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Not to mention <em>Strength of Conviction</em> by Tom Mulcair and <em>Who We Are</em> by Elizabeth May, both released shortly before the 2015 election

Concurred.

Even though the entirety of my extended family doesn't fully acknowledge it as valid, I am glad that the law, my mosque and my husband's church DO acknowledge our inter-faith, inter-racial same-sex marriage as valid and I would love if the law keeps acknowledging it as valid forever and centres my family values and that of the church he goes to and the mosque I go to over that of Conservatives' or right-wing Christians.

Not all Christians are homophobes. In fact I've found more support in my husband's church than anywhere else IMHO.

But religion should not govern the validity of marriage IMHO especially bad misrepresentations of the Bible text that are based off of inaccurate translations of malakoi and arsenkoitai (for further information read: “The Bible does not condemn ‘homosexuality.’ Seriously, it doesn’t.” by adam nicholas phillips https://link.medium.com/pu6zfl8LhZ ) or manipulation of the Quran to condemn homosexuality when it's actually condemning the practice of having a beard-wife (this is from Siraj Al-Haqq Kugle's seminal work available on Amazon here: "Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflection on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims" https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1851687017/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_YbUwDbGMTXC73 ).

Regardless I believe that my family values that "Love is love and it should not matter who someone loves as love is a God-given gift and not controllable by humans and that every consenting adult should be allowed to marry any other consenting adult, regardless of gender (or lack thereof), sexuality (or lack thereof), ability to procreate (or lack thereof), race/ethnicity/culture/nationality" should trump those of social conservatives that couch and hide their desire to manipulate other people's lives in nefarious and sadistic ways in the terms "family values/pro-life/religious basis for country" etc.

For those who are curious, here is the full ruling. Despite the political commentary on the nature of rape cases and rape myths, the judgement also reviews the testimony of both accuser and accused and evaluates their credibility. Of particular interest is a text sent by the accused to his accuser after the incident:

"I am sorry things went as they did. I shouldn’t have said and done some of the things I did. I was upset and felt wronged by you but that does not excuse my own mistakes."

This really didn't seem to gel with his testimony, that he broke up with her but had consolation sex afterwards, but does fit really well with her testimony, that he flew into a violent rage and sexually assaulted her.

Irvings are well known tax cheats who have never paid their fair share and have had a monopoly over new brunswick since at least the 1960s.

Jenica Atwin would make a great Green Party leader

You should read Trust me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It brilliantly digs into the media ecosystem and explains exactly why you are right.

https://www.amazon.ca/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/1591846285/ref=asc_df_1591846285_nodl/?tag=googlemobshop-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=292905515425&amp;hvpos=1o2&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=2803731859655008491&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&...

Spoiler: media went through this in the early 1900s when newspapers were sold individually. Subscriptions to papers is what Bred modern journalism as a virtuous pursuit like we understand it.

Yeah but this doesn't account how the vote changed from 2012 to 2016. Less super rich people voted red, whereas a lot more poor folks did.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0

Nope... Dehumanizing people and feeding tribalism with fear have been scientifically proven to incite violent behaviour

Here is one of the many books on the subject (the one I happened to have read)

Also, I am not trying to "score partisan points"... I am not registered or affiliated with any political party and have very often explained how, in my personal view, all politicians are to be distrusted... It does happen I have a particularly high level of dislike of the type of rhetoric the far-right is absolutely pushing

Why can't booze be in the stores ? The children

Why can't I smoke marijuana ? The children

Why can't marijuana be sold in regular stores ? The Children

Why can't I have a cigar on a patio ? The children

Why can't I X ? The Children

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

Yes, we really do, because already I can see that your conclusion is illogical. Saying that something doesn’t exist does not imply that it once existed but has now ceased to. It could just as easily mean that something never existed. Example:

> Me: Unicorns don’t exist.

> You (“paraphrasing” me): All the unicorns killed themselves.

In the context, that’s most likely what Trudeau is saying—not a core identity has died, but that it never existed.

Further, if what you really wanted to convey was the death or elimination of something, then “suicide” is a poor word to use, because it doesn’t simply mean death—it means taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally. “Suicide” isn’t even on this list of synonyms for “death”. Yet you chose to use the word twice.

So, I still think you’re editorializing, but if you really did intend to merely paraphrase, then paraphrase better.

Yep. The most thorough analysis I've seen is from Jonathan Rhys Kesselman. He goes through three different options, and concludes that none of them is workable.

Simple and appealing ideas don't necessarily work in practice.

I think anti-poverty spending needs to be targeted, supporting the elderly, disabled, and working poor as well as the unemployed.

Policy should be aimed at maintaining full employment. It's much easier to supplement someone's earnings to bring them above the poverty line than to try to provide their entire income, and there's also negative social effects from concentrated unemployment (for example, see William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears).

• Monetary policy - when core inflation drops below 2%, the Bank of Canada lowers interest rates, boosting demand.
• Counter-cyclical fiscal policy - loosening fiscal policy during a severe recession (as Harper did in 2008), tightening it during a boom.
• Labour policy - I think we should be tightening restrictions on the Temporary Foreign Worker program.
• Tax policy - reducing marginal tax rates on the poor. The Canada Child Benefit reform helped here.
• Subsidizing low-wage earners (through the WITB).
• As a last resort, direct employment by the government.

Meat consumption is/was normal, but not common. Mainly because meat is expensive. Historically people ate vegetables and beans because they were in chronic poverty so meat was saved for special occasions. This book is a great example of what cooking looks like in non-western societies, and western societies pre-wealth. We eat more meat because we can afford it, but eating meat in the amount we do is actually pretty bad for us, and not at all what we ate historically.

> From the Chief Medical Officers of Health, the likelihood that you have a medical exemption from a vaccination is one to five in 100,000. The Conservative Caucus is 119 people

Taking the 5 in 100,000 (0.005%) chance, there's a 0.6% chance that one conservative MP would have one, or a 0.002% chance that 2 do, 0.000003% that there's 3 of them (thanks binomial calculator)

I'd doubt them if there's even 1, if there's 2 they're almost certainly lying, 3 is just ridiculous. Unless maybe there's significantly increased risk for old people

Brian Kernigan would be throwing a hissy right now. He's the the guy who co-wrote "The C Programming Language" with Dennis Richie. He was born in Toronto, studied at Princeton, and worked at Bell Labs.

Since the bread in the image is challah (a bread served at pretty much every Jewish holiday except passover), I'm guessing somebody just typed "jewish family cooking" into shutterstock.

Ninja edit: Yup, that picture is literally the first result for &quot;jewish family cooking&quot; on shutterstock

If the CPC had held a truly fair and open competition from the get-go then the option we wound up with (probably the F-35) wouldn't have become the political hot potato it has. Instead we got a damning Auditor General report, promises of a do-over by the Conservatives they never got around to carrying out, and a ludicrous campaign-trail promise by Trudeau to exclude the aircraft from future competitions he thankfully seems to be backtracking on.

>MacKay says the Lockheed-Martin F-35 still beats other planes on the market when it comes to meeting Canada's needs.

He's probably right but I find it hard not to root for the underdog Gripen NG, especially after the rigged competition in Norway in favour of the F-35 at their expense.

CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas

>The gaseous air pollutants of primary concern in urban settings include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide; these are emitted directly into the air from fossil fuels such as fuel oil, gasoline, and natural gas that are burned in power plants, automobiles, and other combustion sources. Ozone (a key component of smog) is also a gaseous pollutant; it forms in the atmosphere via complex chemical reactions occurring between nitrogen dioxide and various volatile organic compounds (e.g., gasoline vapours).

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/10772/air-pollution/286162/Greenhouse-gases

I am confused about this guy's political orientation. His rate-my-prof page implies he is a radical left dude. http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=17183

Is anyone familear with him?

>Were these claims ever substantiated, and if so, did the Trudeau government reverse or change these policies?

Yes there is an entire book on it

https://www.amazon.ca/War-Science-Muzzled-Scientists-Blindness/dp/1771004312

> It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. [emphasis mine] — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

> Go again and see not just the film and the play but read the text of Robert Bolt's wonderful play "Man For All Seasons", some of you must have seen it - where Sir Thomas Moore decides that he would rather die than lie or betray his faith and at one moment Moore is arguing with a particularly vicious witch-hunting prosecutor (a servant of the king and a hungry and ambitious man), and Moore says to this man "You'd break the law to punish the Devil, wouldn't you?" And the prosecutor, the witch hunter, says "Break it?" He says "I'd cut down every law in England if I could do that, if I could capture him." And Moore says "Yes you would wouldn't you? And then when you corner the Devil and the Devil turned round to meet you, where would you run for protection? All the laws of England having been cut down and flattened, who would protect you then?" Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else you, in potentia, you're making a rod for your own back because the other question raised by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is simply this: "Whose going to decide? To whom do you reward the right to decide which speech is harmful? Or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?"

Christopher Hitchens on freedom of speech

I'm just going to leave this book recommendation here

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A Generation of Sociopaths

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Edit: stupid "new" reddit can't deal with it's own link formatting

That's ethnocentrism, but maybe if you gave your reasoning for why you believe that it might also be racism.

Racism has been defined. Maybe you could offer some examples of things you don't think is racist but others do.

Just a PSA for anyone who didn't go to uni or went and didn't do an argumentation/reasoning skills/informal logic course. Coursera's offering Think again: How to Reason and Argue, the next one starts on the 5th and lasts 12 weeks, it's free of course.

If you ever wanted to know how to refute a straw man or wondered what an ad hominem attack was, you'll get that and more. Challenge: I scored 87%, probably could have scored higher with a bit more effort.

> Why don't you like Finley?

According to her application, I got the impression that she felt the party wasn't authoritarian enough, and that advisers shouldn't have as much influence. So she would have ramped up the things that people didn't like about Harper.

> Rempel and Lebel would have been a long shot

They seemed to have lots of support on all the conservative Facebook groups I'm a member of. The largest group did a poll, and put her in the lead for interim. They were well liked.

> We'll have to agree to disagree on the libertarian part.

I assume she just leans that way on a philosophical level. Most libertarian leaning conservatives I know, interpret libertarianism to mean something very different from the Ron Paul brand.

>As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forfend

2. The interesting thing about "people" is that they are not all the same. A policy that is neutral on its face may differentially impact groups of people that share certain characteristics. Should we not at least try to understand what those differential impacts are before we dismiss them? It's one thing to say we shouldn't care, it's quite another to say we shouldn't even know.

This is a bit of a personal conspiracy theory, but may be related to the degree that Russia interferes with Latvia:

I have Latvian friend who speaks glowingly of Latvian mythology and culture, and out of curiosity I browsed to the Latvian mythology Wikipedia page following a chat with her. I read through it, and was struck by how much it focused on the idea that Latvia's national myths are a very recent phenomena. Like, I'm somewhat familiar with the work of Benedict Anderson, but this was a Wikipedia page with a tone that was just out of keeping with what I usually come across.

I have the oddest suspicion that the page has been edited by pro-Russian agents.

Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis really get under my skin with their muckraking. They rose to their current prominence by repackaging ideas that have been floating around in political science for awhile into glossy, alarmist formats for the "faux-woke" crowd (The Shock Doctrine! Capitalism vs. Climate!)

I guess there's value in having prominent media folks keeping far left ideas in the Canadian conversation, but I really don't like the style of Klein & Lewis.

> It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Seeing parties as a tool for moving specific issues forward is much healthier then as a source of significant identity.

When party identification was more important to me I would try to think of positions on every issue, even where I didn't really care. Then I read the book "Getting to Yes" (about negotiation) which really changed by view. It advocates thinking in terms of interests (values would be more applicable here) instead of positions.

I think you should place yourself where you can best advance your values, not where people most share your positions. Though they are often the same in politics.

I think that narrative is because of places like HuffPo which gave Hilary 98.2% chance to win especially when they literally ran hit pieces against other pollsters that didn’t just assume it was an automatic Clinton win.

A lot of people will remember the boisterous idiots over the more measured responses sadly.

> That hasn't been my experience at all; do you have anything to support this claim?

Do you need a refresher on the definition of &quot;firsthand&quot;? I live in arguably the most diverse city in Canada. The vast majority of my interactions at work and socially are with visible minorities. My wife's family came here as refugees 35 years ago. Have you ever spoken to a minority who has lived in Canada for more than 25 years about immigration? I think you'd be surprised.

> "Old stock" small town Canada seems to be a prime recruitment ground for anti-immigrant sentiment, from my experience.

I get the feeling you don't interact with a lot of minorities if you're surprised by a resentment towards non-integrating newcomers.

> just consider a January birthday kid in grade 3 vs. a December birthday kid in grade 3.

look here

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/18/544483397/oldest-kids-in-class-do-better-even-through-college

>Punishing a city for the policies that their elected representatives put in place?

And are endorsed by their voters by re-electing said representatives / not electing alternatives.

>Let's not pretend that this is the only person that San Francisco has failed to hand over to ICE.

And what's the net result? Sanctuary cities are slightly safer [2] than non-sanctuary cities.

Once again the headlines trump the data. Outrage over one incident shouldn't win out over the sum of the facts.

The so-called crackdown on illegal immigration on the US needs some serious cutbacks in scope, scale, and objectives - if not a wholesale rethink as to whether or not it's rational at all.

great write up thank you.

> $15k/yr apiece is a $300bil/yr program.

We can actually do $10k/year and be revenue neutral depending on how aggressive we are at cutting other programs.

But revenue neutral actually means a huge tax cut to nearly everyone, because everyone is getting the UBI ($10k above). So if we raise tax rates just a little, it can still be a tax cut for everyone earning below $50k or $80k, and increase the revenue available such that $15k per person is feasible.

For instance, a flat personal and corporate tax of 30%, (no EI premiums. CPP would be optional. But no deductions for capital gains and dividend income) allows for $15k/person affordability. Someone earning $50k per year from other sources, has effectively net 0 tax, and those earning $75k have about 10% tax bill ($7500), which is also a reduction from current levels.

US numbers: http://jsfiddle.net/3bYTJ/11/

Due to personal interest, I've read some of Peterson's work. I've not sure he represents the faction of psychologists concerned with the discipline's notorious and existential replicability crisis.

He seems rather content to discuss the Christian Logos and attempt to understand how religion shapes culture. A peculiar topic for a psychologist and is no doubt rife with methodological complexity requiring exceptional detail to procedure. Well, one hopes.

A description courtesy of Amazon:

> Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? Jordan Peterson offers a provocative new hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated. A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.

I have little faith in that turning out well. They need to teach some basic economics and monetary theory as well. If kids don't understand what money is, they're ill equipped to understand what finance is.

At a very minimum, they need to understand interest, originary interest, time preference theory of interest, and hopefully temporal and inter-temporal interest in the context of time preference theory. Without that they'll never actually be able to understand anything except on a superficial level. A bit better understanding is needed to squeeze out more benefits.

"Economics in One Lesson" would be a good book at the high school level.

Can you link to the definition you're using? Because the reasoning you're giving doesn't match up with the ones I'm seeing here or here. An

>How am I to assess they are taken out of context, am I just to take CBC's word for it?

You could do your own research, but generally if you're watching news programs you are trusting them to be telling you the truth. You could apply this logic to any story by any news caster and accuse them of propaganda.

Again by your reasoning every publication is guilty of propaganda. You haven't been able to show anything that says the CBC is producing propaganda. Your only proof is that you disagree with human interest stories.

Your interpretations of how the stories affect you is not proof. It's your own bias on the Syrian refugee program. Not every story on them requires a line at the end saying 'but maybe things aren't so good and we shouldn't have brought them here'. That's not balance. That's you projecting.

What you are saying is provably wrong. Please read the 2011 green platform at https://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/147206844/Vision-Green-2011-Green-Party-policy

The only ridiculous thing here is how disengaged you are with the facts. I'm well aware Elizabeth May is an accomplished lawyer with a top tier education, yet she frequently supports pseudoscientific positions. Ideas have to be judged on their own merit, not the credentials of the person proposing them.

I'm really glad your wife had her back problems fixed, but an anecdote is just an anecdote. Projecting your personal experience onto the world isn't good public policy.

For RoCanadian politics, I don't think 2012 has been particularly eventful, especially if compared to 2011. I guess the 3 biggest stories would have to be :

1. The omnibus bills

2. McGuinty's surprise resignation.

3. The robocall saga

But for Quebec politics, 2012 has been a very eventful year, and a game changer on many levels. My Quebec top 3 would be:

1. The whole tuition fee issue getting massively overblown. I never expected that this whole thing could take such gigantic proportions or even polarize the whole nation, even after having witnessed the first big protest in November 2011.

2. The Charbonneau Commission and its effects on Montreal city politics (which unexpectedly resulted in a coalition taking power).

3. The PQ taking power, and with such a thin margin over the surprisingly resilient Liberals

> "I've just had a few drinks, I'm fine to drive" is no different from "I've just had a few hits, I'm fine to drive".

The big difference is that stoned people realize that they're stoned and change their behaviour appropriately; drunk people underestimate their impairment and choose riskier behaviour.

&quot;Drivers under the influence of marijuana tend to overestimate the adverse effects of the drug on their driving ability and compensate when they can (e.g., by slowing down), whereas drivers under the influence of alcohol tend to underestimate their impairment and do not compensate.&quot;

&quot;After THC administration, subjects drove significantly slower than in the control condition, while after alcohol ingestion, subjects drove significantly faster than in the control condition.&quot;

> So, while I don't think the CPC should have done a data-mining petition on the attacks,

How about a data mining page? There are three trackers on the Liberal page (two blocked as 'bad' by Privacy Badger) and six on the NDP page (four blocked as 'bad' by Privacy Badger). (Get Privacy Badger here.)

Just saying... if we're going to get upset about data mining, it's not just text fields that we should be complaining about. Indeed, those are easier to avoid because you just don't fill them out.

This technology is getting cheaper all the time.

Here's one on ali is selling one for $1800 USD

Imagine a future where these things are cheaper than a cup of coffee and powered by a solar panel. The implications of that are startling.

Law enforcement thinks they're being clever and that they have the upper hand but the tables could quickly turn and they'll be crying foul when all of their dirty laundry is aired by an organization like wikileaks.

As part of a lawsuit against a Star Trek fanfilm, Paramount/CBS is claiming ownership over the Klingon Language, which has led to this amazing amicus brief. Its littered with Klingon Proverbs, written in the Klingon Alphabet, with English translations and phonetics in the footnotes. I'm not a lawyer and don't make a habit of reading court documents, but this was a really entertaining read.

The CPC have been using mulcairsndp.ca for two and a half years now. It used to be a Hallowe'en-looking scare site, and now they're reusing it as an anti-daycare thing.

I think. But I'm not sure. Gone is the teeth-baring "angry Tom" stuff, here is a grandfatherly, beaming Mulcair in front of a white background. The CPC can certainly keep me guessing, but I don't know if this is really an anti-NDP site or if it's designed to actually improve the fortunes of the NDP, coming as it would at the expense of the Liberals.

Compared to what they throw at Trudeau, this is positively cushy.

> There's a difference between posting something and storing something though.

Not really. It's all bits in a machine somewhere. With the right twiddling of bits somewhere else anyone is free to gain access to these bits. That's sort of the argument that you were making in your first post wasn't it?

And besides take a look here iCloud isn't just a backup service -- it's a sharing platform as well. Kind of like facebook in a sense eh? I can make an album private on facebook can't I? or a group with only one member that would act as a diary, can't I? So if someone gets it that I don't intend -- is it still my fault?

> If someone hacks into your iButt account and steals your pics, that's another person's wrongdoing.

Do we know for certain that something similar didn't happen in the Dalhousie case?

Unfortunately it looks like it's not workable. Jonathan Rhys Kesselman's analysis isn't necessarily the last word, of course, but I haven't seen any strong counterarguments.

MetaFilter discussion thread.

> The problem that Kesselman points out is that it's hard to see how the numbers can work.

> He considers three different options. The third option is a basic income, given to everyone (no means-testing, no withdrawal of the benefit as your income rises), so there's no effect on marginal tax rates.

> Let's say the basic income is $10,000, well below the poverty line. In total, that's $350 billion, which is larger than current total federal spending. It's about 20% of annual GDP ($1.8 trillion).

> The money to fund the new benefit has to come from somewhere. Let's suppose it comes from higher taxes on the top 10% of the income distribution. Since they only make up 1/10 of the population, that means that they need to pay an average of an additional $90,000 in taxes each year! (Note that the cutoff to be in the top 10% isn't that high: in 2010, total income of more than $80,000 would put you in the top 10%.)

> I think the problem is that although it's possible to redistribute income from the top to the bottom, it's not possible to redistribute from the top to the middle--there's simply too many people in the middle.

> Kesselman's conclusion is that anti-poverty spending needs to be targeted. The Guaranteed Annual Income is appealing because of its simplicity, but it's not workable.

Here's the list of materials that libraries carried but were challenged by patrons in 2018-2019.

Some of the entries are pretty funny.

But here's a book that caught my eye and is currently carried by a public library in Canada: The Unvaccinated Child: A Treatment Guide for Parents and Caregivers

It has glowing reviews like:

"This is a timely and valuable resource to have in your family's possession. If you choose not to vaccinate, you will want to have guidance in how to treat childhood diseases if and when needed." -- Penny Jacobs

"As licensed Naturopathic doctors with thriving practices, Drs. Camp and Thompson bring to this book a combined 25 years of clinical experience treating patients who elect to forego vaccination. Their insight into managing cases such as these make them an excellent resource on this subject." - Holly Castle, ND

"The Unvaccinated Child provides a roadmap to an alternative option for parents who are uncomfortable with the main stream's "one size fits all" approach to your children's health. I would recommend, fully understanding ALL options, so that you can make the most informed choice for your child, for your family." - Cassidy Delisle

Should the public library carry anti-vax resources in the name of freedom of expression?

Obviously you don't like the idea that someone can make a firearm at home with a 3D printer. Ignoring the fact you can make homemade guns that are better and waaaaaaay cheaper from hardware store material, what should be done about this 3D printed gun crisis?

Should 3D files for printing a gun be banned? Should engineering drawings or CAD models of a firearm be banned? Should 3D printers be banned? Should 3D printers be licensed? Should drawings and CAD files to make your own 3D printer be banned?

Whay about books like the Anarchist Cookbook, available on Amazon? Should the book be banned too?

The depressing thing about this sort of stuff is it’s completely drowned out by crowing over tax competitiveness with the US.

Backing “we must lower taxes” as the One True Way to improve Canadian competitiveness and economic success is lazy, facile Reaganite pablum.

We should really be thinking about labour productivity and encouraging our businesses to scale up and become globally competitive. Tax incentives like SR&ED taper off really quickly and mostly just subsidize small business.

High labour productivity is good for everyone (and is often driven by large firms who can benefit from economies of scale), and Canada is just mediocre. In 2017 we came in just below Spain/Italy, and more than 20% lower than Germany/Netherlands/France.

And we should open up our small, sleepy local markets to international competition and give ourselves an incentive to achieve (e-commerce and telecom would be good places to start). This would be good for consumers immediately, and though it might be tough for legacy businesses to adapt, it would leave them and the entire market better off in the long term.

But here we are, in 2018, having barely even willed ourselves into a single domestic market on account of embarrassment over CETA. And those who purport to be friends of business just beg for lower taxes.

I’d encourage anyone interested in Canadian competitiveness to read https://www.amazon.ca/How-We-Can-Win-Happens/dp/073527259X. It’s pretty sobering.

> This seems like a win-win-win: better health of Canadians, more healthy food programs for kids, less money spent on health care.

>But of course Lisa Raitt completely understands the politics of the situation. Canadians are going to loudly complain about any type of tax, regardless of the benefit. Will the CPC run on buck-a-pop? Sadly, it'll probably work.

I would say we actually need both approaches.

Just placing an excise tax on soda would disproportionately affect lower income individuals who generally buy more of it (because it’s cheaper than anything but tap water).

A tax isn’t enough, it requires a comprehensive approach that both treats sugary drinks (and sugar in general) as the health issues they are, they need to be stigmatized like tobacco, while also providing cheaper alternatives.

Perhaps an excise tax on all sugary goods that is directly used to subsidize healthier alternatives, along with a strong public push to stigmatize sugar in general?

No. The Queen is not a citizen.

She is "Canadian" as much as she is British, but she is a citizen of neither country. (So, for instance, she cannot vote in elections any elections.)

Royals are in their own category. "Is she a British/Canadian citizen" is a category error.

She's the sovereign of Canada and is thus "Canadian". This is the same as how she is the sovereign of the various United Kingdoms and thus British.

And it is quite distinct from how I am a citizen of Canada and thus Canadian. I am not the Queen and she is not a subject, so we aren't in the same category.

https://www.quora.com/Is-Queen-Elizabeth-II-a-legal-citizen-of-the-countries-where-she-is-the-head-of-state

http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_queen%27s_nationality

That's not my understanding of "polemic," nor is it bourne out by a search through a few dictionaries.

You're suggesting that these polemics are "just lobbing insults everywhere."

Given that our Government shows all signs of continuing to force this discredited, opportunistic, ill-conceived, anti-democratic Bill through Parliament, do you not understand the anger they're being met with? What part of cutting away at the democratic underpinnings of this nation do you not understand? You think ID is necessary? It's not just about the vouching! You think the Commissioner should be housed with the DPP? That's not the only problem either! There are all kinds of changes that experts have clearly explained using well-supported arguments will degrade our democracy.

Maybe you should try putting yourself in the shoes of those who have gotten so worked up about this. Because we're really, really, really upset about this Bill. Like Coyne says, the longer this goes on, the closer we get to a crisis.

According to the FBI an average of 37 deaths per year are attributed to mass shootings.

The National Weather Service lists lightning deaths at an average of 50 per year over the last 20.

Both studies end at 2013.

The National Hurricane Center decided to finally release the tropical cyclone report for Hurricane Patricia and it's jawdropping. I'm not going to spoil anything, but this article on that Hurricane's tropical cyclone report should explain everything.

https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/hurricane-patricia-mexico-coast

This, along with other information we have so far been given, suggests a blowback motive among other things was at play. In Zehaf-Bibeau's mother's letter, she wrote that "he believed the US government responsible for killing thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians". Also, at least one eyewitness claims that after shooting Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, Zehaf-Bibeau lifted his gun over his head and yelled "For Iraq". Surprisingly I haven't heard any other eyewitnesses corroborate that claim. Additionally, although no personal link exists between Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, the fact that they were both discriminate in their killings is suggestive of more than just mental illness and life experience, although I wouldn't by any means rule those out as they are not mutually exclusive. In regards to the passport situation and where he was trying to go, I find the information so far given by the RCMP and his mother insufficient to know with any reasonable degree of certainty.

>the other guy is worse than them, they're the real problem.

This take is bad like the takeaway leftovers that get left in the kitchen overnight.

Read this.

The origins of Liberalism are rooted in Christianity. Islam can't claim something similar, especially when 'moderate' Muslims still teach their daughters to never reveal their faces to anyone other than their husband, or chop off their baby girls' clitorises.

And the fact that you have to go back to Copernicus while you scream 'BOTH SYDES!' would be funny if it weren't so desperate. Christianity has already been criticised into submission. It was called the Enlightenment, and was closely followed up by the French Revolution and more recently the Sexual Revolution.

Go ask Charlie Hebdo how the criticism of Islam is going.

Lawrence Martin mentions Graham Lowe and Frank Graves, Redesigning Work. Here's an IRPP article where they summarize some of their ideas.

My baseline for thinking about automation is the classic essay by Paul Krugman, The Accidental Theorist (1997). Basically, as we get more efficient in one sector (like manufacturing), we can expect to have more and more jobs in a less efficient sector (like services). The hard part is helping people move between sectors.

> The UK is still in the EU -- the vote last night was not binding and the UK will be out of the EU once they conclude negotiations.

right, but the market is now going through the process of pricing in an exit, with volatility stemming from uncertainty. Suggestions of recession come from Mark Carney and the BoE itself because, while they have signaled a willingness to intervene, they have also said it is unclear how to intervene to balance inflation, growth etc. If Brexit stokes inflation, as Carney warns, rates could be raised rather than cut, it could make the economic damage a lot worse. Before that even happens, Carney is warning about a recession.

Businesses are going to leave IMO. This is like Québec, now the contingency plans will be carried out.

After everything Bell and Rogers have pulled of late, their crocodile tears sound extra hollow.

That being said, Verizon is a behemoth with a lot of money. And they spend a lot of in investing activities. They spent 16 billion in 2012 for capital expenditures. Compare that to Bell, for instance, and you can see how easily all of our Canadian telcos could be squashed by Verizon.

I'm not sure bringing Verizon into the market is the right answer. But, I agree that something needs to be done to kick our telcos in the butt.

highly unlikely it could ever surpass the US? please, take a look at some economic projections. 2030 at the latest. if you adjust for purchasing power they have already overtaken america.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=when+will+china%27s+gdp+surpass+the+us&amp;PC=U316&amp;FORM=CHROMN

blindly believing in American supremacy is very weird. what makes America so special that they can outcompete a country with 4x the labor force?

Sad days for the Torontoist folks. I've never seen a patreon campaign fail as miserably as this one.

It's a shame, since on occasion they produce interesting journalism.

Between this and Trump's polemics on the industry it's not a great time to be a shareholder of these companies but boy, something needs to be done about drug prices. It would be nice if Canada and the US could somehow work together on this file.

Of course, as with many things Trump, his contradictory plans could blow the whole thing up rather than fix it.

Agreed. Jen is much more of a right winger than Justin is a lefty, and Justin is also awful at defending and advocating for leftist positions. The concept for the show totally breaks down because of this, and it's easily the worst thing Canadaland has going at the moment imo.

Rankandfile.ca's podcast had a good (but drunkenly snarky) episode on just how bad Oppo's episode about Canada's left was.

https://player.fm/series/rank-file-radio-prairie-edition/rankandfileca-holiday-special-the-state-of-the-oppo

Note tarlike in the definition

Bituminous coal or black coal is a relatively soft coal containing a tarlike substance called bitumen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bituminous_coal

I also checked https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bitumen "... any of various mixtures of hydrocarbons (as tar)"

>However, the rate of spending appears to have dropped with the change of government when it comes to the three platforms mentioned in both 2015 and 2016. In 2015, Harper government department spending on Facebook worked out to an average of about $7,999 a day versus $5,291 a day in 2016 for the Trudeau government – a 33.8 per cent drop. Departments flocked to Twitter in 2015, spending an average of $6,141 a day. In 2016, however, federal government advertising on Twitter dove 65.3 per cent to an average of $2,129 a day.

>Government spending on YouTube worked out to an average of $3,377 a day in 2015 but dropped nearly 72 per cent to an average of $946 a day.

Some advertising is always going to be necessary and some is doubtless going to remain questionable but it's good to see an overall decrease at this early stage. The article rightly points out it's probably too early to do a full and proper comparison, though, so we'll have to wait and see if this early spending decline holds.

I did wonder why we're spending any money at all on Bing and Yahoo, but I was surprised to learn Yahoo is the #5 most visited site in Canada and Bing is #10 per Alexa.

I haven't mined in 5 or 6 years now but I guess I've been following it a little.

Mining Bitcoin requires dedicated large-scale hardware. There are however hundreds (thousands?) of alternate cryptocurrencies that range from cheap knockoffs of Bitcoin to completely different technology and implementations.

Some of them have been specifically designed to be minable only with general purpose CPUs or similar hardware, so you can still get in on that game on a small scale.

At the moment, coins like Ethereum do well with graphics cards -- a couple high-end cards may bring in 60 MH/s which works out to about ~0.05 - 0.07 ETH a week which is currently worth about $30. Sell the ETH for BTC, then sell the BTC. Not endorsing Ethereum specifically, but that's the general idea.

Done with some care you can likely break even on the hardware investment and get some return. Make sure to factor in your electrical costs! It may be worth investigating some of the dedicated hardware miners that hash for coins besides Bitcoin too.

There are numerous calculators out there that use exchange rates, current network hash rates and such to give you an idea of what your return may be. You'll have to investigate the hash rate for a particular hardware device (whether a CPU, GPU or dedicated) and plug that in with your power rate.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/eth

And of course all of this is contingent on the BTC bubble not popping (or not popping too severely anyway). The alternate coins are tightly coupled to BTC's price.

People did deny the science of the ozone hole. In fact it played out quite similarly to how the current climate fight is. >DuPont, which made 1/4 of the world's CFCs, spent millions of dollars running full-page newspaper advertisements defending CFCs in 1975, claiming there was no proof that CFCs were harming the ozone layer. Chairman Scorer of DuPont commented that the ozone depletion theory was "a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense." (Chemical Week, 16 July 1975).

>The aerosol industry also launched a PR blitz, issuing a press release stating that the ozone destruction by CFCs was a theory, and not fact. This press release, and many other 'news stories' favorable to industry, were generated by the aerosol industry and printed by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune magazine, Business Week, and the London Observer (Blysky and Blysky, 1985). The symbol of Chicken Little claiming that "The sky is falling!" was used with great effect by the PR campaign, and appeared in various newspaper headlines.

One of the key differences is that the affected CFC industries just didn't have the resources to fight it like the current energy industry does.

You might find this article interesting https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/07/15/485900076/how-a-danish-town-helped-young-muslims-turn-away-from-isis

Alienation is a big contributing factor to these problems, and combating that isn't obvious or easy to sell to the public, but it's effective. It's the same issue the prison system has: what rallies the public is an eye for an eye, but what's good for society is often a more complicated matter.

Sure, there are lots. Here's one: http://www.worldcat.org/title/plundering-the-north-for-hyper-profits-non-renewable-resource-extraction-and-royalties-in-the-northwest-territories-1998-2004/oclc/66026227. The article is from 2004, but nothing has changed. Both the Liberals and Conservatives are guilty of mismanaging our resources to the cost of tens of billions.

I would not bother. From the way he is responding to you I can tell he cannot be engaged in a reasonable discussion on this topic. Nothing you have said is unreasonable or inaccurate. And asking for a solid study to look into it is exactly what we should be doing. And the fact that some economists support a basic income is not untrue.

He is probably on the right politically and gets worked up whenever anyone suggests anything further to the left.

I went looking for studies about basic income and found that there are lots of economist who have written essays on the topic. Essays are not worth much. There are few good studies.

Based on a German Case

Most of what I found was academic analysis and articles supporting basic income. Which goes back to what you are saying OP. We need a good set of studies. The fact that some economists blow hot air in support of a basic income wont convince me that the system will work.

As far as him demanding you show him where the economists support it. Like you said just search &quot;basic Income&quot; on Google scholar Lots of arguments for and against. But I might risk saying a majority are for.

But these are analysis and essays mostly. Not solid studies.

Which ad hominem was that? Where did I attack the user?

I attacked the argument the user made, not the user.

The argument made was that Mr. Coyne had a vested interest. I pointed out that this argument was an attack on Mr. Coyne's ethics without any evidence to back up the argument.

> A vested interest doesn't have to be financial; it can be purely ideological.

No it can't. That's a bias and it's very different from a vested interest.

Programs like CPP aren't transfers from the wealthy to the poor.

CPP is insurance against the risk of living too long and outliving your savings. It's like an annuity sold by an insurance company (but with much greater efficiency, because the size of the pool is very large and there's no adverse selection).

EI is of course also insurance, against the risk of losing your job.

Even welfare can be thought of this way: in particular, for women with children, it's insurance against the risk of abandonment.

I think there's two different questions:

1. What do we need to do to address homelessness and First Nations issues?

2. As a society, how much insurance do we want to have? Do we want to self-insure instead?

Joseph Heath:

> Perhaps my most interesting [conceptual clarification] concerns the nature of risk-pooling and social insurance. Many people assume that the fundamental role of the "social safety net" is to redistribute wealth, in order to promote greater equality. Another way of looking at it, however, is to see them as essentially a set of insurance programs, which are run by the government because the private sector fails to provide that sort of insurance, either at all, or at an appropriate price. From this perspective, the reason that the government provides medicare, or employment insurance, is fundamentally the same as the reason that it provides roads and sewers.

Re: another response you got - I'm not terribly sure about AirVPN considering it doesn't mention much about logging. I use Private Internet Access which might be a better option. Zero Logging or "zero knowledge" policies are probably the most important to shop for on for a VPN, for filez, beyond the obvious ones around performance/overselling/location.

Pickety. Ouch.

Well as long as we're ideological, I recommend the Quest for Cosmic Justice, by Dr. Thomas Sowell; Basic Economics by the same; Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt (extremely easy to read); Capitalism and Freedom by Dr. Milton Friedman.

I'd argue that the connection of the familiar "unions good, Chicago school is the devil" tale to an ideal of democracy makes this piece worthwhile; the piece is expressing a concern that the concentration of power in a few hands undermines the ability of the people generally to influence the political process. As for whether that thesis is true, I'm somewhat skeptical. On the one hand, I can't deny that the decisions made by a few hundred people at, say, Google affect my life tremendously; on the other, I doubt that the average middle-class citizens had any noticeably greater say in the political process fifty years ago than does the middle-class citizen today. And now we're paying attention to minority voices of all kinds that weren't at all either represented or listened to before, so, at least in that respect, democracy is faring substantially better today than it was fifty years ago.

Something big that Mr. Brennan missed out on in his criticism of corporations is that corporations have in many ways been good for people working for them precisely in that they've learned to insulate themselves from market forces. When corporations are small, market forces do work very efficiently, but as a consequence, corporations fail all the time and people are left without work. "Corporate bloat" has allowed people greater income security. (I encountered this point in The Affluent Society by J. K. Galbraith.)

Two incidental notes: first, I was very surprised to see mention of Josiah Ober in--well, anywhere, really. I almost went to study with that guy, and I have a fellow classicist friend who's doing work with him right now. Second, as a U of T grad, I'm going to have to point out that this gentleman is at York University now, so we can rag on him together.

You might want to give this a read:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/24/european-far-right-hails-britains-brexit-vote-marine-le-pen

Isolationist policy is becoming a cornerstone of alt-right and far-right ideologies. They think that international treaties threaten their ability to self-determination (just as minorities and their empowerment threaten their place in the world) so they are opting out.

I don't think that's a very charitable reading of Golding's research. In fact, she goes out of her way to characterize the effect as the &quot;high cost of temporal flexibility&quot; as opposed to discrimination.

Put another way:

Goldin calls this phenomenon non-linearity, or a part-time penalty: the part-timer works half the time her partner does, but earns less than half his salary.

I'm just going to keep quoting her because it's important:

>Non-linear compensation prevails in the corporate sector, finance, and law, where employees are incentivized to work double or triple a traditional full-time schedule, because their time is better compensated per hour when they work longer hours. That compensation structure makes it more lucrative for one partner to work 80 hours and the other not to work at all than for both of them to work 40 hours each. If both partners opt for 40-hour weeks so they can share responsibilities at home, Goldin says, “lots of money is going to be left on the table,” which is why she believes so many couples don’t.

>Non-linearity helps explain why most of the gender pay gap occurs within professions, Goldin adds. The distribution of men and women in different occupations accounts for only 15 percent of the gap, and the remaining 85 percent arises within occupations.

People in general feel the effects of wage non-linearity, not just women. But women tend to experience it more either because of choice or societal pressure to take on more family responsibilities.

As to whether the additional hours worked should be compensated disproportionately, that's not really for you or I to say - if that's what the business wants to do, they'll do so regardless of the gender of the person working.

> There's a few countries we should take after: Israel, Norway, Denmark, Singapore, etc.

I wouldn't put Norway in there after the blatant rigging of their competition in favour of the F-35. Israel receives so much international foreign military aid I also question what lessons we can derive from their situation.

Just a quick jab at the West’s policies. We support the Sauds, who support terrorism all over the place — including ISIS — including the 9/11 attacks on the West. It’s utter insanity, and every time we go over there to wage war, it just makes things worse.

Here's a link to their clubs page, and another for the recognised groups page. If the purpose of this pro-life club is to simply discuss the merits of pro-life policy than its comparable to the Grey Matters Club, which appears to be funded (thought that club appears far more broad in the topics discussed). On the other hand, if the purpose of the club is to advocate for policy change than I don't see how that is any different from the Kwantlen University Policy Students for Sustainability club, which advertises as "increasing student involvement and mobilization towards sustainable policy issues" as well as strengthening academic study in sustainability and also appears to be funded.

It usually goes hand-in-hand with de-radicalization counselling. I found this article on LinkedIn a while back which does a decent job explaining it. If he's actively supporting ISIS, then yes, he should be de-radicalized.

>Where did you get that information?

http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Honda-Manufacturing-of-l-Alabama.html (top of the page)

Most modern manufacturing has just as many CNC programmers, machine tool path programmers, robotics installers/maintainers, logistics managers, as it does assembly line workers. That's what pushes the average wage up. But you can't ignore the average wage -- that's ultimately what gets spent in the community.

>Canadians produce at a much lower rate than US workers; productivity of US workers is 20% higher

That's in aggregate, across every job and industry. I've never seen evidence that Canadian private sector workers have a lower productivity in the same job.

>This is a red herring; the average costs associated with the ORPP have been estimated at between $2-3/day for most businesses, or approximately $0.35-$0.40 an hour.

Why break it down like that? We know the cost of the ORPP exactly. It's 1.9% more/yr/employee if the employer can pass along the employee portion to the employee (reducing in-pocket wages), and 3.8% more/yr/employee if the employer cannot (much more likely). That cost increase alone offsets a 4% drop in the dollar.

He certainly does tend to ramble. Hour long tangents can be frustrating when you are interested in hearing the actual topic of a lecture. Despite this he does do a great job at getting his message through to his audiences, judging by his Rate My Professors page.

Anyone who's interested in online voting should take a close look at this attack on the DC Internet Voting System. Network security is extremely hard to get right.

Summary:

> Internet voting exposes what might otherwise be a small, local race of little global significance to attackers from around the globe, who may act for a wide range of reasons varying from politics to financial gain to sheer malice. In addition to compromising the central voting server as we did, attackers can launch denial-of-service attacks aimed at disrupting the election, they can redirect voters to fake voting sites, and they can conduct widespread attacks on voters’ client machines. These threats correspond to some of the most difficult unsolved problems in Internet security and are unlikely to be overcome soon.

The most entertaining detail in the paper:

> We found a pair of webcams on the DVBM network — both publicly accessible without any password — that showed views of the server room that housed the pilot. As shown in Figure 4, one camera pointed at the entrance to the room, and we were able to observe several people enter and leave, including a security guard, several officials, and IT staff. The second camera was directed at a rack of servers.

> These webcams may have been intended to increase security by allowing remote surveillance of the server room, but in practice, since they were unsecured, they had the potential to leak information that would be extremely useful to attackers. Malicious intruders viewing the cameras could learn which server architectures were deployed, identify individuals with access to the facility in order to mount social engineering attacks, and learn the pattern of security patrols in the server room. We used them to gauge whether the network administrators had discovered our attacks — when they did, their body language became noticeably more agitated.

It's probably less of a factor when you're recruiting new grads, more when you're trying to recruit senior people. Matthew Yglesias on the shortage of people who both have experience and are willing to put in long hours.

I'm thinking in particular of a top-notch senior engineer we tried to bring over from Melbourne. He and his wife were totally on board, right up to the point where they arrived and started looking at houses. They already knew Vancouver prices were high, they just didn't realize just how high that was.

I remember when I moved from Edmonton back to Vancouver. In Vancouver there was a lot of complaining about how our salaries weren't as high as US salaries (this is when the Canadian dollar was low, back in the 1990s). In Edmonton, nobody cared; with a typical engineering salary, it was easy to afford a house, probably even on one income. Not in Vancouver.

The critical-mass thing matters too, but that's true for any city that's trying to build itself up as a tech centre.

I can assure you that it's not.

It has to do with a marketing technique or concept that's popularly known as the rule of seven wherein a customer, or in this case a voter, has to hear a message at least 7 times before it sinks in and they begin to accept it as fact or want to buy your product or vote for you or agree with your policy.

I don't know a lot of the specifics, but I believe his book had a lot to do with it.

This review on Amazon stood out:

> “His story has no filters. It pursues forgiveness, but not by running away from the ugliness that makes forgiveness necessary.”

>> Shepell is also a psychologist and wrote a book called ‘A Woman’s Pleasure’ under the pen name J.F. Kelly. The book was released in 2014.

Evidently the book has good reviews (potentially NSFW link) on Amazon.

So... good for Shepell?

I'm torn if including Foundations of Morality'd be too much from him, but his writing style is just a delight.

Anyway, Capitalism and Freedom should still be recommended; it's just ponderous. I'd also recommend A Monetary History... but it's one of those doorstoppers that I've only ever been able to successfully recommend once. : /

Sorry but no. You're philosophically out to lunch. Economically, there is no possible way that everyone receiving GAI in the economy will enable it to go. No wealth generation would occur, merely distribution of created wealth. And that means no growth. Read Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson to understand that yes, a low cost bureaucracy distributing welfare income may be better for everyone than what currently exists, but one that doesn't dismantle all the services of government to cut costs, and instead increases taxes upon all businesses and income earners will stagnate the economy because no wealth generation occurs. That taxpayer money would have been utilized elsewhere, and instead it is given to a portion of society to spend as they like. That doesn't generate extra growth at all. It will likely have a degree of ineffective distribution, making it slightly less efficient than having the individual who earned that money spend it. You're not interested in the civilization as a whole, you're interested in getting more for you. You are selfish, self interested and you know it. You need to read Wealth of Nations, Capital in the 21st Century,and the previous book mentioned and soon you will comprehend how capitalism benefits society as a whole and how manipulating it often leads people worse off than before. I am not defending rich. I'm defending hard workers who make something of themselves above those who don't. And I'm not defending the "super rich billionaire" I'm defending my father who is a cattle rancher and land owner who works his ass off the bring society what it wants: food.

>Surely it is better to spend 90% of the time finding your information, and then simply spend some small portion of time at the end to analyze what you've researched and determine your opinion on the basis of the research?

If you're examining an important problem that lots of other people have investigated, a key step is to familiarize yourself with their findings first (Heath appears to do a lot of reading), before you go off and end up duplicating their efforts.

Paul Krugman's The Accidental Theorist provides an amusing example of what can happen if you skip this step.

Just to point this out, what one thinks is the "balanced" point of view depends entirely on what one's ideological stance is. I've been meaning to write an essay ("Against Moderation", or maybe more accurately "Against the Rhetorical Appeal to Moderation") on this idea for a long time, actually. Having the "balanced" view is very much in fashion in Anglo-American writing, and has a very long history, going back to the Romans' and Ancient Greeks' praise of "moderation" (Aristotle's idea of virtue as being the "mean" between a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess, as outlined in his Nicomachean Ethics, is an especially famous example of this fetish for the "middle way"). But one's opinions completely determine one's ideas about where the right "balance" falls. The Conservatives probably believe their views balance the goods of the economy and the environment, and I suspect the NDP does as well. In short, I think portraying one's view as the "balanced" one is as common and as empty a rhetorical technique as saying that one's view is grounded in "evidence".

Though it's unlikely, I, for one, would like the Liberals to attack the Conservatives from the right (on taxation, for example) and the NDP from the left (on a carbon tax, legalization of marijuana), and to portray themselves as coming from the right and the left. (Note: I may misunderstand what people think of as being "right" and "left".)

I was reading a great in depth NYT article about the emergence of AI and where Montreal has a part to play in it. The podcast CanCon also focused on the city as a AI hub in their most recent episode.

To me, a snap election is when a PM calls an election when most people weren't expecting it. I suspect many would agree with me that an election due to a lost confidence vote, while it might be an unexpected election, isn't a "snap" election.

For example, oxforddictionaries.com under "UK and World English" includes this in its entry for &quot;snap&quot;:

> ADJECTIVE

> Done or taken on the spur of the moment, unexpectedly, or without notice:

> a snap decision

> he could call a snap election

The strong inference I get from that is that a snap election is called.

I disagree. To copypasta from another comment, besides the Animal Rights Collective, their page for clubs also lists

• The Criminology Student Society, which "is open to all students at Kwantlen who are interested in criminological issues and promoting social change."

and

• The Kwantlen University Policy Students for Sustainability, which "was developed to focus on increasing student involvement and mobilization towards sustainable policy issues."

These are all quotes from their own descriptions. These ends look political to me, and I think that if a group devoted to pro-life causes that at least doesn't present itself as political (though they are likely being disingenuous) shouldn't be allowed funding, neither should these groups.

>Critical thinking skills are, quite simply, lacking in a significant chunk of the population.

This. The solution is to impart better critical thinking skills. When the population lacks critical thinking skills they're just as vulnerable without social media. What we're seeing on social media existed long before social media with different modalities. Guerilla poster campaigns, infomercials, sympathetic television and radio broadcasters, newspapers, newsletters and tabloids. Information and propaganda was disseminated over social networks long before computers and in countries with strict government control of media and communication.

Consider how western popular culture spread through the Soviet Union through real life social networks even with tight state controls. The Curious Story of How Bootlegged Hollywood Movies Helped Defeat Communism in Romania Today's social media and communication technology just speeds up the process.

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Regarding the backing vocals for Gimme Shelter, here you go.

This came up within the last 6 months ago, but for the life of me I can't recall where....Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap perhaps? I just remember the part about the curlers...

Gentlemen, how badly are your heads going to explode when Trump wins the election. I mean, you've been underestimating his ability to gather and mobilize support since the very beginning. I don't think you even stopped considering him a joke candidate until sometime in March or April. So, will this be you? Or explodier?

I didn't agree at first, but as I think of it I kinda agree. The line that stuck out most to me was the environmentalist pie-thrower. Charging a pie-thrower with terrorism would make the term sound hollow, like unless they used an allergen against a politician like a nut pie or something. I think it ties into how overreaching terrorist laws can be, like in France they put an environmental activist under house arrest due to the upcoming climate conference with the state of emergency powers. If we let the word terrorist lose its meaning it becomes easier to accept the stifling of dissent like this to be the new norm.