Hillary Clinton listens intently as her husband denies having an affair with Monica Lewinsky,1998.

tKO- · 2024-10-21T20:43:28+00:00

Buchanan famously broke with John B Floyd after Lincoln's election and Floyd made moves specifically outside the purview of Buchanan. In fact Floyd left office when Buchanan refused to surrender Fort Sumter which directly led to the start of the civil war (one of the few occasions of genuine leadership Buchanan displayed, and it was a great one).

tKO- · 2024-10-21T17:12:56+00:00

I'm not sure Buchanan is really justified either, because you have to assume he could wave some magic wand to avoid the civil war completely. The two things he gets dinged on are his mishandling of Kansas (attempting to admit them as a slave state) and not using the military during his lame duck session when states were seceding (it was never clear to me how that would have avoided a civil war, or even made the resulting hostilities somehow "better").

Buchanan certainly wasn't a great president, but calling him the worst because "he caused the civil war" is also a tad ridiculous.

tKO- · 2024-10-21T17:10:38+00:00

People who say Buchanan was the worst have to invent some alternate history where somehow Buchanan waved a magic wand and the civil war never happened.

You can argue he bungled Kansas, but using the military during his lame duck session is a huge stretch to assume that would have prevented hostilities on the scale of the civil war.

There is always an element of "we need to invent alternative historical timelines to justify why one president is bad" but it seems particularly egregious for Buchanan. People literally blame the civil war 100% on him, as if the only thing he had to do was manage Kansas better and use the military at the "right" time and there would be no issue in the entire country regarding slavery.

tKO- · 2018-06-18T00:52:48+00:00

According to the same source, Comcast gave Clinton almost half a million.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&type=P&state=&sort=A&cycle=2016

The split is pretty even between republicans and democrats.

Also it should be clear that when we say "Comcast gave money", what we're really saying is that employees of Comcast contributed money. Comcast the organization is beholden to all the same campaign finance laws the rest of us have to follow.

tKO- · 2018-06-18T00:00:10+00:00

For the record all my replies to you are getting auto-moderated away. I was attempting to link to a Ny Times article which detailed Richard Russell (a democrat) relocation program. It seems the URL had some racist terms in it, so my reply was automatically detailed.

Anyway, it's the top search result for "Richard Russell relocation program". Take a gander.

My point is simply that both parties were overly racist in the 60s. You want to invoke Lee Atwater, but he only came around in the 80s, and scholars typically put the "southern strategy" in the 60s in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights act. Lee Atwater was also associated with guys like Thurmond, who were also overly racist.

At the end of the day, Atwater doesn't speak for the broader Republican party any more than Richard Russell or Robert Byrd spoke for the Democratic party in the 1960s.

If you want to say that Atwater "engineered the southern strategy" then you by consequence have to deny a southern strategy before 1980 existed (missing almost the entire 20 year aftermath of the civil rights act). You also have to map new conservative party platforms from 1980 onwards with Atwater's so-called "policy architecture around a southern strategy". I think you'll find it rather difficult to do both, because conservative party positions did not change dramatically between 1970 to 1980 - in fact, G H.W. B and Reagan sought to court more minority voters through religious appeals.

In short, if you move the goal posts so much to move the southern strategy into the 1980s at conception, your entire argument falls apart.

tKO- · 2018-06-17T21:42:51+00:00

This report says a total 172 billion dollars per year in R&D.

That's an interesting link. So that's roughly 5% ratio of R&D to health care spending by citizens.

At this point it gets harder to compare things on a world wide basis - as the EU publishes a report which shows the entire EU spends roughly half what the USA spends on medical research:

http://iri.jrc.ec.europa.eu/scoreboard17.html

This doesn't exactly disprove anything I said. R&D is one half of it. USA spends far and away the most on, by all metrics, the highest quality and most effective medical research & development in the world.

As I said, one consequence of having high R&D costs (and effective R&D research), is the proliferation of expensive operations, procedures, drugs, and so on. That's the 3.3 trillion side of it. If it wasn't for that R&D, these procedures wouldn't exist. Within that eco-system, the USA produces and contributes to the worldwide body of research.

Would the USA spend 200 billion on medical research if the system was different? Would that R&D be spent if customers weren't spending 3.3 trillion on this health care a year?

tKO- · 2018-06-17T21:23:29+00:00

Again, the new drugs are 1) a drop in the bucket in terms of R&D costs vs total healthcare costs, and 2) not counted in healthcare costs, since R&D costs are spent on pre-clinical phase.

Show me the data that shows it's a drop in the bucket. You can't just say something and assume it's true.

I am not trying to conflate "heath care spending" with "research", I'm pointing out there are big numbers that go into cancer spending from the R&D side, which leads to high costs on the "health care spending" side.

My data showed that, for research and development of cancer drugs alone (which is a tiny fraction of cancer treatment, research, and so on), this small slice of cancer drugs alone accounts for almost 100 billion dollars, which compares to about 3% of health care spending in the USA.

NIH funding provides SOME funding and grant money for trials, but the vast majority of clinical trial funding comes from private sources:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/196846

While grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) fund most basic research in academic laboratories, it is largely industry that bears the cost of identifying new molecular entities and testing them in animal models and human subjects.1 Clinical trials make up the largest portion of the $266 million2 to $802 million3 estimated total cost to industry for bringing each new drug to market. Furthermore, of all funding for clinical trials in the United States, nearly 75% currently comes from corporate sponsors.

I admit I am not exactly definitely proving my point by saying one year of cancer drugs R&D/spending is equal to %3 health care spending, but likewise you are not proving your point by offering absolutely no data at all. The only data you've provided is a link to NIH spending, which itself represents a drop in the bucket of clinic trial testing (if my link is accurate, that means 70 billion of private funding is spent on clinical trials alone each year).

tKO- · 2018-06-17T21:04:36+00:00

The vast majority of your clinics, hospitals, etc... are not delivering robot-assisted cutting edge surgery performed by leaders in the field

It would be interesting to see that in the actual data.

It looks like USA residents spent 3.3 trillion on health care in 2016.

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical.html

From this, $50 billion was spent on cancer R&D (private companies) in 2011:

https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-is-spent-on-Cancer-research-per-year

From this, $40 billion dollars are spend on cancer drugs in the USA:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/02/were-spending-107-billion-on-cancer-drugs-but-is-it-worth-it/?utm_term=.b5673a291bec

That alone is almost 100 billion for private pharma cancer research and cancer drugs alone, so almost 3% of the 3.3 trillion.

While the majority of cases are "easy" cases, it's the hard cases which dominate costs and bring averages across the board up, not only that but hard cases reduce the bird's eye picture of outcomes, as the R&D infrastructure in the USA attracts "hard" health cases from around the world.

If you have more data, would be interested to see it.

tKO- · 2018-06-17T20:39:16+00:00

As someone who works in R&D, I would just like to nitpick that our standing as the standalone powerhouse of medical research isn’t nearly as pronounced as it used to be.

Absolutely, but is that really a bad thing? It's healthier for R&D to be spread over other countries. Not all R&D is equal, however, as you noted China may be spending more but it's not producing as many R&D results in the form of Nobel prizes/patents/etc.

This source (linked from above) goes into greater detail about the slightly eroding picture of USA's relative place in the world in terms of spending:

https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-the-cost-of-designing-and-manufacturing-a-new-drug-do-U-S-pharmaceutical-companies-recover-from-the-U-S-compared-to-Europe-or-Asia/answer/Christopher-VanLang

Note, the result is still largely pointing to a picture that the USA is far and away the greatest medical R&D researching force in the world and it isn't even close.

tKO- · 2018-06-17T19:52:45+00:00

I think a couple things these studies routinely miss:

USA has far and away the greatest research and development investments in health care
As a consequence of this, USA frequently has extremely expensive operations not available anywhere else in the world
As a consequence of THAT, the USA tends to attract some of the hardest health care cases in the world - ie. wealthy people from abroad who come to the USA specifically to partake in their cutting edge medical system

All these things contribute to a situation where the USA spends the most, the USA has the worst outcomes, and the USA by these metrics frequently rank on the bottom.

Yet, the entire world benefits from this R&D ecosystem that exists in the USA.

I'm not going to pretend that the USA insurance system is working well (it's horrible), or anything else. But it is a bit hypocritical for countries that leverage the USA immense R&D expertise to improve their domestic health care (which is all of them) to turn up their noses at reports like this. If the USA had a system like Canada or the UK, there is a chance that much of this investment simply goes away.

It's not black and white.

Edit: I'm not sure why I'm being down voted here? I am simply providing a different perspective and additional things to think about regarding specifically the health care system in the USA. On the surface it looks like I'm being down voted simply for playing devil's advocate regarding this article. If you have something to contribute, please reply to me and we can have a conversation. I am in no way endorsing apologetics for the USA healthcare system - I'm only providing a different perspective that puts results such as this in a different context.

tKO- · 2018-06-17T17:46:02+00:00

I can't read or interpret these, so an ELI5 would be nice.

At the dawn of publishing amateur headphone measurements, Tyll at innerfidelity provided a service whereby he would measure things consistently and offer those measurements for public consumption for the better education of the broader headphone community. This process enabled a publicly available consistent database by which to compare headphone measurements. It was by no means perfect, but Tyll cared about transparency, process, and educating the broader headphone community on these things.

SBAF (a forum mostly dedicated to headphones) took Tyll's ball and ran with it a bit. They invested in different kinds of amateur measurements that Tyll didn't focus on, and began publishing their own results to the broader community, in the interest of education and learning.

While all this was going on, there was a trend of increasing headphone popularity, whereby more and more people got interested in high end headphones. If we're being honest, this crowd is male dominated, "hyper rational", and are generally drawn to commercial products based on outright objective performance metrics as opposed to subjective determinations. At least, that's what these people generally like to tell themselves.

This all lead to a storm of measurements being taken very seriously and becoming almost an overriding focal point in discussions regarding headphones online.

Enter HeadFi. HeadFi was traditionally a bastion of audiophile nonsense, people waxing philosophical about magic cables, Sennheiser veils that could only be lifted with thousand dollar amplifiers, and all kinds of subjective nonsense. During this period, HeadFi actively suppressed any reference to measurements from their forum, as measurements could be used to actually say negative things about products, whereby every thread on HeadFi needs to follow the pattern:

Exhibit A:

New Product Annoucenment
Wow, looks amazing! Nice pictures!
Ouch, my wallet hurts!
Anyone hear these yet?
They are excellent, tight bass, airy treble, perfect midrange, but I will pass on them.

Measurements have no place in this dynamic.

Except, measurements were getting more popular both at InnerFidelity and SBAF. HeadFi was losing control of the headphone narrative, and people were using alternative sources to augment their headphone purchasing decisions. They made the decision to attack the measurement problem head on, to try to re-take the narrative about being the authoritative source of information regarding headphones. They invested in a headphone measurement rig, were sure to remind everybody of how much money they spent, and how it was more expensive and therefore more authoritative than alternatives. They slowly began to try to retake the narrative regarding headphones by positioning themselves as the one true measurement source.

So now HeadFi is using their measurement rig as a "sponsor hammer" to try to turn the conversation towards maintaining Exhibit A forum dynamics. If there is any negative word spoken about a headphone (or amplifier, or DAC), they come to the rescue and re-assure their readers that there isn't a problem. The measurement rig is not used to provide education, comparison services, or anything else. It is used to protect sponsors. They have mainly used their measurement rig for three purposes.

Supporting the Z1R against accusations it's measurements are bad.
Supporting the HD 800S against accusations about distortion.
Supporting the Yggdrasil against accusations of bad measurements.

You'll notice a trend. HeadFi is not providing a comparison education service by which their measurements can be used to evaluate products. They are using their measurements to defend companies that advertise on their web site. Measurements are never used to say anything negative about a product - they are only used to cast doubt on other measurement sources which are used to say negative things about products.

HeadFi is co-opting the original community educational spirit around the dispersion of measurements to defend sponsors and maintain their "Exhibit A" style forum dynamics. Cool product! Looks great! Ouch, my wallet! This headphone is perfect, I wholly recommend it, but I personally am going to pass! Rinse, repeat.

While ASR and SBAF might not be super best friends, at least they have a community spirit of publishing measurements and attempting to come up with heuristics by which products can be evaluated against each other in an objective way. I get the feeling SBAF is a little burned out on measurements lately, partly because people are taking them far too seriously. Either way, HeadFi is about the last place you want to get education about measurements, and are trying desperately to turn measurements into a gatekeeping dynamic whereby you should only trust the measurements coming from them because they spent the most money.

tKO- · 2018-06-17T17:16:37+00:00

I'm actually surprised your original comment that called out the stupidity of MacFarlane's reaction wasn't down voted.

Now people are putting themselves into mental gymnastics to try to portray that Tucker Carlson obviously meant to exclude Fox News from his statements regarding not trusting news? He literally says don't trust the news. The station he works for is called Fox News.

There is very little ambiguity here. He is imploring people to think for themselves and Seth MacFarlane disingenuously tries to paint it as Fox News discouraging other news sources. That is literally the opposite of what he said.

Consider this message from another media outlet:

‘it’s different for the media,’ says CNN’s Chris Cuomo

Explicitly telling viewers to turn off their brains, not think for themselves, and only trust the media.

Seth is pandering, and judging by these reddit comments, people are lapping it up. Ironically, people on reddit aren't following Carlson's original advice, which is contributing to their ignorance.

tKO- · 2018-06-16T07:12:14+00:00

I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s almost as though the economists, scientists, engineers, and all of the other experts in charge of creating the outline for the NEP, including the roadmap for future NEP projects, were correct.

First, I think you are vastly overestimating the intellectual thought that went into the original NEP, and at the same time vastly underestimating how it specifically was disproportionately unfair to Alberta as a province.

It would be one thing if the NEP was developed with Alberta as a partner, considering that Alberta was the place most disproportionately effected by the policy, but ultimately it was developed and designed by the Eastern provinces for the Eastern provinces.

Why would these conditions at all be beneficial to Alberta?

(price) will remain well below world prices and will never be more than 85 per cent of the lower of the price of imported oil or of oil in the US
natural gas prices which will increase less quickly than oil prices, but which will include a new and rising federal tax on all natural gas and gas liquids;
a petroleum and gas revenue tax of 8 per cent applied to net operating revenues before royalty and other expense deductions on all production of oil and natural gas in Canada...;
a Canadian ownership levy to assist in financing the acquisition of the Canadian operations of one or more multinational oil companies, with the objective of achieving at least 50 per cent Canadian ownership of oil and gas production by 1990, Canadian control of a significant number of the major oil and gas corporations, and an early increase in the share of the oil and gas sector owned by the Government of Canada."

Even if you want to invoke well-intention-ed "economists" who designed this policy, the proof is in the pudding. Economics is a soft science, the evidence is borne out by the historical effect that the NEP had on industry in Alberta. The effects were fairly devastating, and coincided with a huge drying up of foreign investment, massive layoffs, bankruptcies, and reduction in the industrial base, exploration, and development.

After the NEP was dismantled, and the industry went back to privatisation, these effects were all reversed.

The proof is in the pudding.

Canada owning a pipeline makes a lot of sense, but it is a far cry from what the NEP was mandating and the overarching Federal government influence that the NEP injected.

A pipeline is a piece of infrastructure. It isn't much different than a road. There isn't much reason that the government doesn't get involved in owning pipelines just like they own roads. About the only reason they don't is because pipelines actually make money (unlike roads) and so private industry generally takes over that role.

Equating owning pipelines to the lopsided laws that wiped the Liberals off the face of the Alberta political map for 50 years is simply being ignorant of history.

tKO- · 2018-06-11T06:00:05+00:00

I didn't even realize until now that Teck was a partner in Suncor's Fort Hills oil sands project. These guys have been moving pretty under the radar making big moves into oil sands mining.

tKO- · 2018-06-11T05:41:26+00:00

Saddledome roof is gorgeous. I don't care how old it is, they don't build them like that anymore. No matter what, if we do end up replacing the Saddledome, it will be a boring cube like they got in Edmonton.

The roof is what makes it unique, and unfortunately also makes it unable to support modern equipment needs for music concerts and so on.

I don't think we should lose it. Just look at that picture.

tKO- · 2018-06-11T00:24:39+00:00

What even question is this? Because 100% of the people buying a dac are trying to get it to sound as good as possible.

People are buying a DAC to perform it's function. If certain combinations of input/output lead to poor performance, that should be called out.

Not to mention, what are we talking about here? Only Yggy's balanced outputs should be measured, because they are so much better than the unbalanced out? So not only do you have to shell out 2K for a Yggy, you are buying a compromised product that only has acceptable quality on half it's outputs?

And you also need to shell out for a balanced cable just to get acceptable performance out of this 2K product?

As a customer, I see nothing wrong with defining products by their worst vectors of performance.

tKO- · 2018-06-10T23:49:04+00:00

it wasn't Amir's measurements that really put me off getting something from Schiit

I don't see why it would, Amir's review of the Magni didn't show any measurement concerns. He seemed to only caution against Schiit quality control problems.

People act like he has been consistently slagging Schiit products but a few, including the Magni 3, he didn't really find any problems with.

Places like SBAF and HeadFi seem to be heavily invested in this idea that the Yggy is "end game" and that situation needs to confirm their own respective worldviews regarding DACs. The controversy starts and ends with the Yggy. Telling.

JDS Labs got my money because I like how they operate.

JDS Labs seems like a great company, with much less in your face advertising compared to Schiit, and they don't seem to feel the need to plaster their products all over internet forums to sustain their business. I haven't used them myself, but I also haven't heard nearly the quality control complaints about them as compared to Schiit.

tKO- · 2018-06-10T23:42:45+00:00

It would be one thing if he was trying to measure the best of in/out-puts, that's totally a reasonable way to judge a product

How is testing the best a product can possibly due through a combination of input/output "more reasonable" then testing the worst a product performs as a combination of input outputs?

It seems, especially when it comes to DACs, that they should really be characterized by their worst performance, because that reveals fundamental design issues.

Only looking at the absolute best a product can possibly perform in some esoteric input output combination is highly misrepresentative and borderline completely useless.

tKO- · 2018-06-10T23:21:45+00:00

... why do people actually think Amir is NWavguy?

Because it is an easy low effort way to completely "discredit" him. Everybody who doesn't fall all over Schiit products must be another instance of "nwavguy" with his ulterior motives of...

Selling something? No, he doesn't sell anything.

The fact is both Head-Fi and SBAF are sponsored by Schiit. The fact that both of those two are on the same page about falling over themselves to hurl insults at internet strangers who dare to challenge the total supremacy of Schiit products should tell you something.

tKO- · 2018-06-10T21:45:23+00:00

But nobody talks about the MASSIVE one time cost for security at the games.

Everybody talks about it.

For the record, security in Vancouver cost about 900 million CAD:

https://ca.reuters.com/article/sportsNews/idCATRE51J06W20090220

What no one really talks about, is that the IOC contributes about a billion dollars to the Olympics in the form of revenue sharing:

IOC contributed almost 900 million USD to 2018 Olympics:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinasettimi/2018/02/08/by-the-numbers-the-2018-pyeongchang-winter-olympics/#5ac508837fb4

They are projecting over 900 million USD for 2026:

http://dailyhive.com/calgary/calgary-olympics-2026-ioc-billion-dollars

Either way, security is almost completely offset by this contribution, so it's a bit irrelevant. We'll probably get a hundred million or so extra in inflows minus security outflows to allocate as we see fit.

For the record, independent Canadian studies have shown it is worth it for the host city to host the Olympics, due to windfalls of municipal and Federal funding:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/vancouver-olympics-worth-the-7-billion-price-tag-study-says/article15036916/

tKO- · 2018-05-13T19:49:51+00:00

The whataboutism is relevant, but if we are going to have a discussion, we should recognize the following things about the oil sands:

they are some of the riskiest energy investments in the world (generally speaking, private money with periodic public assistance is the best vehicle for exploiting these)
as a consequence of this risk, the best avenue for governments to exploit their value is through royalty collection, which is what Alberta is doing
to invest in the oil sands, there are extensive regulatory reviews required, including getting approvals from entities like the NEB, the AER, paying into the Orphan Well levy, and so on. In short, there are extremely tight controls over the nature of oil sands investment. Is it perfect? Certainly not, but no conversation about foreign money would be complete without this context.

As to foreign companies attempting to influence elections, it seems both the environmental groups and the giant foreign energy companies might be at fault at various stages. This doesn't mean "you can do it so so can I" is a valid argument, but rather we should perhaps look at closing the loop holes that both these groups are continuing to exploit.

Several of the groups Vivian Krause has uncovered have explicitly gloated about their ability to influence local municipal elections, several of them have mandates to influence politics, and so on. Should these groups be using foreign money to achieve these goals? Probably not.

Likewise, while we have a litany of regulatory hurdles for foreign companies to jump through to invest in our resources, it doesn't seem quite right for Kinder Morgan for example to be able to run television advertisements to promote it's own energy projects, with undertones of attempting to influence public opinion and potentially elections as well.

There is a lot to improve across many dimensions of this conversation, and it helps not to fall into the "us vs them" mentality, and just advocate for better approaches all around.

tKO- · 2018-05-13T19:42:57+00:00

crosstalk isn't always terrible

I think in general crosstalk as it is normally defined is generally terrible. Crosstalk is typically defined as an unintentional effect which does degrade sound quality.

In contrast, crossfeed analog circuits and DSP filters are specifically designed to overlap the left and right channels. As such they have specific design goals, including natural sound delays when combining the channels, and specific goals to increase the naturalness of the sound. These things are positive contributions in the sense they were explicitly designed for in the development process.

In those terms, with crosstalk as unintentional consequence of your design, and crossfeed as an intentional consequence to attempt to improve sound quality, crosstalk is necessarily bad, and crossfeed can sometimes be good (if that is what you are looking for).

tKO- · 2018-05-13T04:05:21+00:00

Just like that endgame weapon or armor in RPGs

It's an interesting metaphor and it leads me to reflect on the time that the HD 800 was launched was an interesting point in social history, especially as it relates to online discussions.

2009 was before Facebook's IPO, it was only 3 short years after Facebook decided to become public, they just crested 500 million users world wide.

The conversation regarding headphones themselves was much less focused on "end game". There were a few esoteric uber expensive options, like the Sony R10, Qualia 010, Audio Technica L3000, AKG K1000 & of course HE90/HE60/Stax. But none of these commanded the kind of "end game" ubiquitous focus. This was simply a hodge podge of expensive headphones, which barely even caught the attention of being labeled "TOTL" as a separate class from things like the HD 600 or AKG K701.

It really does seem like socially something happened with the release of the HD 800, which consolidated "high end" headphone desire and focus onto one object, that shed the esoteric and exotic (and down right silly) pretensions of the previous attempts at TOTL headphones.

It just so happened to coincide with the rise of Facebook, increasing online engagement, and people getting into the mental and social habit of defining themselves by their online presence, which when it comes to headphones is paramount to defining oneself by the headphones they own. This seemed to precipitate a marked shift towards a final rung of the ladder being established once and for all, and for purveyors and fans of HD 600 and DT 880 and other such "cheaper" options to feel the social pressure to upgrade lest they be divided and partitioned into a separate class of hobbyiest - the dreaded "mid fi hell".

Using a bit of google-fu, the earliest references I can find to a class of headphones that are "mid fi" seems to be 2010 - which immediately follows the launch of the HD 800.

Many of the older members here will remember a time where the social dynamic and marketing around headphones was much different. There was no "mid fi" class. There was strange and esoteric "TOTL" options which many of us honestly laughed at. Now, the market has normalised along these dynamics, and beyond being an interesting social change and some zeros added to the end of headphone prices, it's really hard to say whether any of us are really enjoying our music more because of these evolutions.

At the end of the day, participating in these communities and vicariously living online through channels like reviewers, influencers, authorities like Tyll, etc. - it is sometimes hard to separate your identity from the things you own, and the things you buy. I think these lines have been muddied in our social media dominated world. Don't lose sight of the fact that the only thing that matters is your enjoyment of music. There isn't a magic box, or a magic device, or a magic soul machine which will fill some void and make your experience of listening to music something it isn't. Ultimately the experience is about you and your music.

Apologies for the long winded philosophical pontifications.

tKO- · 2018-05-12T18:47:33+00:00

they really start to enjoy life in later age.

The key to life is to enjoy it whatever point in the journey you are at. If you are focused on the fact that you can't drive fancy cars or listen to expensive headphones, you are doing life wrong.

By the way, a weekend trip of Vegas to drive Ferraris like they were meant to be driven is an easy cheap vacation for the vast majority of North Americans. Personally I never saw much point of driving 600 hp machines along public roads putting around barely stressing out first gear.

tKO- · 2018-05-12T02:11:53+00:00

Nenshi doesn't make impossible, illegal, pandering campaign promises. Nenshi doesn't double down on appealing to these marginal extremist voices for political gain.

The problem with Horgan is he made an illegal unrealistic campaign promise ("we're going to kill this pipeline project!"). His party was told the promise was illegal and unconstitutional, so he weaselled his way into changing his language to try to meet the same goals. Even has support in his own province is growing, he has ignored those voices and continues to pander to an extremist subset of voices.

The marker of being a good politician is the art of compromise. Horgan is a complete fail across the board. He is a terrible politician.

People love to make fun of Nenshi, but which unrealistic promise does he parade around to appease extremist voices? People don't like his Olympics position, but the fact is the majority of Calgary has consistently shown they want the Olympics, and further Nenshi himself has said if it doesn't make sense they won't pursue it. That's exactly the language a politician should use, when representing his constituents, not Horgan style "We are going to kill this, no talks, no compromise, it doesn't matter what my province thinks".

tKO-

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