Ted Rogers once boasted that he'd "never in his life sent a corporate income tax to Ottawa".
Remember the negative billing when the new cable tv channels came out?
Ted Rogers calling other people out on an issue of fairness would be like Bush criticizing Canada for spending too much on the military.
The OECD found that Canadians have the most expensive plans in the world, 2 or 3 times the price of europeans, 1.5-2 times the price Americans pay.
And before somebody pulls out the tired argument about Canada's population density, let's remember that if anything, Canada is even more urbanized than the US, 80% of Canadians live in an urban or suburban area, compared with 60-65% of Americans.
All the Scandinavian countries have similar population densities to Canada, and similar distribution patterns, and at 1/2 the price of Canadian plans, with no 3-year contract terms or similar vendor lock-in bullshit, wireless providers have managed to stay in business.
"Americans still overwhelmingly think the purpose of government is to implement whatever good ideas come up, and solve our problems."
Well, personally, I thought part of the point of government was to get stuff done that isn't profitable by the private sector. I'm thinking food and drug standards, police, fire, roads, sewers, and though I won't get into it here, universal healthcare. (that could just be 'cause I'm a canuck.)
Private industry isn't capable of taking a long view or a disinterested view, and government ought to step in at that point.
"As long as you engage in discussion of the merits (or lack of merits) of the plant, in the context of whether or not it should be illegal, you lose. There will always be arguments against anything, whether its heroin or hydrogen hydroxide, that the material is harmful to the user. There's nothing on this earth that is provably safe. "
I think what you're talking about here is risk management. The way I like to think of it is, no activity is risk free. So the only sensible way to discuss this is in the context of 'what is an acceptable level of risk?'.
Do we want everything to be as safe as flying? Or will we accept things being as dangerous as driving?
No, but didn't most of the founding fathers, especially Jefferson, feel that an educated population was essential for democracy to function?
Also, can't one make an argument that society as a whole benefits by having most people be better educated?
"reap the benefits of serving in the Army to finance your way through college, like I did."
Benefits like what, Post-traumatic-stress disorder? I'm curious, was there a war on when you did this?
What about those of us who are medically unfit for serving in the army? I guess if they weren't born rich, they get to spend their whole life flipping burgers?
"Yes, the X and millenial gen kids never had it so good."
Um, compared to what, exactly? When my dad graduated university with a Bachelor's degree, (chemistry) major employers were lining up to hire him. When a friend of mine's mother graduated journalism school, major news outlets were competing for who gets to hire the grads. These days, your average j-school grad is temping in an office if they're lucky.
When my dad was my age, (early 30's), he had been a homeowner for several years. This was normal, not exceptional, and he came from a lower-middle-class background. The average price of a home was 4-5 times the median income. Now the average price of a home is 10-20 times the median income, depending on what city you live in.
so, when you say people in their 20's and 30's today have never had it so good, what decade are you comparing that with? The 1930's?
"why would they even bother seriously considering abolishing the institution of slavery? How could such a purely philosophical ideal serve to benefit any of them economically?"
I heard an analysis form an economist recently who talked about how economic forces would eventually force the abolition of slavery.
Basically, his thesis was that it's cheaper to hire employees and treat them badly than it is to own slaves, because you have to feed your slaves and stuff.
Now, that off-topic point aside, the thing about Beard's thesis I don't like is that he assumes a uniform opinion/philosophy amongst the founding fathers. There's a world of difference between, say, Jefferson versus Madison or Hamilton.
The other point I heard made was that a number of the founders felt that you ought to put the most power into the hands of the wealthy, i.e., those who had already shown themselves to be the most capable men. It was either Madison or Hamilton (again, sorry if I get my founders mixed up, I'm just a canuck who admires the federalist papers as one of history's greatest works) who, later in life, felt he'd made the wrong call on that, as he saw the wealthy behaving in completely short-sighted, selfish ways. I believe the line was "enrichment of self, forgetting all else".
An author who's name escapes me said that Canadians are often described as 'nicer versions of Americans'. He, (being a proud Canadian Nationalist) said maybe another way of looking at it is to describe Americans as "Canadians in a hurry".
"The established car companies have many designs in their drawers for all kinds of cars, including energy efficient cars. The consumer kept demanding something different."
Let's keep in mind that the reason consumers keep 'demanding something different' is because there's artificial subsidies in terms of road building, price of gas, foreign oil, that keep the actual price of operating a car artificially low.
Statistics Canada, (non-partisan government entity up here in Canada) did a study a few years back, and they found that, depending on who's numbers you use, (i.e. did you get your numbers from Greenpeace or from Exxon-Mobil?) the average motorist underpays the actual cost of operating a car by between 5 and 25 cents per kilometer. (Roads, costs associated with smog/pollution, costs to the taxpayer for car crashes, etc)
So, assume you drive 30,000 km/year (that's what most car dealerships assume when you lease), then there's a bill for between $1500 and $7500 that the taxpayer is picking up.
These numbers are probably even more dramatic in the US, owing to the fact that (until very recently, anyway) gas was about twice as expensive in Canada as in the US, mostly due to higher taxes up here.
"So, while electric cars might make cities more pleasant, unless the upstream source of the energy is either renewable or nuclear* its not going to solve the problems associated with burning fossil fuels.. "
And that's why every city with a population of greater than say, 300,000 - 500,000 people should be building a nuclear plant, starting, like, yesterday.
We might eventually get to the point where solar and wind (I read somewhere that Tesla's original dream was to have a windmill on every single building in Chicago, but that meant there was no good way to charge money for electricity) and other renewables can handle the demand for electricity in the developed world, but not for a long time.
It's too bad that a combination of sloppiness on the part of those building/designing nuclear plants and scientific illiteracy on the part of some anti-nuclear activists has left a real lingering NIMBY attitude towards nukes.
About the only thing I can possibly say bad about nukes is, as you sell them to every single country, then you might find a concern w.r.t. nuclear proliferation. Not in the sense that you can get weapons-grade stuff from a nuclear power plant, but in the sense that once a country has nuclear for power generation, then you get expertise in nuclear engineering. For example, the time between Canada selling CANDU reactors to India and Pakistan and those countries getting the bomb was only about 5-10 years. But that's a minor concern, any state that wants nuclear weapons can get them eventually, and there isn't a damn thing anybody else can do about it short of war.
Besides, sure, the idea of Iran having nukes is a bit scary, but is it really that much scarier than nuclear weapons being in the hands of Regan or Nixon?
I don't know what the case law is in the US, but there is a concept of 'unconscionable' for standard form/contracts of adhesion.
The standard in Canada, where I live, is (since an appeals court case a few years back) basically, for contracts like this, or mortgages, or cell phone contracts, etc., it doesn't matter if you said you read it, or read it, or not.
What matters is, if you HAD read it, is it reasonable to assume that you would've still agreed to it or not?
So please, enough with the "you read it, you get what you deserve" type sentiments. Facebook knows most people don't read every single clause in the terms and conditions, and so do the courts.
BMI is only useful if you discount those who do strength training. When I was doing wrestling/judo, I was in the best shape of my life, and at 5'8" I weighed around 180lbs. Overweight by BMI standards, but my 29-30 inch waist said differently.
"Do we wait until they have nuclear tipped rockets that can reach the US?"
Yeesh... How old is the guy who wrote this, anyway? Ever hear of a time in history called the "cold war"? Let me skip to the relevant point: The USSR had hundreds or thousands of nukes pointed at the US, and it wasn't the end of the world.
If Iran wanted to hurt the US, they know very well they can't take them in a head-to-head fight, so they'd close the strait of Hormuz, and collapse the economy of most of the world, US included.
It never ceases to amaze me that the USA (speaking as your northern neighbor) could possibly see states like Iran or North Korea or, even more laughable, Iraq, as a possible threat to the USA.
You guys stared down the USSR for the entirety of the cold war, facing an enemy with superior numbers and brutal methods who you were very much aware had nukes, and you got by just fine.
OK, they might get nukes, but so what? Lots of countries have nukes. If you wanna take bets on who's going to be the first country to actually _use_ them, my money's on Israel.
Look, the deal with the non-proliferation treaty goes like this. The countries that don't have nukes agree not to produce them, and those that do agree to gradually phase out their stockpiles.
If the US doesn't feel the need to rid themselves of nukes, why should Iran or anybody else feel the need to obey the Anti-Proliferation Treaty?
The country that has the dubious honor of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons on humans doesn't get to take the moral high ground and lecture Iran about their nuclear ambitions.
Here here. I have a job that has me occasionally on call, and we have a rotation/backup system, so that if I'm on call, if I don't pick up the call, it goes to somebody else, and if they don't answer, a 3rd person.
How else could you ever have reliable 'on call' service for your clients? I mean, jebuz, even landlines aren't 100% reliable.
Anybody claiming that they have to be 'on call' so therefore they get to talk in a movie theater is spouting off a statement that's maybe 10% true. Yes, you're on call, but I don't believe that many people (aside from maybe experimental medical people?) are on call with no backup.
Some people like to believe they're more important than everybody, and inflate their importance to justify what's convenient for them at the time.
Ha, I was a customer care rep for AT&T back around 2002-2003, when they were slowly switching from TDMA to GSM.
Fine, great, GSM's superior in almost every way.
We had an internal website where you could check for known service outages in the event that a customer calls and reports no service or other technical problems.
I can't remember where it was, but mostly in southern california, they had one 'known outage' listed. It explained that the transmit power on cell towers in a given area for TDMA customers was being slowly diminished, in order to make the difference in call quality between TDMA and GSM seem more dramatic. Alongside this were strict instructions in big red letters DO NOT GIVE THIS INFORMATION TO THE CUSTOMER.
So, customers would call saying "damnit, before X date I was able to use my phone in my house just fine, but as of "fill-in-the-blank-date" it's been the shits, or no service! What did you guys do!?"
So we'd go thru the motions of troubleshooting, but essentially we were 'gaslight-ing' (look up the movie 'gaslight' if you don't understand) our customers.
Yeah, that's all over the place in Halifax. It's not a law or a by-law, just more of a policy by workplace/office building, you'll see signs up all over the place saying "this is a SCENT-FREE building".
It's usually something that gets started by a couple people in the building with allergies or sensitivities or something, personally, I think it's great. It's usually not targeting people for wearing deodorant, but the 19-year-old kids who bathe in body spray and walk around smelling like a french cathouse.
My last job in Halifax (before I moved to Vancouver) I was working as a line cook. One of our other cooks had an Electrical Engineering degree. One of our waiters had an architecture degree.
A friend of mine used to say "I think I'm the only bartender in town without a master's degree..."
At one point (I can't find a link, unfortunately) NS actually had a _toilet seat_ scandal... Kickback/bribery style dirty deal to install mechanized toilet seats that automatically dispense seat covers, in all NS government offices.
They ended up being sold at auction, some people bought them as collector's items.
There was even a case of a deputy minister, Michael Zareski, who was about to blow the whistle on all of John Buchanan's crooked dealings. Buchanan's cronies had him shipped off to Ontario and, wait for it, involuntarily committed.
Dude, where you from? Calgary? I bet you had one of those "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" bumper stickers when Trudeau realized that since Canada exports more oil than we consume, we could entirely free ourselves from the world price on oil.
It's only in the last 30 years that "now that all the fish have been vacuumed up the economy simply can't support the number of people who live there" became the dominant way of looking at the Atlantic region.
You know that before Confederation, NS was the most prosperous place in Canada? Even up into the 50's or 60's NS had a strong manufacturing base, which is the foundation of a strong economy.
The real problem is that governments in NS (and to a lesser extend federal governments) have not really been focused on (or even aware of) anything except primary and tertiary industries. Sorry, but tertiary jobs don't cut it unless you have a population density more like southern Ontario's. And primary industries are getting squeezed by middlemen everywhere, in every industry.
Never mind that politicians in NS have traditionally been willing to sell their children (or at least constituents) to anybody promising them a campaign contribution and 50 jobs in their riding.
For example, take sable island oil and gas. How much of that is being _refined_ in NS? Oh yeah, zero. If the government at the time had had any forsight (or, balls for that matter) they would've struck a deal stating "You wanna drill for oil and gas here? Sure. But you're gonna _refine_ X % of it here.", like Alberta's done from day one.
You can't build a strong economy on natural resources if you harvest/mine/drill for them in place A, ship the raw materials to place B, and then sell the finished products in place A.
OK, I'm not saying we won't have pandemics ever again, I'm just saying we won't see something like the 1918 flu again.
This is pure conjecture, but I'm still confident that the 1918 flu was the result of special circumstances we're not likely to see again.
Yes, the H5N1 virus has killed about 60% of those _known_ to be infected. But how do we really know how many people were infected? Isn't it possible that there's ten times that number of people who just had a mild case of the flu, stayed home and drank plenty of fluids for a few days, and reported nothing? Never mind the fact that we're only talking about ~300 cases of "known infected" people globally. I'm not an epidemiologist, but that doesn't sound like a huge sample pool to extrapolate to the population in general.
From an evolutionary point of view, it's not in a virus' "interests" to become really, really, lethal.
Think Ebola. Incubation time measured in days, spectacularly lethal (8 or 9 in ten, in hospital conditions).
If a virus kills me before I have a chance to sneeze and cough on my co-workers and the lady in the bank line, it's less likely to spread and reproduce.
As I said above, the only time there was ever a high excess mortality from flu was the 1918 strain, which evolved under unique conditions that you're not likely to see again.
Look, the odds of dying from a pandemic flu outbreak is not worth worrying about.
Look, even the 1918 flu pandemic only killed between 2 and 20% of those exposed.
OK, everybody, repeat after me: That will never, ever happen again. The 1918 flu was really bad, and would've been a lot worse likely in an age of air travel, but the conditions under which that flu virus _evolved_ will never happen again.
First thing you do with a major outbreak like this - close schools, offices, malls, any other place where large groups of people congregate and cough and sneeze on each other. What happened in the leadup to this one? War recruiting drive on everywhere. Crowd together all the young men to sign up for the army.
Now, picture the ideal conditions during WWI to both evolve and spread a flu like this. Troops coming back from the front, wounded or at least weakened from the conditions at the front (poor nutrition, sleep deprived, exhausted, stress, poor sanitation, chemical weapons). Get 'em all together in a room, packed tight, sharing the same air.
The other big scary thing about the 1918 flu was that most excess deaths (deaths above the # of deaths you'd expect in any given year due to flu) were in the age range 65. So it decimated the fit, young, adult population. Or, exactly what you'd expect, given the conditions under which it evolved.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do work on vaccines, and containing outbreaks, that sort of thing, but let's not get real worried about this as if it's something that your HR manager should be planning contingencies for.
A more likely scenario is a hong kong flu or an asian flu scenario. Wikipedia (impeccable and irrefutable source of info that you are! anyways...) tells me that the the US death toll from the 57-58 flu was ~70,000, and the 68-69 flu had a US death toll of ~33,000 with 50 million infected, or ~1 in 1500.
While the idea of me or my loved ones dying of flu doesn't appeal to me, these numbers are on the same order of magnitude as car accident fatalities.
But, just because Canada is larger than the US and has a smaller population doesn't mean the US has a denser population.
80 or 90% of Canadians live within an hour or 2 of the US border. 85% of Canadians live in urban or suburban areas, compared with about (IIRC) 65% of Americans.
Just 4 big cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto account for about 8 or 9 million Canadians, or somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the the population.
The difference is, in all of Canada's huge land mass, most of it is either northern and uninhabitable, and unsuitable for any economic activity except for mining. Mining operations tend to have small clusters of people living/working in densities about what you'd find in a city.
Whereas those vast areas of land in the US, with the exception of a desert of two, some mountains, are mostly suitable for farming.
A large part of the problem of the school system is that the supply of cheap labor dried up some point in the 70's or 80's, once we reached the point where intelligent, college-educated women had career opportunities other than being a teacher.
I'll tell you another problem with teachers (speaking as someone who was engaged to one) - the staggering uniformity of professional opinions amongst graduates of education programs since the 70's or so.
Amongst any other educated professionals, there are usually controversial issues in the field. Some IT people are fans of Microsoft, some think that MS is the devil incarnate.
There doesn't appear to be that sort of ongoing, unresolved debate amongst grads of education programs. Everybody agrees about everything. Is social promotion a good idea? Of course it is, and everybody agrees. Same groupthink applies to other issues that you might think should be controversial, but aren't.
Well, it'd be great if free-market dynamics would solve this problem, but I'm not optimistic... After all, what portion of comcrap users use bittorrent? Of those, what fraction are informed or inclined to understand this kind of stuff? I picture somebody like my girlfriend's parents, who own 2 laptops and a desktop, but when I try and tell her dad that he should turn on his wi-fi encryption, I can see his eyes glaze over as if I'm discussing the finer points of ethnic puppetry or something.
Comcast knows this, in fact is probably _counting_ on it.
Personally, I love free markets. The problem is, we just don't see them very often. The closest thing I've seen to a free market is illegal drugs.
A market should be a place where, if I don't feel I'm getting sufficient 'value' for my money, then I go to someone else, and eventually, both buyer and seller feel they're getting a 'good deal' or a 'fair deal'.
So in something like ISPs, where most people in North America have the choice of nearly identical products from nearly identical service providers, can a market even be said to exist in the first place? If Adam Smith was alive, I think he'd describe the alleged 'market' for internet service as a oligarchy or duopoly, but definitely not a free market.
If a market doesn't properly exist, then free market forces aren't going to work. I personally suspect Comcast et. al. full well know this, and they count on it. Otherwise, why make campaign contributions?
You know why it's bullshit to say "fill-in-the-blank is a slippery slope"?
BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE!
So I can suggest that compulsory education is a 'slippery slope' towards selling our children as Janissaries, or that extending Medicare to all americans is a 'slippery slope' towards soviet-style central controls on the economy, or that checking to see if you have a history of violent criminal behavior is a slippery slope towards the government seizing your guns, or that protecting your 2nd amendment rights is a slippery slope towards the average guy owning his own attack helicopter.
All typical uses of the term 'slippery slope', all equally bullshit arguments.
Not that incremental-ism doesn't happen, but if you wanna suggest that X is on the road to Y, how 'bout providing some evidence for that?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, gimme a break.
Ted Rogers once boasted that he'd "never in his life sent a corporate income tax to Ottawa".
Remember the negative billing when the new cable tv channels came out?
Ted Rogers calling other people out on an issue of fairness would be like Bush criticizing Canada for spending too much on the military.
The OECD found that Canadians have the most expensive plans in the world, 2 or 3 times the price of europeans, 1.5-2 times the price Americans pay.
And before somebody pulls out the tired argument about Canada's population density, let's remember that if anything, Canada is even more urbanized than the US, 80% of Canadians live in an urban or suburban area, compared with 60-65% of Americans.
All the Scandinavian countries have similar population densities to Canada, and similar distribution patterns, and at 1/2 the price of Canadian plans, with no 3-year contract terms or similar vendor lock-in bullshit, wireless providers have managed to stay in business.
"Americans still overwhelmingly think the purpose of government is to implement whatever good ideas come up, and solve our problems."
Well, personally, I thought part of the point of government was to get stuff done that isn't profitable by the private sector. I'm thinking food and drug standards, police, fire, roads, sewers, and though I won't get into it here, universal healthcare. (that could just be 'cause I'm a canuck.)
Private industry isn't capable of taking a long view or a disinterested view, and government ought to step in at that point.
"As long as you engage in discussion of the merits (or lack of merits) of the plant, in the context of whether or not it should be illegal, you lose. There will always be arguments against anything, whether its heroin or hydrogen hydroxide, that the material is harmful to the user. There's nothing on this earth that is provably safe. "
I think what you're talking about here is risk management. The way I like to think of it is, no activity is risk free. So the only sensible way to discuss this is in the context of 'what is an acceptable level of risk?'.
Do we want everything to be as safe as flying? Or will we accept things being as dangerous as driving?
Well, as much as I like both Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, what are the actual odds of either of them winning the nomination?
InTrade.com is currently rating Guiliani at 40% to Romney's 30% to Ron Paul at 6%.
https://www.intrade.com/aav2/trading/tradingHTML.jsp?evID=23030&eventSelect=23030&updateList=true&showExpired=false
"And, no one says college is a right."
No, but didn't most of the founding fathers, especially Jefferson, feel that an educated population was essential for democracy to function?
Also, can't one make an argument that society as a whole benefits by having most people be better educated?
"reap the benefits of serving in the Army to finance your way through college, like I did."
Benefits like what, Post-traumatic-stress disorder? I'm curious, was there a war on when you did this?
What about those of us who are medically unfit for serving in the army? I guess if they weren't born rich, they get to spend their whole life flipping burgers?
"Yes, the X and millenial gen kids never had it so good."
Um, compared to what, exactly? When my dad graduated university with a Bachelor's degree, (chemistry) major employers were lining up to hire him. When a friend of mine's mother graduated journalism school, major news outlets were competing for who gets to hire the grads. These days, your average j-school grad is temping in an office if they're lucky.
When my dad was my age, (early 30's), he had been a homeowner for several years. This was normal, not exceptional, and he came from a lower-middle-class background. The average price of a home was 4-5 times the median income. Now the average price of a home is 10-20 times the median income, depending on what city you live in.
so, when you say people in their 20's and 30's today have never had it so good, what decade are you comparing that with? The 1930's?
"why would they even bother seriously considering abolishing the institution of slavery? How could such a purely philosophical ideal serve to benefit any of them economically?"
I heard an analysis form an economist recently who talked about how economic forces would eventually force the abolition of slavery.
Basically, his thesis was that it's cheaper to hire employees and treat them badly than it is to own slaves, because you have to feed your slaves and stuff.
Now, that off-topic point aside, the thing about Beard's thesis I don't like is that he assumes a uniform opinion/philosophy amongst the founding fathers. There's a world of difference between, say, Jefferson versus Madison or Hamilton.
The other point I heard made was that a number of the founders felt that you ought to put the most power into the hands of the wealthy, i.e., those who had already shown themselves to be the most capable men. It was either Madison or Hamilton (again, sorry if I get my founders mixed up, I'm just a canuck who admires the federalist papers as one of history's greatest works) who, later in life, felt he'd made the wrong call on that, as he saw the wealthy behaving in completely short-sighted, selfish ways. I believe the line was "enrichment of self, forgetting all else".
An author who's name escapes me said that Canadians are often described as 'nicer versions of Americans'. He, (being a proud Canadian Nationalist) said maybe another way of looking at it is to describe Americans as "Canadians in a hurry".
"The established car companies have many designs in their drawers for all kinds of cars, including energy efficient cars. The consumer kept demanding something different."
Let's keep in mind that the reason consumers keep 'demanding something different' is because there's artificial subsidies in terms of road building, price of gas, foreign oil, that keep the actual price of operating a car artificially low.
Statistics Canada, (non-partisan government entity up here in Canada) did a study a few years back, and they found that, depending on who's numbers you use, (i.e. did you get your numbers from Greenpeace or from Exxon-Mobil?) the average motorist underpays the actual cost of operating a car by between 5 and 25 cents per kilometer. (Roads, costs associated with smog/pollution, costs to the taxpayer for car crashes, etc)
So, assume you drive 30,000 km/year (that's what most car dealerships assume when you lease), then there's a bill for between $1500 and $7500 that the taxpayer is picking up.
These numbers are probably even more dramatic in the US, owing to the fact that (until very recently, anyway) gas was about twice as expensive in Canada as in the US, mostly due to higher taxes up here.
"So, while electric cars might make cities more pleasant, unless the upstream source of the energy is either renewable or nuclear* its not going to solve the problems associated with burning fossil fuels.. "
And that's why every city with a population of greater than say, 300,000 - 500,000 people should be building a nuclear plant, starting, like, yesterday.
We might eventually get to the point where solar and wind (I read somewhere that Tesla's original dream was to have a windmill on every single building in Chicago, but that meant there was no good way to charge money for electricity) and other renewables can handle the demand for electricity in the developed world, but not for a long time.
It's too bad that a combination of sloppiness on the part of those building/designing nuclear plants and scientific illiteracy on the part of some anti-nuclear activists has left a real lingering NIMBY attitude towards nukes.
About the only thing I can possibly say bad about nukes is, as you sell them to every single country, then you might find a concern w.r.t. nuclear proliferation. Not in the sense that you can get weapons-grade stuff from a nuclear power plant, but in the sense that once a country has nuclear for power generation, then you get expertise in nuclear engineering. For example, the time between Canada selling CANDU reactors to India and Pakistan and those countries getting the bomb was only about 5-10 years. But that's a minor concern, any state that wants nuclear weapons can get them eventually, and there isn't a damn thing anybody else can do about it short of war.
Besides, sure, the idea of Iran having nukes is a bit scary, but is it really that much scarier than nuclear weapons being in the hands of Regan or Nixon?
I don't know what the case law is in the US, but there is a concept of 'unconscionable' for standard form/contracts of adhesion.
The standard in Canada, where I live, is (since an appeals court case a few years back) basically, for contracts like this, or mortgages, or cell phone contracts, etc., it doesn't matter if you said you read it, or read it, or not.
What matters is, if you HAD read it, is it reasonable to assume that you would've still agreed to it or not?
So please, enough with the "you read it, you get what you deserve" type sentiments. Facebook knows most people don't read every single clause in the terms and conditions, and so do the courts.
Here, here.
BMI is only useful if you discount those who do strength training. When I was doing wrestling/judo, I was in the best shape of my life, and at 5'8" I weighed around 180lbs. Overweight by BMI standards, but my 29-30 inch waist said differently.
"Do we wait until they have nuclear tipped rockets that can reach the US?"
Yeesh... How old is the guy who wrote this, anyway? Ever hear of a time in history called the "cold war"? Let me skip to the relevant point: The USSR had hundreds or thousands of nukes pointed at the US, and it wasn't the end of the world.
If Iran wanted to hurt the US, they know very well they can't take them in a head-to-head fight, so they'd close the strait of Hormuz, and collapse the economy of most of the world, US included.
It never ceases to amaze me that the USA (speaking as your northern neighbor) could possibly see states like Iran or North Korea or, even more laughable, Iraq, as a possible threat to the USA.
You guys stared down the USSR for the entirety of the cold war, facing an enemy with superior numbers and brutal methods who you were very much aware had nukes, and you got by just fine.
OK, they might get nukes, but so what? Lots of countries have nukes. If you wanna take bets on who's going to be the first country to actually _use_ them, my money's on Israel.
Look, the deal with the non-proliferation treaty goes like this. The countries that don't have nukes agree not to produce them, and those that do agree to gradually phase out their stockpiles.
If the US doesn't feel the need to rid themselves of nukes, why should Iran or anybody else feel the need to obey the Anti-Proliferation Treaty?
The country that has the dubious honor of being the only country to ever use nuclear weapons on humans doesn't get to take the moral high ground and lecture Iran about their nuclear ambitions.
Here here. I have a job that has me occasionally on call, and we have a rotation/backup system, so that if I'm on call, if I don't pick up the call, it goes to somebody else, and if they don't answer, a 3rd person.
How else could you ever have reliable 'on call' service for your clients? I mean, jebuz, even landlines aren't 100% reliable.
Anybody claiming that they have to be 'on call' so therefore they get to talk in a movie theater is spouting off a statement that's maybe 10% true. Yes, you're on call, but I don't believe that many people (aside from maybe experimental medical people?) are on call with no backup.
Some people like to believe they're more important than everybody, and inflate their importance to justify what's convenient for them at the time.
Ha, I was a customer care rep for AT&T back around 2002-2003, when they were slowly switching from TDMA to GSM.
Fine, great, GSM's superior in almost every way.
We had an internal website where you could check for known service outages in the event that a customer calls and reports no service or other technical problems.
I can't remember where it was, but mostly in southern california, they had one 'known outage' listed. It explained that the transmit power on cell towers in a given area for TDMA customers was being slowly diminished, in order to make the difference in call quality between TDMA and GSM seem more dramatic. Alongside this were strict instructions in big red letters DO NOT GIVE THIS INFORMATION TO THE CUSTOMER.
So, customers would call saying "damnit, before X date I was able to use my phone in my house just fine, but as of "fill-in-the-blank-date" it's been the shits, or no service! What did you guys do!?"
So we'd go thru the motions of troubleshooting, but essentially we were 'gaslight-ing' (look up the movie 'gaslight' if you don't understand) our customers.
Yeah, that's all over the place in Halifax. It's not a law or a by-law, just more of a policy by workplace/office building, you'll see signs up all over the place saying "this is a SCENT-FREE building". It's usually something that gets started by a couple people in the building with allergies or sensitivities or something, personally, I think it's great. It's usually not targeting people for wearing deodorant, but the 19-year-old kids who bathe in body spray and walk around smelling like a french cathouse.
Working the most embarassingly dead-end jobs.
My last job in Halifax (before I moved to Vancouver) I was working as a line cook. One of our other cooks had an Electrical Engineering degree. One of our waiters had an architecture degree.
A friend of mine used to say "I think I'm the only bartender in town without a master's degree..."
It'd be a Nova Scotian provincial government...
At one point (I can't find a link, unfortunately) NS actually had a _toilet seat_ scandal... Kickback/bribery style dirty deal to install mechanized toilet seats that automatically dispense seat covers, in all NS government offices.
They ended up being sold at auction, some people bought them as collector's items.
There was even a case of a deputy minister, Michael Zareski, who was about to blow the whistle on all of John Buchanan's crooked dealings. Buchanan's cronies had him shipped off to Ontario and, wait for it, involuntarily committed.
Dude, where you from? Calgary? I bet you had one of those "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" bumper stickers when Trudeau realized that since Canada exports more oil than we consume, we could entirely free ourselves from the world price on oil.
It's only in the last 30 years that "now that all the fish have been vacuumed up the economy simply can't support the number of people who live there" became the dominant way of looking at the Atlantic region.
You know that before Confederation, NS was the most prosperous place in Canada? Even up into the 50's or 60's NS had a strong manufacturing base, which is the foundation of a strong economy.
The real problem is that governments in NS (and to a lesser extend federal governments) have not really been focused on (or even aware of) anything except primary and tertiary industries. Sorry, but tertiary jobs don't cut it unless you have a population density more like southern Ontario's. And primary industries are getting squeezed by middlemen everywhere, in every industry.
Never mind that politicians in NS have traditionally been willing to sell their children (or at least constituents) to anybody promising them a campaign contribution and 50 jobs in their riding.
For example, take sable island oil and gas. How much of that is being _refined_ in NS? Oh yeah, zero. If the government at the time had had any forsight (or, balls for that matter) they would've struck a deal stating "You wanna drill for oil and gas here? Sure. But you're gonna _refine_ X % of it here.", like Alberta's done from day one.
You can't build a strong economy on natural resources if you harvest/mine/drill for them in place A, ship the raw materials to place B, and then sell the finished products in place A.
OK, I'm not saying we won't have pandemics ever again, I'm just saying we won't see something like the 1918 flu again.
This is pure conjecture, but I'm still confident that the 1918 flu was the result of special circumstances we're not likely to see again.
Yes, the H5N1 virus has killed about 60% of those _known_ to be infected. But how do we really know how many people were infected? Isn't it possible that there's ten times that number of people who just had a mild case of the flu, stayed home and drank plenty of fluids for a few days, and reported nothing? Never mind the fact that we're only talking about ~300 cases of "known infected" people globally. I'm not an epidemiologist, but that doesn't sound like a huge sample pool to extrapolate to the population in general.
From an evolutionary point of view, it's not in a virus' "interests" to become really, really, lethal.
Think Ebola. Incubation time measured in days, spectacularly lethal (8 or 9 in ten, in hospital conditions).
If a virus kills me before I have a chance to sneeze and cough on my co-workers and the lady in the bank line, it's less likely to spread and reproduce.
As I said above, the only time there was ever a high excess mortality from flu was the 1918 strain, which evolved under unique conditions that you're not likely to see again.
Look, the odds of dying from a pandemic flu outbreak is not worth worrying about.
Look, even the 1918 flu pandemic only killed between 2 and 20% of those exposed.
OK, everybody, repeat after me: That will never, ever happen again. The 1918 flu was really bad, and would've been a lot worse likely in an age of air travel, but the conditions under which that flu virus _evolved_ will never happen again.
First thing you do with a major outbreak like this - close schools, offices, malls, any other place where large groups of people congregate and cough and sneeze on each other. What happened in the leadup to this one? War recruiting drive on everywhere. Crowd together all the young men to sign up for the army.
Now, picture the ideal conditions during WWI to both evolve and spread a flu like this. Troops coming back from the front, wounded or at least weakened from the conditions at the front (poor nutrition, sleep deprived, exhausted, stress, poor sanitation, chemical weapons). Get 'em all together in a room, packed tight, sharing the same air.
The other big scary thing about the 1918 flu was that most excess deaths (deaths above the # of deaths you'd expect in any given year due to flu) were in the age range 65. So it decimated the fit, young, adult population. Or, exactly what you'd expect, given the conditions under which it evolved.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't do work on vaccines, and containing outbreaks, that sort of thing, but let's not get real worried about this as if it's something that your HR manager should be planning contingencies for.
A more likely scenario is a hong kong flu or an asian flu scenario. Wikipedia (impeccable and irrefutable source of info that you are! anyways...) tells me that the the US death toll from the 57-58 flu was ~70,000, and the 68-69 flu had a US death toll of ~33,000 with 50 million infected, or ~1 in 1500.
While the idea of me or my loved ones dying of flu doesn't appeal to me, these numbers are on the same order of magnitude as car accident fatalities.
Let's put this stuff in perspective, OK?
But, just because Canada is larger than the US and has a smaller population doesn't mean the US has a denser population.
80 or 90% of Canadians live within an hour or 2 of the US border. 85% of Canadians live in urban or suburban areas, compared with about (IIRC) 65% of Americans.
Just 4 big cities of Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto account for about 8 or 9 million Canadians, or somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the the population.
The difference is, in all of Canada's huge land mass, most of it is either northern and uninhabitable, and unsuitable for any economic activity except for mining. Mining operations tend to have small clusters of people living/working in densities about what you'd find in a city.
Whereas those vast areas of land in the US, with the exception of a desert of two, some mountains, are mostly suitable for farming.
Here, here.
A large part of the problem of the school system is that the supply of cheap labor dried up some point in the 70's or 80's, once we reached the point where intelligent, college-educated women had career opportunities other than being a teacher.
I'll tell you another problem with teachers (speaking as someone who was engaged to one) - the staggering uniformity of professional opinions amongst graduates of education programs since the 70's or so.
Amongst any other educated professionals, there are usually controversial issues in the field. Some IT people are fans of Microsoft, some think that MS is the devil incarnate.
There doesn't appear to be that sort of ongoing, unresolved debate amongst grads of education programs. Everybody agrees about everything. Is social promotion a good idea? Of course it is, and everybody agrees. Same groupthink applies to other issues that you might think should be controversial, but aren't.
Well, it'd be great if free-market dynamics would solve this problem, but I'm not optimistic... After all, what portion of comcrap users use bittorrent? Of those, what fraction are informed or inclined to understand this kind of stuff? I picture somebody like my girlfriend's parents, who own 2 laptops and a desktop, but when I try and tell her dad that he should turn on his wi-fi encryption, I can see his eyes glaze over as if I'm discussing the finer points of ethnic puppetry or something.
Comcast knows this, in fact is probably _counting_ on it.
Personally, I love free markets. The problem is, we just don't see them very often. The closest thing I've seen to a free market is illegal drugs.
A market should be a place where, if I don't feel I'm getting sufficient 'value' for my money, then I go to someone else, and eventually, both buyer and seller feel they're getting a 'good deal' or a 'fair deal'.
So in something like ISPs, where most people in North America have the choice of nearly identical products from nearly identical service providers, can a market even be said to exist in the first place? If Adam Smith was alive, I think he'd describe the alleged 'market' for internet service as a oligarchy or duopoly, but definitely not a free market.
If a market doesn't properly exist, then free market forces aren't going to work. I personally suspect Comcast et. al. full well know this, and they count on it. Otherwise, why make campaign contributions?
You know why it's bullshit to say "fill-in-the-blank is a slippery slope"?
BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE!
So I can suggest that compulsory education is a 'slippery slope' towards selling our children as Janissaries, or that extending Medicare to all americans is a 'slippery slope' towards soviet-style central controls on the economy, or that checking to see if you have a history of violent criminal behavior is a slippery slope towards the government seizing your guns, or that protecting your 2nd amendment rights is a slippery slope towards the average guy owning his own attack helicopter.
All typical uses of the term 'slippery slope', all equally bullshit arguments.
Not that incremental-ism doesn't happen, but if you wanna suggest that X is on the road to Y, how 'bout providing some evidence for that?