Saturn

Are you looking to privatize the atmosphere?

That should be the strategy of the state but those who run the state are there for only 4 years at a time. Hence, we'll limit pollution in 2050 when they are long dead (and so will be many of us). It's always nice to think that we have more time to deal with the problem and it won't hit us in our lifetimes. As for our kids, we are always more concerned about our own convenience than about our kids, no?

We'll be paying for the impacts when we find a way to bury 2 kg of CO2 for $0.40 or $0.45. Any ideas?

WTF??? What planet are you from? Or century?

Wonder what happened to having by-elections when MPs decide to cross the floor. Oh, ya, I guess that went down the drain along with a thousand other Conservative election promisses when Emerson crossed. But is it much of a surprise that Liberals switch to the Conservatives and vice-versa given that there is hardly any difference between the two?

But men are also much more likely to die just as they get to executive positions. It is much easier to replace a 28-yr-old employee for a few months or a year than it is to replace a dead executive given that " the cost that companies spend on training, retaining and developing their executives is enourmous."

Cause immigrants are scum and are not qualified by definition. You should be embarrassed for asking such questions.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/1032/1/91/ .http://blog.wakeupwalmart.com/ufcw/2005/05...fifty_memb.html

Yes. The perception is that a woman might get pregnant and will miss work as a result, hence hiring a woman may be expensive. The reality is that men can be expensive employees too as they are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviour (smoking, drinking excessively, using illicit drugs and killing themselves in accidents), resulting in higher medical and life insurance costs, not showing up for work or simply having a heart attack in the office and scaring the shit out of everyone present. When you put the benefits and risks associated with each, it isn't clear to me that hiring women is a worse choice than hiring men. But most people doing hiring are still men (older men at that) and they are more willing to hold a potential pregnancy (and months of missed work) against a female applicant while not even considering a male applicant's substantially higher chances of having a heart attack in the office or dying before retirement (and missing work without notice).

Agreed. But I still think that people will do more stupid things out of ideology rather than the lack of it.

Given that OAS is clawed back completely at $103,000 (not $30 as you suggest), I would guess that most seniors do get it. I'd guess that only 1 or 2% of seniors make over $103,000 annually, so the remaining 98% or so do get OAS.

If Hitler had won the war, he would have been the most popular chanselor for sure. You could even argue that he is the most popular even though he lost.

The LCBO pumps over a billion $ into the provincial government's coffers and I sure don't want it sold off to someone's friends for nothing. Of course as the most profitable crown corp in Ontario, Harris was eager to privatize it but was just short on time to actually do it and McGuinty has been barely able to contain himself (we'll see how long that lasts). I view alcohol as a luxury good or as a bad at times since some people don't seem to be able to handle it appropriately, so I don't particularly want to see more choice in buying it. Actually they always checked my ID until I turned 28 or so but I've been told that I look younger than I am. But whether they check IDs would probably be determined by what the incentive for sales is vs the disincentive for getting caught, not by whether the store is government owned or not. I'd make a guess and suggest that the sales incentives for employees are strongest in private, owner-operated businesses, followed by private non-owner operated businesses, followed by government operated businesses. Finally, sales of "fake" alcoholic beverages, which kill and blind thousands of people around the world (and I think are a much bigger problem than selling beer to minors), can IMO be better managed by a large government-operated corporation than a multitude of small mom and pop operations.

Well, they are. From shooting doctors who provide abortions, to spending most of their time fighting SSM and to blowing up buildings due to xenophobic or religios beliefs, people are putting ideology ahead of self-interest.

Of course it does. The LCBO is one of the most profitable crown corporations in Ontario which provides billions of revenues to the province, which are used to fund education, health-care, infrastructure projects and so on. If it were privatized, that would most likely mean that it will be handed over as a monopoly to political friends of the government in power, which means that the profits will no longer go to the above noted areas but will most likely go to fund some worthy and profitable project overseas. So, yes, the difference will be huge.

When you have $3 billion to spend, just jumping in to see what value comes out of it in the long run is probably not the wisest option. There may be cases where only one company can provide the service/goods. But search and rescue helicopters is certainly not one those cases.

Like it or not, self-interest is the single biggest force in human behaviour. Ideology or morals are also have a major influnce on how we act. Your morals may dictate that you should support SSM out of a sense of fairness. But they could also dictate that you should oppose it because of your religious views. You may support welfare programs because you feel compassion, others may oppose welfare because they view welfare recipients as scum who steal their hard earned tax dollars and welfare as an incentive for more people to join the lazy scum ranks thus hurting society in some way. You can decide which view you agree with but most people on both sides base their views on ideology and very few actually take a hard look and make a clear assessment on what's really in their own interest. I happen to think that if people were more rational and less ideological, things would not be perfect but we would see far more balance between young and old, races, sexes, etc.

If you are as nearsighted as you describe above, then you'd probably be doing yourself a disservice by "acting in your own interest". You may think that welfare is a program you will never use, but most people who have collected welfare didn't ever think they would need it either. If you have no kids and you vote against childcare, you would be missing the fact that you benefit from childcare indirectly, whether because children who are better taken care of are less likely to cost you money by ending up in jail or on welfare or whether or because you will need someone to take care of you when you get older and presumably a half-literate, former inmate would not be the best person to do so. Again, if people are properly able to assess what their interests are and vote accordingly, we will have a much more balanced system than we currently do.

Care to show us stats where controling for seniority, education and maternity leave produce almost no difference? From what I've seen this no difference is roughly 20%.

Regardless of your own opinion, there is no evidence that a fetus is anything more than tissue before 5 months into a pregnancy. Abortions are performed after the first trimester only in cases where the mother's health/life are at risk. So, no, abortion doesn't kill anyone. Again you ignore reality. The fact is that the aborted children are those who would be most likely to end up on the welfare rolls and later in jail. If people like you were to lay off the rhetoric, the welfare rolls (mostly made up of single moms, who had babies in their teens, and their kids) would undoubtedly shrink. That's the welfare bums you can't stand. On one hand you hate abortions, on the other you hate the product of failure to have an abortion. Again, you ought to be more consistent in your views. You either oppose abortion and are willing to pay the financial consequences or you don't oppose abortion and you don't want to pay. You can't have it both ways!

Education is a good choice for you because schools are bending backwards to hire male teachers, so you'd have a huge advantage there. Social work? Why would you even think about that? The stats are widely available - you can find them yourself. Women make roughly 75c for each $1 a man makes even when education, experience, work hours, etc. are taken into account.

However skewed the age distribution of the population, seniors will not become the majority in the foreseeable future. The only reason they have a huge advantage politically is that they are more likely to vote than any other group and they are about 4 times as likely to vote as the under 30 crowd. In addition, what also skews policy in their favour is the "set of values" that middle-aged journalists and their bosses and owners has installed in the general population - namely go after the peanuts (welfare) but never think about seniors' benefits (far more expensive than welfare), and give us taxcuts (because we are in the prime earning years of our lives and we benefit the most) but ignore the fact that you will later pay for them. As I said, if younger people knew what their own interests were and voted accordingly (and voted more often btw), the system would be more balanced and less skewed in favour of older generations.

If there was a useful "natural limit" to how much people can spend, personal bankruptcies would not exist. Unfortunately, for many the "natural limit" is only reached after their finances are in total disarray and a bankruptcy is the only way out. I don't think that this is how our country's finances should be handled.

When I said eliminate the OAS and bump up the GIS by the same amount for people with incomes under $20K, I didn't mean that there would be any change in the total benefit. I simply meant that we should call the OAS portion these people receive GIS. Similarly, OAS (now called GIS) would be clawed back starting at $20K and fully eliminated at $30K or so. This will ensure that seniors with low incomes have sufficient incomes and will yield some $5 billion in savings right now. The reality is that OAS is simply unsustainable in its current form with increased lifespans and the large number of seniors which will only keep going up and up.

Care to tell us about Rand, The left behind series and what they have to do with OAS?