Someone might want to inform the CRTC bureaucrats of the consequences of pissing off at least 4-million voters — election of the party that promises to rid us of the CRTC. (Really, this would be about 25% of the electorate assuming that each Canadian Netflix account corresponds to a household with 1.6 voters.)

Gouge us, go to war, waste tens of billions of dollars, the public doesn't care. But cut off our entertainment — it's torches-and-pitchforks time!

Buzz never punched anybody! The tape was faked! You can see that the shadows are all wrong!

Who determines the IPO price? The underwriters.

My point is that it should be The Market that determines the IPO price(s), not the necessarily incompetent and corrupt Central Planners. You'd think these guys ever heard of a little thing called the Free Market and the regulators would have an obligation to ensure that a Free Market is provided to the public?

So they get their "canadian content" that way.

Except that the simulcast material is *American* content. Its origin doesn't change just because it's been licensed by Canadian channels for broadcast in Canada. I haven't read the rules, but counting commercials as Can-Con would be pure lunacy. In fact, it would allow all Canadian channels to carry nothing but American content all of the time, defeating any pretense of Can-Con requirements actually existing.

The IPO also wasted nearly $10B considering that the issue price was $68 and it started trading at $95. I just can't understand the logic behind the IPO mechanism. The purpose of an IPO is to raise as much capital as possible for a company to enable it to grow. However, 41% of the IPO value didn't go to the company; it went to lottery-winning middle men who were given shares for $68 and immediately flipped them to the open market.

An IPO should operate like a Dutch auction, with company having a trading account loaded with all of the IPO shares and starting sale for at a high valuation like $200 and then ticking down 1% every minute that "too few" shares are sold. This maximizes the haul for the IPO company by not squandering billions of dollars on bank insiders.

Huh? The American networks as carried in Canada do not have 50% Canadian content in prime time. In fact, it's probably zero percent.

I can't understand why the UK is playing along with the 50%+1 idea. It is illegitimate. All Constitutional changes require a supermajority and this is the most fundamental of all Constitutional changes. Canada dispensed with the 50%+1 foolishness after the 1995 Quebec referendum with the Clarity Act which quashes all hope for legal secession (since no more than 40% of Quebeckers have ever really supported secession). A simple 50%+1 majority would surely disappear in the face of the years of economically disruptive negotiations, capital flight, and population flight. (On second though, the latter might help the Yes side.)

If the UK is divisible, then so is Scotland. What do the people who live near the oil think about independence?

This project was very successful, considering that the central purpose of all alternative-energy projects is to extract government subsidies. Any other outcome is coincidental.

I think that a fair way to approach taxation for multinational corporations would be to tax the revenue/profits earned in each tax jurisdiction according to that jurisdiction's rules. Instead of the concept of a jurisdiction providing services to enable corporate operations, view it as the jurisdiction providing consumers to corporations. That way, profits Apple earns from consumers within California are taxed the same way even if Apple moved all of its operations to Ireland. However, to avoid the huge burden on small companies from reporting to several hundred tax jurisdictions, set a lower limit that jurisdiction reporting is only required when revenues from a jurisdiction reach $20M for a company (or whole aggregation of shell corporations).

opened the floodgates for "... on a computer" patents

followed by new patents on the same old ideas for "... on the web", "... on a smartphone", etc.

And jetliners. They need to run on batteries, too! Because I say so!

You get total emissions by taking per-capita emissions and multiplying it by "capitas". Do you see how that has a big impact with China's number of "capitas"?

Why is a taxpayer-funded broadcaster even allowed to own copyrights in the first place?

The cameras are likely to "accidentally" break anyway

The won't be "accidentally" breaking when the perp is actually being belligerant, which is most of the time there is an incident. If we were to posit that the cop is telling the truth in the Michael Brown case, the weeks of disruption, rioting, looting, vandalism, and arson could have been obviated by the timely release of the video.