At some point you're going to have to post how you really feel, because sarcasm doesn't work well all the time in written form. Some people are going to start thinking you're actually believe what you're writing. Just saying. (it really shouldn't be that way, but in this day in age there's a lot of incredibly stupid people out there)
Well, if I don't really care what people think I think, and my goal is to influence how they think or behave, what is the most effective action?
My experience is that saying "I disagree with you, and here is why I think you are wrong" seems to cause people to ignore everything after "I disagree with your". Today I have trying out saying "I agree with you, and here are some pretty stupid reasons why I agree that maybe point out some major flaws in your position". Maybe (wishful thinking) that will lead some to more deeply examine their positions.
Unfortunately, I suspect that even the wildest exaggerations and most biting satire is unrecognized by a significant fraction of those that it is targeted.
Hopefully my feeling that 99% of the world has gone down the tubes is an artifact of global communication advances and human psychology and that things were not REALLY better back in the day, but that it always feels like things used to be gooder than now.
Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to faceless corporate overlords to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
are you a virtual slave to your employer because if you loose health insurance your self or one you love will surely die? Because thats the norm here for people approaching retirement.
Anyone who is not willing to quit their job and move across the country to find work in a new field that maybe offers better health care coverage really just hates America. They are the problem with the US health care system! Not the insurance companies! Not the employers!
I am not certain if you are poe-ing us or what. Here is an example that runs counter to your argument. My wife's boss has a blood clotting problem. His wife had a breast cancer issue, totally cured now.
His health insurance company wanted to drop him badly. To the point of charging him somewhere between 30 - 40 thousand a year. He tried to get insurance elsewhere. The answer was always no.
He was stuck. Had he been an employee, moving to another company would have left him completely unable to get insurance. Forced immobility, and at the mercy of the insurance company, and if an employee, employment
That sucks. I really mean that.
Clearly the result of governmental meddling in the free market. Good thing we don't have socialized medicine for all. Any attempts to increase the fraction of the population covered by the socialized medicine we do have are just an attempt by the elite to take our freedoms and ruin the country - don't fall for it.
Your doctor decides what is needed, and what is a priority. Co-worker went in to the Clinic for neck pain. They took an MRI. Within 30min, they had him at an ER Surgical room, going in for emergency spinal surgery.
Good outcomes. But at some point, someone decides how much to pay doctors, where to build hospitals, and what procedures will be financed. It is important that those decisions rest with private, for-profit entities because public ones are evil because of reasons.
You don't even seem to have understood the meaning of the words even as far in as, "pros and cons."
Yeah, my usage of the double meaning of "con" as in "disadvantage" in addition to the noun form of "an instance of deceiving or tricking someone" was a bit subtle. Good thing I didn't try to also employ "con" in the verb form and instead stuck with "scam". That sort of word-play has no place in serious discussion of societal issues.
Also, I left it to the reader to decide how sarcastic I was being. A bit of a literary rorschach test. Very prone to confusion.
My understanding was for music at least, when Apple has lost distribution rights, any downloads you had made were retained, you just were no longer able to download it again. Has this changed or is it different for movies?
Or is this something to do with the DRM for movies compared to how Apple does not have DRM on audio files?
Looking in my files, it seems like the only movies I have "purchased" from Apple are ones that were not available as rentals when we wanted to watch them - the purchase price was low enough to justify an evening's entertainment for the family, so we have basically treated them as a rental. If I wanted to really "own" them, I would make sure I had copies downloaded into our digital archives.
are you a virtual slave to your employer because if you loose health insurance your self or one you love will surely die? Because thats the norm here for people approaching retirement.
Anyone who is not willing to quit their job and move across the country to find work in a new field that maybe offers better health care coverage really just hates America. They are the problem with the US health care system! Not the insurance companies! Not the employers!
Please, do not introduce logic to this thread...it in will not be tolerated. You should also be ashamed for pointing out the cons of socialized medicine...only the pros should be so smokey the emphasized...there must be some...
There are no pros! There are only cons!
And the biggest con is that virtually every industrialized country has bought into the con of socialized medicine! What a bunch of idiots! Anyone who tries to tell you things like "yeah, different systems have challenges, but most people in most places have come to the conclusion that universal health care is the way to go" are just running part of the scam! Don't listen to them!
Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to elected officials to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
Whoops, bad pick! My US geography and knowledge of where the big gun murder places are is not so great. I figured if I just went down the state list and picked something a few down the list it would show that absent the top eight cities the US still had a pretty high gun murder rate.
So lets get extreme. You said "Remove small geographical areas in just 6-8 of our largest cities and the US homicide rate drops to one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the world."
Yet, the linked Wikipedia statistics show Canada has a gun homicide rate of 0.61 deaths per 100,000 (with overall gun deaths of 2.05 per 100,000) while the UK has a gun homicide rate of 0.06 deaths per 100,000 (with overall gun deaths of 0.23 per 100,000), and Canada is pretty high on the list, there are a lot that have lower rates (the UK does seem to have among the lowest rates).
Out of all the sates, only four (and Florida has no data listed) seem to have gun homicide rates lower than Canada, and none are lower than the UK. How would omitting the 8 worst cities manage to drop the statistics in more than forty states? It doesn't seem like omitting these areas would drop the country average to "one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the world."
When I do some simple web searched to look for data supporting your statements, I mostly come up with articles that seems to broadly counter it - for example this seems to indicate the gangs make up somewhere between 10 and 25% of gun deaths https://www.huffingtonpost.com... according to data from the federal National Gang Center and this https://www.vox.com/policy-and... has similar information.
If you have a reference that supports your statement that removing "small geographical areas in just 6-8 of our largest cities" makes a huge difference in the US ranking in country homicide rates, I would be interested to see it, because it doesn't match up with how I interpret the data that I have seen.
Of course, my data might be total crap and maybe the US is unique among developed countries with all of the bad stuff able to be blamed on those inner city gang bangers. If other places also had similar percentages of their bad stuff being done by the gangs, then absent the gangs, their numbers would drop too.
Remove small geographical areas in just 6-8 of our largest cities and the US homicide rate drops to one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the world. That's the fact hidden, and purposely ignored by gun grabbers, in the average homicide rate folks like to trot out. Those of us who live outside of those few dozen square miles of the US don't want, or need, any of the idiotic gun control laws that routinely get trotted out as "solutions" to gun related homicide. Drug gang violence is what you should start looking at if you want to solve the vast majority of our gun homicide problem. But then you would have to actually want to solve the violence problem, not just use an out of context statistic as justification to take peoples guns away.
Really? Outside of the top eight cities the homicide rate is low in the USA?
To pick a place without a big city, Missouri seems to have a gun homicide rate of about 6.9 per 100,000 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh, that was all homicides. If we want gun deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which gives Canada a rate of 2.1 and the UK a rate of 0.23 for 100,000 Wow, time to move to the UK if you worry about being shot!
The law changed in Canada. Private health care (outside the system) is now legal.
Because it's a human right to spend money on health care, rather than just dying while waiting for the 'free' version.
Canadian courts have acknowledged that their health care system is _killing_ people with delays. You should too.
I don't know where you are getting this type of information, but it doesn't match the reality "on the street" north of the US Canada border.
I can't find any references to the courts acknowledging such things. Is there data that the US health care system has fewer deaths-per-capita due to people not receiving required treatment? My understanding was that there were significant number of people with no coverage for serious conditions (cancer, heart, etc.) - do none of them die?
Anyhow, surveys of the population show great support for the publicly funded medical system, warts and all, in comparison to private medical systems.
"And I wouldn't argue that we always need the most outstanding outcome possible, but I think there's an argument to be made that you shouldn't just muddle your way through life, doing the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes."
Why not? Isn't that a moral argument?
I'm being a bit extreme, but I think it is important to examine the underlying assumptions when making judgements about others.
Fred is a happy person, and feels he has a fulfilling life. Fred does the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes. Why should we as a society piss on Fred for not achieving more? Sure - incentivize "excellence", but implying that Fred has a "problem" when in fact it is the rest of us who have the "problem" (one of perspective) I think is a bit of a stretch. Give Fred a break.
Good point. That was one of the things mentioned by the author in a radio interview - the way we joke about procrastination, and equate it with moral failings.
Sure, leaving things until late can be a reason the job done is done poorly, and that should be addressed. However the the starting point should to evaluate the outcome and then if the outcome is poor figure out why - there are lots of poor outcomes that are not the result of leaving things until later, and focusing just on procrastination may have little or no bearing on the quality of the outcome.
Anyhow - I hear the author of the Psychology Today article promoting her book in a radio interview a few months ago and it seemed like an interesting observation - namely that procrastination gets a whole lot of negative attention, sort of like being lefthanded once did, and that it is not generally helpful and may in fact be harmful.
This was an interesting article on how most discussions of procrastination stigmatize the action of putting tasks off, even in cases where doing so causes no harm. Studies seem to indicate that a large fraction of the population "procrastinates" while still successfully completing tasks. These people may have no problems with their lives beyond the stress of people who want them to do things sooner because those people can't stand to see people work at the last minute. Treating all procrastinators as if they "have a problem" probably causes more harm than it prevents.
students using their devices to play games, check and read their social media, watch movies listen to music, generally not paying any attention in class have lower grades! Wow what a discovery! Next they will figure out sleeping through classes or not showing up does the same thing!
Wonder what the cost for this earth shattering research project was.
I have not taken a look at this particular study (I couldn't get to it through a couple of clicks, and I am lazy), but I doubt that it is as cut and dried as you imply.
This type of study is hard to do well. Questions that are of interest might be: "How much do students use their devices to do non-educational stuff while in the classroom?", "How large of an impact is it?", "Are there effects on other students in the vicinity who are not using a device?", "How does it influence the instructor?", "Are there positive effects for some students?".
Controlling for confounding effects in human studies can be extremely difficult. In this case they did the study over one semester, with half the lectures (A) banning devices, and half the lectures (B) allowing devices. What if in that semester, Rutgers had a "quiz bowl" team that because of scheduling, made a half dozen super-students schedules limited in such a way that they were all in the A group? Would that skew the results? Were the lectures delivered the same in A and B? Was the lighting in one different than the other? Does time of day mess up your results, either because that causes your students to be different due to other course scheduling or because people learn differently at different times of day.
Toronto offsets property taxes, because the provincial government gives them the different out of the general revenue funds. That means if you live in a normal burb of Toronto, your property taxes might be say $5400/year on a $1m/house. While the same house in London, Ontario would cost you $9k-10k/year in property taxes.
By "the same house" do you mean a $1m/house in London (which clearly is not the "same" as a $1m/house in Toronto) or do you mean a physically similar house? The average price for a home in London seems to be $343,939 while in Toronto it looks like it is not quite three times the price. Thus if Toronto has a property tax rate of about one half the property tax rate in London, I could see one arguing that Toronto home owners are paying MORE than similar home owners in London.
These London homes look much fancier than these Toronto homes:
I had forgotten how much responsibilities the "municipalities" got downloaded on back in the early 2000s - I think you are right that much of the "provincial" infrastructure is probably already there.
As for the difficulty of political representation - it certainly is a tough problem to solve . If half you population is concentrated in one region, there is some logic in putting a whole lot of your resources and services in that region, but then again it is important to give everyone else reasonable access to all those services too. Putting the province's only cancer hospital up in Kenora wouldn't make much sense, but having all of the "only one in the province" services in Toronto doesn't make much sense either.
If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.
Likely richer, more taxes go into Toronto then they payout, because provincial taxes offset Toronto's lower property taxes. Those are offset by the ontario general revenue fund. The rest of the province is farming and industry, depending on the year they make up between 50-70% of the GDP of the province.
Thanks, you clearly have a better handle on provincial finances than myself.
"Toronto's lower property taxes"? Lower how?
Does Toronto have lower "tax dollars per square foot", or "tax dollars per resident", or "tax percentage of assessed value", or some other metric?
Clearly if more of the provincial GDP is generated outside of the GTA than inside, in the long term the GTA is a "net drain" on the province, but the tax system does not always directly match the GDP distribution across a region, particularly when the tax revenue comes from a variety of different systems (property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, etc.).
Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.
The reality is, in Canada it wouldn't matter. If Toronto became a new province and the rest of Ontario came up short on income it would be offset. Canada has a monetary policy called "country equalization" meaning areas that generate more money, pay for the services of the poorer parts of the country. So when Ontario was rolling in manufacturing jobs for the better part of 80 years, they paid the offset of nearly the rest of the country besides Alberta. When Alberta was rolling in so much money back during the oil price spike, they did the same.
The worst, I mean best is that we'd see a significant drop in the amount of bureaucracy in the province. Depending on the numbers by whatever company looks it up. Between 17% and 30% of the province(depending on year) is directly employed by the province itself. That's a lot of people.
I suspect that splitting the province would see an increase in people employed by the two new provinces compared to the one old province. We could divide some of the existing departments between the two new provinces, but some positions would need to be filled with new people (the current person who decides on the menu for the provincial legislature lunch cafeteria would probably not work for both new provincial legislature cafeterias, even if each new cafeteria can get by with half as many cooks, for example). Maybe one of the new provinces would have a "leaner" bureaucracy than the old one had due to differences between the size of bureaucracy needed for the different economic structures of the two provinces (maybe farming bureaucracy is more or less labour intensive than banking bureaucracy), but I can't see how dividing a region would produce overall efficiencies. Usually people talk about economies gained by scaling up rather than down.
People are so angry that when a person running for I think it was mayor or counselor claimed that Toronto should be it's own province, people started cheering for it. Oh it wasn't the people in Toronto, they have this idea that us rednecks will starve to death without them. It was rural, and rural-urban voters who were cheering this idea on, after nearly a generation of being literally fucked over by a single city getting all the money they wanted because it's such a gigantic voting block.
If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.
Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.
More likely it was "The program didn't have the intended effect of getting more people on benefits to take on part time work or start their own businesses, so we shut it down" or something along those lines.
That at least would make some sense. But if you were a "making sense" type of person you would probably not kill a pilot program that only had about 4,000 participants only a year and a bit into its three year scheduled trial, because then you wouldn't really be able to draw very reliable conclusions about the actual impact of the program.
Killing the program at this point seems more like: "We are philosophically opposed to the entire notion and we don't have any interest in the potential that the results of the trial might be counter to our expectations, thus it is a waste of resources."
I personally was not very fond of the Ontario program, as it did not really seem to me like a very good trail of a basic income system, but it does seem pretty stupid to kill it off before we could get useful info from it.
The fact that all the Ontario political parties said they would finish the trial when it was first implemented, and that the winner of the recent election pledged to keep the pilot running during the election makes this decision a little extra irritating. Saying "we are going to kill this program and our new program will be great" rather than waiting until the new program was read to be released also seems a bit wonky.
This article from February https://www.thestar.com/news/g... seems mostly positive, but really one can't draw any strong conclusions until all the data is in.
I don't know the law / regulations in the UK, but in Canada a will does not automatically require Probate. Examples: You name an executor, and are unmarried and died with no debt, or all your property (and it's debt) is bequeathed to a spouse.
Who's spouse? According to the example, "you" are unmarried.
My wife had a student (actually their spouse) who did the opposite, getting on the plane in Africa at about +40 and arriving in Toronto at -40. He ended up deluding himself that winter was a fabulous wonder and took up skating and had his newborn signed up for hockey teams as soon as he could walk.
Thanks for sharing. I don't know that there is much "karma served" - but these sorts of discussions can provide some interesting perspective.
As the product of a fairly similar "Commonwealth Colonial" legacy in Canada and the Northern US, I usually manage to convince myself that most of my life choices are the product of rational thoughts and decisions, rather than emotion and clever self justification of whatever my lizard-brain instincts have decided it wants or whatever the random history of my self, family, or culture have lead me to. Sometimes that might even be true!
Right now, I live only a few hours from Ottawa, which I believe has the largest annual temperature difference of any capital city in the world (I think they might have hit 40 last week, and -40 is not totally unheard of - we tell ourselves that it is a "dry cold" that ain't so bad. Maybe, but the high humidity hot is pretty unpleasant.) Currently I am visiting my "hometown" on the coast in Vancouver which had "pre-contact" cultures on the coast with such "easy living" at least in terms of food resources, that people gave extreme gifts or even destroyed wealth to demonstrate social status - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It is thought of as a bit rainy for many people though, so not the Pacific Paradise that the Polynesians prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point you're going to have to post how you really feel, because sarcasm doesn't work well all the time in written form. Some people are going to start thinking you're actually believe what you're writing. Just saying. (it really shouldn't be that way, but in this day in age there's a lot of incredibly stupid people out there)
Well, if I don't really care what people think I think, and my goal is to influence how they think or behave, what is the most effective action?
My experience is that saying "I disagree with you, and here is why I think you are wrong" seems to cause people to ignore everything after "I disagree with your". Today I have trying out saying "I agree with you, and here are some pretty stupid reasons why I agree that maybe point out some major flaws in your position". Maybe (wishful thinking) that will lead some to more deeply examine their positions.
Unfortunately, I suspect that even the wildest exaggerations and most biting satire is unrecognized by a significant fraction of those that it is targeted.
Hopefully my feeling that 99% of the world has gone down the tubes is an artifact of global communication advances and human psychology and that things were not REALLY better back in the day, but that it always feels like things used to be gooder than now.
Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to faceless corporate overlords to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
Fixed that for you... :(
Well there is that....
are you a virtual slave to your employer because if you loose health insurance your self or one you love will surely die? Because thats the norm here for people approaching retirement.
Anyone who is not willing to quit their job and move across the country to find work in a new field that maybe offers better health care coverage really just hates America. They are the problem with the US health care system! Not the insurance companies! Not the employers!
I am not certain if you are poe-ing us or what. Here is an example that runs counter to your argument. My wife's boss has a blood clotting problem. His wife had a breast cancer issue, totally cured now.
His health insurance company wanted to drop him badly. To the point of charging him somewhere between 30 - 40 thousand a year. He tried to get insurance elsewhere. The answer was always no.
He was stuck. Had he been an employee, moving to another company would have left him completely unable to get insurance. Forced immobility, and at the mercy of the insurance company, and if an employee, employment
That sucks. I really mean that.
Clearly the result of governmental meddling in the free market. Good thing we don't have socialized medicine for all. Any attempts to increase the fraction of the population covered by the socialized medicine we do have are just an attempt by the elite to take our freedoms and ruin the country - don't fall for it.
Just to be clear: I don't really mean that.
Your doctor decides what is needed, and what is a priority.
Co-worker went in to the Clinic for neck pain.
They took an MRI.
Within 30min, they had him at an ER Surgical room, going in for emergency spinal surgery.
Good outcomes. But at some point, someone decides how much to pay doctors, where to build hospitals, and what procedures will be financed. It is important that those decisions rest with private, for-profit entities because public ones are evil because of reasons.
You don't even seem to have understood the meaning of the words even as far in as, "pros and cons."
Yeah, my usage of the double meaning of "con" as in "disadvantage" in addition to the noun form of "an instance of deceiving or tricking someone" was a bit subtle. Good thing I didn't try to also employ "con" in the verb form and instead stuck with "scam". That sort of word-play has no place in serious discussion of societal issues.
Also, I left it to the reader to decide how sarcastic I was being. A bit of a literary rorschach test. Very prone to confusion.
If you read the article...
Now why would I do that? :-)
My understanding was for music at least, when Apple has lost distribution rights, any downloads you had made were retained, you just were no longer able to download it again. Has this changed or is it different for movies?
Or is this something to do with the DRM for movies compared to how Apple does not have DRM on audio files?
Looking in my files, it seems like the only movies I have "purchased" from Apple are ones that were not available as rentals when we wanted to watch them - the purchase price was low enough to justify an evening's entertainment for the family, so we have basically treated them as a rental. If I wanted to really "own" them, I would make sure I had copies downloaded into our digital archives.
are you a virtual slave to your employer because if you loose health insurance your self or one you love will surely die? Because thats the norm here for people approaching retirement.
Anyone who is not willing to quit their job and move across the country to find work in a new field that maybe offers better health care coverage really just hates America. They are the problem with the US health care system! Not the insurance companies! Not the employers!
Please, do not introduce logic to this thread...it in will not be tolerated. You should also be ashamed for pointing out the cons of socialized medicine...only the pros should be so smokey the emphasized...there must be some...
There are no pros! There are only cons!
And the biggest con is that virtually every industrialized country has bought into the con of socialized medicine! What a bunch of idiots! Anyone who tries to tell you things like "yeah, different systems have challenges, but most people in most places have come to the conclusion that universal health care is the way to go" are just running part of the scam! Don't listen to them!
LOL!
Who decides what is "needed"?
Who decides what is a, "priority"?
Do they just give you a pill and send you home?
Yeah! We don't want a faceless government bureaucracy ultimately beholden to elected officials to set health policy! We want all our healthcare decisions to be made by a faceless corporate bureaucracy ultimately beholden to shareholders! Clearly that is the one true path to success!
Whoops, bad pick! My US geography and knowledge of where the big gun murder places are is not so great. I figured if I just went down the state list and picked something a few down the list it would show that absent the top eight cities the US still had a pretty high gun murder rate.
So lets get extreme. You said "Remove small geographical areas in just 6-8 of our largest cities and the US homicide rate drops to one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the world."
Yet, the linked Wikipedia statistics show Canada has a gun homicide rate of 0.61 deaths per 100,000 (with overall gun deaths of 2.05 per 100,000) while the UK has a gun homicide rate of 0.06 deaths per 100,000 (with overall gun deaths of 0.23 per 100,000), and Canada is pretty high on the list, there are a lot that have lower rates (the UK does seem to have among the lowest rates).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Out of all the sates, only four (and Florida has no data listed) seem to have gun homicide rates lower than Canada, and none are lower than the UK. How would omitting the 8 worst cities manage to drop the statistics in more than forty states? It doesn't seem like omitting these areas would drop the country average to "one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the world."
When I do some simple web searched to look for data supporting your statements, I mostly come up with articles that seems to broadly counter it - for example this seems to indicate the gangs make up somewhere between 10 and 25% of gun deaths https://www.huffingtonpost.com... according to data from the federal National Gang Center and this https://www.vox.com/policy-and... has similar information.
If you have a reference that supports your statement that removing "small geographical areas in just 6-8 of our largest cities" makes a huge difference in the US ranking in country homicide rates, I would be interested to see it, because it doesn't match up with how I interpret the data that I have seen.
Of course, my data might be total crap and maybe the US is unique among developed countries with all of the bad stuff able to be blamed on those inner city gang bangers. If other places also had similar percentages of their bad stuff being done by the gangs, then absent the gangs, their numbers would drop too.
Remove small geographical areas in just 6-8 of our largest cities and the US homicide rate drops to one of the lowest, if not the lowest, in the world. That's the fact hidden, and purposely ignored by gun grabbers, in the average homicide rate folks like to trot out. Those of us who live outside of those few dozen square miles of the US don't want, or need, any of the idiotic gun control laws that routinely get trotted out as "solutions" to gun related homicide. Drug gang violence is what you should start looking at if you want to solve the vast majority of our gun homicide problem. But then you would have to actually want to solve the violence problem, not just use an out of context statistic as justification to take peoples guns away.
Really? Outside of the top eight cities the homicide rate is low in the USA?
To pick a place without a big city, Missouri seems to have a gun homicide rate of about 6.9 per 100,000 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That is multiple times the UK or Canadian rate according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Oh, that was all homicides. If we want gun deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which gives Canada a rate of 2.1 and the UK a rate of 0.23 for 100,000 Wow, time to move to the UK if you worry about being shot!
The law changed in Canada. Private health care (outside the system) is now legal.
Because it's a human right to spend money on health care, rather than just dying while waiting for the 'free' version.
Canadian courts have acknowledged that their health care system is _killing_ people with delays. You should too.
I don't know where you are getting this type of information, but it doesn't match the reality "on the street" north of the US Canada border.
I can't find any references to the courts acknowledging such things. Is there data that the US health care system has fewer deaths-per-capita due to people not receiving required treatment? My understanding was that there were significant number of people with no coverage for serious conditions (cancer, heart, etc.) - do none of them die?
Anyhow, surveys of the population show great support for the publicly funded medical system, warts and all, in comparison to private medical systems.
"And I wouldn't argue that we always need the most outstanding outcome possible, but I think there's an argument to be made that you shouldn't just muddle your way through life, doing the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes."
Why not? Isn't that a moral argument?
I'm being a bit extreme, but I think it is important to examine the underlying assumptions when making judgements about others.
Fred is a happy person, and feels he has a fulfilling life. Fred does the bare minimum to accomplish acceptable outcomes. Why should we as a society piss on Fred for not achieving more? Sure - incentivize "excellence", but implying that Fred has a "problem" when in fact it is the rest of us who have the "problem" (one of perspective) I think is a bit of a stretch. Give Fred a break.
but I'll post it later.
Good point. That was one of the things mentioned by the author in a radio interview - the way we joke about procrastination, and equate it with moral failings.
Sure, leaving things until late can be a reason the job done is done poorly, and that should be addressed. However the the starting point should to evaluate the outcome and then if the outcome is poor figure out why - there are lots of poor outcomes that are not the result of leaving things until later, and focusing just on procrastination may have little or no bearing on the quality of the outcome.
Anyhow - I hear the author of the Psychology Today article promoting her book in a radio interview a few months ago and it seemed like an interesting observation - namely that procrastination gets a whole lot of negative attention, sort of like being lefthanded once did, and that it is not generally helpful and may in fact be harmful.
This was an interesting article on how most discussions of procrastination stigmatize the action of putting tasks off, even in cases where doing so causes no harm. Studies seem to indicate that a large fraction of the population "procrastinates" while still successfully completing tasks. These people may have no problems with their lives beyond the stress of people who want them to do things sooner because those people can't stand to see people work at the last minute. Treating all procrastinators as if they "have a problem" probably causes more harm than it prevents.
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
students using their devices to play games, check and read their social media, watch movies listen to music, generally not paying any attention in class have lower grades! Wow what a discovery!
Next they will figure out sleeping through classes or not showing up does the same thing!
Wonder what the cost for this earth shattering research project was.
I have not taken a look at this particular study (I couldn't get to it through a couple of clicks, and I am lazy), but I doubt that it is as cut and dried as you imply.
This type of study is hard to do well. Questions that are of interest might be: "How much do students use their devices to do non-educational stuff while in the classroom?", "How large of an impact is it?", "Are there effects on other students in the vicinity who are not using a device?", "How does it influence the instructor?", "Are there positive effects for some students?".
Controlling for confounding effects in human studies can be extremely difficult. In this case they did the study over one semester, with half the lectures (A) banning devices, and half the lectures (B) allowing devices. What if in that semester, Rutgers had a "quiz bowl" team that because of scheduling, made a half dozen super-students schedules limited in such a way that they were all in the A group? Would that skew the results? Were the lectures delivered the same in A and B? Was the lighting in one different than the other? Does time of day mess up your results, either because that causes your students to be different due to other course scheduling or because people learn differently at different times of day.
Toronto offsets property taxes, because the provincial government gives them the different out of the general revenue funds. That means if you live in a normal burb of Toronto, your property taxes might be say $5400/year on a $1m/house. While the same house in London, Ontario would cost you $9k-10k/year in property taxes.
By "the same house" do you mean a $1m/house in London (which clearly is not the "same" as a $1m/house in Toronto) or do you mean a physically similar house? The average price for a home in London seems to be $343,939 while in Toronto it looks like it is not quite three times the price. Thus if Toronto has a property tax rate of about one half the property tax rate in London, I could see one arguing that Toronto home owners are paying MORE than similar home owners in London.
These London homes look much fancier than these Toronto homes:
https://www.homesinlondonontar...
https://www.kijiji.ca/b-house-...
I had forgotten how much responsibilities the "municipalities" got downloaded on back in the early 2000s - I think you are right that much of the "provincial" infrastructure is probably already there.
As for the difficulty of political representation - it certainly is a tough problem to solve . If half you population is concentrated in one region, there is some logic in putting a whole lot of your resources and services in that region, but then again it is important to give everyone else reasonable access to all those services too. Putting the province's only cancer hospital up in Kenora wouldn't make much sense, but having all of the "only one in the province" services in Toronto doesn't make much sense either.
If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.
Likely richer, more taxes go into Toronto then they payout, because provincial taxes offset Toronto's lower property taxes. Those are offset by the ontario general revenue fund. The rest of the province is farming and industry, depending on the year they make up between 50-70% of the GDP of the province.
Thanks, you clearly have a better handle on provincial finances than myself.
"Toronto's lower property taxes"? Lower how?
Does Toronto have lower "tax dollars per square foot", or "tax dollars per resident", or "tax percentage of assessed value", or some other metric?
Clearly if more of the provincial GDP is generated outside of the GTA than inside, in the long term the GTA is a "net drain" on the province, but the tax system does not always directly match the GDP distribution across a region, particularly when the tax revenue comes from a variety of different systems (property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes, etc.).
Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.
The reality is, in Canada it wouldn't matter. If Toronto became a new province and the rest of Ontario came up short on income it would be offset. Canada has a monetary policy called "country equalization" meaning areas that generate more money, pay for the services of the poorer parts of the country. So when Ontario was rolling in manufacturing jobs for the better part of 80 years, they paid the offset of nearly the rest of the country besides Alberta. When Alberta was rolling in so much money back during the oil price spike, they did the same.
The worst, I mean best is that we'd see a significant drop in the amount of bureaucracy in the province. Depending on the numbers by whatever company looks it up. Between 17% and 30% of the province(depending on year) is directly employed by the province itself. That's a lot of people.
I suspect that splitting the province would see an increase in people employed by the two new provinces compared to the one old province. We could divide some of the existing departments between the two new provinces, but some positions would need to be filled with new people (the current person who decides on the menu for the provincial legislature lunch cafeteria would probably not work for both new provincial legislature cafeterias, even if each new cafeteria can get by with half as many cooks, for example). Maybe one of the new provinces would have a "leaner" bureaucracy than the old one had due to differences between the size of bureaucracy needed for the different economic structures of the two provinces (maybe farming bureaucracy is more or less labour intensive than banking bureaucracy), but I can't see how dividing a region would produce overall efficiencies. Usually people talk about economies gained by scaling up rather than down.
People are so angry that when a person running for I think it was mayor or counselor claimed that Toronto should be it's own province, people started cheering for it. Oh it wasn't the people in Toronto, they have this idea that us rednecks will starve to death without them. It was rural, and rural-urban voters who were cheering this idea on, after nearly a generation of being literally fucked over by a single city getting all the money they wanted because it's such a gigantic voting block.
If Ontario lost Toronto (or more likely the whole GTA, no?) would the province be richer or poorer? How much provincial tax revenue comes from the GTA and how much provincial government spending goes on in the GTA? With about half of the province's population in the GTA I would not be surprised to find that the GTA is "gives more than it gets". Even just Toronto has about one fifth of the province's population.
Politically the rest of the province would probably love to get rid of the voting power of half the population, but it seems unlikely that it would be a very good economic change for anyone outside the GTA.
More likely it was "The program didn't have the intended effect of getting more people on benefits to take on part time work or start their own businesses, so we shut it down" or something along those lines.
That at least would make some sense. But if you were a "making sense" type of person you would probably not kill a pilot program that only had about 4,000 participants only a year and a bit into its three year scheduled trial, because then you wouldn't really be able to draw very reliable conclusions about the actual impact of the program.
Killing the program at this point seems more like: "We are philosophically opposed to the entire notion and we don't have any interest in the potential that the results of the trial might be counter to our expectations, thus it is a waste of resources."
I personally was not very fond of the Ontario program, as it did not really seem to me like a very good trail of a basic income system, but it does seem pretty stupid to kill it off before we could get useful info from it.
The fact that all the Ontario political parties said they would finish the trial when it was first implemented, and that the winner of the recent election pledged to keep the pilot running during the election makes this decision a little extra irritating. Saying "we are going to kill this program and our new program will be great" rather than waiting until the new program was read to be released also seems a bit wonky.
This article from February https://www.thestar.com/news/g... seems mostly positive, but really one can't draw any strong conclusions until all the data is in.
Who's spouse? According to the example, "you" are unmarried.
My wife had a student (actually their spouse) who did the opposite, getting on the plane in Africa at about +40 and arriving in Toronto at -40. He ended up deluding himself that winter was a fabulous wonder and took up skating and had his newborn signed up for hockey teams as soon as he could walk.
Thanks for sharing. I don't know that there is much "karma served" - but these sorts of discussions can provide some interesting perspective.
As the product of a fairly similar "Commonwealth Colonial" legacy in Canada and the Northern US, I usually manage to convince myself that most of my life choices are the product of rational thoughts and decisions, rather than emotion and clever self justification of whatever my lizard-brain instincts have decided it wants or whatever the random history of my self, family, or culture have lead me to. Sometimes that might even be true!
Right now, I live only a few hours from Ottawa, which I believe has the largest annual temperature difference of any capital city in the world (I think they might have hit 40 last week, and -40 is not totally unheard of - we tell ourselves that it is a "dry cold" that ain't so bad. Maybe, but the high humidity hot is pretty unpleasant.) Currently I am visiting my "hometown" on the coast in Vancouver which had "pre-contact" cultures on the coast with such "easy living" at least in terms of food resources, that people gave extreme gifts or even destroyed wealth to demonstrate social status - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It is thought of as a bit rainy for many people though, so not the Pacific Paradise that the Polynesians prefer.