I'll admit I should have granted more leniency because the OP mentioned Gore, and as such was already political. But you still took the opportunity to take a shot at Obama and talk about Agenda 21 and I don't see why were either of those were relevant. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with talking about either in general, but when you take a comment with political content and respond by injecting additional political commentary it suggests you're more interested in the politics than the science.

I wasn't projecting anything. You may not be partisan in the sense of Republican/Democrat but the fact your comment grinds unrelated policial axes suggests that ideology is very present, at least in the context of that comment.

Sea ice is irrelevant to sea levels.

Land ice matters for sea levels, and the land ice is shrinking.

Only four sentences and you find time to take unrelated shots at Obama and the UN (Agenda 21).

Why do I get the feeling your opinions are driven by partisanship instead of science and economics?

Why are you talking about the Arctic in an article about the Antarctic?

Furthermore why are you talking about Al Gore and models? Sure Gore is somewhat important in his role as an advocate, but Al Gore saying something wrong doesn't mean the models are wrong, it's means Al Gore is a politician who doesn't know the science. I'm not up to date on the models but I never got the impression that an ice free artic in this timeframe was the consensus of the scientists (sure, some thought it could happen, but that's not the same thing).

Btw, on that topic the Arctic ice is still shrinking.

A process only aided by the Conservatives extreme reluctance to do anything about global warming. It's actually kinda brilliant.

Step 1) Deny climate change

Step 2) Northwest passage opens up

Step 3) Profit!!!

Nm, I did specify 'we' when referring to Canada so you're likely referring to the US. Which would be odd because unlike Lithuania or Kyrgyzstan the one thing you can be assured of is everyone does know a ton about your country.

Not to sound confused, but which country are you talking about?

True but that's the case for any kind of business with international customers.

That's actually got me wondering why politicians always talk about job creation when selling film and television subsidies since the underlying economics are so dodgy. It seems the true reason for subsidies is the cultural benefit from having a healthy film industry.

Some people think Canadians are extraordinarily nice for how we deal with people like this, the truth is we simply have different ways of dealing with problems.

Consider the topic of justice and how to deal with bad people. The US is big into angry retributions and capital punishment, making sure people are punished harshly and everybody knows it.

Canada on the other hand simply tries to put bad people in a place where they don't bother anyone, and when someone does have to be punished we don't talk about it as much. In fact we're big believers in rehabilitation. Quite often we'll give the guilty something they really really want, hoping that in time they'll realize how terrible it is and discover the error of their ways.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I understand your anger and I'm sorry, we both know the US has been responsible for some terrible things, global warming, the Iraq War, NSA spying, etc, the list goes on for a while.

But sending Justin Beiber was definitely overkill.

I think regulating Google and Netflix is a really bad idea but I think there's a defensible motive in trying to promote Canadian content and defend Canadian content providers.

I'm not sure Americans really understand what it's like for smaller countries who lack the population or money to compete with American media productions. People get so much culture from television that it's hard to maintain a national identity when there's a US megaphone next door that dominates mass media. In some ways a well functioning film industry is as important as a military. Just look at what's happening in Ukraine, the rebellion is most certainly not fuelled by East Ukrainians, however it would be hard for Russia to do what it's doing without the support of an East Ukrainian minority who feels closer to Russia and is scared by Kiev. Almost certainly Russia's game would be much more difficult if Ukraine had a mass media strong enough to forge a strong national identity in East Ukraine.

That being said I'm not sure how this works on the Internet, but smaller countries do have a reason to worry about getting swamped by culture from American websites.

There's lots of unethical practices that corporations avoid as a matter of good PR.

Imagine if exploiting tax loopholes was so socially unacceptable that corporations lost more money than they'd make through lost sales.

Partly, but there's also a possibility that the legislation is fairly well written and closing these loopholes would cause even more serious problems.

There's also the possibility that the legislation is terribly written, and by choosing a well defined high profile target (Microsoft) they can create enough political will to fix the legislation.

Yeah, I read some of the post you linked.

So you seem to think that the 16th amendment only defines income in an incredibly narrow manner, granting the government very limited power to tax the income of corporations and none to tax individuals. You base this on your... creative interpretation of a 1921 supreme court ruling.

You're not alone in this interpretation, amazingly tax protesters have gone to the courts to make this argument many times, not so amazingly they have lost every single time.

Which begs the question. Assuming you are right, and the 1921 ruling didn't allow income tax, then you're still wrong. In the time since the courts have repeatedly ruled that income taxes are legal. Either the court rulings are legitimate, and income tax is allowed, or they're illegitimate, in which case you have no reason to cite the 1921 ruling. Hell, if you disregard the authority of the constitutionally authorized supreme court, who has rejected your interpretation by never even bothered to hear one of those lower court decisions, then I don't see how you can then claim to be so concerned about the wording of the 16th amendment.

Couldn't this approach be used for any infectious disease for which there's no effective cure but there are some survivors? Are there just no Western diseases that fit the profile? I suppose you need both a person sick with a deadly infection and a recent survivor of a same infection (with the same blood type). So it may just be the case that we simply don't experience that scenario enough to develop this solution. But I'm curious if this approach has been used outside of Ebola in Africa.

Completely offtopic but I suddenly want someone to make a movie about the making of the original Star Trek series just so they can cast this guy as Shatner.