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Domain: theguardian.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to theguardian.com.
Comments · 4,274
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Re:Serving hits since 2006 apparently
...snipsnip... Nothing can protect any individual anywhere from the wrath and power of the United States. Don't believe that? Just ask Osama Bin Laden.
Or the politicians, economists, credit rating executives, bankers and brokers who steered us into the subprime mortgage crash in 2007. Boy they're suffering now.
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Re:Assange's position is absurd
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
The allegations centre on a 10-day period after Assange flew into Stockholm on Wednesday 11 August. One of the women, named in court as Miss A, told police that she had arranged Assange's trip to Sweden, and let him stay in her flat because she was due to be away. She returned early, on Friday 13 August, after which the pair went for a meal and then returned to her flat.
Her account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she "tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again". Miss A told police that she didn't want to go any further "but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far", and so she allowed him to undress her.
According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had "done something" with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.
When he was later interviewed by police in Stockholm, Assange agreed that he had had sex with Miss A but said he did not tear the condom, and that he was not aware that it had been torn. He told police that he had continued to sleep in Miss A's bed for the following week and she had never mentioned a torn condom.
On the following morning, Saturday 14 August, Assange spoke at a seminar organised by Miss A. A second woman, Miss W, had contacted Miss A to ask if she could attend. Both women joined Assange, the co-ordinator of the Swedish WikiLeaks group, whom we will call "Harold", and a few others for lunch.
Assange left the lunch with Miss W. She told the police she and Assange had visited the place where she worked and had then gone to a cinema where they had moved to the back row. He had kissed her and put his hands inside her clothing, she said.
That evening, Miss A held a party at her flat. One of her friends, "Monica", later told police that during the party Miss A had told her about the ripped condom and unprotected sex. Another friend told police that during the evening Miss A told her she had had "the worst sex ever" with Assange: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."
Assange's supporters point out that, despite her complaints against him, Miss A held a party for him on that evening and continued to allow him to stay in her flat.
On Sunday 15 August, Monica told police, Miss A told her that she thought Assange had torn the condom on purpose. According to Monica, Miss A said Assange was still staying in her flat but they were not having sex because he had "exceeded the limits of what she felt she could accept" and she did not feel safe.
The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when "he agreed unwillingly to use a condom".
Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. "Ac
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Charges are bullshit. Always have been.
The rape allegation is nothing but a pretext to get him into custody so he may be interrogated by or outright handed over to the United States. If it wasn't, the government of Sweden would have taken up Assange years ago on his offers to be interviewed by investigators remotely or in person at the embassy. Or to return to Sweden outright if they promised not to hand him over to U.S. custody.
The response to this inconvenient fact is generally a pithy "since when do wanted suspects get to negotiate terms". Well, since cops negotiate with suspects all the time. Lets say Dallas cops had Micah Xavier Johnson on the phone and were trying to get him to surrender. They would of course say no to crazy demands like a million dollars and a getaway car. But if Johnson had offered to give himself up on the condition that he not be flown to Guantanamo to be tortured, the SWAT commander would roll his eyes and say "sure, we wont fly you to Cuba, so drop your guns and walk out with your hands up".
Assange's fear of being handed over to the U.S. isn't remotely crazy, though, since Sweden handed people over to the CIA who were then tortured and Obama had Manning tortured with months of solitary confinement. So, yeah, a suspect gets to negotiate terms when dealing with entities known for kidnapping and torture, two things the people screaming about alleged rape DGAF about.
The response to that is a pithy "well Assange offered to give himself up if Obama commuted Manning's sentence so he's bluffing". EXCEPT - the very credible threats of persecution and torture is why Ecuador granted Assange asylum in the first place. If Sweden were to take extradition and interrogation by the U.S. off the table, the reason for that asylum disappears. So if this is really about alleged rape, let it be about the alleged rape and nothing else. Either Sweden takes Assange up on his offer because the threat is real, or Sweden takes Assange up on his offer so Ecuador will show him the door.
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Do people get arrested for un-PC speech? You bet.
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Do people get arrested for un-PC speech? You bet.
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Re:Scientists my foot
Barnier has already said the UK will get a 'Canada style' trade deal. I.e. no trade tariffs, but no financial passporting.
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
And that's his opening offer. I'm sure all those Remoaner banks like Goldman Sachs will get financial passporting in the end. If not, that's just tough. But they are traitors and kind of deserve it.
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Re:Every ad-writing person, ever:
I expect the same will happen with tablets: the majority of users eventually will use a tablet as their primary computing device.
LOL, so did Steve Jobs, about 10 years ago... He was wrong.
In fact, it seems not a year goes by without someone claiming that "this is the year PCs will die and be replaced by tablets."
http://time.com/3643693/tech-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
http://www.datacenterjournal.c...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
I personally find the debate comical... what does "PC" stand for? Personal Computer; what is a tablet, if not a computer that is personal?
Some folk would argue over anything.
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Re:What is really interesting is the market cap
investors are confident their investment will yield exponential returns from some new tech we havent seen or current/old tech we haven't seen utilized in a new way
It could also be that investors are betting that Tesla is going to make it big on first-mover advantage and network effect.
Right now, all the electric cars are great second cars. For short trips around town, commuting to work, etc. a Nissan Leaf is great. But if you want to take a long road trip for any reason, you aren't taking that Nissan Leaf. You use your gasoline car.
All the electric cars, except Tesla. Tesla's Supercharger network is something that they have paid huge money to put together, and it means that you really can have just a Tesla as your only car. Long road trips? Just stop at a Supercharger and eat a snack or something while your car charges.
Only Tesla has the Supercharger network and cars that can use it. With any other brand of car, charging will take at least twice as long.
Assuming that Tesla can get their production line running smoothly for the Model 3, they can sell a lot of cars each year. And they are going to make money on each of those cars.
Right now, Tesla is losing lots of money, but it's not being wasted. They invested in R&D to develop the new Model 3, the new Semi, and the new sports car. They invested in equipment to make the Model 3. They invested in their own battery factory so they can get the lowest cost on batteries.
So the best possible scenario for Tesla: they get the Model 3 production line flowing and sell nearly half a million cars in 2018, and by 2019 or 2020 they are all caught up on back orders and selling over half a million Model 3s each year. They make a lot of money per car due to low cost on the batteries. All those cars use the Tesla Supercharger network, and lots of friends and family of Tesla owners get rides in the new cars and decide they want Teslas also, leading to more orders for Model 3s. Then they start selling lots of Semis, they finish the Model Y and sell lots of those, and they wind up owning a large chunk of the battery electric vehicle market. People start buying Teslas because they are confident in the charging network, and Tesla can afford to build out the charging network even more because they are now finally making money, and it snowballs. Then one or more factories in Europe come on line, making batteries and cars, and Tesla starts selling over a million cars per year. And the factory in Shanghai comes on line and they sell even more. Where does it end? Could Tesla grow to be the size of Honda?
Note that nothing in that scenario assumes new tech we haven't seen, or really even old tech we haven't seen utilized in a new way. It just assumes that Tesla wins big by being the first company to get volumes up and costs down enough to really sell a battery electric vehicle at a price people can afford. Plus Tesla wins in the Semi space by being the first company with a viable product.
Tesla also has a fairly wild plan, where they finish the full (level 5) self-driving features; they get legal approval for the cars to drive around on their own; and Tesla owners can opt-in to have their cars driving in an Uber-like carsharing service called Tesla Network. Imagine people have their cars drive them to work. Then, while they are at work, their cars join themselves to the service, and drive around picking people up and dropping them off; the people get paid for the trips their cars make, and then when it's time for them to go home for the day their cars automatically release themselves from the service and go to pick them up and drive them home. Thus a l
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Re:Umn .. Did his phone work?
and when done in the correct order he can talk to someone?
Yes which is why it took so long to get the information out. Calling individual media outlets is an incredibly inefficient way of disseminating information. For better or worse in any emergency twitter will get the information to a wider audience and will be picked up by the media faster than anything else these days.
I heard there's a tsunami warning in the USA.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/0... : Count 1 official Twitter source
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-... : Count 1 semi-official Twitter source, 2 unoffical twitter sources.
https://www.theguardian.com/us... : Count no link to Twitter, but a quote in the article from an official's twitter account. -
Re:ARM guys will probably do it right
https://www.theguardian.com/ed...
"Lump of ice" (advice)
Which to receive sometimes can be very cold comfort.It's worth pointing out this is incredibly obscure and may well have been invented by Guardian journalist keen to pad their article out to the minimum word limit. Unlike 'septic', which was originally an armed forces thing from the friendly but bantering relationship between the US and UK but has now spread to the point almost all Brits are aware of it .
https://www.urbandictionary.co...
Cockney rhyming slang for a yank (american). The whole phrase is 'Septic Tank' - but as with most cockney rhyming slang the first word is used only. The reason for the link is that, like a septic tank nobody likes a filthy stinking american!!!
What are you fucking shooting at me for you filthy fucking septic cunt, im on your side!!!!
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Re:This is why we don't trust your "experts"
ah, little Troller Boy is still upset in defense of, again, the perennial martyr of the Right, the Great Sarah Palin, the least contributory of all of the losing VP-candidates throughout history, the one who all you have to say about is over the mean liberals and leftists who say such harsh words.
How Sad that that's ALL you can offer about her. Or her drones.
It's ok, we know you have nothing. No leadership. No integrity. It's trolling all the way down for Dumb-Ass-Troll.
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Re:This is why we don't trust your "experts"
ah, little Troller Boy is still upset in defense of, again, the perennial martyr of the Right, the Great Sarah Palin, the least contributory of all of the losing VP-candidates throughout history, the one who all you have to say about is over the mean liberals and leftists who say such harsh words.
How Sad that that's ALL you can offer about her. Or her drones.
It's ok, we know you have nothing. No leadership. No integrity. It's trolling all the way down for Dumb-Ass-Troll.
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Can you even read, you ignorant fuck?
From the link posted by the troll above:
Facebook has said less than £1 was spent on Russian adverts designed to disrupt the Brexit vote, downplaying claims that meddling from the Kremlin helped swing last yearâ(TM)s referendum.
The US internet giant responded to an investigation from the Electoral Commission by saying the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy organisation with links to the Russian government, spent just $0.97 (73p) in Britain during the two months of the EU referendum campaign.
However, its claims were instantly disputed by a senior MP.
Damian Collins, the chair of the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee, accused Facebook of failing to probe the true extent of Russian meddling.
And surprise-surprise... They are going back to see if they've maybe, perhaps, possibly, missed some - once they are called out about it.
Just like how Facebook's could not have influenced the outcome of the election in November 2016.
But by April of 2017 "disinformation campaign during the election" WAS there but it was "statistically very small".
Then in September it turns out it they sold $150.000 worth of ads to Russians for some "3000 ads" connected to some 470 accounts, aimed at promoting discord on issues such as "gun rights, immigration, LGBT rights and race".
Or was that "80,000 pieces of content [which] may have been viewed by a total of 126 million people", as was revealed by late October 2017.How those numbers keep growing... it's as almost as if Zuckerberg and Co. are lying through their teeth to cover their asses - then rolling over when pressed about it.
Meanwhile, in the land of Brexit...
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.
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Re:Why look behind this curtain in particular?
Where are the gangs of Brits roaming the cities across the nation, hunting down foreigners and assaulting them? They don't exist.
Liar.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.dw.com/en/britain-s...
Where are the managers and company owners refusing to hire foreign workers? They don't exist.
Liar.
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Where are the people demanding forced repatriation of anybody not born in the UK? They're meeting in small pub rooms, decried by the general population, gaining no traction politically.
Pants on fire.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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Re:Why look behind this curtain in particular?
Where are the gangs of Brits roaming the cities across the nation, hunting down foreigners and assaulting them? They don't exist.
Liar.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.dw.com/en/britain-s...
Where are the managers and company owners refusing to hire foreign workers? They don't exist.
Liar.
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Where are the people demanding forced repatriation of anybody not born in the UK? They're meeting in small pub rooms, decried by the general population, gaining no traction politically.
Pants on fire.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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Re:Why look behind this curtain in particular?
Where are the gangs of Brits roaming the cities across the nation, hunting down foreigners and assaulting them? They don't exist.
Liar.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://www.dw.com/en/britain-s...
Where are the managers and company owners refusing to hire foreign workers? They don't exist.
Liar.
https://www.theguardian.com/po...
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Where are the people demanding forced repatriation of anybody not born in the UK? They're meeting in small pub rooms, decried by the general population, gaining no traction politically.
Pants on fire.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
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Re:The Russians at my homework!
Re:The Russians at my homework!
A shame that David Davis didn't think of that excuse.
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Re:Oh, I get it!
What are you talking about? There's been a massive amount of attention to Russian support of Jill Stein. This has included aspects of Senate investigations https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/19/jill-stein-trump-russia-investigation-documents. There were many mainstream media reports on it such as https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/why-are-senate-russia-investigators-interested-jill-stein-n831261 and https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/senate-intelligence-committee-jill-stein-russia.
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Re:Prepare for the daily Cold War II fearmongering
Its all about Cina and Russia now. The waves of US domestic propaganda will flow all over social media now.
Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media" (18 Mar 2011)
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Operation Earnest Voice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So now its a confirmed story about a super big torpedo thats got a super long range and a super sized payload.
Kanyon has what designers crave.
It's got Cobalt-60. -
Re: I hope
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Re: Meanwhile...
Right, we're going to get the facts about Hillary from a Fox news site. As car as I can tell all she's guilty of is breaking IT department rules. Pretty much everyone on Slashdot should be in prison in that case.
Then you're willfully obtuse and willfully ignorant. Anyone else would be serving many, many decades in prison for mishandling classified evidence and then obstruction of justice in destroying the evidence. Hillary had no more authorization to store the far more serious and larger quantities of classified information on her unsecured email server than Kristian Saucier had authorization to store classified information on his unauthorized, unsecured cell phone.
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Re:So what?Not the best Brexit article. Here is a Gardian article.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...Concern about Russian influence in British politics has intensified as it emerged that more than 400 fake Twitter accounts believed to be run from St Petersburg published posts about Brexit.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh identified 419 accounts operating from the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) attempting to influence UK politics out of 2,752 accounts suspended by Twitter in the US.
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/. failure
Slashdot, you should know better than to allow this garbage on the front page. It's short and yet still packed with unfounded claims and base assumptions that are far from normal, yet the author makes no attempt to explain or justify these absurd assumptions. In a world where we have to make phone lanes and have teenage suicides at new highs despite rising quality of life, I fail to trust this author's disingenuous claim that there is a weak link between smartphone addictions and happiness.
Slashdot, you should be ashamed for calling this news. It's comment bait, that's it; and why you are losing more of your audience every month.
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Re:Amazing
Well, there is this plane that flew around the world
It was a proof of concept that showed that the current technology is capable of powering an electric plane perpetually with solar panels while in the air.
The predecessor to it had its first flight in 2009.Theoretically that plane doesn't have to land to refuel, ever.
However that is just an experimental plane. It is made to fly around, not to carry a load.
A plane like that would probably be pretty good in cases where you want to look for people who have gone missing or want to look at the extent of a natural disaster since it doesn't have to go back to refuel. You only land because the pilots need to rest or because it is too dark to see anything.Planes for transporting people and goods will be built differently, but on the other hand they won't need solar panels and batteries that can last them through the entire night.
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Re:Bay Area Idiots
If those are your three criteria, Hawaii has you beat hands down. Sucker.
I'm totally in favor of Hawaii. It has weed, surfing and pretty girls. And fruity drinks with umbrellas. And grass skirts.
OK, fuck it. I'm moving to Hawaii.
But if you move to Hawaii, you'll be Haole... Only tourist drink those fruity drinks with umbrellas... And you'll see such abominations like the Mormon owned Polynesian Cultural Center... Just don't be associated with stuff like this...
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Re:Climate changes. It always has.
So much wrong with all this, but I'll just hit the high points.
Increasing heat waves and droughts as well as sea level rise will halt agriculture near the equator
No it won't. This is why the rhetoric matters, and why "warmest year on record" is such utterly useless nonsense. One average temperature number for an entire planet bathed in gigatons of fluids is absurd to the point of insanity. Those fluids move energy. Lots of energy. The atmosphere and the oceans are both giant energy conveyors. "Global warming" does not mean everywhere on Earth gets uniformly warmer by some number. That's why you're not supposed to use the phrase anymore. Some places will in fact get colder. The equator won't get appreciably warmer. Instead the tropical zone will get broader. Heat pushes further north and south during the respective summers than it used to. Regardless though, agriculture at and near the equator is nearly irrelevant: 79% of the Earth's equator is ocean, where human agriculture is nonexistent.
Like, even supposing you're a sociopath that doesn't give one single flying fuck about some poor fellows in Africa starving, they're not just going to stay still and die away, leaving us here in the developed economies sipping our Coke zeroes going 'oh, that's a shame, pass me the joint and tell me what's hot on Spotify.'.
Except they're starving because of assholes like Robert Mugabe, not because of climate anything (or weather, for that matter). Productive farmland became a desolate waste because people stopped farming, not because crops wouldn't grow. African starvation is the result of African land management policies and "charitable" donations of millions of tons of food from the developed world over decades that drove local farmers out of business, not CO2.
A few million people, most of them not even in Europe or attempting to come here, are at a move right now and there are groups in Europe calling for a total closure of all the borders and full panic mode because some brown people have the audacity to not live in a state of complete anarchy
Considering those brown people caused their own state of anarchy, Europeans are perfectly justified in demanding they stay the hell home and fix their own problems. A mass migration of millions is totally unjustified by any climate rhetoric, but you've been forcefed so many half-truths and lies about climate that you've become too blind to see the real causes of mass migrations. In short, they heard you're giving away free stuff and will accept the bullshit excuse of "climate refugee" as a reason for why they should get your free stuff. Maybe you can absorb a "few millions" and keep your cultural identity, but I doubt it, so you might want to consider self-preservation before you try to cure all the other ills of the world.
You spin a whole dystopian vision of the future at this point, which I'm not going to bother to quote because it too is crap. All food is local, with the exception of a handful of over-populated islands. Americans, and yes, Europeans too, have been getting fat while Africans starve, since time immemorial. It's just become fashionable since the '80s to notice and wring your hands about it, then butt in and make the problems worse. In the nearly 40 years since, Africa has had more than enough food to feed itself, and not enough, and good years or bad, the worst problem is politics, not climate.
...it's only going to get increasingly worse as time goes by unless those of us with some brain power and capital do something.
That's racist.
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Re:Just a PR release
Hmm. According to this article in the Guardian, it's 100% over the period of 1951 to 2010. Why 100%? Because over that period non-anthropogenic climate factors had a net cooling effect, reducing the impact of anthropogenic warming factors. So the net effect of anthropogenic climate factors was larger than the observed warming trend.
Their source for those figures was the IPCC AR5 report.
So, at least some of the time scientists are willing to give a specific answer to the question of "How much of the warming is caused by AGW?"
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Re:And new Nature study
Meanwhile, The Guardian is reporting a Nature study that states that the most dire predictions of global warming are unlikely.
Being, the prediction that the Earth will warm 4-5 degrees C by 2100 is not credible.
You forgot the other part of the story, which is that predictions that the earth is going to warm by less than 2 degrees C are also "not credible", according to this particular study. This study indicates the most likely climate sensitivity value is approximately 2.8 C which is slightly lower that the AR4 most likely estimate of 3.0 C. This is a bit of good news - bad news, because it rules out some the worst and some of the best case scenarios. Overall, it's slightly positive because a slightly lower sensitivity value means we have slightly more flexibility to deal with global warming.
In case anyone is wondering what climate sensitivity is, it's how much warming results from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
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And new Nature study
Meanwhile, The Guardian is reporting a Nature study that states that the most dire predictions of global warming are unlikely.
Being, the prediction that the Earth will warm 4-5 degrees C by 2100 is not credible.
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Facebook is in trouble - and its about time
I honestly think Facebook is in a deepening crisis. Just look around at who is using it, and what they are using it for. They must take responsibility for the Fake News issue, and not just for Trump, but there was also evidence of interference with Brexit and other democratic elections. They must take responsibility for their users postings. Then there is the whole dopamine reward design that is embeded within it, they make it as addictive as they can by design according the the people that designed it for them.
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Re:ICEs and petroleum need to go away
the cost for an EV will probably never come down to a parity with ICE cars
Most experts think that once the cost of a battery comes down, battery electric vehicles will cost less than ICE vehicles. Some people are claiming that BEVs are already cheaper than ICEVs if you take total cost of ownership into account.
I have seen several people repeating the claim that when lithium batteries for cars drop below $100 per kilowatt-hour, BEVs will cost less than ICEVs and consumers will start switching to them to save money. Elon Musk has in the past said that 2020 could be the year this happens. (For Tesla, anyway, since Tesla built its own battery factory just to get the lowest cost on batteries.)
https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery-cost-dropped-80-6-years-227kwh-tesla-190kwh/
the only hope is for some type of battery that does not involve lithium
I'll bet you that BEVs will boom in the next few years, still using lithium batteries. The high price of lithium is sending a signal to the free market, and as a result more development of lithium resources is happening. If prices are high enough, lithium and other metals can be recovered from sea water, and we aren't running out of sea water anytime soon. Also, we haven't really started recycling lithium car batteries yet, but that's coming too.
According to this article a Tesla Model S only needs 15 pounds / 7 kg of lithium, about as much as a bowling ball; and experts think that just the lithium available from mining would be enough for 185 years.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-future/
Tons of research is going into batteries, but it is way too early to bet on a winning horse at this point.
For years I have been interested in batteries big enough to run an entire city ("grid-scale" batteries). I was assuming that something unusual like the liquid metal battery technology or flow batteries would be needed, but Tesla has started selling grid-scale lithium battery packs to Australia. So maybe lithium is even getting inexpensive enough for grid-scale. My understanding is that the Tesla battery in Australia can only supply power for a very short time, so I haven't lost interest in liquid metal or flow batteries.
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Re: No need for it any more
That is 100% pure American Exceptionalism and Obama himself spent considerable time debunking that very concept. Nobody believes in it any more except a bunch of jingoist fools and alt-right trolls.
The Myth of the Indispensable Nation: The world doesn't need the United States nearly as much as we like to think it does. Like many foreign policy concepts overwhelmingly endorsed by officials and policymakers, this one has little basis in reality. If you consider everything encompassing global affairs - from state-to-state diplomatic relations, to growing cross-border flows of goods, money, people, and data - there are actually very few activities where America's role is truly indispensable, defined by Webster's as "absolutely necessary." The problem with allowing this classification of Americaâ(TM)s global role to persist is that it is so patently false, and thus an illogical basis upon which to base and prescribe U.S. grand strategy. Indispensable nations on the right side of history don't lose votes in the UN 200-9.
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Re:Not counting the cost of storage
I do not see a fundamental problem going to 100% renewables.
You might not, but that national academy of sciences does. They have rejected the feasibility of the leading 100% renewable plan. Many of the worlds top climate scientists have repeatedly said nuclear power is the only viable path forward on climate change
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Re:Thanks. I probably wouldn't
Found it.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... -
Re:I'm wondering what's going to happen
I've seen some terrible climate forecasts that are possible in the Middle East if the weather patterns change to bring massive humidity to a previously arid but oppressively hot climate. Even the base line predictions are pretty bad. Agriculture will likely move north (south in the Southern Hemisphere) and the region has few natural resources outside of hydrocarbons. It looks like Mother Nature gives no fks and is about to punch the Middle East in the nuts. Of course the Middle East is probably where a lot of the CO2 came from, so it all makes internet sense. In any case it's not looking great for anyone, except maybe Canada.
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Wealth distribution
Why do people get upset that 1% of the population owns 50% of the world's wealth. And in response they flock to something like bitcoin, where 1000 people or 0.007% owns 40% of the wealth?
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Re:Eventually Peter Thiel will end up owning
Peter Thiel is an agent of the God Emperor, a Gandalf to Trump's Eru Ilúvatar.
In this analogy Nick Denton would be Saruman type figure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Patrick Curry says Tolkien is "hostile to industrialism", linking this to the widespread urban development that took place in the West Midlands where Tolkien grew up in the first decades of the 20th century. He identifies Saruman as one of the key examples given in the book of the evil effects of industrialization, and by extension imperialism. Shippey notes that Saruman's name repeats this view of technology: in the Mercian dialect of Anglo-Saxon used by Tolkien to represent the Language of Rohan in the book, the root word searu means "clever", "skillful" or "ingenious" and has associations with both technology and treachery that are fitting for Tolkien's portrayal of Saruman, the "cunning man". He also writes of Saruman's distinctively modern association with Communism in the way the Shire is run under his control: goods are taken "for fair distribution" which, since they are mainly never seen again, Shippey terms an unusually modern piece of hypocrisy in the way evil presents itself in Middle-earth.
It seems to me that Denton, as Democrat and city dweller has much on common with Saruman.
Also if you read Emily Gould's piece it's striking how the Gawker people all seem to betray their friends.
https://www.theguardian.com/me...
Not surprisingly Gould has often found herself alienating the people who are closest to her. A former boyfriend went public in the New York Post, penning a critical piece about the way she published details of their relationship on her secret(ish) blog, Heartbreak Soup. After her memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever, was published in 2010, her family, stung by the way she characterised her parents' relationship, stopped talking to her for a time. Even her best friend, Ruth Curry, took umbrage at the depiction of Bev, one of the two central characters in her recently published debut novel, Friendship (they are still close, but Gould says that Curry trusts her less).
Emily Gould was the Gawker Orcer who was sent out to explain the indefensible Gawker Stalker on Jimmy Kimmel and got shredded.
Emily Gould isn't doing that well now - she left Gawker "exhausted by the emotional comeuppance of 'being shady, insulting and two-faced'" and now complains she's only making $17,000 a year.
I.e. all these NYC leftists seem to hate each other. It's this sort lack of lack of discipline and team solidarity that led to Saruman's downfall at the hands of Grima Wormtongue after he tried to blame him for the damage done to The Shire.
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Re:I say thank you to Alexa
“I asked my nan why she used ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and it seemed she thinks that there is someone – a physical person – at Google’s headquarters who looks after the searches.
“She thought that by being polite and using her manners, the search would be quicker,” he said.
Manners maketh Nan: Google praises 86-year-old for polite internet searches
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Re:What if he actually WAS an ambassador?
You haven't understood what is going on. Making them destroy a bunch of stuff from the IT room junkbox was Cameron letting them off.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
The picture certainly shows the remains of a MacBook: its casing - said separately by Rusbridger to be a MacBook Pro, but which might actually be an Air; it looks too thin to be a Pro - and its motherboard. But Guardian snapper Roger Tooth's photo also contains what is clearly a second MacBook mobo, along with an old graphics card - an AMD job, we'd say; you can see the three output connectors on the backplane - and another motherboard, possibly a small desktop computer or maybe another device, given the large areas empty of circuitry.
Destroying the graphics card shows they know nothing about computers. Or maybe they're being disingenuous.
https://www.headoflegal.com/20...
A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on
There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it.
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK.
And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement
So they destroyed an old Macbook and old graphics card and thus met the destruction part of the Snowden material rather than handing it back.
As the site points out
By taking the less dramatic of the options open to him, Rusbridger has preserved his paper's ability to publish without immediate constraint - and it may well end up being able to publish more than if he'd taken the other route. His decision seems to me fully justified.
I.e. the Guardian still had copies of the Snowden stuff in the US and so long as the published from there, the angle grinding old IT scrap performance meant they were legally in the clear and didn't need to handover what they had.
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him t
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Re:Already the backtracking begins
Which is why it was lovely to see that even on the Guardian people are calling out media lies on this - see the comments on
https://www.theguardian.com/co...This media misinformation is only damaging the media.
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Re:*Cackle*, *cackle*, *cackle*, ...
It was quite well covered here in the UK by the BBC and others:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
http://www.independent.co.uk/v...
https://www.theguardian.com/fi...It seems Catherine Deneuve has made a name for herself with this - just typing her name into Google turns up some of these links.
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Re:James Damores memo has been thoroughly debunked
Feminist psychologist and neuroscientist Cordelia Fine on Damore:
Some of Damore’s ideas, she adds, are “very familiar to me as part of my day-to-day research, and are not seen as especially controversial. So there was something quite extraordinary about someone losing their job for putting forward a view that is part of the scientific debate. And then to be so publicly shamed as well. I felt pretty sorry for him.”
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Crude prices up recently, so a good time to divest
Versus when others chose to divest portfolios: Harvard University activists were an early proponent of divesting from companies associated with fossil fuels, but the wheels of change moved so slowly, the legendary portfolio actually lost money from fallling oil prices before the pressure to sell off these assets reached a crescendo.
After finally winning the divestment prompted the sell off of petroleum and coal assets at a time of market downturn.
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Re:What if he actually WAS an ambassador?
Though not hardliners siding with US on matters of espionage.
The US alliance is absolutely vital to the UK - without it we'd need to build our own Trident missiles. And we'd need to build our own listening centres to replace the NSA ones which cooperate with GCHQ.
It's doable for sure - the UK did have programs like this when the US suspended nuclear cooperation after WWII. And the UK could work with Canada, Australia, Singapore and so on - and in fact UK cooperation with these countries was folded into the Five Eyes. However it would cost significantly more than the UK currently spends on intelligence and defence.
And in a sense people like Assange are just as much enemies of GCHQ as they are of the NSA. Even if the NSA/GCHQ cooperation ceased the UK would still be out to get him.
Or maybe I should say "the UK would clearly still want to cooperate with our European friends and allies on law enforcement. Particularly on odious sexual crimes like rape".
And before anyone quibbles about what he was accused of and whether he has been charged, read this. From the New Statesman, a far left magazine that was initially very sympathetic to Assange.
https://www.newstatesman.com/b...
The Guardian, another far left paper which published the Wikileaks stuff also thinks he should not be able to evade justice
https://www.theguardian.com/co...
Mr Assange, who invited the UN panel to examine his case in 2014, knew the outcome in advance. That may account for his offer to give himself up to the British authorities if its opinion went against him. He will hope that its findings allow him to claim some kind of moral victory, and strengthen his call that the Swedish authorities drop their investigations. But he would still face arrest in the UK: he was granted bail while he fought extradition to Sweden and he broke his bail conditions, at great expense to those friends and supporters who had backed him financially, by fleeing to the Ecuadorian embassy. No doubt the conditions of his self-imprisonment are unpleasant; they are certainly severely limiting. But it is possible to sympathise with his circumstances, and to applaud his role in the WikiLeaks revelations that exposed embarassing and sometimes illegal US activity that were published in the Guardian (while deploring his later decision to dump many more, unmediated, on the web) without accepting his right to evade prosecutorsâ(TM) questions about the allegation that he committed a serious criminal offence.
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Re:Fucking Muslim "refugee" rapists strike again
It wasn't at such a level that they would have to start women only carriages, water parks, and new year's parties. I know it's all nice and PC to pretend that Islam is the religion of peace and all religions and cultures are as good, but it just isn't true
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Re:Grab some popcorn
We can't accurately predict the weather for 5 days
Can't predict a coinflip either, yet we can predict very accurately the average result of 10,000 coinflips. Same with climate, which is a long-term aggregate of countless individual weather events. But sure, all those thousands of egghead climate scientists from all over the planet are obviously just making shit up, right? And apparently coordinating it all in a massive global conspiracy.
It's not a fact.
Then how do you explain the vast amount of peer-reviewed evidence supporting it that's cited in the IPCC reports? Gonna wave that all away?
There certainly is a huge monetary motivation to say it's NOT a fact.
Fixed that for you. And if you doubt me, let me know if you find any monetary motivation bigger than $33 trillion in stranded assets. Or perhaps just compare salaries.
Everything they do makes it LOOK like they are covering shit up.
According to whom? Certainly the studies cited in the IPCC reports are about as clear as it can get. Every scientific institution and meteorological department in the world endorses its conclusions - are all of them also covering this shit up, risking their reputations and sabotaging everything science stands for? Or perhaps other interests just want you to think so? There's certainly plenty of direct evidence for that.
You want data? Oh we deleted it.
You have an opinion we don't agree with?
Then provide evidence to back it up, or STFU. That's how science works.
The curves don't match what we said was going to happen ten years ago?
They look OK to me.
Don't get me started on having Al Gore as a spokeman
Haha, nobody elected Gore as any sort of spokesman other than himself, and certainly he has ZERO to do with the scientific case for AGW. That's like saying the entire Republican party are frauds because Trump is kind of a dick.
show me a solution that does NOT put us back into the dark ages
Well first off, the type of solution has NOTHING to do with the existence of the problem. Seriously, are you really going to deny the problem even exists just because you don't like someone's proposed solution to it? Is that rational?
Second, there are any number of proposed solutions. Pick some that you like. Nuclear is fine by me, if you can make an economic case for it (and certainly in some areas it makes a lot of sense). Solar and wind are obvious choices to be part of the energy mix, particularly in areas where there's lot of sun and/or wind. Geothermal, wave power, thorium - there are plenty of carbon-neutral energy sources to choose from.
And for intermittency, power companies already have to deal with that, since no power plant is perfect - e.g. coal plants are offline 40-60% of the time, so they have to be covered too. The answer is wide distribution and redundancy from a variety of sources ("the wind always blows somewhere") with some storage
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Re:Hard to believe
Re "I bet there's a backdoor."
Recall PRISM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... (12 Jul ‘13)
"... bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism"
"'.. routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport"."
Enjoy that big brand junk encryption again and again. -
Re:Firewall
AC did you forget how some big US brands helped?
"... handed the NSA access to encrypted messages" (12 Jul ‘13)
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
"pre-encryption stage access to email"
"had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected"
"routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport"."
"helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption" -
try reading your own links
Hey look, the lynwood liar is at it again. Many countries met their targets.
And as already pointed out, the article doesn't match what you claim anyway...
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Weird coincidence.
Have just read a couple of articles during lunch from Stewart Lee's "Content Provider" Selected Short Prose Pieces 2011-2016 book (original article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/19/stewart-lee-bbc-witch-hunters-reform-panel-culture-secretary), which included a suggestion to Andrew Fisher of Shazam, and then came across this shortly after.