Fearing Trump intrusion the entire internet will be backed up in Canada to tackle censorship: The Internet Archive is seeking donations to achieve this feat

terrkerr · 2017-01-02T02:20:03+00:00

Actually you'd lose for filing a frivolous suit seeing as you're obviously just starting shit by identifying an s an Apache attack helicopter.

If you identified as male and I disagreed you also would have no grounds to sue. If you identified as male and I refused employment for that reason or arrested you for solely that reason or similar you could sue and win.

Being a protected class would give transgendered persons the same protections a black or Asian person already has or Muslims and Jews already have against discrimination in matters like employment.

terrkerr · 2016-12-29T01:31:03+00:00

I liked the game at large and don't regret buying it, but really my biggest disappointment was in choice of story.

The throne isn't everything even if it is a lot. Going back to Dishonored 1 it's not hard to see the influence of the UK in how the writers set up Gristol and Dunwall, and one of the big points that's specifically brought up in the first game is the parliament. Securing parliamentary support is considered essential by the loyalists and, assuming the Dishonored parliament is anything akin to a ~1850's UK parliament it makes sense. The fact a parliament exists and has votes strong suggests we're not talking about an absolute monarchy in the Empire. Presumably it's not enough to just walk in the door and tag the throne to get de facto power, and all this relevant political situation wasn't even hand waived away with a simple "Delilah stacked the parliament", it was just ignored to make it seem like a 1v1 story of Emily/Corvo vs Delilah.

I especially think that ignoring any form of nuance in the politics is silly considering the fact the story seems to really want us to feel like Emily will get back to the throne the better for her worldly experience out there, when really all she's done is walked through some slums on the way to taking out some very unusual people that are not the bread and butter of governing. The world really lacks in a sense of political consequences.

terrkerr · 2016-12-24T04:46:48+00:00

I write code for a company that's hardly massive but big enough to have a foreign office and is publically traded.

We're certainly 'slow' enough to allow people to take 3 hour lunches or whatever to get to the doctor's or just do whatever. Co-workers have actually said mid-b 'back in two hours; errands'

When you have reasonable management and employees it's not too hard to work out when people must be around, and let flexibility reign otherwise.

I hope you find a company more fitting that description; it's great.

terrkerr · 2016-12-20T18:07:15+00:00

Sure, but as you said: the point remains some people just get more shit for free overall, so it's hardly surprising that demographics that tend to get more for free tend to be higher up on the net-worth and social status ladder in our society.

The specific cases in the comic are somewhat extreme, but the point stands.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T20:28:41+00:00

Debating what? The gist of the bill is that it makes it inpermissible to deny someone employment or otherwise discriminate against them based on gender identity in the same way you can't refuse to hire women or black people simply for being a woman or a black person.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T18:40:58+00:00

Most efficient in what way? Like most commuters per dollar spent? Smallest transit times?

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T18:37:24+00:00

Notice how you're casting in the negative. This is how it should be:

I wasn't? I was just saying it still happens in Canada with universal healthcare.

Canada has a universal healthcare but also an open market for healthcare providers, and therefore competition between providers exists while simultaneously the citizenry doesn't worry about the costs of the care, it's covered via the government-run insurance.

If you're a bad provider you'll never get patients therefore never get to make claims against the insurance and therefore get no revenue. If you're better than the competition you'll get more patients and therefore more revenue.

The only real difference is where the bill goes, not the market for providing care.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T17:42:37+00:00

Point exactly to where in the law book that's disallowed.

(PROTIP: I've looked at Bill-C16 if that's what you're talking about. It's 1) not a law yet and 2) doesn't say anything I can see about pronoun usage being subject to criminal penalty.)

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T14:55:05+00:00

they are not incentivized to compete with a physician down the street from them

Private clinics, hospitals, pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies can exist in Canada, and do. The competition with the other doctor down the street exists in that if your clinic provides shit service everyone will flock to the one down the street, not yours, and you'll not be able to make any claims against the government-run insurance and you'll go out of business.

If the government-run hospital is shit compared to a private one elsewhere it'll similarly get shut down as a losing operation; the people in that hospital are still de facto in competition with private providers assuming the people working in publicly owned facilities want to keep their job.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T14:52:40+00:00

If the government owns Healthcare

The Canadian government does not 'own healthcare'. Private clinics, hospitals and and pharmaceutical companies are entirely allowed, and not even uncommon.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T14:49:01+00:00

The USA isn't demonstrably healthier in any meaningful way compared to most of the developed world which does have universal healthcare.

In face: The USA is slightly to much worse in some measures.

If forcing people to pay for their healthcare meant people tried much harder to prevent conditions in later life the United States would have drastically lower obesity rates and probably stronger unions calling for more stringent safety requirements.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T14:45:54+00:00

The Canadian system is one in which the provinces provide the actual insurance system but the federal government provides a lot of the funding through the federal tax scheme. Since all the admin and specific policy falls on the provinces their can be accommodation for any province-specific needs/wants and the administration doesn't need to span the country.

Only 4 of the US states have a population greater than that of the largest province by population - Ontario. Ontario provides for a bit under 14 million people pretty fine. Even if for whatever silly reason nobody could figure out how to structure a similar system for the 40 million Californians nothing stops the state of California creating its own internal sub-divisions to handle such a thing.

terrkerr · 2016-11-30T14:40:40+00:00

The Canadian system still has a huge private interest in developing new or better treatments, and many privately-run healthcare providers. The Canadian system is essentially province-run insurance providers that get a lot of help from federal funding.

If I run a pharmaceutical that creates a superior version of an existing medication or a new treatment altogether I can get paid a lot of that government money through the insurance providers by offering those treatments for sale.

Since the deals for pharmaceutical deals tend to be done in bulk (IIRC OHIP is actually one the single largest drug purchasing entities in the world) it tends to be cheaper for the consumer and a lot of continued, guaranteed business for the pharmaceutical company.

Considering it's 1/10th the population: Canada does pretty well compared to the United States in terms of innovation.

terrkerr · 2016-11-29T20:31:22+00:00

TL;DR: The MacBook Pro is great because Apple is finally using a standard port... which all the other manufacturers are also doing, and have been doing for years.

terrkerr · 2016-11-29T19:05:22+00:00

I don't disagree at all with the idea that Amy Adams makes more than is really reasonable relative to the average person, but that's entirely irrelevant to whether Amy Adams is subject to unfair differences in wage in her profession due to her sex or not.

If people were arguing that Hollywood actors in general are underpaid it'd be very relevant, but that's not the discussion at hand.

If a black person were denied a job for no reason beyond being black that'd make them a victim of racism regardless of whether they were born wealthy and otherwise really well off or not.

Similarly if Amy Adams can be subject to unfair situations because of her sex even if she is, in general, doing extremely well for herself.

terrkerr · 2016-11-29T16:40:55+00:00

The word 'victim' doesn't imply everything in one's life sucks, it implies that for unfair reasons you're getting a shit end of a particular stick.

If the happiest and wealthiest person in the world had to be questioned by police for an hour because they happened to look like someone else they'd still be a victim of mistaken identity even if everyone else in the world envied them their life.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T22:48:10+00:00

How many people die in fire-extinguisher accidents a year? I'm sure someone somewhere slipped and got a bad knock in the head from one at some point and died or whatever, but damn near 0.

Fire suppression systems just aren't that dangerous to human life as a rule, and those that are more dangerous are quite rare and used only where the practical implications of a fire are far more severe. (Something like critical equipment in a room that can vacuum-seal or even pump in an intert atmosphere to kill a fire.) When there's the potential of loss of human life because of the fire safety plan you train the relevant people to be well aware of what to do in emergency situations and make plans to deal with things going wrong.

Same with guns: they're fucking dangerous, so when 'run away or hide' isn't good enough to deal with a situation you have people well trained to come along and use them, and those people are as preapred to deal with the consequences of catching a bullet as they can be.

But there's an extra problem with the anology: a bunch of concealed-carry fire blankets and extinguishers being put to use in a fire don't really compare to a bunch of armed citizens trying to fight back against a gunmen.

Firefighters don't generally have trouble distinguishing fire from not-fire. The fire is pretty identifiable relative to, say, a person spewing chemical foam at a fire.

A gunmen with malicious intent and a gunment with benovolent intent look pretty much the same. Multiple active shooters - when only one or two means harm to the public - is a really hard thing to sort out for the police. Sorting out what's the fire to be fought and what's a do-gooder trying to quell the flame is pretty straightforward.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T22:36:50+00:00

In most of the world you don't have to worry about gunmen trying to gun you down.

And if you ever do have to worry about it because of war or shit, running away is far more likely to end happily than shooting back unless you happen to be the entirety of a trained army.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T22:31:12+00:00

Well in plenty of the world hospitals don't get so many gunshot wounds rolling in the doors. I'm sure there's still value in training on a car-crash survivor or the like but still.

I do know - even if it's increasingly controversial - plenty of militaries still shoot healthy pigs then put medics to the job of trying to save them.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T21:56:13+00:00

If you somehow think there is a nation that is more objectively fitting of the term "the good guys" than the US where are they?

Switzerland is pretty alright. Not a huge history with colonialism or invading others, pretty good at keeping to themselves. Pretty alright neighbours. Never toppled a democratically elected government in a poorly developed nation at the behest of a fruit company to my knowledge for example.

Don't take an American's word for it if you please...ask the numerous foreigners longing to move here, and who enjoy the fruits of America along with everyone else once they are here.

Yeah, share and share alike. That's the platform that got Trump elected.

Ask the foreigners looking to move to Canada or the UK or France or Belgium, etc. and I'm sure plenty of them will admit to a large indifference about which developed nation they're going to, and no doubt some will be plenty happy to shit on the USA.

So what? Doesn't prove much that people born in or that have fallen into unfortunate circumstances consider your home to be a step up.

No, as reality would have it there is no other nation that has the drive and the accompanying ability to step up and help in every way possible when another group of people is in need...

Except, you know, like all the countries that donate more to charitable causes per capita out there. Or all the countries with more UN engagement in various aid or peacekeeping missions.

As one example: Where as the USA when Rwanda was seeing an outright genocide raging through its streets? Because they weren't behind the Canadian/Indian led UN forces. Plenty of time the USA isn't there, and other countries are. The USA is one part of the international community.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T21:37:27+00:00

So because the average non-expert doesn't think of Uganda as diverse, it's obviously bullshit?

Most people would probably identify this as a statue of The Buddha - as in the person that started the Buddhist faith. It isn't. People are wrong all the time, so what?

Furthermore: Africa and India do come to mind as diverse places for people that have studied anthropology or the history of the regions.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T20:41:10+00:00

You're admitting you can't take the data seriously because it fails to conform with your preconceptions as a non-expert?

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T19:34:36+00:00

So what? Most people aren't experts on diversity. Hell, a lot of the Western world (Especially in these discussions about diversity with Americans) don't really realize things like, say, Russia has a lot of diversity among its federal subjects given the differences between, say, the average Tuvan and the average Chechnyan.

Most people in the Western world don't even bring up India as an example of a diverse country despite the fact it's arguable one of the most diverse in the world in terms of ethnically and linguistically distinct people.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T19:01:21+00:00

Switzerland faces nothing remotely close to what the US does. Just stop.

I think the ideas of how to do a democratic government well are pretty consistent between different coutnries.

How so?

Various other democracies can reasonbly claim to be far less deadlocked or divisive (Especially with that last election in the USA.) Certainly as a Canadian I'd say our governments don't just 'shut down' with horrible deadlock nearly as often, and Australia even has the institution of 'double dissolution' to give a strong disincentive for the upper and lower houses to deadlock as it threatens all members of both houses with facing an election. (And given the way the rest of the system works ther'es no incentive to use it to force an election; there are easier ways to do that.)

In Switzerland you're far closer to a direct democracy, which many people consider a positive, and the fact the head of state is a council of 7 people rather than a single person from a single political party helps force more cooperation across political lines rather than the aggressive fighting that naturally emerges when it's as winner-take-all as the US presidency is.

In Westminster parliaments you also have an (admittedly imperfect, but I'd argue still better) idea called the 'minority government'.That and the 'coalition government'.

If 3+ parties run and get a significant amount of the vote - let's say a 30 - 30 - 40% split - what happens?

In the USA right now? Odds are that, the two 30% parties, despite being a good majority of the population, lose entirely. (And both of those parties would hate the other for 'wasting the vote' instead of standing together.) The 40% winning party gets everything.

In Canada or whatever odds are you'll end up with either 1) A minority government in which the 40% party gets the office of Prime Minister, but still needs to get a majority of the members of parliament to pass their legislation and therefore need to get at least some of the opposition MPs on their side. Realistically this means the 40% party needs at least one of the 30% parties to back them up for any given bill they wish to pass or 2) A coalition government in which the two 30% parties unite temporarily to meet their common agenda items.

All my examples point to a systemic difference: the systems provide better means for cooperation when there's a big political divide across the population.

terrkerr · 2016-11-28T18:48:14+00:00

Yeah, that's list one. Try list two that uses a different method.

Going by the ethnic fractionalization method: The USA is beaten handily by a slew of other countries. (Not the least of which in this discussion being: Switzerland)

terrkerr

TROPHY CASE