For a long time, CNN was the only game in town. Now it seems to have drifted significantly leftward
I would disagree. I think it drifted downward which to a leftie appears to be to the "right" and to a conservative appears to be "left". In actuality they just suck.
But if there's anything CNN isn't, it's "right leaning".
See above. To me they appear "rightward leaning" (but that is because of where I am in the relation to them on this crude left-right spectrum). But objectively speaking, I am prepared to accept that it is mostly because they just cant keep their lies and disinformation straight and I tend to notice the "right-leaning" bullshit more then the other kind. As I said earlier, this is most likely the result of their pathetic attempts to pander to the lowest common denominator, the knuckle dragger viewing audience. Subsequently they appear completely far-out to any thinking person, be it on the left or right.
None of the network nightly newscasts are worth a damn
I have to agree with you there. The problem seems to be systemic. I blame it on the owners of the networks who seem to seek either easy profits (by lowering the bar) or have some hidden agendas on the menu, amongst which stupifying of the American audience features prominently.
Thank God for the internet.
I concur (although, being an Atheist, I would formulate that sentiment differently). The internet is the last bastion of democracy at this point. That is why I am so concerned about the efforts of MPAAs/RIAAs and other "intellectual property" greed-mongers to lock it completely down, ostensibly for profit, but anyone with half a brain can tell where it would end up from the political perspective.
Every time I see someone calling CNN "left-slanted", "left-biased" etc, I can't help but laugh at the success of the brainwashing of the American TV audience. "Left" biased?! Mother Jones or CounterPunch are examples of a "left-biased" media not CNN. CNN to many of us Canadians looks like a bastion of inane apologisms for the ruling elites (regardless of which side they are on), generic, incompetent disinformation (mostly right leaning) combined with massive amounts of brainless "infotainment". In short, CNN is a pathetic result of trying to appear "unbiased" while pandering to the lowest common denominator. As opposed to FOX which tries hard to pander to the lowest elements of the right-wing crowds and thus tries to inflame and profit from "us vs them" psychosis, persecution complexes, medieval theocratic throwbacks etc, and yet it loudly proclaims to be "unbiased" and "no spin". While offering nothing but.
In general it appears that the enemies of the liberal phillosophies managed to shift the lanugage so that "left" is now renamed "extreme loony left", "center" to "left" and everything else "conservative". It is an interesting -- albait sad -- Orwellian language war to watch for us outsiders.
What I want to know is, how come the farmers are big enough to lobby the government not to end farm protection but the factory workers etc being replaced by chinese and indian and asian workers cant band together to do the same?
Most of the "farmers" in the US are mega-corporations such as Monsanto. Because farming has become such a cut-throat business and which requires massive expenditures, primarily on very expensive chemical fertilisers and herbicides, the giant chemical companies making them found themselves to be debtholders to many, many farmers. Then they simply foreclosed on them. Some of these corporate "farms" are now so huge that they expand from horison to horison many times over.
You do forget the socio-economic backgroud of all of this insanity: the charlatans and voodoo-economists who are running the show are insisting that the US will "transition" into "idea economy" where everybody is either an inventor, musician, programmer, CEO or a waitress or a buger-flipper. No manufacturing of any kind (unless you count the burgers -- which is already being tried). All manufacturing is to be done in "developing" countries like China and the USians are to "manage" and "own intellectual property" which enslaves those dim-witted orientals to their oooh-so "enlightened" US masters into paying a tithe on everything they make.
To say that I am predicting a societal and economic collapse of this scheme would be an understatement. But in the meantime crooks and thieves will bamboozle or bribe politicians to pass laws to "aid" this "transition", while stealing everything which is not nailed down in sight. The corporate thieves of course fully realizing the futility of this and only hoping that they can get rich syphoning off the vast river of wealth they have created flowing from the US to China (and then probably hoping to profit on the inevietable backlash, economic downturn and eventual re-alignment of economic forces)
But one of the participants in the project claims that 11 colonies from the set on which the paper was based on were fake. Which is likely to put the credibility of whole thing in a rather negative light in the scientific community, to put it mildly.
Don't blame your customers. They're only doing what is best for themselves
That is giving customers waaay too much credit. In actuality they do whatever seems to them the most selfish, instant-gratification thing. Which frequently happens to be also the most short-sighted, retarded, counter-productive thing ever. As some wise man once said: "You can't go wrong underestimating the stupidity of American consumers". I would extend this to include all consumers, everywhere, who would gladly put themselves in the gutter, starving, because 3 years earlier they absolutely insisted on buying the cheapest crap ever from the most opressive backwater on the globe, proudly proclaiming to everyone who would listen how much did they "save" on their latest, 99% low-grade plastic and completely useless 2 weeks later piece'o'crap.
30 million people living in mansions. 270 million people mopping their floors.
I think you just about nailed it on the head. Except that the actual number is something like: 3 million people living in palaces, closed communities, sparkling mini-cities up on the hill and 297 million people begging to mop their floors. At least that is the plan concocted by those 3 million and wholeheartedly supported by about 150 million of drooling morons who figure they will be invited to share in the spoils, and which moronic notion those 3 million encourage while winking knowingly to each other.
The assumption of all of the above being, of course, that the market is capable of developing such a replacement strategy, even with gentle prodding, based on shifting financial incentives, and that this new equilibrium does not have some rather profound effects, like, say, complete and total change in the economics of transportation and manufacturing processes, great many of which depend on plastics. This is not to say that a positive outcome is impossible. I am merely pointing out what appears to be your unwarranted, blind faith in the infallability of free market and an out-of-hand dismissal of a possibililty of seismic shifts in the way of life of hundreds of millions of people, all of which can have far ranging effects well beyond the scope of pure economics, and with which the free markets are completely unequipped to deal with.
Then how do you explain business' that act ethically (Google, Ben & Jerry's, etc) without external forces? Could it just be that ethics can be profitable too?
For some companies, in certain stages of their life-cycle the "ethics" is "cheap" enough to afford. Some try to (mostly unsucessfully) make it an "image" i.e. use it as advertising aid.
Note that Google is already having trouble doing so and as its global penetration increases and a number of competitors appear you will see a steady deterioration to continue. Ben & Jerry is unfamiliar to me.
90% of business is image
Incorrect. Price+product quality+manufacturing/labour+delivery schedules constitute the 90% of business. "Image" counts only in very few areas, i.e. in the so called "consumer" businesses. Even there, it is easy to create an "image" completely at odds with the reality. And then again, price and "cool toys" outweigh any such considerations: see Xbox.
Therefore businesses must appear ethical.
Not at all. The sales apparently are not related to this factor and one can always sell under a different brand (one of the reasons why companies tend to own many many completely different brands).
The appearence of ethical behavior generally is within the lines of actually acting ethical.
Incorrect. No such relationship can be demonstrated.
Therefore (2) companies can be genuinely ethical (without external force outside the actual market)
The "ethical" considerations are by definition external to "free market" as they are not part of the base capitalist theory. And as the present day activities of companies clearly demonstrate.
A Most business' main goal is to maximize profit for its shareholders, [snip]
That is incorrect. The parent is right, Maximise profit for its shareholders is the definition of a business. What you missed is that there is a corollary to it: by any means you can get away with.
That is because there is this thing in which the businesses operate called "the society" which has its own rules of conduct. Businesses are amoral by nature. Profit is their only god. All other "ethical" and "moral" considerations are imposed on them externally.
If your code of business was taken to the extreme, then we'd see Steve Balmer literarily put hits on Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Think Moscow just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
If Balmer thought he could get away with it (that is if the US experiences thought him it was possible, and his pals were doing the same) he would have done it without a second thought.
What my father did not do was press for a transfer to a U.S. hospital for a repair when it would have been effective.
You keep repeating this assertion, as if its repetition would somehow increase its validity. There is no way for you to tell, after the fact and without complete access to the knowledge and the decision making process of those doctors, what the actual prospect of the procedure's effectiveness was. There are many, many factors in any surgery and it is quite likely that the particular growth pattern of the aneurysm your father had was inoperable using that procedure, or it was extremely risky in the estimation of these doctors.
I'm told that one has to be forceful in these situations, but again, that should not be required.
That should not be required indeed in situations where Canadian treatment is not available but a foreign one is, it is applicable, and the prospects for success are good. But again, there is only your amateurish post-facto assertion that it was the case. As to having to be forceful sometimes when faced with asking for coverage, it only applies here in borderline cases where the professionals themselves are uncertain what to do. In that situation it is possible for a patient or his family to force their hand in some way. This type of scenarios being of course much worse with the US insurers, who are in the business of making money and thus frequently engage in acrymonious feuds with their customers and doctors over the necessity and chance of success of various procedures if their cost is high or demand exorbitant amounts of paperwork to be completed in order to obtain payment/coverage.
25% die before a specialist sees them before diagnosis. In the U.S. a specialist can see you the day you are referred to him or her, or at most, the next day.
Where do you, pray tell, pull these ass-clown "statistics" from? From my personal experience, when I had a bout of a minor arythmia, I ended up in the most busy ER of the city (by accident) and was being administered stabilising drugs by a resident within 5 minutes and I was diagnosed by a specialist within 30 minutes of my arrival. What the fuck are you talking about?!
You have an abdominal aortic aneurysm. It will grow until it rupture, killing you.
Which we are to assume is operable in its current state, because you, the world-famous cardiology expert, is telling us on Slashdot. On the other hand there was, by your own admission, a group of actual cardiologists, who having had some experience in the matter, decided that odds were so slim as to make the whole attempt unjustified.
There is no procedure performed in Canada to correct this. This is a routine surgery in the U.S., costing between $12,000 to $20,000, with a five year survival rate of 75%. The risk of intervention vs. the risk of doing nothing makes it a standard practice to operate when it reaches 5 cm in size. Do you have $12,000?
And if it were truly applicable and if the odds of the success were indeed so high, the procedure would have been performed, as it is done on so many people when such procedures are unavailable in Canada. As I repeatedely demonstrated, the $12,000 was not a factor in the decision, except that you, being obsessed about money and hoarding of it, are unable to grasp that there could have been any other reasoning, like the fact that the doctors realized that in your father's case even the semi-experimental US procedure was extremely unlikely to succeed.
- Sigh - "No, I paid my taxes for health care, among other things. The rest went for food, clothing, and shelter for myself any my family, so I do not have $12,000 to spare." "I'm sorry, there is nothing we can do."
Such conversations simply do not occur, unless you are trying to persuade the Universal Medicare to pay for your Voodoo sessions in Africa. Cost is not a major factor in such decisions, as I already, on multiple occasions, demonstrated with many examples.
Things have improved since 1999, somewhat: the surgery is now performed in Canada, but the survival rate is only 25% instead of 75%. No doubt due to the shoddy techniques: likely invasive, involving a heart-lung machine, instead of via an endoscope (where a reinforcement is introduced into the body and stitched around the aorta while the heart is beating, rather cool, actually).
Again, where is the source of these "statistics" of yours?!
Must be nice to win the lottery (er, get to the top of the waiting list before dying -- what was that about 25% of cardiac patients dying before seeing a specialist?)
That "lottery" is called life, genius. Many cardiac arrest patients die because it is physically impossible to get to them within the critical first 10 minutes since the time of their heart failure. There is nothing (save telepathy+teleportation, absence of which is surely yet another insideous, devious plot of the commmie-MDs, no?) that can be done about it. Even if they do make it to the hospital, there is still a significant chance of them not being revived, no matter what procedures the doctors apply. Next thing, you are going to accuse the Universal Medicare of failing to stop aging and death in general. I can hear your whining already: "And 70% of people aged 95 do not make it to 96! Aha! What an unfair, socialist lottery!".
If you were religious, I would suggest filing a petition to God on this subject, but as it stands I can only recommend a visit to a psychoterapist who might help you with this, another of your complexes, control freakery. And its primary cause, the anxiety you feel about life being so unpredictable.
Well, Dad lost. Even that would be fine, except he had no choice but to gamble his health care on the state.
No, he "lost" because nothing useful could be done for him at the time. You again keep on insisting that some hypothetical procedure, performed under hypothetical circumstances, applicability of which is entirely of your own, amateurish making, would have, with near 100% certainty saved him, never you mind the opinion of the many doctors with direct access do diagnostic data. Never you mind the fact that the cost of the procedure was not a factor. I am absolutely positive that were your father somehow sent to the US for the procedure you are so convinced of being the miraculous cure, and still have died, you would be still accusing the Medicare of being, "too slow", "failing to spend another $25134 for a more experimental procedure XYZ" or better yet "of being a band of incompetents who unecessarily sent your father to this unpredictable and experimental procedure, which must have killed him! They made him a guinea-pig! Waaaaaah!" and so on. There is simply no possible outcome which would in any way make the Universal Medicare an acceptable solution. Because this is really not about your father. He is simply an excuse you are using to masquarade your whining about the real source of your discontent: having to part with those, dearest of all things to you, coins.
I made no such comparison. Are you so dense that you can't see a reducto ad absurdum disproof of your assertion that unpopularity implies stupidity? Namely, by providing an example where the popular was wrong?
It was unpopular to oppose Nazi persecution of Jews. It was also dead right. It many be sensationalist to use such an extreme exampe, but reducto ad absurdum (dis)proofs are just that: showing that the logical consequences of the claim are absurd.
Reductio ad absurdum only works, genius, when there is a way to directly and logically make a progression from a statement to such an absurd and clearly impossible position. What you have instead engaged in is a logical fallacy called the Undistributed Middle, i.e. Jews were an unjustly persecuted minority, Libertarians are a minority, therefore libertarians are unjustly persecuted.
That is you assumed, incorrectly, that the numerical disadvantage of the proponents of your view is the criterion by which your views are recognised as illogical. In fact the reverse is true, your small numbers are the result of the illogical nature of your position. Unlike the Jews, membership in which group is based on descent and religion, and whose small numbers were dictated by a 2000+ year long sequence of historical events. There is no barrier, other then making a convincing argument, for transitioning from a position of a Socialist or a Communist to a Libertatian. On the other hand, one could completely reject the Jewish religion and still remain a Jew as far as the Nazis were concerned.
Therefore, you can not denounce as stupid, or incorrect, a view solely on the basis of it's unpopularity.
This is a logical fallacy called Burning a Strawman (a sub-type of the Red Herring argument). That is you are attempting to pretend that I based my argument solely on the unpopularity of your views (i.e. construct a strawman) and then you proceed to attack that false position, and to defeat it easily (i.e. burning that strawman) in order to create an illusion of an argumentative victory.
This is precisely the reason for the libertarian stance aginst the initiation of force...
That stance is not only hypocritical with you (as you implied use of force on several occasions) but also illogical in the context of any proposed societal structure. It assumes that in every case there exists a non-violent method of response to any situation. Also, you quite disingenuously pretend that in a Libertarian society there is no forcible enforcement of contracts, contracts which are a critical element of that whole silly system. Do tell, how are you planning to stop thievery or even simple refusal to hold one's end of a deal followed by refusal of participation in any arbitration?
there no moral right to tax me if, left alone, I do not consume what those taxes fund.
Except that you always do, unless you were born to a pair of hermits in the mountains, educated by them, dressed in sheepskins and never ever had any significant contact with the rest of the society. As a matter of fact, such hermits could escape taxation completely as they could be missed by census and unless found by accident, would not register on any governmental list. But as soon as you come down from the mountain and into the village, your are immediately starting to take advantage of the communal effort, i.e. the communal facilities of a village, such as its central crossroads with the inn located conveniently therein. Move up to a small city and you got a central, paved square, some sort of street lighting and quite possibly a constable or two. And so on. At each stage of immersion in the society you are taking greater and greater advantage of its ammenities, and by doing so for a prolonged period of time and not contributing to them it is you who becomes a thief of communal resources.
Your position is also utterly absurd from the point of view of its practicality. You assume that it is possible to pay only for th
So, those who oppose the majority, particularly a large majority are stupid?
No, only those who do so based on a lunatic, self-centered, thoroughly debunked premise. That would be you.
Hmm, Jews opposing their persecution are stupid
Here come the Jews again. Never you mind that they were subjected to an actual persecution, complete with one-way box car trips to the gas chambers and which make you comparing yourself to their plight a complete, cretinous, unable to grasp any sort of perspective, dickhead. That persecution complex of yours is really in control of your whole psyche. Perheaps you should use some of that $1200 a month insurance plan for a good psychotherapist. Who knows, maybe it will help.
Furthermore, there are quite a larger number of people who agree with me, than you might think -- you think the Cato Institute is funded by air? Fortunately, they are rather plentiful where I am.
I am looking forward to the Independent Libertarian State Of Texas any day now. Clue: you are an insignifant minority even in Texas.
... yet any claim I might have had to the benefits of this "sharing" is to be denied based on a simple distrust that I might be impoverished at a particular point in time.
Again, this is a fabrication, entirely of your own making, and in a large part a result of that clinical persecution complex you are suffering from.
"Help the poor!".
"Mmm, O.K."
"Damn, I'm poor now! Help me?"
"No, don't believe you're poor".
Yes, these childlish fantasies do take precedence to actual facts in your warped "worldview", no doubt as to that.
Clearly, the only ones who can ever derive any benefits under this system are those who were always poor.
Oh yea, they are all busy partying on their 40-footer yachts, toasting their welfare with Dom Perignon.
Thus, poverty, or at least relative poverty, becomes desirable and self-improvement is discouraged
Yes, that is why we have all those millionaires around here and a vibrant middle class. Last I looked, the real estate market for huge houses and luxury cars is booming (not that it is a particularly good thing from the macro-economic and environmental perspectives, but that is another discussion).
Now, the truly funny part is that you probably believe this insane hyperbole as being true. Which puts you firmly in the company of the frothing lunatics on street corners, who ambush unsuspecting passer bys with stories of how "CIA has been stealing their thoughts", complete with their arms flailing wildly and spittle flying onto the hapless victims.
The "crimes" against you... err... "humanity" probably started at a very young age, the first instance being when that daycare worker insisted that you share that colourful toy the daycare provided, which you hoarded desperately, with the other kids, instead of putting elbows in their ribs and trying to poke their eyes out everytime they got close. And you knew you were persecuted by the way she reacted when you let out that stream of invective you learned from your father, when he spoke of those "Revenue Canada Mass-Murderers", towards her.
of people to the point that they no longer have the resources to purchase necessary life-saving surgery for themselves is murder. You support murder.
Except that, as I pointed out repeatedly, that "life saving" part is all in your head. Everyone here gets full access to all reasonable life-saving procedures. That is the ones that actually have some chance of succeeding in their particular cases, to the best knowledge of many doctors, as in all serious cases doctors must consult each other and decisions are not made unilateraly. The cost of the procedures is inconsequential to these considerations. From the news alone which I can remember, off the top of my head, there is the case of a child given $17,000 a week US experimental drugs for what might be years on end, as that is the only practical way to help him. There is that Saskatchewan girl being sent to the US Mayo Clinic for a string of $6k a pop procedures. There are many such cases. In 2001 Ontario Healthecare spent $3.2 million on a rare drug Cerezyme to provide the enzyme replacement therapy to 20 (yes, twenty) Gaucher's deasease patients.
And then there are cases of a refusal of $10 procedure to some idiot who believes that a professionally performed enema in an ER will save him from an alien abduction. Something tells me that, being as finely mentally balanced as you, he had to be dragged out by the security guards while screaming "Murderers!" (as you do) all the way to the parking lot.
You embelish prosperity to the point of believing that bankrupcy is a temporary year of negative revenue, instead of complete financial ruin: If I sold a $100,000 car to pay my employees a little bit longer, before closing my business, you would deny me what my taxes funded, because I had the $100,000 car at some point.
You simply are lying as usual. Not only is everyone covered by healthcare, regardless if you are bankrupt, poor or mega rich (and which is porbably the major beef with your businessmen pals, of having to mix with the proles), bankruptcy and therefore a proveable, complete loss of income does automatically qualify you for welfare and a host of other services. It does not qualify you for unemployment benefits, as you, being self-employed, never paid the unemployment insurance. Bankruptcy however does not touch your RRSP savings, which can leave you with a sizeable fortune stashed away, something that is a clear advantage to the business people, and that is not mentioning the off-shore bank accounts they are so fond of.
see now your problem: you envy success. You hate people who have succeeded, whether or not they currently are succesful. But, this is no surprise: it is the affliction of the socialist.
As I already pointed out, success and a pig pile of cash are not synonymous. Monetary rewards for being creative and industrous are not in any way forbidden in Canada. All that is required of those who manage to get rich is some recognition of "noblesse
Well, I would't say everybody, but, in general, yes.
I hope you do realize how pathetically stupid that statement makes you look. Poor oppressed you. The whole world disagrees with you, but for a few like-minded nuts. The unwashed masses fail to recognize your inherent superiority and instead they mock and oppress you with all those demonic things, like taxes, traffic regulations and prohibitions against trade in human body parts. In this you have joined that another fine group of unfarily persecuted "geniuses". Perhaps you should work on joining forces.
Hmm. No blood in the streets here, or anywhere else in the U.S. where I've lived.
As I said, the US is nowhere near to being a libertarian country. Count your lucky stars.
H, Markham, Ontario was a pure hell for the four months I lived there, when it came to crime. Whitby was not much better. We got used to the Metro Toronto "murder of the day" being announced on the news, but certainly didn't like it.
You are a bald-faced liar. There were 65 murders in 2003 in the whole Greater Toronto Area, which happens to be the most populous city in the whole country. For some contrast: Dallas, Texas, your neck of the woods, happens to be... err... the crime capital of the US in 2003, with 244.
Kettle, meet Pot.
I remember checking violent crime stats, and learned that the rate of violent crimes against women in Canada was double that in the U.S. Of course, in Dallas, women kill their would-be rapists.
Do share. In the meantime, from that article:
Dallas is No. 2 in per capita nonviolent theft and fraud, after San Antonio. We're second for rape, after Philadelphia, with more than twice as many rapes per 100,000 people as New York City.
Sigh, what a turkey.
"fall hard" end up getting told, "You made $$$$$$ last year -- no help for you!".
I fully sympathise! How horrible it is to have to sell that $120k BMW and to re-mortage the mansion! Don't these communists have any compassion?! Don't they realise how hard it is to have to let the maid go and do your own laundry?! No help until you actually really need it!? You were not cut out for this! This is like, like,... insulting! You are sooo better then this! Can't they tell a superior being when faced with one!? Barbarians!
(Generally businessmen who's businesses failed due to competition, and who once employed dozens of people)
Oh dear. Poor businessmen! Look, they only failed to compete in a marketplace, for which failure they collected a significant income while it lasted, and as a result of which there are dozens of people now out of work. And these ugly communists refuse to even pay for one butler! These wealth redistibution fiends want you to take responsibility for your own screwups and sell the yacht. Don't talk to me about these dozens of employees who now have to be helped! These peasants were the cause of it all! If they only worked harder and over the weekends as you told them! Bastards! And now the commies mock you by saying that they will give you welfare, housing aid and so on only after you are as poor as those employees of yours. The devils even dare to offer you.... job training! This is outrageous! Demeaning! What unspeakable, communist evil!
Not me. No more.
As I said, have fun. The one thing we can agree on is that you are happier out of here and so is the majority of Canadians for not having to put up with your childlish tantrums anymore.
And that "Notwithstanding Clause"... Geez: "These are your rights unless we say otherwise." That is just so messed up.
It has its uses, apparently. But the pros and cons of the Charter of Rights and the related laws are really no longer of any personal interest to you. Unlike the US politics, which, purely due to geography and the size of US population has a significant impact on Canada, the reverse is not true. Thus no problem as far as you are concerned.
Last time I checked, those were rankings by decidely socialist organizations.
That would be, according to you, everybody with the possible exception of the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Like Canada, they used to be good places to live, but the economic chickens have come home to roost.
Say what? We have very low unemployment, booming trade, massive trade surpluses and a government with a balanced budget. The Bank Of Canada has a hard time keeping the loonie down as to maintain good export pricing for our goods because of all the foreign investment pouring into the country, as opposed to the US dollar which seems to be getting seriously wobbly. What have you been smoking again?
Soviet Union, Canada, Cuba, etc. -- they'll all end up in the toilet.
Is this one of those "pick the one that is not like the rest" tests?
Then why do societies with less burdonsome taxation fare better in the long term than those with more burdonsome taxation in terms of stagnation of the quality of such institutions, when compared to their private counterparts?
Huh?! Where!? When!? Last I heard places like the Netherlands and Sweden had the highest standards of living and were being nearly universally recognised as best places to live in. Coincidently, they do have world's highest levels of taxation. What the hell are you moaning about?
You dismissed an AAA repair denied my father as an "experimental" procedure. Experimental in Canada, perhaps, but not in the U.S. at the time, where the cost is a mere $12k or $20k, depending on whether one opts on the invasive or endoscopic repair.
No, I dismissed it not only because it was "experimental" here but the entire applicability of this procedure and its likely outcome is entirely of your own making. You are asking me to take your, tax hating, Medicare hating, amateur word versus that of expert doctors who had all the relevant diagnostic evidence in front of them at the time.
Today, I'm told this surger is performed in Canada, but the survival rate there is 25%, whereas it is 75% in the U.S. Why?
Maybe because it is performed equally on old chain-smoking railroad workers as it is on gym-going, millionaire businessmen, while it is only performed on the latter group in the US? Or more likely your number is entirely fabricated or else you would be posting a link to a study which says so.
(Even the U.S. has Medicare, and hospitals can not turn away people in need of urgent care for lack of funds)
Yea, it works wonders over there when people wait to the last possible moment to go to the ER when their routine illness developed into a major crisis due to lack of aid earlier or better yet, the nearest "public" ER is 200 miles away. Never you mind the abysmal level of actual services such hospitals provide and their practice of kicking out major heart surgery patients after 2 day stay to reduce costs to minimum.
The US is probably the only one of the industrialized countries which managed to make "public service" into a four letter word. Something profoundly screwed up in their national psyche. They'd rather die horribly then share a few pennies with their fellow citizens, except when it comes to military spending and murdering people and blowing things up abroad. Then there is no shortage of cheering and expenditures.
But, that would imply a two-tier health care system which Canada soundly rejects (and is the only nation in the world to do so).
No it is not. Many European countries do likewise or the "private" medicine is restricted to non-essential procedures.
But, the Canadian "Social Contract" is a horrible ripoff to the married middle class wage earner supporting a family.
No it only appears so to you, whose idea of "fair share" is 100% for you and 0% for others.
1. There is no such language. The major languages are Czech and Slovak.
Fair enough.
2. The reference is to those, and all other recent refugees who came as freeloaders, happily accepting welfare on the backs of those who came before them and had to struggle. Prague Springers are merely a reference to the type of immigrant.
Even of this was true, the number of these new immigrants is insignificant, compared to the overall population of Canada. Also a vast majority of them does work and they do pay their taxes. I am not sure how a relatively small number of failed immigrants is supposed to be of some great catastrophic significance.
Eh? What prevents them from turning into one now? The government? The largest mob of them all?
The government does indeed. As to your moaning about it being a "mob", vote some politician out and then try to vote some Cappo or his Russian mob equivalent out of his "office" and compare the results. Make sure your will is in order though before you attempt that second part.
Nothing "stops them", but then, nothing stops them now. Though the second ammendment is a rather nice deterrent, in extremis.
Except that vast majority of the countries on Earth do not have one and do not tolerate guns in hands of every nutcase on the street and therefore it is not any sort of deterrent now. It is not a deterrent at all in the US as an organised band of well armed individuals could successfully engage and defeat small groups of haphazardly armed citizens who are not in the business of combat for profit.
A Black Panther with a shot gun is a rather convincing counterparty to a biggoted white sherrif.
As I said, a complete, violent, whomever-has-the-bigger-gun anarchy. Streets running in blood until a stable equilibrum is reached of walled-in and heavily defended compounds surrounded by a sea of chaos and poverty.
Slashdot Mirror
I would disagree. I think it drifted downward which to a leftie appears to be to the "right" and to a conservative appears to be "left". In actuality they just suck.
But if there's anything CNN isn't, it's "right leaning".
See above. To me they appear "rightward leaning" (but that is because of where I am in the relation to them on this crude left-right spectrum). But objectively speaking, I am prepared to accept that it is mostly because they just cant keep their lies and disinformation straight and I tend to notice the "right-leaning" bullshit more then the other kind. As I said earlier, this is most likely the result of their pathetic attempts to pander to the lowest common denominator, the knuckle dragger viewing audience. Subsequently they appear completely far-out to any thinking person, be it on the left or right.
None of the network nightly newscasts are worth a damn
I have to agree with you there. The problem seems to be systemic. I blame it on the owners of the networks who seem to seek either easy profits (by lowering the bar) or have some hidden agendas on the menu, amongst which stupifying of the American audience features prominently.
Thank God for the internet.
I concur (although, being an Atheist, I would formulate that sentiment differently). The internet is the last bastion of democracy at this point. That is why I am so concerned about the efforts of MPAAs/RIAAs and other "intellectual property" greed-mongers to lock it completely down, ostensibly for profit, but anyone with half a brain can tell where it would end up from the political perspective.
Every time I see someone calling CNN "left-slanted", "left-biased" etc, I can't help but laugh at the success of the brainwashing of the American TV audience. "Left" biased?! Mother Jones or CounterPunch are examples of a "left-biased" media not CNN. CNN to many of us Canadians looks like a bastion of inane apologisms for the ruling elites (regardless of which side they are on), generic, incompetent disinformation (mostly right leaning) combined with massive amounts of brainless "infotainment". In short, CNN is a pathetic result of trying to appear "unbiased" while pandering to the lowest common denominator. As opposed to FOX which tries hard to pander to the lowest elements of the right-wing crowds and thus tries to inflame and profit from "us vs them" psychosis, persecution complexes, medieval theocratic throwbacks etc, and yet it loudly proclaims to be "unbiased" and "no spin". While offering nothing but.
In general it appears that the enemies of the liberal phillosophies managed to shift the lanugage so that "left" is now renamed "extreme loony left", "center" to "left" and everything else "conservative". It is an interesting -- albait sad -- Orwellian language war to watch for us outsiders.
Most of the "farmers" in the US are mega-corporations such as Monsanto. Because farming has become such a cut-throat business and which requires massive expenditures, primarily on very expensive chemical fertilisers and herbicides, the giant chemical companies making them found themselves to be debtholders to many, many farmers. Then they simply foreclosed on them. Some of these corporate "farms" are now so huge that they expand from horison to horison many times over.
Err... like this one?.
To say that I am predicting a societal and economic collapse of this scheme would be an understatement. But in the meantime crooks and thieves will bamboozle or bribe politicians to pass laws to "aid" this "transition", while stealing everything which is not nailed down in sight. The corporate thieves of course fully realizing the futility of this and only hoping that they can get rich syphoning off the vast river of wealth they have created flowing from the US to China (and then probably hoping to profit on the inevietable backlash, economic downturn and eventual re-alignment of economic forces)
Lemme guess ... Slashdot is crawling with Spencer style, "social darwinism", Ayn Rand flavoured libertarians?
But one of the participants in the project claims that 11 colonies from the set on which the paper was based on were fake. Which is likely to put the credibility of whole thing in a rather negative light in the scientific community, to put it mildly.
That is giving customers waaay too much credit. In actuality they do whatever seems to them the most selfish, instant-gratification thing. Which frequently happens to be also the most short-sighted, retarded, counter-productive thing ever. As some wise man once said: "You can't go wrong underestimating the stupidity of American consumers". I would extend this to include all consumers, everywhere, who would gladly put themselves in the gutter, starving, because 3 years earlier they absolutely insisted on buying the cheapest crap ever from the most opressive backwater on the globe, proudly proclaiming to everyone who would listen how much did they "save" on their latest, 99% low-grade plastic and completely useless 2 weeks later piece'o'crap.
I think you just about nailed it on the head. Except that the actual number is something like: 3 million people living in palaces, closed communities, sparkling mini-cities up on the hill and 297 million people begging to mop their floors. At least that is the plan concocted by those 3 million and wholeheartedly supported by about 150 million of drooling morons who figure they will be invited to share in the spoils, and which moronic notion those 3 million encourage while winking knowingly to each other.
The assumption of all of the above being, of course, that the market is capable of developing such a replacement strategy, even with gentle prodding, based on shifting financial incentives, and that this new equilibrium does not have some rather profound effects, like, say, complete and total change in the economics of transportation and manufacturing processes, great many of which depend on plastics. This is not to say that a positive outcome is impossible. I am merely pointing out what appears to be your unwarranted, blind faith in the infallability of free market and an out-of-hand dismissal of a possibililty of seismic shifts in the way of life of hundreds of millions of people, all of which can have far ranging effects well beyond the scope of pure economics, and with which the free markets are completely unequipped to deal with.
For some companies, in certain stages of their life-cycle the "ethics" is "cheap" enough to afford. Some try to (mostly unsucessfully) make it an "image" i.e. use it as advertising aid.
Note that Google is already having trouble doing so and as its global penetration increases and a number of competitors appear you will see a steady deterioration to continue. Ben & Jerry is unfamiliar to me.
90% of business is image
Incorrect. Price+product quality+manufacturing/labour+delivery schedules constitute the 90% of business. "Image" counts only in very few areas, i.e. in the so called "consumer" businesses. Even there, it is easy to create an "image" completely at odds with the reality. And then again, price and "cool toys" outweigh any such considerations: see Xbox.
Therefore businesses must appear ethical.
Not at all. The sales apparently are not related to this factor and one can always sell under a different brand (one of the reasons why companies tend to own many many completely different brands).
The appearence of ethical behavior generally is within the lines of actually acting ethical.
Incorrect. No such relationship can be demonstrated.
Therefore (2) companies can be genuinely ethical (without external force outside the actual market)
The "ethical" considerations are by definition external to "free market" as they are not part of the base capitalist theory. And as the present day activities of companies clearly demonstrate.
That is incorrect. The parent is right, Maximise profit for its shareholders is the definition of a business. What you missed is that there is a corollary to it: by any means you can get away with.
That is because there is this thing in which the businesses operate called "the society" which has its own rules of conduct. Businesses are amoral by nature. Profit is their only god. All other "ethical" and "moral" considerations are imposed on them externally.
If your code of business was taken to the extreme, then we'd see Steve Balmer literarily put hits on Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Think Moscow just after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
If Balmer thought he could get away with it (that is if the US experiences thought him it was possible, and his pals were doing the same) he would have done it without a second thought.
You keep repeating this assertion, as if its repetition would somehow increase its validity. There is no way for you to tell, after the fact and without complete access to the knowledge and the decision making process of those doctors, what the actual prospect of the procedure's effectiveness was. There are many, many factors in any surgery and it is quite likely that the particular growth pattern of the aneurysm your father had was inoperable using that procedure, or it was extremely risky in the estimation of these doctors.
I'm told that one has to be forceful in these situations, but again, that should not be required.
That should not be required indeed in situations where Canadian treatment is not available but a foreign one is, it is applicable, and the prospects for success are good. But again, there is only your amateurish post-facto assertion that it was the case. As to having to be forceful sometimes when faced with asking for coverage, it only applies here in borderline cases where the professionals themselves are uncertain what to do. In that situation it is possible for a patient or his family to force their hand in some way. This type of scenarios being of course much worse with the US insurers, who are in the business of making money and thus frequently engage in acrymonious feuds with their customers and doctors over the necessity and chance of success of various procedures if their cost is high or demand exorbitant amounts of paperwork to be completed in order to obtain payment/coverage.
Where do you, pray tell, pull these ass-clown "statistics" from? From my personal experience, when I had a bout of a minor arythmia, I ended up in the most busy ER of the city (by accident) and was being administered stabilising drugs by a resident within 5 minutes and I was diagnosed by a specialist within 30 minutes of my arrival. What the fuck are you talking about?!
You have an abdominal aortic aneurysm. It will grow until it rupture, killing you.
Which we are to assume is operable in its current state, because you, the world-famous cardiology expert, is telling us on Slashdot. On the other hand there was, by your own admission, a group of actual cardiologists, who having had some experience in the matter, decided that odds were so slim as to make the whole attempt unjustified.
There is no procedure performed in Canada to correct this. This is a routine surgery in the U.S., costing between $12,000 to $20,000, with a five year survival rate of 75%. The risk of intervention vs. the risk of doing nothing makes it a standard practice to operate when it reaches 5 cm in size. Do you have $12,000?
And if it were truly applicable and if the odds of the success were indeed so high, the procedure would have been performed, as it is done on so many people when such procedures are unavailable in Canada. As I repeatedely demonstrated, the $12,000 was not a factor in the decision, except that you, being obsessed about money and hoarding of it, are unable to grasp that there could have been any other reasoning, like the fact that the doctors realized that in your father's case even the semi-experimental US procedure was extremely unlikely to succeed.
- Sigh - "No, I paid my taxes for health care, among other things. The rest went for food, clothing, and shelter for myself any my family, so I do not have $12,000 to spare." "I'm sorry, there is nothing we can do."
Such conversations simply do not occur, unless you are trying to persuade the Universal Medicare to pay for your Voodoo sessions in Africa. Cost is not a major factor in such decisions, as I already, on multiple occasions, demonstrated with many examples.
Things have improved since 1999, somewhat: the surgery is now performed in Canada, but the survival rate is only 25% instead of 75%. No doubt due to the shoddy techniques: likely invasive, involving a heart-lung machine, instead of via an endoscope (where a reinforcement is introduced into the body and stitched around the aorta while the heart is beating, rather cool, actually).
Again, where is the source of these "statistics" of yours?!
That "lottery" is called life, genius. Many cardiac arrest patients die because it is physically impossible to get to them within the critical first 10 minutes since the time of their heart failure. There is nothing (save telepathy+teleportation, absence of which is surely yet another insideous, devious plot of the commmie-MDs, no?) that can be done about it. Even if they do make it to the hospital, there is still a significant chance of them not being revived, no matter what procedures the doctors apply. Next thing, you are going to accuse the Universal Medicare of failing to stop aging and death in general. I can hear your whining already: "And 70% of people aged 95 do not make it to 96! Aha! What an unfair, socialist lottery!".
If you were religious, I would suggest filing a petition to God on this subject, but as it stands I can only recommend a visit to a psychoterapist who might help you with this, another of your complexes, control freakery. And its primary cause, the anxiety you feel about life being so unpredictable.
Well, Dad lost. Even that would be fine, except he had no choice but to gamble his health care on the state.
No, he "lost" because nothing useful could be done for him at the time. You again keep on insisting that some hypothetical procedure, performed under hypothetical circumstances, applicability of which is entirely of your own, amateurish making, would have, with near 100% certainty saved him, never you mind the opinion of the many doctors with direct access do diagnostic data. Never you mind the fact that the cost of the procedure was not a factor. I am absolutely positive that were your father somehow sent to the US for the procedure you are so convinced of being the miraculous cure, and still have died, you would be still accusing the Medicare of being, "too slow", "failing to spend another $25134 for a more experimental procedure XYZ" or better yet "of being a band of incompetents who unecessarily sent your father to this unpredictable and experimental procedure, which must have killed him! They made him a guinea-pig! Waaaaaah!" and so on. There is simply no possible outcome which would in any way make the Universal Medicare an acceptable solution. Because this is really not about your father. He is simply an excuse you are using to masquarade your whining about the real source of your discontent: having to part with those, dearest of all things to you, coins.
Reductio ad absurdum only works, genius, when there is a way to directly and logically make a progression from a statement to such an absurd and clearly impossible position. What you have instead engaged in is a logical fallacy called the Undistributed Middle, i.e. Jews were an unjustly persecuted minority, Libertarians are a minority, therefore libertarians are unjustly persecuted.
That is you assumed, incorrectly, that the numerical disadvantage of the proponents of your view is the criterion by which your views are recognised as illogical. In fact the reverse is true, your small numbers are the result of the illogical nature of your position. Unlike the Jews, membership in which group is based on descent and religion, and whose small numbers were dictated by a 2000+ year long sequence of historical events. There is no barrier, other then making a convincing argument, for transitioning from a position of a Socialist or a Communist to a Libertatian. On the other hand, one could completely reject the Jewish religion and still remain a Jew as far as the Nazis were concerned.
Therefore, you can not denounce as stupid, or incorrect, a view solely on the basis of it's unpopularity.
This is a logical fallacy called Burning a Strawman (a sub-type of the Red Herring argument). That is you are attempting to pretend that I based my argument solely on the unpopularity of your views (i.e. construct a strawman) and then you proceed to attack that false position, and to defeat it easily (i.e. burning that strawman) in order to create an illusion of an argumentative victory.
This is precisely the reason for the libertarian stance aginst the initiation of force ...
That stance is not only hypocritical with you (as you implied use of force on several occasions) but also illogical in the context of any proposed societal structure. It assumes that in every case there exists a non-violent method of response to any situation. Also, you quite disingenuously pretend that in a Libertarian society there is no forcible enforcement of contracts, contracts which are a critical element of that whole silly system. Do tell, how are you planning to stop thievery or even simple refusal to hold one's end of a deal followed by refusal of participation in any arbitration?
there no moral right to tax me if, left alone, I do not consume what those taxes fund.
Except that you always do, unless you were born to a pair of hermits in the mountains, educated by them, dressed in sheepskins and never ever had any significant contact with the rest of the society. As a matter of fact, such hermits could escape taxation completely as they could be missed by census and unless found by accident, would not register on any governmental list. But as soon as you come down from the mountain and into the village, your are immediately starting to take advantage of the communal effort, i.e. the communal facilities of a village, such as its central crossroads with the inn located conveniently therein. Move up to a small city and you got a central, paved square, some sort of street lighting and quite possibly a constable or two. And so on. At each stage of immersion in the society you are taking greater and greater advantage of its ammenities, and by doing so for a prolonged period of time and not contributing to them it is you who becomes a thief of communal resources.
Your position is also utterly absurd from the point of view of its practicality. You assume that it is possible to pay only for th
No, only those who do so based on a lunatic, self-centered, thoroughly debunked premise. That would be you.
Hmm, Jews opposing their persecution are stupid
Here come the Jews again. Never you mind that they were subjected to an actual persecution, complete with one-way box car trips to the gas chambers and which make you comparing yourself to their plight a complete, cretinous, unable to grasp any sort of perspective, dickhead. That persecution complex of yours is really in control of your whole psyche. Perheaps you should use some of that $1200 a month insurance plan for a good psychotherapist. Who knows, maybe it will help.
Furthermore, there are quite a larger number of people who agree with me, than you might think -- you think the Cato Institute is funded by air? Fortunately, they are rather plentiful where I am.
I am looking forward to the Independent Libertarian State Of Texas any day now. Clue: you are an insignifant minority even in Texas.
Again, this is a fabrication, entirely of your own making, and in a large part a result of that clinical persecution complex you are suffering from.
"Help the poor!". "Mmm, O.K." "Damn, I'm poor now! Help me?" "No, don't believe you're poor".
Yes, these childlish fantasies do take precedence to actual facts in your warped "worldview", no doubt as to that.
Clearly, the only ones who can ever derive any benefits under this system are those who were always poor.
Oh yea, they are all busy partying on their 40-footer yachts, toasting their welfare with Dom Perignon.
Thus, poverty, or at least relative poverty, becomes desirable and self-improvement is discouraged
Yes, that is why we have all those millionaires around here and a vibrant middle class. Last I looked, the real estate market for huge houses and luxury cars is booming (not that it is a particularly good thing from the macro-economic and environmental perspectives, but that is another discussion).
Now, the truly funny part is that you probably believe this insane hyperbole as being true. Which puts you firmly in the company of the frothing lunatics on street corners, who ambush unsuspecting passer bys with stories of how "CIA has been stealing their thoughts", complete with their arms flailing wildly and spittle flying onto the hapless victims.
The "crimes" against you ... err ... "humanity" probably started at a very young age, the first instance being when that daycare worker insisted that you share that colourful toy the daycare provided, which you hoarded desperately, with the other kids, instead of putting elbows in their ribs and trying to poke their eyes out everytime they got close. And you knew you were persecuted by the way she reacted when you let out that stream of invective you learned from your father, when he spoke of those "Revenue Canada Mass-Murderers", towards her.
of people to the point that they no longer have the resources to purchase necessary life-saving surgery for themselves is murder. You support murder.
Except that, as I pointed out repeatedly, that "life saving" part is all in your head. Everyone here gets full access to all reasonable life-saving procedures. That is the ones that actually have some chance of succeeding in their particular cases, to the best knowledge of many doctors, as in all serious cases doctors must consult each other and decisions are not made unilateraly. The cost of the procedures is inconsequential to these considerations. From the news alone which I can remember, off the top of my head, there is the case of a child given $17,000 a week US experimental drugs for what might be years on end, as that is the only practical way to help him. There is that Saskatchewan girl being sent to the US Mayo Clinic for a string of $6k a pop procedures. There are many such cases. In 2001 Ontario Healthecare spent $3.2 million on a rare drug Cerezyme to provide the enzyme replacement therapy to 20 (yes, twenty) Gaucher's deasease patients.
And then there are cases of a refusal of $10 procedure to some idiot who believes that a professionally performed enema in an ER will save him from an alien abduction. Something tells me that, being as finely mentally balanced as you, he had to be dragged out by the security guards while screaming "Murderers!" (as you do) all the way to the parking lot.
You embelish prosperity to the point of believing that bankrupcy is a temporary year of negative revenue, instead of complete financial ruin: If I sold a $100,000 car to pay my employees a little bit longer, before closing my business, you would deny me what my taxes funded, because I had the $100,000 car at some point.
You simply are lying as usual. Not only is everyone covered by healthcare, regardless if you are bankrupt, poor or mega rich (and which is porbably the major beef with your businessmen pals, of having to mix with the proles), bankruptcy and therefore a proveable, complete loss of income does automatically qualify you for welfare and a host of other services. It does not qualify you for unemployment benefits, as you, being self-employed, never paid the unemployment insurance. Bankruptcy however does not touch your RRSP savings, which can leave you with a sizeable fortune stashed away, something that is a clear advantage to the business people, and that is not mentioning the off-shore bank accounts they are so fond of.
see now your problem: you envy success. You hate people who have succeeded, whether or not they currently are succesful. But, this is no surprise: it is the affliction of the socialist.
As I already pointed out, success and a pig pile of cash are not synonymous. Monetary rewards for being creative and industrous are not in any way forbidden in Canada. All that is required of those who manage to get rich is some recognition of "noblesse
I hope you do realize how pathetically stupid that statement makes you look. Poor oppressed you. The whole world disagrees with you, but for a few like-minded nuts. The unwashed masses fail to recognize your inherent superiority and instead they mock and oppress you with all those demonic things, like taxes, traffic regulations and prohibitions against trade in human body parts. In this you have joined that another fine group of unfarily persecuted "geniuses". Perhaps you should work on joining forces.
As I said, the US is nowhere near to being a libertarian country. Count your lucky stars.
H, Markham, Ontario was a pure hell for the four months I lived there, when it came to crime. Whitby was not much better. We got used to the Metro Toronto "murder of the day" being announced on the news, but certainly didn't like it.
You are a bald-faced liar. There were 65 murders in 2003 in the whole Greater Toronto Area, which happens to be the most populous city in the whole country. For some contrast: Dallas, Texas, your neck of the woods, happens to be ... err ... the crime capital of the US in 2003, with 244.
Kettle, meet Pot.
I remember checking violent crime stats, and learned that the rate of violent crimes against women in Canada was double that in the U.S. Of course, in Dallas, women kill their would-be rapists.
Do share. In the meantime, from that article:
Sigh, what a turkey.
"fall hard" end up getting told, "You made $$$$$$ last year -- no help for you!" .
I fully sympathise! How horrible it is to have to sell that $120k BMW and to re-mortage the mansion! Don't these communists have any compassion?! Don't they realise how hard it is to have to let the maid go and do your own laundry?! No help until you actually really need it!? You were not cut out for this! This is like, like, ... insulting! You are sooo better then this! Can't they tell a superior being when faced with one!? Barbarians!
(Generally businessmen who's businesses failed due to competition, and who once employed dozens of people)
Oh dear. Poor businessmen! Look, they only failed to compete in a marketplace, for which failure they collected a significant income while it lasted, and as a result of which there are dozens of people now out of work. And these ugly communists refuse to even pay for one butler! These wealth redistibution fiends want you to take responsibility for your own screwups and sell the yacht. Don't talk to me about these dozens of employees who now have to be helped! These peasants were the cause of it all! If they only worked harder and over the weekends as you told them! Bastards! And now the commies mock you by saying that they will give you welfare, housing aid and so on only after you are as poor as those employees of yours. The devils even dare to offer you .... job training! This is outrageous! Demeaning! What unspeakable, communist evil!
Not me. No more.
As I said, have fun. The one thing we can agree on is that you are happier out of here and so is the majority of Canadians for not having to put up with your childlish tantrums anymore.
And that "Notwithstanding Clause"... Geez: "These are your rights unless we say otherwise." That is just so messed up.
It has its uses, apparently. But the pros and cons of the Charter of Rights and the related laws are really no longer of any personal interest to you. Unlike the US politics, which, purely due to geography and the size of US population has a significant impact on Canada, the reverse is not true. Thus no problem as far as you are concerned.
That would be, according to you, everybody with the possible exception of the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Like Canada, they used to be good places to live, but the economic chickens have come home to roost.
Say what? We have very low unemployment, booming trade, massive trade surpluses and a government with a balanced budget. The Bank Of Canada has a hard time keeping the loonie down as to maintain good export pricing for our goods because of all the foreign investment pouring into the country, as opposed to the US dollar which seems to be getting seriously wobbly. What have you been smoking again?
Soviet Union, Canada, Cuba, etc. -- they'll all end up in the toilet.
Is this one of those "pick the one that is not like the rest" tests?
And it never occured to you that having an active registered retirement plan in Canada would make Revenue Canada suspicious?!
Huh?! Where!? When!? Last I heard places like the Netherlands and Sweden had the highest standards of living and were being nearly universally recognised as best places to live in. Coincidently, they do have world's highest levels of taxation. What the hell are you moaning about?
You dismissed an AAA repair denied my father as an "experimental" procedure. Experimental in Canada, perhaps, but not in the U.S. at the time, where the cost is a mere $12k or $20k, depending on whether one opts on the invasive or endoscopic repair.
No, I dismissed it not only because it was "experimental" here but the entire applicability of this procedure and its likely outcome is entirely of your own making. You are asking me to take your, tax hating, Medicare hating, amateur word versus that of expert doctors who had all the relevant diagnostic evidence in front of them at the time.
Today, I'm told this surger is performed in Canada, but the survival rate there is 25%, whereas it is 75% in the U.S. Why?
Maybe because it is performed equally on old chain-smoking railroad workers as it is on gym-going, millionaire businessmen, while it is only performed on the latter group in the US? Or more likely your number is entirely fabricated or else you would be posting a link to a study which says so.
(Even the U.S. has Medicare, and hospitals can not turn away people in need of urgent care for lack of funds)
Yea, it works wonders over there when people wait to the last possible moment to go to the ER when their routine illness developed into a major crisis due to lack of aid earlier or better yet, the nearest "public" ER is 200 miles away. Never you mind the abysmal level of actual services such hospitals provide and their practice of kicking out major heart surgery patients after 2 day stay to reduce costs to minimum.
The US is probably the only one of the industrialized countries which managed to make "public service" into a four letter word. Something profoundly screwed up in their national psyche. They'd rather die horribly then share a few pennies with their fellow citizens, except when it comes to military spending and murdering people and blowing things up abroad. Then there is no shortage of cheering and expenditures.
But, that would imply a two-tier health care system which Canada soundly rejects (and is the only nation in the world to do so).
No it is not. Many European countries do likewise or the "private" medicine is restricted to non-essential procedures.
But, the Canadian "Social Contract" is a horrible ripoff to the married middle class wage earner supporting a family.
No it only appears so to you, whose idea of "fair share" is 100% for you and 0% for others.
Fair enough.
2. The reference is to those, and all other recent refugees who came as freeloaders, happily accepting welfare on the backs of those who came before them and had to struggle. Prague Springers are merely a reference to the type of immigrant.
Even of this was true, the number of these new immigrants is insignificant, compared to the overall population of Canada. Also a vast majority of them does work and they do pay their taxes. I am not sure how a relatively small number of failed immigrants is supposed to be of some great catastrophic significance.
The government does indeed. As to your moaning about it being a "mob", vote some politician out and then try to vote some Cappo or his Russian mob equivalent out of his "office" and compare the results. Make sure your will is in order though before you attempt that second part.
Nothing "stops them", but then, nothing stops them now. Though the second ammendment is a rather nice deterrent, in extremis.
Except that vast majority of the countries on Earth do not have one and do not tolerate guns in hands of every nutcase on the street and therefore it is not any sort of deterrent now. It is not a deterrent at all in the US as an organised band of well armed individuals could successfully engage and defeat small groups of haphazardly armed citizens who are not in the business of combat for profit.
A Black Panther with a shot gun is a rather convincing counterparty to a biggoted white sherrif.
As I said, a complete, violent, whomever-has-the-bigger-gun anarchy. Streets running in blood until a stable equilibrum is reached of walled-in and heavily defended compounds surrounded by a sea of chaos and poverty.