Yaro

What is part of a question....

Your going to have to be more specific?

Not surprisingly again you don't know what your talking about, the statement your referring to made by Zhu Chenghu was not only stated that it was his personal opinion that China would use nukes to defend itself this in and of itself falls well under the no shit classification. What kind of deterrent would nukes be if they said something other then we will use them to defend ourselves? Bruce Garvey is an idiot, has always been an idiot, and its highly likely he will always be an idiot. The man rights for the national post, the flagship of a media group is modeled after Fox. Not only that hes a rather poor writer by there standards bringing us such beautiful (and blatantly fabricational articles) "Bring the hot seat to Canada" and "Blimp comeback pushed in Manitoba, at Pentagon". The man attacked law professors accross the country for stating the simple truth that in order to deny gay marriage Harper would have had to use the not withstanding clause, something that he had argued against the very existence of. He is in short a simple minded ideologue with a proven track record of idiocy. There is no such thing as a winner between China and the US, each nation would ,without realistic possibility for victory, annihilate each other. Which is why there will never be a war between any of the current nuclear powers, because any victory would be pyrrhic. Why would a country like the US and/or China risk what will be at at the worst a place at the forefront of the worlds powers? In order for this to take place you would need a completely irrational leadership in either country which is not the case and is highly unlikely to become the case.

The BoC is a private institution looking after its own needs as it always has and always will. If TCT or BoM came out with a similar report would anyone take it seriously?

Your picking Tom Delay as an example of someone in the US being held to account? Are you serious? The guy has been an out and out criminal for 15 years and hes finally getting nailed because he went WAY over the top. There is more corruption in TEXAS then there is in Canada, there is more corruption in HALIBURTON then there is in Canada, there is more corruption in the PENTEGON then there is in Canada. The notion that there's relatively a significant amount of corruption in Canada when compared to the US betrays a lack of knowledge of US politics. Not to mention the fact that what Delay has been doing forever is 100x worse then what the liberals did.

Yes it is.

Could you provide a link to that Fraser Institute report RB?

I have to agree, teachers don't have jobs which are any more stressful then a host of others. The general stress level of every job has risen dramatically. You are dramatically oversimplifying what teachers do, teaching is not any more easy then most other jobs which require the same amount of education and they make less then most people with jobs in that class. There are many reasons for the state of our education system but suggesting that parents and outside organizations interfere less now then they did 30 years ago is patently untrue and combined with the massive funding cuts the results were fairly predictable. Once again, parents have been becoming more and more involved in school. What you are suggesting simply isn't born out by the evidence, if parent involvement improved the educational outcomes then the system should be in far better shape then it is. Teacher pay is different across the country, in Alberta and Ontario it is the highest and in BC it is one of the lowest (when adjusted for cost of living). Teachers Salaries Based on what? What were you told about life in the eastern bloc? You have absolutely no basis upon which to compare the two. This is ideological propoganda. There is a large part of the Russian population moving towards the communist ideology, why do you think that is?

That's not true at all, the DART team is very highly trained. There are few examples of teams capable of what they are anywhere in the world. The notion that you can replace there expertise locally anywhere but a few places in the world is based on a false premise-that people like the DART team exists everywhere when they clearly don't. I agree with Argus, we need SLC badly. Canada is to big a country not to have it, even just for domestic needs.

The US is just as big if not a bigger human rights abuser then China. China is not the police state it is portrayed as being, they have fewer police at every level then any of the western nations and although they have there problems human rights abuses are pretty far down the list at this point. The above is stated with the understanding that the economic free zone in China is not included in China proper and the human rights abuses committed there are usually committed under foreign control. The US has the worlds largest espionage organizations and has been spying on the corporate entities of other countries using Omnivore, and before that Carnivore, and before that Echelon. The whole of the modern cutting edge encryption industry is based upon countering US industrial espionage. Having said that the Chinese are just as bad, they spy generally using more manpower and less technology but its clear they have no moral issue with spying to whatever extent they can. They just have a lot less to lose in the spy game. The issues of IP are extremely important going forward. A country like China will never have any desire or need to enforce IP law internally. Why would they? It would simply be a direct cost with no benefit besides lowering the living standard of there population. Right now Chinese citizens can get virtually any piece of IP at little or no cost, this is a tremendous factor in maintaining a relatively high living standard. This of course relevant if you ignore two important factors. 1. IP law has become insane, extended way way beyond its natural or valuable reach. 2. Using a scarcity based value and distribution model for a non-scarce product wasn't asinine. Absolutely, the only long term strategy that makes any sense is the development and encouragement of domestic consumption and creating agreements on the basic principles of social law for any country we are going to deal with. Unfortunately that would require a lot of short term pain which no government looking to get reelected is going to want any part of. The US closing there borders would be a short term disaster and a long term blessing. The fact of the matter is at the end of the day we can do a great deal more damage to them then they can do to us. We have dozens of very anxious trading partners all over the world who would be very happy to get there hands on natural resource agreements. Why people think that because we stop exporting to the US(something that will trickle down as our dollar rises anyways) will have such a huge impact beyond what will occur naturally is beyond me. China is a far more suitable partner then the US for us, further to that over the last 25 years they have been pretty damn responsible and honest on the world stage. No I don't want to cozy up to China but the notion that the US has been honest or good neighbors to Canada is laughable. It was largely at the behest of the US that we dismantled our military, that same military that they are now screaming at us to strengthen (now that we have no military-industrial base and will have to purchase it from them-or so they assume).

Teachers have seen an effective cut in pay of 50% since 1993. Why do people assume that they can read lips if they have never tried it? See above. Most teachers would be thrilled with a cola as would the teachers union, that’s 9% btw. So let me get this straight, you blame the teachers for massive cuts in funding, massive increases in classroom size, putting special needs students in regular classrooms, cutting virtually all the supplementary positions such as librarians? Of my children go to private school, there education combined costs me more then the average Canadian makes. This is where the aristocracy is born. Wanna bet? You tell me what year did the first private corporation open in the USSR? How large was the budget for the KGB compared to the CIA? I remember enough of the cold war to be able to compare it to history and laugh at the stupidity that was fed to me in an attempt to insure my indoctrination. We were every bit as indoctrinated as they were. The have a saying in Russia now, the capitalists have managed to do what 70 years of communist rule never accomplished; they made communism look good. On the topic of essential services, these are supposed to be reserved for life and death jobs; doctors, police, firemen, water, and power. These are essential services, jobs that need to be done to maintain society on the most basic of levels. Teachers aren't even remotely essential service. The fact of the matter is that the teachers in BC have been legislated back essentially for 12 years now. The public school system is basically in shambles and this may very well end up with a general strike which would insure a great deal of devastation to the BC economy. If the ports in BC go down again it could literally mean hundreds of billions of lost dollars over the next decade.

Well, my lawyer isn't available as he works for me but I did ask him and he told me that the fact that I have held property in the US for more then 10 years combined with the fact that I employed more then 50 people there allowed a expedited claim. He did however tell me that when he attempted to get work visa’s for the employees I had brought in from other parts of the world that the process was no more onerous then Canada’s. However it should be noted these were workers at an education level that couldn’t be found locally. I hope that helps people find what they are looking for.

Absolutely correct, the price is determined by grade and at the point of sale.

Actually leafless, no you have no point here. Your understanding of the principles of NAFTA is clearly poor. NAFTA in principle is an agreement to merge Canada and the US as economic entities; Canada in effect cannot apply any measure to American importers that it does not apply to its own and visa versa. The notion of stumpage fees is irrelevant and not even a directly applicable topic of discussion. Canada has an asset (lumber) which it uses in a natural way (low stumpage fees being natural considering the nature of our resource). Honestly why do you post? You clearly have absolutely no knowledge of the issues and contribute virtually nothing. You don't know who’s right and who’s wrong? Ok let me make this simple, we are right in a very clear and absolute sense. The WTO would only have jurisdiction in the absence of an agreement such as NAFTA. I would also like to add that you are clearly incredibly ignorant of the vitriol which has been spewed by American law makers at Canada when they have felt it was to there benefit. No Canadian government ever has been even a small fraction as insulting or aggressive to the US as they are to us. Once again an appalling lack of knowledge. There is virtually no security or military expert in the world which does not gain direct financial benefit from supporting the outdated and pointless US war machine that believes that we would be safer by cooperating with the US. Only one country on earth has actively threatened our borders over the last 100 years, care to guess who that is? There is no credible (even in an odd fantasy land like yours) threat to Canada, starting an arms race or moving away from diplomatic methodologies is a far greater threat to Canada then whatever our relationship might be with a quickly declining near bankrupt hyper power. In fact by taking the sycophantic UK/Australia route we only encourage the kind of psychotic behavior we are currently seeing out of the US. Trade in and of itself is meaningless, if you think its meaningful then I suggest you articulate well why you think it is because I can assure you I have debated the point with far better versed individuals then yourself. Canadian trade opportunities in the rest of the world are non-existent? Do you have any actual working knowledge at all on this topic? Canada is ideally situated to trade with China and India, not to mention Japan. We have the highest natural resource value per capita of any country on earth. This is just plain an assine statement with no factual foundation whatsoever. Really? Because the EU, Japan, and the US all have no trouble dealing with these countries and indeed seem to enjoy it quote a bit. The U.S. has nothing invested in Canada; individual Americans who have already begun the exodus which will continue for decades have a great deal invested in Canada. Those interests are irrelevant to anything but market and political stability, both of which Canada has in spades. What exactly do you base the "good neighbor" notion on? I hear this all the time but I rarely hear exactly why they are a good neighbor. Well I think we have established that your opinions are based on decidedly lacking knowledge base so you will have to excuse me if (after careful consideration) I discard them with a light chuckle. Canada is in a far stronger position then the US is in, we have something they need in natural resources they have nothing that we need and do not already possess. There is simply no reasonable way to suggest that post transitionary pains that are coming regardless due to a rising dollar Canada would be significantly worse off not trading with the US. I am beginning to think that there may come a time when it becomes necessary for Canada to have its own civil war. Our inbreed hicks are starting to get out of hand. Blah blah blah, I have no real basis for my criticism of the government so I will just use a few minor (yes I said it MINOR) incidents of mismanagement to make broadly based and unsupported accusations at a government that has been about as fiscally conservative as any on earth over the last 15 years. And once again, I am truly startled that so many people will so quickly side against there own nation. If people truly want to be American, then why not simply become American? This Anti-Canadian bias puzzling to say the least.

No, I applied, they were eager to accept me for many reasons. I can't honestly give the reason as my lawyer handled the paperwork but I have a very hard time beliveing that if you have any kind of education whatsoever that getting into the US is hard for a Canadian.

Well I don't know how old you are but the fact of the matter is that what was called a doctor today most likely wouldn't have qualified as a nurse today, what was called a scientist wouldn't rate a technology degree and what was called an engineer was really a technician. I don't mean to belittle your argument or your education and I do believe that liberal arts educations do have value and contribute to an intellectually active population but the notion that someone could "learn on the job" what is required to be a modern professional engineer/doctor/researcher is insane. The education at universities is quite literally twice as intense as it was when I was going to school and from the sounds of it was probably 4x as intense as it was in your day. Your clearly out of touch with modern university life if you think what you describe could be reasonably applied today.

Just in case anyones wondering, oil sold to the Chinese would be sold at exactly the same price as what it would be sold to the Americans for.

Depends on what kind of law, but yes a great deal of Law school is memorization. Lawyers do not use a significant amount of common sense, which is the ability to predict the response of ones surrounding in a reasonable way and applying it continually. What lawyers do is apply a specific logical construct that is represented by the legal system and through the use of specific language. I don't see why, a good 99% of mathematics is rote memorization. I could go into a diatribe out higher mathematics but less then .0000001% of the population participates in the use of any kind of developmentry mathematics while a good 20 or so % of the population uses mathematics in a rote way. If the mathematics of Finance and the generally applied non doctoral level marketing and economics mathematics were a trial for you then I would suggest that your basic understanding of mathematics was lacking because those three topics are some of the most simplistic mathematics you will ever find anywhere. BCIT is a fine school, and I have in my employee a half dozen of there robotics and electronics graduates in my employee. But they are a step below both MIT and Waterloo (which is the most accomplished school in Canada). WTH does this mean exactly? that engineers and scientists are lower grade of intellectual then liberal arts graduates? I really hope that’s not what you’re saying... In the end this list is utter crap, the insanely skewed mechanics used in developing this list which are incredibly biased towards Ivy league and other named institutions and towards western universities as well as those with political clout and away from technical institutions (where most of the most pure intellectuals go) is obvious. Take a look at the names on 80 or so of the last 100 noble laureates and you will find they are names that hold a great deal of political sway.

Clearly I need to define some economic terms here that might clear up this picture: Productivity Measured in output value vs. cost, this value is used by companies to determine pretty much everything. It is not directly related to efficiency but does determine real world profitability. Efficiency Measured in output value vs. a(man hours) + b(resource depletion), this number is used by economists to determine the creation of social wealth vs. the depletion of resources (including labour). From a social economics point of view when efficiency rises productivity has a tendency to rise to a point. GDP(and why its a completely crap statistic) GDP is measured in two ways, but by far the most common way is the GDP = private + government + investment + net exports. Now there are many many problems with this but I will focus on two major ones. Government vs. Private consumption Private consumption is measured from the consumer, the only transactions which are to be counted in private consumption are the actual final purchase by the consumer. Private consumption is just that a consumption statistic, however in the private sector an estimated (20-30% estimates vary widely) of all transactions in the private sector is purchased under a consumptionary mechanism and resold again under a consumptionary mechanism. Essentially being double counted. On the other hand government spending is calculated using total government expenditure, thus no double counting is even possible. Why do this? Well some people might say its simply another method of manipulating the numbers for political gain but the truth in this case is probably just the availability of number. There is no way to actually track private consumption in as easy a way as the governments. However it does skew GDP towards highly privatized economies. The NEW Issue NEW (Net Economic Wealth) is a very difficult thing to pin down, however the spirit of the statistic is to measure the growth in wealth of a society as a whole. NEW is a modified GDP, although there are a number of different ways in which NEW is modified to account for social wealth the primary function is simply to deduct the factors which create a higher socialized cost in high GDP societies. For example, in a country with a lower pollution standard there will be costs associated with this lower standard. These costs however are often counted TOWARDS GDP, a company pouring effluence into a river will create damage to local populations that will require medical care expenditures, and it will create environmental damage that will have a clean up cost. In both these cases GDP has risen when social wealth has actually fallen (often dramatically). There are MANY other factors that contribute to making the GDP statistic utterly useless a few off the top of my head are... Black and Grey economies (uncounted consumptive activities in some countries) IP Issues (some countries rarely respect the IP rights of the largest producers) The relationship between these two values tends to follow closely the relationship between NEW (net economic wealth) and GDP. Like the NEW/GDP relationship the higher productivity is pushed the wider the gap becomes. To a large extent it is the rising discrepancy between these numbers that is responsible for the fall in efficiency and world wide social wealth. Social Wealth The measurement of a societies total wealth, the combined wealth of every person in it withholding the socialized cost. The total result of the NEW statistic. The Whys, Why do so many people use GDP to represent wealth? Pretty simple really, almost without exception anyone using GDP to represent wealth is either simply ignorant of its issues or has an ideological agenda. Why isn't NEW or a similar statistic used more often? Pretty simple as well, NEW is a VERY difficult statistic to work with and determine, there are however general agreement as to the nature the trends of NEW, specifically in relation to GDP. Also the majority of discussion of economics is in relation to the investment market rather then the economy as a whole. NEW isn't useful for investors as it primary deals with the downloaded social costs of encouraging GDP growth. <<I will write more when I have time>>

I have dual citizenship, it took me 6 months? I never said that there was anything wrong with the US, at the very crux of the issue I belive strongly in honest democracy. The vast majority of Canadians have proven themselves to be fiscally responsible (or at least want that out of there government) and socially liberal. Thats not going to change anytime soon. Canada will probably allways be more moderate then the US, so if a person isn't happy about that why not move?

I don't vote, and I consider myself pretty center of the ilse on most issues. I in the end like a balanced system. However that doesn't mean that I don't know an idiot when I see one, Harper has been a complete political buffon. I keep wanting the guy to actually do something to provide some actual opposition but it has become abundently clear that the man is completely incappable of it. Ok thats not what I said, but if you seriously need evidence of a politician lying I have a bridge you might be interested in... An all to accurate synopsis of Steven Harper The man is portrayed as an intellectual but is in reality a dufus at best. The fact that he managed to con enough of the alliance and PC's to unite the party behind him speaks to a serious need for better conservative representatives in Canada (although a united conservative party will hopefully eventual get there act together).

Actually high quality coke isn't nearly as harmful as it’s made out to be, heroin is far more harmful and crystal meth is insanely dangerous. If you had any notion of the number lawyers/doctors/engineers that use coke it would probably blow your mind. IMO our dishonesty as a society about drugs has made the problem far worse, when I hear someone tell there child that if they smoke a joint they will get addicted, become a junkie and be unable to function (ala refer madness) it really irritates me. I mean what are the chances that a 15 year old doesn't know some guy who smokes pot recreationally and still does well in school and is in pretty much every way a normal person? What do you think is going through that same kids mind when you tell him crystal meth will make you addicted 75% of the time after 2 uses and will destroy your life? They sure aren't going to be thinking gee they lied to me about pot but I am sure there telling the truth about this crystal meth stuff.

from what I understand corn is far better grown south of the border regardless and isn't a particularly profitable product regardless. If there was a longer turn around time for our farmers to start producing corn or there was any kind of relitive shortage of demand in agriculture it might be nessecary but as of right now there really is no story here. Toro The food subsidies in the US are actually a very good story, they were actually started shortly after corporate farms started to grow and force out family farms but only because it had been such a great political tool against the USSR that farms had been lost to the state and they didn't want to see farms start to be run out of business because of the potential for political fallout. Today those very same subsidize are collected largely by those corporate farms. I wish I could remember the book on this, was a great one.

Yup, I import highly skilled engineers from India and Russia on a regular basis (reletively) and its insane the kind of trails these brilliant engineers have to go through to get certification. I have to have them partnered with people far below them in ability to ruberstamp everything they do for years. I have a good friend that is a doctor from Hungry, he attended one of the worlds finest medical schools and it will take him 10 years to get certified here so he just became a nurse. Its a very sad thing to see.

Do you belie that China exports to us without wanting anything in return? This is the most asinine statement I have ever seen (and I mean that quite literally). Trade is just that an exchange of goods. Are you actively misinterpreting me? The Chinese and Indians produce goods more cheaply, not more efficiently this doesn't just make us poorer in the long run it makes everyone poorer by the margin of efficiency lost. In this case it is the efficiency lost due to logistical considerations which are increasingly significant. Bullshit, there are two primary groups which divide social wealth there is the investor and the worker. When the return on investment rises the return on labour falls, this is extremely well understood and accepted. The bare market system provides more for an aeronautical engineer then a janitor not because of productivity but because of demand, under your theory there would be no significant difference between the wage earned regardless of country and that is simply not the case. You clearly have no actual understanding of the labour market as productivity has as much relevance on wages earned as landed cost has on retail price, in other words they are completely unrelated unless we come down to a point where either drops in efficiency below the point of reasonable return. Heh, it’s funny but I have yet to see you post about rising wages from anywhere. The FACT of the matter is that wages over the past 25 years have fallen everywhere, the only way to make it appear that wages have risen is to include front line managers in the wage calculations and/or calculate family income. The article I posted had clear information that showed the dramatic fall of wages in Mexico a country that should have seen a very very clear rise in wages under your theory and you have yet to explain why the economies of Ethiopia, Chili, and Malaysia all skyrocketed in virtually every category when they largely closed there markets. The article I linked was not to backup the statement that wages have been falling, As for the world bank, read the book I listed and you will understand why I can't take anything they say seriously. And I never denied there was a link between social wealth and productivity, of course if you make the labour market work twice as hard you’re going to produce more wealth. What does that have to do with wages? If everyone contributed directly to wealth creation then wages would by definition rise but since the vast majority of the wealth falls to the investors then wages don't have to rise past the point which the labour market demands. Actually your wrong, I have an economics background and about 80% of economists (IMO) would say that wage growth is peripherally linked to productivity growth it is a very lose connection. Total social wealth is linked to productivity, as in exactly what I have been saying all along the more goods that are produced the wealthier society as a whole gets, this is however increased proportionally by efficiency gains not directly to productivity gains which are again...not the same thing. There is nothing that you have said there that invalidates anything I have said, your analysis is from the view of an investor. Mine is from the view of an economist. First off, the oil industry has been closing refineries for years in order to drive up prices. Secondly what you and he said in no way explain the lack of competitive priceing. The fact that there is competition in the area of exploration is neither new nor significant. Oil Industry in collusion for decades No I haven't, I have given the exact definitions of those terms, you as an investor probably understand both there meaning and there importance differently but that doesn't change the fact that free trade has had a tendency to increase productivity (through longer work hours) and cost effectiveness (through low foreign wages) while simultaneously lowering efficiency from losses in logistical efficiency and population distribution. It’s not an odd statement at all, as an investor you see money as wealth. This is obvious, money is not wealth it is the representation of wealth. Wealth is what you trade for goods and or services that are consumed in the transaction. For instance, when you go out to dinner and purchase the food and service you receive and consume wealth, in exchange for that you trade the representation of wealth that society agrees your money represents. Money has no intrinsic value, it is not valuable in any way other then what we all agree it’s valued at by social contract. When you create money without creating goods or providing services in proportion to that growth in capital you lower the relative value of that money. No it doesn't happen right away and no for all intents and purposes you buying a dinner or creating some capital that didn't exist before doesn't effect the larger economy in isolation. Actually it makes perfect sense, first off the US government has been printing money at a record pace over the last 5 years, 2ndly changes to the nature of IP law have been artificially boosting GDP on a truly massive scale (over the last 30 years), reductions in the requirements for corporations to properly fund pension plans and a dozen other actions taken by the US government have all resulted in a massive availability of capital which has pushed short term GDP. Over the time period before 1975 there was a great deal of real growth since then it has been to an overwhelming extent statistical manipulation. In the end the fact of the matter is that what is pushed as economics by think tanks like the heritage foundation and by corporately controlled entities such as the IMF really aren't indicative of what the vast majority of economists say. There just the only ones you ever hear from. You are misinterpreting once again, I am talking about ROL you are talking about social wealth. As productivity goes up social wealth tends to follow but that has no relation to wages. In order for the relationship you are describing to be true labour would have to be the primary beneficiary of rising productivity, they are not investors are. PS, don't take my tone to mean a lack of respect, if anything I tend to become more aggressive with people I respect.