I could point out that some research on both sides are utterly crap. funding the study of beetles migration habits? yeah I dont think we need to waste money on that one
As others point out, beetles are actually very economically important and you're showing the problem of lay people judging research, namely the benefits of research often aren't immediately obvious
Probably 1 and 3. Commercial CA are supposed to have a copy put in escrow in case the government needs access. How easy it is for the government to get access I don't know but would guess it's not hard
Worked in the other direction as well. People would never have stood for illegalizing such a common and useful plant as hemp. Rename it as marijuana and demonize it and no problem illegalizing one of the most useful plants on the planet.
Here in the US, the roads and healthcare, just like everything else, are paid for by going further into debt. Federal taxes and the % levels they're set at today are mainly about reinforcing social classes.
Yea, we have a right wing government currently, same thing, into debt why they scream how they're fiscally conservative. (http://www.politicalcompass.org/test puts both Harper and Obama far to the right except Obama isn't as statist compared to Harper, who by the way also promised transparency in government and makes Obama look very open). The Conservatives are also cutting Revenue Canada's budget way back while promising to go after offshore tax evaders.
fads and fashion are not culture. they're consumerism. culture is people DOING stuff, not BUYING stuff.
That's not really true, fashion changed in the middle ages even though most people weren't consumers, just slower. Also the record companies were willing to experiment by signing non-standard groups to multi-album contracts to see if they'd catch on right into the '70's. There was a lot of interesting music published in the '60's and early '70's. Music that would never get published today as the performers were ugly or at least not media material and music that was not mainstream and did not create an instant hit and often barely charted. Movies I won't comment on. As the sibling post hints at, buying stuff is a form of doing.
Don't you mean "the number one problem in US education, parents who have to both work 12 hours a day leaving them no time to raise their children"?. Personally I've only been a successful parent due to having an order of magnitude cheaper housing compared to the going rate, thank deity.
She can fire the government (they'll always resign first) if they don't pass a budget, and if no other party has the support in Parliament to pass a budget she can dissolve Parliament so the people can vote in a new one. The people do get pissed if they're forced to vote to often and usually punish the party that won't compromise. The system has evolved so that the government has to have a budget unlike the American system where it looks as though they'll never pass a budget again.
If it cost $80 in expenses, eg gas etc, last year to mow the lawn and this year it is going to cost $110 to mow the lawn as well as the cost of living going up, is $120 really an unreasonable increase or actually a decrease?
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is quite different from the American Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is very definite, eg Congress will make no law (States were allowed) whereas in Canada when the Charter was being debated it was pointed out that a similar document would allow child porn and hate speech, so section one was written,
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
This is the part that allows exceptions such as national security, hate laws and such and something that the American constitutional literalists do not believe in, except when its their pet cause. You see it all the time on here, Americans, usually right wingers with libertarian tendencies going on about how everything would be great if the government followed the constitution, usually with a very rigid interpretation.
By the way saying that a tax is 'regressive' means approving discrimination. You want to apply laws differently to different people based on their specific circumstances, that's injustice and discrimination.
Be consistent please. Discrimination (excepting in the case of race and perhaps religion) is perfectly constitutional. We're talking about a country that has institutionalized discrimination based on feudal principals. A country that didn't amend its constitution to make women equal to men in law. A country where the constitution was written to discriminate against classes of citizens by denying them the vote. If you want to go on about the constitution you have to accept that it's an 18th century document and was designed to discriminate and tough if it's you that is being discriminated against as that is the American way.
The first amendment is out of date. It needs to be extended with the word electronic as currently it seems that electronic papers aren't covered and many people seem to think it should have some exceptions added for things like child porn and national security. Currently it is disregarded in the above circumstances. The second amendment needs to have "well regulated" better defined as that language has changed, same with arms and also why is it OK to have a blanket ban on a class of people owning arms, namely felons many of which are considered felons for reasons having nothing to do with abuse of arms, eg having smoked a joint many years previously .
I misunderstood your usage of nation. Of course if you're going to count the Quebecois you also have to count the Acadians of New Brunswick who have the same Constitutional protections of their French .
You must mean Saint Pierre and Miquelon though strictly speaking they're part of France so of course they speak French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon Or perhaps rereading your comment you're thinking of French Guinea which is in the north of South America? Seems there are parts of France scattered all around the Americas as well as places like Haiti which also speak French. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana
Yea, well those Chinese are so stupid that they're happy with a 10% profit margin while paying their workers enough to buy their products. Just stupid when they could sell everything and make a killing in the stock market.
You keep going on about obeying the constitution and how wonderful it is but it has a fatal flaw, no way to enforce it. Perhaps the founding fathers thought the States would just ignore or nullify unconstitutional laws but Lincoln defeated that idea. Perhaps you should be talking about fixing the constitution, perhaps a constitutional court that can rule if a law is constitutional as I;ve heard good arguments that the Supreme Court wasn't meant to be a constitutional court and they've failed miserably at it. I'm not sure how a constitutional court should be made up besides that it shouldn't be Federal, perhaps appointed by the States?
You have a database consisting of people who failed a background check. Sorta how it's done in my country, everyone who has taken a short course on gun safety is allowed to buy a gun (basically only long guns) unless a judge has ordered otherwise and I'm sure the cops have access to the list of people banned from owning a gun.
Perhaps the best way is these days, to follow the constitution. 1 representative per 30,000 people.
That isn't currently part of the constitution though it was the first proposed amendment to the constitution and is still awaiting ratification so all you have to do is to get 28 more States to ratify it besides the 11 that originally ratified it. There is also the problem that the wording was changed at some point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
We're talking about over a hundred years ago, the interoperability was about wired land phones, namely the idea that all companies use basically the same technology allowing things like long distance to exist. I probably should have put honestly in quotes as AT&T did aggressively use patents and contract law to get their monopoly but by being a first mover, very good business people and aggressively expanding it is possible to get a monopoly in areas with a high barrier to entry. In the case of AT&T they aggressively bought up right a ways, refused to inter-operate with their competition and expanded very quickly including buying out their competition and became a monopoly. It was a shitty situation if you lived somewhere that wasn't served by AT&T as you couldn't phone outside of your area. And of course with a monopoly they became abusive and the government started regulating them, even nationalizing them during WWI and eventually settling on leaving them as a regulated monopoly. Google is a recent example of a company becoming close to a monopoly by having good timing, a good product and aggressively expanding. Microsoft might have been able to do the same if they had concentrated on building the best products instead of concentrating on being abusive. Gates was in the right place at the right time, just he came from a family of lawyers so being abusive was natural to him.
Not really, the San Juan islands did have strategic value at a time when America and the British Empire didn't get along as well as now. Also this was during the lead up to the American civil war and the south was counting on the support of the British Empire as England was very depend on cotton for their textile industry. Unluckily for the south, England had stockpiled so much cotton that when the civil war broke out England didn't need to get involved and stayed neutral which led to the south losing the war. Once the civil war ended, it led directly to Canada becoming an independent nation as they were scared of the States and the Provinces united for strength. Things were different back then. Of course the best part of that war was zero casualties, if the Iraqi war ended with zero casualties I doubt that there would be many complaints.
Of course we aren't direct descendants of apes, we are apes. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and how any educated person can even doubt it... Next you'll be stating that it is only faith to claim that lions and house cats are both felines, I mean lions roar, don't purr and hunt as a pack, obviously no relationship to the house cat who God created to keep lonely old ladies company.
Wars have been started by similar acts, eg one of the last times Canada (actually the British Empire) and the States went to war was over an American shooting a trespassing pig and the proposed compensation for the dead pig. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_war
Officially it is only collusion if the companies actually collude, eg communicate between each other. As no evidence has turned up, officially it is just the companies individually deciding the profits are greater if they don't compete. The barriers to entry in so many areas are high even without any artificial barriers. For an oil company they have to come up with a source of oil, refine the oil, transport it and sell it. Meanwhile the entrenched companies would probably be quite willing to run at a loss until the new kid went broke. Same with ISPs, they need to put in so much infrastructure to wire everyone up that it takes a huge upfront investment and the established companies would once again be willing to run at a loss or at least minimal profit until the newcomer goes broke. For phone and electricity the government ended up having to build most of the infrastructure as the investment was just to much for private companies to serve the majority of the province (less then a million people back then spread over a larger area then Texas with much more rugged terrain).
Just imagine how much worse buying gasoline would be if certain companies purchased rights to supply all gasoline to individual cities, locking out competition.
Probably be an improvement as the cities might compete. Currently here there are 6 companies competing here to sell gasoline. They all put the prices up exactly the same amount at the same time. Most of the time when the price goes up, the only apparent reason (experts agree) is that they can. They follow the fine line of how much they can charge and get away with it. I'm paying the same for a litre of gasoline now as when it was US$150 a barrel and the American dollar was worth 30% more. As business will tend to do, they're happy to split a larger profit then compete for a small profit. More on topic, my government has actually been pushing for competition but the new players are all going broke trying to develop the infrastructure and are currently putting themselves up for sale (with the incompetents being the only interested buyers) as they just don't have a huge advertising firm willing to bankroll them. Natural monopolies are very hard to displace even with the government helping (while trying not to be socialist). Even AT&T got their original monopoly honestly (with the help of patents) and the government traded them official status as a monopoly in trade for interoperability.
Wasn't the "fire in a crowded theater" used to stop people from protesting the draft during WW I? They could have added some weasel words if they didn't mean it to be absolute which is what my country did when someone pointed out that having an absolute right to freedom of expression enshrined in our constitution would allow child porn. Note also that the restriction originally was on Congress, not the States or other lesser governments such as cities who were free to pass a law against "fire in a crowded theatre" It just gets me that it is the same people who go on about obeying the Constitution as want to execute Manning.
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I could point out that some research on both sides are utterly crap. funding the study of beetles migration habits? yeah I dont think we need to waste money on that one
As others point out, beetles are actually very economically important and you're showing the problem of lay people judging research, namely the benefits of research often aren't immediately obvious
Probably 1 and 3. Commercial CA are supposed to have a copy put in escrow in case the government needs access. How easy it is for the government to get access I don't know but would guess it's not hard
Worked in the other direction as well. People would never have stood for illegalizing such a common and useful plant as hemp. Rename it as marijuana and demonize it and no problem illegalizing one of the most useful plants on the planet.
Here in the US, the roads and healthcare, just like everything else, are paid for by going further into debt. Federal taxes and the % levels they're set at today are mainly about reinforcing social classes.
Yea, we have a right wing government currently, same thing, into debt why they scream how they're fiscally conservative. (http://www.politicalcompass.org/test puts both Harper and Obama far to the right except Obama isn't as statist compared to Harper, who by the way also promised transparency in government and makes Obama look very open).
The Conservatives are also cutting Revenue Canada's budget way back while promising to go after offshore tax evaders.
fads and fashion are not culture. they're consumerism. culture is people DOING stuff, not BUYING stuff.
That's not really true, fashion changed in the middle ages even though most people weren't consumers, just slower.
Also the record companies were willing to experiment by signing non-standard groups to multi-album contracts to see if they'd catch on right into the '70's. There was a lot of interesting music published in the '60's and early '70's. Music that would never get published today as the performers were ugly or at least not media material and music that was not mainstream and did not create an instant hit and often barely charted.
Movies I won't comment on.
As the sibling post hints at, buying stuff is a form of doing.
Don't you mean "the number one problem in US education, parents who have to both work 12 hours a day leaving them no time to raise their children"?. Personally I've only been a successful parent due to having an order of magnitude cheaper housing compared to the going rate, thank deity.
She can fire the government (they'll always resign first) if they don't pass a budget, and if no other party has the support in Parliament to pass a budget she can dissolve Parliament so the people can vote in a new one. The people do get pissed if they're forced to vote to often and usually punish the party that won't compromise.
The system has evolved so that the government has to have a budget unlike the American system where it looks as though they'll never pass a budget again.
If it cost $80 in expenses, eg gas etc, last year to mow the lawn and this year it is going to cost $110 to mow the lawn as well as the cost of living going up, is $120 really an unreasonable increase or actually a decrease?
And if your taxes dropped to zero, then your salary could be dropped by 30% and management could get a big bonus for increasing share-holder value.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is quite different from the American Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is very definite, eg Congress will make no law (States were allowed) whereas in Canada when the Charter was being debated it was pointed out that a similar document would allow child porn and hate speech, so section one was written,
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
This is the part that allows exceptions such as national security, hate laws and such and something that the American constitutional literalists do not believe in, except when its their pet cause.
You see it all the time on here, Americans, usually right wingers with libertarian tendencies going on about how everything would be great if the government followed the constitution, usually with a very rigid interpretation.
By the way saying that a tax is 'regressive' means approving discrimination. You want to apply laws differently to different people based on their specific circumstances, that's injustice and discrimination.
Be consistent please. Discrimination (excepting in the case of race and perhaps religion) is perfectly constitutional. We're talking about a country that has institutionalized discrimination based on feudal principals. A country that didn't amend its constitution to make women equal to men in law. A country where the constitution was written to discriminate against classes of citizens by denying them the vote. If you want to go on about the constitution you have to accept that it's an 18th century document and was designed to discriminate and tough if it's you that is being discriminated against as that is the American way.
The first amendment is out of date. It needs to be extended with the word electronic as currently it seems that electronic papers aren't covered and many people seem to think it should have some exceptions added for things like child porn and national security. Currently it is disregarded in the above circumstances.
The second amendment needs to have "well regulated" better defined as that language has changed, same with arms and also why is it OK to have a blanket ban on a class of people owning arms, namely felons many of which are considered felons for reasons having nothing to do with abuse of arms, eg having smoked a joint many years previously .
I misunderstood your usage of nation. Of course if you're going to count the Quebecois you also have to count the Acadians of New Brunswick who have the same Constitutional protections of their French .
You must mean Saint Pierre and Miquelon though strictly speaking they're part of France so of course they speak French.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon
Or perhaps rereading your comment you're thinking of French Guinea which is in the north of South America? Seems there are parts of France scattered all around the Americas as well as places like Haiti which also speak French.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana
Yea, well those Chinese are so stupid that they're happy with a 10% profit margin while paying their workers enough to buy their products. Just stupid when they could sell everything and make a killing in the stock market.
You keep going on about obeying the constitution and how wonderful it is but it has a fatal flaw, no way to enforce it. Perhaps the founding fathers thought the States would just ignore or nullify unconstitutional laws but Lincoln defeated that idea.
Perhaps you should be talking about fixing the constitution, perhaps a constitutional court that can rule if a law is constitutional as I;ve heard good arguments that the Supreme Court wasn't meant to be a constitutional court and they've failed miserably at it. I'm not sure how a constitutional court should be made up besides that it shouldn't be Federal, perhaps appointed by the States?
You have a database consisting of people who failed a background check. Sorta how it's done in my country, everyone who has taken a short course on gun safety is allowed to buy a gun (basically only long guns) unless a judge has ordered otherwise and I'm sure the cops have access to the list of people banned from owning a gun.
Perhaps the best way is these days, to follow the constitution. 1 representative per 30,000 people.
That isn't currently part of the constitution though it was the first proposed amendment to the constitution and is still awaiting ratification so all you have to do is to get 28 more States to ratify it besides the 11 that originally ratified it. There is also the problem that the wording was changed at some point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment
We're talking about over a hundred years ago, the interoperability was about wired land phones, namely the idea that all companies use basically the same technology allowing things like long distance to exist.
I probably should have put honestly in quotes as AT&T did aggressively use patents and contract law to get their monopoly but by being a first mover, very good business people and aggressively expanding it is possible to get a monopoly in areas with a high barrier to entry. In the case of AT&T they aggressively bought up right a ways, refused to inter-operate with their competition and expanded very quickly including buying out their competition and became a monopoly. It was a shitty situation if you lived somewhere that wasn't served by AT&T as you couldn't phone outside of your area. And of course with a monopoly they became abusive and the government started regulating them, even nationalizing them during WWI and eventually settling on leaving them as a regulated monopoly.
Google is a recent example of a company becoming close to a monopoly by having good timing, a good product and aggressively expanding. Microsoft might have been able to do the same if they had concentrated on building the best products instead of concentrating on being abusive. Gates was in the right place at the right time, just he came from a family of lawyers so being abusive was natural to him.
Not really, the San Juan islands did have strategic value at a time when America and the British Empire didn't get along as well as now. Also this was during the lead up to the American civil war and the south was counting on the support of the British Empire as England was very depend on cotton for their textile industry. Unluckily for the south, England had stockpiled so much cotton that when the civil war broke out England didn't need to get involved and stayed neutral which led to the south losing the war.
Once the civil war ended, it led directly to Canada becoming an independent nation as they were scared of the States and the Provinces united for strength. Things were different back then.
Of course the best part of that war was zero casualties, if the Iraqi war ended with zero casualties I doubt that there would be many complaints.
Of course we aren't direct descendants of apes, we are apes. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and how any educated person can even doubt it... Next you'll be stating that it is only faith to claim that lions and house cats are both felines, I mean lions roar, don't purr and hunt as a pack, obviously no relationship to the house cat who God created to keep lonely old ladies company.
Wars have been started by similar acts, eg one of the last times Canada (actually the British Empire) and the States went to war was over an American shooting a trespassing pig and the proposed compensation for the dead pig.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_war
Officially it is only collusion if the companies actually collude, eg communicate between each other. As no evidence has turned up, officially it is just the companies individually deciding the profits are greater if they don't compete.
The barriers to entry in so many areas are high even without any artificial barriers. For an oil company they have to come up with a source of oil, refine the oil, transport it and sell it. Meanwhile the entrenched companies would probably be quite willing to run at a loss until the new kid went broke.
Same with ISPs, they need to put in so much infrastructure to wire everyone up that it takes a huge upfront investment and the established companies would once again be willing to run at a loss or at least minimal profit until the newcomer goes broke.
For phone and electricity the government ended up having to build most of the infrastructure as the investment was just to much for private companies to serve the majority of the province (less then a million people back then spread over a larger area then Texas with much more rugged terrain).
Just imagine how much worse buying gasoline would be if certain companies purchased rights to supply all gasoline to individual cities, locking out competition.
Probably be an improvement as the cities might compete. Currently here there are 6 companies competing here to sell gasoline. They all put the prices up exactly the same amount at the same time. Most of the time when the price goes up, the only apparent reason (experts agree) is that they can. They follow the fine line of how much they can charge and get away with it. I'm paying the same for a litre of gasoline now as when it was US$150 a barrel and the American dollar was worth 30% more. As business will tend to do, they're happy to split a larger profit then compete for a small profit.
More on topic, my government has actually been pushing for competition but the new players are all going broke trying to develop the infrastructure and are currently putting themselves up for sale (with the incompetents being the only interested buyers) as they just don't have a huge advertising firm willing to bankroll them. Natural monopolies are very hard to displace even with the government helping (while trying not to be socialist).
Even AT&T got their original monopoly honestly (with the help of patents) and the government traded them official status as a monopoly in trade for interoperability.
Wasn't the "fire in a crowded theater" used to stop people from protesting the draft during WW I?
They could have added some weasel words if they didn't mean it to be absolute which is what my country did when someone pointed out that having an absolute right to freedom of expression enshrined in our constitution would allow child porn. Note also that the restriction originally was on Congress, not the States or other lesser governments such as cities who were free to pass a law against "fire in a crowded theatre"
It just gets me that it is the same people who go on about obeying the Constitution as want to execute Manning.