kimmy

If it was just a matter of posting those ridiculous rants, he'd be funny or sad depending on your point of view. What got him arrested was continuously sending death threats to atheist and skeptic writers like PZ Myers and Jen "Boobquake" McCreight, and even stalked PZ Myers in person at a conference in Montreal. He was found to have severe bipolar disorder and substance abuse issues, and was given medical treatment and an 18 month suspended sentence for sending death threats, and among the terms of the sentence was that he not use internet message boards and forums. Seeing that he's back again (he posted another diatribe earlier today) and is posting the same insane stuff as before, it's clear that he's off the wagon, off his medication, breaking the conditions of his sentence, and probably threatening people once again. -k

While I realize that the easiest thing to do is just delete this nonsense, I think it's also worth pointing out that his visits to this forum are also a violation of the terms of his sentence. Perhaps, rather than deleting them, his posts could be stored somewhere so that the next time he's arrested they could be forwarded to the legal authorities? -k

A gold-backed currency doesn't prevent bubbles. A gold-backed currency doesn't prevent corruption or shenanigans. A gold-backed currency wouldn't have prevented the unregulated derivatives market that was a key ingredient in the 2008 collapse. A gold-backed currency does none of these things, yet you keep talking about it as if it's the answer to all these problems. I'm also baffled as to your complaint about electronic transactions and "tokens". Are you suggesting someone should only be allowed to make a purchase if they're able to physically go to the store and put a piece of gold in the shopkeeper's hand? No, the actions of the Obama government since 2008 will not put a stop to financial corruption. That doesn't mean that all such efforts are doomed, it just means that the Obama government has done a poor job of it. -k

If people only lived in places that were immune to natural disaster, there would be precious few places to live. In my part of the world, it's forest fires. I don't think a wildfire could penetrate the city far enough to reach my home, but many of my friends and co-workers who live near outlying areas have had to evacuate at some point over the past few years. And yet, they don't live in stone houses... There is a point where "what's possible", "what's practical", and "what's prudent" intersect, and for most of us, the "practical" axis is a big limiting factor in determining what's possible. It might be possible for an Oklahoma family to live in a tornado-proof bomb shelter, but it's probably not very practical. It might be possible for Kimmy to drive around in a collision-proof tank instead of an aging Malibu, but it wouldn't be very practical. And I suspect my chances of being injured or killed in a traffic accident are probably much higher than an Oklahoma resident's chances of dying in a tornado. -k {"Nothing ever burns in Bedrock! Everything's made of stone!" -official motto of Joe Rockhead's Volunteer Fire Department}

Full of enthusiastic monarchists, no doubt. -k

If you think Wall Street makes decisions the same way you think when you're buying a car, then I think that either you're either not paying attention to what the finance industry has been up to, or you run an automotive chop-shop. -k

It's sure getting easy to ignore everything the aboriginals complain about. It's all just starting to blur together into one big pity-party. It's kind of like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", but it's more like "The Boy Who Cried Continuously." -k

Of course more money. Shareholders want more money, right now. Executives want more money, right now. All this blathering about "easy money" is off the mark because it would be (and was) the same under the gold standard. A result of giving shareholders what they demand. Why would Bain care about Sealy's reputation? Why would Bain care about Bain's reputation, for that matter? Bain, like HSBC and Goldman Sachs, doesn't give a crap what you and me think about them. I don't think "too many meaningless rules" is the problem. I don't think either of us can say that. I don't think either of us is qualified to go through the rules and say "this one is meaningless! that one is meaningless! We'd be better off without them!" When you say "too many meaningless rules", it makes me think you've swallowed the spiel from people like American Enterprise Institute or frickin' Willard. "Let's scrap these job-killing regulations and get America back to work!" "Let's unshackle the American Entrepreneur and let him create jobs!" Of course, they'd like you to think they're talking about regulations about logging in spotted owl habitat, but the regulations they really want to scrap are ones that hinder their rich friends in looting the economy at the pace they'd really like to. I agree with you about meaningless punishments. I bet frickin Willard and the AEI don't. I don't recall ever hearing any of those kinds of people complaining that "you know, I think it's time for corporate wrongdoers to really pay." I also agree with you about rules that grant privilege and squelch competition. What would be good, though, would be *meaningful* rules. That's another thing you didn't hear frickin Willard or the American Enterprise Institute or any of those kinds of knuckleheads offering. They pay lip service to the value of regulation, basically because they know that they've turned deregulation into a dirty word through their own stupidity. But when it comes down to it, they can't offer a single suggestion as to what regulations they'd like in place of Dodd-Frank, because the truth is that they don't want any at all. Perhaps we need better people if we want better legislation. As I said before, the rich were using their wealth to get their way in politics long before the gold standard was phased out, so trying to blame it on floating currency fails. Your "Golden Age of Real Capitalism" was full of corruption. You're rambling about something that never even existed. And what specific unfair laws are preventing decent people from improving their lives? I mean, you might have a point if you're talking about drug prohibition, but I assumed we were talking about economic issues here. BP was not bailed out. There was never going to be a carcass for anybody to absorb, because BP was not in financial danger. Had it been up to the free market, BP's punishment for the ecological and economic devastation they caused would have been light. Were it not for a tyrannical, bullying government and its pesky, job-killing regulations, it's unlikely that BP would have coughed up the tens of billions of dollars it has paid for clean-up, compensation, and penalties. -k

A lot of casualties. I am just barely old enough to remember when the tornado hit Edmonton in 1987. My house only lost some shingles, but some people lost everything. I remember that people from all over North America donated things to the families whose homes were destroyed. It made quite an impression on me, so I want to do the same to help people who've been affected by this. -k

I found a video of it! -k

I know what legal tender means. I'm asking you to explain your point. What the hell are you even talking about. That's demonstrably false, first off. All they need to do is avoid the consequences of acting irresponsibly. There's plenty of examples. And secondly, as Wilber points out... what makes you think the long term even matters to the people making these decisions? When there's so much gain to be made by acting short term, why bother thinking long term at all? It's not my concept of humanity in general, but it seems to be how the job description of people who excel in business. Maximize profits, increase shareholder value, other issues are of no consequence. That might not be what they are like as human beings, but that is what they are like when they are doing their job. How would I act? I like to think that if I had my own business, I would run it as ethically as I knew how. I'd want it to be something I could be proud of. I would want it to last. At this point I have to point out that the people who built the businesses we're often talking about are often not the people who are making these decisions. The people who built Sealy Mattresses were probably proud of the company and the product and wanted it to last... the people at Bain had none of these notions... to them it was a collection of assets on some ledgers, and they concluded that laying off people and making poorer-quality products and taking on debts to issue "special dividends" to Bain Capital was the best way to maximize their shareholders' value. How would I act if I were in a position like Dick Fuld, where I had the opportunity to make a vast amount of money based on the quantity of transactions I made, and suffered no consequences if the quality of those transactions turned out to be shoddy? The shareholders are putting pressure on me to rack up big numbers for them *right* *now*? And I get an enormous sum of money if I do? And the only consequences to me if I do a bad job are that I get fired and keep the obscene amount of money I am making right now? I think I would try to give the shareholders what they wanted. Wouldn't you? Private industry came up with this system of compensation, I have to point out. You can't blame it on government. "Let's motivate our executives to really perform by offering great bonuses if they provide great profits!" "But what if they sacrifice the long-term good of the company in favor of short-term profit so that they can get those bonuses?" "Good point. Let's reward them for great profits by giving them stocks as well as bonuses! That way, they have an incentive to care about the long term good of the company!" "But what if they make short-term decisions to get bonuses and stocks and drive up the stock price, then sell their stocks before the consequences of short-term thinking hurt the company?" "Oh, you're just being silly! That would never happen!" Yep, that would never happen, right? I don't necessarily want *more* rules, I want *meaningful* rules, and I want *meaningful* punishment for those who break the rules, and I want the rules to be enforced vigorously instead of in the toothless way that they have been enforced them over the past however many years. If you're HSBC and you can make billions of dollars by breaking the law, and the punishment when you get caught is a fine that you can pay out of the profits you made while breaking the law, that's not a meaningful punishment. That's not an incentive to change your behavior. If you get caught carrying a small quantity of recreational drugs, you can end up doing hard time. If you get caught laundering money for drug cartels and terrorists, you sleep in your own bed and your shareholders find their dividends cheques are a couple of dollars less this quarter. That's a serious problem. Wrongdoers in the finance industry know that the feds are scared to actually go to court, and that if they get caught breaking the rules, the punishment is going to be some paltry out-of-court settlement with no admission of guilt. Well, that's a darned complicated question. But if you think "Bring Back the Gold Standard!" is the answer, you're terribly naive. No, I don't think fair laws and vigorous enforcement of laws leads inexorably to tyranny. But that sounds positively tyrannical! Seriously, though: dismantled by who? The US government? The British government? The government of the Netherlands or the Cayman Islands or wherever they file their taxes or do their banking? I agree completely. Well, yeah. I think that if individuals within HSBC who facilitated banking for drug cartels and terrorists were faced with the prospect of doing hard time, they'd have acted differently. Better regulations. Meaningful enforcement. Disentanglement of those who have the money from those who make the rules. -k

No, Topaz, that's the Northern Lights. It has nothing to do with moon explosions. -k

I don't agree about the *only* nation part. One of my Brit friends was recently complaining about the existence in England of families who have not worked for generations. One wonders if the immigrant slums around Paris (the ones where a near war erupted a few years ago) will result in the same. One could make the argument that Canada's Indian reserves have an underclass of permanently unemployable people. I have a friend whose 22 year old daughter is an idiot. The idiot daughter has idiot friends. My friend tells me stories about her idiot daughter and her idiot friends. Finding ways to scam the government for money so that they can keep on partying is their only job. Several of them have fake medical disabilities-- "back pain"-- that they claim prevents them from working. Most of these idiot girls have children of their own, and I am worried. With parents like that, their kids won't have much of a chance in life. My friend is basically raising her grandson as her own, and just desperately hoping it turns out better than it did with her idiot daughter. -k

So... -some of the kinetic energy of a massive impact would be converted to heat -the heated materials emit radiant energy -the massive kinetic impact will throw heated material all over -some of the heated material will also be liquified or vaporized, expanding rapidly and ejecting even more heated material from the impact area. ...does that about cover it? -k

I think that what you're looking for is pretty much non-existent in Western Canada. There are small communities around that used to have a French Canadian character-- St Paul or Bonneville or Grouard in Alberta, for example... but I think that French character has faded with each generation and is mostly gone. Your best chance might be to come to BC's southern interior-- Oliver, Osoyoos, Penticton-- during the summer. Quite a few Quebecois come to that area to work as seasonal workers in the orchards. It lets them travel, make some money, get together, drink and do drugs, throw up on stuff, harass the local residents, commit vandalism, and generally create a terrible impression of French Canadians in general. -k

Greed is facilitated by the gold standard too. They quite clearly *do* mind losing their currency, as demonstrated by their ferocious opposition to tax reform and ferocious efforts to support any and all legislation that reduces their expenses. But even if I were to agree to this premise, all it does is suggest that a gold-backed currency would make things even more cut-throat, because money would (according to you) become much more precious. Cutting employee wages would be even more crucial if you were paying wages in precious gold-backed currency, wouldn't it? whaaaa? All of this is completely false. Responsible practices reduce profits all the time. If it costs money to do it, it reduces your profit. In *some* instances, there might be a counteracting financial consequence to not acting responsibly, but that's hardly a given. The most profitable corporations are generally pretty good at evading financial consequences of irresponsible behavior. If you run a pulp mill, cleaning your effluent before it goes back into the river costs money. It reduces your profit. You might respond with "yeah, but when consumers find out that your pulp mill is flushing toxic chemicals right into the river, they will punish you by not buying your product anymore!" And that might be true, *if* consumers actually know that you're flushing untreated waste straight into the river. But how many consumers actually know about the environmental practices of pump mills when they go buy a package of paper? If CheapoBrand costs $1.60 and SuperBrand costs $2.00, they'll pay $1.60 and not bother to consider that the extra 40 cents might include the costs of running an ecologically responsible operation. And if somebody discovers that your pulp mill is dumping untreated effluent straight into the river, who cares? You can do some PR work. ("Gee, we're sorry. We didn't realize the harm we were doing. To make things right, we're spending $100,000 to build a playground for homeless ducks." And you can pull CheapoBrand products off the market and rebrand them as "EcoBrand - with 10% recycled contents, to save nature!" and raise your price to $1.75 per package. And continue acting destructively, because conning consumers into thinking you've changed your ways is cheaper than actually fixing your pulp mill. And corporations are clearly much more interested in finding ways to keep consumers from finding out what their real practices are than in improving their practices. (If you don't believe me, consider the recent outbreak of US states passing laws making it illegal to expose cruelty at meat processing facilities. It might be illegal to skin a calf alive, but if you film someone skinning a calf alive and report it to the authorities, you'll be charged as an "eco-terrorist" and do hard time.) And, some companies are more or less immune to punishment in the form of consumer revolt, anyway. We might both agree that HSBC and Goldman Sachs are scum, but they don't make a nickel off of proles like us, so what we think is completely irrelevant to them. Gasoline prices jumped 8 cents overnight everywhere in town, and it's pretty clearly long weekend price-gouging and it's pretty obviously collusion, but my tank is pretty low and I can't picture myself boycotting gas stations for very long. Now, there are some good examples of times when irresponsible behaviour really did reduce profits. The British Petroleum "Deep Water Horizon" disaster, for example. BP cut corners in safety engineering, and the result was a huge disaster. It cost BP a vast amount of money, in part because of their own damaged equipment and lost production, but mostly because the *government* forced them to pay massive fines and a massive amount of money to clean up their mess. That must kind of make you mad, right? I mean, on the one hand you're arguing that unethical or irresponsible behavior just isn't profitable. And yet, the reason unethical or irresponsible behavior is occasionally unprofitable is because of collective actions-- either government-enforced fines and penalties or collective consumer backlash-- that in any other thread you'd be crying about as "bullying". The "other" Golden Rule says that "He who has the gold, makes the rules." The wealthy have been able to get their way for longer than there has been fiat currency. Read about the Colorado mining wars for some interesting tales from your Golden Age of Real Capitalism and how politicians literally let their rich friends get away with murder, and sometimes even helped. You keep talking about bailouts, but the expectation of a bailout isn't the heart of the problem. Certainly the banks got their bailouts, but the people who drove the industry into the ground didn't need bailouts. They had already collected their obscene bonuses and many had already left the industry by the time the brown stuff hit the fan. Lehman Brothers didn't get a bailout. Remember watching the video of Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld testifying to a committee? Talking about how badly he felt that his company was destroyed? You might argue that it was irrational for him to take risks that ultimately destroyed his company. I would respond that the dude got paid 500 million dollars in bonus money because of all that risky behavior. If you can make a half billion dollars by engaging in reckless behavior, it's *not* reckless, it's rational. What kind of idiot would pass up the opportunity to make 500 million dollars? Sealy Mattress didn't get a bailout. Remember Bain Capital's "vulture capitalism" takeover of Sealy Mattresses? We discussed it in another thread last fall. As you'll recall, Bain bought Sealy, proceeded to cash in by having Sealy take on massive debts to issue special payments to Bain, and proceeded to find ways to squeeze every dime out of Sealy they could by laying off people and cutting corners, and ultimately sold Sealy as a shadow of its former self. Someone said "but but, it wasn't rational for them to do that! They took a big asset and turned it into a small asset! They could have grown it!" But it was completely rational. They made a fortune by wrecking Sealy. It might not have been good for the economy as a whole that Sealy got turned from a good company into a crappy company. But it was *freaking great* for Bain Capital! These guys get their money whether there's a bailout or not. They're just following the model that PT Barnum invented: fleece the suckers and move on to the next town before they wise up. Get paid and get out with your money, and leave the consequences to somebody else. That's what Dick Fuld did at Lehman, that's what Bain Capital did with Sealy, it's what Frank Dunn and friends did at Nortel, and on and on. The problem isn't fiat currency or bailouts, it's that people can make a hell of a lot of money by acting for the short term, so they have no reason to care about what happens long term. eyeball's depleted fisheries boil down to the same issue. -k

There are methods of treating depression that employ powerful magnetic pulses to stimulate neurons, and the human brain has been mapped out to some degree... an electroencephalogram can determine what parts of your brain are most active at a given time and a general guess as to what your brain is doing can be made. Certainly there is some interaction between your brain and electromagnetism. However, that alone doesn't make psychic phenomena plausible. Last time this came up, I mentioned Shannon's Law-- a fundamental of communications theory-- and pointed out that the signal to noise ratio for a hypothetical psychic communication system would be immeasurably low, so the theoretical bandwidth of this communication link would be immeasurably small. I still believe this is the correct way to analyze the likelihood of psychic phenomenon: as a communications system. Every communications system has certain components: a sender, a channel, a receiver, and a message. Take a hypothetical psychic event, identify those 4 components, and you should be able to come to a conclusion about whether it's viable or not. So, supposing we're discussing Amanda Berry being trapped in this guy's house. Sender: Amanda Berry, in a house in Cleveland. Receiver: Sylvia Browne, in a television studio in New York City, 500 miles away from Cleveland. Message: "Help, I am being held in a house against my will!" Channel: well that's the head-scratcher, isn't it? It can't be electromagnetic, because the human brain can't transmit a message that far. The human brain is such a poor transmitter of electromagnetic signals that when we do an EEG we have to put the antennas right on the scalp. Even commercial radio stations with tens of kilowatts of transmitting power don't reliably cover 500 miles, especially with a mountain range in the way. Clearly electromagnetism is out. And let's consider interference. Sylvia is sitting on stage in front of a crowd of people, in the middle of a metropolitan area of 20,000,000 other people, in a region that's home to around 100,000,000 people... and we're supposed to believe that she can distinguish a thought from a single mind some 500 miles away, herself in the middle of a metropolitan area of over 3,000,000 people? I think that the signal-to-noise ratio problem once again comes into play: the signal is a thought from one brain far away, and the noise is 100,000,000 much closer brains near the receiver, plus 3 million other brains close to the sender, plus who knows how many other brains in between. Once again the Shannon's Law argument comes into play: the signal to noise ratio becomes so impossibly tiny as to make the usable bandwidth of this communications channel completely non-existent. And that's just imagining our psychic trying to receive a message from a living person. The scenario becomes even more ridiculous if you consider a typical Sylvia Browne scenario: the sender isn't a living person, it's a corpse under water somewhere. Sender? Communications medium? Message? People can say stuff like "well the brain can receive electromagnetic signals" or "well quantum mechanics says such and such..." but when you break it down into specifics, you have to come to the conclusion that the explanations for how this could work can't involve existing science. -k

Well you seem to blame fiat currency for all of these problems that really boil down to just plain naked greed. But why would a gold-backed currency encourage corporations to act any differently? If HSBC and Goldman-Sachs can reap massive profits by acting like scum, it doesn't matter whether those profits are in a gold-backed currency or a fiat currency. All that matters is they are getting richer. A gold based currency doesn't make ethical business practices more profitable. If using shoddy environmental practices is cheap, and using responsible environmental practices is expensive, the accounting works out the same whether it's in fiat currency or gold-backed. Responsible practices reduce their profits. Gold based currency doesn't make responsible environmental practices a more attractive option. If a broker or a banker or a CEO can make obscene bonuses based on reckless short term behavior, it doesn't matter to him whether it's a fiat currency or a gold-backed currency. He's getting an obscene bonus. A gold-backed currency doesn't give him stronger incentive to prioritize long-term stewardship over a short-term windfall. The real issue isn't fiat currency. The real issue is that we have evolved into a system that rewards short-term thinking and doesn't reward long-term thinking. I'm talking about what exists today because that's what exists today. You seem to be talking about some sort of idealized concept that only exists in your imagination. Huh? Since I object to the way many of the large corporations conduct themselves, I'm probably acting badly myself? Is what you're saying? What bad behavior am I justifying here? Please expand on this. It seems like a bizarre leap. But that's just a meaningless phrase that's made to sound insightful by using words that make people empowered. Not true! Gold has excellent electrical and chemical characteristics that make it an ideal material for many applications! It seems silly to have such a useful material locked in vaults when it could be put to good use by industry. I think that all the gold-hoarders are really accomplishing is driving up the price of electronics components. -k

People didn't become greedy until they did away with the Gold Standard? Really? Really??? It appears that the large majority of CEOs don't agree. There are some counter-examples, of course... Costco provides terrific employee salaries and benefits compared to other retailers, to name one. But for the most part, no. Big corporations focus on the bottom line. Jobs? The environment? The future? Those things don't put money in the shareholders' pockets. There's no tangible payoff, and there's no timeline. The shareholders don't want an ROI consisting of fuzzy-wuzzy feelings, they want an ROI consisting of cash. If there is a deficit in fuzzy-wuzzy feelings, corporations can address it with a fuzzy-wuzzy PR campaign. Long term thinking might make "big picture" sense, but the realities of business in almost every industry make short-term gain a higher priority than long-term prudence. Outsourcing jobs might leave people unemployed and angry, but until angry unemployed people show up at the gates of your mansion, that's irrelevant to you. And there's heavily-armed police forces to disperse riots at your gate anyway. Remember the AIG part of the 2008 financial crisis? AIG brokers were writing insurance policies for derivatives transactions as fast as they could... and ultimately it nearly destroyed the company. Why did those brokers write all those risky policies? Were they blind to the dangers it posed to the company? No, it's because they weren't paid based on stewardship of their company's long-term best interests, they were paid based on how many policies they sold *right now*. The same general pitfall can be found elsewhere in the housing bubble as well, of course. Agents who got paid on how many mortgages they wrote *right now*. CEOs who got obscenely huge bonuses based on now the company did *last quarter*, not 3 years ahead. Reputation? Reputation is a fine thing... but companies like HSBC and Goldman Sachs have discovered that if you can make billions of dollars by acting like scum, reputation isn't everything. -k

The polls told us all along that the NDP would win this election... but the polls were wrong. Quite peculiar, that. I wonder if the polling over-sampled the NDP-leaning Lower Mainland, and under-sampled the Liberal-leaning rest of the province. The Liberals didn't just maintain their majority, they actually increased it. I think one has to interpret this as an endorsement of Christy Clark. The BC Liberal campaign put Christy Clark front and center, and the public approved. Clark has been a controversial figure even within her own party, as the "old guard" never really accepted her. There had been some talk about a party mutiny against Clark right after the election. But I think this result makes that scenario unlikely. She won them this election. Of course... Clark lost her own seat. Dan Ashton, the mayor of Penticton, won a seat in the legislature. He never resigned as mayor; he is on a leave of absence. There is talk that Ashton may resign his seat in the Legislature and resume his post as mayor, giving Clark the opportunity to run in a byelection. Penticton is a pretty safe seat for the Liberals. -k

Ok, so what is your idea of capitalism, why did it disappear, and how do we get back there? But there is no incentive for anyone to expand their concept of what's in their self-interest. Why should some CEO expand his idea of self-interest to include others, the environment, the community, or the future? Why should he embrace the idea that he's responsible to others as well as himself? -k

I saw American statistics last week indicating that firearms homicides and non-fatal firearms crime are all dramatically lower than they were 20 years ago: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/07/gun-homicide-rate-down-49-since-1993-peak-public-unaware/ ...but the majority of people believe that gun crime has actually increased during that span. 56% of people believe gun crime has increased, and only 12% believe it has decreased. Why are people much more worried about gun crime when there is actually much less gun crime to be worried about? -k

I'm skeptical of the idea about aboriginal suicide rates being linked to "cultural continuity". I think the issue is not so much that "they lost their culture", but rather that "they lost their culture and replaced it with a dismal lifestyle". As for suicides jumping sharply among middle-aged white people between 1999 and 2010... do you think that Canadian life changed so much in that span that it caused a spike in suicide rates? Or do you think their might be other factors, like financial stress resulting from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression? -k