hitops

For Canadians buying a first house right now, putting your money in a house just means a lifetime of debt. Our average home price is $400K (that's the average, it's double that in Van and TO), vs around $180 in the US. OECD says we have the most over valued housing in the world. When the market is performing so much better than the bank interest rate, it makes sense to go with the market. But borrowing and spending is not the same as investing. Governments do not invest in the market, they 'invest' in various other nonsense which usually just mean vote-buying (such as we saw yesterday). That's not an investment that pays back, that's just spending money. In the future, we don't benefit from the government buying people votes today. We do benefit from having a lower national debt.

Nobody knows what's going on, since it's not going on yet. We will never know until it's legalized. During prohibition, there were no amazing formal whiskey production facilities. Now it's legal and there are.

lol. The offenders are directly, specifically, and repeatedly citing Islam as their entire motivation and raison d'etre. What other definition do you need? It would be like if you said you support Mulcair because of his polices, but then I said no, you like him because of his beard. It doesn't matter what I say, since YOU are the subject, YOU are the one who defines your own motivations, not me. Not even a drop in the bucket compared to Islamic death counts. Wiki says the IRA killed around 1800 people in the entire conflict. ISIS alone is at 5000 in the first 6 months of 2014. It's laughably incomparable. Obviously nobody can ever touch Stalin or Mao's tens of millions, but in the category or religions violence, nobody comes close to Islam. Ummm no it's not 'the Jews', it's the IDF, the formal army of a democratic secular state of many religions. You don't have to be Jewish to be an Israeli citizen, nor to fight in the army. Nor does the army fight for Jewish causes or claim they fight on behalf of God or against any group based on their religion. LRA actually counts as religious violence, you're catching on. Not even a drop in the bucket compared to Islamic death count. Correct, it's not. Maybe you just don't understand what violence in name of religion is vs other types of violence. Well since the initial claim I was responding to was specifically about religious violence and that 'all religions do it', that is why I'm focusing an answer specific to that. Regardless, Islamic-motivated violence actually DOES, at the present time, kill more people than any other kind of violence, religious or not, in the world. That's not even counting Assad, since he was killing for his own self-interest rather than in the name of God or a particular religious group.

You've got several assumptions in there we have no reason to assume are true. I'm sure those exact same assumptions were made prior to the end of prohibition, but it didn't turn out that way.

Only if you invest in assets you can quickly sell to put back into the house if interest rates rise. The problem with having a huge amount of your net worth in the house is it is very non-liquid. When you need the money, it's a very expensive and time consuming process to sell the house. Then the most obvious benefit which is that while you're paying your 2-3% on your house, the market is getting 7-10% (actually a fair bit better in recent years). In many place in Canada today, renting makes far more sense than buying. That includes almost every major market.

Sounds like you know what you're doing here. Paying down the house these days doesn't seem nearly as smart as putting money into the stock market. That said, it's still compelling to pay down the house for some reason.

Correct. Routinely done all over the world. The more specific you can get on your information, the better. But you can't read minds, so at some point you have to apply generalities, unfortunately. There is a reason why Philippino immigrants have an overwhelmingly good reputation, and Sudanese immigrants have a bad one, to give one example. There are cultural and religions trends that bear out in those communities. IMO, it's fine to discriminate using statistical data even if that's not fair to some individuals. The world is not perfect. You could easier gather data on how many immigrants from a certain country are still on assistance after 5 years, or some other metric. Should be as data-driven as possible. Data unfortunately cannot read minds either, it can only identify trends.

Since that's what happened with alcohol, yes I would say so.

But that would require people actually form human relationships with others, treat them nicely and try to create an arrangement. Sounds scary. There are certainly people with legitimate disabilities. The majority today however, are just issues of self-abuse. Can't remember the last person with 'back problems' I saw that wasn't obese. There are tons of private organizations that help people like that. But those organizations also require you to deal in good faith with them, treat with workers with basic respect and form some kind of relationship with them. Many people who want gov to fund services don't want to have to give anything, they want to remain isolated and harbor contempt for those who pay, and never have any accountability to them. Just the sheer inconvenience of speaking with another human with anything other than total selfishness and anger is beyond them. I can't tell you how many patients get upset that when they get their free, volunteer drivers the drivers don't pick them up in exactly the right way, drive the right way, come at exactly x time etc. And they feel it's ok to yell at them, be rude etc. Total lack of gratitude.

That is what conservatives are saying now, as well as NDP. You've got yourself mixed up.

Not sure how those point respond to my post, or are relevant in any way.

It would be tough to design a system to help people less efficiently than foreign aid, which as you point out, is routinely counter-productive. If you need a source, try here: http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/09359.pdf or here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/ForeignAid.html

Unfortunately in the non-perfect, non rainbow and unicorn filled world we currently occupy, there's no way to perfectly know who will be a radical. We do however know generally speaking from which areas they tend to come. We have to be pragmatic and use surrogate markers because that is the best information we have. It's not wrong for a nation to orient immigration policy towards it's best interests.

I did exactly address your question, and specifically considered the fact that most violence in Canada is not Muslims. You just can't read, or perhaps don't know the definition of disproportionate. And you didn't address in any way the fact that Muslims are vastly over-represented in worldwide religious-motivated violence. I'll repeat the other point you didn't read, or ignored. Everyone knows governments all over the place commit violence. But the specific point stated that 'all religions do it', that's absolutely false. Only one religion's adherents compose 95%+ of all violence where religion is cited as the motivation. That was the specific claim, that I was specifically responding to. 'Most violence is not Muslims', is a misleading statement. It's not that most violence is non-Muslim, most violence is non-religious in Canada. But of that violence that is motivated by religion, Islam is far over-represented given it's size in the country. The same is true worldwide.

Not even close. In the 1950's and 1960's, many things caused prosperity but the main thing was that the US was effectively the only full-capacity functioning modern economy and had tons of exports to everywhere. Building highways and airports had minimal contribution if any. In contrast, the internet boom was ONLY because of the internet. Post-war, the US (and other nations) experienced the largest reduction in government spending ever in history, as the war machine wound down. During the internet boom, there was no significant change in government spending. It was purely new commercial activity.

This such nonsense, and if I had a nickel for every time I've seen this claimed on behalf of the Liberals, or Clinton..... In the 90's the internet came into being. The boom from that, affected everyone around the world and created vast wealth. Every government in the modern world did well, and had great balance sheets. That's not because they all, at exactly the same time, just by coincidence happened to have great economic policies. It's because of the internet.

Definitely time to legalize it. Cigarettes and alcohol are legal. Both are more hazardous, and both smell worse after excessive consumption. If alcohol was not here, 95% of police would be out of a job, according to a friend who is an officer. In contrast, there are almost no police calls due to the effects of pot on someone. If I got a magic button where I could replace all drinking and cigarette smoking with an equivalent amount of pot smoking, as a doc I would push that button in a second.

The foreign aid one always makes me smile. There is not a shred of evidence that foreign aid makes any difference at all, and it might actually be harmful. After many hundreds of billions spent, the effect is approximately zero according to those who have studied it. Hiring people from other countries, who then send money home, transfers approximately 40x-100x more money to poor people than all foreign aid combined.

Every single thing imaginable is easier, safer, faster, better for a person like that. Such is life. Anyone who wants special treatment, should have the option of paying more for it. The amazing thing is that natural solutions always spring up when these supposed 'problems' present themselves. Just look at the lengthy Saskatoon bus strike with no bus service. Shockingly, civilization did not collapse with zombies roaming the streets. People started, gasp, carpooling, walking, biking etc. The horrors!

That exactly makes my point though doesn't it? In Canada, a nation of people who are largely, if religious, Christian or Jewish, or who are non-religious, we don't have many religions-inspired attacks. And despite being a small minority, the few attacks we have are disproportionately (relative to their population) associated with Muslims. You've mentioned the war on terror. This is irrelevant to the point of whether 'all religions do it'. We all agree that nations of all sorts do bad things for the usual reasons of self-interest. Those are secular aims. We are talking about religious-motivated violence. In history, the biggest killers (by kill count) by a huge margin were non-religious and or anti-religion (Stalin, Mao). But they aren't here today, and we're talking about religious violence today. Worldwide, Muslims make up a massively disproportionate share of violence and conflict. It's so disproportionate, that in relative terms, no other religion is really on the radar. It's arguably a much larger share even than non-religious violence (done for the usual power, land, resources reasons). There is no comparison. 'All religions' aren't doing it. It's pretty much just Muslims. Have you read the Koran or Hadiths (record of Mohammed's life). If not, do so. It will quickly become very unsurprising why that theology is quickly adopted into violent movements compared to others. When the founder of the religion lived and operated like ISIS, no wonder whey ISIS has appeal. All they have to say is 'we are following what Mohammed said'. And they are! That's the problem. The peaceful ones you and I know, have absolutely nothing in common with the prophet Mohammed, thankfully.

Right, and I don't see any problem with that either. It's ok to get your mail at a community box.

There's no perfect solution, you can't start deporting people born here. You can be smart about who comes here. You have to work pragmatically and play the cards you are dealt. People anywhere can be radicals. It's just tens of thousands of times more common in some places vs others. Reasonable logic tells you to put efforts where they are most useful, instead of just throwing your hands up if you can have total perfection.

Exactly. We don't need people here who even think those things are ok, even if they given token lip service to it when required. Unfortunately we need to be smart about it, like Nordic countries are.

This discussion is not about whether people kill over the usual stuff like resources, land, power, etc. Obviously they do and always have. The debate is about killing in the name of religion. And there is one religion that has a virtual monopoly on that. And a few isolated crazies who kill in the name of other religions (or anti-religion) every other 2-3 years, taking out a couple or a dozen people, has utterly no comparison to the dozens of organized Islamic groups who have killed, with no exaggeration, literally 10000x as many people as all other religious-motivated groups combined over the same period. Saying 'it's not just Muslims' is like saying 'it's not just cluster bombs that are dangerous', on the basis of the fact that a slingshot fired by an 8-year old can also hurt. The scale and the scope are laughably incomparable.

Meanwhile, thousands of people have died just this year alone, directly at the hand of people specifically citing Allah as the their inspiration. But ya, the odd group killed here and they over the last 15 years is definitely comparable! Get a clue.