Canada has another problem, although a somewhat understandable one: we don't recognize many foreign medical credentials. I've read too many articles about people who were surgeons in their home country who had to get out when the place fell apart, and are now driving cabs in Canada because their medical credentials aren't recognized here, and won't be until they repeat their training in a Canadian program.
It is an issue in the US as well - in both the US and Canada foreign trained doctors (including those from English speaking high-standards places like the UK and Australia) need to do an internship at a local hospital just like graduates of local med-schools do - regardless of their experience or qualifications (I think they also have to sit for some soft of qualifying exam in order to be eligible for that). Not only doe this add a lot of time to the process - spots for internships for these candidates are in short supply - also artificially in my estimation.
In Ontario recently, the provincial Liberals have suggested that they would provide incentives for new immigrants to be hired by employers - and I think much of the proposal is focused on this type of foreign credential issue. Of course the other parties are jumping all over that and characterizing it as a nefarious plan to steal the jobs of "Canadians" and give them to "Foreigners". I am disgusted by the parties, and the media, constantly fear mongering rather than speaking to the real issues surrounding anything in the public sphere.
In the U.S. (and lots of other places), people die because they can't afford medical care. Here in Canada, people who could afford medical care die on waiting lists because there aren't enough doctors. I'm glad I don't run a country, because I don't know of a perfect solution to this (and doubt there is one). I think Canada probably should maintain the essentials of its current system but allow privately-paid treatment as well (which is now explicitly illegal), to end the need for medical tourism. I think the U.S. should run screaming from Obama's incoming system, which combines the worst aspects of both. (Buy private medical insurance or be a criminal? Really?)
There is also a significant shortage of primary care doctors in much of the USA as well. I recall seeing a statistic a few years back that one of the poor areas of San Francisco, with a population of about 70,000 was served by a total of two or three doctors at a single clinic. Peterborough Ontario at the time (2005 or so?) was one of Ontario's most medically undeserved communities, with a population of about 70,000, and hundreds (thousands?) of people without a primary care physician as there were only a couple dozen in town.
Both countries suffer from the artificial control of the supply of med students - largely set by the medical societies, in addition to the relatively low pay that primary care physicians (the "family doctor") get on either side of the boarder, particularly when compared to specialists of which in some fields I think there is a bit of a glut. Double or triple the number of spots in med school (to say the level per capita they were producing in the 1950s) and some of these issues might be lessened.
If Amazon pulled out of CA, Amazon's shareholders would have their executive's heads on a platter. There is no way this type of tax issue would justify ignoring a market of 36 million potential customers.
Of course, said taxes are unconstitutional (but not in the opinion of the courts) in the first place, which is why they call them use taxes (as if what you call a tax has anything to do with its constitutionality).
Too bad the constitution never provided for a way to make decisions about how the constitution was to be interpreted, so we could settle debates about the constitutionality of various pieces of legislation. Maybe some sort of body independent of the congress and the executive branches of government? Some sort of "top" court that could decide this type of thing?
As a business owner I am taxed only when I take money out and spend it. What I do is purchase everything I need under the company as an expense, which means food, travel, everything. Say you have your shares donated to the trust. Every year you can give a cash gift tax free to every member of your family.
Meanwhile, if you work for someone you pay income tax, sales tax. It's effectively a double dip, dip on earn, dip on spend. I pay approximately 2-3% effective tax and I get a lot of that back in tax breaks from the feds.
You better hope not to get audited. If your company is buying you food and travel, not directly related to that company's business, both you and the company are supposed to be reporting that gift as a "Taxable Fringe Benefit", and you are supposed to be paying income tax on that. Granted, there may be some overall savings to be had in this way due to paying with "before tax" income vs "after tax" income, but certainly not enough to reduce your tax rate to near zero.
The US tax system operates on the principle that for the most part people are being fairly honest, and so most returns are accepted as legitimate reflections of reality - however there are systems in place to flag common errors, and random selections to occasionally turn up more ingenious frauds. Wikipedia directs one to US Code 26,6501 which seem to have no limitations on the time for collecting unpaid taxes for a false return or a "willful attempt to evade tax", which this type of activity might fall under - so doing this for a number of years could build up quite a liability if it is ever found to be illegal.
I also think the IRS gives "tattle-tale" bounties for people who turn in tax cheats - according to CNN it is "up to 15% of the amount that has been underpaid, with a maximum award of $10 million." So if you are filling out questionable tax returns, maybe you should keep it quiet.
A jpg pasted into a document and emailed isn't legally binding in the United States.
My work requires real signatures.
And a fax of a signature is not a "real signature" either - the case law that gets sited for the validity of a faxed signature applies equally well to a typed name at the end of an email message - see http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Jan/1/241481.html . Anyone worried about the legality of a document of this nature would require the original which ends up being sent by post or courrier in any case - the fax just provides a nice quick way of saying "the document is in the mail" - a scan would do the same.
Surely they could just feed the generated electricity back into the grid without all the local flywheels being necessary? As I recall, the Vancouver trolley buses have been doing this type of thing since at least the 1970s. If the grid can handle the output necessary to accelerate the trains, surely it could handle the input of slowing them down?
You left out the Green Party. With Jack Layton gone, and the talk (even if nothing comes of it) of a merger between the Grits (Liberals) and the Dippers (NDP) diluting the lines, a good chunk of the left-of-center vote (and some of the centrist vote) is going to say "a pox on both your houses" and shift to the Greens next election. While they may not get many seats, they will affect outcomes.
I am not so sure - other than their environmental platform, the Greens are not particularly "left-leaning" in much of their policy - though I do think they are thought of as being left-of-centre.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, who exactly are they catching measles from if the majority of the population is, and has been for a long time, vaccinated?
People travel a lot these days. Someone brings it in from someplace where it is still present.
On May 24, 2011 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the United States has had 118 measles cases so far this year. The 118 cases were reported by 23 states and New York City between Jan 1 and May 20. Of the 118 cases, 105 (89%) were associated with cases abroad and 105 (89%) of the 118 patients had not been vaccinated.
I wasn't vaccinated, had measles, and am still around today. Not sure about what new strains there are, but plenty of people used to get measles at school when I was there and it just meant you had a few days off. A quick Google check tells me there was one measle death in 10 years in the UK, and that one person had lung problems and was already heavily on immuno-suppressant drug.
Getting measles = staying in bed with plenty of water and some nice warm soup. Dangling kid off balcony = potential death.
Phillip.
I don't know, Wikipedia states
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles#Epidemiology "Mortality in developed countries is ~1/1000. In sub-Saharan Africa, mortality is ~10%. In cases with complications, the rate may rise to 20–30%."
A mortality rate of 1/1000 might actually be higher than dangling a kid off a balcony. Considering that the child mortality rate in developed countries is only about 6 per thousand live births, if we ditched the whole vaccination thing there would be a lot of dead children in not too long.
From the wikipedia article:
"On May 24, 2011 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the United States has had 118 measles cases so far this year. The 118 cases were reported by 23 states and New York City between Jan 1 and May 20. Of the 118 cases, 105 (89%) were associated with cases abroad and 105 (89%) of the 118 patients had not been vaccinated.[74]"
They put out a story telling women that a type of birth control pill increased their risk of getting cancer.
I like the anacdote... but not sure it is applicable as I think there actually may be risks to using birth control pills that a lot of young women have been taking very seriously for the last decade or so, with good reason.
There may also be high risks to not getting pregnant every 18-20 months through most of their reproductive years, like women have been doing from the "start of time" up until the 19th century or so. A "modern" woman goes though about 12 menstruations a year compared to on average one or two for those in the past, and all of those hormonal cycles seem to greatly increase the risks of various forms of cancers. Of course I don't have any citations for this type of thing, so I might be totally pulling it out of my ass....
Last week, the GMC ruled that Dr Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for children and acted "dishonestly" while he carried out his research. It will decide later whether to strike him off the medical register.
The regulator only looked at how he acted during the research, not whether the findings were right or wrong - although they have been widely discredited by medical experts across the world in the years since publication.
"The panel ruled that Wakefield had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant", acted both against the interests of his patients, and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research.[8][9][10] The Lancet immediately and fully retracted his 1998 publication on the basis of the GMC’s findings, noting that elements of the manuscript had been falsified.[11] Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register in May 2010, and may no longer practise medicine.[12]"
You will never get anywhere in politics without money, and you'll never get money without money
While it's certainly easier to make money if you already have some, I would say most of the most visible billionaires (especially in tech) made their money starting from essentially nothing.
Only by the poorest definition of "nothing". Virtually all of them came from upper middle class with a culture of education and an extensive family and social network of secure individuals and families. The hard work and vision of the individual are not to be denied, and of course that is a vitally important factor, but the external influences are very important too. None of those multi-millionaires are orphaned children of dirt farmers from the back-woods of nowhereseville.
I have voted online in the past and it certainly has promise compared to having to wait in line at a polling station. Since some fairly important elections are done by postal mail, (in the US Oregon and Washington do (or at least may): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting#States_with_all_vote-by-mail_elections for example) it is at least possible to take reasonable precautions against major voting fraud.
And just so we're absolutely clear, I'd rather live in a world where one or two people die having a water fight than live in a world where someone can arrest an adult for planning a water fight.
As a corollary I'd like to go on record preferring a country (or world) where there is a small risk of being blown up by a terrorist nutjob to one where I am made "safe" from insignificant risks by the loss of significant freedoms, while things that pose much larger actual risks are allowed to go on, largely because someone is making a pile of money off of those larger risks.
In general I prefer freedom to safety, though I will accept a certain amount of restriction where it makes reasonable sense. But for Crom's sake, do it for real reasons, not for political expediency.
How many deaths were caused by people crossing the street at appropriate crosswalks and with the traffic lights? Better make that illegal. How many deaths playing football in after work leagues? Better make that illegal. How many deaths falling out of bed? Better make that illegal!
Neither you nor I know the stats for dangers associated with this type of mob event. In general I agree with you, but it seems like there is at least the potential that this type of event could be orders of magnitude more likely to result in injury or death than the examples you site. We already do have laws prohibiting crossing against the light - do we perhaps need laws to address the dangers associated with "open invite" style of "fun" events? Will our existing laws against bad behaviour be sufficient if this type of event becomes common? Frankly I don't know.
I don't say this often, because I try to be generally polite even on the internet, but your logic is retarded. It is what leads to kids not being able to play tag during recess. It is the levels of paranoia that makes an adult male hesitate to help a terrified child because someone might think that they are trying to kidnap them. It is a significant portion of what is wrong with our society: the idea that everything and everyone can, and should, be made as completely safe as possible, regardless of the consequences.
And just so we're absolutely clear, I'd rather live in a world where one or two people die having a water fight than live in a world where someone can arrest an adult for planning a water fight.
Is there any level of death rates where you would be willing to do something more than go with the "hey, shit happens" type of attitude? Does it make a difference if the deaths are participants or "innocent" bystanders?
In general I do agree with your assessment that as a society we have become overly risk averse, to our detriment. However, I will restate: "If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place." Personally I would give more support to less draconian measures than "making water fights illegal", but to deny that there are certain levels of danger that should be addressed through legislation is at least as "retarded" as the logic that I claim to be able to see.
If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place.
There have been injuries and deaths resulting from posts made to online web forums before too. Are you implying the activity we both just did should be illegal? By your logic, it sure seems so! I'll let you turn yourself in first however...
Granted, FAR more posts are made safely every day than those that result in injury or death, however the exact same is true of water fights.
Sure, general water fights seldom result in any troubles, but what about "open call" water fights such as these? If 10% of them result in someone's death - probably we want to do something about it.
Hey, I think it is a bit over the top too, however I can understand at least some of the reasoning. It looks like back in 2008 there were at least a few instances of people calling for a great big waterfight and a bunch of thugs turned up and caused troubles for the water-people and "innocent" bystanders were also negatively impacted. If this becomes common, then it makes sense to try to do something to prevent the unwanted outcomes. In my opinion one should be using existing laws against the "troublemakers", but there is some justification in assigning some share of the responsibility for problems with the people who "organized" the event in the first place.
Freedom of speech and assembly are limited in a variety of situations where other people's safety are impacted for example. One might be charged with some sort of "public nuisance" type of offense if you started to throw money into the street, and there is the famous prohibition of shouting "Fire!" in crowded theaters if in fact no fire exists.
I don't know if this is over reaching or not, but there was at least one death and a number of serious injuries back in 2008 in these mass water fight events.
If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place.
One of my main issues with bing has nothing to do with complex search algorithms. Just search for e.g. shoes. The first page of results already contains two sets of duplicate results in my case: www.shoes.com and www.shoes.com/womens (sic, it actually stands for "women's"), and www.shoes.be and www.shoes.be/schoenwinkels.asp?l=k.
I get this with virtually every search term I've ever tried on Bing, which means that there are much less individually useful results than on Google (which will group all similar results from the same domain and then let you move on).
From your.be link I suspect you're actually not using Bing. Real Bing is only available in US (and partly in UK I think). In the rest of the world they just renamed their old solution to Bing without actually launching the real product. Amazing decision, leading to discussions like this where we are not really talking about the same search engine.
My bing shoe searches on bing.com and bing.ca are identical. Neither turns up any shoes.be results, but they do turn up shoes.com as well as shoes.com/womens on the first page.
Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated by them. You will never punish abusers and never give an incentive to treat you nice. Stupid rule.
I can see that if you follow the "Golden Rule" you might never punish abusers (unless you are wise enough to realize that you too would like some feedback for undesirable behaviour when it occurs), but why do you feel that following the "Golden Rule" would make you to "never give an incentive to treat you nice"? Surely you would like incentives for yourself to treat others nice?
Oh, wait a minute, I understand - that was all one idea, not two different problems: "You will (never punish abusers and thus never give an incentive...)" rather than "You will (never punish...) and (never give and incentive...)"
Back in the 1980s while doing some work at Atomic Energy of Canada's Reactor Safety Division (AECL's WNRE RSD if you are into acronyms), someone left a tooled leather briefcase against one of the many walls in the "hot" section of the lab. The bomb squad ended up being called in for a 2+ hour drive from Winnipeg because while many of us were pretty sure it looked like "Frank's" briefcase, we couldn't see the carved design on the front which would have confirmed the identity, and protocol prohibited anyone from picking it up to check. Frank was nowhere to be found - his desk did not look like he had arrived yet for the day, but his radiation badge had been checked out. A bit before the bomb-squad arrived, Frank turned up. He had stopped by the wall to talk to a colleague and had then continued the conversation in the cafeteria over coffee while leaving his briefcase.
I don't know what lesson might be learned from that - but it did give me an excuse to goof off all morning rather than converting some reactor simulation code from Fortran IV to Fortran 77. The simulated core was described by my co-op adviser as being "Sort of like a dinosaur" because it was "thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end."
Slashdot Mirror
Canada has another problem, although a somewhat understandable one: we don't recognize many foreign medical credentials. I've read too many articles about people who were surgeons in their home country who had to get out when the place fell apart, and are now driving cabs in Canada because their medical credentials aren't recognized here, and won't be until they repeat their training in a Canadian program.
It is an issue in the US as well - in both the US and Canada foreign trained doctors (including those from English speaking high-standards places like the UK and Australia) need to do an internship at a local hospital just like graduates of local med-schools do - regardless of their experience or qualifications (I think they also have to sit for some soft of qualifying exam in order to be eligible for that). Not only doe this add a lot of time to the process - spots for internships for these candidates are in short supply - also artificially in my estimation.
In Ontario recently, the provincial Liberals have suggested that they would provide incentives for new immigrants to be hired by employers - and I think much of the proposal is focused on this type of foreign credential issue. Of course the other parties are jumping all over that and characterizing it as a nefarious plan to steal the jobs of "Canadians" and give them to "Foreigners". I am disgusted by the parties, and the media, constantly fear mongering rather than speaking to the real issues surrounding anything in the public sphere.
In the U.S. (and lots of other places), people die because they can't afford medical care. Here in Canada, people who could afford medical care die on waiting lists because there aren't enough doctors. I'm glad I don't run a country, because I don't know of a perfect solution to this (and doubt there is one). I think Canada probably should maintain the essentials of its current system but allow privately-paid treatment as well (which is now explicitly illegal), to end the need for medical tourism. I think the U.S. should run screaming from Obama's incoming system, which combines the worst aspects of both. (Buy private medical insurance or be a criminal? Really?)
There is also a significant shortage of primary care doctors in much of the USA as well. I recall seeing a statistic a few years back that one of the poor areas of San Francisco, with a population of about 70,000 was served by a total of two or three doctors at a single clinic. Peterborough Ontario at the time (2005 or so?) was one of Ontario's most medically undeserved communities, with a population of about 70,000, and hundreds (thousands?) of people without a primary care physician as there were only a couple dozen in town.
Both countries suffer from the artificial control of the supply of med students - largely set by the medical societies, in addition to the relatively low pay that primary care physicians (the "family doctor") get on either side of the boarder, particularly when compared to specialists of which in some fields I think there is a bit of a glut. Double or triple the number of spots in med school (to say the level per capita they were producing in the 1950s) and some of these issues might be lessened.
If Amazon pulled out of CA, Amazon's shareholders would have their executive's heads on a platter. There is no way this type of tax issue would justify ignoring a market of 36 million potential customers.
Of course, said taxes are unconstitutional (but not in the opinion of the courts) in the first place, which is why they call them use taxes (as if what you call a tax has anything to do with its constitutionality).
Too bad the constitution never provided for a way to make decisions about how the constitution was to be interpreted, so we could settle debates about the constitutionality of various pieces of legislation. Maybe some sort of body independent of the congress and the executive branches of government? Some sort of "top" court that could decide this type of thing?
Naw, that'll never work.
As a business owner I am taxed only when I take money out and spend it. What I do is purchase everything I need under the company as an expense,
which means food, travel, everything. Say you have your shares donated to the trust. Every year you can give a cash gift tax free to every member of your family.
Meanwhile, if you work for someone you pay income tax, sales tax. It's effectively a double dip, dip on earn, dip on spend. I pay approximately 2-3%
effective tax and I get a lot of that back in tax breaks from the feds.
You better hope not to get audited. If your company is buying you food and travel, not directly related to that company's business, both you and the company are supposed to be reporting that gift as a "Taxable Fringe Benefit", and you are supposed to be paying income tax on that. Granted, there may be some overall savings to be had in this way due to paying with "before tax" income vs "after tax" income, but certainly not enough to reduce your tax rate to near zero.
The US tax system operates on the principle that for the most part people are being fairly honest, and so most returns are accepted as legitimate reflections of reality - however there are systems in place to flag common errors, and random selections to occasionally turn up more ingenious frauds. Wikipedia directs one to US Code 26,6501 which seem to have no limitations on the time for collecting unpaid taxes for a false return or a "willful attempt to evade tax", which this type of activity might fall under - so doing this for a number of years could build up quite a liability if it is ever found to be illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance_and_tax_evasion
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/6501.html
I also think the IRS gives "tattle-tale" bounties for people who turn in tax cheats - according to CNN it is "up to 15% of the amount that has been underpaid, with a maximum award of $10 million." So if you are filling out questionable tax returns, maybe you should keep it quiet.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/02/pf/taxes/rat_out_tax_cheat/
A jpg pasted into a document and emailed isn't legally binding in the United States.
My work requires real signatures.
And a fax of a signature is not a "real signature" either - the case law that gets sited for the validity of a faxed signature applies equally well to a typed name at the end of an email message - see http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Jan/1/241481.html . Anyone worried about the legality of a document of this nature would require the original which ends up being sent by post or courrier in any case - the fax just provides a nice quick way of saying "the document is in the mail" - a scan would do the same.
Surely they could just feed the generated electricity back into the grid without all the local flywheels being necessary? As I recall, the Vancouver trolley buses have been doing this type of thing since at least the 1970s. If the grid can handle the output necessary to accelerate the trains, surely it could handle the input of slowing them down?
You left out the Green Party. With Jack Layton gone, and the talk (even if nothing comes of it) of a merger between the Grits (Liberals) and the Dippers (NDP) diluting the lines, a good chunk of the left-of-center vote (and some of the centrist vote) is going to say "a pox on both your houses" and shift to the Greens next election. While they may not get many seats, they will affect outcomes.
I am not so sure - other than their environmental platform, the Greens are not particularly "left-leaning" in much of their policy - though I do think they are thought of as being left-of-centre.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, who exactly are they catching measles from if the majority of the population is, and has been for a long time, vaccinated?
People travel a lot these days. Someone brings it in from someplace where it is still present.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_outbreaks_in_the_2000s
On May 24, 2011 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the United States has had 118 measles cases so far this year. The 118 cases were reported by 23 states and New York City between Jan 1 and May 20. Of the 118 cases, 105 (89%) were associated with cases abroad and 105 (89%) of the 118 patients had not been vaccinated.
I wasn't vaccinated, had measles, and am still around today. Not sure about what new strains there are, but plenty of people used to get measles at school when I was there and it just meant you had a few days off. A quick Google check tells me there was one measle death in 10 years in the UK, and that one person had lung problems and was already heavily on immuno-suppressant drug.
Getting measles = staying in bed with plenty of water and some nice warm soup. Dangling kid off balcony = potential death.
Phillip.
I don't know, Wikipedia states
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles#Epidemiology
"Mortality in developed countries is ~1/1000. In sub-Saharan Africa, mortality is ~10%. In cases with complications, the rate may rise to 20–30%."
A mortality rate of 1/1000 might actually be higher than dangling a kid off a balcony. Considering that the child mortality rate in developed countries is only about 6 per thousand live births, if we ditched the whole vaccination thing there would be a lot of dead children in not too long.
From the wikipedia article:
"On May 24, 2011 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the United States has had 118 measles cases so far this year. The 118 cases were reported by 23 states and New York City between Jan 1 and May 20. Of the 118 cases, 105 (89%) were associated with cases abroad and 105 (89%) of the 118 patients had not been vaccinated.[74]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality
They put out a story telling women that a type of birth control pill increased their risk of getting cancer.
I like the anacdote... but not sure it is applicable as I think there actually may be risks to using birth control pills that a lot of young women have been taking very seriously for the last decade or so, with good reason.
There may also be high risks to not getting pregnant every 18-20 months through most of their reproductive years, like women have been doing from the "start of time" up until the 19th century or so. A "modern" woman goes though about 12 menstruations a year compared to on average one or two for those in the past, and all of those hormonal cycles seem to greatly increase the risks of various forms of cancers. Of course I don't have any citations for this type of thing, so I might be totally pulling it out of my ass....
a UK professor, who has been on trial for telling false results to help his own company
All I can find in the article you link to is:
Last week, the GMC ruled that Dr Wakefield had shown a "callous disregard" for children and acted "dishonestly" while he carried out his research. It will decide later whether to strike him off the medical register.
The regulator only looked at how he acted during the research, not whether the findings were right or wrong - although they have been widely discredited by medical experts across the world in the years since publication.
Wikipedia has more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
"The panel ruled that Wakefield had "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant", acted both against the interests of his patients, and "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in his published research.[8][9][10] The Lancet immediately and fully retracted his 1998 publication on the basis of the GMC’s findings, noting that elements of the manuscript had been falsified.[11] Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register in May 2010, and may no longer practise medicine.[12]"
You will never get anywhere in politics without money, and you'll never get money without money
While it's certainly easier to make money if you already have some, I would say most of the most visible billionaires (especially in tech) made their money starting from essentially nothing.
Only by the poorest definition of "nothing". Virtually all of them came from upper middle class with a culture of education and an extensive family and social network of secure individuals and families. The hard work and vision of the individual are not to be denied, and of course that is a vitally important factor, but the external influences are very important too. None of those multi-millionaires are orphaned children of dirt farmers from the back-woods of nowhereseville.
There have been some forays into online voting in Ontario municipal elections in the past - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Canada#Ontario_2
I have voted online in the past and it certainly has promise compared to having to wait in line at a polling station. Since some fairly important elections are done by postal mail, (in the US Oregon and Washington do (or at least may): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_voting#States_with_all_vote-by-mail_elections for example) it is at least possible to take reasonable precautions against major voting fraud.
And just so we're absolutely clear, I'd rather live in a world where one or two people die having a water fight than live in a world where someone can arrest an adult for planning a water fight.
As a corollary I'd like to go on record preferring a country (or world) where there is a small risk of being blown up by a terrorist nutjob to one where I am made "safe" from insignificant risks by the loss of significant freedoms, while things that pose much larger actual risks are allowed to go on, largely because someone is making a pile of money off of those larger risks.
In general I prefer freedom to safety, though I will accept a certain amount of restriction where it makes reasonable sense. But for Crom's sake, do it for real reasons, not for political expediency.
I can get behind that sentiment.
How many deaths were caused by people crossing the street at appropriate crosswalks and with the traffic lights? Better make that illegal. How many deaths playing football in after work leagues? Better make that illegal. How many deaths falling out of bed? Better make that illegal!
Neither you nor I know the stats for dangers associated with this type of mob event. In general I agree with you, but it seems like there is at least the potential that this type of event could be orders of magnitude more likely to result in injury or death than the examples you site. We already do have laws prohibiting crossing against the light - do we perhaps need laws to address the dangers associated with "open invite" style of "fun" events? Will our existing laws against bad behaviour be sufficient if this type of event becomes common? Frankly I don't know.
I don't say this often, because I try to be generally polite even on the internet, but your logic is retarded. It is what leads to kids not being able to play tag during recess. It is the levels of paranoia that makes an adult male hesitate to help a terrified child because someone might think that they are trying to kidnap them. It is a significant portion of what is wrong with our society: the idea that everything and everyone can, and should, be made as completely safe as possible, regardless of the consequences.
And just so we're absolutely clear, I'd rather live in a world where one or two people die having a water fight than live in a world where someone can arrest an adult for planning a water fight.
Is there any level of death rates where you would be willing to do something more than go with the "hey, shit happens" type of attitude? Does it make a difference if the deaths are participants or "innocent" bystanders?
In general I do agree with your assessment that as a society we have become overly risk averse, to our detriment. However, I will restate: "If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place." Personally I would give more support to less draconian measures than "making water fights illegal", but to deny that there are certain levels of danger that should be addressed through legislation is at least as "retarded" as the logic that I claim to be able to see.
If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place.
There have been injuries and deaths resulting from posts made to online web forums before too. Are you implying the activity we both just did should be illegal? By your logic, it sure seems so! I'll let you turn yourself in first however...
Granted, FAR more posts are made safely every day than those that result in injury or death, however the exact same is true of water fights.
Sure, general water fights seldom result in any troubles, but what about "open call" water fights such as these? If 10% of them result in someone's death - probably we want to do something about it.
Hey, I think it is a bit over the top too, however I can understand at least some of the reasoning. It looks like back in 2008 there were at least a few instances of people calling for a great big waterfight and a bunch of thugs turned up and caused troubles for the water-people and "innocent" bystanders were also negatively impacted. If this becomes common, then it makes sense to try to do something to prevent the unwanted outcomes. In my opinion one should be using existing laws against the "troublemakers", but there is some justification in assigning some share of the responsibility for problems with the people who "organized" the event in the first place.
Freedom of speech and assembly are limited in a variety of situations where other people's safety are impacted for example. One might be charged with some sort of "public nuisance" type of offense if you started to throw money into the street, and there is the famous prohibition of shouting "Fire!" in crowded theaters if in fact no fire exists.
I don't know if this is over reaching or not, but there was at least one death and a number of serious injuries back in 2008 in these mass water fight events.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1499810.ece
If every time one of these events happened, there were serious injuries, I can see the logic behind trying to prevent the gatherings in the first place.
And why did Bing get top billing in the headline when Yahoo seems to have beat them both in the summary? Of course I didn't RTFA.
One of my main issues with bing has nothing to do with complex search algorithms. Just search for e.g. shoes. The first page of results already contains two sets of duplicate results in my case: www.shoes.com and www.shoes.com/womens (sic, it actually stands for "women's"), and www.shoes.be and www.shoes.be/schoenwinkels.asp?l=k.
I get this with virtually every search term I've ever tried on Bing, which means that there are much less individually useful results than on Google (which will group all similar results from the same domain and then let you move on).
From your .be link I suspect you're actually not using Bing. Real Bing is only available in US (and partly in UK I think). In the rest of the world they just renamed their old solution to Bing without actually launching the real product. Amazing decision, leading to discussions like this where we are not really talking about the same search engine.
My bing shoe searches on bing.com and bing.ca are identical. Neither turns up any shoes.be results, but they do turn up shoes.com as well as shoes.com/womens on the first page.
Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like to be treated by them. You will never punish abusers and never give an incentive to treat you nice. Stupid rule.
I can see that if you follow the "Golden Rule" you might never punish abusers (unless you are wise enough to realize that you too would like some feedback for undesirable behaviour when it occurs), but why do you feel that following the "Golden Rule" would make you to "never give an incentive to treat you nice"? Surely you would like incentives for yourself to treat others nice?
Oh, wait a minute, I understand - that was all one idea, not two different problems: "You will (never punish abusers and thus never give an incentive...)" rather than "You will (never punish...) and (never give and incentive...)"
"Upgrade Complete" is pretty fun.
It took all of my willpower not to title this essay, "In Soviet Russia, Gamification Engages You".
Awesome!
I liked that one too.
Back in the 1980s while doing some work at Atomic Energy of Canada's Reactor Safety Division (AECL's WNRE RSD if you are into acronyms), someone left a tooled leather briefcase against one of the many walls in the "hot" section of the lab. The bomb squad ended up being called in for a 2+ hour drive from Winnipeg because while many of us were pretty sure it looked like "Frank's" briefcase, we couldn't see the carved design on the front which would have confirmed the identity, and protocol prohibited anyone from picking it up to check. Frank was nowhere to be found - his desk did not look like he had arrived yet for the day, but his radiation badge had been checked out. A bit before the bomb-squad arrived, Frank turned up. He had stopped by the wall to talk to a colleague and had then continued the conversation in the cafeteria over coffee while leaving his briefcase.
I don't know what lesson might be learned from that - but it did give me an excuse to goof off all morning rather than converting some reactor simulation code from Fortran IV to Fortran 77. The simulated core was described by my co-op adviser as being "Sort of like a dinosaur" because it was "thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end."
well said