there are some expressions which directly impinges on someone else's freedom, and is therefore not free speech
I dislike that line of reasoning because it's utterly vague and open to abuse. For example, if I feel that your speech has threatened me, should you no longer be able to express your thoughts? What if you feel that my feelings are irrational? There's far too much uncertainty to try to enforce those kinds of rules and they invariably end up being used wrongly.
I'd rather look at this matter in terms of responsibility. All speech is free speech, but all persons are also held responsible for the consequences of their own speech. Cry fire in a crowded theater all you want, but if it causes a panic and results in injury, then you should be held financially responsible. Slander or libel someone and you're responsible for any damages to their reputation. The same goes for goes for threats and the like. Call for the death of some politician as much as you like, but if you start a riot or a lynch mob, then you're also criminally responsible for your part in what happened.
Even specific threats are murky water as the degree to which an arbitrary individual would consider it serious depends heavily on context. If it's some AC on the internet yelling about killing you, most would just brush it off as a random troll and not worth their time, but if it were your neighbor, most would take it more seriously. Then there's further ambiguities at play. Consider the difference between "I will kill you" and "I ought to kill you" and consider that in the heat of the moment one might be said instead of the other or a person might misconstrue one for the other and report an incorrect recollection of events to the police.
The best counter to terrorists broadcasting their message is to use free speech to show everyone how wrong and small-minded they are. Trying to suppress it through government power only serves to help their cause. If you don't like someone's message, use your own free speech to point out why it is wrong. Letting some third party arbitrate what can and cannot be said is just asking for trouble in the long run.
You're probably better off reading the Cliffs notes as it's rather dry. It could have made its point in far fewer pages and even for someone with political leanings towards those of the author, the portrayal of the antagonists (socialism) is so absurd that the book almost becomes a black comedy to me, although some would claim that is the style of the book and such is intentional.
Either way, eventually you will make your way to the John Galt radio speech, which is where the book casts all pretenses of being a novel and spills its philosophical guts on the table, just in case you were functionally brain dead and couldn't deduce the message from the previous several hundred pages.
Just save yourself the trouble and read a summary. The book doesn't work as either a work of fiction or as an ideological treatise. Even if you're the type of person to agree with every word of the book, it's still not worth your time.
Unlimited is a pointless qualifier for most things. Even if you have no data cap, your still limited by how fast your connection will let you pull-down data in terms of what you can download, so there's still a limit. Even if you have truly unlimited parental leave, you'll still eventually die of old age so there's still a limit.
Unlimited only really works with abstract concepts, like numbers. Once you get into the physical world, there's almost always some bound that limits what's possible to attain.
That sounds good and all, but they're still going to want to pay some company for support. Any government that's too incompetent to manage licensing properly should not be trusted with supporting their software.
I don't think the government needs to strictly use open source, but I do agree that anything they use should be an open standard as that allows for the most competition in terms of choice of support provider, contractor, etc. as well as ease of transitioning from one to another. Also, if they want to buy custom software, the code must be open sourced (or the government must be given a license to treat it as such from their perspective) so that they're not locked into a single company for ongoing support, bug fixes, or future enhancements.
It has less to do with not liking what someone is expressing and more to do with getting advertiser revenue. There's a whole lot of stuff that most advertisers don't want to have their product associated with, so Reddit just wants to sweep all of that under the rug so they can present a shiny-clean image to the world. If advertisers found kittens objectionable, you can bet they'd ban that as well, even if the owners were rather found of kittens.
It's invariably the failing of a lot of new start-up products that start out without a good revenue model in place and then only end up alienating their users when they try to cram the revenue generating functionality in later (looking at you Dice) and it causes issues. You'd think people would stop throwing venture capital at companies that have no idea how to make money with their product, but apparently there's a good enough return there to keep doing it.
You'd almost think it would be worse for professionals because they have spend years training and their brain and body have an expectation of board reaction that doesn't exist in this case. You'd probably have an easier time with an amateur because they don't have to unlearn years training and ingrained behavior that either doesn't work or works against a person in this case.
Looks like Back to the Future Part II was correct in that we'd have hoverboards in 2015, but they're certainly not as advanced as in the film. However, the Lexus appears to work over water though, so I suppose they have that going for them.
Actually, you still see benefits when decriminalizing harder drugs as Portugal has done.
It would be far better to spend the massive amounts of money it takes to house non-violent drug offenders in prisons on rehabilitating them in environments where it is cheaper to do so and won't make them want more drugs. Additionally, legalizing these drugs means that they generate taxable revenue which can be spent on rehabilitation programs and reduce the amount of money that needs to be spent on drug enforcement and housing prisoners, which has a nice side effect of allowing law enforcement to spend time dealing with other crime.
Did you expect the people who wanted this legislation to stop wanting it just because it didn't go through the first time? They're always going to keep pushing for it, regardless of how many times it gets voted down, so you're always going to have to keep opposing them.
Take a look at it from a different angle. Gay people didn't stop pushing for marriage rights just because they had been denied in the past or ballot measures were unsuccessful. Why should you finding it surprising that the people who want SOPA or similar laws would quit just because it didn't work the first time?
I'm not really sure what you mean, but the markets created by players tend to be better approximations of real markets than entirely AI markets and they can also drive game play and player interaction, all without requiring additional development effort.
Let's use a simple example of crafting healing potions that are consumed by other players. If no one needs those potions, no one will buy them, so it's probably not as valuable to bother making them. But if they are used, the price will naturally increase as there's more demand than supply and so other players will be drawn to craft those potions. If the materials to make those are limited and also exist in the game world, you might have more contention over them and players fighting over them if the game allows PvP combat and the possibility of other players being paid to act as protection for these efforts or people harassing opposing factions or groups to prevent them from acquiring those resources.
Games like EVE allow for that kind of result, which creates a type of game world that some players enjoy and it doesn't require large amounts of developer effort to create a functional AI driven economy or scripted game play that mimics the scenario above. I'm not sure how you can claim that the notion of the invisible hand doesn't work in games when there's a particularly good example of it working well. I can't think of any game I've played that as an entirely AI-driven economy that's come anywhere close to creating the same kind of experience you can get from EVE. The economy in that game is such a good approximation that they even had a massive ponzi scam several years ago.
The problem is that creating a realistic economy requires writing a lot of code to handle that game behavior as well as ensuring that the game behavior realistically models a real economy, or at least enough so in order to be satisfying.
EVE (and many MMOs) get around this problem by having the players drive the economy, which means that you don't need to code much AI to handle this as the players will tend to make intelligent decisions and create a functional economy. The only remaining issue is for developers to ensure that there're sufficient "sinks" in the economy so that inflation doesn't get out of control. EVE tends to do better here because the game allows for practically all player assets to be destroyed and leave the economy, whereas other MMOs tend to be limited in terms of what can be destroyed or permanently lost.
It's just an observation of human nature. It's why groups like the KKK exist and you'll be hard pressed to find a person or group that doesn't do this. People have experiences and generalize from them and then act on those generalizations. People are even notorious for holding on to those beliefs even when shown clearly contradictory evidence. Our brains are wired to work that way after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and even if a person is congnizant of this, they're still susceptible to falling into that kind of thinking.
When it came to supporting our work financially, we figured that companies that benefited from open source software would just hand over giant wads of cash to an unproven new nonprofit run by two former software engineers.
I realize they're probably being tongue-in-cheek, but does it really come as any surprise that such an organization (regardless of what it's doing) would be closing down? That seems like an even more cavalier approach to funding than the typical venture-capitalist start-up approach in silicon valley where the business model is to just get a bunch of users and figure out how to generate revenue at some magical point in the future.
I think that the other big problem is that they didn't provide enough ongoing value to a company to get funding. Any organization could use their recommendations or examples to create a code of conduct, but once that's in place, they're only really receiving money for past services rendered and no business is just going to keep forking over money that they don't need to.
A lot of Africa is trapped is a cycle of abject poverty that makes it difficult to progress, especially at the lower rungs of society. It's also necessary to consider that a lot of the diseases (Ebola, but HIV especially) that feed into that loop have originated in Africa. The parts of the continent that are doing better tend to be those that don't have massive issues with Malaria, AIDS, etc. Never mind group conflict due to arbitrary borders that have no real basis on history or culture that lead to distrust among the populace along with other mysticism and superstition brought on by a lack of education.
A lot of the other examples you listed also received financial backing to help with growth or recovery. The U.S. and allies brought great destruction upon Germany and Japan, but we also ensured that they could recover and prosper, in large part because of what happened after WWI with Germany.
There are a few African nations that are doing quite well, but Africa is not some monolith and many of the better off countries don't care a gnat's fart more than anyone else about the African countries that are dealing abject poverty, genocide, and epidemics on a continual basis.
Publicly accessible bathrooms that will end up full of junkies strung out on heroin who don't want to sleep out in the rain?
Cities have found out that these public resources tend to get abused, vandalized, or otherwise misused such that the general public doesn't want anything to do with them. Spend the money solving the poverty issues that tend to ruin implementations like that instead, and it turns out that many of the other problems which required those implementations tend to vanish as well.
You'd be better off just having the police occasionally ticket a few people for public urination and give them sufficient community service hours to clean up the mess it makes.
When I hire programmers, I want programmers that can take vague requirements, apply their intelligence and experience, and provide a solution that works well and can evolve*. Sometimes this might mean the ability to convince me my requirements are ill-considered. If they aren't self-motivated and self-directed, they're wasting my time.
That's fine if you have a small team that can communicate and work well together, but on larger projects the overhead makes that kind of collaboration impossible and having everyone running off and producing their own solutions is a recipe for disaster and you'll end up with people arguing over how it should be done and an utter nightmare when it comes to integrating the various pieces. Sometimes its a lot easier to iron out the requirements, produce a very detailed design, and only leave minor implementation details up to the individual programmer, especially when a lot of those programmers might not be the highly intelligent or experienced people one would want to hire.
What's the price? The community could conceivably use some crowd-funding platform and everyone could pitch in $5 if they wanted to. I would imagine that ads could cover most of the hosting and bandwidth expenses and the community can just take turns filling the editor role such that the ongoing costs should be minimal. Anything extra could always go towards supporting open source development efforts.
Which is especially funny given his recent moves to release 22 convicted drug offenders. Not that I disagree with this course of action (really no one should be going to prison over this in the first place) but it's also contradictory to previous actions by his administration in relation to drug enforcement.
We're probably better off under Obama than we would have been under McCain or Romney, but I don't think anyone can deny that President Obama is a lot different than candidate Obama. The funniest part is that we're seeing the same kind of swell around Sanders and how much change he'll bring. I never really followed politics much when I was younger, but has it always been like this? Townshend was wrong. It's seems like you can just keep fooling us over and over again.
Do you think the patent trolls are going to keep that money on hand where something like that might happen. The money will have been spent on something, like a big bonus for the CEO or paid out in fees for expert witness testimony to someone's friend. Perhaps they needed a new company car which just happens to be a Rolls-Royce or something similar.
Anyone crooked and morally bankrupt enough to even run this type of enterprise isn't going to keep the money sitting around. Eventually the jig is up and if there's no money left, it's easy to abandon and move on to something else.
Unfortunately it's against that law to just leave you to die for your own stupidity in such cases and society invariably ends up bearing the costs. It's far less expensive to vaccinate people than it is to deal with the fallout from not doing so. Up until we can agree that you can contractually permit society ignoring any consequences for your poor decision, the pragmatic solution is to require it.
One could also take a position that not vaccinating your children is tantamount to neglect as they are incapable of making such a choice at that age and you're merely forcing your own beliefs on the child whether they would objectively want to make that decision in later life or not. Again, were there a system by which society could be absolved of having to deal with the consequences of an individual's poor decisions, this wouldn't be an issue, but we do not live in that world.
It's not morally justifiable, but the laws that are in place make coercion necessary from a financial point of view. If the government is going to force me to pay for something, I'd like to pay as little as possible and that means vaccinating the population to the greatest extend possible.
Skepticism is healthy, and when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. However, this is being repeatedly validated by multiple credible sources, which means that it should be accepted. If the crowd here is skeptical, it's only because we've see so much junk science over the years that has been latched onto and all the damage such things do. Look at the anti-vaccination movement, which has resulted in an increase in cases of diseases that were practically non-existent for decades.
Everything that's generally accepted today went through similar amounts of skepticism at some point and was borne out by repeated studies to prove its validity. Anything less and you've got something more akin to a religion and articles of faith.
I disagree. Canada is just as bad as the U.S. in some regards. For example, if you want to purchase blank media, you're paying a piracy tax to the media companies because they lobbied that legislation successfully. There are plenty of other examples of the Canadian parties bending to the whims of various special interests.
From a purely theoretical stand point, it's a lot easier to lobby/bribe a party (single entity) than it is to bribe a large number of individual representatives. You even point out that the individual MPs are simply expected to vote with their party. Given that most probably don't understand the stuff they're voting on (same thing in the U.S. for most topics and the average Congress critter) voting the party line is an easy cop out, so it only becomes a matter of getting the person pushing the party line in one's pocket.
I think that there are better solutions for dealing with lobbying issues such as enforcing single term limits for every position at a federal level and forbidding collecting campaign contributions or campaigning while holding office. The only way to bribe a representative would be to do so before they are elected and because they can only have a single term, there's no incentive for them to stay bought.
the action or process of investing money for profit or material result.
The Kickstarter backer rewards or eventual product is the material reward in this case.
Also, have you ever heard the phrase "Improving education is investing in the future of our country." or something similar to that effect? Clearly no one is talking about owning some part of future generations or anything along those lines.
Slashdot Mirror
there are some expressions which directly impinges on someone else's freedom, and is therefore not free speech
I dislike that line of reasoning because it's utterly vague and open to abuse. For example, if I feel that your speech has threatened me, should you no longer be able to express your thoughts? What if you feel that my feelings are irrational? There's far too much uncertainty to try to enforce those kinds of rules and they invariably end up being used wrongly.
I'd rather look at this matter in terms of responsibility. All speech is free speech, but all persons are also held responsible for the consequences of their own speech. Cry fire in a crowded theater all you want, but if it causes a panic and results in injury, then you should be held financially responsible. Slander or libel someone and you're responsible for any damages to their reputation. The same goes for goes for threats and the like. Call for the death of some politician as much as you like, but if you start a riot or a lynch mob, then you're also criminally responsible for your part in what happened.
Even specific threats are murky water as the degree to which an arbitrary individual would consider it serious depends heavily on context. If it's some AC on the internet yelling about killing you, most would just brush it off as a random troll and not worth their time, but if it were your neighbor, most would take it more seriously. Then there's further ambiguities at play. Consider the difference between "I will kill you" and "I ought to kill you" and consider that in the heat of the moment one might be said instead of the other or a person might misconstrue one for the other and report an incorrect recollection of events to the police.
The best counter to terrorists broadcasting their message is to use free speech to show everyone how wrong and small-minded they are. Trying to suppress it through government power only serves to help their cause. If you don't like someone's message, use your own free speech to point out why it is wrong. Letting some third party arbitrate what can and cannot be said is just asking for trouble in the long run.
You're probably better off reading the Cliffs notes as it's rather dry. It could have made its point in far fewer pages and even for someone with political leanings towards those of the author, the portrayal of the antagonists (socialism) is so absurd that the book almost becomes a black comedy to me, although some would claim that is the style of the book and such is intentional.
Either way, eventually you will make your way to the John Galt radio speech, which is where the book casts all pretenses of being a novel and spills its philosophical guts on the table, just in case you were functionally brain dead and couldn't deduce the message from the previous several hundred pages.
Just save yourself the trouble and read a summary. The book doesn't work as either a work of fiction or as an ideological treatise. Even if you're the type of person to agree with every word of the book, it's still not worth your time.
Unlimited is a pointless qualifier for most things. Even if you have no data cap, your still limited by how fast your connection will let you pull-down data in terms of what you can download, so there's still a limit. Even if you have truly unlimited parental leave, you'll still eventually die of old age so there's still a limit.
Unlimited only really works with abstract concepts, like numbers. Once you get into the physical world, there's almost always some bound that limits what's possible to attain.
That sounds good and all, but they're still going to want to pay some company for support. Any government that's too incompetent to manage licensing properly should not be trusted with supporting their software.
I don't think the government needs to strictly use open source, but I do agree that anything they use should be an open standard as that allows for the most competition in terms of choice of support provider, contractor, etc. as well as ease of transitioning from one to another. Also, if they want to buy custom software, the code must be open sourced (or the government must be given a license to treat it as such from their perspective) so that they're not locked into a single company for ongoing support, bug fixes, or future enhancements.
It has less to do with not liking what someone is expressing and more to do with getting advertiser revenue. There's a whole lot of stuff that most advertisers don't want to have their product associated with, so Reddit just wants to sweep all of that under the rug so they can present a shiny-clean image to the world. If advertisers found kittens objectionable, you can bet they'd ban that as well, even if the owners were rather found of kittens.
It's invariably the failing of a lot of new start-up products that start out without a good revenue model in place and then only end up alienating their users when they try to cram the revenue generating functionality in later (looking at you Dice) and it causes issues. You'd think people would stop throwing venture capital at companies that have no idea how to make money with their product, but apparently there's a good enough return there to keep doing it.
You'd almost think it would be worse for professionals because they have spend years training and their brain and body have an expectation of board reaction that doesn't exist in this case. You'd probably have an easier time with an amateur because they don't have to unlearn years training and ingrained behavior that either doesn't work or works against a person in this case.
Looks like Back to the Future Part II was correct in that we'd have hoverboards in 2015, but they're certainly not as advanced as in the film. However, the Lexus appears to work over water though, so I suppose they have that going for them.
Actually, you still see benefits when decriminalizing harder drugs as Portugal has done.
It would be far better to spend the massive amounts of money it takes to house non-violent drug offenders in prisons on rehabilitating them in environments where it is cheaper to do so and won't make them want more drugs. Additionally, legalizing these drugs means that they generate taxable revenue which can be spent on rehabilitation programs and reduce the amount of money that needs to be spent on drug enforcement and housing prisoners, which has a nice side effect of allowing law enforcement to spend time dealing with other crime.
Did you expect the people who wanted this legislation to stop wanting it just because it didn't go through the first time? They're always going to keep pushing for it, regardless of how many times it gets voted down, so you're always going to have to keep opposing them.
Take a look at it from a different angle. Gay people didn't stop pushing for marriage rights just because they had been denied in the past or ballot measures were unsuccessful. Why should you finding it surprising that the people who want SOPA or similar laws would quit just because it didn't work the first time?
I'm not really sure what you mean, but the markets created by players tend to be better approximations of real markets than entirely AI markets and they can also drive game play and player interaction, all without requiring additional development effort.
Let's use a simple example of crafting healing potions that are consumed by other players. If no one needs those potions, no one will buy them, so it's probably not as valuable to bother making them. But if they are used, the price will naturally increase as there's more demand than supply and so other players will be drawn to craft those potions. If the materials to make those are limited and also exist in the game world, you might have more contention over them and players fighting over them if the game allows PvP combat and the possibility of other players being paid to act as protection for these efforts or people harassing opposing factions or groups to prevent them from acquiring those resources.
Games like EVE allow for that kind of result, which creates a type of game world that some players enjoy and it doesn't require large amounts of developer effort to create a functional AI driven economy or scripted game play that mimics the scenario above. I'm not sure how you can claim that the notion of the invisible hand doesn't work in games when there's a particularly good example of it working well. I can't think of any game I've played that as an entirely AI-driven economy that's come anywhere close to creating the same kind of experience you can get from EVE. The economy in that game is such a good approximation that they even had a massive ponzi scam several years ago.
The problem is that creating a realistic economy requires writing a lot of code to handle that game behavior as well as ensuring that the game behavior realistically models a real economy, or at least enough so in order to be satisfying.
EVE (and many MMOs) get around this problem by having the players drive the economy, which means that you don't need to code much AI to handle this as the players will tend to make intelligent decisions and create a functional economy. The only remaining issue is for developers to ensure that there're sufficient "sinks" in the economy so that inflation doesn't get out of control. EVE tends to do better here because the game allows for practically all player assets to be destroyed and leave the economy, whereas other MMOs tend to be limited in terms of what can be destroyed or permanently lost.
It's just an observation of human nature. It's why groups like the KKK exist and you'll be hard pressed to find a person or group that doesn't do this. People have experiences and generalize from them and then act on those generalizations. People are even notorious for holding on to those beliefs even when shown clearly contradictory evidence. Our brains are wired to work that way after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and even if a person is congnizant of this, they're still susceptible to falling into that kind of thinking.
When it came to supporting our work financially, we figured that companies that benefited from open source software would just hand over giant wads of cash to an unproven new nonprofit run by two former software engineers.
I realize they're probably being tongue-in-cheek, but does it really come as any surprise that such an organization (regardless of what it's doing) would be closing down? That seems like an even more cavalier approach to funding than the typical venture-capitalist start-up approach in silicon valley where the business model is to just get a bunch of users and figure out how to generate revenue at some magical point in the future.
I think that the other big problem is that they didn't provide enough ongoing value to a company to get funding. Any organization could use their recommendations or examples to create a code of conduct, but once that's in place, they're only really receiving money for past services rendered and no business is just going to keep forking over money that they don't need to.
A lot of Africa is trapped is a cycle of abject poverty that makes it difficult to progress, especially at the lower rungs of society. It's also necessary to consider that a lot of the diseases (Ebola, but HIV especially) that feed into that loop have originated in Africa. The parts of the continent that are doing better tend to be those that don't have massive issues with Malaria, AIDS, etc. Never mind group conflict due to arbitrary borders that have no real basis on history or culture that lead to distrust among the populace along with other mysticism and superstition brought on by a lack of education.
A lot of the other examples you listed also received financial backing to help with growth or recovery. The U.S. and allies brought great destruction upon Germany and Japan, but we also ensured that they could recover and prosper, in large part because of what happened after WWI with Germany.
There are a few African nations that are doing quite well, but Africa is not some monolith and many of the better off countries don't care a gnat's fart more than anyone else about the African countries that are dealing abject poverty, genocide, and epidemics on a continual basis.
Publicly accessible bathrooms that will end up full of junkies strung out on heroin who don't want to sleep out in the rain?
Cities have found out that these public resources tend to get abused, vandalized, or otherwise misused such that the general public doesn't want anything to do with them. Spend the money solving the poverty issues that tend to ruin implementations like that instead, and it turns out that many of the other problems which required those implementations tend to vanish as well.
You'd be better off just having the police occasionally ticket a few people for public urination and give them sufficient community service hours to clean up the mess it makes.
Or you could just hack their mobile device that can function as a hot-spot and use that as an attack vector.
When I hire programmers, I want programmers that can take vague requirements, apply their intelligence and experience, and provide a solution that works well and can evolve*. Sometimes this might mean the ability to convince me my requirements are ill-considered. If they aren't self-motivated and self-directed, they're wasting my time.
That's fine if you have a small team that can communicate and work well together, but on larger projects the overhead makes that kind of collaboration impossible and having everyone running off and producing their own solutions is a recipe for disaster and you'll end up with people arguing over how it should be done and an utter nightmare when it comes to integrating the various pieces. Sometimes its a lot easier to iron out the requirements, produce a very detailed design, and only leave minor implementation details up to the individual programmer, especially when a lot of those programmers might not be the highly intelligent or experienced people one would want to hire.
What's the price? The community could conceivably use some crowd-funding platform and everyone could pitch in $5 if they wanted to. I would imagine that ads could cover most of the hosting and bandwidth expenses and the community can just take turns filling the editor role such that the ongoing costs should be minimal. Anything extra could always go towards supporting open source development efforts.
Which is especially funny given his recent moves to release 22 convicted drug offenders. Not that I disagree with this course of action (really no one should be going to prison over this in the first place) but it's also contradictory to previous actions by his administration in relation to drug enforcement.
We're probably better off under Obama than we would have been under McCain or Romney, but I don't think anyone can deny that President Obama is a lot different than candidate Obama. The funniest part is that we're seeing the same kind of swell around Sanders and how much change he'll bring. I never really followed politics much when I was younger, but has it always been like this? Townshend was wrong. It's seems like you can just keep fooling us over and over again.
Bennett Haselton could always buy it.
What money?
Do you think the patent trolls are going to keep that money on hand where something like that might happen. The money will have been spent on something, like a big bonus for the CEO or paid out in fees for expert witness testimony to someone's friend. Perhaps they needed a new company car which just happens to be a Rolls-Royce or something similar.
Anyone crooked and morally bankrupt enough to even run this type of enterprise isn't going to keep the money sitting around. Eventually the jig is up and if there's no money left, it's easy to abandon and move on to something else.
Unfortunately it's against that law to just leave you to die for your own stupidity in such cases and society invariably ends up bearing the costs. It's far less expensive to vaccinate people than it is to deal with the fallout from not doing so. Up until we can agree that you can contractually permit society ignoring any consequences for your poor decision, the pragmatic solution is to require it.
One could also take a position that not vaccinating your children is tantamount to neglect as they are incapable of making such a choice at that age and you're merely forcing your own beliefs on the child whether they would objectively want to make that decision in later life or not. Again, were there a system by which society could be absolved of having to deal with the consequences of an individual's poor decisions, this wouldn't be an issue, but we do not live in that world.
It's not morally justifiable, but the laws that are in place make coercion necessary from a financial point of view. If the government is going to force me to pay for something, I'd like to pay as little as possible and that means vaccinating the population to the greatest extend possible.
Skepticism is healthy, and when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. However, this is being repeatedly validated by multiple credible sources, which means that it should be accepted. If the crowd here is skeptical, it's only because we've see so much junk science over the years that has been latched onto and all the damage such things do. Look at the anti-vaccination movement, which has resulted in an increase in cases of diseases that were practically non-existent for decades.
Everything that's generally accepted today went through similar amounts of skepticism at some point and was borne out by repeated studies to prove its validity. Anything less and you've got something more akin to a religion and articles of faith.
I disagree. Canada is just as bad as the U.S. in some regards. For example, if you want to purchase blank media, you're paying a piracy tax to the media companies because they lobbied that legislation successfully. There are plenty of other examples of the Canadian parties bending to the whims of various special interests.
From a purely theoretical stand point, it's a lot easier to lobby/bribe a party (single entity) than it is to bribe a large number of individual representatives. You even point out that the individual MPs are simply expected to vote with their party. Given that most probably don't understand the stuff they're voting on (same thing in the U.S. for most topics and the average Congress critter) voting the party line is an easy cop out, so it only becomes a matter of getting the person pushing the party line in one's pocket.
I think that there are better solutions for dealing with lobbying issues such as enforcing single term limits for every position at a federal level and forbidding collecting campaign contributions or campaigning while holding office. The only way to bribe a representative would be to do so before they are elected and because they can only have a single term, there's no incentive for them to stay bought.
the action or process of investing money for profit or material result.
The Kickstarter backer rewards or eventual product is the material reward in this case.
Also, have you ever heard the phrase "Improving education is investing in the future of our country." or something similar to that effect? Clearly no one is talking about owning some part of future generations or anything along those lines.