Moonlight Graham

Boges answered your question. Probably $100 trial run, then the lower bills until they are all plastic.

What took them so long? Why produce bills that easily rip & must be replaced???

I have no idea, investigate what these dollars are for. My point is that every dollar in "aid" has a purpose, and are often just as much about advancing our own interests as any other foreign policy. So much of it, even to the poorest countries, come with strings attached.

Saying we giv aid to these "well-off" countries is meaningless without context. The aid may have foreign policy purposes not listed in this thread, ie: the #1 recipient of US foreign aid is Israel...and it's not because they are a starving country in need of food & vaccines. Also, how much does Canada receive in foreign aid from China and the other countries we give aid to?

Totally agree, although it may be a "loud majority" rather than a minority. Nobody's perfect, nobody can follow the New Testament to a "t", but there's a lot of hypocritical Christians out there. A lot of good Christians too I might add.

There are many causes of the Great Depression. What you're talking about is one major factor. I'm not saying all gov intervention of the economy is good. It's clear that govs mucking around with interest rates has contributed to economic bubbles like 1929 and the housing bubble. But you can't just claim that because the gov screws up in one area that then all government regulation is bad. That's a slippery slope and is illogical. I totally agree that it creates a moral hazard for banks. However, at the same time, there needs to be some kind of fail-safe for people. What happened during the Depression is that there was no fail-safe, so as some banks began to go belly-up it created a panic and a huge run on the banks which resulted in 9000 banks or so going bankrupt, and many lost their savings with these bankruptcies. Another one of the causes of the Depression. Plus collapse in banks = collapse in lending, new businesses, and investment etc. I really don't know what the answer is. I highly value the efficiency of the free markets, and how it naturally will fail companies that are doing bad business & deserve to fail & reward good companies consumers like with profits. But what do you do with "too big to fail" companies like the huge banks/insurance companies that, if they do fail, will cause a domino effect of collapse like the Depression? Letting those banks & the crappy car companies, that all deserve to fail, could be nice to let fail and maybe would have been better for the economy in the long-term, but it would almost certainly have led to a far worse recession. Kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Who said they have no control or are "ineffectual"? It is physics, it is cause and effect, it is statistics. Well-known Dr. Gabor Mate, psychiatrist at the Vancouver OnSite facility, said that every single addicted person he treated at the facility, without exception, was the victim of sexual/physical/severe physiological abuse growing up. It is simple statistics to know that if you are, say, molested as a kid, the odds of you running away (from your abusive parents or the shit-hole group homes you live in after being taken away from their parents by CAS) and living on the street, of not finishing high school, of being a drug addict, goes up dramatically.

Where has Canada aid anything of this sort? The links you provided show NOTHING of the sort, only that MacKay wants to ask the Israeli DM if they plan to attack or what their plans are. Said nothing of Canada's involvement whatsoever.

Intermediate at guitar. I pick up my guitar everyday and fiddle around just to have something to do while watching tv. I probably get in a few hours per week. If I jam with buddies once a week then add an extra 3-4 hours.

Exactly. I'd say exactly the same thing about homeless people (who are often also addicts).

He needs to be quiet. What if people want to read etc.? They'd tell a passenger to zip it.

WSJ war drums boom-boom-boom...

What's the point you're trying to make with it?

I completely agree, well said. An example of what you were saying about changing the rules would the 30's Depression. Regulations & fail safes didn't exist to prevent it, and worker conditions were poor long before 1929 and obviously the masses were deeper in the crapper after the crash. Americans became fed up, booted out Hoover in a landslide and voted in FDR, who brought in the New Deal. Now thankfully we have gov regulations to prevent some of the things that caused the depression, like gov insurance of bank accounts (at least in Canada) in case of a bank collapse to help prevent a run on the banks as happened in 1929. In anything politics, strict idealism is dangerous. Political ideologies are theories, and there are holes in all of them. Being open-minded to adapt your thinking to realities "on the ground" is logical, blind adherence to an ideal despite evidence against it is not.

Me likes this idea. Make a rough calculation (or as close as one could estimate) what it costs us, then slap it onto tobacco products.

Me thinks the economic boom in that era had a heck of a lot more to do that just low gov regulation. A little thing called the 2nd Industrial Revolution. If you want to go as laissez-faire as it was back then and you're expecting some massive boom because of it you'll be disappointed. We'll need something as revolutionary to production in a short period of time like combustion engines, cheap steel, electricity, and the telephone. This era was economically prosperous, but that doesn't equal everything to do with society prosperity. No gov regulation, then major retraction in things like minimum wage, workers comp, safety standards, environmental standards, labour rights, EI etc. How were those things in the 1870's? I'm not a communist. I'm saying there's been income growth in the past 30 years and virtually all of it has gone to the 1%. Who has been benefiting from the deregulation that began with Reagan/Thatcher? "Trickle-down economics" sold to us in this era has statistically turned out to be a pile of rubbish.

Probably not the right decision, but like you said, it's just parts, not bodies. Like a blown-off foot etc. I still wouldn't really like my ankle ashes dumped in a landfill though/

Absolute rubbish. How has deregulation done for the US economy recently? Compare that to the better-regulated Canadian banking system etc. Society won't prosper if there isn't a bit of sane gov regulation. Since the Industrial Revolution up to about WWII, laissez-faire capitalism proved to produce many social problems. Show me these stats. You've been tricked i says.

No they don't. They produce or acquire it, then it becomes theirs to own. Winning the lottery or stealing or inheriting or getting a welfare cheque, is that "earned" wealth?

10% of the global population owns 50% of the total wealth.

Who says he's part of the 1%? There are a great many within the 99% who have been tricked by the 1% to defend them, in the name of "liberty and freedom and 'gov intervention is evil'". Gramsci was darn correct: and

Iran's entire nuclear program wouldn't need to be destroyed. I thought they only have 1 nuclear reactor and 2 uranium enrichment sites (maybe they have a 3rd or 4th site in secret?). Destroy those and they can't produce nukes. Given this, there would be no need for regime change/invasion. Airstrikes were enough to take out Iraq's nuke program threat. Iran's sites are buried within mountains, plus lessons learned would say such airstrikes would be much harder if possible at all. But if Israel thought they could get at them they'd try it. Regional war is a possibility if there's an attack. But would Israel be willing to risk that compared to an Iran with nukes? Israel wouldn't need to ask US/Nato permission, we would be dragged into it whether we liked it or not. US wouldn't just sit back and do nothing. NATO acted in Libya despite a crappy economy.

Like the US and coalition in Iraq? Or Operation Babylon - re: Israel destroying Iraq reactor in 1981? Actually, they are being punished by Iran trying to make nukes so they don't become Iraq or Afghanistan. I don't blame Iran one bit, and any sane country would do exactly as Iran is doing now. That said, who the heck wants Iran with nukes?...though odds are very low that Iran would use them despite Western/Israeli propaganda. This is so going down. Israel will attack Iran's sites, and with Western support.

Gone from where? Good luck wiping out an entire country that big...then having the nuke radiation/fallout whisked in the breeze over Israel. Yum!

Doubtful. The 1% need to appease the masses in order to peacefully maintain their wealth and power. Part of this means giving them just enough wealth and social benefits etc. to make them feel they have a decent standard of living and a chance to be upwardly mobile in income/wealth. If we were all dirt-poor the rich wouldn't last long. We've been brainwashed by elites/government of this trickle-up economics bullcrap, that in terms of economic growth "a rising tide lifts all ships", when the numbers show very little "lift" for the masses and the 1% laughing all the to the banks that they own.