I am confused. I have never been an "Elections Inspector" whatever that is. But I have worked several times as a scrutineer (watching the voting etc from within the polling station.) We easily watched counting of hundreds of ballots in 45 minutes.
Oh wait, I am in Canada and the ballots in provincial and federal elections only have the 4 to 6 names of the candidates for that riding. We don't lump in judges, dog catchers etc on a single giant ballot.
So again with the caveat that are ballots may have a superior design, counting hundreds of ballots by hand can easily be done in 45 minutes. Sit down and separate a shuffled deck of cards into four suits. How long did that take? About 2 minutes? Times 16 for 800 votes, 32 minutes. With the ballots we use here sorting ballots is not much harder then sorted cards into suits. They are not colour coded but its just a single straight line of check boxes which is just as easy.
So perhaps instead of eVoting Machines you need to redesign your elections for less complicated ballots.
Although I do agree that counting machines are different then voting machines and should be able to be incorporated into the process.
In my province we had a referendum to change to a form of proportional representation called STV. The group against this change represented it as requiring "electronic voting" which was a willful and dirty misrepresentation. While electronic tabulation of counting would have helped a great deal, that is not the same as electronic voting.
you take an insurance with the only goal to have somebody else pay for your problems covered by the insurance.
Wrong again. You take an insurance policy to share risk with thousands of other people. The actuarial people in the insurance company know that for every 1000 people 1 will get TB, 1 will get something and so on. So they calculate the cost of treating all the various things that can happen to that group of a thousand people based on the best stats they have, and then they divide the cost between that thousand people and add a bit for profit.
So really its more of a buying club. Which is why it the US should have went with a public single payer health insurance company like Canada has.
Minimum sentences apply only under aggravating circumstances... like selling drugs on school property, selling drugs while armed with a gun, or selling drugs on behalf of organized crime.
You are mostly correct, however let me help clarify
"selling drugs on school property"
WRONG. Selling drugs "near where children frequent" is the language used. So is that a city block or a mile? I posit that in a city you are never more then a few blocks for a school, day care, etc.
"selling drugs on behalf of organized crime."
Yes, but organized crime only means if at least three people financial benefit from it. So a few college kids selling weed can count as "organized crime"
There is another circumstance that you didn't mention which was involving a 3rd parties property. So all you have to do is sell weed from your rented apartment or a coffee shop to run afoul of this one.
So I can hear someone saying "Sure but we can count on the prosecutors judgement. They can choose to have the case heard as involving these 'aggravating' circumstances or not."
True, but if so then what does this law do? All it does is move the discretion from the judge to the prosecutor. Is that a good idea? The prosecutor has a vested interest in getting convictions which means they may be LESS likely to ask for aggravating circumstances to apply. Was that the outcome that they wanted?
There was only one outcome that Harper wanted from this law and it was purely political. He got to tell a bunch of old people that voted for him that he was getting tough on crime.
All it shows is his true colours in that he will put political gains ahead of good policy everytime.
It is not very helpful to condemn the use of taxes as a regulatory tool without providing an alternative.
Do you have any ideas other then the intellectually lazy stance of standing on principal?
Should the government then set minimum fuel efficiency standard for various classes of trucks/cars/buses etc and then make it illegal to make/sell/own anything that does not comply? There is no "tax" in that plan. The purpose of leadership is to lead, we can discuss the methods of leadership but the role is still required.
Lets use sewers as a very close proxy for car emissions. Are you in very of a select few deciding that we should pay taxes to properly dispose of our shit? Or should we all be free to do what we want with it? My car throws emissions onto your sidewalk. Would you like me to do the same with my feces?
I understand that Libertarian ideals are very seductive, to bad they just lead to dictatorships of force. Arg! it gives me a headache just trying to get inside your head to understand you.
Some of what you say is true however we also have a trade strategy that punishes the developing world.
At world trade meetings the US and Europe constantly harp on about the importance of free trade. BUT then they claim that food is a strategic resource as a justification of their $40b subsidy of farms in the EU and $20b in the US.
So you see free trade means that I can buy your banks and phone companies but it does not mean that you can sell us your food.
What are small developing nations supposed to export? Fire engines and ice breakers? Let the poor bastards sell us food on a level playing field then talk to me about how it is their lack of character that is holding them back.
I am not as familiar with the US but here in Canada I have worked in the Canadian civil service both as an employee and a contractor as well as availing myself of various government services as a citizen. What I can tell you is that in my experience they are professional run and have no more issues or inefficiencies than any large private organization private.
Also the customer service I receive from pretty much every level of government far exceeds anything I get from say my cell phone company or a big box retailer.
You may find that the US civil service does not met your exceptions but it would be a mistake to apply that as a rule across the rest of the modern world.
There are more motivators then just profit and in some sectors of society profit is the exactly the wrong kind of motivator. Prisons come to mind to me. A private prison can increase profits by either increasing the incarceration rate, or by lower services to prisons (drug treatment, and other rehabilitation services). Neither of those would serve the public good so private prisons are an extremely terrible idea as I am sure you in the USA are learning.
Personally I put health insurance in the same basket. It works better as a single public body.
We don't have government doctors what we have is a government insurance company. The actuarial information is basically open to all so its possible to see why the premiums are set the way they are. I have never heard of anyone complaining that a procedure was not covered (except a sex change operation, but I think most of those are still covered). If it wasn't for US TV we would know the meaning of the word "pre-existing condition". When I go to the doctor they proscribe whatever drugs or treatments are best and I do them. I hit my head in a hockey game one morning so I went to a doctor in the afternoon and they sent me for an MRI the next morning. After the MRI I walked across the street and see the specialist who reviewed the results with me. No fuss no muss and no waiting lists. Anyone telling you about a "health care crisis" in Canada is out to lunch and has an agenda against your better interest.
Innovation? Our single public insurance system funds all sorts of preventative measures like encouraging (not coercing) healthy lifestyles and seeking early treatment.
Exactly what kind of "innovation" does a private health insurance company in the US provide? New ways to screw you out of the treatment you need?
For profit companies are simply not the best tool for all occasions. Not for profits societies, regulated monopolies and government run agencies all have their roles to play. To me health insurance is a natural fit for government.
This idea that anything the government does the private sector can do better is an absolute lie.
Government forcing private individuals to purchase something from a private entity simply because they're citizens is Socialist. Ergo, those that propose such policies/legislation are Socialist, despite any labels they may dress themselves in.
Not sure that I would agree with you on this. The proper modern social democrat thing to do would have been to gone to a single payer model where there was no private health insurance. Then the rates would be so low that only the completely indigent or stupid wouldn't pay it but they would be covered by the automatic subsidy and base line level of service.
What you got instead was some sort of weird hybrid designed to let private insurance companies stay in a game that should have been 100% public.
If you think about it for even a minute you can see that a public insurance body should be the most natural thing in the world. Insurance is about spreading the risk with premium level set by the math of the actuarial tables. So the more people in the pool the lower the premiums.
If it were a public body it could be designed to break even, or at the very least run it as a regulated monopoly with a set profit level like a utility.
So the threat was a low probability event, the vulnerability turned out to be what, a run away meltdown? The risk is how many square miles and ocean contaminated for how long?
It doesn't matter how low the probability of the threat is, if the risks are high enough you need to plan for them.
Its not a "think tank" there are chambers of commerce all around the world. It is a member driven organization with local chapters that also support regional and national committees. I am on the board of directors of my local chapter. All chapters and regional/national organization carry the name of the city or region they serve. Nothing insidious about it.
The nefarious business we get up to locally is running small business trade shows in the mall, and having one hell of a Christmas party:)
With that said our national organization here in Canada is constantly spewing out stuff that our local chapter directors disagree with. Welcome to large distributed organizations.
Also, After speaking a few times with my local Conservative Party MP I believe they reject two of the underlying ethics of the Kyoto Protocol.
The first ethic they reject is what I would call the "fair play ethic" which basically asserts that the developed world should allow the developing world to pollute a little longer so they can catch up and finish developing.
The second ethic they reject is the "per person principal". Conservatives continually drone on and on about how much China pollutes compared to China as "a nation". Of course they don't bother comparing Canada to say Luxembourg. If they did compare the per capita emissions it would show that we emit 4 to 5 times as much as each Chinese citizen.
These position have been hashed out over and over by professional ethicist, so it is accurate to say that technically, the Canadian Government is behaving unethically.
As a Canadian who worked very hard to prevent this Conservative Party from getting a majority Government, you have my apology for failing.
I have been in a similar circumstances and there are a few other ways to handle it.
#1 solution use a link for your main format that you want the search engines to read (html) then instead of links for the other version use forms. You can still use get, and you can style the submit button to look like a link. Sure its a bit more html then a simple link but as a solution it is simple and effective.
The real word example for me is that I would like to get a portable or shelf stereo that I can plug my phone into. Either using a standard microphone style jack, USB, or even SD card. Unfortunately every electronics store in the three towns around me have shelves full of stereos that only have iPhone cradles and no other option.
Yes if I order online I have a few more options, but even then it is very hard to find a portable stereo that takes audio in via a USB port.
Firstly, The size of the country shouldn't really matter much. It's all about how you plan your society and your industry.
You may have freedom of movement, but paying for the gas is not an entitlement.
Secondly, I don't think you really have a choice anymore about the cost of fuel. According to the International Energy Agency's 2010 report we already hit peak oil in 2006. http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/weo2010sum.pdf
So even without removing oil's subsidize the cost is going to rise and rise as demand continues to grow.
Why in the world do people call twitter social networking like say a faceboook ?
What makes Micro-bloging? or text message syndication? a "social network". No personal information need be involved, there is no friending or circles or cliques or whatever.
Or perhaps it IS a social network and what we need is a new name for things like facebook? Like maybe "social disease"?
So ya, there will still be some oil somewhere, but can we pump out enough to keep our current economies going? No probably not. It needs to be replaced with something.
If you read Jeremy Rifkin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Rifkin) he figures that the financial collapse of 2008 was actual triggered by oil reaching its all time high a few months previous. It's when everyone realized that the game was over and they couldn't keep discounting the future so much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Rifkin
What makes you think he is wrong? After all the International Energy Agency already stated that we hit peak oil back in 2006 so its all down hill from here.
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder Americans are so over-weight! Their like children gulping that much corn syrup.
Two liters of soda pop a day!! Good god man are you mad!
I am confused. I have never been an "Elections Inspector" whatever that is. But I have worked several times as a scrutineer (watching the voting etc from within the polling station.) We easily watched counting of hundreds of ballots in 45 minutes.
Oh wait, I am in Canada and the ballots in provincial and federal elections only have the 4 to 6 names of the candidates for that riding. We don't lump in judges, dog catchers etc on a single giant ballot.
So again with the caveat that are ballots may have a superior design, counting hundreds of ballots by hand can easily be done in 45 minutes. Sit down and separate a shuffled deck of cards into four suits. How long did that take? About 2 minutes? Times 16 for 800 votes, 32 minutes. With the ballots we use here sorting ballots is not much harder then sorted cards into suits. They are not colour coded but its just a single straight line of check boxes which is just as easy.
So perhaps instead of eVoting Machines you need to redesign your elections for less complicated ballots.
Although I do agree that counting machines are different then voting machines and should be able to be incorporated into the process.
In my province we had a referendum to change to a form of proportional representation called STV. The group against this change represented it as requiring "electronic voting" which was a willful and dirty misrepresentation. While electronic tabulation of counting would have helped a great deal, that is not the same as electronic voting.
Wrong again. You take an insurance policy to share risk with thousands of other people. The actuarial people in the insurance company know that for every 1000 people 1 will get TB, 1 will get something and so on. So they calculate the cost of treating all the various things that can happen to that group of a thousand people based on the best stats they have, and then they divide the cost between that thousand people and add a bit for profit.
So really its more of a buying club. Which is why it the US should have went with a public single payer health insurance company like Canada has.
You are mostly correct, however let me help clarify
WRONG. Selling drugs "near where children frequent" is the language used. So is that a city block or a mile? I posit that in a city you are never more then a few blocks for a school, day care, etc.
Yes, but organized crime only means if at least three people financial benefit from it. So a few college kids selling weed can count as "organized crime"
There is another circumstance that you didn't mention which was involving a 3rd parties property. So all you have to do is sell weed from your rented apartment or a coffee shop to run afoul of this one.
So I can hear someone saying "Sure but we can count on the prosecutors judgement. They can choose to have the case heard as involving these 'aggravating' circumstances or not."
True, but if so then what does this law do? All it does is move the discretion from the judge to the prosecutor. Is that a good idea? The prosecutor has a vested interest in getting convictions which means they may be LESS likely to ask for aggravating circumstances to apply. Was that the outcome that they wanted?
There was only one outcome that Harper wanted from this law and it was purely political. He got to tell a bunch of old people that voted for him that he was getting tough on crime.
All it shows is his true colours in that he will put political gains ahead of good policy everytime.
And now that we have more oil then god and are just another captured petro-state, that isn't going to change soon.
Goodbye Canadian Democracy, hello corruption of the legal system.
It is not very helpful to condemn the use of taxes as a regulatory tool without providing an alternative.
Do you have any ideas other then the intellectually lazy stance of standing on principal?
Should the government then set minimum fuel efficiency standard for various classes of trucks/cars/buses etc and then make it illegal to make/sell/own anything that does not comply? There is no "tax" in that plan. The purpose of leadership is to lead, we can discuss the methods of leadership but the role is still required.
Lets use sewers as a very close proxy for car emissions. Are you in very of a select few deciding that we should pay taxes to properly dispose of our shit? Or should we all be free to do what we want with it? My car throws emissions onto your sidewalk. Would you like me to do the same with my feces?
I understand that Libertarian ideals are very seductive, to bad they just lead to dictatorships of force. Arg! it gives me a headache just trying to get inside your head to understand you.
Some of what you say is true however we also have a trade strategy that punishes the developing world.
At world trade meetings the US and Europe constantly harp on about the importance of free trade. BUT then they claim that food is a strategic resource as a justification of their $40b subsidy of farms in the EU and $20b in the US.
So you see free trade means that I can buy your banks and phone companies but it does not mean that you can sell us your food.
What are small developing nations supposed to export? Fire engines and ice breakers? Let the poor bastards sell us food on a level playing field then talk to me about how it is their lack of character that is holding them back.
The West, like the rest, are hypocrites.
I am not as familiar with the US but here in Canada I have worked in the Canadian civil service both as an employee and a contractor as well as availing myself of various government services as a citizen. What I can tell you is that in my experience they are professional run and have no more issues or inefficiencies than any large private organization private.
Also the customer service I receive from pretty much every level of government far exceeds anything I get from say my cell phone company or a big box retailer.
You may find that the US civil service does not met your exceptions but it would be a mistake to apply that as a rule across the rest of the modern world.
There are more motivators then just profit and in some sectors of society profit is the exactly the wrong kind of motivator. Prisons come to mind to me. A private prison can increase profits by either increasing the incarceration rate, or by lower services to prisons (drug treatment, and other rehabilitation services). Neither of those would serve the public good so private prisons are an extremely terrible idea as I am sure you in the USA are learning.
Personally I put health insurance in the same basket. It works better as a single public body.
We don't have government doctors what we have is a government insurance company. The actuarial information is basically open to all so its possible to see why the premiums are set the way they are. I have never heard of anyone complaining that a procedure was not covered (except a sex change operation, but I think most of those are still covered). If it wasn't for US TV we would know the meaning of the word "pre-existing condition". When I go to the doctor they proscribe whatever drugs or treatments are best and I do them. I hit my head in a hockey game one morning so I went to a doctor in the afternoon and they sent me for an MRI the next morning. After the MRI I walked across the street and see the specialist who reviewed the results with me. No fuss no muss and no waiting lists. Anyone telling you about a "health care crisis" in Canada is out to lunch and has an agenda against your better interest.
Innovation? Our single public insurance system funds all sorts of preventative measures like encouraging (not coercing) healthy lifestyles and seeking early treatment.
Exactly what kind of "innovation" does a private health insurance company in the US provide? New ways to screw you out of the treatment you need?
For profit companies are simply not the best tool for all occasions. Not for profits societies, regulated monopolies and government run agencies all have their roles to play. To me health insurance is a natural fit for government.
This idea that anything the government does the private sector can do better is an absolute lie.
Not sure that I would agree with you on this. The proper modern social democrat thing to do would have been to gone to a single payer model where there was no private health insurance. Then the rates would be so low that only the completely indigent or stupid wouldn't pay it but they would be covered by the automatic subsidy and base line level of service.
What you got instead was some sort of weird hybrid designed to let private insurance companies stay in a game that should have been 100% public.
If you think about it for even a minute you can see that a public insurance body should be the most natural thing in the world. Insurance is about spreading the risk with premium level set by the math of the actuarial tables. So the more people in the pool the lower the premiums.
If it were a public body it could be designed to break even, or at the very least run it as a regulated monopoly with a set profit level like a utility.
Threats, Vulnerabilities, Risks
So the threat was a low probability event, the vulnerability turned out to be what, a run away meltdown? The risk is how many square miles and ocean contaminated for how long?
It doesn't matter how low the probability of the threat is, if the risks are high enough you need to plan for them.
Its not a "think tank" there are chambers of commerce all around the world. It is a member driven organization with local chapters that also support regional and national committees. I am on the board of directors of my local chapter. All chapters and regional/national organization carry the name of the city or region they serve. Nothing insidious about it.
:)
The nefarious business we get up to locally is running small business trade shows in the mall, and having one hell of a Christmas party
With that said our national organization here in Canada is constantly spewing out stuff that our local chapter directors disagree with. Welcome to large distributed organizations.
Nooooooo,,,,wow what a bummer
Those are all things you can do with your eyes still on the road.
"I've found if you want to keep a PC clean a combination of Comodo Dragon or Chromium with ABP on Windows 7 with Avast Free works like magic."
;)
I just pay for my porn. With the money I save not have to by AV...I can buy more porn
Also, After speaking a few times with my local Conservative Party MP I believe they reject two of the underlying ethics of the Kyoto Protocol.
The first ethic they reject is what I would call the "fair play ethic" which basically asserts that the developed world should allow the developing world to pollute a little longer so they can catch up and finish developing.
The second ethic they reject is the "per person principal". Conservatives continually drone on and on about how much China pollutes compared to China as "a nation". Of course they don't bother comparing Canada to say Luxembourg. If they did compare the per capita emissions it would show that we emit 4 to 5 times as much as each Chinese citizen.
These position have been hashed out over and over by professional ethicist, so it is accurate to say that technically, the Canadian Government is behaving unethically.
As a Canadian who worked very hard to prevent this Conservative Party from getting a majority Government, you have my apology for failing.
I have been in a similar circumstances and there are a few other ways to handle it.
#1 solution use a link for your main format that you want the search engines to read (html) then instead of links for the other version use forms. You can still use get, and you can style the submit button to look like a link. Sure its a bit more html then a simple link but as a solution it is simple and effective.
The real word example for me is that I would like to get a portable or shelf stereo that I can plug my phone into. Either using a standard microphone style jack, USB, or even SD card. Unfortunately every electronics store in the three towns around me have shelves full of stereos that only have iPhone cradles and no other option.
Yes if I order online I have a few more options, but even then it is very hard to find a portable stereo that takes audio in via a USB port.
Mono-cultures just plain suck.
Not to mention that you can disable Google Analytics simply by blocking it with NoScript.
Firstly, The size of the country shouldn't really matter much. It's all about how you plan your society and your industry.
You may have freedom of movement, but paying for the gas is not an entitlement.
Secondly, I don't think you really have a choice anymore about the cost of fuel. According to the International Energy Agency's 2010 report we already hit peak oil in 2006. http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/weo2010sum.pdf
So even without removing oil's subsidize the cost is going to rise and rise as demand continues to grow.
Or running away feedback system that turns us into another Venus.
I have learned that my entire business is based on taking some bloated excel "app" and converting it to a proper rdbs.
So ya Excel gets people started, and I, in theory get them where they are going.
Why in the world do people call twitter social networking like say a faceboook ?
What makes Micro-bloging? or text message syndication? a "social network". No personal information need be involved, there is no friending or circles or cliques or whatever.
Or perhaps it IS a social network and what we need is a new name for things like facebook? Like maybe "social disease"?
Page 8 here: http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/weo2010sum.pdf
So ya, there will still be some oil somewhere, but can we pump out enough to keep our current economies going? No probably not. It needs to be replaced with something.
If you read Jeremy Rifkin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Rifkin) he figures that the financial collapse of 2008 was actual triggered by oil reaching its all time high a few months previous. It's when everyone realized that the game was over and they couldn't keep discounting the future so much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Rifkin
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/weo2010sum.pdf
The relevant section is on page 8 partial quoted here: