If we take socio-economic mobility as an indication of innovation, and look at effective tax rates rather than book tax rates, the more highly taxed and strictly regulated economies of Europe and the thoroughly Europeanized former colonies have done better than the US in the era of plummeting taxes and deregulation that really kicked of with Reagan.
The only way you can make that claim is if you ignore the over regulation that happpened just before Reagan and during the Reagan years. Holding a mans balls in a vise and clamping it down tighter is not a fair comparison to what he could achieve before you did so.
Also, your wrong to attempt to use socio-economic mobility as a sign of innovation. The biggest innovations in the US would have left people deprived of income and completely offsetting the entire system. As innovation comes about, less work is needed from people which means less pay and a constant increase in less employment. Less taxes make investments possible buy lowing the net gain needed for profit or return on investment which increases the oppertunity for the work thereby increasing the opportunity for income. You need to ask yourself, when is the last time a poor man has given you a job that you could live off of. When is the last time that has happened to anyone you know. It doesn't happen. Taxes take money from people who will give the jobs making jobs less likely to be found. The government then attempts to spend the money which creates a demand which causes jobs to be done. However, because the government is more or less a middle man here, the problems is that the same money is less efficient when the government passes it around. Of course you then get into targeting sectors and stuff like that but that can just as easily be accomplished by targeted tax cuts and direct subsidies.
I often have to backtrack from what people assume my position is when I say things like that.
I can see how you might look at the numbers and come to the conclusions you have. But starting in the 1970's, we started over regulating things and getting concerned about worker safety and the environment. Now we also have two separate tax systems, the federal and the local (state and city) which brings the effective tax rates to a different conclusion. Take states like Road Island and South Carolina and California, you will notice that their effective tax rates are higher then others. It's also the case that their unemployment is higher then others. Now there are many factors for unemployment, GM and other automakers moving plants to Mexico for instance is a reason I didn't include it but when normal economic issues happen, the highest taxed areas generally feel it first and the longest with higher unemployment and so on. Being that the federal government's tax rates are universal across the states, it's easier to see the differences within the states. Here are a few pages you can look through for tax information and unemployment information. Like I said, there are a number of things that effect this stuff, but another indication is the cost of living indexes too. The higher taxes areas generally have a higher cost of living which exaggerate the socio-economic mobility effects you were alluding to before.
I certainly think consequences need to be considered. I even think that the consequences of government inaction, deregulation, loss of public goods, et cetera need to be considered.
Personally, I believe there is a balance that needs to be struck between neccesary services and taxes for them and freedom to keep what you earned. If you get too far to one side, it's off ballance, if you get to far to the other, it's the same. And I believe this g
You can't bust a myth by presenting your own or as you like to do, not present one and pretend you did.
Anyways, it isn't a myth and you can't show the tax and cap system as anything other then I stated. In fact, it relies exactly on what I stated for it to be productive. If you resent me for pointing that out, you will just have to get over it. It is what your pushing and I think we have discussed this before.
I went a little off into the deep end when I started in on the population control. I know the global warming supporters have backed down from that and hidden the nutcases that actually believe it should be done. However, it is obvious that they have influenced enough people under different premises and their wills are being carried out. I remember watching Ted Turner talking about population control and how he thought global warming would practically disappear as a problem if 15% of the worlds population did. Actually, he said is we had 15 or 20% less people, global warming wouldn't be an issue right now. It opened some eyes that have looked at the entire abortion issue which seems to be racists in the least. Take planned parenthood, they won't set up an abortion clinic unless there is a significant minority population present. They have offices and clinics that don't perform abortions in predominately white neighborhoods but the abortion clinics require minorities. I may be wrong to draw connections to that, but I remember someone saying a few decades back that if the blacks and Hispanics/Latinos keep reproducing at the rate they were, they would outnumber whits in America in short of 50 years. I never really bought into conspiracies until I saw that.
Anyways, if you think I'm wrong about the tax and cap systems, or even Kyoto, then point to where it is wrong. We have discussed the push to forgive the third world debt that got roped into the global warming solutions like Kyoto and how it magically disappeared when it came about in the past. And just for the sake of keeping focus, we will forget about all the arguments against global warming as it has been claimed and just focus on the so called solutions. Show that I'm wrong, it's a challenge that I have passed to you before, and it is being passed now. The entire idea of Kyoto is reducing Carbon emissions in a localized area in order to build up underdeveloped countries. The entire idea behind a cap and trade or tax program on carbon emissions is to drive the costs up so the people can't afford it. No official emissions accounting takes with any purposed global warming solutions like Kyoto account for emissions caused in other countries due to exporting production of stuff or carbon ofset payments to those countries. China is a good example of this in which they chose some the dirtiest way to create power and with Europe's exporting of emissions combined with America's increase in imports, they are now the world's largest Co2 emitter and even though they are signatory to Kyoto, they have absolutely no caps on those emissions. India is catching up for the same reasons and under the same freedoms. With the advent of the EU, it's difficult to follow the import history but China and Indian imports into Europe have increased over 600% since 2000 as European nations attempt to limit Carbon emissions and come into compliance with Kyoto regulations.
The earth has been hotter and colder since humans have been around and it still suited us.
It appears that your only looking at the extremes. No one has said the earth is going back to the time of dinosaurs, at least not for hundreds if not thousands of years from now. Don't mistake looking for the right ways to react as not reacting at all.
Currently, it's up to the license holder to identify the interference and initiate the resolve to it. If after notifying someone of the problem and the problem isn't corrected, then the FCC gets involved. The fines associated with their involvement generally cover the cost of their involvement and then some.
It isn't like the FCC is driving around like the Verizon Can you hear me now guy.
The problem is with what is necessary and what isn't.
Japan during their economic down turn a few years back employed bunches of people to dig ditches by hand with another lot to fill them in. Those people received pay checks and purchased things in the economy and it crashed their economy in the process. Some things like police and fire, perhaps some roads are going to be necessary. Digging ditches and filling them in aren't. Likewise, certain other government services are a waste. Look at AM track which has never turned a profit in it's entire existence. Look at the bus lines and mass transit in most cities, they take away from government then they ever bring back. Most of them are severely lacking in functionality to boot.
The problem is agreeing on what is demonstratively necessary as a service provided by the government verses a service you simply don't want to pay for. Mass transit, you could ride a bike or purchase a car. Forcing companies to provide broadband internet to areas that are already unprofitable when the biggest reason they are unprofitable is because of easement fees and right of way charges that the government puts in place to begin with. So you use government to fix a problem government started but without understanding those problems in the first place, you end up creating more problems in the end. Some taxes and some regulation is needed, too much poisons the food, too little leaves people to cook their own food. People react and adapt more efficiently then governments do, if there is an error, it should be one that effects the people directly not one that has to entrench itself in government first. The people can react far better then any government can. Your completely wrong about the high tax and big government, any cursory glance at history will show that. And it isn't something that's just specific to the US, Ireland, the UK and many other countries saw increased growths by lowering taxes in the past.
Actually, most of the breaks are applied across the board and the large businesses only seem like they are getting a larger break because 5 or 10 percent of ten times the money is ten times the break.
Rarely, you will see targeted breaks like what is in the Stimulus bill directed solely are large businesses because they are the only ones capable of making something specific happen. Take the Broad band language in the pork (I mean stimulus) bill, you can only get money if you were providing high speed service at the time the bill became law and the bill defined high speed as over 3 meg for wireless and over 5 meg service for wired service. It's actually a combination of up and down speeds but the 3 and 5 are the down sides and they show that the Time Warner, Cox, Att/sbc and existing large players are the only ones who will receive any of the money.
As for that one subsidy that can't be had. The federal government doesn't belong in the health care business. They have no constitutional authority in doing so and even if they did get into it beyond what they already are, the costs will increase exponentially and half of what you railed about will still be in the system. That's right, we still have people on medicare and Medicare who are denied treatments because the government considers them experimental or not cost beneficial. That happens in our own health care system, take a real look at the others, Canada, England's, even Germany's. Most of those countries all had a disproportional amounts of people seeking health care in other countries because their public health care at homes wasn't sufficient. In England, you could buy private medical insurance for a while now, you could use this or the public system, in Canada, they just started offering medical insurance in the private sector so if the wait is too long or a procedure was denied, they would take you to another country if needed to get the services you need.
Everyone talks about how much a drain it is having to pay their own medical expenses. What they don't understand is that they will still have to pay it. The only difference will be if they have any choices in the matter. Most of the people I see who want government health care can afford it anyways. In actuality, there are very few people who don't have health care because they can't actually afford it. The poor is generally under some government program, the middle class can generally pay their own but often purchase a big screen TV or something instead. Most employers pay for some but it's simply not their responsibility. Employers never paid in the past, some large companies had medical facilities and company doctors but those were few and far in between. The idea of medical benefits from the employers didn't come around until the 50's or so when the Korean war kicked off and there was a shortage of workers in the US. Employers couldn't afford to pay more so they started offering benefits to attract productive workers. It's just not really the employers responsability to pay this shit. And this shit didn't get expensive until the HMO act when the government started getting involved in the first place.
Like I said, you don't know the effects of the close system. I just pointed to where removing all our emissions would acually cause an increase in heat build up. It's not as simply as saying quit putting that shit into the air. There is already shit in the air and if we stop pushing particulate matter in, we are going to change the climate even more and most likely for the worse.
We will take your toxic gas buildup argument and work from there. Let's say the gas buildup is 30 times normal. Now we can forget that normal will always be an arbitrary number and just focus on the so called normal. If 30 times the normal has 30 times the effect, and the effect is hampered by half because particulate matter is blocking the sunlight in the first place, then we are only realizing the effects of half or 15 times normal. If we stop emitting the particulate matter, we will effectivly have doubled the gas effects causing twice the amount of warming or more.
Look at it this way, you have a river that goes through a town. Every year it floods the town and someone ended up building a dam upstream to control the flooding. The dam holds back the bulk of the water and releases it in a controlled output when the weather is good so the town doesn't flood. But now the river has more water in it year round then it normally should. People realize this after a few years when it starts washing the bases for the bridges away and they have to rebuild them. Someone notices that there is a damn upstream that stops the town from being flooded and having to rebuild everything instead of just the bridges. Now, you seem to be the person who says Tear Down the Dam. It isn't natural and the river flow should be this arbitrary number despite that society has adapted to the other flow and built around it. So without ever looking at the volume of water on the other side, you decide to dynamite the dam which releases 200000 times the water that the river has ever seen and wipes out the entire town and every town down stream for 200 miles. Your dead too but died knowing "it's natural now".
You need to know what your actions will do before you do them. If this was simply you driving your car on a deserted road with no one else around, I couldn't give a fuck. But your essentially demanding the damn be torn down not understanding what it's doing or what is behind it. You are wanting to put everyone Else's life at risk because you have fallen into some blind following of irrational thinking. You need to understand what will happen before action.
And your not throwing your biased and unsupported ideas out at the moment too. Cherry picking, half truths, right to ignore the truth that can only be seen by the convinced, Yea, Your a bastion of pure truth there.
I didn't say anything about global warming, I said that you can't test it by Carbon alone as the parent attempted to claim. Your explanation is only part true too. So much for an honest discussion. Anyways, the oceans release Co2 when they warm up, in fact in the current warming models, they account for that specifically. Your right about the permafrost releasing Co2 and methane, but that only part of the picture. Other things that effect the permafrost and Oceanic release of Co2 the sun, volcanic activity, water currents which is indirectly controlled by the sun and a few other things.
We have had many exchanges in the past and I recognise you have the right to ignore the prefered cap and trade solution and rant against a tax solution in order to misinform and push your own politicaly inspired anti-science agenda.
Listen, I didn't state anything other then the effects of the tax based solutions. If you see that as a bad thing, then maybe you should examine these solutions in more detail and perhaps take an economics course taught by someone who isn't a true believer also.
Kyoto was nothing more then a redistribution of wealth, you can work it out with the math, a 30% reductions in emissions for all man made carbon releases over 20 years will be an increase in emissions once you figure population growth. The idea of mandating limits do two things, they either drive the costs of production so people can't afford it or they drive the production to places where the caps aren't in place. This is the entire idea behind Kyoto, is seen in all of European countries except Germany which has seen almost a negative population growth and had the benefit of accounting irregularities that moved their practical goals closer to their actual production levels. The rest of Europe has farmed it's emissions out to China and India, some in south America and it is the entire reason all these other countries signed Kyoto in the first place. Of the 168 some countries who signed onto it, only 38 or so have emissions caps at all, of the remaining, they stand to benefit from investment in off shoring the emissions. None of the political solutions so far introduced evade these facts and you cannot either.
As for the math, lets says there are 100 people and they emit 10 units of carbon each on average. That's 1000 units of carbon. If we decrease the emissions by 30% over 20 years, they will emit after the 20th year 300 units a year less or 700 units which is 7 units per person. Now, people like to fuck and with fucking there are babies which means the population increases. Generally the increase in population is between 1.5 and 3 percent a year depending on the place. At 1.5 percent a year over 20 years, we end up with roughly 134.5 people, or 34.5 more people. With 34.5 extra people emitting 7 units more a year that's 241.5 units of carbon making the 300 saved more like 58 units. If you go with the 3% growth per year, you end up with 180.5 people after 20 years or 80.5 more then you started with. Those 80 people will end up using or emitting 563 units of carbon making that 30% reduction inefficient to even cover the population's increased output based on growth. You are now 263 units above your original number before the 30 percent reduction.
Now that was just an exercise in extremes. the magical reality is going to be that population growth changes from year to year and country to country. Unless your a dictator like China, you can't force abortions onto people or tell them they can't reproduce. But what you can do is fund organizations like Planned Parenthood and various other groups who go into minority areas and convince them no to reproduce. What you can do is drive the cost of living up so much that people don't think they can afford having kids. O
The problem is that Co2 will rise and fall with the temperature whether it is a problem or not. Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it.
There are tons of sources of Co2 that will be emitted or sequestered based solely around the temperature of the earth without ever getting into man made emissions.
Your also purposing a test that is practically impossible to do. You can't control Co2 emissions. Even the current so called solutions to it don't attempt to eliminate it, it attempts to tax the hell out of it so the products made are too expensive for people to purchase meaning less products get made and they attempt to push manufacturing off onto smaller less developed countries for various political reasons.
Well, First you have to make sure that the crap is actually crap. Then you have to look at what the crap is actually doing, not just what you think it is doing.
If someone flipped a switch tomorrow that magically stopped all Fossil Carbon emissions, we would be worse off then the are now. Particulate maters in the emissions offset a portion of the sun light by trapping it or reflecting it in the upper layers of the atmosphere. The effect is basically that is Carbon emissions are bad, it will get a lot worse when we stop because we are protected from a portion by the particle matter in the atmosphere.
When the majority of air traffic was stopped right after 9/11, the lack of those emissions were enough to measure both an increase in sunlight making to ground level and temps in those areas for that short period of time. Stopping the dumping of garbage can have a really bad effect if we don't understand what it is doing.
Quebec is French culture. Attacking Quebec is attacking French culture and it is a show of bigotry and racism.
Bullshit. Baseball and apple pie is the American way but not liking apples or speaking out against the steroid use in Baseball isn't trashing America or the American way. In the same sense, speaking out against a province of a country that breaks the country's own laws is not speaking out against their culture. In order your statement to be close to being right, the french culture must be little more the arrogant asses who refuse to follow the rules and attempt to withhold government services from people that aren't just like them. I don't think that is true in any sense.
Again, The French Language Charter is bill 101 only in name. The French Language Charter was adopted in 1977 by repealing Bill 22, which was passed in 1974 by a Liberal government of all things and which essentially made the official Language French in everything, but still maintains to this day English services for the English speaking population. Bill 22 is what put everything in place, Bill 101 was exclusively a name change and advertising clauses (French advertising must be bigger than English advertising, and all product literature must be available in French) modifications, the rest pretty much staying the same as it was in 1974 when Robert Bourassa presented it and passed it to the assembly.
In name, it doesn't matter. The connection is there and that means you are simply wrong. As for Bill 101, every version that I can find, be it on wikipedia or through various law sites, include everything in the Charter of the French Language. Bill 101 is more then an advertising clause whether you like it or not.
Also, I don't get your gripe about English service in government, since you can get served in English at every government office or any Ministry. Even all their websites are both bilingual, which is more than what the French Language charter provides for. The Federal rules govern only Federal jurisdiction, they cannot dictate to a province what is and isn't acceptable language wise, only the language of Federal services. Since those are few and far between, their jurisdiction doesn't amount to much. Provincial language jurisdiction covers everything like health, education, business, imports etc..
You don't get it because you aren't paying attention to what I said. Your supposed to be able to get bilingual service in every government office but that wasn't the case when I needed to do so. Do you understand that the gripe is because they didn't do what they were supposed to do. The rules said one thing and someone pushed another on my- ignoring the rules. And yes, the federal rules do dictate to non-federal government offices. It's in the federal constitution and states that all citizens have that right when dealing with anything provided by the government. The original Charter of the French language has been modified numberous times because of constitutional challenges and some of those cases made it to the Canadian Supreme Court (Quebec (Attorney General) v. Blaikie, [1979] 2 S.C.R. 1016 is probably the most known one).
I'm sorry you lost money, but that is your own fault. Maybe you should have read the rules before you started doing business in Quebec. No one is forcing French culture on you again, but if you want to come here, you have to play by our rules. We won't go to your home province and try to force French on you, nor do I expect any kind of French when I go to Toronto or Vancouver even though the Federal government provides for it.
I did read the damn rules. The damn rules were followed by the damned government. Here is something else you won't do if you come to my home, you won't find that the laws and rules say one thing but everyone else does another and it stops you from participating in something your
When I was there, I got the run around for attempting to use English. I couldn't select where I went based on the majority or minority population either, I had certain things to do that needed to be done in certain places because of the details involved. I ended up having to call a guy connected to the Canadian federal government so he could call a guy who ended up putting pressure on the local offices to deal with me and then I suffered an extreme attitude for it. Eventually, I ended up having to hire a lawyer to do what normal people are supposed to be able to do and even he told me I should have been able to do it on my own.
As for the minorities and all that. I don't care how they are made up. I don't even care if it was "french only". What I care about is the rules being one thing and then having them be another in practice so you don't know what your supposed to do. If I had known it was French only because of the rules, I could have made arrangements from the start that would have saved a lot of time and money. But when the rules say one thing and they change them without notifying anyone, it creates a hassle that according to the law, I shouldn't had went through.
It probably would have been cheaper in the long run if I greased the palms of the bureaucrats but without knowing French, I couldn't even tell if they were hinting that they wanted that. You would think that if corruption was their goal, they would have at least came to my level so I could understand what they wanted.
Oh well, with any luck, I will never be in that position again.
One big problem with your argument is that language is a provincial jurisdiction.
Not according to the Canadian constitution and the sections on rights. Language is set in stone to be both English and French and your options, not the provinces. Now the province can make rules on who is entitled to the options like in education where one parent has to be a native English or french speaker or whatever. As for getting government services, it's either or at your option. They are obligated to the Constitution which glues the country together are they not?
You seem to be mostly against bill 101, which is simply a bill about advertising language. The French Language Charter is what you're really denouncing though and this charter dictates that you will get billingual service in government, even though English is not an official language of the province.
Your not serious are you? You really think the Charter of the French Language and bill 101 are separate pieces? They aren't, they are the same thing. What your thinking of was the fist court challenge to bill 101 which dealt with the advertising requirements. Make no mistake, they are the same. And yes the constitution act guarantees bilingual services where Bill 101 or the "Charter of the French Language" as they are the same thing, only guarantees the right to french language except in specific cases. The problem I have is that Universal rules are/were being ignored and it directly effected me at one point in time. I don't care is french was the official language, I care that the rules of the damn country said I should have been able to conduct my business in English and I was railroaded by the government because I tried to do so.
BTW, I would make sure you know what your talking about before accusing someone else of being ignorant on the subject.
Also, you should note that with Charlotte Town's failure, Quebec still hasn't ratified the Canadian constitution and as such, I don't see why we should be bound by it, especially in areas where the Federal government is trying to push itself unto provincial jurisdiction.
I don't care what hodgepodge setup you guys managed to mangle yourself in. Quebec is taking advantage of Treaties and other activities provided by the federal government of Canada and in doing so, they need to follow the rules. IF you want to split away, then do it. But don't create an environment where you pick and choose the best of both worlds. It screws others who don't know how anally retentive Quebec is. It's seriously like attempting to play a game and having one person changing the rules to their benefit during the game then claiming to have won by playing by the rules. Either give in or get out so everyone knows the rules and where they stand.
As such, your post is simply an attack on the French culture and not proof that the French culture is pushing itself unto people forcibly. Even, it seems to be the contrary, you seem to be trying to push your culture unto the people of Quebec. Good luck with that bit of hypocrisy.
My post was to attack Quebec, not the french culture. It's Quebec that is pushing the french culture in inane ways with the government refusing to participate in English in many instances. I could care less about the french culture itself. What I care about is having the rules say one thing and then the government acting in a totally opposite way that ends up costing me money. And no, I'm not trying to push my culture anywhere, I'm simply trying to play by the rules that said English or French. Denying that right which is protected by the constitution doesn't mean I'm pushing anything, It means I'm objecting to having something else pushed on me.
I'm not Canadian but I had to do some business there back in 2002-2003. In Quebec, I was stonewalled and given the run around for not knowing French until I eventually made a complaint to my contacts in Montreal who contacted someone in Ottawa who then contacted the governments I was working with. I then got cooperation but it was one of those "only because I have to" confrontational situations. If a form needed another form, they wouldn't say a word and I ended up having to hire an attorney to get some simple things done that normal citizens were supposed to be able to do. I could fill out the forms in English but they wouldn't give any written in English and often provided the wrong forms just to give me the run around.
I don't think any part of Canada is supposed to work that way. We ended up cutting our business with Canada altogether after that. Or at least for the next 15 months I still worked on that project.
Perhaps I could have been more clear in my original presentation. Most of the time, when people take things the wrong way, I find it is because the original statement was not as clear as it should have been. I knew what I was talking about but it doesn't necessarily mean you or anyone else would have.
Anyways, we got that resolved and I look forward to reading your comments in the future. Had I actually said what you thought I did, your reply would have been spot on so don't take anything we discussed in a way that stops you from posting and participating.
A lot of times, it's an older person who owns one (or part of one) of the companies I service and he normally has a secretary or people for the tasks he doing but wants to do something on his own or whatever. Cutting them off would probably end up dropping several companies with between 5 users up to 50 users which is in my target model. Of course the smaller companies aren't as profitable as the larger ones but they seem to keep me busy when the larger companies aren't. I sort of look at it like having to wine and dine the client or something along those lines except they get the bill.
And don't get me wrong, It's not all the time either. It's not even daily. It's more like once a month, every couple of weeks or something along those lines that I get a couple of calls like that. They just stick out so much and are so memorable.
I don't mind putting up with idiots, most of the time, we are having to deal with people that are less intelligent then ourselves, or at least how we see ourselves. I have a good way at dumbing down complex explanations of processes and making the customer understand the depth of the problem or the fix in terms that they can relate to. Most of the time they are paying me good money and need to feel secure in that they are getting something for it. I never considered myself a people person either but I'm starting to wonder now.
I'm purely outside support so I guess we are dealing with entirely different types of people.
Anyways, I was curious is you had those types of people and what they thought about it but it looks like I read in between the lines and assumed something that wasn't.
Assuming that your still in civics class, ask your teacher what Article 20 (or was it 22, I can't be bothered to check right now) of the Canadian federal constitution says about that. Especially along the lines of Bilingual access to government, services provided by the government, education, health and so on.
The federal constitution provides that French and English is the official language and each Canadian has the RIGHT to address their government or any services it offers in either. Read it yourself, it's article 20, Bill 101 and their implementation runs a foul of that.
While pointing to key words in articles is nice for you and all, how does the customers like that?
I know several customer I have who I personally think just get lonely and want to talk to someone for $85 an hour. They call and ask stupid questions like How do I find a file I saved in the "My Documents" folder because word opens to his last saved directory or something. I have one guy who calls about every three to four weeks asking me what his password is for Quick books. I usually have to tell him to look on his monitor right by the note that says read this before calling me. There is another who keeps asking why he gets all these popups all the time, they are Vista's notifications like A virus scan has started and so on. There are a few more idiots like the girl running an accounting service from her home who saw the file server "just sitting there" and donated it to her church because they needed a computer then wondered why she couldn't access anything. It was a pretty nice file server too for a one man operation, a raid 5 setup with an external tape backup that has a 7 slot robot changer (I picked up second hand for about $200 because she never backed up or changed tapes) and VPN into my network for off site backups. The day she complained she could get any work done, the church called and asked for the passwords to get into the computer which I headed off with "a mistake has been made".
Most people who can't search for an existing document with an existing solution are the people who need hand holding anyways. I don't think it is too much of a problem if they are willing to pay for it and most of them are. Maybe I'm just an Idiot magnet but for some people, the personal service is what they want in customer service.
A note about the Quick books password, This is on a home system with just him and his wife present, no account numbers that correspond to anything in real life and keeps track of his charitable donations so he can report them to his accountant. I know sticky notes with passwords aren't a good thing, but there really isn't anything sensitive in it. The only reason he has a password on the file is because someone told him it was a good idea. That's also why he has a yahoo mail account, a Gmail account, and a hot mail account that he can never access because he forgets where the page you log in from is. I think he's loosing his mind (Alzheimer or something) but amassed a small fortune during his working years and doesn't like feeling useless.
Actually, yes they do when you are there. Quebec is different from the rest of Canada and even institutes mandates differently. There are a group of separatist in Quebec that attempt to make it as different from Canada as possible. Take bill 101 for instance. The British parliament created a rule for minority education in different languages so Quebec made French the "official language" and refused to allow English or any other version until it was challenged in the Canadian supreme court.
To this day, Quebec attempts to lock out English or other language speaking people even though the Bilingual act forbids it. If you attempt to do business with the Quebec government in any other language, you will get railroaded until you complain to Montreal and then you still don't get normal cooperation. At least that's the way it was in 2002-2003 when I last did business there.
If you move to Quebec, you live by the provincial rules, which are set by the elected officials representing people of the province. This is no different than Ontario, Albert or any other province. If you don't like the provincial laws, you are free not to move there.
Quebec, contrary to their fucked up ideas, are a province of Canada which has it's own rules that Quebec needs to follow too. It isn't that they have their own rules that is the problem, it's that they are in some cases ignoring the country's rules that are the problem. If something is a national law (and by national, I mean Canadian) then Quebec is supposed to be in compliance with it. Bill 101 is clearly in violation with federal constitution's bill of rights section 20. Bill 101 is the most obvious case and there are more.
Again, the problem isn't that they have their own ways, it's that their own ways conflict with the country's ways thereby pushing it on you. The option to move to another state or province because one is being hostile to the country's laws and constitution is absurd to say the least. If California all the sudden said English only or Spanish only, or arbitrarily decided that the 16th amendment need not apply, the rest of the US would be outraged and make the stop. Why Canada puts up with it, I will never know. Probably because too many people said if you don't like it, leave and they did.
From my understanding, the guy didn't object to the search of the device and cooperated with the border agents until they requested him to log in so they could see the files. That's a little more then agreeing that it is your property or am I missing something?
A nation is pretty much little more then a group of people with similar qualities. It's not a legal right in any way. A nation is also subject to interpretation as it is being used. Take the nation of Islam for instance or the nation of the US. Members of both can be members of both because they talk or separate common grounds. A club of Chess players can be a nation once it's members reach a certain size but it doesn't give them any legal status.
Following the historical culture of a nation doesn't remove it's obligations to the country it is part of. And your right, it doesn't entitle them to enforce that onto others but it's what they try to do. It's why so many other people don't like them, even Canadians from different provinces don't like them for that reason.
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The only way you can make that claim is if you ignore the over regulation that happpened just before Reagan and during the Reagan years. Holding a mans balls in a vise and clamping it down tighter is not a fair comparison to what he could achieve before you did so.
Also, your wrong to attempt to use socio-economic mobility as a sign of innovation. The biggest innovations in the US would have left people deprived of income and completely offsetting the entire system. As innovation comes about, less work is needed from people which means less pay and a constant increase in less employment. Less taxes make investments possible buy lowing the net gain needed for profit or return on investment which increases the oppertunity for the work thereby increasing the opportunity for income. You need to ask yourself, when is the last time a poor man has given you a job that you could live off of. When is the last time that has happened to anyone you know. It doesn't happen. Taxes take money from people who will give the jobs making jobs less likely to be found. The government then attempts to spend the money which creates a demand which causes jobs to be done. However, because the government is more or less a middle man here, the problems is that the same money is less efficient when the government passes it around. Of course you then get into targeting sectors and stuff like that but that can just as easily be accomplished by targeted tax cuts and direct subsidies.
I can see how you might look at the numbers and come to the conclusions you have. But starting in the 1970's, we started over regulating things and getting concerned about worker safety and the environment. Now we also have two separate tax systems, the federal and the local (state and city) which brings the effective tax rates to a different conclusion. Take states like Road Island and South Carolina and California, you will notice that their effective tax rates are higher then others. It's also the case that their unemployment is higher then others. Now there are many factors for unemployment, GM and other automakers moving plants to Mexico for instance is a reason I didn't include it but when normal economic issues happen, the highest taxed areas generally feel it first and the longest with higher unemployment and so on. Being that the federal government's tax rates are universal across the states, it's easier to see the differences within the states. Here are a few pages you can look through for tax information and unemployment information. Like I said, there are a number of things that effect this stuff, but another indication is the cost of living indexes too. The higher taxes areas generally have a higher cost of living which exaggerate the socio-economic mobility effects you were alluding to before.
Personally, I believe there is a balance that needs to be struck between neccesary services and taxes for them and freedom to keep what you earned. If you get too far to one side, it's off ballance, if you get to far to the other, it's the same. And I believe this g
You can't bust a myth by presenting your own or as you like to do, not present one and pretend you did.
Anyways, it isn't a myth and you can't show the tax and cap system as anything other then I stated. In fact, it relies exactly on what I stated for it to be productive. If you resent me for pointing that out, you will just have to get over it. It is what your pushing and I think we have discussed this before.
I went a little off into the deep end when I started in on the population control. I know the global warming supporters have backed down from that and hidden the nutcases that actually believe it should be done. However, it is obvious that they have influenced enough people under different premises and their wills are being carried out. I remember watching Ted Turner talking about population control and how he thought global warming would practically disappear as a problem if 15% of the worlds population did. Actually, he said is we had 15 or 20% less people, global warming wouldn't be an issue right now. It opened some eyes that have looked at the entire abortion issue which seems to be racists in the least. Take planned parenthood, they won't set up an abortion clinic unless there is a significant minority population present. They have offices and clinics that don't perform abortions in predominately white neighborhoods but the abortion clinics require minorities. I may be wrong to draw connections to that, but I remember someone saying a few decades back that if the blacks and Hispanics/Latinos keep reproducing at the rate they were, they would outnumber whits in America in short of 50 years. I never really bought into conspiracies until I saw that.
Anyways, if you think I'm wrong about the tax and cap systems, or even Kyoto, then point to where it is wrong. We have discussed the push to forgive the third world debt that got roped into the global warming solutions like Kyoto and how it magically disappeared when it came about in the past. And just for the sake of keeping focus, we will forget about all the arguments against global warming as it has been claimed and just focus on the so called solutions. Show that I'm wrong, it's a challenge that I have passed to you before, and it is being passed now. The entire idea of Kyoto is reducing Carbon emissions in a localized area in order to build up underdeveloped countries. The entire idea behind a cap and trade or tax program on carbon emissions is to drive the costs up so the people can't afford it. No official emissions accounting takes with any purposed global warming solutions like Kyoto account for emissions caused in other countries due to exporting production of stuff or carbon ofset payments to those countries. China is a good example of this in which they chose some the dirtiest way to create power and with Europe's exporting of emissions combined with America's increase in imports, they are now the world's largest Co2 emitter and even though they are signatory to Kyoto, they have absolutely no caps on those emissions. India is catching up for the same reasons and under the same freedoms. With the advent of the EU, it's difficult to follow the import history but China and Indian imports into Europe have increased over 600% since 2000 as European nations attempt to limit Carbon emissions and come into compliance with Kyoto regulations.
The earth has been hotter and colder since humans have been around and it still suited us.
It appears that your only looking at the extremes. No one has said the earth is going back to the time of dinosaurs, at least not for hundreds if not thousands of years from now. Don't mistake looking for the right ways to react as not reacting at all.
Currently, it's up to the license holder to identify the interference and initiate the resolve to it. If after notifying someone of the problem and the problem isn't corrected, then the FCC gets involved. The fines associated with their involvement generally cover the cost of their involvement and then some.
It isn't like the FCC is driving around like the Verizon Can you hear me now guy.
The problem is with what is necessary and what isn't.
Japan during their economic down turn a few years back employed bunches of people to dig ditches by hand with another lot to fill them in. Those people received pay checks and purchased things in the economy and it crashed their economy in the process. Some things like police and fire, perhaps some roads are going to be necessary. Digging ditches and filling them in aren't. Likewise, certain other government services are a waste. Look at AM track which has never turned a profit in it's entire existence. Look at the bus lines and mass transit in most cities, they take away from government then they ever bring back. Most of them are severely lacking in functionality to boot.
The problem is agreeing on what is demonstratively necessary as a service provided by the government verses a service you simply don't want to pay for. Mass transit, you could ride a bike or purchase a car. Forcing companies to provide broadband internet to areas that are already unprofitable when the biggest reason they are unprofitable is because of easement fees and right of way charges that the government puts in place to begin with. So you use government to fix a problem government started but without understanding those problems in the first place, you end up creating more problems in the end. Some taxes and some regulation is needed, too much poisons the food, too little leaves people to cook their own food. People react and adapt more efficiently then governments do, if there is an error, it should be one that effects the people directly not one that has to entrench itself in government first. The people can react far better then any government can. Your completely wrong about the high tax and big government, any cursory glance at history will show that. And it isn't something that's just specific to the US, Ireland, the UK and many other countries saw increased growths by lowering taxes in the past.
Actually, most of the breaks are applied across the board and the large businesses only seem like they are getting a larger break because 5 or 10 percent of ten times the money is ten times the break.
Rarely, you will see targeted breaks like what is in the Stimulus bill directed solely are large businesses because they are the only ones capable of making something specific happen. Take the Broad band language in the pork (I mean stimulus) bill, you can only get money if you were providing high speed service at the time the bill became law and the bill defined high speed as over 3 meg for wireless and over 5 meg service for wired service. It's actually a combination of up and down speeds but the 3 and 5 are the down sides and they show that the Time Warner, Cox, Att/sbc and existing large players are the only ones who will receive any of the money.
As for that one subsidy that can't be had. The federal government doesn't belong in the health care business. They have no constitutional authority in doing so and even if they did get into it beyond what they already are, the costs will increase exponentially and half of what you railed about will still be in the system. That's right, we still have people on medicare and Medicare who are denied treatments because the government considers them experimental or not cost beneficial. That happens in our own health care system, take a real look at the others, Canada, England's, even Germany's. Most of those countries all had a disproportional amounts of people seeking health care in other countries because their public health care at homes wasn't sufficient. In England, you could buy private medical insurance for a while now, you could use this or the public system, in Canada, they just started offering medical insurance in the private sector so if the wait is too long or a procedure was denied, they would take you to another country if needed to get the services you need.
Everyone talks about how much a drain it is having to pay their own medical expenses. What they don't understand is that they will still have to pay it. The only difference will be if they have any choices in the matter. Most of the people I see who want government health care can afford it anyways. In actuality, there are very few people who don't have health care because they can't actually afford it. The poor is generally under some government program, the middle class can generally pay their own but often purchase a big screen TV or something instead. Most employers pay for some but it's simply not their responsibility. Employers never paid in the past, some large companies had medical facilities and company doctors but those were few and far in between. The idea of medical benefits from the employers didn't come around until the 50's or so when the Korean war kicked off and there was a shortage of workers in the US. Employers couldn't afford to pay more so they started offering benefits to attract productive workers. It's just not really the employers responsability to pay this shit. And this shit didn't get expensive until the HMO act when the government started getting involved in the first place.
Like I said, you don't know the effects of the close system. I just pointed to where removing all our emissions would acually cause an increase in heat build up. It's not as simply as saying quit putting that shit into the air. There is already shit in the air and if we stop pushing particulate matter in, we are going to change the climate even more and most likely for the worse.
We will take your toxic gas buildup argument and work from there. Let's say the gas buildup is 30 times normal. Now we can forget that normal will always be an arbitrary number and just focus on the so called normal. If 30 times the normal has 30 times the effect, and the effect is hampered by half because particulate matter is blocking the sunlight in the first place, then we are only realizing the effects of half or 15 times normal. If we stop emitting the particulate matter, we will effectivly have doubled the gas effects causing twice the amount of warming or more.
Look at it this way, you have a river that goes through a town. Every year it floods the town and someone ended up building a dam upstream to control the flooding. The dam holds back the bulk of the water and releases it in a controlled output when the weather is good so the town doesn't flood. But now the river has more water in it year round then it normally should. People realize this after a few years when it starts washing the bases for the bridges away and they have to rebuild them. Someone notices that there is a damn upstream that stops the town from being flooded and having to rebuild everything instead of just the bridges. Now, you seem to be the person who says Tear Down the Dam. It isn't natural and the river flow should be this arbitrary number despite that society has adapted to the other flow and built around it. So without ever looking at the volume of water on the other side, you decide to dynamite the dam which releases 200000 times the water that the river has ever seen and wipes out the entire town and every town down stream for 200 miles. Your dead too but died knowing "it's natural now".
You need to know what your actions will do before you do them. If this was simply you driving your car on a deserted road with no one else around, I couldn't give a fuck. But your essentially demanding the damn be torn down not understanding what it's doing or what is behind it. You are wanting to put everyone Else's life at risk because you have fallen into some blind following of irrational thinking. You need to understand what will happen before action.
And your not throwing your biased and unsupported ideas out at the moment too. Cherry picking, half truths, right to ignore the truth that can only be seen by the convinced, Yea, Your a bastion of pure truth there.
I didn't say anything about global warming, I said that you can't test it by Carbon alone as the parent attempted to claim. Your explanation is only part true too. So much for an honest discussion. Anyways, the oceans release Co2 when they warm up, in fact in the current warming models, they account for that specifically. Your right about the permafrost releasing Co2 and methane, but that only part of the picture. Other things that effect the permafrost and Oceanic release of Co2 the sun, volcanic activity, water currents which is indirectly controlled by the sun and a few other things.
Listen, I didn't state anything other then the effects of the tax based solutions. If you see that as a bad thing, then maybe you should examine these solutions in more detail and perhaps take an economics course taught by someone who isn't a true believer also.
Kyoto was nothing more then a redistribution of wealth, you can work it out with the math, a 30% reductions in emissions for all man made carbon releases over 20 years will be an increase in emissions once you figure population growth. The idea of mandating limits do two things, they either drive the costs of production so people can't afford it or they drive the production to places where the caps aren't in place. This is the entire idea behind Kyoto, is seen in all of European countries except Germany which has seen almost a negative population growth and had the benefit of accounting irregularities that moved their practical goals closer to their actual production levels. The rest of Europe has farmed it's emissions out to China and India, some in south America and it is the entire reason all these other countries signed Kyoto in the first place. Of the 168 some countries who signed onto it, only 38 or so have emissions caps at all, of the remaining, they stand to benefit from investment in off shoring the emissions. None of the political solutions so far introduced evade these facts and you cannot either.
As for the math, lets says there are 100 people and they emit 10 units of carbon each on average. That's 1000 units of carbon. If we decrease the emissions by 30% over 20 years, they will emit after the 20th year 300 units a year less or 700 units which is 7 units per person. Now, people like to fuck and with fucking there are babies which means the population increases. Generally the increase in population is between 1.5 and 3 percent a year depending on the place. At 1.5 percent a year over 20 years, we end up with roughly 134.5 people, or 34.5 more people. With 34.5 extra people emitting 7 units more a year that's 241.5 units of carbon making the 300 saved more like 58 units. If you go with the 3% growth per year, you end up with 180.5 people after 20 years or 80.5 more then you started with. Those 80 people will end up using or emitting 563 units of carbon making that 30% reduction inefficient to even cover the population's increased output based on growth. You are now 263 units above your original number before the 30 percent reduction.
Now that was just an exercise in extremes. the magical reality is going to be that population growth changes from year to year and country to country. Unless your a dictator like China, you can't force abortions onto people or tell them they can't reproduce. But what you can do is fund organizations like Planned Parenthood and various other groups who go into minority areas and convince them no to reproduce. What you can do is drive the cost of living up so much that people don't think they can afford having kids. O
The problem is that Co2 will rise and fall with the temperature whether it is a problem or not. Generally the Co2 levels trail the temperature shifts, Global warming and Climate change seem to say they are now forcing it.
There are tons of sources of Co2 that will be emitted or sequestered based solely around the temperature of the earth without ever getting into man made emissions.
Your also purposing a test that is practically impossible to do. You can't control Co2 emissions. Even the current so called solutions to it don't attempt to eliminate it, it attempts to tax the hell out of it so the products made are too expensive for people to purchase meaning less products get made and they attempt to push manufacturing off onto smaller less developed countries for various political reasons.
Well, First you have to make sure that the crap is actually crap. Then you have to look at what the crap is actually doing, not just what you think it is doing.
If someone flipped a switch tomorrow that magically stopped all Fossil Carbon emissions, we would be worse off then the are now. Particulate maters in the emissions offset a portion of the sun light by trapping it or reflecting it in the upper layers of the atmosphere. The effect is basically that is Carbon emissions are bad, it will get a lot worse when we stop because we are protected from a portion by the particle matter in the atmosphere.
When the majority of air traffic was stopped right after 9/11, the lack of those emissions were enough to measure both an increase in sunlight making to ground level and temps in those areas for that short period of time. Stopping the dumping of garbage can have a really bad effect if we don't understand what it is doing.
Bullshit. Baseball and apple pie is the American way but not liking apples or speaking out against the steroid use in Baseball isn't trashing America or the American way. In the same sense, speaking out against a province of a country that breaks the country's own laws is not speaking out against their culture. In order your statement to be close to being right, the french culture must be little more the arrogant asses who refuse to follow the rules and attempt to withhold government services from people that aren't just like them. I don't think that is true in any sense.
In name, it doesn't matter. The connection is there and that means you are simply wrong. As for Bill 101, every version that I can find, be it on wikipedia or through various law sites, include everything in the Charter of the French Language. Bill 101 is more then an advertising clause whether you like it or not.
You don't get it because you aren't paying attention to what I said. Your supposed to be able to get bilingual service in every government office but that wasn't the case when I needed to do so. Do you understand that the gripe is because they didn't do what they were supposed to do. The rules said one thing and someone pushed another on my- ignoring the rules. And yes, the federal rules do dictate to non-federal government offices. It's in the federal constitution and states that all citizens have that right when dealing with anything provided by the government. The original Charter of the French language has been modified numberous times because of constitutional challenges and some of those cases made it to the Canadian Supreme Court (Quebec (Attorney General) v. Blaikie, [1979] 2 S.C.R. 1016 is probably the most known one).
I did read the damn rules. The damn rules were followed by the damned government. Here is something else you won't do if you come to my home, you won't find that the laws and rules say one thing but everyone else does another and it stops you from participating in something your
When I was there, I got the run around for attempting to use English. I couldn't select where I went based on the majority or minority population either, I had certain things to do that needed to be done in certain places because of the details involved. I ended up having to call a guy connected to the Canadian federal government so he could call a guy who ended up putting pressure on the local offices to deal with me and then I suffered an extreme attitude for it. Eventually, I ended up having to hire a lawyer to do what normal people are supposed to be able to do and even he told me I should have been able to do it on my own.
As for the minorities and all that. I don't care how they are made up. I don't even care if it was "french only". What I care about is the rules being one thing and then having them be another in practice so you don't know what your supposed to do. If I had known it was French only because of the rules, I could have made arrangements from the start that would have saved a lot of time and money. But when the rules say one thing and they change them without notifying anyone, it creates a hassle that according to the law, I shouldn't had went through.
It probably would have been cheaper in the long run if I greased the palms of the bureaucrats but without knowing French, I couldn't even tell if they were hinting that they wanted that. You would think that if corruption was their goal, they would have at least came to my level so I could understand what they wanted.
Oh well, with any luck, I will never be in that position again.
Not according to the Canadian constitution and the sections on rights. Language is set in stone to be both English and French and your options, not the provinces. Now the province can make rules on who is entitled to the options like in education where one parent has to be a native English or french speaker or whatever. As for getting government services, it's either or at your option. They are obligated to the Constitution which glues the country together are they not?
Your not serious are you? You really think the Charter of the French Language and bill 101 are separate pieces? They aren't, they are the same thing. What your thinking of was the fist court challenge to bill 101 which dealt with the advertising requirements. Make no mistake, they are the same. And yes the constitution act guarantees bilingual services where Bill 101 or the "Charter of the French Language" as they are the same thing, only guarantees the right to french language except in specific cases. The problem I have is that Universal rules are/were being ignored and it directly effected me at one point in time. I don't care is french was the official language, I care that the rules of the damn country said I should have been able to conduct my business in English and I was railroaded by the government because I tried to do so.
BTW, I would make sure you know what your talking about before accusing someone else of being ignorant on the subject.
I don't care what hodgepodge setup you guys managed to mangle yourself in. Quebec is taking advantage of Treaties and other activities provided by the federal government of Canada and in doing so, they need to follow the rules. IF you want to split away, then do it. But don't create an environment where you pick and choose the best of both worlds. It screws others who don't know how anally retentive Quebec is. It's seriously like attempting to play a game and having one person changing the rules to their benefit during the game then claiming to have won by playing by the rules. Either give in or get out so everyone knows the rules and where they stand.
My post was to attack Quebec, not the french culture. It's Quebec that is pushing the french culture in inane ways with the government refusing to participate in English in many instances. I could care less about the french culture itself. What I care about is having the rules say one thing and then the government acting in a totally opposite way that ends up costing me money. And no, I'm not trying to push my culture anywhere, I'm simply trying to play by the rules that said English or French. Denying that right which is protected by the constitution doesn't mean I'm pushing anything, It means I'm objecting to having something else pushed on me.
I'm not Canadian but I had to do some business there back in 2002-2003. In Quebec, I was stonewalled and given the run around for not knowing French until I eventually made a complaint to my contacts in Montreal who contacted someone in Ottawa who then contacted the governments I was working with. I then got cooperation but it was one of those "only because I have to" confrontational situations. If a form needed another form, they wouldn't say a word and I ended up having to hire an attorney to get some simple things done that normal citizens were supposed to be able to do. I could fill out the forms in English but they wouldn't give any written in English and often provided the wrong forms just to give me the run around.
I don't think any part of Canada is supposed to work that way. We ended up cutting our business with Canada altogether after that. Or at least for the next 15 months I still worked on that project.
Perhaps I could have been more clear in my original presentation. Most of the time, when people take things the wrong way, I find it is because the original statement was not as clear as it should have been. I knew what I was talking about but it doesn't necessarily mean you or anyone else would have.
Anyways, we got that resolved and I look forward to reading your comments in the future. Had I actually said what you thought I did, your reply would have been spot on so don't take anything we discussed in a way that stops you from posting and participating.
Oh, they pay for it.
A lot of times, it's an older person who owns one (or part of one) of the companies I service and he normally has a secretary or people for the tasks he doing but wants to do something on his own or whatever. Cutting them off would probably end up dropping several companies with between 5 users up to 50 users which is in my target model. Of course the smaller companies aren't as profitable as the larger ones but they seem to keep me busy when the larger companies aren't. I sort of look at it like having to wine and dine the client or something along those lines except they get the bill.
And don't get me wrong, It's not all the time either. It's not even daily. It's more like once a month, every couple of weeks or something along those lines that I get a couple of calls like that. They just stick out so much and are so memorable.
I don't mind putting up with idiots, most of the time, we are having to deal with people that are less intelligent then ourselves, or at least how we see ourselves. I have a good way at dumbing down complex explanations of processes and making the customer understand the depth of the problem or the fix in terms that they can relate to. Most of the time they are paying me good money and need to feel secure in that they are getting something for it. I never considered myself a people person either but I'm starting to wonder now.
I'm purely outside support so I guess we are dealing with entirely different types of people.
Anyways, I was curious is you had those types of people and what they thought about it but it looks like I read in between the lines and assumed something that wasn't.
Assuming that your still in civics class, ask your teacher what Article 20 (or was it 22, I can't be bothered to check right now) of the Canadian federal constitution says about that. Especially along the lines of Bilingual access to government, services provided by the government, education, health and so on.
When you finish your course, we can talk.
The federal constitution provides that French and English is the official language and each Canadian has the RIGHT to address their government or any services it offers in either. Read it yourself, it's article 20, Bill 101 and their implementation runs a foul of that.
While pointing to key words in articles is nice for you and all, how does the customers like that?
I know several customer I have who I personally think just get lonely and want to talk to someone for $85 an hour. They call and ask stupid questions like How do I find a file I saved in the "My Documents" folder because word opens to his last saved directory or something. I have one guy who calls about every three to four weeks asking me what his password is for Quick books. I usually have to tell him to look on his monitor right by the note that says read this before calling me. There is another who keeps asking why he gets all these popups all the time, they are Vista's notifications like A virus scan has started and so on. There are a few more idiots like the girl running an accounting service from her home who saw the file server "just sitting there" and donated it to her church because they needed a computer then wondered why she couldn't access anything. It was a pretty nice file server too for a one man operation, a raid 5 setup with an external tape backup that has a 7 slot robot changer (I picked up second hand for about $200 because she never backed up or changed tapes) and VPN into my network for off site backups. The day she complained she could get any work done, the church called and asked for the passwords to get into the computer which I headed off with "a mistake has been made".
Most people who can't search for an existing document with an existing solution are the people who need hand holding anyways. I don't think it is too much of a problem if they are willing to pay for it and most of them are. Maybe I'm just an Idiot magnet but for some people, the personal service is what they want in customer service.
A note about the Quick books password, This is on a home system with just him and his wife present, no account numbers that correspond to anything in real life and keeps track of his charitable donations so he can report them to his accountant. I know sticky notes with passwords aren't a good thing, but there really isn't anything sensitive in it. The only reason he has a password on the file is because someone told him it was a good idea. That's also why he has a yahoo mail account, a Gmail account, and a hot mail account that he can never access because he forgets where the page you log in from is. I think he's loosing his mind (Alzheimer or something) but amassed a small fortune during his working years and doesn't like feeling useless.
Actually, yes they do when you are there. Quebec is different from the rest of Canada and even institutes mandates differently. There are a group of separatist in Quebec that attempt to make it as different from Canada as possible. Take bill 101 for instance. The British parliament created a rule for minority education in different languages so Quebec made French the "official language" and refused to allow English or any other version until it was challenged in the Canadian supreme court.
To this day, Quebec attempts to lock out English or other language speaking people even though the Bilingual act forbids it. If you attempt to do business with the Quebec government in any other language, you will get railroaded until you complain to Montreal and then you still don't get normal cooperation. At least that's the way it was in 2002-2003 when I last did business there.
Quebec, contrary to their fucked up ideas, are a province of Canada which has it's own rules that Quebec needs to follow too. It isn't that they have their own rules that is the problem, it's that they are in some cases ignoring the country's rules that are the problem. If something is a national law (and by national, I mean Canadian) then Quebec is supposed to be in compliance with it. Bill 101 is clearly in violation with federal constitution's bill of rights section 20. Bill 101 is the most obvious case and there are more.
Again, the problem isn't that they have their own ways, it's that their own ways conflict with the country's ways thereby pushing it on you. The option to move to another state or province because one is being hostile to the country's laws and constitution is absurd to say the least. If California all the sudden said English only or Spanish only, or arbitrarily decided that the 16th amendment need not apply, the rest of the US would be outraged and make the stop. Why Canada puts up with it, I will never know. Probably because too many people said if you don't like it, leave and they did.
From my understanding, the guy didn't object to the search of the device and cooperated with the border agents until they requested him to log in so they could see the files. That's a little more then agreeing that it is your property or am I missing something?
A nation is pretty much little more then a group of people with similar qualities. It's not a legal right in any way. A nation is also subject to interpretation as it is being used. Take the nation of Islam for instance or the nation of the US. Members of both can be members of both because they talk or separate common grounds. A club of Chess players can be a nation once it's members reach a certain size but it doesn't give them any legal status.
Following the historical culture of a nation doesn't remove it's obligations to the country it is part of. And your right, it doesn't entitle them to enforce that onto others but it's what they try to do. It's why so many other people don't like them, even Canadians from different provinces don't like them for that reason.