A few bad actors decided tehy were super bankers and tried to make a lot of money - what should have happened is to let the go under and not bail them out - and let deposit insurance pay off teh depositers.
Actually, it was the FDIC that caused a lot of the S&L problems. Also the way S&Ls were regulated. They were not required to keep much cash on-hand and were allowed to list "goodwill" as part of their assets. The FDIC guarantee meant that they S&Ls were able to do goofy things like invest in jackalope ranches because they knew that their customers' money was federally insured.
The S&L bailout wasn't bailing out S&Ls, it was giving Granny her $2500 CD back.
(One of the primary authors of the S&L legislation? Senator Ted Kennedy, the senior balloon from Massachusetts.)
Or Neverwinter Nights, so you aren't limited to the quality of nerd you can find locally. Also, you don't have to smell them.
I've had to put up with a lot of weirdos over the years in order to play role-playing games. I'm very thankful of Bioware's work to release me from the need to hang around The Black Crow Cauldron, or whatever in order to play a game.
Plus rolling dice is stupid. The computer does this better and faster, not to mention that it keeps track of the rules better. Arguing rules may be "part of the fun", but for non-retards, fighting monsters and out-witting wizards was more fun. The beauracracy part of D&D was it's worst feature. Of course, the twattish, malodorous nerds all think the "mainstreaming" of D&D has ruined it.
Your opinions also applied just a few years ago to the music industry.
Theaters only do well with first-run movies. First-run movies are also very spotty in quality. People are starting to waidt for the DVD (the long lead times between a theatrical release and home video are down to mere weeks) so they don't get burned by high ticket prices (per viewer, no less!).
What makes the big bucks for theaters? Family movies. Get mom and dad and the two kids in there for The Incredibles, you make a bundle. But, wait: mom and dad are now waiting for the DVD and watching it at home. $20 for the DVD (or $3 for the rental), and the kids can watch it again and again.
Why is the theater relevant again? Only for purists.
Just as an interesting data point: a 300mhz G3 clamshell iBook with 128mb of RAM will run 10.3, so long as you only ask it to run Safari. We keep it in the living room as a quicky Web station, connected to the I'net with an Airport card.
These machines are old and slow enough you can sometimes find friends or family giving them away. That's how we got ours.
Not to say that I wouldn't mind a bit more memory. Sometimes multiple tabs will engage swapping. And you have to leave the screen at 16-bit or the UI drags some. But it's pretty impressive to see this machine running at all.
(The best solution would be to run 9.2.2, but all of the browsers for OS 9 suck ass.)
Your experience mirrors my own with Solaris 8 x86. They had a deal where you could order it for $75, and I did. Installing to a dual P-Pro machine was pretty painful, but I managed.
The real problem came when I tried to find things. Everything was scattered all over the filesystem in places that I'm sure make perfect sense to old-hand Solaris admins, but for me, coming from Free and OpenBSD where everything is lined up neatly and stored in its proper place, it was a nightmare.
I eventually had to give it up because I couldn't get netatalk to compile on it. I still have the CDs laying around.
Check the other sites they've done. See if they look like something you could use. Ask the other companies if they were good to work with.
See how much experience they have. If one of their developers is an active participant in a Free software project of some sort, that's a good sign.
Finally, sacrifice a chicken and mutter an incantation from the darkest magick of Voodou. The project will go over-time, over-buget, and will be atrociously broken in unexpected ways. The only way to avoid this for any non-trivial system is to pay a lot of money, or do something highly derivative.
I wouldn't bother with trying to measure which language/technique is "best". They're all good and bad in different ways. I myself like PHP because it's easy and fast, and if I get hit by a bus there are gobs of people who can spend a week looking at the code and pick up where I left off.
Check out Drupal. You might find it to be a perfect fit for you. I use it almost exclusively as it's very powerful and very easy--and very fast, incidentally. I'm not so thrilled about a few things--that it uses the database as a less-dangerous filesystem and not as a true RDBMS, mostly because of a MySQL mindset; that some of the modules (image.module) requires a Web server-writable directory--but by and large it solves 90% of the problems and isn't as difficult to use as Zope/Plone.
Your argument devolves to "the Devil made me do it," which is bullshit in all its forms. That the German people were bullied into submission by a few bad, scary people doesn't wash. The magnificent German army wasn't just Hitler and Goebbels and a few others--it took a lot of actual Teutonics to staff that Teutonic war machine.
You're right in that I'd be unimpressed by your history books--for every history book written with one opinion, there's another to refute it. Logic here is sufficient--placing the blame for all of Nazi Germany's crimes at the feet of a handful of people is not logical. Compliance with a significant minority, if not majority, of Germans is also required. We're not talking about hiding a few pages of sensitive data here--we're talking about train cars-full of human cargo. You can miss seeing it, sure, but you have to want to.
So, your argument is that of course there's rampant anti-Jewish bigotry in Europe, but that during WWII it had no impact and that it was all Adolf's fault? If your history book makes that claim, I'd toss it in the garbage.
And this is all beside the point. You admit that there's rampant anti-Jewish bigotry in Europe--so where do they get off getting self-righteous about access to municipal wireless? Which, if you look back, was the whole point of my post.
This isn't a debate rule anywhere. It's a USENET axiom. You lose for manufacturing facts out of moonbeams.
When the argument revolves around the benevolence and socially progresssive thinking of Europeans, when a significant portion of recent history was dominated by actual Nazi Europeans (Germany) or de facto collaborators (France), Godwin's Law doesn't apply.
In other words, it's not a strawman argument when it actually is a man's suit stuffed with straw and tied to a pole.
I call bullshit. It's a very popular idea now that nobody really knew what was going on--Auschwitz was a sausage factory, etc. etc., but the reality was that the German people were just as happy to put the blame for their plight on the Jews as was the government to accomodate them.
Europe is still today rife with anti-Jewish bigotry. Just ask a Jew--if you can find one.
we allow our local/community governments to do what the electorate want them to do.
Even if that means killing all the Jews! How enlightened you are!
Seriously--can we have one Slashdot story that doesn't have 300 comments from Canadians/EUians that say "Oh, we're so much better because we have foo. Gosh, Americans are stupid! LOL!" It's not relevent; it does not move the discussion forward; it's a pant-load of self-justification.
You sound like somebody who's never won a 20-kill limit game with proxy mines where 2/3 of your kills were due to spawn-mining.
Or you've never sniped a guy with the damned-to-hell Klobb.
Goldeneye was a very good, well-balanced FPS on an unremarkable console. It was well-designed and executed. What is sad is how so many similar games have come since that seemed to have never learned anything from this game.
Are you still considered lucky when sites (that is, most of the Web) are not designed with lynx in mind, and you then have to wade through a mess of irrelevant links before you can get to the content? Whereas a graphical browswer allows you to visually filter out the extraneous crap and focus on the meat of the page? Or, even better, access a Web-based tool like phpLDAPAdmin which uses frames?
I use lynx only because I'm often left trying to use a Web site from a shell to download something. Lynx sucks. It fills a need, but just barely.
God knows you're right. Know what I'd really like? A curses-based LDAP admin tool. Really, that would solve 90% of the pain of LDAP for a commandline-using admin.
First, congratulations on being incapable of reading. I said "Levis, MTV and American imperialism", which I figured would be a nice catch-all for the litany of complaints leveled by the Left. Which, you'll notice, includes FOREIGN POLICY, you knob.
If you want to make the argument that our past interventionist foreign policy caused terrorism, well, bully for you. That's the kind of unprovable nonsense that liberals have been carting for years. Did we cause the Taliban by financing the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets? Maybe. It's debatable. It's not debateable that defeating Soviet expansionism was a good thing, and therefore a cogent argument can be made that the trade-off of the Taliban (assuming we were a direct cause) for a Soviet defeat was worthwhile.
To borrow a phrase from you unlamented candidate, it's nuanced. Had we not financed the mujahideen, Afghanistan would have been under the thumb of the Soviets. Is that better, or worse than the Taliban? Also debateable.
Nobody hates Canada because Canada is no threat. Neither are the Swiss. America is a threat to Islamofacism, because we're the only ones with the will (and more importantly, the means) to fight it. Two guys with rusty swords could conquer Belgium. One bomb in a Madrid train station and the Spaniards turned tail and ran--Spain has already surrendered. France is in the process of being overrun, and Britain? Well, at the rate the British are being out-bred by Muslims, it's easy to see that in a generation or two the U.K. will be a founding member of the New Caliphate.
More people have been killed in the name of Christianity than any other single cause.
This is complete bullshit. It's not just wrong, it's really, badly, terribly wrong. You will find out that the world looks different when you're not talking out of your ass. You should try it.
I can't believe somebody actually used this old horseshit canard on me--"More people have been killed in the name of Christianity..." Goddamn, you're one dumb son of a bitch.
Holy crap, that was the biggest pantload of horseshit I think I've ever read.
I think you just based an argument on the differing definitions of "liberal", and how it has changed over time. Bravo, you're a loon. A loon without a point, I should add.
Right, that's why they've targeted peacefull democracies around the world for decades. Just look at all the thousands of civilians killed in terrorist attacks on Australia and Candada. Not.
Canada will bend over and accept the Caliphate. See the current situation where Canada is looking at allowing sharia courts to have jurisdiction over family matters of Muslims in Canada.
Oh, and also see the bombs in the Madrid train station. Congratulations on being wrong.
You shouldn't throw stones in a glass house. Blowing off terrorists as wanting to establish an Islamic theorcracy is just blowing off the fact that our foreign policy is the reason why we get attacked and other countries don't.
This word, "fact", I do not think it means what you think it means. Please justify your assertion that it is a "fact".
It is an "opinion", one that the terrorists conveniently parrot because it seems to work so well on the Left. Oh, and also, other countries certainly are being attacked (see above), so basically you're talking out of your ass. I have the feeling this is a regular occurance with you.
Your grasp of asymmetrical warfare is staggering in its naivete.
Muslim terrorists are not fighting the Great Satan because of Levis jeans and MTV and American imperialism. They are fighting to establish a worldwide caliphate under Islamic law, through coercive force, using asymmetrical tactics that target civilians with the intent of scaring them into compliance.
i.e., a bully. And it works, too, at least on silly liberals with Pollyanna views of the world and who take terrorists at their word when they claim that it's American imperialism that makes them strap bombs to retarded kids.
You can put an SE/30 on the network too. Look on ebay for ethernet cards for the SE/30. You can even get ethernet cards for the old Mac SE. (I had one in the kitchen for a few years for a terminal. Then I got married.)
Actually, my SE/30 was an SE with an upgraded SE/30 motherboard. BTW, the SE/30 with an external SCSI disk makes a pretty decent personal mail server. Put Net or OpenBSD on it, and off you go.
The SE/30 was one of the all-time great Apple products. It would take 128MB of RAM when that was an obscene ammount of memory. Various video cards would give you a pretty fast dual-monitor setup for graphic design. Every nerd should have one if for nothing else than a portable-ish terminal.
People with an agenda other than publicly funded universal healthcare usually make that claim
I.e., people who are not on the dole, or who don't wish to be on the dole. Or, as you imply, people with diabolica agendas, possibly involving liberty and other pernicious ideas.
Contrary to your claim, there are people who have issues with the system who are not "people with agendas", but rather people who have died while waiting for treatment.
n 1999, Dr. Richard F. Davies, a cardiologist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa, described in remarks for the Canadian Institute for Health Information how delays affected Ontario heart patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft surgery. In a single year, for this one operation, the doctor said, "71 Ontario patients died before surgery, 121 were removed from the list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery," and 44 left the province to have the surgery, many having gone to the United States for the operation. (According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, 33 Canadian hospitals performed approximately 22,500 bypass surgeries in 1998-99.)Cite
Who is going to invade Canada? Who wants to attack Canada? Nobody. The US looks out for us purely out of self-interest.
Again, with feeling: Canada depends on American muscle. Put Canada near, say, North Korea. Then come and talk to me about who wants to attack Canada.
P.S. It's not just self-interest, it's also good neighborliness. Canada is like our kid brother--we pick on y'all, but when it comes down to it, you're our brother, and we'll look out for you, so you get you use your allowance to buy candy and toys instead of paying off the bullies. That is perhaps the best goddamn analogy for the US/Canadian relationship ever.
If a political party openly campaigns on certain policies, is elected based on those policies, and as a government implements those policies, it is not coercion. The electorate chose those policies.
So you would accept a ban on homosexuality, if the majority elected people who enacted that legislation? Reductio ad absurdum, perhaps, but no less true. If you're going to argue with truisms, I'm allowed to be sloppy.
In the USA, we aren't subject to the whims of the majority. At leas in theory--in practice, the masses often get their way. I don't know about Canada--aren't y'all still subject to the Queen?--but it seems to me that our constitutional republic is less, ahh, fluid. You probably wouldn't recognize Canada pre-Trudeau, but from what I've read it was more American than America in that it was quite the home to rugged individualism.
Define "functioning". Canada's socialized health care, for example, is suffering in numerous areas.
Also, until Canada pays for its own defense, I don't think it's cricket for our Great White Neighbors to be so snarky about how "caring" their government is. Didn't I read an article about how Canada's disaster team was unable to go help with the tsunami disaster because they couldn't lift the tonnage? Yes I did.
Safety nets used to be provided by families and churches--you know, by people who choose to help those in need. When the government does that, it's not a matter of choice, and coerced charity is as good a shorthand for socialism as I've ever seen.
Scurrilous things about liberals, Democrats, et. al.? You imply that it's only right-wingers who do this.
Hideous invective is spewed by both sides. And speaking of Canadians and Brits, I've read the articles in mainstream foreign papers who claim that our government is headed by a poorly-trained chimp, and that all Americans are fat imperialistic bastards.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it was the FDIC that caused a lot of the S&L problems. Also the way S&Ls were regulated. They were not required to keep much cash on-hand and were allowed to list "goodwill" as part of their assets. The FDIC guarantee meant that they S&Ls were able to do goofy things like invest in jackalope ranches because they knew that their customers' money was federally insured.
The S&L bailout wasn't bailing out S&Ls, it was giving Granny her $2500 CD back.
(One of the primary authors of the S&L legislation? Senator Ted Kennedy, the senior balloon from Massachusetts.)
I've had to put up with a lot of weirdos over the years in order to play role-playing games. I'm very thankful of Bioware's work to release me from the need to hang around The Black Crow Cauldron, or whatever in order to play a game.
Plus rolling dice is stupid. The computer does this better and faster, not to mention that it keeps track of the rules better. Arguing rules may be "part of the fun", but for non-retards, fighting monsters and out-witting wizards was more fun. The beauracracy part of D&D was it's worst feature. Of course, the twattish, malodorous nerds all think the "mainstreaming" of D&D has ruined it.
Theaters only do well with first-run movies. First-run movies are also very spotty in quality. People are starting to waidt for the DVD (the long lead times between a theatrical release and home video are down to mere weeks) so they don't get burned by high ticket prices (per viewer, no less!).
What makes the big bucks for theaters? Family movies. Get mom and dad and the two kids in there for The Incredibles, you make a bundle. But, wait: mom and dad are now waiting for the DVD and watching it at home. $20 for the DVD (or $3 for the rental), and the kids can watch it again and again.
Why is the theater relevant again? Only for purists.
Just as an interesting data point: a 300mhz G3 clamshell iBook with 128mb of RAM will run 10.3, so long as you only ask it to run Safari. We keep it in the living room as a quicky Web station, connected to the I'net with an Airport card.
These machines are old and slow enough you can sometimes find friends or family giving them away. That's how we got ours.
Not to say that I wouldn't mind a bit more memory. Sometimes multiple tabs will engage swapping. And you have to leave the screen at 16-bit or the UI drags some. But it's pretty impressive to see this machine running at all.
(The best solution would be to run 9.2.2, but all of the browsers for OS 9 suck ass.)
Your experience mirrors my own with Solaris 8 x86. They had a deal where you could order it for $75, and I did. Installing to a dual P-Pro machine was pretty painful, but I managed. The real problem came when I tried to find things. Everything was scattered all over the filesystem in places that I'm sure make perfect sense to old-hand Solaris admins, but for me, coming from Free and OpenBSD where everything is lined up neatly and stored in its proper place, it was a nightmare. I eventually had to give it up because I couldn't get netatalk to compile on it. I still have the CDs laying around.
Check the other sites they've done. See if they look like something you could use. Ask the other companies if they were good to work with.
See how much experience they have. If one of their developers is an active participant in a Free software project of some sort, that's a good sign.
Finally, sacrifice a chicken and mutter an incantation from the darkest magick of Voodou. The project will go over-time, over-buget, and will be atrociously broken in unexpected ways. The only way to avoid this for any non-trivial system is to pay a lot of money, or do something highly derivative.
I wouldn't bother with trying to measure which language/technique is "best". They're all good and bad in different ways. I myself like PHP because it's easy and fast, and if I get hit by a bus there are gobs of people who can spend a week looking at the code and pick up where I left off.
Check out Drupal. You might find it to be a perfect fit for you. I use it almost exclusively as it's very powerful and very easy--and very fast, incidentally. I'm not so thrilled about a few things--that it uses the database as a less-dangerous filesystem and not as a true RDBMS, mostly because of a MySQL mindset; that some of the modules (image.module) requires a Web server-writable directory--but by and large it solves 90% of the problems and isn't as difficult to use as Zope/Plone.
Your argument devolves to "the Devil made me do it," which is bullshit in all its forms. That the German people were bullied into submission by a few bad, scary people doesn't wash. The magnificent German army wasn't just Hitler and Goebbels and a few others--it took a lot of actual Teutonics to staff that Teutonic war machine.
You're right in that I'd be unimpressed by your history books--for every history book written with one opinion, there's another to refute it. Logic here is sufficient--placing the blame for all of Nazi Germany's crimes at the feet of a handful of people is not logical. Compliance with a significant minority, if not majority, of Germans is also required. We're not talking about hiding a few pages of sensitive data here--we're talking about train cars-full of human cargo. You can miss seeing it, sure, but you have to want to.
So, your argument is that of course there's rampant anti-Jewish bigotry in Europe, but that during WWII it had no impact and that it was all Adolf's fault? If your history book makes that claim, I'd toss it in the garbage.
And this is all beside the point. You admit that there's rampant anti-Jewish bigotry in Europe--so where do they get off getting self-righteous about access to municipal wireless? Which, if you look back, was the whole point of my post.
When the argument revolves around the benevolence and socially progresssive thinking of Europeans, when a significant portion of recent history was dominated by actual Nazi Europeans (Germany) or de facto collaborators (France), Godwin's Law doesn't apply.
In other words, it's not a strawman argument when it actually is a man's suit stuffed with straw and tied to a pole.
Europe is still today rife with anti-Jewish bigotry. Just ask a Jew--if you can find one.
Even if that means killing all the Jews! How enlightened you are!
Seriously--can we have one Slashdot story that doesn't have 300 comments from Canadians/EUians that say "Oh, we're so much better because we have foo. Gosh, Americans are stupid! LOL!" It's not relevent; it does not move the discussion forward; it's a pant-load of self-justification.
Please--when the revolution comes, the hardasses will be the ones in charge because (surprise), they're hardasses. Also, they're armed.
When phones were rare and expensive, people weren't calling me all the damn time.
Or you've never sniped a guy with the damned-to-hell Klobb.
Goldeneye was a very good, well-balanced FPS on an unremarkable console. It was well-designed and executed. What is sad is how so many similar games have come since that seemed to have never learned anything from this game.
I use lynx only because I'm often left trying to use a Web site from a shell to download something. Lynx sucks. It fills a need, but just barely.
God knows you're right. Know what I'd really like? A curses-based LDAP admin tool. Really, that would solve 90% of the pain of LDAP for a commandline-using admin.
If you want to make the argument that our past interventionist foreign policy caused terrorism, well, bully for you. That's the kind of unprovable nonsense that liberals have been carting for years. Did we cause the Taliban by financing the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets? Maybe. It's debatable. It's not debateable that defeating Soviet expansionism was a good thing, and therefore a cogent argument can be made that the trade-off of the Taliban (assuming we were a direct cause) for a Soviet defeat was worthwhile.
To borrow a phrase from you unlamented candidate, it's nuanced. Had we not financed the mujahideen, Afghanistan would have been under the thumb of the Soviets. Is that better, or worse than the Taliban? Also debateable.
Nobody hates Canada because Canada is no threat. Neither are the Swiss. America is a threat to Islamofacism, because we're the only ones with the will (and more importantly, the means) to fight it. Two guys with rusty swords could conquer Belgium. One bomb in a Madrid train station and the Spaniards turned tail and ran--Spain has already surrendered. France is in the process of being overrun, and Britain? Well, at the rate the British are being out-bred by Muslims, it's easy to see that in a generation or two the U.K. will be a founding member of the New Caliphate.
More people have been killed in the name of Christianity than any other single cause.
This is complete bullshit. It's not just wrong, it's really, badly, terribly wrong. You will find out that the world looks different when you're not talking out of your ass. You should try it.
I can't believe somebody actually used this old horseshit canard on me--"More people have been killed in the name of Christianity..." Goddamn, you're one dumb son of a bitch.
I think you just based an argument on the differing definitions of "liberal", and how it has changed over time. Bravo, you're a loon. A loon without a point, I should add.
Right, that's why they've targeted peacefull democracies around the world for decades. Just look at all the thousands of civilians killed in terrorist attacks on Australia and Candada. Not.
Canada will bend over and accept the Caliphate. See the current situation where Canada is looking at allowing sharia courts to have jurisdiction over family matters of Muslims in Canada.
Oh, and also see the bombs in the Madrid train station. Congratulations on being wrong.
You shouldn't throw stones in a glass house. Blowing off terrorists as wanting to establish an Islamic theorcracy is just blowing off the fact that our foreign policy is the reason why we get attacked and other countries don't.
This word, "fact", I do not think it means what you think it means. Please justify your assertion that it is a "fact".
It is an "opinion", one that the terrorists conveniently parrot because it seems to work so well on the Left. Oh, and also, other countries certainly are being attacked (see above), so basically you're talking out of your ass. I have the feeling this is a regular occurance with you.
I just couldn't stand by and let this guy's nonsense assertion pass without comment.
Muslim terrorists are not fighting the Great Satan because of Levis jeans and MTV and American imperialism. They are fighting to establish a worldwide caliphate under Islamic law, through coercive force, using asymmetrical tactics that target civilians with the intent of scaring them into compliance.
i.e., a bully. And it works, too, at least on silly liberals with Pollyanna views of the world and who take terrorists at their word when they claim that it's American imperialism that makes them strap bombs to retarded kids.
You can put an SE/30 on the network too. Look on ebay for ethernet cards for the SE/30. You can even get ethernet cards for the old Mac SE. (I had one in the kitchen for a few years for a terminal. Then I got married.)
Actually, my SE/30 was an SE with an upgraded SE/30 motherboard. BTW, the SE/30 with an external SCSI disk makes a pretty decent personal mail server. Put Net or OpenBSD on it, and off you go.
The SE/30 was one of the all-time great Apple products. It would take 128MB of RAM when that was an obscene ammount of memory. Various video cards would give you a pretty fast dual-monitor setup for graphic design. Every nerd should have one if for nothing else than a portable-ish terminal.
Ah, I see. "So long as those darkies are dying over there, and not all up in my face, it's easier to dismiss them."
I.e., people who are not on the dole, or who don't wish to be on the dole. Or, as you imply, people with diabolica agendas, possibly involving liberty and other pernicious ideas.
Contrary to your claim, there are people who have issues with the system who are not "people with agendas", but rather people who have died while waiting for treatment.
Who is going to invade Canada? Who wants to attack Canada? Nobody. The US looks out for us purely out of self-interest.
Again, with feeling: Canada depends on American muscle. Put Canada near, say, North Korea. Then come and talk to me about who wants to attack Canada.
P.S. It's not just self-interest, it's also good neighborliness. Canada is like our kid brother--we pick on y'all, but when it comes down to it, you're our brother, and we'll look out for you, so you get you use your allowance to buy candy and toys instead of paying off the bullies. That is perhaps the best goddamn analogy for the US/Canadian relationship ever.
If a political party openly campaigns on certain policies, is elected based on those policies, and as a government implements those policies, it is not coercion. The electorate chose those policies.
So you would accept a ban on homosexuality, if the majority elected people who enacted that legislation? Reductio ad absurdum, perhaps, but no less true. If you're going to argue with truisms, I'm allowed to be sloppy.
In the USA, we aren't subject to the whims of the majority. At leas in theory--in practice, the masses often get their way. I don't know about Canada--aren't y'all still subject to the Queen?--but it seems to me that our constitutional republic is less, ahh, fluid. You probably wouldn't recognize Canada pre-Trudeau, but from what I've read it was more American than America in that it was quite the home to rugged individualism.
Define "functioning". Canada's socialized health care, for example, is suffering in numerous areas.
Also, until Canada pays for its own defense, I don't think it's cricket for our Great White Neighbors to be so snarky about how "caring" their government is. Didn't I read an article about how Canada's disaster team was unable to go help with the tsunami disaster because they couldn't lift the tonnage? Yes I did.
Safety nets used to be provided by families and churches--you know, by people who choose to help those in need. When the government does that, it's not a matter of choice, and coerced charity is as good a shorthand for socialism as I've ever seen.
Hideous invective is spewed by both sides. And speaking of Canadians and Brits, I've read the articles in mainstream foreign papers who claim that our government is headed by a poorly-trained chimp, and that all Americans are fat imperialistic bastards.
Congratulations on your one-sided myopia, BTW.