks

more guns, more senseless death. this is indisputable. the usa suffers from a huge problem because of morons and douchebags who think otherwise. look at this chart and tell me what the usa's easy guns attitude really means:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/...

it's not really the legal problem. it's the culture problem. the culture of guns in the usa is fucking retarded

stupid deluded americans who think guns are good. they are the problem. they have given us a violent death-ridden society for no real benefit and no good reason

Incidentally, the US already has one of the highest university completion rates in the world:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/education/university-completion.aspx

I was actually wrong. However, US lags quite a lot in life expectancy for 5 and 10 year old which takes child mortality into account.

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/health/life-expectancy.aspx

This ref ( http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/society/burglaries.aspx) for 2006 has it at 640 for the Netherlands and 721 for the USA (in per 100000 people). This ref ( http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/nl-netherlands/cri-crime&all=1 and http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/us-united-states/cri-crime&all=1 ) has total crime victims at 25% in the Netherlands and at 21% in the US.

In all probability, homeless people will follow the same distribution curve as everyone else. That would imply that 2% of all homeless people have an IQ of 148 or above (UK's IQ scale, use your local Mensa entry requirement to figure out what's equal to that) and that 30.9% would be able to complete a degree program if given the opportunity.

The Great Source of Wisdom says that there's up to 2 million people in the US who are homeless at any given time, some on a more permanent basis than others. It's a fair bet that even the transients aren't really able to get into a university though.

That would give you 40,000 people of Mensa-level intelligence and around 618,000 people who would be able to complete further education. Finding one person of either level of ability shouldn't be that hard or even unusual - 40,000 people can't be easy to miss and well over half a million should be blatantly obvious.

Now, the median income of people with a bachelor's degree was 40K in 2009. That's the 25% tax bracket. So, the government is losing 10K per year per person who could have a degree but doesn't, which works out to $6.18 billion just from lost income tax revenue. That's ignoring anything such people might invent or contribute to society (and it's clear from even the one example that these are people who are just as able to contribute as anyone) along with all the money the government could collect from businesses as a result of such contributions. That's a hell of a lot of money to be throwing away. I like pragmatic socialism (note the "pragmatic" part) and social justice, so naturally I want fewer homeless people for those reasons. Particularly because I'm pragmatic - that's over half a million potential innovations that won't happen, over half a million potential entrepreneurs that won't get to start anything... Yes, there will always be homeless and the country can't afford to take care of everyone, we all know that, but this goes well beyond what is sane or rational. The desire to be seen as anti-socialist has become moronic and self-destructive.

Nobody can help everybody, but $6bln aught to be more than enough to cover the costs of helping far, far more than we are.

Much more unforgiving than what? My understanding is that in England, most of the time if you are born in the "working class", your children will die as part of the "working class". If you look at U.S. statistics, you discover that most of the people in the bottom quarter of wealth in the population ten years ago, aren't in the bottom quarter today.

Wrong. Both US and UK fare pretty poorly when it comes to class mobility, which is something that came to a surprise to me, given how easily the meritocracy meme is thrown around here in the US. My interpretation is that, more often than not, it's the children of the wealthy that get to the great schools where you're prepared for a successful life. Sure, there are fellowships for the poor that manage to perform well in standardized tests, but rich kids who attend great private high schools are much more likely to score high and make it to, say, an Ivy League school. That's what happens when you leave basic societal needs like education and health to the ups and downs of the free market.

This is really bad. In tomorrows conference to be presented by the Conference Board of Canada, we see who two of their sponsors are:

"The Conference Board of Canada would like to acknowledge the contribution of the following individuals and organizations in the development of this conference:"

Graham Henderson
President
Canadian Recording
Industry Association

Wendy Noss
Executive Director
Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association

Tomorrows conference is all about Intellectual Property Rights. They state: "Effective IPR protection is essential to capitalize on innovation and encourage R&D investment. Canada needs world-class intellectual property policy and practices to compete globally. Policymakers and business leaders need to recognize IPR's crucial role in enabling businesses to capitalize on development investments and successfully commercialize their innovations."

The whole thing is obviously a massive lobbying effort on behalf of their sponsors (clients?). The Conference Board of Canada are clearly advocates of IP, and therefore have a strong conflict of interest when it comes to doing any "independent" research on this topic. In no way, shape. or form can they possibly be independend.

This really shouldn't be much of a surprise. Check out the people involved in their conference on Intellectual Property they are having tomorrow in Toronto.

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/conf/09-0120/brochure.aspx

The president of the CRIA is the chair of the conference for crying out loud.

Under their retraction they provide a contact link. I clicked on that link and gave them my thoughts as pasted below, and the acknowledgement promises a response. Will get back to you on upon their reply.

Dear Sir/Madam,

After almost selling out Canada to the USA via your plagiarized reports on intellectual property, I would strongly suggest that you contract Prof. Michael Geist or at least work closely with him in the next effort. Michael is well know, extremely knowledgeable on the subject, and trusted by a large number of Canadians. Only in this way will you regain the prestige you once had.

Sincerely,

...

Copying that freshman assignment leads to copying conference reports later on in life.

Actually, copying that freshman assignment _really_ pisses off the poor schmuck who has to grade it. Not only have you just insulted his (or her) intelligence by turning in something that was obviously cribbed from Wikipedia, but also instead of just spending a few minutes reading your paper, scribbling down a grade and then moving on to the next one he has to look up the original source that you copied from, have a chat with the professor in charge of the class, take time out of his day to have a meeting with you and explain exactly how dumb you just were, and then after wasting all that time dealing with your mess, decide whether or not to inform your department head and have you expelled for it.

By that time the only two things keeping you in school at all are the fact that there's an awful lot of paperwork involved in having you expelled, and that your professor may still feel sorry for you. Your best bet is to admit everything, tell a mildly sad story about how you were running out of time and panicked, and then never do it again.

Saying "No, you're wrong, I just forgot one citation but everything else is fine" is not it.

Well, aparently being openly socialist means the preview button changed its name to "Submit". Let's try it again with proper formatting:

the socialist notion that the men of ideas are of no importance

First of all, stop reading Ayn Rand as it's obviously giving you very very strange ideas about socialism. Various implementations of socialism (i.e. highly authoritarian ones), sure. But not socialism as an idea. No more than being an American makes you a fat, gun toting, inbred redneck who's never been outside the county he was born in, let alone country. It's true for some Americans, but it's not a general thing.

Here's a fun fact for you:
Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are all very socialist countries. High taxes, high level of social security (free school, education, health care etc), and they're all very keen on getting people educated in college (i.e. making men of ideas). They see their future as one that has interlectual companies outperforming regular industry.

In fact most of Europe would be seen as socialist by US standards. So lets compare university graduates in Europe to those of the US. I found this page while searching for "university graduates" per capita:

Education and Skills:
Percentage of Graduates in Science, Math, Computer Science, and Engineering

Finland and Sweden rank 2nd and 4th on that list, Denmark and Norway are 14th and 15th and the US comes in at number 16 out of 17 countries compared.

Now, if these four heavily socialist countries are still managing to produce more graduates in these fields (percentage wise from the graduate population) AND they believe that "men of ideas are of no importance", why are they wasting all that money on those educations? Keep in mind, a college degree from a Scandinavian university is probably more expensive (higher taxes), but the state pays the tuition. Some of these countries even give the students money while they're in school (actual payments, not student loans).

Either they DO belive that "men of ideas are of no importance" but they're not socialist countries ... or you're completely and utterly mistaken about what makes a socialist a socialist.

the socialist notion that the men of ideas are of no importanceFirst of all, stop reading Ayn Rand as it's obviously giving you very very strange ideas about socialism. Various implementations of socialism (i.e. highly authoritarian ones), sure - but that's true of

Here's a fun fact for you:
Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden are all very socialist countries. High taxes, high level of social security (free school, education, health care etc), and they're all very keen on getting people educated in college (i.e. making men of ideas). They see their future as one that has interlectual companies outperforming regular industry.

In fact most of Europe would be seen as socialist by US standards. So lets compare university graduates in Europe to those of the US. I found this page while searching for "university graduates" per capita:

Education and Skills:
Percentage of Graduates in Science, Math, Computer Science, and Engineering

Finland and Sweden rank 2nd and 4th on that list, Denmark and Norway are 14th and 15th and the US comes in at number 16 out of 17 countries compared.

Now, if these four heavily socialist countries are still managing to produce more graduates in these fields (percentage wise from the graduate population) AND they believe that "men of ideas are of no importance", why are they wasting all that money on those educations? Keep in mind, a college degree from a Scandinavian university is probably more expensive (higher taxes), but the state pays the tuition. Some of these countries even give the students money while they're in school (actual payments, not student loans).

Either they DO belive that "men of ideas are of no importance" but they're not socialist countries ... or you're completely and utterly mistaken about what makes a socialist a socialist.