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Comment by throwawaylinux | Hacker News Reader

A wasted opportunity for grievance peddlers and hand wringers to steal more limelight and derail public discourse from more important things, so they can hear themselves speak and act like they're bravely engaging battle at great risk to themselves for the benefit of all others, by stamping their names on pointless political and bureaucratic machinations that achieve exactly nothing for the common person.

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This is somewhat in the same vein as the argument that we can't possibly do anything of modest importance if somewhere children are starving. Amusingly this remains true even if we do nothing to ameliorate the larger problem its mere existence provides sufficient counter argument for any action. Inevitably if larger matters go unaddressed it is because we don't want to pay higher taxes to feed starving kids not because all our time was consumed by the trivial.

No, it's completely different, because this is not important at all. Evidence-free assertions of aforementioned grifters notwithstanding.

But tacitly admitting a poor cost/benefit with a reductio ad absurdum argument is not a great start anyway, because the actual situation is not an absurd one and margins matter.

Doesn't the crown cost Canadians like 58M per year over over half a billion in the next decade?

This isn't an argument though, you'd have to try to claim that a new scheme with a president (or whatever idiotic scheme the ruling class tries to foist on people) would cost less.

Stripping most of that funding from the useless crown representative and entourage would be a great idea. Could be done tomorrow with acts of parliament and executive with no fanfare and no need for constitutional grandstanding. The fact they don't gives the imagination a good starting point for how much it would cost to be a republic.

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