Let me explain something to you. Canada is a confederation of ten provinces with clear separation of powers. And yet we still have the Canada Health Act. And there's certainly no lack of Federal legislation that the States have agree to.

So if I'm unemployed under your system, how will I pay for, oh I dunno, treatment for melanoma?

And what, you don't think the US system has a ton of horror stories. My run-in with serious illness was my wife's thyroid cancer, and the only real delay was because the initial symptoms aped salivary gland blockage. Within days that that specialist figured out that it was a probable tumor (initially they thought a carotid body tumor), we were driving to Victoria to see an ENT (ear-nose-throat specialist) whose specialization was cancerous tumors. She had surgery a few weeks later, which identified it as a thyroid tumor, and the big delay for removing the thyroid gland (total thyroidectomy) was that she had to heal sufficiently from the initial surgery.

Yes, there are delays and rationing, but really that happens in any system. In the US, in many places, rationing is basically defined by the size of your wallet. In Canada and other countries with universal systems, it's defined by utilization.

The public health system saved my wife's life, and other than her need to take thyroid replacement hormone for the rest of her life, she has fully recovered. Furthermore, I was laid off right in the middle of this nightmare, and the end result was that there was no bankruptcy or loss of our house.

I'll take the odd delay in treatment over no service at all or going bankrupt to save my loved ones' lives. If you like the American system so damned much, I urge you to move there.

Yes, the Provinces decide how, but the parameters are not all that wide, and because the system is in considerable aspects Federally proscribed, you don't see that much variance between Provinces. And, in fact, the Feds have on occasion flexed their muscle and have sent warning shots to provinces who have traveled too far off the line.

Here's the facts. I am a resident of British Columbia. I pay about $127 per month in Medical Services Premiums. For that I won't be given a bill at any hospital or any doctor if I have a medical issue. If I need a scan or some other diagnostic test, I will not be billed. Furthermore, if I end up needing healthcare in Prince Edward Island, I will still be protected.

People did try to call it Romneycare, but maybe the magic underwear made it less convincing.

Yup, it's a mess. Perhaps if you Americans would finally just introduce a proper universal health care system, instead of these constants half-measures, you could stop spending such an enormous portion of your GDP on health care.

Um, no, it's not fully hands off. The Medicare act is Federal legislation that sets certain criteria for how the Provinces run their healthcare systems. The Provinces are given some latitude, but key aspects must be respected by the Provinces.

So your argument basically sums up to "People move and die all the time, so who the fuck cares if we're the actual cause of it."

Perhaps I'll start dumping raw sewage on your front lawn. I mean, sewage gathers up all the time, and you can always move, right?

Well yes, humans will survive, or at least a fair chunk of them. But the geopoltiical ramifications will be enormous. If previous climate shifts are any indication, we will see massive migrations as people try to get from where they're starving to where they think there is food. You will have wars and all the economic, political and social volatility that goes along with that. You will have nations that were previously capable of producing sufficient food to feed their population suddenly have to import, as rainbelts shift and previously arable land becomes arid land.

When long-chain hydrocarbons become very expensive, then the general quality of life will indeed go down. Unless we come up with a really cheap alternative form of energy (ie. fusion), most of the other forms of hydrocarbons we have on Earth and throughout the solar system are short chain (mainly methane), and it takes a lot of energy to make long chain hydrocarbons out of them. If you can produce that kind of energy, then you don't even need fossil fuels anymore.

Well no, they likely won't say something absurd and false. And what's this problem with panels? It's not as if the overwhelming majority of scientists feeding their studies to the IPCC are somehow saying something fundamentally in disagreement with the panel.

The amount of money flowing into climate research is peanuts compared to what your average multinational petroleum company makes in a week. So can we stop with this "It's a conspiracy for grants" bullshit. It's probably the most retarded and pathetic objection. It's as if you don't even fucking care about science at all, but simply an ideological war with buffoons like yourself who imagine the universe gives one sweet fuck about your political and economic beliefs.

If we're causing the warming trend we're seeing, then we're causing it, and ideology is utterly fucking meaningless. I mean, your opposition to it is like trying to assert the supernova are political.

The proposed solutions will have the side effect of preserving long chain hydrocarbon reserves for future use. In other words, when we run out of cheap oil, a lot more than the price of gas is going to skyrocket, and the effects on the global economy will be as harsh as AGW's effects on the global economy. What I'm afraid of is that we'll see the two happen at the same time.

The cost right now to the economy of pushing away from an oil-based economy are huge, but manageable. Wait thirty or fifty years, and it will be another story. Sure, I'll probably be dead by the time the worst of it happens, but I'd like to not completely fuck over my kids and grandkids.

"Because the effect of that would be to push even more transactions into unregulated "dark pools". Why do you believe that HFT is harmful? Do you have any evidence, other than fear of something you don't understand?"

Yes - (1) HFT has the potential to cause extreme volatility swings. (2) HFT essentially introduces a tax on every other buyer and seller in the market (because it actually widens the difference between the post and the offer).

On point #2, I'll just leave this here: http://qz.com/95088/high-frequency-trading-is-bad-for-normal-investors-researchers-say/

I agree with you in general, although in the Westminster model, you usually have two parties that swap power and a distant third that on very rare occasions can play a kingmaker role. At the end of the day, it's all the same. Conservatives and liberals, however they are constituted (and sometimes the liberals may cross the line into some degree of socialism, aka Britain in the post-war period up until New Labour's victory in 1997) simply swap places.

What has exacerbated the situation in the United States is the way in which the two major political parties have so thoroughly taken over the voting system itself. I think back to the 2000 election where you had a Republican in Florida (Katherine Harris) actually responsible for certifying election results. When you have a close race like in 2000, whether she's the finest most upstanding person or not, it calls into question the validity of the whole process. While other countries usually have a central non-partisan election authority that manages elections and certifies results, in the US, the constitutional division of powers between states and the federal government basically allow the very voting system itself to be undermined, if in appearance alone, by partisan concerns.

Then there is gerrymandering, which happens in a number of countries besides the United States, which can heavily distort elections. In some ways the US is a century or more behind other industrialized democracies, although a certain amount of gerrymandering does go on elsewhere.

This has been the chief argument for the party list proportional representation system, in that it largely removes the temptation to gerrymander. Parties have to campaign to get representatives elected, and it becomes much more difficult to rig the voting system so that certain districts are created that will tend towards one party or another.

FPTP is just a bloody awful system. It tends to disenfranchise an enormous number of voters, and it basically allows major political parties to game the system to their benefit.

Yes, the mainline parties in the UK have started talking about immigration reform (well, there was always a Tory rump that talked about it, and many of those are now UKIP). The problem being that the very inventors of "embrace, extend, extinguish" are politicians. They are very very good and taking an opponent's idea and running it through an election, after which they'll happily toss it in the dumpster and go back to their original plans. Look at how the GOP has for decades adopted the language of Libertarians, and yet every time they achieve power, any Libertarian ideas disappear. People like Ron and Rand Paul have been for years the GOP's useful idiots.