I presently work in Seattle, but have lived in Dollard Des Ormeaux, Quebec (a suburb of Montreal), and Markham and Whitby, Ontario (suburbs of Toronto). Such strikes occur about once every two years on average.
But, it is true that healthcare is rationed in Canada: each province only permits a certain number of each kind of medical "procedure" in a year (doctors are paid by the province by procedure performed, and this is how costs are controlled). Toward the end of the year, the caps are reached on an increasing number of procedures.
Canada is not "my country", though I had the misfortune to have been born there. The Canadian healthcare system murdered my father by taking his money, and denying him the essential surgery he could have otherwise purchased with it.
If I had to pledge alegience to any nation, it would be to the U.S.A. because I hold the principles in it's constitution in the highest regard. Though presently run over somewhat roughshod, by a rather manic administration, I am certain they will, in short order, be held in the highest respect by her citizens (among who's number is counted my son).
but at the end of the day, that's an extra $2000USD out of your pocket every year.
Not quite.
Canadian salaries are about 30% lower (after accounting for cost of living and currency exchange rate differences) than U.S. salaries for similar jobs. Taking into account differences in taxes, after tax income is lower still.
So, that extra US$2000 does not exist.
For a quick ballpack comparison, where one can earn (as a software engineer) CA$76.5k in Toronto, one can earn around US$100k in Seattle, and pay less in taxes, as a fraction of income. I haven't even included benefits (which cover a lot of health insurance).
How does Americans paying a premium for drugs in Canada prevent those drugs from being sold cheaper to Canadians?
Drug prices are regulated in Canada, so free market shortages can't affect prices (only create waiting lists). And, if prices are regulated, supply to non-citizens could be regulated as well.
Either doctors are paying by accepting lower salaries, or taxpayers or paying more, or both.
Doctor's salaries in Canada are established by a stipulated rate per "procedure", and a limit to the number of procedures that can be performed in a given year.
Thus, doctors can earn greater income only by performing more procedures and not by virtue of commanding a higher rate because of greater skill, experience, or success records. This drives the best doctors to the U.S., leading to shortages.
The doctor shortages (I've read estimates of 1400 too few doctors for the metro Toronto area alone), and caps on total number of procedures a year lead to long waiting lists: about four years for ostheoarthritic surgery for conditions that are extremely painful and render one non-ambulatory (unable to walk). The money to pay for the surgery is instead wasted on "in home" nursing care for the non-ambulatory patient.
Now, doctors don't have to subscribe to the Canadian Healthcare system (and the rates it pays), and can take privately paying patients, but they can't do both (unlike U.S. doctors which can be affiliated with several insurers). Given that it is illegal for people eligible for government coverage to pay for it (so they don't "jump the queue"), this means that almost all doctors are "in the system", except those that specifically cater to non-citizens (like sports doctors on staff for major league sports teams, etc.).
Oh, and while citizenship conveys eligibility for healthcare coverage, there are serious strings attached to actually obtaining it: when establishing a new residence in Ontario, for example, to get health coverage you must agree to never leave the province, or pay back any benefits you received at a rate "to be determined" (and not necessarily what was paid on your behalf - that being a secret between the government and the doctor or hospital, though the rates are public knowledge)).
So, citizens can't legally pay for care that is covered, and coverage requires agreeing to never leave the province of residence or face unspecified "recovery" costs. That sure sounds like the former Soviet Union to me.
Well, convicts remain citizens. I think you mean to use the word "convicted felons" instead of "convicts". It is arguable whether felons, having served their sentences, should have the same standing, in this regard, as non-felon citizens.
B: One can't justify a death by arguing they "might've" died anyway: If I scare you, and you die of a heart attack because of fright, I have killed you. It doesn't matter that you might've died ten minutes later, anyway. I'd still likely be found guilty of third degree murder, at least. There is a principle in law that essentially requires you to take people as they come and not as you expect them to be.
C: Godwin's Law, yes. Except I am not comparing Canada's Prime Minister to Hitler. I am noting that an observation Hitler made that makes perpetuation of heinous crimes far more likely than one would otherwise expect (and bolstered by his very perpetuation of heinous crimes against humanity), applies to Canada.
Convicts should be relegated behind foreigners in any waiting list
Perhaps, but citizens, free, not incarcertated, wait while foreigners don't:
I got my son to see a doctor only because he was an American citizen. At first, the government balked arguing that he was Canadian by parentage, but I, presenting his American birth certificate and passport, challenged them to prove it -- I was wise to never apply for his Canadian citizenship to be verified so there was no record of it.
Non-citizens can also buy the care immediately for which Canadians have to wait. I've heard about being friendly toward other nations (and the supposed Ameriacan poor grade in this are), but this is absurd: take care of "your own" first, no?
My father died becuase he was denined a $50k surgery on the grounds (a) he'd have to wait, (b) all the skilled surgeons left the country (for far better pay), (c) he was "old" and thus not paying significant taxes making saving his life a loosing proposition. I've learned that his situation is far from rare, these days.
If he hadn't been burdened with the high taxes during his working life, he could have saved those $50k ten or twenty times over, by the time his health needs became serious. But, having been taxed "for free healthcare" among other things, he didn't have the money left to try to save his life when the "free healthcare" turned out to be a fraud.
Canada robs (takes tax dollars and does not deliver what they are supposed to fund) and murders (impoverishes to the point of being unable to save one's own life) people, pure and simple.
That's far worse than letting people die who never had the means to save themselves in the first place.
The funny thing is, in the U.S., with about 13% of the population without any health insurance (around 40 million people), charitible giving is amazing: "help", though never guaranteed, is quite likely available. No hospital can turn anyone away in urgent need of care, either. And, rather than scrabbling around like rats seeking whatever piece of the diminishing social service pie they can, most people are actually friendly, and helpful -- even toward foreigners like me (who mind our own business, and pay our own way, and comply with the limits of our work visas).
I don't know what's more disgusting: that Canada is run by thieves and murderers, or that they dare act they way they do in the name of "compassion". Liars as well as thieves and murderers.
Hitler observed that "the bigger the lie, the better" because no one would believe anyone capable of the heinous acts behind a grand deception: most people being "corrupt rather than downright evil". Six million Jews learned that, horribly, he was correct on this observation: even with mounting evidence, the existance of concentration camp gas chambers was just too awful to "possibly be true". Canada serves as a modern poster child for this very same observation: no one believes that the government won't save the lives of people who paid way more toward health care than saving their life would cost.
The horrible truth is that Canadians are tax slaves, funding the excesses of bureaucrats while thinking they will get some "social benefit". The illusion is maintained by throwing the equivalent of crumbs to the poor, their votes easily bought for a guarantee of subsistance: "Elect us, and we will enslave those who work, take 95%, and give you 5% for your trouble at the polling booth" is about the only campaign slogan that would ring true. Welfare councellors, who are supposed to help people get off the dole, recount to me that 80-90% of their clients refuse to do anything to improve their situation, citing those that work enough to pay taxes as "suckers".
Lying, thieving, murderous, freeloading, criminals, I say!
< light bulb on > Ah! < light bulb off > While the planet will exert a force with a component in opposition to my direction of motion after I pass it similar to the force it exerted in my direction of motion before I passed it; having moved, the magnitude of this force will be less (the planet is further away from me). I thus experience a net accellation and the planet a net decelleration.
As with all insights, once understood, this ranks up there with "Duuuuh!".
I never really understood gravity assists. I understand how they can change angular momentum of a craft, but, kinetic entergy (and thus speed (the magnitude of velocity)) would remain the same at equal distances from the assisting body, no (since gravity is a conservative force)?
To correct myself: listing a party affilliation simply requires being a member of a recognized political party. That requires having a large enough number of candidates run in the previous election (listed, possibly, as independents).
It used to be the case that not running sufficient candidates (the number was 50 for recogition in the next election and deregistration after the current one), would result in deregistration of the party. But, that was challenged by the Communist party around 1997, IIRC. They, and the Libertarian Party of Canada (talk about politics making for strange bedfellows!) benefitted from the challange: They won in the courts, and the government did not invoke the hideous "notwithstanding" clause of the Canadian constitution to overrule that (Yes, Canadian federal and provincial governments can overrule the Supreme Court of Canada. And this doesn't bother anyone. Idiots.).
A would-be candidate requires (at least this was the number around 1993) 100 nominating signatures from their chosen riding (rather like an electoral district) in order to appear on the ballot there. If a sufficient number of like-minded candidates from a common party meet this qualification in enough ridings, they can be listed under their party name as well, instead of as "Independent".
You'd think this would result in a very large number of candidates on the ballot, what with the low barrier to entry (well, the nominations, and the $1000 fee - almost entirely tax-refundable (you contribute it to your campaign for a $450 tax break, and at least half gets returned to the campaign after you file your paperwork -- all of it if you get 15% of the vote)).
Sadly, Canadians are so apathetic, that rarely do non-mainstream candidatates get enough nominations to appear on the ballot.
Of course, I'm quoting early 90's requirements -- they may have changed since.
Except you don't need to correct the short burst errors (and waste bandwidth on the syndrome), because you can correct them as longer burst errors - you only have to detect the short burst errors to know to wait for the corrections.
Having treated them as erasures, and recovered them, you can then see what the actual short burst error was, and use this information to adapt your error correction approach (i.e. do I have a poor channel or just one that drops whole packets every so often, likely due to equipment dropping them intentionally).
This won't work for burst errors, only erasures, and only then in the face of an otherwise error-free channel. How do you know your data hasn't been corrupted just because it hasn't been lost.
I suppose an interleaved code can help here: add checks to the individual packets, and redundancy over packets as a whole "later" to correct for erasures or corruptions. So, instead of requesting a retransmission, you wait for enough data to reconstruct what was lost or corrupted.
Still, depending on the loss rate, retransmission might be more desirable than redundancy, trading off bandwidth for latency. I smell an adaptive approach.
You are correct: you can overcome a burst error of any length with a suitable ECC.
However, what do you do when you encounter a burst error longer than your ECC design limit? A more complex code may not be the answer for reasons of computational complexity.
The solution (employed with great success in CD media) is interleaving: instead of sending A1A2A3 B1B2B3 C1C2C3 you send A1B1C1 A2B2C2 A3B3C3. Let's assume the middle of that, A2B2C3, got lost, and you can only recover an error of one third that length. No worries! You've interleaved your data!!
You deinterleave what you receive from A1B1C1 A3B3C3 into A1<error>A3 B1<error>B3, and C1<error>C3. Each of these can be corrected.
There are whole families of such interleaved error correcting codes. You can even interleave interleaved codes! CIRS means "cross-interleaved Read Solomon" and covers many of the techniques employed commercially (particularly in CD media).
But, there is a price to pay, and that is latency: you have to have all the data to deinterleave so, instead of waiting for, say, three packets, you have to wait for nine.
Such codes are well-suited for streaming transmissions (if you can tolerate the latency), but I'm not sure that they'd work well for interactive applications.
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A retired person is a tax drain.
You put 2+2 together.
But, it is true that healthcare is rationed in Canada: each province only permits a certain number of each kind of medical "procedure" in a year (doctors are paid by the province by procedure performed, and this is how costs are controlled). Toward the end of the year, the caps are reached on an increasing number of procedures.
If I had to pledge alegience to any nation, it would be to the U.S.A. because I hold the principles in it's constitution in the highest regard. Though presently run over somewhat roughshod, by a rather manic administration, I am certain they will, in short order, be held in the highest respect by her citizens (among who's number is counted my son).
Try finding a doctor in Toronto taking new patients. You pay that $2k without getting any service when you need it.
Not quite.
Canadian salaries are about 30% lower (after accounting for cost of living and currency exchange rate differences) than U.S. salaries for similar jobs. Taking into account differences in taxes, after tax income is lower still.
So, that extra US$2000 does not exist.
For a quick ballpack comparison, where one can earn (as a software engineer) CA$76.5k in Toronto, one can earn around US$100k in Seattle, and pay less in taxes, as a fraction of income. I haven't even included benefits (which cover a lot of health insurance).
It usually happens, though, when staff go on strike for better pay.
Drug prices are regulated in Canada, so free market shortages can't affect prices (only create waiting lists). And, if prices are regulated, supply to non-citizens could be regulated as well.
Doctor's salaries in Canada are established by a stipulated rate per "procedure", and a limit to the number of procedures that can be performed in a given year.
Thus, doctors can earn greater income only by performing more procedures and not by virtue of commanding a higher rate because of greater skill, experience, or success records. This drives the best doctors to the U.S., leading to shortages.
The doctor shortages (I've read estimates of 1400 too few doctors for the metro Toronto area alone), and caps on total number of procedures a year lead to long waiting lists: about four years for ostheoarthritic surgery for conditions that are extremely painful and render one non-ambulatory (unable to walk). The money to pay for the surgery is instead wasted on "in home" nursing care for the non-ambulatory patient.
Now, doctors don't have to subscribe to the Canadian Healthcare system (and the rates it pays), and can take privately paying patients, but they can't do both (unlike U.S. doctors which can be affiliated with several insurers). Given that it is illegal for people eligible for government coverage to pay for it (so they don't "jump the queue"), this means that almost all doctors are "in the system", except those that specifically cater to non-citizens (like sports doctors on staff for major league sports teams, etc.).
Oh, and while citizenship conveys eligibility for healthcare coverage, there are serious strings attached to actually obtaining it: when establishing a new residence in Ontario, for example, to get health coverage you must agree to never leave the province, or pay back any benefits you received at a rate "to be determined" (and not necessarily what was paid on your behalf - that being a secret between the government and the doctor or hospital, though the rates are public knowledge)).
So, citizens can't legally pay for care that is covered, and coverage requires agreeing to never leave the province of residence or face unspecified "recovery" costs. That sure sounds like the former Soviet Union to me.
Well, convicts remain citizens. I think you mean to use the word "convicted felons" instead of "convicts". It is arguable whether felons, having served their sentences, should have the same standing, in this regard, as non-felon citizens.
B: One can't justify a death by arguing they "might've" died anyway: If I scare you, and you die of a heart attack because of fright, I have killed you. It doesn't matter that you might've died ten minutes later, anyway. I'd still likely be found guilty of third degree murder, at least. There is a principle in law that essentially requires you to take people as they come and not as you expect them to be.
C: Godwin's Law, yes. Except I am not comparing Canada's Prime Minister to Hitler. I am noting that an observation Hitler made that makes perpetuation of heinous crimes far more likely than one would otherwise expect (and bolstered by his very perpetuation of heinous crimes against humanity), applies to Canada.
Perhaps, but citizens, free, not incarcertated, wait while foreigners don't: I got my son to see a doctor only because he was an American citizen. At first, the government balked arguing that he was Canadian by parentage, but I, presenting his American birth certificate and passport, challenged them to prove it -- I was wise to never apply for his Canadian citizenship to be verified so there was no record of it.
Not in Canada, apparently.
My father died becuase he was denined a $50k surgery on the grounds (a) he'd have to wait, (b) all the skilled surgeons left the country (for far better pay), (c) he was "old" and thus not paying significant taxes making saving his life a loosing proposition. I've learned that his situation is far from rare, these days.
If he hadn't been burdened with the high taxes during his working life, he could have saved those $50k ten or twenty times over, by the time his health needs became serious. But, having been taxed "for free healthcare" among other things, he didn't have the money left to try to save his life when the "free healthcare" turned out to be a fraud.
Canada robs (takes tax dollars and does not deliver what they are supposed to fund) and murders (impoverishes to the point of being unable to save one's own life) people, pure and simple.
That's far worse than letting people die who never had the means to save themselves in the first place.
The funny thing is, in the U.S., with about 13% of the population without any health insurance (around 40 million people), charitible giving is amazing: "help", though never guaranteed, is quite likely available. No hospital can turn anyone away in urgent need of care, either. And, rather than scrabbling around like rats seeking whatever piece of the diminishing social service pie they can, most people are actually friendly, and helpful -- even toward foreigners like me (who mind our own business, and pay our own way, and comply with the limits of our work visas).
I don't know what's more disgusting: that Canada is run by thieves and murderers, or that they dare act they way they do in the name of "compassion". Liars as well as thieves and murderers.
Hitler observed that "the bigger the lie, the better" because no one would believe anyone capable of the heinous acts behind a grand deception: most people being "corrupt rather than downright evil". Six million Jews learned that, horribly, he was correct on this observation: even with mounting evidence, the existance of concentration camp gas chambers was just too awful to "possibly be true". Canada serves as a modern poster child for this very same observation: no one believes that the government won't save the lives of people who paid way more toward health care than saving their life would cost.
The horrible truth is that Canadians are tax slaves, funding the excesses of bureaucrats while thinking they will get some "social benefit". The illusion is maintained by throwing the equivalent of crumbs to the poor, their votes easily bought for a guarantee of subsistance: "Elect us, and we will enslave those who work, take 95%, and give you 5% for your trouble at the polling booth" is about the only campaign slogan that would ring true. Welfare councellors, who are supposed to help people get off the dole, recount to me that 80-90% of their clients refuse to do anything to improve their situation, citing those that work enough to pay taxes as "suckers".
Lying, thieving, murderous, freeloading, criminals, I say!
64 looks painful and 69 smells fishy.
As with all insights, once understood, this ranks up there with "Duuuuh!".
Thanks.
More correctly: the force of gravity gives rise to a conservative field.
I never really understood gravity assists. I understand how they can change angular momentum of a craft, but, kinetic entergy (and thus speed (the magnitude of velocity)) would remain the same at equal distances from the assisting body, no (since gravity is a conservative force)?
It used to be the case that not running sufficient candidates (the number was 50 for recogition in the next election and deregistration after the current one), would result in deregistration of the party. But, that was challenged by the Communist party around 1997, IIRC. They, and the Libertarian Party of Canada (talk about politics making for strange bedfellows!) benefitted from the challange: They won in the courts, and the government did not invoke the hideous "notwithstanding" clause of the Canadian constitution to overrule that (Yes, Canadian federal and provincial governments can overrule the Supreme Court of Canada. And this doesn't bother anyone. Idiots.).
So, KE = 684 x 10^9 J.
I thought, perhaps, that you used a British billion 10^12 instead of an American Billion 10^9, but I'd still not get your numbers.
Kudos. A relatively unknown engineer suddenly earned a great deal of respect from me.
A would-be candidate requires (at least this was the number around 1993) 100 nominating signatures from their chosen riding (rather like an electoral district) in order to appear on the ballot there. If a sufficient number of like-minded candidates from a common party meet this qualification in enough ridings, they can be listed under their party name as well, instead of as "Independent".
You'd think this would result in a very large number of candidates on the ballot, what with the low barrier to entry (well, the nominations, and the $1000 fee - almost entirely tax-refundable (you contribute it to your campaign for a $450 tax break, and at least half gets returned to the campaign after you file your paperwork -- all of it if you get 15% of the vote)).
Sadly, Canadians are so apathetic, that rarely do non-mainstream candidatates get enough nominations to appear on the ballot.
Of course, I'm quoting early 90's requirements -- they may have changed since.
Having treated them as erasures, and recovered them, you can then see what the actual short burst error was, and use this information to adapt your error correction approach (i.e. do I have a poor channel or just one that drops whole packets every so often, likely due to equipment dropping them intentionally).
I suppose an interleaved code can help here: add checks to the individual packets, and redundancy over packets as a whole "later" to correct for erasures or corruptions. So, instead of requesting a retransmission, you wait for enough data to reconstruct what was lost or corrupted.
Still, depending on the loss rate, retransmission might be more desirable than redundancy, trading off bandwidth for latency. I smell an adaptive approach.
However, what do you do when you encounter a burst error longer than your ECC design limit? A more complex code may not be the answer for reasons of computational complexity.
The solution (employed with great success in CD media) is interleaving: instead of sending A1A2A3 B1B2B3 C1C2C3 you send A1B1C1 A2B2C2 A3B3C3. Let's assume the middle of that, A2B2C3, got lost, and you can only recover an error of one third that length. No worries! You've interleaved your data!!
You deinterleave what you receive from A1B1C1 A3B3C3 into A1<error>A3 B1<error>B3, and C1<error>C3. Each of these can be corrected.
There are whole families of such interleaved error correcting codes. You can even interleave interleaved codes! CIRS means "cross-interleaved Read Solomon" and covers many of the techniques employed commercially (particularly in CD media).
But, there is a price to pay, and that is latency: you have to have all the data to deinterleave so, instead of waiting for, say, three packets, you have to wait for nine.
Such codes are well-suited for streaming transmissions (if you can tolerate the latency), but I'm not sure that they'd work well for interactive applications.
Special Relativity is much easier to explain in layperson's terms.