Moonbox

The tragic thing about all of this is that there ARE lots of good teachers, professors and EAs out there. There are a lot of bad and indifferent ones too. Sadly in my program (Business) the best professors were on contract and only taught one or two classes a year and ran successful businesses for the majority of their time. The actual tenured professors were a waste of time other than the odd exception. At least with universities and colleges you can review your professors and the administration DOES take that into account where they can with those on contract. My third year Finance professor was suspended for a year after my cohort took his finance class. In the public schools (or professors with tenure), however, we have no such mechanism. Bad teachers or lazy teachers (which at this point I'd argue are the majority) have iron-clad job security and thus no motivation to make the extra effort. We, of course, are supposed to believe that they're all martyrs and that the fact that some of them pay for classroom art supplies makes up for their phenomenal wages, benefits and job security, but that's far from the truth.

You refuse to do a great many things, the most obvious being objective critical thinking. The fact is that we have really no idea what the situation on the ground is in China. I don't trust a single thing they say and don't believe their virus numbers are even remotely accurate, but the idea that they herded sick people from Wuhan to places around the world (and kept them from moving within China) is comical. It's as likely as not that there are all sorts of sick people in Beijing that we're not hearing about, but why should you care? You're quoting Fox News. Truth and facts aren't really important to you.

What do you think happens if US citizens sue China? Nothing. This topic is absurd. I'm not defending China, but the idea that there's some way that any sort of meaningful law suit can be brought to bear against China is about as likely as the US being held accountable for war crimes and errant drone strikes.

Well that's a gross oversimplification, and wrong in many regards. The idea that we should have allowed the economy "fail" in 2008 is straight-up dumb. It shows a profound lack of understanding for how our economies work and a version of revisionist history that forgets what the 1930's were like. Our economic system certainly isn't perfect, and it's definitely exploited, but speculation is they key to a free market economy. Everything about our economy, from buying milk at the grocery store to building giant new condo complexes in Toronto is based on speculative profit-driven business. Anytime you offer something as a service or good you're taking a risk that you won't make a return on your investment. Speculation can, however, get wildly out of hand, and you can easily argue that we're in that environment today. On that we can agree. The inflated real-estate market in Canada is a house of cards based on cheap credit more than foreign investors (though we really don't know to what extent they've driven prices up). When the BoC dropped rates in 2008/2009 to ease against the Great Recession, that was good policy. It was, however, only supposed to be temporary. Instead, provincial and federal governments (along with the BoC) allowed and encouraged the housing boom to continue to absurdity. There's no doubt that financiers, banks and realtors have profited immensely off the boom, but blaming it on them is too easy. I have clients with <$100,000 family incomes that own 2-3 fully-financed rental properties in the GTA. I wish I'd met them before they bought into the seductive realm of easy-money real-estate, but the fact is that they're not particularly bright. They are also quite greedy. From the very top to the very bottom, people are greedy. The smart and greedy tend to do better than the dumb-and-greedy, but the bottom line is that greed is what feeds these sorts of bubbles - greed and a healthy dose of ignorance and short-term thinking. I've said in other threads, but the one thing that Western governments and economies never fail to do is ignore obvious problems and risks until they blow up in their faces.

I'm not disagreeing with any of those points, and I'm certainly not advocating for online classes. I think it's frankly pretty dumb that we're at the point where we even consider it, especially for elementary and highschool. The root of the problem, however, is money. The idea that everyone should be able to go to university and take whatever they want, I think, is a sorely misguided use of public funds and in many cases (some of my friends from uni come to mind) a waste of resources. While you definitely want to make sure that people have the opportunity to get a post-secondary education, I don't think we need to be paying to drag people who don't care and don't try through their 3 and 4 year degrees.

The Socratic method? Oh please. Most programs/classes, at best, make pretenses of the Socratic method. When they're cramming 75+ students in a lecture hall, there's little back-and-forth going on. Most of the tenured professors I had in university mailed it in the whole way and were annoyed with someone trying to foster debate. Of course there are exceptions and I did have the odd professor who engaged with students, but much like public school teachers they are the exception rather than the norm. That's what iron-clad job security does. It's one thing to pay the best-performing educators top dollar, but paying them based on seniority or whatever is another story altogether. Something has to give, and governments and universities have resorted to working AROUND their militant unions as best they can.

We're not at all tied to the USD, and our currency floats freely against it. You could argue monetary policy has been designed to keep the CDN lower than the USD to make exports cheap. Listen to bcheney on this. He actually knows what's he talking about. You don't have a clue. Our dollar is a petro dollar, and our currency will rise and fall mostly on oil prices and resources...because that's all our economy does. We dig stuff out of the ground and sell it.

Sure. Risk infecting other people, the very opposite of what he's suggesting everyone else should do. That would be leading by example, wouldn't it? Your suggesting basically the stupidest possible thing he could do, all for the banal idea that he "he be a man".

Youth could be the solution. Andrew Scheer is a dinosaur hiding in a middle-aged man's body. He was so out of touch and tone-deaf that it made me cringe, and I generally vote conservative. I couldn't vote for him though, nor am I pleased with the idea of voting for Peter MacKay. As demographics continue to skew towards the echo-boom, the archaic ideas you spoke of will get more and more out of fashion and those that support them (or fail to support progressive values) will get more and more irrelevant. There are lots of younger conservatives out there. They just want to see fiscal and social common-sense, or secular conservatism, rather than the old-school religious brand.

It's probably not transmitted by aerosol, but that's as far as the research goes. They've found clear evidence of viral RNA within airborne particles but haven't found them to be viable for infection. The problem here, of course, is that to feel really safe about it you need to prove a negative. It's not enough to just say, "We haven't recorded airborne transmission". The sort of research needed to completely rule it out will probably take a year, or more, unfortunately. We really don't know a ton about the virus yet.

Again, the reason that religious groups don't have a lot of influence anymore is because a lot of the more vocal ones are trying to IMPOSE their belief systems on other people who don't believe them. The ability to practice religion and follow a system of beliefs is actually vigorously defended in Canada, just like abortion and gay marriage now are. One area in which I would say the federal government has failed miserably, however, is with Quebec and the banning of religious symbols etc on public servants. While I do think there's something to be said about not allowing public servants to hide their faces behind veils, I find it kind of despicable that the Quebec and Canadian governments don't explicitly and honestly explain that's what's really at issue. Nobody cares if someone is wearing a Star, Cross, Crescent, Buddha etc... around their neck. The overall ban seems to be a thinly-veiled (sorry for pun) way of targeting specific practices (hijab/niqab for example) and hiding it behind a more all-encompassing ban. The one thing I'll say about religious rights is that people should be free to believe or practice their religion unmolested, but only to the extent that they can be reasonably accommodated. Where the law should be flexible to respect religious practices, those religions should in term be flexible with the the law and good public order.

Nobody is holding anything "against" church goers. In a way I admire people of faith. It's when they start to impose THEIR values on everyone else and want to DENY other people's rights where I think they deserve ridicule. Gay marriage or abortion "rights" are just that. They're not huge budget items and, in fact, likely save the economy money rather than cost it. If you bring up native "rights", on the other hand, that's a minefield of different issues including but definitely not limited to just "rights". One of the biggest issues there, you can argue, is money. Realistically there is no good solution on those matters, but the debate goes well beyond the issue of social values. There are, of course, lots of cases where social justice causes grossly overstep and get ridiculous, but I'm not asking the Conservative Party to get on board with everything. I'm asking them to shelve the moronic notion that things like gay marriage or abortion are still up for worthwhile debate in government. They're not. They're basic human rights in Canada.

Okay, fair, but I don't think people aren't questioning the government. Just because you agree with what they're doing doesn't mean you aren't watching them carefully. Canada seems to be pretty much in lock-step with the rest of the world on trying to deal with the virus, and so far I haven't seen much that causes me concern. The stimulus bill as it was originally presented was bullshit, but it was amended and now we sit and wait.

Fair enough, and good for you. That's a bang-bang that will keep people off your lawn.

I can't tell if this is remotely serious, or if you're just a pretty funny guy.

I just want to see someone who's not living in the 1980's still. I saw this article in the Globe a little while ago, and it echoes a lot of my sentiments. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-tories-need-a-leader-with-vision-or-risk-losing-young/ Natalie Pon, a cool, smart chick from out west and a fair bit younger than your average conservative, lays it out pretty clearly. Hanging on to outdated social conservative values, particularly on gay marriage and stuff like that, is going to keep the conservatives out of power for a long time. The ship has sailed on a lot of these matters, and as the younger generation continues to take on a bigger and bigger role in politics and the economy, ignoring them in favor of Bible-Thumpers in Quebec or the Prairies, or clinging to the Harper-era old guard is going to leave Trudeau and pals firmly entrenched.

Noted. Guess how valuable your unsupported opinion is? My opinion is that a vampire-cult produced the virus to cull the weak and the elderly (because their blood tastes bad) so that they could purify their livestock population.

Sort of exaggerated the article in your analysis, but he is being a tool. I think the Conservatives need to do some serious soul-searching to put a contender out there that can contend with Trudeau. McKay is not that man. They need someone younger, and someone new.

The government is not asking us to do anything particularly daunting. To start, stay home for a few weeks. They're not asking us to hand our firstborn to the army and our second-born to the navy. You're using another straw-man here and pretending the government is asking us to accept anything is justified. They're not. The stimulus bill Trudeau tried to pass was a bit of a turd and he overstepped there, but accepting some short-term self-isolation is not the end of the world that you make it out to be. The curious thing about this sort of mindset is that on one hand, you're telling us that the fear-mongering over the virus is exaggerated and hyped, but then you're doing the same thing with the theories about the government grasping and about how the sacred "economy" being sacrificed (never to recover I guess?). That too is exaggerated. Coming out of the current crisis, governments will have been served a rude awakening and will be more serious about future preparedness. It will ultimately be an expensive lesson to learn, but the one thing that western economies continue to do successfully is ignore their problems until they blow up in their face.

Rue there's something to be said about bureaucratic ineptitude and political agendas. I've little faith in the UN myself and don't doubt that the WHO is mired in red tape, but that doesn't mean that everything they do and say is wrong. They have in the past had tremendous success dealing with other diseases. Regardless, we can simply ignore the WHO and the UN altogether and see that health experts around the world are saying the same things. Even in the US, doctors and epidemiologists etc. have been sounding the alarm for weeks/months, so you're not just dismissing the WHO. You're dismissing the global health apparatus and doctors everywhere. Apparently you've heard from "immunologists", but we can't really debate that. Unless you can source some reputable material we don't really have much to work with there. While pointing to South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan DOES show us how things could/should work, you know as well as I do that they're not an option here - not yet. For reasons both of us have pointed to, those countries are much better prepared. Among those that weren't (like Europe, Canada and the USA) we're seeing things unfold as the experts you discredit predicted, and it's going to continue to get worse before it gets better. As for going back to work, I don't think it's really clear what you're advocating. I thought I made it pretty clear that some sort of slow and pensive return to work would eventually be possible, but not yet - not while cases are spiking. I do agree that we can't just shutter the economy for 8 months, but we DO need to be really serious about things over the next couple.

While I've long felt that Trudeau and his government have had a boneheaded and fantasy-like naivete surrounding China, I did hear on CTV news today that China was sending a bunch of masks and protective gear in return. I'm generally the LAST person to defend China, but I don't think they're so dumb as to blatantly fuck everyone over that's just recently helped them. This, they feel, is their moment to shine and take a leadership role while the US so embarrassingly flounders in its own Donald-Trump-ineptitude. Unfortunately I also believe they're lying and they've not managed to control the virus like they report they have.

Hey I would be the first person to tell you to stay away from me if you got the virus. We've found common ground on that! I brought up my financial background in reference to the economic impact this will have. On that topic, I have a pretty good understanding of how the virus is going to affect things, and how the idea of everyone going back to work and everything being just fine is straight-up dumb. It's not how it will work. As for where you "prefer" to get your "data" from, I can't really comment much on that. There are always "alternative facts" available and if you want to keep nattering about your WHO straw-man, nobody here can stop you. Forget the fact that the WHO is responsible for eradicating diseases like smallpox and polio for a second. We can just ignore them altogether and listen to public health officials in Canada or Australia or wherever else if you want (maybe not Russia or China ). They're not saying anything different. We're seeing the infection spread just as they told us it would. No offense, but as soon as I started reading "politically compromised entities" I started rolling my eyes. That's pretty standard qanon or D E E P S T A T E conspiracy sloganeering, and I've entertained that rabbit hole of absurdity plenty of times before. At its core, it's a lazy, catch-all rebuttal of any/all facts than run contrary to the narrative you're peddling. You can't trust the WHO, they're compromised. The ministry of health is corrupt. Bureaucracy! This is all a ploy by the Rothschild family to ruin the economy and help unseat Trump. /yawn.

One of the problems here is that there's no way to ensure that what someone studies is what they'll actually end up doing. For folks going to business school, I can almost guarantee you that they're coming out of the program with a lot of useful and practical real-world knowledge. For a lot of other degrees, that's not so much the case. I do think, however, that greater emphasis should be placed on public funding to steer people towards certain careers, and some programs should be subsidized more than others. I'd be perfectly fine with subsidizing trade school heavily and pulling public funding for undergrads in English or History or whatever. That's not to say they should be cut out, but let's stop subsidizing the folks who scraped into a university program with a C average in high school and only managed to get into Communications or whatever. They're not academics and never will be, so we shouldn't be paying for them to party 5 nights a week at Queen's or Western or whatever.

It's not a war, and the death rate isn't even close to 9.5%. The death rate that is being listed is only for recorded cases, and those recorded cases are skewed heavily towards the people with obvious to severe symptoms. Most of the health professionals are advising it's more like a 1-3% death rate, which is still scary, but the overwhelming majority of infections aren't even being detected. The detected cases are just the tip of the iceberg, and the worst cases are all included in that.

I'm not so sure that it was a deliberate power-grab, but rather just something they wanted to do to avoid delays on further action down the road. It was a poor decision and even poorer attempt regardless, and the government ought to be embarrassed that they even tried.