So far we're kind of getting by.
I don't hold out much hope, though, because the rich, the powerful, and the politicians all seem to want strictly private healthcare while the vast majority of the population wants not just effective and accessible public healthcare, but to expand coverage to dental, vision, hearing, and pharmaceuticals.
Never mind the hardships that come from transitioning to a different system, the usual result of this kind of disconnect is violent revolution.
I agree, but until we're a lot closer to zero carbon emissions than we are now, capture technology should be treated as research. Prototypes, even proof of scalability prototypes are fine, but they should not be sucking resources from emission reduction or, worse, trying to replace emission reduction.
Oh yes, the term limits should be reduced. But one thing I like about the appointment system (also easily managed under sortition) is that individual terms are just that, individual. That is, there isn't a wholesale sweep of all sitting members at once, the way there is with Parliament.
I don't know how something like that could be managed in a purely elected body and think it's worth keeping. I suppose there wouldn't really be a problem with having everyone elected via what we now call byelection.
That makes me wonder if party politics, campaigning, and electioneering would change if Parliamentary terms were individualized instead of globalized to the Parliament as a whole.
In principle, I like the idea of having a check on Parliament. Not a block that can prevent things from happening, but something that can slow things down a bit when necessary and maybe cause Parliament to rethink what they're up to or moderate their actions. In general, I think the Senate is reasonably effective at that.
In principle, I like the idea of some kind of regional representation. Not so much that the province with small populations can stand in the way of sound national policy, but enough to limit the exploitation of those provinces in favour of the ones with larger populations. I'm not sure that the Senate has been as effective in that regard as it could have been.
I really like the idea that no Senator can be an active member of any political party. They should all sit as independents. In fact, I would argue that no Senator should ever have been sitting member of Parliament, and maybe not even held party membership for at least a decade.
Finally, I would like to experiment with sortition (random selection instead of political appointments or elections) and a properly constrained, yet not powerless Senate seems like the perfect place to try it out.
I don't know if this counts but I'm one of those nutters who has no images on either. Just pure black screens.
Come to think of it, maybe they are images. I remember taking a photo with the lens completely covered for something...
Yup, no spine and maybe no ethics. Sometimes you have to do what is right, regardless of the consequences to yourself. Every ethical person knows that and every ethical person with a spine sucks it up and makes it happen.
I'm a member of a generation whose wealth is tied up in home ownership. I say let 'er rip!
We can't keep putting off a fix forever, so the earlier we tackle it, the better. No matter what we do, someone has to suffer, at least a little bit, so get it over with.
There is also plenty of money available to help ease the suffering if only we had the courage to tax properly.
It also might not hurt to let the institutional lenders and the investment class just eat some losses.
What I find kind of amusing in a "no, I'm not actually a Luddite" kind of way is that I make plenty of use of mapping, but very little of GPS. Oh, I definitely use it to pinpoint me on the maps I've downloaded, but I've only used turn by turn navigation a couple of times just to see what it's like. My normal procedure hasn't changed since I was a kid playing "turn by turn navigator" on family trips: pull out the appropriate map, figure out where we are, figure out where we want to go, eyeball a route while noting general direction and guesstimated travel time, pick out a few things that will signal we've gone off track somewhere, and go.
I spend enough time in places where there is no cell signal that I always have downloaded maps available and refresh them before I might have to depend on them, the same way I used to stop at gas stations and tourist information booths to pick up current maps.
My primary use for GPS is to track my routes on the water and my fishing spots and, to a lesser extent my hiking, neither of which actually requires actual charts or maps. Although I do find the charts and maps useful.
In a sense, yes, especially if they've been in use for a very long time. Normally, when people speak of "historic" cemeteries, they're talking about ones that haven't seen any use for many decades.
I live within about 100 km of a dozen or so rural cemeteries. Easily half haven't been used for 30+ years. Even though the active ones have interments that might be older than the oldest in the unused ones, it's the unused ones, associated with families and communities that no longer exist, that are considered historic.
Just be careful out there! Apparently bears have vision comparable to humans, making hot pink more visible to them than blaze orange.
As a former hunter, I was intrigued, so I did a bit of searching. Most of the articles suggested that the testing had been done and that hot pink might actually be superior to blaze orange. It's supposedly more visible to humans and less visible to the main big game animals.
And then we have the agricultural regions of Saskatchewan, where the only water that doesn't fall from the sky has to flow through Alberta first. So far, Alberta and Saskatchewan seem to have been mostly sharing the pain, but I can't help thinking that those days are coming to an end.