Wild Bill

There is an important difference, BM! You're quite correct that there is mudslinging on both sides. Still, from my perspective the difference is that the right mocks the Left's ideas as being impractical or loopy. The Left seems to be virtually entirely ad hominem - non-left people are labeled as conservatives and thus are EVIL PERSONS! The Right mocks ideas and the Left mocks the individual people! That is the major reason why in my 58 years I have never been attracted to the Left. I just never could respect them for their personal attacks. That's why I've come to believe most leftwing people today have a religious faith rather than a political philosophy. They don't just disagree with their opponents, they demonize them!

You seem to be implying that the "people" are always right! Nothing could be further from the truth! As a group, society believes more of what they are taught by Oprah and Dr. Phil. Huge numbers of people believe in astrology. If they have decided they don't trust someone no amount of evidence will change their minds. Look at Mulroney, for example. There is a lot of iffiness about the accusations that he was crooked but millions of Canadians believe it, no matter what evidence you might drag up. Don't misunderstand me, however. I'm the guy who became a Reformer mostly because of their populist philosophy! I believe that the people should have a far more direct political influence, with referenda being routine. I liked the idea that an MP sound be continually trying to take the pulse of opinion with the majority of his riding constituents and vote according to their wishes, not his or that of the party's. You see, how can people learn if they are never allowed to make a mistake? Sure sometimes people will make a dumb choice, especially in the beginning of a more populist system. I KNOW that initially some bonehead decisions will be made! However, constant reality checks will help to educate the people. Look at some of the European countries, like Greece or Ireland. They were all for running up their national debt by means of their politicians' promises. Now they are getting a reality check, perhaps a very, very painful one. Good, I say! They will learn and be the better for it! We should be doing the same here.

Well, I have many long term friends in that area. It's an hour or two away, on the lesser side if traffic is good or you take rural roads. I'm going by what I'm told by some who live there. If you have proof that they're all wrong then I bow to your better perspective from Winnipeg.

I have no idea what the hell Shaw Cable is doing in your area, HB! I've never heard of such a thing! Anywhere else, if your tv could get the cable channels before then it will still get them after! I could see a cable company deciding to no longer support analog tv at all. It would save them a LOT of money on hardware. That would require a converter box from digital to analog. But only getting channels up to ch 20-? I just don't understand that!

You don't see adaptation in a matter of a couple of generations, Betsy. It can take years with insects, centuries with mammals. Drastic changes with higher lifeforms might need thousands of years. Your cat may like to eat veggies but there's no way it can live on a veggie only diet. I had nearly 20 years with my last cat. Let us know how many years YOUR cat lives living exclusively on veggies! You strike me as rather cruel, killing your pet for a silly point. Mammoths and sabertooths (saberteeth?) simply didn't have enough time to adapt. Climate change apparently happened too quickly. If we have found so many frozen mammoth carcasses in the Arctic it's doubtful if they had even a couple of generations at most. Trying to use a lack of adaptation when you are dealing with such a short timeframe is either simple scientific ignorance or a deliberate distortion of the facts. Those species that don't have time to adapt to changing conditions simply die out! That's why they aren't around anymore.

C'mon down to Niagara region! Yes, they have walk-in clinics to make up for a lack of doctors. Yes, they are available. It's only an hour or two's drive! Surely your sick or injured baby can hang on for at least THAT long! Actually, those people would find that American services are much closer, in terms of time. I wonder if anyone has any stats on how many Canadians use an American service...

Well, on this one suggestion of yours I'm laughing on the outside! Any techie knows that it ain't that simple! Your idea is too simplistic and won't work! Solar shingles have been around for a couple of decades. Last I looked the average roof would cost about $40,000. Do you really think that's affordable? What's more, the provincial grid is not developed enough to handle all those homes feeding that power into it. You're talking BILLIONS of investment to modernize the grid! The other option is to have that solar roof provide power for just that home. Unfortunately, you need more than just the solar cells. You need a big battery bank to store the power and electronic circuitry to charge the batteries without overcharging and also to convert the DC of the solar cells into 120 volt AC power for the home. More expense! Don't feel bad, though. Dalton McGuinty understands even less than you and felt perfectly qualified to commit the provincial taxpayers to his unworkable programs!

Exactly! As I said, we SHARE a common monarch! That's NOT the same as British rule! That's why Quebec could theoretically become independent and still keep the monarch, if it so chose. The same with Scotland. I also happen to believe that Canada is the brightest star in the Queen's tiara!

Well, perhaps they are BOTH bad examples! Where does that leave us? As far as individuals affording healthcare better than "government paid", there's also private insurance. You are really talking about whether government run systems are more efficient and therefore less expensive than private schemes. I find it hard to tell with our own Canadian system. When you ask which delivers the better care, we get told that long wait times either are exaggerated or you just imagined waiting that long. Then if you ask about the efficiency and cost-effectiveness, some of the same people will tell you that we may be slow in some areas but that's a worthwhile price to have universal care! At the risk of once again being called cynical, it seems that the American system works reasonably well for the working man. Health insurance is understood to be a necessity and is part of your salary package. I still remember how back in the days when your OHIP premium was shown as a deduction on your pay statement I had a friend take a transfer to an American branch. He told me that his private insurance was cheaper than his OHIP premium and had better coverage! Certainly the service was faster! Now, years later, we can't see such differences as easily. The OHIP premium is paid by the employer and we never see it to make any comparisons. It simply appears to be "free". America has other government paid plans for the poor, both young and old. You may be placed in a ward with 12 other beds but you get the care. In fact, it is illegal for a hospital to refuse to treat an accident victim for lack of insurance, in most states. Some states allow a hospital to refuse care if there are alternative hospitals available that will treat the poor victim but they have to be careful. If the victim is in critical condition and their turning him away results in his death then they can and have been charged. Also, with no private coverage it is true that you will likely not be able to get the attention of high-level, expensive specialists. So the American system serves well the working man but not so good for the non-working man. As opposed to our system, which treats everyone equally and its failings are also universal. If our system is so much better then why is it that so many of our politicians and rich folk go to the States for their treatment? I still remember Bob Rae's granny being sent to Buffalo, back when he was the premier of Ontario. Or how about ol' Danny boy from Newfoundland and his heart trouble? In the real world, we have always had a two-tier system. If you have the money, you can pay for treatment outside the country. If you don't, you can't.

Still leaves me a bit confused about the dating, William. During WWII I have read in multiple books that British Officers were given a reality check over Canada NOT being a colony! Those Brits took it for granted that Canada would just supply soldiers and they would be under British command. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Canada was a dominion, meaning a separate country that happened to share the same Queen or King as Britain. MacKenzie King made it quite clear to the British that Canada's soldiers were under Canadian command. The Air Force was an exception, in that there was no Canadian command. Canadian pilots served under British command, flying in the British air force with no distinction between them and other pilots. Moreover, Canada paid its own people! They were not on the British payroll. This caused much hard feelings as the Canadian pay rate was better than the British. How does this fit with Canada merely being a "dominated territory"?

Perhaps, but isn't our medicare budget approaching runaway status? It consumes an ever growing percentage of our tax money, larger perhaps than anything else. Also, is Europe still that good an example with the chain of economic bankruptcies that are starting?

It seems people on the "left" just love to throw out stuff like this but I've never been able to find out WHY they think so! It seems that any politician, in fact any PERSON at all who might be considered a conservative or more simply, NOT a socialist is an evil demon who loves to wreak hardship on poor people just for the evil joy of it! Apparently, they also eat kittens, too! This is just simplistic drivel of the most ridiculous kind! It makes argument very easy, though. A socialist person is good and a non-socialist person is bad! This is also true for anything either one does or says! Publicly hating non-socialists will make a socialist look like even MORE of a good person! Frankly, to me it's all juvenile crap!

Actually, I believe Angola is also on the list. Great company, eh?

William, this is really not an issue - a yawner, in fact. First off, if you are on cable or satellite you don't have to do anything. That leaves people on rabbit ears or antennae. With those people, only those with old tvs will have a problem. Tvs that have been made in the past 4-5 years all have both analog and digital tuners. You just select "auto tune" on the remote and let your tv scan for whatever kind of signals it can pick up. If your tv is 'flat' it's guaranteed to have a digital tuner inside. So that leaves only people with old tvs, on rabbit ears or antennae. That's not very many people! Still, there are some out there. They need to purchase a converter box that will pick up digital channels and convert them into an old-fashioned signal for an old fashioned tv. The price is $50 or so at Future Shop. So what's the big deal? The earth is NOT coming to an end!

Well, it's not totally off the topic. How much the doctors are paid directly affects medicare costs. Governments would rather restrict the payments by limiting the number of doctor students instead of doctor's incomes. Students are less visible. Since they are always complaining and not always that well focused on the source of their complaints they tend to be ignored. As I said, it's convenient to limit the budget by limiting the number of doctors.

Even if we accept for the sake of argument that everything you stated was 100% true that still leaves the premise that the more doctors you have the larger the draw on your state medicare budget. That's been the whole point of this thread, Dr. Dre! Of course it's an engineered shortage but it doesn't have to be engineered by greedy or racist incumbent doctors. Just try to open the doors up and see how fast any provincial finance minister outright panics and comes running to slam it shut!

Yes, they were net figures you quoted for disciplines that had little or no overhead. Making almost the max is easy if you have no expenses. Did you find any net income figures for GPs with office and staff overheads?

You're quite right, Guyser! And I don't get out much, either! Although if "Lana Fever" came out of retirement I'd be out the door so fast you'd feel a tail wind! Even without the cap however it really doesn't change things much. One GP can only see so many patients per day, paid or unpaid. So there is a practical limit to his billings. The number of retiring doctors is easily known and so is the number of spaces available for medical students. If the governments involved wanted to they could throw the doors wide open but they would expect that their medicare costs would go through the roof! These are no longer the days of deliberately running deficits. Governments must at least appear to be frugal and good money managers. This means that if medicare costs more they have to cut somewhere else to break even. That also is politically unpopular. Better for a party in power to keep the situation the way it is and hope the voters are too dumb to figure things out! Perhaps I'm being way to cynical but I've stated before that there may be a cold blooded factor under all the noise and confusion. What's really plugging up and costing medicare is a big honkin' pile of Baby Boomers! The peak of the curve has entered the range most needing health care. Give it another decade or two and they will start to die off. If ruling parties can just stall and obfuscate for a bit longer the problem will gradually correct itself! It's going to be bloody well deadly for those of us entering the "peak" but politicians believe in "the greatest good for the greatest number" which corresponds to an old Ayn Rand quote that goes "Society is everyone in general and nobody in particular but (when you need something) it is never, ever YOU!"

Not quite, William. I was talking about family doctors. They have to pay for the roof over their head, their staff and their supplies and utilities. Specialty doctors such as YOU cited generally work out of a hospital. They have either no staff or just share one clerical assistant. Their overhead is FAR lower than a family doctor! But they all have the same cap! I kind of expected you to make that sort of mistake. There's no shame in it. Most people would and did! We are programmed to believe that certain professions are just money-making machines. We see only their net income. We don't see the sacrifices to become educated and qualified in such professions, the overheads, the extra hours. Basically, it's just an extension of "the grass is always greener". Or more simply "I'm the only one who works hard and doesn't get paid enough!" It's just human nature.

I think something is missing from that list. At the end of the school year, how much did that gifted student actually learn? More important, how much did they learn on their own because they found what was offered to them at school to be too easy, too boring and too irrelevant? After all these years, looking back at my own school experience and watching what my children went through I've come to the conclusion that our mainstream system is simply incapable of dealing with gifted children. Not surprising, when you consider that the percentage of gifted teachers is likely as small as the number of gifted children. We can also wonder how many gifted folks were involved at a high enough level to develop those so-called 'gifted' programs. Besides, the real focus is always on the challenged, not the gifted. Perhaps that is the way it should be, since gifted children have far better abilities to advance in this world. Certainly, politically politicians get far more "brownie points" for helping the challenged child. If the proof is in the pudding, I have never met anyone yet who was a gifted student and who believed that schools did a very good job in educating them. Rather, I have found these people to have been voraciously self taught. These are the people who when you visit their homes you find that every book in their bookshelf has actually been opened and read! Most folks today that are graduates of our school system don't even HAVE a home library! So as I've previously posted, I think that parents of gifted children should not try to rock the boat and leave themselves and their child open to perhaps some negative repercussions. Far better to teach your child that they have to toe the line at school to get that degree, even if the only value to that degree is to get a good job. Meanwhile, get them reading before they even go to kindergarten! That's not even too early to introduce them to the computer and the Net! Teach them how to satisfy their own knowledge interests. To those who worry they might inadvertently see something "naughty" on the Net, spend some time with your children once in awhile as they surf the Internet! That bonding time is precious and VERY important to teaching them to self-educate! I taught both my children to read before they hit the age of four, the same way my parents taught me. You read a book EVERY night to your child! You will be surprised and tickled at how soon they catch on to word recognition. One night your child will be reading to you and NOT by memorization! The school 'system' is politically forced to make at least token efforts for children that fall out of the median average, both above and below. That doesn't mean that YOUR gifted child will see some benefits, just that there will APPEAR to be some efforts! So take some initiative and invest your own time with your child and you will see far better results.

William, to us older folks the answer is obvious. The policy of limiting medical students was a deliberate attempt to rectify a DIFFERENT problem! At the risk of provoking a kneejerk reaction from some NDP posters to MLW, the first time I saw this happening was during Bob Rae's term as premier of Ontario. In an attempt to address the provincial deficit he decided that if we limited the number of doctors AND capped how much each doctor was allowed to bill yearly that would limit the amount of money he would have to pay out for medicare. The earnings cap was trumpeted all over the media 'cuz it was an easy sell. I think it was about $450,000 and was presented to the public as if that was the doctor's actual net yearly income. Of course it really wasn't. The doctor had his office and his staff to pay for and that ain't cheap! To the voters however it looked like Rae was protecting us from being gouged! Limiting the number of spots for students was kept rather quiet and basically ignored anyway, since the effects weren't immediately obvious and we all know that most media reporters are really rather thick! Every graduating doctor can get a provincial medicare billing number. No number, he doesn't get paid! Combine the two factors together and what happened was that often doctors found themselves hitting the billing cap and yet still having more patients to see! Rather than work a lot of unpaid hours (most doctors work much more than a 40 hour week anyway) they decided to limit their number of patients. So we ended up with doctors seeing less patients and more and more people unable to find a family doctor! But Rae had cut his medicare costs so well that no premier since of any party has changed what he did! They're ALL screwing us!

We're not really disagreeing, Bonam! "just stretched out in time" is an important variable. It fits with my premise that non-technical or practical people take it for granted that we will see electric car battery technology just as quickly as we saw computer improvements. I mean, scale the time axis on a graph over several centuries and that progress is almost a certainty. To expect it within a decade or so is just a wild ass guess that warrants careful consideration before investing large sums of money. And BC2004 is also quite right that we must account for how we power these vehicles, with necessary infrastructure that is not presently in our home garage. We also have to consider how much power the grid has available. If your car runs out of juice on the way to work will you have to wait until after 9:00 pm before you can afford to re-charge it?

Have you been noticing this universal belief, usually held by non-technical or practical people, that increased volume will INEVITABLY and QUICKLY result in a drastic price reduction? They have no understanding to back this premise up but they accept it as a Law of the Universe! I think it comes from what we all have witnessed in the computer industry. Moore's Law states that every 2 years the size of available memory doubles and the cost drops in half! The cost of computer power keeps nose-diving. A PC-XT was a couple of thousand dollars when new. Today we buy such computing power as to have been not just a defense department secret but likely totally unavailable just a few years ago! The catch is that the chemistry, composition and physics behind semiconductors and computer chips lends itself more easily to these advances than other materials. Where is it written that electric car battery technology will follow the same curve? Most of what makes up an electric car is already mature technology. We've had wheels, steering wheels, car seats and car bodies for a century or so! Only the power train is new and actually, not all that new. So perhaps if you had to make your own electric car for mass marketing you would quickly discover that there is nowhere near as much room for cost reductions with volume as there was with computer chips. Different applications have different factors. A blanket assumption that everything will follow the same curve as computers in the same time frame is rather naive, if not silly! I'm not saying that there won't be cost reductions with electric cars. Of course there may, but they may not be as big or happen as fast as people are assuming. Potential customers might believe in magic but a manufacturer must be far more sure of the variables or he's out of business! Uneducated people seem to take technology for granted as a magic wand that will give them whatever they want! Dalton McGuinty takes it for granted that volume will make his MicroFit and Fit programs cost-effective, when to a technical eye his premise is full of holes. I've posted before the old standard joke shared by almost all techs and engineers, illustrated by a cartoon pinned to the wall of their desk "cube" that shows a manager giving a flipchart presentation of a flow chart, pointing to one spot and saying something to the effect of "Engineering miracle will be produced here!" The joke is that engineers and techs know that most non-technical managers actually believe and act as if this is true and possible! Now things appear to have gone a step farther. The "great unwashed" not only believe that electric car technology was perfect and profitable but that a manufacturer would deliberately abandon the idea so that A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COMPANY that sells oil might lose some money! Who says fantasy is dead?

Newspapers, lawyer magazines, Wiki...yeah, I guess I picked the most racist! Interesting definition you appear to have of racism - anyone who disagrees with your revisions of reality! For a better example of racism I suggest you look inward. You insist that one race is always and ever right and go so far as to discount the direct experience of thousands of people, revising history to your own biased viewpoint. You make a Jehovah Witness seem like the most open minded in the world! I swear if Charles Eng was a native you'd call him a Sister Theresa! The difference between us is that I can see good and bad in anyone, regardless of their race. Judging by your posts on this board, you have a problem in that area.

I do take pride in it! I used to work for big high tech international corporations, then the industry collapsed. That left me old enough for a new experience - age discrimination! So after some lame attempts at some companies who were next door to criminal, I became my own boss! I now build and repair guitar amplifiers and such equipment! I'm fortunate enough to have a good reputation. I have customers from the casual to the famous and have some that ship their amps in from across Canada. I don't make anything like the money I used to but keeps slowly getting better as the customer base grows. At least I do get treated to a lot of free beer! I'm much happier being a tech than I ever was as a salesman. It appeals to my religion, which is "Utilitarian". It means that I think and value in terms of what works. Most people don't, I find. They have strong ideas on the way things OUGHT to be, if only people would believe as they do and do as they say! Insisting that the world change to get your premise to work is stupid and futile to a Utilitarian. They know that it's much easier to deal with the parameters as they are and come up with a working paradigm that fits reality. But Hey! Thanks for the advice! I'll value it as much as the sarcasm that came with it! I suspect you were an ABBA fan, or perhaps Celine Dion.