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The Old Hack

Political Discussion Thread (READ FIRST POST)

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The issue with disability insurance is another one of those situations where all it takes are people willing to abuse the system to ruin it for those that actually do need it. And most often, so-called solutions to prevent just anyone from claiming disability is to make everyone jump through as many hoops as possible to filter out freeloader, but even those with actual disabilities might be scared to apply because what if something they put in the forms isn't enough to approve the claim.

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18 minutes ago, Scotty said:

... but even those with actual disabilities might be scared to apply because what if something they put in the forms isn't enough to approve the claim.

This. Or, what I put something in the forms that throws up a red flag and disqualifies me?

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Today is Memorial Day in America.  If you know a veteran, ask them about missing friends and listen to them.  If it is in your belief system, ask if you can pray for them.

Don't thank the living veteran for their service any more than you would normally.

  Memorial Day is for the dead. 

Veteran's day is for all the veterans died or alive.

The fact that November 11 is Memorial/Remberance day in most of the non-American Anglosphere causes some confusion in some places.

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So the Ontario provincial government decided that a great way to use taxpayer's money and corporate sponsorships to help celebrate Canada's 150th birthday, would be to haul a 6 story tall 13600kg rubber duck through the Great Lakes, stopping at 6 ports along the way to allow people to take selfies with it. What the heck does a giant rubber duck have to do with Canada? This is the same provincial government that decided to sell power generated by all the new wind turbines built around here to the US and buy power for Ontario residents from Quebec which drove the cost of power up...

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sounds like the same sort of government intelligence we get here in the US...

 

 

... and some people think the government should be running even more stuff, and messing even more with the stuff it doesn't directly run.

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We can probably argue till the cows come home whether global warming is real or not, but how people can argue that pollution isn't bad for us is just baffling to me.....

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It may be in what is considered "pollution". After all, the poison is in the dosage. We wouldn't want to dump a city's daily production of raw sewage into the middle of a forest, but bears dump raw sewage in the forest all the time.

The US's EPA frequently tries to adopt absurdly strict standards, and for that matter has been known to deliberately distort scientific processes and results to produce a desired outcome. The FDA does the same.

It would be difficult to locate a nuclear reactor in the vicinity of Denver Colorado because the standards for the amount of radioactivity allowed in air discharged from any of the reactor-related buildings are so strict, the natural air in the same area is non-compliant. And yet the various conditions that the strict standards are supposed to prevent are no more prevalent there than elsewhere in the US.

The City of Seattle has, scattered around town, a number of water reservoirs that are open to the sky. One time a young man was caught urinating in one of them. They had to turn off water outflow from that reservoir, find a way to divert its entire contents into the sewer system, treat all its surfaces with antibacterial agents, and refill it before it could be put back into service. (Note: absent a kidney, bladder, or urinary-tract infection, urine is sterile. And there was probably less than a tenth of a liter of urine in several hundred thousand liters of water.) And yet, there are numerous species of birds flying over these reservoirs, and water-birds landing in them, all the time, and that is not a sanitation problem that requires any special measures.

In summary: just because someone calls something pollution, doesn't prove that it IS pollution, let alone that it's pollution of a level we need to do anything about.

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5 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

It may be in what is considered "pollution". After all, the poison is in the dosage. We wouldn't want to dump a city's daily production of raw sewage into the middle of a forest, but bears dump raw sewage in the forest all the time.

How many bears are there in the US vs how many people there are in the US? It's one thing for all the bears to take a dump in a forest, but another for all the people to take a dump in a forest.  Back in the late 1800's English slums were known to have poor sanitary conditions, there was no proper plumbing and sewage removal and heavy rains caused the streets to be flooded with waste. There was even a time when all that sewage was getting dumped in the Thames which cause high levels of disease because people drank from and bathed with water from the same river.

What I'm worried about is the message being sent with the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement and such would be like telling everyone "Hey, climate chance isn't real, so go ahead and burn your old tires and dump your waste in the nearest pond, it'll be fine!"

As for the Seattle example, yeah I'll agree that they're being pretty selective when it comes to what's considered contamination, to be honest, the reservoirs should be closed to the sky to prevent animals, birds and whatnot from contaminating the water. For me, we get our drinking water from Lake Huron so it's about as prone to all sorts of contaminants, but the pumping/treatment station has a number of filtration and sterilization systems to make sure it's as clean as possible for human consumption. Some areas get their water from underground sources and need to be monitored constantly for stuff like E.Coli that occurs from sewage getting into the water supply, either from Human waste or run off from large scale livestock farms. The biggest case in recent history for Canada at least is the Walkerton tragedy where E.Coli levels weren't monitored properly which lead to thousands getting sick while those that were in charge of maintaining the system kept saying nothing was wrong. What happened in Walkerton is pretty much the reason why regulations needs to be strict.

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15 hours ago, Scotty said:

What I'm worried about is the message being sent with the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement and such would be like telling everyone "Hey, climate chance isn't real, so go ahead and burn your old tires and dump your waste in the nearest pond, it'll be fine!"

I am not a fan of the US unnecessarily further hobbling its economy in order to set a good example, so pulling out of the Paris Agreement makes sense.  Same reason why I was happy to see GW Bush pull the US out of Kyoto. 

The US example continues to be reducing emissions without being hamstrung by treaty.  That seems a reasonable example to follow.

If we're looking for bad examples, Paris pretty much lets China and India do whatever they want.  They get gold stars just for showing up.  The US will make more emission reductions outside the Paris framework than either China or India will make inside it.

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Action would hobble and hamstring us, yet without doing any of that, we'll still be reducing more than China's going to? That sounds very doubtful. Compare China's goal of 64% reduction from 2005 levels by 2030 to the goal you just said would hamstring us, to reduce by 28% from 2005 levels. So either China has to not just fail a little but completely in reducing, in which case Paris wasn't actually bad to be in anyway - or we utterly clobber our Paris goal without trouble.

Which is it?

http://www.climateactiontracker.org/countries/china.html

http://www.climateactiontracker.org/countries/usa.html

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China isn't doing anything for Paris that they weren't going to do anyway.  Their emission targets are where their build projects are already going to put them anyway.

So any voluntary effort the US puts into emission control by definition beats the no-effort china is putting forth.

It also artificially helps China's numbers that they are far worse polluters and carbon-emitters than the US.  We've gone after most of the low-hanging fruit that China still needs to work on.

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It also artificially helps China's numbers that they are far worse polluters and carbon-emitters than the US

 

We have roughly 2.5 times China's carbon emissions per capita, and that's without taking into account supply-chaining (in which if they build something we consume, it would count towards us).

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3 hours ago, Drachefly said:

 

We have roughly 2.5 times China's carbon emissions per capita, and that's without taking into account supply-chaining (in which if they build something we consume, it would count towards us).

china, the carp in the air's so thick you could probably watch an eclipse safely with no eye protection.  That's not true anymore in the US, I don't think even in LA.

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In some potentially lighter political news, the Canadian government has been doing some cleaning up of the Criminal Code.

For the more serious part, they've made it clearer that a rape victim's past sexual history can't be used against them by the defense. There had been a long standing belief of what's now referred to as The Twin Myths, in that 1) past sexual activity made it more likely the victim consented to the act and 2) that past sexual activity made a claim less believable. Basically this would hopefully lessen the fear a victim might have in being judged unfairly.

 

In the more amusing aspect, it is now no longer illegal to practice witchcraft and sorcery. :)

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24 minutes ago, Scotty said:

In the more amusing aspect, it is now no longer illegal to practice witchcraft and sorcery. :)

Amusing, perhaps, but a legitimate advancement in religious freedom, thinking pagan denominations in particular here.

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5 minutes ago, HarJIT said:

Amusing, perhaps, but a legitimate advancement in religious freedom, thinking pagan denominations in particular here.

I know, I was mainly amused by the differing responses to the changes, on the sexual assault aspect, a lot of the responses were positive and serious. But for the witchcraft aspect it several responses were similar to what ToH joked about in the "annoying" thread.

Also something I just noticed that ToH might appreciate is that Canada is repealing blasphemy laws which Denmark apparently just did as well, the law prevented screenings of Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" in Sault-Ste-Marie when it was released in 1980.

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9 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Agreed. In fact, I believe Vorlonagent may be too conservative in his estimate. I suspect they will be repeating not merely the important points but also the lesser ones well into next week.

Meanwhile in the UK, the election votes are being counted.

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2 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

Ohmydearlord.

One has to wonder ... who did the firing? Did they shoot their own?

The Moderator: I request of all of you to be exceedingly careful about how you discuss this latest horror. Please, no accusations. No matter who shot at whom, I cannot and will not view this as an act of politics but rather as an act of violence done by a very disturbed individual. To me, it is entirely irrelevant what party the victims belonged to and nor will I view the shooter as an agent of any political party. If anything, this was an act calculated to injure democracy itself. That is all.

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54 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

The Moderator: I request of all of you to be exceedingly careful about how you discuss this latest horror. Please, no accusations. No matter who shot at whom, I cannot and will not view this as an act of politics but rather as an act of violence done by a very disturbed individual. To me, it is entirely irrelevant what party the victims belonged to and nor will I view the shooter as an agent of any political party. If anything, this was an act calculated to injure democracy itself. That is all.

Of course. As the facts come to light, your words gain more weight. The shooter was a man who was seriously mentally disturbed.

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