cannuck

It hurts me to have to say this, but: Iranians allowed this situation to develop without much resistance, or they just ran away and hid in another country. To ask the West to come in and risk being tagged with a hundred claims of interference, imperialism, etc. would not likely go down well with voters over here. I had asked my Iranian friends about this many years ago. They explained that there was (and IS) a significant portion of the population that remained relatively uneducated and in support of the Imams. Not sure what the situation on the ground is now.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I have spent a fair bit of time there and have very close friends. Also have very good Iranian friends and certainly agree with what you have to say about the situation in Iran.

You certainly don't seem to know much at all about KSA. If you have been there, you clearly did not learn much about the country or its people.

Sadly, about all we can do is protest and sanction. The situation in Iran, Venezuela, Russia, China, NoKo, etc. exists because the citizens LET it develop and continue to exist. The people of Iran are now doing exactly what they need to do to start the end of this regime. Invading or even interfering would be wrong, as a country needs to have IT'S OWN belief, understanding and cohesive action to chart its own future.

Exactly the kind of total BS I expect to see the looney left (nd the looney right1) spewing endlessly. The solution to transportation issues is NOT to devise even more polluting ways to pollute even more to more of the same thing. The answer is doing LESS of the idiotic shit of moving people and goods endlessly back and fourth. As I have to re-itereate endlessly: WE DO NOT HAVE A CARBON EMISSION PROBLEM WE HAVE A CARBON ABSORPTION PROBLEM. And wasting time on "renewables" or other conventional energy system changes to maintain the status quo will do NOTHING about the real problem - oceanic killoff of the plankton that once could easily absorb our CO2 emissions. You get into the political mindset of "us against them" taught by political partisanship to ignore ANY intelligent thought and just keep spewing the party line mindlessly.

Yeah, it can do a lot of things. It can let a megalomaniac lie, cheat and murder his way into absolute power, completely erase any defacto remnants of representative democracy, terrorize and threaten the very existence of our world sitting there with the nuclear button under his thumb.

Not even close. Chairman Mao starved something around or over 100,000,000 Chinese when he nationalized farmland.

Missing from all of this is the fact that one of the largest body of victims are the Russian people. We in the rest of the world stood idly by as a Joe Stalin wannabe lied, cheated and murdered his way to the top and now has a nuclear trigger to execute his mad fantasies of becoming defacto Joe #2. The correct solution goes back to around 1999 when Putin should have been eliminated, but I believe he already had put his meathooks into the governing clique(s). Now tens of thousands of Russin conscripts and enlisted will pay the price for his reign of terror.

been gone a while (nasty capitalist pig stuff, have to actually work) but thought of this thread when I was down in IA last week. The so-called "green" movement from the political left South of the border has seen 2 nukes and all of the coal fired capacity in IA closed down,. It was hot (95-100F most days) and I was watching a bunch of 80 year old diesel gensets get started and run flat out to feed the state grid. Yeah, the brilliant foresight of the Looney Left means that the state has to rely on ancient diesel gensets to meet their daytime loads. Yeah, go buy another Tesla (BTW THE most polluting way to move a motor vehicle - but since the truth doesn't fit the mindless logic of the virtue signalling set that will fall on deaf ears). If the effing morons would ever bother to actually LEARN anything about our environment, they would deal with the REAL issue (inability of oceans to absorb the CO2 we produce) and not screw uo the economy needed to DEAL with the actual problems.

He can do that because we were stupid enough to elect him as Prime Ministrer.....TWICE!

Quite aware of monetary theory, but in reality I find that most of what is now taught in economics is what has been adapted to try to legitimized the return of an economy that worships speculation - that is nothing but wealth re-distribution and generation of unbelievably large inflationary pressure. If economics and monetary theory and policy actually worked FOR the country(ies) rather than its financial community we wouldn't be in the big mess we are in (i.e. having de-funded Main Street) and the much bigger mess when the world stops allowing the Greenback to be propped up. Sorry can't engage meaningfully right now - in the middle of year end.

You have that exactly backwards. Inflation is the measure and result of rising prices - as is increase in money supply (much of that due to speculative gain that inflates the money supply without creating any wealth). It is a fairly complex subject, I will admit.

There are THOUSANDS of businesses just like mine. We buy metals, petroleum products, compressed gasses, etc. and make things. And we have to sell those things for twice as much to maintain any kind of sustainable business. I am hardly unique. ANY increase in ANYTHING within an economy is just that: INFLATIONARY. Just because the half-wits trained as "economists" by banks tell you about the value of a basket of consumer goods that does not by any means represent the whole economy. When prices go up, one of two things happens: economic activity slows down or the money supply increase to match the increases in transaction prices = INFLATION. We are particularly succeptable to screwey minimalization of inflation since we are tied at the waiste to the greenback - and when it inflates, central banks around the world have to jump in and buy USD to prevent their own dollar denominated instruments and forex trade receivables from tanking - thus reducing expressed inflation and bottling up massive inflationary pressure - that will one day explode.

1. In a fair trade world, if China or anyone else is willing to meet the same standards as the US, Mexico, EU, UK, etc. already meet there would be no barrier whatsoever to their entry. 2. The #1 environmental concern is oceanic pollution and dieoff. Gaseous carbon emissions are a problem BECAUSE of the damage done to oceans can no longer absorb the CO2 we (and nature) emit. As usual, the political morons and those who benefit from scare and guilt tactics are full of absolute BS.

We need to set and enforce these laws for products to cross INTO Canada over our borders. EASY for NAFTA and EEC countries already but impossible for 99% of crap made of Chinesium. (in case you were wondering: that is some mysterious material that is sometimes an insulating plastic and others a conducting metal - changes state on any whim - and almost always toxic as shit). ANYTHING to do with "carbon reduction" is such a vast political question it needs an entire forum of its own to reveal to BS associated, so let's just leave that out of this particular discussion.

Well, since nearly EVERYTHING that I need to buy to stay in business is AT LEAST DOUBLED in price over the last 2 years, thus every dollar in my bank account has effectively been reduced to $0.50, I would say we already HAVE hyperinflation.

The solution to the idiotic things we did would have been - and still COULD be to set actual standards that have to be met to enter our market. Things such as environmental, product safety, worker protection, etc. standards that WE have to meet whether we sell domestically or export.

The elephant in the corner of the room that the looney left media ignores is the total ineffectiveness of the UN. Putin (and Xi) simply giving them the raspberry and carrying on with his own agenda. There was a comment that there is no longer the ideological dogma of Communism that defines Russia and China's ambitions to "dominate the world", but in both cases it is/was not the ideology that drove these states to their extremes, it was/is the desire of absolute authoritarian dictatorships to do whatever they please to enact wild schemes hatched in the back rooms of their centers of power. Given good government ANY political ideology could work well for the people of a country and the world as neighbours. What seperates good government from bad (IMHO, of course) is that good government represents what is good for and desired by the people (within their borders and beyond) and bad government operates by giving a privileged few the power to do things in THEIR best interests or ambitions. On the "China wanting do dominate the world" front: that ship sailed long ago. One Road, One Belt is doing exactly that. And we were stupid and greedy enough to finance that expansionism through WalMart.

Agreed. As the world population explodes, it urbanizes. Urban populations tend to be dependent populations, so they vote left.

The confusion about what a Conservative is goes way back to the incredible jerk (pun words carefully chosen) to the left under PET - a genuine, card carrying Commie. Over the decades, as the LPC drifted further left to capture the NDP vote, some of the middle ground Libs drifted loosely into the Tory camp - resulting in genuine confusion at the CPC as to what the heck a Conservative in Cannuckistan really is. An effective leader doesn't have to BE from either or any end of the CPC spectrum, he or she simply needs to BE a leader, and electable.

About 20 years ago I did a lot of work in this area. What I have come to conclude is that the fixed compensation or political/idealogic bent of systems administration are road blocks to good sick care. I am reminded of a model I was taught at one of the largest medical universities in China, where at one time or in some areas a doctor was assigned a number of patients for life, and was then paid on the basis of who was healthy and alive. Not that I think we need to do that, but you can see there are indeed ways to shift the emphasis on how to reward for performance, vs. penalize for failure. Today medicine in North America is 100% about money (to most, I can tell you from experience NOT all) but it is the overall theme. What is IMHO THE most detrimental exclusion is information - i.e. revealing truth. This I believe is because we live in the shadow of the US LLL (Legal Liability Lottery) where admitting or being discovered to have failed at some function could open you, your employer and your insurers to massive liability. Read the rest of this thread and you can see from our small cross section of Canadiana that those "sue the bastards" attitudes come right through even though that is NOT the way we live for the most part in this country.

Our family home is in SK but my business locations are Wyoming and New York. We have very close friends in the US, China, MENA, UK and EU that we have been in business with for decades, and I have spent a LOT of time with them. BUT: there are few places on this planet that can compare with Canada overall. The sick care system in the USA is so expensive because lawyers use medical, transportation, food, etc. businesses as lottery centers to sue for the most ridiculous things you could imagine - and courts will award millions or even billions of dollars in settlements for ridiculous claims. The ratio of lawyers per capita in the USA is 30x what it is in Japan as an example. The result is that doctors, clinics and hospitals in the USA pay a ridiculous amount to insurance companies to fund the "LLL" (Legal Liability Lottery) - and you have to remember that the courts and judges are all lawyers - so they AND THE INSURANCE COMPANIES make literally trillions of dollars from the LLL and have no interest in fixing that problem. It is not just a medical problem. Try building a general aviation airplane or components in the USA and you will find the legal red tape from both insurance AND government regulatory requirements make if financially impossible - thus why much of that industry is now offshore. In summary: the opportunities and rewards in the US economy far, far outweigh those in Canada, but the risks of personal or corporate financial or health related disaster are also much higher. Do you feel lucky???? I must defer to those in Ontario to tell you about how far out from Toronto one can live and still exploit the economy that a large center brings. Personally, I would look at those areas a bit further out if you can avoid the need to commute into the city. My family home was the Niagara Peninsula (about 2.0 hours from Toronto by car) but I have been gone so long I can't give you an accurate reading on those outlying areas. What I CAN tell you is that there are some beautiful and very welcoming communities that are much lower cost than the big city itself.

Here we go again. It happens that SOME privately funded and operated long term care facilities far, far exceed ANYONE's idea of what is good care. I agree, though, that many of the "bottom end" private operations are absolutely horrible. But the idea that just because someone is being paid by the government and belong to a union is somehow going to magically insure a caring and capable staff is total BS. You need to do some critical thinking and when you do, you will learn to "follow the gold". What for the most part differentiates good care from lower standards of care is how much the service delivery staff is being paid and feels they are valued. Where government has failed miserably is not in allowing private care, but in not regulating and enforcing (the real role government SHOULD be providing) a standard of care that INCLUDES adequate compensation for employees. Invoking the "government and unions all good" vs. "private business all bad" BS is very divisive and dishonest.