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Comment Re:"unlikely to know" (Score 2) 32

There was an article on here a while back which discussed how fake credentials were being used by North Korea to allow its people to work on remote projects. They were given a fake name, fake skills, fake education, etc, which was then passed to a hiring company who then "vetted" the person without even seeing or talking to them.

So yes, it is possible the companies didn't know.

Comment Re:We are not far behind (Score 1) 115

Those terrorists went to the Capitol to deliberately and knowingly disrupt the official proceeding of Congress. They weren't there on a field trip to look at the sights.

If you're claiming those people shouldn't be jailed because they were non-violent, then the same applies to all the people at Columbia who did nothing more than exercise their First Amendment right to criticize Israel's deliberate targetting of civilians, medical personnel, and journalists, such as the almost 300 bodies found buried in a mass grave at the Nasser Medical Complex, some who had their hands tied. This was the same hospital Israel besieged for days, cutting off power and letting babies on ventilators die.

Comment Re:Only to investors, right? (Score 2) 28

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

Comment Re: 20% survival is pretty good (Score 1) 57

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

Comment Re:Sure, let someone else be the gatekeeper (Score 4, Informative) 162

I want to know what distros of Linux ACTUALLY are stable enough, and intuitive enough to have the non-technical-savvy (aka normal/average) person use it without being frustrated?/

Linux Mint. It's essentially a Windows configuration. Same right-click menu systems (better than Windows 11), same start menu system (which you can see). If the average person who futzes around with Windows can't run Linux Mint, they're being deliberately obtuse. Or they're stupid.

Comment Re:Welcome to the machine (Score 2, Interesting) 259

Without profit driven, you end up with what LA has: 5 Billion dollars missing in various "help the homeless" scan non profits.

Or three bankrupt casinos ("The money I took out of there was incredible."), failing golf courses, a failed airline, a failed "university", and other businesses which never turned a profit. It's almost as if the point was not to generate a profit, but scam people out of their money.

Comment Re:How big is the ocean? (Score 3, Informative) 68

Let's say in the next 100 years the Pacific Ocean rises 1 inch. At the same time Shanghai, which is on the coast, sinks 1 foot. That is 13 inches of change. If the city is only a few feet above sea level, that one foot makes a huge difference when it comes to drain water runoff, sewage dispersion, tunnels, etc.

For reference, Shanghai has sunk 3 meters in the past 100 years.

China has a long history of dealing with subsiding land, with both Shanghai and Tianjin showing evidence of sinking back in the 1920s. Shanghai has sunk more than 3m over the past century.

Comment Re:Good, but what about inflation? (Score 1) 23

Constitutionally yes health care belongs to the provinces. I'm sure you are aware that in reality that is not the case. The Canada Health Act firmly inserts the feds into the system and has for most of my life.

Running the health systems is completely the purview of the Provinces. The major requirements of the Canada Health Act are mostly in terms of what services are offered (so that we don’t have a nationally fractured system where basic procedures aren’t universal).

Other than that, there is the health transfer from the Federal Government down to the Provinces — but the Provinces aren’t supposed to rely solely on that transfer to fund their health care systems. And that money typically doesn’t come with any strings attached (other than it be used for healthcare).

Crumbling systems are entirely the fault of the Provinces. The licensing of Doctors happens at the Provincial level (albeit by the various Provincial colleges), training and education happens at the Provincial level, hiring of Doctors and Nurses happens at the Provincial level, and the construction of hospitals happens at the Provincial level. And those are the parts of the system that have been failing, and mostly because successive Conservative Provincial governments have been starving the system.

Yaz

Comment Re:Good, but what about inflation? (Score 1) 23

Anyone who has been paying attention knows our health care system has serious issues.

The bulk of which aren’t due to the Federal government, as in Canada the provision of healthcare services is the domain of the Provinces.

It’s notable that two of the Provinces with the worst problems are led by Conservative Premiers, who have been dismantling health care systems in their Province as a way to try to bring in more American-style private for-profit healthcare.

Yaz

Comment Re:how does an six- to nine-month school cost 30K? (Score 4, Informative) 38

Read that part again. It's not that the school costs that much, it's that the finance charges on these "loans" could pile up over time. Just like any loan which isn't paid off and interest continues to accrue.

Why do you think so many people owe more on their student/medical loan than the original value of the loan? They didn't pay enough of it off fast enough so the interest kept adding to their total loan cost.

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