The sibling poster makes some of the points that I would. I'll just add that currently there are many people who have all they could ever need and still struggle for more. Of course I do note that you're promoting ending up in a Socialist paradise where the people own the means of production. History has shown that there is always a Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who will fuck that up. Power seems to be one thing that certain people can never have enough of.
1. I believe the loophole is closed, at least no one exploits it and the previous government exploited every loophole it could as well as various illegal moves and changing laws as much as they felt they could get away with. Our governments are more responsive as the people will and have thrown them out. Both main parties have gone from governing to a couple of seats at times. The advantage of no Gerry-mandering is few 100% safe seats. Signs all come from the parties (or candidate), most all commercials come from the parties (or candidate). We actually just vote for our MP (Member of Parliament, equals your Representative)
3a. We're only allowed to donate $1550 (indexed) in total. Not sure if that is per year or per Parliament (election cycle).
3b. The pharmaceutical companies got caught doing something like that a couple of elections ago, definitely illegal and while it may happen, it is minor as the chances of getting caught are too high.
Our freedom of speech is limited to what is reasonable in a free and democratic society, as the writers didn't want to legalize child porn and wanted the freedom to limit speech in the case of national security and didn't want to be like America where the Constitution is ignored whenever the courts feel like it. Both the First and Second Amendments are pretty clear and don't contain any exceptions, not for child porn, not for national security, not for having whole classes of people that can't be armed etc. Other rights are more subjective, eg what is a reasonable search, what is cruel and unusual punishment, where I think our courts often do a better job then the American ones.
If given the choice. We already see with things like automobiles where most all models are online and I can imagine a future where most all appliances are connected though hopefully easily disabled.
More like when the Americans revolted because they felt they had an inalienable right to steal property, namely North America, which was already occupied, by savages so fair game.
Don't forget to rinse and repeat. Once those 95% have been eliminated, the 5%, who are now 100%, only need 5% being productive while once again 95% will be non-productive leeches, so once again they'll wipe out the bottom 95%, until there is only one productive person left.
The few experiments (not very good as the people getting a basic income were surrounded by people who didn't) showed that the main changes were mothers taking more time from work to raise a family and young people pursuing more education rather then leaving school to work. Education will always lead to more opportunities. In a world with a basic income, there will still be work, luxuries, etc and most people will still work. Would you quit working for a thousand bucks a month?
1. Spending is limited but commercials do get aired by some groups promoting or more commonly attacking by some groups. I'm not right up to date on those rules. You are allowed to donate during an election assuming you haven't donated earlier in the year, which is more common. Yard signs and other signs are given out or put up by the parties, who are also responsible for cleaning them up. You're obviously allowed to put up a blog and allowed to pay a reasonable amount of money to put it up. What a reasonable amount is would be left to the courts I'd imagine.
2. New parties often start at the Provincial level, eg Reform (our tea party) first ran in the western Provinces. The Bloc Quebecois was various Quebec politicians quitting their parties and forming a new one to promote their Province and culture. They are allowed to spend some of their money, it's just limited, same with independents. The idea is to have a leveler playground. I've been talking about the Federal rules, while the Provinces have been implementing similar rules, it is still mostly a free for all at the Provincial level and the elections are completely separate from the Federal election with various parties only existing at the Provincial level, which is where most of the newer parties have come from. Otherwise they just have to get their message out to begin with, as the Greens did. Having the Provincial politics largely divorced from the Federal politics also allows more diversity.
3. Of course I can slip a politician a 20 and no one would know, but all spending is supposed to be audited with separate accounts etc so it is hard for them to spend large anonymous cash donations. And of course there is still the revolving door, a lot of former Conservatives got good paying jobs in the oil industry after leaving politics, as well as the paid trip to some tropical resort (with hookers and blow). It's not perfect but seems a lot better then the media circus that happens down there, unluckily it is another thing that is getting Americanized, with the former government trying to run the election all the time instead of the traditional waiting for the wit to be dropped. It is also one of the problems with fixed election dates (Constitutionally there just has to be an election at a maximum of 5 years and can be forced if the government loses the confidence of Parliament, eg not passing a budget means the end of that government and unless another group can pass a budget, an election)
I'm not an expert so some of the above may be not quite right.
We tried some fixes in Canada, 1. Tried to limit all political spending, eventually the Conservatives went to the Supreme Court and got a ruling that outside of an actual election (usually 6-8 weeks here) our freedom of expression allowed spending money. Spending is still limited during an actual election, last one was a record length as the Conservatives had the most money and thought they would out spend everyone else. 2. Public money was given out based on the results of the last election. It was slow but fourth and fifth parties slowly got more money and the Greens even elected a candidate. Conservatives canceled this as soon as they had enough of a majority to cancel it. 3. Only individuals are allowed to donate, up to a maximum of currently about $1500 (indexed to inflation). No corporate, union, or other special interest donors, This is still on the books. We also have an independent organization running the elections, setting the electoral districts etc, this helps the most, no gerrymandering, relatively honest elections. The Conservatives neutered them as they kept getting caught cheating and claimed that they were getting picked on. Last election, Elections Canada wasn't even allowed to try to register voters unlike all previous elections and were severely underfunded. It's amazing where you can cut spending in the name of austerity while wasting money as usual in other areas. Ideally is a Constitutional Amendment to implement the above, but they're hard to pass, perhaps even harder in Canada then the States. Most amendments use the 7/50 rule, 7 out of 10 provinces representing 50%+ of the population. The Provinces have also decided that amendments have to pass a referendum.
People (and even capitalism) are better off due to the mixture of capitalism and socialism. One example is having an educated work force. When automation became advanced enough that children were no longer required in the work force, society took over and put them in school, which led to a more educated workforce. Universal education is more socialist then capitalist. Other improvements in peoples lives came about through collective action to get better wages/working conditions and laws to do the same. The argument can be made that a well paid work force leads to more consumption which leads to more work. Things were pretty horrible for the common person at the beginning of the industrial revolution, perhaps slightly better then subsistence farming, perhaps not when the farmers could produce something that there was a demand for.
Yes, the right believes in a small government, a government that can do nothing except spy and repress the citizenship. Force their brain dead religion on people (including helping crucify the left leaning Messiah, arsehole was for the people and even shared wine with the common person), throw people in jail (or execute them) for an endless list of illegal acts, often acts that don't hurt anyone else, see eg all the drug laws. They routinely claim to be strict Constitutionalists but disagree with both the first and second amendments as they're always in favour of Congress passing laws for limiting speech for certain reasons and they're always in favour of limiting who can bear arms to themselves when the amendment is pretty clear, people have the right to bear arms. Not certain people have the right to bear arms. They've even taken over Libertarianism, changing it from a political movement to empower the people to a political movement to empower the corporation.
There's putting in the occasional weekend/overtime and there's the expectation of putting in hundred hour weeks. At my age I wouldn't put up with hundred hour weeks, especially as I know that after about 8 hours of actual work the errors start piling up and the next morning is spent fixing last nights work. It does make you look productive though.
It's a question of conflicting rights, in this case the rights of individuals to not be discriminated against, versus the rights of businesses to discriminate, and since businesses are not individuals, but rather creations of law (even the smallest business usually needs a license), the individual wins, at least in my country where our Constitution actually says,
15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
Private citizens are always free to not do business with a business for any reason. You are free to not go into the pizza place that's owned by the gay black guy. Public businesses such as the pizza place are not free to stop the black gay guy from ordering a pizza as it is discrimination and being open to the public means just that, open to the public. They can have blanket non-discriminatory rules such as no shirt, no service. There's always a gray area too, such as is a Church public or private? In Canada the Supreme Court made a point that a Priest etc can't be forced to marry a gay couple but a government worker can be forced (on penalty of losing their job for refusing) when they ruled that gay marriage is legal. It does get insane sometimes, like why is a private womens club OK but not a private mens club?
Well companies are smart enough to use their power to get lower taxes and also to push the line, a very fuzzy line, between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax cheating and to hire good enough lawyers that they can drag out legal battles for close to forever which discourages government from going after them.
Alberta (think Canada's Texas, traditionally very conservative) tried the flat tax thing and went way in the hole, about $10 billion for a Province with only a couple of million people. Conservatives seem to have a terrible grasp of basic economics as while they'll cut spending, they'll cut income even faster and have no concept of a rainy day fund and also over simplify like Alberta's 10% flat tax along with the believe that oil would never drop much below a hundred dollars a barrel. The center seems to actually do the best economically as they'll take the best ideas from both wings and at least here ran a surplus for 8 years before the Conservatives got in, cut taxes and racked up the national debt. Funny enough, last (federal) election, both the right and left were promising balanced budgets and the centerists got in with a promise of a 10 billion deficit to rebuild infrastructure.
Every new technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Technologies that were minorly disruptive were minor net creators of jobs. Technologies that were hugely disruptive were huge net creators of jobs. Predict a pessimistic deviation from that paradigm at your own peril.
Actually new technologies have enabled society to support more non-workers as the overall employment rate (expressed as a percentage) has dropped quite a bit from pre-industrial revolution when employment was close to 100%. We now have whole classes of people who don't work such as children, housewives and way more idle rich, disabled, welfare recipients and even homeless. There were also periods of time where keeping employment up meant wholesale theft, eg most of the Americas. There were a lot of people who only were employed due to being able to homestead for example. And of course the homesteading was only possible by killing or otherwise displacing the original inhabitants of that land. If you are talking absolute numbers, then yes there are more people employed now then any time previous, mostly due to there being more people then ever before.
Interesting, I've never seen that definition of HVAC. I always read it as High Voltage Alternating Current and thought occasionally it was used to mean High Volume Air Conditioning, something that is mostly useless where I live and in much of Europe as well. Thanks for a definition that makes more sense, also shows the differences in dialects of English. BTW, ventilation is important in a car when you live in a rainy zone, such as the Netherlands, need lots of ventilation at times to keep the windows fog free.
You're setting a pretty high bar if you try to separate war from politics as war is often if not always a form of politics. Any military action against purely civilian targets is a form of terrorism as civilians are not the military and the main point of targeting them is political. The military value of bombing Dresden was pretty low, while the political value was very high. The same can't be said about bombing Berlin as at least there was a high military value. Same can be said about nuking the most western orientated towns of Japan, especially when the target is a cathedral, a cathedral.full of refugees. The nuking could have started with military targets, of which there were many in Japan. But the Americans wanted to make a political statement to the Russians. But yes, I was originally thinking of the various terrorist groups that America has trained and financed to push American politics in Central and South America by targeting civilians. There are other groups such as the Taliban and in particular Obama Bin Laden who America financed and trained to push American politics in the Middle East. I also find it quite distressing to see a Chinese person, a nationality that has been extensively mistreated by Americans, including acts that if done to white men that would be called terrorist act, putting out blanket statements against "towel heads" which includes quite a large population, Muslims, Hindi, Sikh and I'm sure more. Some of my friends are Sikh and wear turbans and some of my family are brown people, including Hindi who also wear turbans and Native Americans who have a long history of having terrorist acts committed against them with the goal of stealing their land.
Well they're kinda dependent on HVAC as they need the high voltages for quick charging and generally it is easier to use AC though I guess HVDC would work. The real problem with electric is heat. Have to use the battery to heat the car or perhaps do like the old VW Beatles and have a gas powered heater. They can also do things like coat the window shield with a thin layer of gold and directly melt the ice and defog using minimal power.
There were other laws such as the Smith act that were enforced as well as a general blacklisting led by the Government, or at least a powerful person in the government. Shit in the late 19th century it wasn't unusual to call out the Militia to put down strikes and such.
The earthquakes from fracking (at least here) are not along the major fault lines so they aren't going to help and possibly will make it worse by transferring energy towards the major fault lines. Haphazardly and randomly crushing rock and adding lubricant is as stupid as walking through the mountains randomly shooting a shotgun during avalanche season.
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The sibling poster makes some of the points that I would. I'll just add that currently there are many people who have all they could ever need and still struggle for more.
Of course I do note that you're promoting ending up in a Socialist paradise where the people own the means of production. History has shown that there is always a Lenin, Stalin, or Mao who will fuck that up. Power seems to be one thing that certain people can never have enough of.
1. I believe the loophole is closed, at least no one exploits it and the previous government exploited every loophole it could as well as various illegal moves and changing laws as much as they felt they could get away with. Our governments are more responsive as the people will and have thrown them out. Both main parties have gone from governing to a couple of seats at times. The advantage of no Gerry-mandering is few 100% safe seats.
Signs all come from the parties (or candidate), most all commercials come from the parties (or candidate). We actually just vote for our MP (Member of Parliament, equals your Representative)
3a. We're only allowed to donate $1550 (indexed) in total. Not sure if that is per year or per Parliament (election cycle).
3b. The pharmaceutical companies got caught doing something like that a couple of elections ago, definitely illegal and while it may happen, it is minor as the chances of getting caught are too high.
Our freedom of speech is limited to what is reasonable in a free and democratic society, as the writers didn't want to legalize child porn and wanted the freedom to limit speech in the case of national security and didn't want to be like America where the Constitution is ignored whenever the courts feel like it. Both the First and Second Amendments are pretty clear and don't contain any exceptions, not for child porn, not for national security, not for having whole classes of people that can't be armed etc.
Other rights are more subjective, eg what is a reasonable search, what is cruel and unusual punishment, where I think our courts often do a better job then the American ones.
If given the choice. We already see with things like automobiles where most all models are online and I can imagine a future where most all appliances are connected though hopefully easily disabled.
More like when the Americans revolted because they felt they had an inalienable right to steal property, namely North America, which was already occupied, by savages so fair game.
Don't forget to rinse and repeat. Once those 95% have been eliminated, the 5%, who are now 100%, only need 5% being productive while once again 95% will be non-productive leeches, so once again they'll wipe out the bottom 95%, until there is only one productive person left.
The few experiments (not very good as the people getting a basic income were surrounded by people who didn't) showed that the main changes were mothers taking more time from work to raise a family and young people pursuing more education rather then leaving school to work. Education will always lead to more opportunities.
In a world with a basic income, there will still be work, luxuries, etc and most people will still work.
Would you quit working for a thousand bucks a month?
1. Spending is limited but commercials do get aired by some groups promoting or more commonly attacking by some groups. I'm not right up to date on those rules. You are allowed to donate during an election assuming you haven't donated earlier in the year, which is more common. Yard signs and other signs are given out or put up by the parties, who are also responsible for cleaning them up. You're obviously allowed to put up a blog and allowed to pay a reasonable amount of money to put it up. What a reasonable amount is would be left to the courts I'd imagine.
2. New parties often start at the Provincial level, eg Reform (our tea party) first ran in the western Provinces. The Bloc Quebecois was various Quebec politicians quitting their parties and forming a new one to promote their Province and culture.
They are allowed to spend some of their money, it's just limited, same with independents. The idea is to have a leveler playground.
I've been talking about the Federal rules, while the Provinces have been implementing similar rules, it is still mostly a free for all at the Provincial level and the elections are completely separate from the Federal election with various parties only existing at the Provincial level, which is where most of the newer parties have come from. Otherwise they just have to get their message out to begin with, as the Greens did.
Having the Provincial politics largely divorced from the Federal politics also allows more diversity.
3. Of course I can slip a politician a 20 and no one would know, but all spending is supposed to be audited with separate accounts etc so it is hard for them to spend large anonymous cash donations. And of course there is still the revolving door, a lot of former Conservatives got good paying jobs in the oil industry after leaving politics, as well as the paid trip to some tropical resort (with hookers and blow).
It's not perfect but seems a lot better then the media circus that happens down there, unluckily it is another thing that is getting Americanized, with the former government trying to run the election all the time instead of the traditional waiting for the wit to be dropped. It is also one of the problems with fixed election dates (Constitutionally there just has to be an election at a maximum of 5 years and can be forced if the government loses the confidence of Parliament, eg not passing a budget means the end of that government and unless another group can pass a budget, an election)
I'm not an expert so some of the above may be not quite right.
We tried some fixes in Canada,
1. Tried to limit all political spending, eventually the Conservatives went to the Supreme Court and got a ruling that outside of an actual election (usually 6-8 weeks here) our freedom of expression allowed spending money. Spending is still limited during an actual election, last one was a record length as the Conservatives had the most money and thought they would out spend everyone else.
2. Public money was given out based on the results of the last election. It was slow but fourth and fifth parties slowly got more money and the Greens even elected a candidate. Conservatives canceled this as soon as they had enough of a majority to cancel it.
3. Only individuals are allowed to donate, up to a maximum of currently about $1500 (indexed to inflation). No corporate, union, or other special interest donors, This is still on the books.
We also have an independent organization running the elections, setting the electoral districts etc, this helps the most, no gerrymandering, relatively honest elections. The Conservatives neutered them as they kept getting caught cheating and claimed that they were getting picked on. Last election, Elections Canada wasn't even allowed to try to register voters unlike all previous elections and were severely underfunded. It's amazing where you can cut spending in the name of austerity while wasting money as usual in other areas.
Ideally is a Constitutional Amendment to implement the above, but they're hard to pass, perhaps even harder in Canada then the States. Most amendments use the 7/50 rule, 7 out of 10 provinces representing 50%+ of the population. The Provinces have also decided that amendments have to pass a referendum.
People (and even capitalism) are better off due to the mixture of capitalism and socialism. One example is having an educated work force. When automation became advanced enough that children were no longer required in the work force, society took over and put them in school, which led to a more educated workforce. Universal education is more socialist then capitalist.
Other improvements in peoples lives came about through collective action to get better wages/working conditions and laws to do the same. The argument can be made that a well paid work force leads to more consumption which leads to more work.
Things were pretty horrible for the common person at the beginning of the industrial revolution, perhaps slightly better then subsistence farming, perhaps not when the farmers could produce something that there was a demand for.
In some cases, eg Canada, America has put a lot of pressure on to not have too big a military.
Yes, the right believes in a small government, a government that can do nothing except spy and repress the citizenship. Force their brain dead religion on people (including helping crucify the left leaning Messiah, arsehole was for the people and even shared wine with the common person), throw people in jail (or execute them) for an endless list of illegal acts, often acts that don't hurt anyone else, see eg all the drug laws.
They routinely claim to be strict Constitutionalists but disagree with both the first and second amendments as they're always in favour of Congress passing laws for limiting speech for certain reasons and they're always in favour of limiting who can bear arms to themselves when the amendment is pretty clear, people have the right to bear arms. Not certain people have the right to bear arms.
They've even taken over Libertarianism, changing it from a political movement to empower the people to a political movement to empower the corporation.
There's putting in the occasional weekend/overtime and there's the expectation of putting in hundred hour weeks. At my age I wouldn't put up with hundred hour weeks, especially as I know that after about 8 hours of actual work the errors start piling up and the next morning is spent fixing last nights work. It does make you look productive though.
It's a question of conflicting rights, in this case the rights of individuals to not be discriminated against, versus the rights of businesses to discriminate, and since businesses are not individuals, but rather creations of law (even the smallest business usually needs a license), the individual wins, at least in my country where our Constitution actually says,
Private citizens are always free to not do business with a business for any reason. You are free to not go into the pizza place that's owned by the gay black guy.
Public businesses such as the pizza place are not free to stop the black gay guy from ordering a pizza as it is discrimination and being open to the public means just that, open to the public. They can have blanket non-discriminatory rules such as no shirt, no service.
There's always a gray area too, such as is a Church public or private? In Canada the Supreme Court made a point that a Priest etc can't be forced to marry a gay couple but a government worker can be forced (on penalty of losing their job for refusing) when they ruled that gay marriage is legal.
It does get insane sometimes, like why is a private womens club OK but not a private mens club?
Well companies are smart enough to use their power to get lower taxes and also to push the line, a very fuzzy line, between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax cheating and to hire good enough lawyers that they can drag out legal battles for close to forever which discourages government from going after them.
Alberta (think Canada's Texas, traditionally very conservative) tried the flat tax thing and went way in the hole, about $10 billion for a Province with only a couple of million people.
Conservatives seem to have a terrible grasp of basic economics as while they'll cut spending, they'll cut income even faster and have no concept of a rainy day fund and also over simplify like Alberta's 10% flat tax along with the believe that oil would never drop much below a hundred dollars a barrel.
The center seems to actually do the best economically as they'll take the best ideas from both wings and at least here ran a surplus for 8 years before the Conservatives got in, cut taxes and racked up the national debt.
Funny enough, last (federal) election, both the right and left were promising balanced budgets and the centerists got in with a promise of a 10 billion deficit to rebuild infrastructure.
Every new technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. Technologies that were minorly disruptive were minor net creators of jobs. Technologies that were hugely disruptive were huge net creators of jobs. Predict a pessimistic deviation from that paradigm at your own peril.
Actually new technologies have enabled society to support more non-workers as the overall employment rate (expressed as a percentage) has dropped quite a bit from pre-industrial revolution when employment was close to 100%. We now have whole classes of people who don't work such as children, housewives and way more idle rich, disabled, welfare recipients and even homeless. There were also periods of time where keeping employment up meant wholesale theft, eg most of the Americas. There were a lot of people who only were employed due to being able to homestead for example. And of course the homesteading was only possible by killing or otherwise displacing the original inhabitants of that land.
If you are talking absolute numbers, then yes there are more people employed now then any time previous, mostly due to there being more people then ever before.
Interesting, I've never seen that definition of HVAC. I always read it as High Voltage Alternating Current and thought occasionally it was used to mean High Volume Air Conditioning, something that is mostly useless where I live and in much of Europe as well. Thanks for a definition that makes more sense, also shows the differences in dialects of English.
BTW, ventilation is important in a car when you live in a rainy zone, such as the Netherlands, need lots of ventilation at times to keep the windows fog free.
You're setting a pretty high bar if you try to separate war from politics as war is often if not always a form of politics.
Any military action against purely civilian targets is a form of terrorism as civilians are not the military and the main point of targeting them is political. The military value of bombing Dresden was pretty low, while the political value was very high. The same can't be said about bombing Berlin as at least there was a high military value.
Same can be said about nuking the most western orientated towns of Japan, especially when the target is a cathedral, a cathedral.full of refugees. The nuking could have started with military targets, of which there were many in Japan. But the Americans wanted to make a political statement to the Russians.
But yes, I was originally thinking of the various terrorist groups that America has trained and financed to push American politics in Central and South America by targeting civilians. There are other groups such as the Taliban and in particular Obama Bin Laden who America financed and trained to push American politics in the Middle East.
I also find it quite distressing to see a Chinese person, a nationality that has been extensively mistreated by Americans, including acts that if done to white men that would be called terrorist act, putting out blanket statements against "towel heads" which includes quite a large population, Muslims, Hindi, Sikh and I'm sure more. Some of my friends are Sikh and wear turbans and some of my family are brown people, including Hindi who also wear turbans and Native Americans who have a long history of having terrorist acts committed against them with the goal of stealing their land.
Well they're kinda dependent on HVAC as they need the high voltages for quick charging and generally it is easier to use AC though I guess HVDC would work.
The real problem with electric is heat. Have to use the battery to heat the car or perhaps do like the old VW Beatles and have a gas powered heater.
They can also do things like coat the window shield with a thin layer of gold and directly melt the ice and defog using minimal power.
Yet you emigrated to America and I assume pay taxes, a country with a long history of funding terrorism, including funding the House of Saud.
There were other laws such as the Smith act that were enforced as well as a general blacklisting led by the Government, or at least a powerful person in the government. Shit in the late 19th century it wasn't unusual to call out the Militia to put down strikes and such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is still on the books though no longer enforced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is still on the books though not currently enforced.
There's also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which goes directly against the 1st amendments rule that Congress will pass no law limiting speech and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which was eventually found to be unconstitutional.
The earthquakes from fracking (at least here) are not along the major fault lines so they aren't going to help and possibly will make it worse by transferring energy towards the major fault lines. Haphazardly and randomly crushing rock and adding lubricant is as stupid as walking through the mountains randomly shooting a shotgun during avalanche season.