Adam1980

Fellow seems pretty common sense. Following a 'middle road' usually gives a better result than other methods. Thanks for this; I'll read some more about his positions.

You ask very good questions I think. It goes to the root of the tacit agreements we in this society have made. One quick comment; the government does not pay for healthcare, we all do. We all pool our resources into a great pot and the various governments spend it on the public as a whole. Framed like that, your argument is strong. We have all agreed to shoulder our various portions of the burden, and ideally that should include not drinking until your liver fails, or smoking until your lungs fails...or refusing a vaccine for something that requires all of us to get, or the societal benefit does not occur. On the other side though, assuming we all can get immunity simply by making a choice and getting a couple of needles, is there any real downside we should spend energy on talking about? I do not think the public should pay for the irresponsibility of individuals. I would agree that if someone willingly refuses the vaccine (or doesn't do good diligence and climbs a mountain), they should reap the consequence. What does that look like in real life? They've presumably paid into the pot so are entitled to some service.

For sure. I think the present (it has changed!) definition of diversity misses the mark. Of course different viewpoints and experiences and approaches will problem solve better. Of course if you can incorporate that into the process you'll be better off. How one gets there is another question; just having people with different genitalia and skin colours is not sufficient. I think a good marker of real and valuable diversity is a lot of conflict.

Minor thread hijack to follow: Googling 'diversity' I get this: 1. the state of being diverse; variety. "there was considerable diversity in the style of the reports" 2. the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc. "equality and diversity should be supported for their own sake Selecting the former as the definition, is a rant like the above true diversity? Where someone can be 'politically IN-correct' and get bandwidth, and have their ideas out there to be challenged and argued over and mean bad words said? I think so. I think it takes a bit of courage and it's hard to do and we'd all be better served if we were all a little less 'correct'.

What opportunities are no longer available? I'm not trying to be cheeky, but to limit the discussion to Canada, there are many varied 'game' to go after. Fish, mammal, bird...pick something to kill and eat and one can do so. I think it's a reasonable statement to say that standard of living is better now that some indeterminate time in the past. To name a few big ones off the top of my head, we cure and treat more disease effectively, folks live longer, and there are more and varied opportunities for people to make a living doing different things.

The easy answer is it's a complex result of the history of the two 'powers' that successfully land grabbed here. To follow the analogy, people use COBOL because they find utility in it. Presumably at some point all the people who do will die, the knowledge of it's use will die, and the still useful systems that use it will transition into the more common and available languages. The popular subsets of coding languages is ever evolving, and expanding.

May be a dangerous precedent; government mandating you putting a certain cocktail of chemical into your body.

For sure. I think it speaks to the time it takes for humans to adjust their conventional wisdom. You can read many military history books about the generals fighting the last war because that's what they know; same thing here perhaps. It's not a terrible way to do business in basing your response on past experience, but it seems to be very hard to adapt in the moment. I suppose that's what we hope our leaders can do though.

I don't disagree that the whole thing is overblown and the response disproportionate to the threat, but it appears there is a threat, so I find it hard to call it a 'hoax'. I wonder what would have happened if we went to the other side of the response spectrum and carried on with life as was before. We would see many deaths in long term care homes. One can imagine the population screaming at the folks in power that they didn't do enough!

Agree regarding controlling diseases, given that it requires humans to do a certain thing some or all of them will not like to do. Good journalism on the virus: The Plague Year | The New Yorker Taking at face value, there's many failures that made things worse than they need to be, including non-ideal information sharing.

It feels like it would be hard to convince you, but in what way is this virus and the impacts it's having a hoax?

One hopes that the activist would've actually thought something real and bad was being done...my wager is 1/2 laziness, 1/2 malignant self serving intent.

So in an ideal world I suppose the parties should be trying to procure these types of high achievers, better than average humans and bringing them into the party fold. Then in theory they could accomplish good things at the local level, and throw their good ideas into the party 'idea cauldron' and let the ideas get discussed and argued over and rejected and refined until something good pops out at the party level and appeals to voters. Then move up the food chain... I wonder if this is why we don't really see much originality and good ideas at the federal / provincial level. Too much perversion and filters for the good stuff when one begins the journey. Good thread.

It will be interesting to see if the public holds the government to account for this. I believe this issue was known long ago, and they are just now about to face the reckoning. The virus may be a big and visible enough issue to mobilize the mob.

The parent should make available good food in the house, and teach the kid to prepare good meals with it. The parent should ensure the kid values exercise as well, probably organic useful exercise rather than running on a treadmill. The answer is quite clear if you frame the question as you have I think. How one get's the parent(s) into that situation is the tough one. For example just knowing 'good food' means is a loaded question. Off the top of my head I can name 3 different diet philosophies being utilized by people I know, and they all swear what they're doing is the summit of nutrition philosophy. There's alot of diet data, a lot of Netflix diet shows, and a lot of diet pundits...