Wild Bill

Why would the fact that many CEOs today lack good character make me feel any better? Or is that the way you see me, some kind of caricature of a capitalism supporter who cackles while corporations get rich on the backs of peon workers? I have no problem with anyone making more than I do, just being forced to pay for someone else's extravagant wage designs, often given to those who really aren't that skilled. Did you know that one of those higher paying CP jobs is just walking a stretch of track everyday, making sure there has been no damage? A necessary job but hardly deserving of the level of renumeration. And Michael, not all of us live in a storybook world. I just ended a bad marriage, where I took a huge financial loss. I will be 60 this year. Age discrimination is real, no matter that it is officially against the law. My guitar amp build/repair business is up and down and over the year was never that high. It took a severe hit while my separation was worked out. That took over 2 and 1/2 years! Difficult and draining years, at that. My original career was totally de-railed. The industry I grew up in has been decimated. Thousands of us lost jobs that have never come back. I live in Hamilton, which has had one of the highest unemployment rates in Ontario for a long time now. And you seem incredulous as you ask me about not being able to afford milk for my tea instead of beer with my buddies? Sorry to disillusion you Michael but I ran out of time while juggling finances last month and my phone/Internet was cut off for a few weeks. I've since found a part-time job. Minimum wage but it does give just enough to put me into a positive position. I'm slowly catching up on the arrears with the utilities. I may barely have my nose out of the water but I'm slowly floating higher, instead of sinking. I am not complaining, by any means. There are lots of folks doing far worse than I am. At my age, I also have lost some friends to cancer and such. So I am talking from a valid perspective, Michael. The thought of a guaranteed and high paying job no matter what the vagarities of the economy was never a possibility for me in the private sector. I'm afraid I just can't hold any respect for Sid Ryan and his charges. They have advantages guys like me could only have dreamed.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I have always been a populist. That's why I worked so hard for Reform, back in the old days. People should have the right to get what the majority want, even if its wrong! How else can they learn? On the other, I think the short term pain as the electorate rode a learning curve about what works and what doesn't would be enormous! You must have heard the old term of "bread and circuses", referring to ancient Rome. As their democracy evolved they eventually gave the vote to even the lowest members of their society. As soon as they realized they had the power to vote themselves more bread and more circuses for entertainment, that's exactly what they did! Rome promptly went broke. Afterwards, adjustments had to be made for Rome to survive. Even educated people often seem to have no idea of "Utilitarianism", or what will or will not work in practice. Too much government spending means higher and higher taxes. There is no choice about that. Government after all has no money of its own. ALL of it comes from the citizens! As Ten Years After sang way back in the late 60's - "Tax the rich! Feed the poor! Till there are no rich no more!" Still, when all is said and done I think in the long term the pain would be worth it. I think one of the greatest problems we face today is that too many people are insulated from negative consequences of wrong choices. They never are made to learn from their mistakes! Today, its always easy to fend off any responsibility and find someone else to take the blame. So bring it on! The people will no doubt bring severe reality checks down upon themselves! Yet these harsh checks will teach them lessons they cannot ignore. Canada will eventually evolve out of it. The people will have much more input into their government and will also be much more knowledgeable or even wise about making decisions. But OH! We would likely endure a terrible decade or two to achieve that wisdom! Individuals usually learn quickly before they come to grievous harm but in groups, as in communities or countries, we always seem to have to learn everything the hard way.

Well, I'm far from being a neo-fascist, although I suspect you would consider me one simply for disagreeing with you about ANYTHING, including brands of beer! Yet I also have always had a problem with Sid Ryan. It has always been obvious that he has never given a crap about any harm he does to ME! Sid is the champion of union workers, especially those in the public sector. He tries to get the absolute most for those workers, no matter how extravagant or ridiculous it may seem to citizens not in those categories. So these workers almost always make FAR more than I ever have! While I'm just a taxpayer who gets hit harder to pay for Sid's people. I've long ago run out of any empathy I may have had, I'm afraid. No doubt, you will simply brand me as a greedy, envious bastard. That always seems to be the Sid Ryan type of rhetoric towards anyone who might challenge him. His membership can curse me over a few rounds of beer, while I worry about having milk in my fridge for my tea. Whatever, I no longer care. I'm too busy trying to keep my electricity and gas connected to my home.

Waldo, it is common knowledge that too many African governments have used foreign aid to buy guns, which have ended up in the slaughter of millions. To focus on never-ending academic climate change arguments instead of the deaths of so many innocents seems far more callous to me. The Rwanda massacres should never have been allowed to happen. What ever happened to "Never Again!"? I guess we all have our own priorities.

Sometimes the reverse is true, Tim! As you might remember, I build and repair guitar amplifiers. Back in the late 70's a company called Ibanez designed and marketed a foot pedal overdrive unit for guitar, basically putting a mammoth amount of extra gain from a dual op amp into the amplifier for a specific rock and roll sound. They stopped production for a decade or so but the device was still so popular they started up production again. The odd thing was that many guitarists claimed the new units didn't sound as good! Now since their market was musicians the initial reaction was that it was all a psychological effect and not based in physics but the sheer number of complaints forced them to look closer at the problem. They were building the new units not only identical in every respect one could think of but also many of the same workers on the line were involved. Eventually, they discovered that the problem was the new production specifications of the dual-op amp!Over the years manufacturing techniques for making the IC had improved in order to make the device have better distortion figures. This was fine for a hifi application but in this case the electric guitar signal was SUPPOSED to be distorted! When you amplified the signal through a new version of the op amp the signal did not distort in exactly the same manner as the old ones! There was nothing that could be done. Chips are devices that can only be made in huge volumes. Ibanez could not possibly order enough of these op amps to justify not just a specific production run but also recreating the obsolete machines involved from a decade earlier! Technology moves on and everything is interrelated to everything else. You usually cannot get whatever you want if all the supporting factors are not available. This is where politicians, who are always laymen, make so many mistakes in their decisions in imposing artificial conditions in the marketplace, like subsidizing alternate power technologies thinking this will bootstrap these technologies to cheaper and more effective levels. They have no firm grasp on how such technical things get created. To them its all the same - miracles that are delivered simply by throwing money at them. They should all be FORCED to watch those great Burke documentaries!

This might be appropriate to the argument: http://www.noahbrier.com/archives/2011/11/steam-engine-time/ The article deals with a long standing and popular notion of "steam engine time" which holds that when all the underlying facts and inventions have been discovered and invented, then and only then will someone build something new, based upon the old finally being common knowledge and available. "When it is steam-engine-time, steam engines will occur everywhere. But not before. Because all the precursor and supporting ideas and inventions need to be present. The Romans had the idea of steam engines, but not of strong iron to contain the pressure, nor valves to regulate it, nor the cheap fuel to power it. No idea – even steam engines — are solitary. A new idea rests on a web of related previous ideas. When all the precursor ideas to cyberspace are knitted together, cyberspace erupts everywhere. When it is robot-car-time, robot cars will come. When it is steam-engine-time, you can’t stop steam engines." "Economic leadership in particular must hence be distinguished from “invention.” As long as they are not carried into practice, inventions are economically irrelevant. And to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it, and a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds of aptitudes. Although entrepreneurs of course may be inventors just as they may be capitalists, they are inventors not by nature of their function but by coincidence and vice versa. Besides, the innovations which it is the function of entrepreneurs to carry out need not necessarily be any inventions at all. It is, therefore, not advisable, and it may be downright misleading, to stress the element of invention as much as many writers do." Writers of "hard" or "techie" science fiction birthed this concept decades ago and used it many times in Alternate History plots. Anyhow, some folks may find the article interesting. A deeper google would also prove worth while. One of the leading sources of the notion is William Gibson, the author who first coined the genre "cyper punk".

Yeah, yeah, yeah! Tell that to the Tutsi in Rwanda! Next you will tell me that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was responsible for that massacre...

Well, I'll bet you 2 beer that he will never be PM! I just don't think the federal NDP could attract enough votes from Ontario westward to make that possible. Particularly here in Ontario. Maybe if Bob Rae got hit by a bus! There are just too many older voters that remember his NDP provincial government. You can try to defend it all you want but the plain truth is that it would be easier to get Mulroney re-elected than to get Ontario voters to give the NDP another chance, either federally or provincially. In 20 years or so enough of them will have died off and it will be a new ball game but for right now, I just can't see it! It is an emotionally based sentiment. You can't try to use reason to change people's minds when their hearts were stung so badly. Overall one could argue it's not even a fair sentiment but again, that doesn't matter. It IS a bit of an ad hominem attack, very similar to those on Rob Ford as Mayor of Toronto made every day by the Left! Still, there is a grain of truth to it. Mulcair has repeatedly made suggested financial policy statements. 11 times for his mortage??!! It is perfectly logical to question his ability to understand and handle financial problems. Keep in mind that the NDP has ALWAYS been vulnerable to attacks on how they would manage financesl! They always have great plans for how to spend money but they get very vague on how to produce it. Usually they just blow those questions off with talk of more taxes on the rich, taking it for granted that somehow the rich are genetically programmed to keep producing wealth no matter how much you tax them and they will NEVER quit or leave the country! It is useless to point out that there have been some NDP provincial governments that did quite well with finances. As always, they have to fight perceptions based on years of rhetoric from NDP opposition parties and of course, Bob Rae's Ontario term. Again it is not entirely fair, since Mulcair would PM and not finance minister. One would expect he would choose someone else who would be good at the job. Yet once again, that doesn't matter. In politics, perception is reality.

Where does ANY of our money come from? If we don't have enough, then we need to re-examine our spending priorities. Does it make sense to assume that every dime we are currently spending is spent wisely and efficiently? That ALL programs have merit? How about federal transfers? With the imbalance between what we give and what we get from Quebec, perhaps we should encourage them to separate! We could then no doubt easily afford the F-35s! Sorry! I wasn't serious but I just couldn't resist! :lol:

You're question is valid regardless, GH, but you do realize that we are not paying in one lump? That it's spread out over maybe 20 years? Lockheed couldn't deliver in one lump and we wouldn't expect them too anyway.

Compensate Africa? Would it not be more efficient to simply pile up the donations and set fire to them? It would save a lot of time, considering that Africa has always just blown the money on corruption and arms.

Hmmm. You do make assumptions, don't you? Where did I say that the talking heads who support attacking Iran are right? I thought I was merely pointing out that the Doves" had little or no INFORMED opinion! Why does that imply that any talking head on a network news panel who advocates a strike also has access to valid intel? I'm talking about how those who keep saying that an attack on Iran would fail have a poor argument and specious history, that's all. I would expect that the American and Israeli governments have much better intelligence than those tv panelists or pacifist group spokespeople. The same for some scientists, it would seem. Carl Sagan WAS totally wrong, after all! Iraq did become a cluster screwup but NOT with the invasions! It was politicos like Dick Cheney who screwed up the OCCUPATION of Iraq! I would agree with you that this was a failure but that was never my point in the first place! I was commenting on the likely success of any military invasion. Cheney always seemed a total idiot to me! After the military had successfully taken over Iraq he decided to disband Iraq's armed forces. What the hell were those soldiers then supposed to do? They no longer had an income! Were they supposed to sit in the dark while they and their families starved? While being nice and quiet and out of sight? This was a very ignorant and callous move on Cheney's part! It no doubt precipitated much of the subsequent troubles. If you want to debate if attacking Iran is a politically good idea we have threads already. This one was about how likely a military strike would be successful. I believe it would be, that's all! Please don't make me your straw man. Just because I disagreed on one point doesn't meant I disagree with you on everything.

A number of more pacifistic spokespeople have stated this idea but so far all I've seen or heard is rhetoric. The same voices were raised before BOTH invasions of Iraq! Yet look how fast Saddam's forces crumbled while retreating from Kuwait just as fast as they possibly could. The second war had essentially the same result. I remember hearing from Carl Sagan just before the Allies ousted Saddam from Kuwait that they should forego the idea, since if Saddam torched the Kuwaiti oilfields it might trigger a nuclear winter. Well, Saddam DID torch those oilfields! Still waiting for any nuclear winter... I think that the popular media and all those talking heads who are not directly plugged into the actual operating intelligence networks of America and Israel are simply trying to deter any attack on Iran, for various reasons but mainly for their pacifistic philosophy. Even those quotes from high ranking intelligence officers are mostly from those retired. So the number of INFORMED opinions is far lower than it may appear! There may indeed be an active intelligence officer or two publicly taking the "don't attack" view but even then I would find it difficult to believe that they would breach their own security and confidentiality by making such public statements. Such professionals NEVER use the media to try to influence their superiors! So it would appear that this idea is just a lot of hot air! Maybe those who are spreading this meme are sincere. Maybe they are biased towards Iran or against Israel. Maybe the ones with the highest profile are being paid by the mullahs! Who knows? Still, it just doesn't seem a well-founded view to me. Sadly, it's possible that those who believe attacking Iran would fail and escalate the situations might well be right! However, their methods and the history make them look wrong or even suspect. They are crying "Wolf!". It would be a shame if there were actually a wolf at the door, when they have raised such false alarms for so long. We need contrary views but this element seems to have destroyed its own credibility.

Guyser, I have a very simple rule about disco, dance music and much modern pop. If I can play it then it must be crap! :lol:

Actually Shake, it was a referral! From a musician's forum I frequent. The biggest fear of the membership there is for ABBA to stage a comeback tour!

Actually, with the sound off you're right!

I went back and re-read all the posts. You're right! I did have it wrong as to what you and not someone else had said! My apologies. However, you did say the following: "Thats only true if the grid has no storage capability. The more you have the more you can smooth over flucuations in availability. None of this stuff is impossible or even technologically very hard." Actually, most of it IS impossible or technologically hard today! Even here in a part of Canada blessed with a lot of lake and water systems there aren't that many close by to all the population centres. I doubt if there are enough to make a significant difference to our needs anyway but even if there are, the present technology won't work to store wind power produced by Oshawa with water pumped up behind a dam in Moosonee or Kapuskasing. For even a small town we're not talking a simple water tower here, Dre! The reservoir would have to be BIG! And what about the prairies? Kinda flat near Winnipeg or Regina! With today's technology there's no way in hell we could power them from energy stored from those Oshawa turbines. We need a stupendous technical breakthrough to make alternative power viable by having significant storage capability and transmission ability, along the lines of an Apollo Project! Virtually every techie understands this as blatantly obvious. Sometimes they can get a bit testy when they hear the same idea that WON'T work from someone not technical - and it's the thousandth time they've heard someone say it. Still, none of us know everything and to be fair, I don't think you deserved the harshness of some of the feedback. An apology towards you is in order, I think but it's not up to me.

My good doctor, it would appear in your own reading you may have missed an important technical point that destroys your argument. With normal losses in transmission lines your suggestion of storing power hundreds if not thousands of miles away just won't work! What you seem to have overlooked is what was mentioned about needing superconductor technology before our transmission grid could do such tricks. It was also mentioned that by then we would likely have fusion power. Just exactly WHEN we will have such technologies is as impossible to predict as when someone like Einstein will come along. Some ideas are not the result of slow development but of some individual's inspiration. Creativity comes when it wants to, not when we demand it! When will the next Da Vinci appear? If we artificially set the price of art higher will that force more Mona Lisa quality work? The fact that superconducting technology is absolutely necessary to store alternative power in some reservoir some distance away is as obvious to anyone with even a casual education in how electrical generation and distribution works as why a fish needs a fin or a flipper! Hence the criticism that was directed at you. I admit it was a little unkind but Dre, in this case I'm afraid it was accurate! If its any comfort, you are in good company! That's the trouble with trying to substitute casual academic reading for more in depth and experienced learning. The very premier of Ontario has done the same as you, even worse by a quantum jump! It was only a year or two ago that we all saw him doing photo-ops where he promised that all the unemployed from our lost manufacturing industry were going to get high paying jobs building wind turbines and solar panels! We heard him say that Ontario was going to be a world leader and exporter of such technology! He's been kinda quiet about that for a while now, hasn't he?

There's a big assumption in your argument, Michael. You are assuming that it is a positive thing to trust governments as efficient vehicles to solve our problems. What if the way a government approaches a problem is not only poor but actually more harmful? The old joke that an elephant is a mouse made by a government is an apt one! You are asking for blind faith. If someone feels that his own observations and life experience suggests that his government is NOT a positive solution to a problem then it is only logical, even a sane decision!, to give up on them and seek other channels.

Really? I always thought it was 42!

Here's the link: http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2012/04/simple-math-problem-could-indicate-your-religious-beliefs.html "Whether or not you believe in a higher power might come down to how you approach problem-solving." "But a surprising new report by psychologists William Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, of the University of British Columbia, would seem to indicate that your inclination to be religious can be – at least in part – determined by how you approach a math problem." I confess that I got it wrong too! I guess maybe that's because I am not a fervent atheist but rather a devout agnostic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xoPm4-lXGQ I thought disco meant the end of good music. Then hiphop came along and proved me wrong. Now this came out! The world is coming to an end.

A lot of good points Dr. Dre but I have to quibble with one of them. This idea that anything you want will be invented or developed if there is market demand makes anyone technically educated just cringe! I think this idea came about from the digital computer revolution. When the computer chips that make up computers were invented the improvements in both price and power were spectacular! They gave rise to the oft-quoted Moore's Law, which says that the price of memory will halve and the power double every 2 years. So now we have cheap computing for the masses that would have been a Defense Dept secret only a decade or two ago. There is a popular view fostered by talking heads that aren't that technically learned themselves that this concept is universal and applies to any other technology. Unfortunately, reality doesn't work like that! What happened with computers was very different from what had gone on before. The devices themselves were rather cheap, dollars or even pennies instead of hundreds or thousands. The very technology was revolutionary, rather than evolutionary. Nothing like the computer chip had ever been invented before. Look at cars! It's been a century and we are just barely starting to get away from the internal combustion engine. All the improvements have been evolutionary - better and more efficient ways of doing the same thing. There have been electronic add-ons to the typical auto but the basic car is essentially the same as that built by Henry Ford. A mechanic from the 1940's would recognize much if not most of what he would see on a modern automobile, except of course for the electronics. Even then, he would likely be able to quickly figure out what the electronics does, not HOW it works! So it is very much just an assumption that storage for power produced by alternative technologies would quickly follow demand, or become cheap enough to be cost effective. Have cars gotten very cheap over the years? In some respects they are more expensive today than 50 years ago, as a portion of the typical disposable income. Certainly, their cost is not in the class of that of a laptop computer. Different technologies have their own unique aspects that make them different from one another. Only an "artsie" rather than a "techie" sees them as all the same, since he hasn't enough background knowledge to understand those differences. Storage technologies such as you suggest could very well take generations to be developed to the point of being cost-effective or competitive to that which we already have. It's entirely possible that it could NEVER happen! Making what we have artificially more expensive in the hopes of forcing what we want to be developed is likely not just futile but downright cruel to those of us not rich enough to afford the increased costs of necessities like energy. That's why I grow very uneasy when politicians like McGuinty try to use political power to play with technologies by manipulating market conditions. They just don't have any clue of what they are doing! It's like giving a baby a loaded machine gun for a toy.

Never took economics in University. Didn't want to have to pretend to be a Marxist in order to pass! That was the situation at McMaster in 1971. BTW, you have totally butchered the meaning of my premise. I said nothing about their innate intelligence. My points were about their ability to critically vet all the info they were absorbing. The idea that the younger brain is not mature and fully capable in this area is not mine but has been virtually a given in such medical circles for a couple of decades now. Not having a mature level of critical thinking is not the same as being stupid. That is your opinion, not mine. I would however support the contrary argument, which would be that being able to quickly absorb massive amounts of information is not the same as being smart. Obviously, someone capable of achieving a university degree in maths and sciences is not stupid. As he or she gets older the critical thinking skills will usually develop more strongly than someone not of that level. However, if we are talking about arts or poli-sci majors I'm not sure if the same applies...

I guess its hard to get perspective on ourselves sometimes. We just can't turn around fast enough! Doctor, YOU made the definitions! You accept this description of people as true and valid yourself. Others may disagree. We are all entitled to our opinions. I took from your post that you had stepped outside of that realm and defined your opinions as facts. Hence my elitist comparison. Perhaps a better term more in keeping with my own "definition" of the Canadian Left being more of a faith than a philosophy would be "righteousness".