Moonbox

Buddy Burgers: $1.75 and soo good. Sure Boges, if you live in a border village in the EU that might work. I highly doubt, however, that most Danes were travelling several hours to get cheaper Big Macs, or even to go grocery shopping. They'd pay more in transportation, so that theory doesn't make a lot of sense. Works for me. If obesity presents a high cost to the health system, it seems pretty fair that obese people should either be encouraged to eat better (via taxes) or should contribute extra to health revenue (via the same targeted taxes). Maybe, but there are specific offenders on which we can focus. Proper restaurants are not the real problem. I eat out for lunch virtually every day and none of it is particularly healthy. Going to a proper restaurant, however, requires at least a tiny amount of time and mental effort. I have to walk/drive there, sit down, wait 15-25 minutes for my meal and it costs $15-20 each person, all of which presents some portion control features. The real offenders are the burger & fries, pizza or Chinese joints and such, where you can pick up immense quantities of junk for dirt cheap on the way home in less time than it would take you to make a decent sandwich.

Sure, okay. Given your demented world views, I have to take that as a compliment. You still have answered me though. Is it reasonable to expect a consumer to track a fish purchased at the supermarket all the way back down the supply chain to the catch itself prior to serving it for dinner? Would a $10 purchase justify that sort of effort?

Sure, if that's what's specifically happening. Unfortunately, the leaps in logic you make to suggest that a company investing in a foreign country's economy makes all of its shareholders complicit in any crimes its dictator may or may not commit are 100% irrational. He would probably tell you to take off your tinfoil hat. Again, I'll ask you, would this be a reasonable thing to do, given the effort required and the size of the purchase? Sure, but in the end all the consumer has is the certificate. He just has to trust that it's legitimate and hope that food inspection agencies are doing their job. I'm well aware of your nutty thoughts and paranoid beliefs. In discussing this with you I'm merely trying to see if they are the product of colossal ignorance or a purely irrational mind. Oooh! Shareholder! There's that big scary word that eyeball doesn't understand again. Careful everyone! A shareholder might get you while you're sleeping!

Yes, for all realistic purposes it almost literally is. Well I'm glad we have all that cleared up! They confidently write their phone number because there's almost no way to trace it back. Things like burner phones or spoofing make it near impossible to track down. When your caller ID says a call is coming from your province, it may actually just be a disguised call from Pakistan. Two problems with that. First, disabling a phone number is ineffective prevention in the first place. It's far easier to set up a new number than it is to have the police disable one. Second, this is assuming that the number is even a traceable and legitimate number in the first place. If the police have anything to go on, they usually do. Petty fraud or vague complaints of it with no tangible leads and/or evidence to investigate aren't things our police should be interested in. They don't have unlimited resources.

Try reading it a third time, because you failed again to understand the second time.

You can hold people/corporations accountable insofar as they were complicit to the crime. You cannot hold the average shareholder accountable. There may be cases where a large or institutional shareholder is directly involved in or indirectly encouraging a crime, but the average shareholder is so far removed from the actual running of the company that they're no more culpable than a non-shareholder.

All of this is right. It's also very sad and nearly impossible to do anything about. The expression "A fool and his money are soon parted" dates back 400+ years and it's an expression known by virtually every native English speaker in the world. As you mention, however, it's not just the fool that is taken. It's also the addled/old/infirm. I had an older client once whose husband sent ~$50,000 to a scammer in China in just over a year's time. When his wife found out about it he'd already sent over $30,000. Unfortunately, she couldn't stop him because doctors couldn't do anything about it, deeming him mentally competent despite this. She was completely helpless to stop her husband throwing their retirement savings down the toilet.

I'm not surprised you'd equate dictators to terrorists given your oversimplified and childlike perception of the world and how it works. Equally unsurprising is how you've lumped corporate participation in dictator-controlled economies with terrorist financing. Both your judgement and your moral compass need adjustments. Wow. You're actually making me laugh now. At no point did I say that food on the grocery store shelves isn't traceable or monitored. I asked you how the end consumer could be reasonably expected to acquire this sort of detailed information before consuming a purchase. If I bought a fish at the grocery store, I wouldn't be expected to trace its handling back to the fisherman who caught it before serving it, would I? Extend this logic to the stock market now (if you can) and explain to us all how the average ma & pa investor dropping a few thousand dollars down on a stock would be expected to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the inner circle workings of the corporation and all of its conduct abroad? The answer to this question is identical to the to the one in the paragraph above. When you suggest things like individual shareholders (which often number in the 100,000-1,000,000 or more range) are all complicit in potential corruption abroad, you make it painfully clear how tragically ignorant you are about the world. Your vague understanding of words like shareholder and corporation and the near-mythical villainy you attribute to them extend no further than the average goofball conspiracy theorist's.

You've been suggesting all sorts of literally insane things in this thread: Let's arrest the shareholders (numbering in the tens/hundreds of thousands) of huge international mining corporations who may not be great corporate citizens abroad! Each and every shareholder is accountable! Obviously they all have the time and resources required to get an executive-level understanding of each company they invest in, and to know what each of their thousands of employees are doing! Then. if someone takes issue with your 13-year old logic and you suggest they attempt suicide!?!?

and if I bought some fish to serve at a party from the grocery store, how would you suggest that I go about getting this information? Could I just scan the bar-code at home and get a picture of you smiling with your catch? Would I get a timeline of everywhere the fish has been and every single person that's handled it? Would I get lab-test results showing that it's not contaminated and x-ray images showing there are no razor blades inside?

You've obviously never owned a share of stock in your life, nor do you know anything about investing. Suggesting that the average individual should or even can oversee his (hopefully) widely diversified holdings is about as reasonable as suggesting that when you have friends over for a BBQ, you've ensured you have a detailed break down of where your burgers came from, what the cow's name was, every person who handled it from farm to kill floor to grocery store and that you've had them all tested for ecoli and examined them for glass shards. Nobody's ever called you reasonable though.

Perhaps. I have worked in finance/banking for most of my adult life and have seen first hand how these scams work and who falls for them. The second place people go after being taken is their bank (the first is the police). Unfortunately neither party can do much to help. I have also seen almost every variety of this sort of scam and it's not just old people and idiots who fall for them. Even educated professionals are occasionally caught. Regardless, a sucker is still a sucker. It takes a special type of naivety to accept a $30,000 bank draft from a Chinese "sports team" who need chiropractic services and then agree to send $10,000 back to them when a day later after they adjust how long they'll be staying in Canada...obviously before their cheque clears. It's not that I have no sympathy for these people, as they're usually overly trusting, desperate or in some way incapable/vulnerable, but the fact is that it's not realistic or even really possible for local or even regional police to do much to stop it. The resources required to track the scammers down are immense as they're extremely careful and suspicious people who bolt at the first sign of complication. The only real defence against them is educating people on the danger.

The justice system cares, it's just like you said that it's way too hard to track these things down, particularly for local/municipal police. The scam artists are generally not local themselves and often from other countries. In one of these cases, a simple petty fraud arrest would likely require full-scale RCMP/FBI/Interpol investigations. Law enforcement doesn't have unlimited resources and sadly there is way bigger (and often easier) game to catch. The other thing to consider is that this sort of scam is easily preventable and only the dumbest schmucks (or invalids) actually fall for them. For the former it's simply not realistic to suggest we spend valuable resources saving people from their own stupidity. For the latter it's really a sad situation where seniors probably need more family and social support (particularly ones with dementia/infirmities).

It was a dumb story, sorry. On the one hand it completely ignores the real problem people have with today's capitalism (mainly the accelerating income gap and the corruption/abuse of the "system") and on the other hand it's just a pain painfully clumsy analogy. I actually winced when I read it. It's not the corporations that are the problem. It's the people running a lot of them.

Low voter turnout has no relevance on the conversation. You're talking about altogether denying the option/right to vote to legal adults, many of whom are engaged and interested enough to make a (relatively) informed decision.

Maybe not, but they're both non-starters. Unless deemed medically incompetent, you can't deny an adult the vote. There's no reasonable basis for suggesting otherwise. The suggestion that they're too dumb/ignorant to vote is highly suspect as you could probably say the same about the electorate in general.

The average 21 year old is not really any more bright than the average 18 year old. Regardless, the problem with this logic can be easily demonstrated with two points. First, there are a lot of 18-21 year olds who are far more intelligent and responsible than a lot of 40 and 50 year olds. Also, the same 18-21 year olds are probably a lot sharper and reasonable than the average 90+ year old, but we'd deny the former the right to vote while allowing barely-lucid 'invalids' to make decisions for the future they won't be a part of.

Enlisted = Rank and File Commissioned = Officer Why are you talking about the police? Your problems with the terminology aside, the main point is that you don't consider young adults fit to vote, event though they make up a large portion of our enlisted personnel and junior officer ranks in the military. Sure, we'll let you die for your country, but no, you're too dumb to vote. Impressive logic, as always.

but we allow 18-19 year old kids to enlist and be commissioned, so what does it matter if they're drafted or not? We trust them with extremely dangerous weapons and expensive equipment, but in your esteemed opinion they can't be trusted to vote. Right...

Your curiosity/need to know is of paramount importance. Unfortunately the media and government generally don't distribute videos of people getting violently killed because, well, it's generally not necessary, sensitive or particularly civilized.

Maybe not anywhere, but there are a lot of places that it should be audited that it isn't.

Well you brought into question how profoundly ONE person can affect civilization. JFK's assassination is one example. Have you ever heard of Franz Ferdinand? I wonder... and you're likely basing this on little more than self-serving bias/delusion. It wasn't a red herring. It was a fairly simple illustration of how brain-dead your comment was.

Well the idea is that the 1% make and control far more of the wealth than their actual individual contributions would fairly dictate. You don't need any figures to tell you the top 1% income earners aren't contributing 21% to the total economic output. I'm not sure what you thought you were proving with these numbers.

16-year olds are minors and can't even sign legally-binding contracts. They're just barely old enough to get part time jobs and many of them have never made a dollar on their own. For all intents and purposes they're essentially uneducated and they're highly impressionable to boot. A vote from a 16 year old would usually be a vote determined by the kid's parents or (even worse) by their teachers.

Not really! Ontario voters gave Kathleen Wynne a free pass on the multi-billion gas plant cancellation scandal, so it's unlikely they're going to care much for a gazebo from 5 years ago! Only in your mind jacee, but I'm sure you're alright with that!