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Whiteycar posted:I wasn't being ironic. gently caress making a profit off essential services. I hate to tangentially agree with you know who, but I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Partly because of the debate over what counts as an essential service, but also because government intervention in the economy (which is by no means a bad thing!) should consider the exact market structure it's entering. Public Goods are a default area for government involvement, and I'd say infrastructure heavy markets like electricity generation, the telecom sector, and many types of insurance should also be the government's business. But price signalling still is a true and good thing; it works well in food distribution, which realistically is also an essential service in this day and age.
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Oct 6, 2014 00:22
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PT6A posted:I know my post wasn't phrased perfectly, but I was referring just to the value-based taxes instead of the quantity-based taxes, which, I believe is specifically what Rutibex was responding to in the post I quoted. I get that smokers and drinkers need to pay for the externalities we cause, but I don't see why my decision to smoke a more expensive cigar versus a cheaper cigar of the same size means I need to pay an additional, very punitive sin tax. I am doing the same amount of damage to myself and society. Because Progressive Taxation.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:41
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smoke sumthin bitch posted:most people drink because they want alcohol molecules in their bloodstreams. if you're looking for a good tasting liquid why not drink orange juice or some poo poo. Can't I want both? What I really want a good Hefeweizen to become popular enough to get common carriage in various establishments. Belgian Wits have been making headway, which gives me some hope. Not Shock Top though, holy poo poo that stuff is gross.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:36
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Has anybody ever used that service where you essentially hire a DD to drive your car home for you? I loving love that idea in theory, but I've just never heard of anybody using it, so I don't want to either.
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Oct 7, 2014 21:25
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PK loving SUBBAN posted:It's prohibitively expensive I think because you need two drivers and a car with every call, one to drive you home and one to drive the other guy wherever you are. At that point, a cab is always way cheaper. Yeah, I don't doubt that the cab would be cheaper, it would have to be, but a cab ride home from downtown is already in the $50 range for me, so if it's a modest cost increase I wouldn't be too upset. It would just save me the hassle of having to go get it again in the morning. It's also not something that happens more than once a year, so whatever. PK loving SUBBAN posted:...Uber and Uber-likes could have been developed by these near monopolies. They didn't. I don't understand how this doesn't exist yet. Surely the taxi companies can at least put together an app that allows me to call a cab, and then provides updates on when it will arrive. PittTheElder has issued a correction as of 22:16 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 22:11
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lonelywurm posted:And it was Hungary. Although I'm pretty sure it's not only Hungary. Hungary is definitely the worst offender, but from what I gather anti-Roma sentiment is pretty high throughout south eastern Europe right now.
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Oct 8, 2014 02:29
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Whiskey Sours posted:Pretty much: It's like the definition of FYGM.
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Oct 9, 2014 04:37
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swagger like us posted:The domestic threat [posed by ISIS] is way bigger than anything we have seen before. What evidence does anyone have for this? ISIS is essentially just the Taliban of 1994, there's no reason to think they're super organization unlike we've ever seen before. It's the type of organization that can and should be rooted out, but air raids are not going to accomplish that, nor are we willing to spend the kind of money that will be required.
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Oct 9, 2014 20:27
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swagger like us posted:Re-read my post, the evidence is in there. ISIS is not the Taliban of 1994 because there is a huge number of western foreign fighters. These fighters, once they come home, aren't just going to retire and have a home with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. Why are westerners different? The Taliban had tons of overseas support, most notably from Arabia (on top of Pakistani involvement of course). And who says they're all going to come home? Perhaps ISIS will succeed in establishing itself somewhere, in which case they might well sit tight. If ISIS fails, they may very well die. Even if they do all come home, this is the point you have to consider: ocrumsprug posted:This is a problem, but this is not a problem that you can solve with a military. The way to combat terrorism isn't to try and blow them up in some foreign land, it's to understand where these people come from, what's radicalising them, fixing those problems, and then through vigilant police action at home. And that's leaving aside the whole question of whether terrorism is even that big of a deal. It barely kills anyone outside of local conflict zones.
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Oct 9, 2014 20:40
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Ashley Madison posted:If anyone wants to sign up for iPolitics and has access to their college/university email account, use the promo code STU1415 and it's free for this school year. This just worked with my alumni account too.
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Oct 10, 2014 21:46
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Vermain posted:How do they keep consistently overshooting their estimates like this? What sort of bizarre metrics are being used? Probably politics. If you just assume that the price of oil will be higher, then provincial royalties are higher, and your budget looks better.
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Oct 10, 2014 23:17
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Everybody has been evacuated out of the core anyway, nobody is holing up in the dark down there. E: wait, I'm probably missing the joke too. Someone explain?
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Oct 13, 2014 03:27
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Rime posted:There was a large arguemeny last thread where PT6A vehemently claimed that downtown businesses should have remained open during the flooding and that people who stayed home from work were fools. I remember that, I was just wondering about the context of the copied post.
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Oct 13, 2014 04:44
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Seat Safety Switch posted:Hey, it's downtown Calgary. We'll sell you Monster energy drinks, cash, by candlelight. Surely they're lined up around the block, making money hand over fist?
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Oct 13, 2014 05:07
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A 10% flat tax.
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Oct 13, 2014 06:12
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Why does this even have anything to do with Nenshi? He's the mayor, but this isn't really his purview. All he can do is pass on information, and yell at people and maybe get that time shaved down, but probably not.
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Oct 13, 2014 08:33
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Lester B. Pearson posted:Maybe I am dumb but how would they benefit from a lower oil price? The article says lower prices now mean less investments in startup extraction projects, which means more profit in the medium term. That or they're particularly pissed off at some local oil-producing rival, and thinks a price cut will hurt them more.
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Oct 14, 2014 06:20
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vyelkin posted:Wait, no, I mean close the borders, it's the only way to be safe. When in doubt, move to Madagascar and close the port.
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Oct 15, 2014 15:40
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drat that Nenshi, warning us that the outage might have been longer than it was. We have the market to thank for this! 
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Oct 17, 2014 04:14
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PT6A posted:Nenshi, throwing tantrum over railroad: Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe CP deserved to have someone yell at them? What they were doing was pretty loving reckless, and you can be drat sure neither of the other two branches of government were going to do anything about it. Really the same goes for the property developer lobby, those guys aren't doing our city any favours, and their effective lobbying is costing you, inner city tax payer, quite a bit of money.
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Oct 18, 2014 00:16
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Five loving percent? Even leaving aside all the loopholes, that's still atrociously low.
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Oct 21, 2014 22:51
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Rime posted:The reluctance of Canada to become a world-leader in any sort of technological breakthrough these days, especially nuclear, is quite befuddling. No it isn't, that sort of technological innovation would require the government having the funds available to fund a robust scientific research economy.
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Oct 22, 2014 06:05
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MA-Horus posted:CP24 keeps saying "NHL says too soon to say if Leafs and Sens will play tonight" The correct opinion.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:11
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Rime posted:Jesus christ, all I did was express concern at how this would impact the future of the country. Nobody feels bad that increased anti-terrorism measures will prevent a coup d'etat in what remains a strongly democratic country, please leave.
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Oct 22, 2014 18:27
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Generation Internet posted:The entire reason we were in Afghanistan for 13 years was in response to the worst single attack against innocent civilians since WWII. We went there on the faulty assumptions that you can somehow reform an entire country to an idealized liberal democracy quickly and cleanly, and that you can prevent extremist attacks on civilians everywhere by force of arms alone in an isolated underdeveloped part of the world, but once we were there there was a commitment to attempt to improve the quality of life for people living there. Characterizing it as 'bombing out' a country for over a decade is unfair to the people who were there actually attempting to make a change and flat out untrue. Obviously there was nothing perfect about our involvement and things could have been handled better, but I don't believe we're a bully nation for our role there. The implication that somehow we had this coming simply because we were there is offensive. I think the bolded portion is pretty wrong. I'm not trying to disparage the efforts of the guys who were there, I'm sure most of them had good intentions. But you really do have to look at this in the wider context of what our governments were planning to achieve. You can't just waltz into a country that's seen a quarter century of civil war, becoming impoverished in the process, and then expect to have everything turn out well. You can say that our governments assumed everything would turn out fine, but that's essentially gross negligence, and it doesn't let them off the hook. We probably could have turned Afghanistan into at least a secure, functioning, democratic state (probably not a western liberal democracy), but it would have required a massive investment, both in capital, and in personnel, many of whom likely would have died in the process. Neither our governments nor the population at large were willing to support anything on the scale required, and I'd say that means we had no damned business being there in the first place. And that's to say nothing of how properly sorting out Afghanistan also would have involved properly sorting out Pakistan, a nuclear armed state run by its intelligence agency, utterly paranoid of it's much more powerful neighbour, and active state sponsor of terrorist organizations. e: Although I have to say I disagree with Greenwald, I doubt our overseas adventures have really made us any more of a target than we would have been anyway. But I'm also not sure why anyone is still talking about today's incident and ISIS in the same sentence, we have exactly zero evidence at this stage that the former has anything to do with the latter. Kafka Esq. posted:I don't think everyone was reading the same article I was - Greenwald rightfully pointed out that the statists were going to use a one-off attack on soldiers in a parking lot as the Canadian come-to-Jesus moment on terrorism. He points out that if Canadians can't expect a little counter-violence to their violence across the world, recognize it, and accept that our adventuring will have costs that shouldn't be used as pretext to go kill more innocent civilians elsewhere, then we should get out of the adventuring game altogether. I do agree with this general sentiment though. We in the West need to get to a point where we can sensibly react to terrorist acts without comically overreacting. In the grand scheme of things, September 11th barely killed anyone. When Americans collectively decided to flip their lids about it, they truly did let the terrorists win. It was an absolutely tragedy to be sure, but that's no reason to let it define two decades of foreign policy. PittTheElder has issued a correction as of 20:54 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 20:47
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JawKnee posted:you might call it our burden to bear, right? 
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Oct 22, 2014 23:26
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If all violence is terrorism, then we don't have to commit sociology to classify it.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:31
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He is very obviously being sarcastic.
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Oct 23, 2014 06:42
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Communocracy posted:I'm gonna take a moment away from calling for the heads of middle eastern children to ask about this relatively mundane NIMBY issue. Can any of you science/energy/pollution minded goons tell me if the town residents had a real complaint here or are they getting up in arms about nothing? To me, it seems like somebody just read the word 'hydrogen' in the plant's description and yelled "MY GOD, THAT'S A CHEMICAL, RIGHT?" but I don't actually know. From reading about it briefly, hydrogen fuel cells seem like a pretty good thing overall, yes? Yeah, seems super tame. Hydrogen is explosive, but not in any special way. As long as you're taking reasonable precautions, it's probably safer than say, a gas station, where you'd have long term concerns about fuel leeching into the soil. Nothing I'm finding online specifies how they would have produced the hydrogen had they chosen to do so on site, but it'd probably be by electrolysis which is relatively harmless. Overall it's just an industrial chemical that requires you to take appropriate safety measures, but there's no real long term concerns which is nice. However it sounds like there's a dispute over exactly what the authorities were told. If safety regulators or the fire department didn't know about the presence of large quantities of hydrogen, that's a serious public safety risk, but not one specific to hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells are indeed pretty cool, though when thinking about it from a carbon footprint perspective you do of course need to consider how it was produced in the first place.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:10
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Baronjutter posted:That whole area should be farmland really. Destroy all suburbia, at least the sprawl on prime farmland.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:16
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Baronjutter posted:lazy gently caress had to jack a car to drive like 200m ? If he walked calmly and quickly and didn't flail his gun around he probably would have made it much further. He was probably operating under the assumption that the House guards are armed, and just running the 200m with a gun would have got him shot in short order.
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Oct 23, 2014 23:43
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PT6A posted:All I'm saying, because I'm a radical atheist oval office, is that I'd support secular dictatorship over a democracy that favours theocracy. 
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Oct 24, 2014 08:25
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JoelJoel posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrkgV5bl7kQ I do not understand why The Trews are so popular.
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Oct 24, 2014 21:23
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FowlTheOwl posted:Will they arm the soldiers in the future to allow them to respond, or would it just be to risky? Honestly I'm surprised they're armed at all, other than with a holstered sidearm maybe. I don't know that it would be all that risky, given that the guys picked are all military, and probably among the most reliable in the crop. Might just be a big bureaucratic thing, I don't know what sorts of administrative safeguards the forces have to ensure ammunition isn't going missing.
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Oct 26, 2014 06:44
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HookShot posted:A big personality like him? SURELY they spoke to at least one lawyer before making that decision, and if they really did make the decision based entirely on "well he's into BDSM..." well I have a hard time believing any lawyer or even HR person wouldn't have just shut that idea down. Yeah, there's clearly something more serious than 'BDSM sure is weird, anybody could tell you firing somebody for that isn't going to end well. Even if higher ups at CBC just had some grudge against him, you'd think they would have cut him a few months ago when the big budget cuts came down.
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Oct 27, 2014 01:18
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Cultural Imperial posted:What I want to know is what the gently caress were the CBC paying jian so that he could lawyer the gently caress up like he was japan in pearl harbour This simile doesn't make any sense.
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Oct 27, 2014 07:46
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Heavy neutrino posted:Goldman Sachs predicts oil will fall to $70/barrel in 2015 I keep hoping that one of these rampant price swings will eventually force the people of this province to accept that oil revenue can't replace broad base taxation, and that deficits aren't categorically bad. But who am I kidding...
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Oct 27, 2014 18:25
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Pinterest Mom posted:I really don't understand why we need counting machines at all. For Montreal municipal elections, we elect multiple positions, each on a separate ballot, shove them all in the same box (3-5 ballots per voter, depending on the area), and then we hand count them in about half an hour and it's fine? Exactly. I've never understood the drive to put everything onto one ballot, and the quest for mechanized vote counting that derives there from. I guess it would still be annoying to count if you had 200 people running for mayor or some drat thing, but that's a good sign you should probably tighten the requirements.
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Oct 27, 2014 22:01
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Poizen Jam posted:I have to go with Jordan on this one. I'm not a fan of May, but if we don't allow our politicians to hone up to their mistakes and change their opinions in the face of evidence, without painting it as a sign of weakness, then we're promoting a political climate of ideologues and platitudes rather than honest discourse. Yeah, we've got more than enough legitimate reasons to dislike May, no reason to latch on to something she clearly didn't mean. Also, a Moxy Fruvous song just came up in my randomized playlist. Don't see what everyone has against them. 
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Oct 28, 2014 00:15
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colonel_korn posted:It's pretty conspicuous that the statement only talks about a relationship with one woman while the Star story claimed there were at least three. Four. Supposedly he also managed to sexually assault a women while at work. flakeloaf posted:Ghomeshi told the CBC he was into kink and that his exes might allege he was violent or abusive. CBC doesn't care. I'm guessing the whole case is going to hinge on the claim in Paragraph 17, namely that the CBC has independently investigated the claims as presented to them, and determined that there was no lack of consent involved. Evidently this lead Ghomeshi to conclude he was then fired based on "HE LIKES CHOKEY-SEX". Of course, I have no idea how the CBC's legal team would actually investigate whether consent was actually present, or whether that was just based on whatever evidence Ghomeshi showed them, and if something new came to light that lead to his dismissal. PittTheElder has issued a correction as of 18:41 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 18:35
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