Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
It rains everyday so we are used to it and can cope (although in true "British" Columbia style it grinds to a halt with 1/4" of snow)
Rents are only slightly outrageous, the secret is to build high rises at transit stations and in the downtown core, although house price are eye-watering to anyone not from London.
Lots of smart people, the city is majority ethnic groups that stereo-typically do well in school, and the country is prepared to let more skilled workers in. Best scenery in North America and food that is the natural result of taking everything UKIP hate and putting them in one city.
Only drawback is that the pay is 1/2 that of silicon valley because everyone wants to live here and Canadians are too polite to ask for a raise.
I cycle to work everyday and I have ignored a crying kid who fell off their bike for the same reason.
If they were crying I assume they were breathing - if they had been completely still I might have stopped. It's become one of the rules of modern life in the UK - you don't talk to the police + you cross the road if you see a young child alone.
Glad I left.
>It's not like terrorism is a new thing, and we handled it perfectly well in the '70s and '80s when the IRA were blowing things up, without any of these new laws.
Although we did have laws allowing us to round up and intern people without charge or trail based on their ethnicity.
We also took the same uncharged presumed-innocent people up in helicopters, put hoods over their heads and threw them out. They were only a few feet off the ground so it was classsified as "enhanced questioning" rather than torture by the inquiry, although the eu and Irish govts disagree.
It's also because the BBC doesn't make programs it buys them.
I make pop-idol-bake-off-challenge-in-the-attic-on-ice and I offer ti to the BBC for X pounds and Canada for $Y and Australia for $Z - if the BBC says it is going to charge people in Australia and Canada to watch it on iPlayer then I'm going to charge the BBC X+Y+Z to make up for my lost revenue.
But it does get silly - I can't download an episode of some 30year old radio comedy because there is a bit of music in the background that the BBC don't have international rights to - or they don't want to spend a year of lawyers and 1000s to find out who owns it, played on it, arranged it, etc etc
For profit isn't necessarily inefficient and government isn't necessarily cheaper.
Here car insurance is a govt monopoly - everybody pays the same irrespective of what car you drive or how old you are. The only weighting is years of no-claims.
The result is that with max no-claims I pay >$1500 vs <$300 in the UK. Partly this subsidizes 17year olds being given Ferraris on their birthday but mostly it subsidizes the large "transfer payments" the government makes from the coffers of the insurance corporation to the treasury.
One claim was that if the US introduced free-at-point health care for everyone as in the NHS or Canada it would actually save money - because it covers so much of the healthcare anyway but does it at $50/aspirin hospital rates.
There was a bill to allow the VA and DoD to act together and use their buying power to force down the price of drugs they buy as you might do in a free market capitalist country. But it was blocked, seems the army don't pay as many lobbyists as the drug companies.
Worked for a company making environmental monitoring.
We had a call from a mine in Canada that needed a blast effects monitor urgently - so urgently they needed the manual scanning and emailing so they could learn to use it in advance.n
Got a call at 2 in the morning.
>It won't turn on.
Did you charge the battery for 24 hours like it says in the manual (we can't ship the internal battery charged)?
>No as soon as it arrived we took it underground to use.
Try connecting the charger it should run anyway.
> No there is no power - I need you to fix it now. We need to blast in the next hour.
So you are 5000 miles away, a mile underground, no power and the battery isn't charged - exactly what do you expect me to do ?
....
Your entire civil aviation, maritime transport, emergency services, road pricing, traffic management relies on a system which a semi-friendly country can turn off the next time you don't allow GM foods or hormone dosed meat into the eu ?
Or if you decline the opportunity to take part in their latest war then can not only call you cheese-eating surrender monkeys - but also shut down your transport infrastructure.
Schemes which are solely designed to reduce tax - like a certain software company charging itself 100quid/copy for the rights to the name which is held by a Cayman island company - are illegal.
So if a government was prepared to stand upto a business it might decide that a swiss subsidiary charging 2.50 for 25p worth of beans might just be evasion in the same way as Jimmy Carr being paid in interest free loans
>"costs paid to any company in the same legal group (ie. parent company, company owned by the same > parent company, subsidiary etc...) do not count as costs for taxation purposes in the UK",
Might make it tricky to sell petrol if you can't count the cost of the oil and refining and have to pay 25% of the price at the pump along with the other 75% petrol tax
That's because there is a a lot of case law about safe makers and safe owners being forced to help open a safe for the police.
There is even more case law preventing courts demanding people admit what they meant by some writing's hidden meaning.
The feds are being careful to phrase this in terms of "it's just unlocking a safe" rather than George Washington being made to read all his private correspondence out to the British.
> not even Congress has been able to get around someone answering, "I plea the Fifth."
Although the "put a bag over your head and a secret flight to a secret prison in Syria then attach electrodes to you" policy was a sort of way of getting around it.
Because "All possible assistance" could include requiring Apple to send a copy of your key to Langley. After all you don't want to be aiding terrorism/drug smuggling/child porn/stepping on the cracks in the pavement - do you?
And of course once fitted the feature will be available to other partners, like the police, IRS, INS etc. then other governments are going to want it. Hey Apple, want to sell in China/Russia/South America - well we want access to the same keys.
Changing the ecosystem of millions of cubic miles of seawater will no have no unexpected side effects - like say toxic algea blooms migrating to kill the fishing crop of a whole continent - because sudden giant man-made changes to ecosystems have always worked well.
Then of course it also means we can up our CO2 production because now we have a solution. If this can absorb 2x Britain's usage then Britain can obviously double its CO2 output, and since the solution isn't just Britain's - so can every other country in europe. And as this is in the Pacific then China and the USA can both increase their use of coal as well.
Fortunately this will be decided by economics - one group who are experts in the accurate long term prediction of complex systems and spotting unforseen side-effects.
Will we see a national strike of imagineering consultants?
Will there be benefits all over South Yorkshire to support the strikers?
Will we see police batton charges outside silicon Roundabout coffee shops?
Will police stop cars containing people with rimless glasses and goatees.
Why spend money on a government department whose only job is to point out the obvious fact that your last massive IT project was a colossal waste of money ?
Everybody knows it will be a colossal waste of money as soon as it's announced - so why employ expensive specialists to tell you afterwards?
There won't be anybody on the course not on the scheme.
Certain universities will be quick to "customise" degrees to fit this funding in partnership with specific employers. Some of this will be good - you will have engineering degrees specifically on fixing RR engines at whatever Derby Tech is called today.
But mostly you will have degrees in web design in partnership with some temp agency who farms the students out to different clients for a few months.
The real problem will be who is guaranteeing the scheme? 2 years into your sandwich the government changes the tax rules or the company decides to make cuts and you are suddenly hit with tuition fees for the remainder of the course or the uni just scraps it because it doesn't have a partner.
