admined
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Posts posted by admined
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Just now, Moonbox said:
The school system should teach financial literacy. It's crazy that it doesn't. You might learn about basic things like compound interest, but with very little context. One of the best courses I took in high school was an "Entrepeneurship" elective. The teacher was a hot mess and a drunk, but he was smart and he actually taught us about real-world things and how the economy worked.
I used to teach (non-finance subjects) in high school. But every year I would try to take just an hour or so to talk about avoiding and managing debt, budgeting, cost-benefit analysis, and the basics of buy-and-hold investments. It really isn't hard. I learned those things as a kid from my parents and other responsible adults in my life. But a lot of kids don't.
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3 minutes ago, Moonbox said:
Having worked out of university as a financial advisor for a Big Bank, it's shocking to me how little even well-to-do Canadians know/care about markets, debt or even basic personal finance. Outside of their little households, most people know almost nothing.
Well I guess fighting that was supposed to be the job of the public school system and the media (i.e., CBC and TVO). But that really doesn't seem to be a big focus now (Translation: those institutions are, broadly speaking, far too consumed by ideology to worry about little things like financial literacy).
New platforms for independent journalism (like Paul Wells, The Bureau, The Audit, and others) can certainly help.
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1 minute ago, Michael Hardner said:
I have been thinking about the AG for a long time.
That could be a starting point to open up government to actual public involvement, both in terms of budgets but also feedback on services.
It's interesting that the OAG website explicitly encourages the public to submit petitions concerning environmental issues, - to be forwarded to the appropriate ministers - but not on other topics. I had to dig pretty deep even to find mention of protocols for internal whistleblowers.
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This article describes the good work that the Auditor General has done (including busting open the ArriveCAN scandal). But the article also points out the mega-tonnes of waste and scandal that are being missed.
Who decides what the AG examines? Are those decisions political?
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29 minutes ago, eyeball said:
The problem is we really suck at doing anything about corruption. So we should try applying the same logic to attracting honest talent as we do to attract competent talent - make compensation for honesty so good that it out competes corruption.
I don't believe that corruption is a result of poverty. It's much more the result of bad character. So I don't think paying people more will lead to a more honest civil service. Of course, that doesn't mean I feel they should be paid less either.
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1 minute ago, eyeball said:
Sounds like we need to pay public servants more than they can make in the private sector if we expect to attract the talent we need.
Does that logic rankle the way it does when it's applied the other way?
Well this particular issue had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with corruption. Even a mediocre - but loyal - civil servant will know that public funds aren't meant to be distributed freely among friends.
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I strongly suspect that data and objective analysis have all that much to do with government decisions. As this article argues (based on official Canadian severe weather event data), complex systems are notoriously difficult to fully understand and government policies are unlikely to get it right.
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According to this report, ArriveCan wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers' money on an overpriced and useless product because of “decades of underfunding”.
QuoteNDP MP Blake Desjarlais said the ArriveCAN debacle is the result of “decades of underfunding” to the public service which has left it needing to subcontract some of the work to private companies.
So I guess the secret of fighting corruption and waste is to throw away so much money that no one will even want to steal it.
Gotcha.
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I think car theft is definitely a very big deal. Besides multiple neighbors having their cars stolen off their driveways over the past couple of months, watching my auto insurance rates rising year after year isn't fun.
I guess setting mandatory sentencing limits can't hurt. But the problem probably won't come under control until the business model is disrupted, which might involve technology as much as policy.
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While no one was looking, it seems that Loblaw Companies Ltd's for-profit Maple has grown into a major medical services provider. Is this the beginning of the end for public healthcare in Canada?
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We now all know how Global Affairs Canada had enjoyed using our tax dollars to support Hamas. But who's keeping an eye on where else they're spending our money? It looks like they've been throwing billions into disease prevention that isn't preventing diseases.
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What's really annoying is the way Chow described her plan to protect tenants from her property tax hike:
Quote“Landlords will not be able to use that as an excuse to push up rent increase.”
"An excuse" Like the only reason she could imagine landlords ever raising rents was as an plan to get super-rich by sucking the last pennies from their poor tenants.
I'm not a landlord myself, but I know how stretched many of them are and how easy it is to fall into losing money month after month. The mayor's attitude is insulting.
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Why should professors feel any pressure to hold back when the federal government has been actively funding UNRWA for many years, including a quarter of a billion dollars since 2016 - all while claiming to be fully aware of how the money was spent.
It's true, of course, that even if the government had been consistently opposed to funding terror there would still be academics - and academic institutions - choosing the wrong side. But at least they couldn't claim to represent the establishment view.
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The delicious thing is that the government itself (back in 2021) claimed to have already spent "more than $100B" in "clean growth"
And what did all that spending get us? I just happened to be researching that today. Here's the most recent data from the government's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program:
...In other words, $100B (and whatever else they've spent since 2021) bought us MORE emissions!
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4 minutes ago, OftenWrong said:
Perhaps a polls thing, but I'm guessing they've worded something in their proposed legislation that makes it legally challengable.
Maybe the part that allows minors to elect to off themselves without parental permission or even awareness. That would be them.
Yeah. But it's NOT like them to notice the problem before the challenge hits...
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The federal government has announced it is seeking another pause...
I'd love to know what changed their minds. I mean, they've always known that extending MAID to the mentally ill would be both controversial and legally problematic. Is this an "I-can't-believe-the-latest-polls" thing?
The least likely possibility is that they're having difficultly putting extra "safeguards" in place. I'm not convinced they were interested in safeguards from the start.
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That's a strange study construction. Why would they compare COVID vaccination reactions to non-COVID vaccines? First of all, I didn't read the whole paper to see if they controlled for mRNA vs other COVID vaccine technologies, but wouldn't it have made more sense to compare mRNA vs non-mRNA, since that's the primary focus of myocarditis concerns.
But the real problem here seems to be that they don't seem to have controlled for possible confounding variables, like age, health, and distribution differences between population cohorts of vaccine recipients spread over so many decades.
I don't want to pre-judge the study (again: I haven't read it), but an awful lot of low-value topics receive approval for research papers these days.
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I wonder if the moderation is working at all right now. I joined and left me first message a few days ago (in the Federal Politics forum) and it still hasn't been moderated. If moderation is dormant, I guess that would make it impossible for new members to join.
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I'm trying to figure out why the Liberal government is so eager to fight this one. After all, if they would just let the ruling go quietly, it'll be out of the news in a few days and - if they're lucky - be mostly forgotten long before the next election.
One possibility is that the ruling makes the government vulnerable to lawsuits - which could be even more damaging than the ruling alone. Although I'm not sure they'd be more expensive to taxpayers than a Supreme Court appeal (not that Liberals have ever worried about taxpayer money).
Perhaps it's also about ego: Trudeau and company might see themselves and their legacies as defined by the way they handled the convoy protests. Perhaps they just can't let it go.
I guess there's a third option here: the Liberals imagine there's a vast population of pro-lockdown voters out there just waiting for their heroes to appear.
Any thoughts?
Thinking about missed potential in the Office of the Auditor General
in Federal Politics in Canada
Posted
100% agree. But for the vast (and growing) proportion of Canadians who are already good and done with school (not to mention the CBC), there are helpful online resources available. And that's besides the endless free raw government and financial data out there waiting to be parsed and interpreted.