Please, name ONE policy with isn't tax, heading toward less CO2 emissions. Give me one example of a country that wants to ban petrol-based cars, or at least push for electric. The profit here, is simply going through a tax, and the enslavement of poor people having no choice but to use fossil fuel for their car, because there's simply no other alternative available, and that nobody cares to make policies to push for such a change. Open your eyes!
1. Australia is looking at introducing an emissions trading scheme not a carbon tax.
2. You're opposed to a tax on carbon because of its effect on poor people, yet you're proposing banning petrol cars? You don't think that might have some effect on all those poor people who have to use them "because there's simply no other choices available"?
3. As far as promoting electric cars go, Japan had a scheme promoting hybrids for a while, although I think it has been wound down now. It's not electric but Brazil has been promoting biofuels for decades. That's off the top of my head. There's probably others. Other than that there are plenty of countries investing heavily in public transportation. Japan, France, Germany, Korea, Spain and China have all invested heavily in bullet trains (I'm sure there are others). It's not as shiny as bullet trains but plenty (most?) cities around the world have been working hard to build up intra-city train/tram networks. All of this is irrelevant though firms not individuals are being targeted by the ETS.
4. Even in Australia government direct investment in "green" industries and targeted schemes have been touted as an alternative by the opposition leader. However, most economists have ridiculed the idea preferring an ETS which encourages market led innovation rather than the government attempting to pick winners (and all the incompetence and corruption that implies).
Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.
No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.
Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.
Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?
Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).
On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.
iPhones are =assembled= in China. Most of the insides are from Japan, Korea, Germany, Taiwan and even a few parts from the US. All those iPhones being shipped from China go down as a massive trade deficit between the US and China, but when you look at the value added in China it's only a few dollars and, the US is actually mostly running a deficit with Japan, Korea, Germany.etc. Ditto. for playstation 3 and all those other high tech gadgets made in China.
Made in China label doesn't mean that it's actually made in China!
This is VERY bad news to an already weakened dollar.
The dollar has been overvalued for decades, and look at the result: manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, and a vastly negative trade balance. With an over valued currency, It's simply cheaper to import something than to produce it locally.
A high exchange rate doesn't make a currency strong anyway, long term stability and low inflation are more important.
"Overvalued" currencies are a silly excuse for the US's poor trade performance. If currency valuation was the determining factor in the size of trade surpluses then post-plaza accord Japan's trade surplus should have narrowed significantly. In fact it's been rising and falling without much change in the average at all. Or Germany wouldn't run a huge trade surplus with the rest of the EU even though they trade in the same currency.
Furthermore there's a lot of evidence out that a large part of US trade-deficit with China with its undervalued currency is actually a deficit with Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Germany. China is becoming an end point for the assembling of products (iphone, ps3.etc. etc.) but the reality is that the internals of those products are actually coming from Japan.etc. http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6335 has a good analysis. The iPhone alone adds 1.9billion to the US trade deficit with China. However the reality is that the value added in China was only 3.6% of the total manufacturing costs. The rest of the value was added elsewhere and imported into China. Looked at like that the real deficit between the US and China in iPhone trade is only $73 million dollars. The rest is a deficit to 1. Resource exporting nations (Australia.etc. which btw. runs a trade surplus with all the East Asian economies and has a very strong currency while actually running a deficit with the US!) 2. High Tech manufacturers (Japan, Germany.etc.). Or in other words the Euro and the Yen are high but the US is still running a trade deficit with Japan and Germany. It just now gets hidden as a trade deficit with China.
The reason the US hasn't succeeded as an exporter is because it has systemically failed to make the long-term capital investments necessary to make its industries competitive. It's easier for a CEO to fire 10,000 workers claim a massive increase in profits collecting outrageously huge performance-bonuses (or non-performance please just go away bonuses aka. "golden parachutes") than it is for them to make serious long term investments than sacrifice immediate profit for future-benefit. I'd blame a tax-structure that doesn't provide strong incentives for corporations to bring profits back onshore and reinvest them in infrastructure and employing new workers and an (ultra) short-term focused stock market.
If you had been watching the Japanese news you would know what you are reporting is both old news and garbled. There were many highly inaccurate reports in the Western media. IMO the Western media is completely unreliable re Fukushima.
I'm in Japan and I _only_ watch (or more specifically read) the Japanese news. The figures I gave were reported in Asahi newspaper yesterday. I admit though that I confused that report with the report about water leaking into the sea. They were separate issues. So my apologies.
Literally thousands of tons of highly radioactive water have gotten past containment already. They are planning to pump it into barges and ships with a total capacity of 15,000 tons. A lot of the radioactive water is 100,000 times more radioactive than water found in a functioning nuclear reactor.
That implies that the water that has got past containment is 100,000x more radioactive. Following your advice I checked out NHK. They say that the water found inside the turbine building of the second reactor is 100,000x more reactive (not the water leaking out). The water found in "the pit" the facility outside containment where the crack was found was 10,000x more radioactive. Further, that implies that they're going to use barges to remove the water that has escaped containment. From what I've heard the barges are for water that is in the turbine buildings which are inside the containment (Correct me if I'm wrong but that is what was reported). In regards to the water in the pit they're trying to close the holes. They were unable to cement it so they're going to try some other "chemical substance"
The authorities don't know how the water is leaking out and don't know the upper bound on the total amount of radioactivity released. The lower bound is already rather staggering. In addition, radioactive materials have already leaked into the ocean and the ground water. TEPCO said the level they measured in the ground water was the similar to the high levels found in the turbine buildings and the tunnels outside the plants. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said those readings were way too high so they asked TEPCO to measure again more carefully.
Here's where the Asahi article comes in. Those figures (ground water) were measured from a pumping-station (not the turbine building) used to remove underground water to stabilize the reactor. Following the Asahi news article (just reporting what the nuclear safety agency said) the current explanation is that that got there through dust carried on the rain and isn't indicative of a leak.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
Okay I haven't heard any reportage about the specific (or rough) tonnage of the amount of water that has escaped (at least not in the last 3 days news at http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-fukushima/ which I just flicked through), but given a 20cm crack that would seem like a likely figure. So now we have to be clear what we're talking about. The contamination discovered at the pumping station (not the turbine building) in the underground water is believed to have been caused by radioactive materials carried on the rain. The contamination escaping into the sea water is from a 10-20cm crack in a facility called "the (/a) pit" (Japanese version) near the sluice gate for sea-water connected to the second reactor.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thous
You mean like when you have backups of your computer which you haven't tested? Or maybe when you make backups on magnetic media to weather a solar storm?
Did you deliberately ignore the part where I said "Geological surveys in the region showed apparently no records of such tsunamis occurring"? And how by the way do you test systems for a mega-earthquake followed by a mega-tsunami? If we had the ability to actually generate the kind of energy needed to properly simulate those conditions we wouldn't need to worry about some puny little gigawatt level power plant...
Building walls to hold the ocean back from an island is a sad joke guaranteed to have a painful punchline.
I guess we should get to and eliminate all nuclear reactors from islands then. We can start with Three Mile. Oh wait is that not an area known for 15m Tsunamis? Well neither was Fukushima! It's damn easy to tell everyone what they should have done with the benefit of hindsight. But practically there's a point between reasonable risk management and unreasonable risk management. I mean what if a nuclear reactor got hit by a meteor? Should we speculate about that as well?
Oh and further on the subject of risk-management the second plant not far from the first plant has been fine. Which imo further suggests just that this was quite a freaky accident.
Jeeze Louise. Literally thousands of tons of highly radioactive water have gotten past containment already. They are planning to pump it into barges and ships with a total capacity of 15,000 tons. A lot of the radioactive water is 100,000 times more radioactive than water found in a functioning nuclear reactor. The only way this radioactivity could have escaped is if the fuel rods melted or broke contaminating the water and then the water escaped through leaks in the secondary stainless steel containment vessel.
Eh? Current explanation is that the iodine-131 detected at levels _10,000_ times the normal legal limit where found in a pumping station used to remove underground water to prevent the reactor being moved around due to water buoyancy. TEPCO believes that there's no leak into the underground water and that the iodine entered the water supply through dust carried on the rain. Same as the iodine detected everywhere else.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
Or it didn't. So far the water that is going to be pumped is the water that has pooled in the pump room. The pump room is inside the containment It's believed that it leaked out of broken pipes between the reactor and the cooling pump. No need to panic about a breached containment. Monitoring is slowly coming back online (keep in mind the hugely difficult conditions they're working in). As more monitoring comes online we should get a clearer picture. Until then we've just got speculation.
From what I read Tepco, their regulators and the general government in Japan has ignored all 3 items in my subject.
For doing that they will pay the huge price of a 10-20 year cleanup with enormous damage to their economy and the respect the people have for their institutions.
It is not only the Middle East that may see governmental changes in the near future.
Living in Japan and talking to the average Japanese person that is not what they think _at all_. Most people here think that you should listen to what the government has to say and not overreact and so far they've been spot on. The reaction of the overseas media has been a matter of some scorn even amongst Japanese entertainment/news programs. Rolling blackouts and massive Tsunami devastation will have a far bigger economic impact but it will be only temporary.
As for Transparency, Cooperation & Risk Management. Could you be specific about which areas you found lacking and how if presented with the same _evolving_ view of the situation without the benefit of knowing what would happen next you would have handled the situation differently?
They haven't kept radiation levels secret. They haven't kept the detection of radioactive elements secret. They haven't kept explosions secret. They've provided constant updates on what steps they're taking. The IAEA has said that there information sharing has met international standards.
In terms of risk management what would you have had them do differently (without having the benefit of hindsight)? They had a multi-stage backup system which was working till it was flattened by a mega-tsuanmi. Geological surveys in the region showed apparently no records of such tsunamis occurring. When those systems failed they moved onto the next stage of manual cooling it while they worked to get power back.
on the contrary.. I'm saying you should be afraid that 'your' government isn't keeping things running well and keeping up.
I'm saying if your in the USA you should be afraid of your government, not China.
With all due respect then, perhaps you should consider wording yourself more clearly than "take it you didn't loose your house then?" Especially when you consider that the grandfather post, which I was replying to, was stating that US industry was harmed by Japanese research.
Now as for your overall assertion, I'm not sure exactly where it is that you're saying the US government isn't keeping things running well and keeping up. If you're suggesting that the government should support workers who've lost their jobs because of technological advance or help companies who are losing their markets because they can't keep up with technological advance, I think that is a matter of your own political philosophy. Libertarians would almost certainly disagree, although many others may agree. I won't bore you with the details of my personal beliefs.
If you're suggesting that the fact that China is catching up with the US in scientific output is because of a failure of the US government, then I would have to disagree. It's simply a mater of scale. China has more than 4x the population of the US. If the average Chinese citizen is 1/4 as economically productive as the average US citizen then the Chinese economy will be larger than the US economy. Same scale applies roughly enough to scientific output, as long as the Chinese can get their house reasonably in order, then it is natural that China will produce more research than the US. Now there are almost certainly problems with science in the US some of which are almost certainly problems with the government. However, based on population, the natural state of affairs is that China will produce more scientific research than the US.
Should we have been afraid of the development of cars because horse and carriage makers might loose their jobs? Saying we should be afraid of scientific advancement because companies can't keep up is saying that we should be afraid of the advancement of humanity because un-innovative companies can't compete.
Was US industry harmed when Japan started taking research seriously, and applying it to their products? Absolutely.
Was the average US consumer harmed? No. They benefited from cheaper, better quality, more functional products. The fact that US companies couldn't keep up is a problem with US companies. It would be extremely stupid to be afraid of others increasing the knowledge pool of humanity because we want to live in a time warp where companies incapable of innovating are protected from having to.
See the plain truth is that the JVM is a least-common-denominator. It is an interpreter for gawd's sake, and one that knows it is sufficiently crap that it has a "just in time compiler" so that it can set itself aside whenever it realizes that it is too much crap for the code it is running. But it still suffers from the conceit that it is ever _not_ too much crap... why not just JIT the entire code base? And if that, why not just compile the code base once to begin wiht? Yes, then it woudlnt' be a "VM" but come on, competing with runtime to run a compiler? Really? Because you know that compiled code would be "better"? But "not always"? REALLY?
Because JIT compiling allows the optimizer to take advantage of features like SMD4 without having to compile for that, and allows you to perform optimizations based on run-time analysis. The LLVM project is JIT vm written specifically to take advantage of these sorts of potential optimisations. Despite being a relatively young project C/C++ code compiled into LLVM bytecodes has shown better performance than code compiled into native-binaries using GCC.
In the case of Java, the JVM in server mode beats out plenty of compiled languages and comes quite close to C/C++ on the programming language shootout. A lot of the difference could easily come down to the fact that with the JVM array bounds checking, RTTI and virtual methods are unavoidable (and very nice to have imo).
Aside from potential performance advantages using a VM also has the advantage that it gives you nice run-time errors with things like a NullPointerException with a nice stack trace rather than just getting a seg-fault. This IMO is probably the biggest plus.
If Ruby, the language, wasn't full of... um... "crap"... the ruby-to-native-C translations would _naturally_ run much faster than the ruby-to-JVM JRuby just by virtue of not being in the VM. But lo and behold, that's not the case Ruby is _modeled_ on the mistakes of Java and its ilk. Perl-to-C has many of the same problems, and likely Python would as well. They just don't labor under the misapprehension that if they could just find the right platform things would be better. They make themselves the best version of themselves possible. Perl does a damn good job of being Perl, and Python "does okay" for being plagued by that stupid white-space thing, and having a completely unstable incompatability between V2.X and V3.
This is just completely, entirely wrong.
Firstly JRuby is fast because it compiles (presumably on the fly) the Ruby code into jvm bytecode and then uses the jvm to run the byte-code. The JVM (written in C++ I believe) is a much a better piece of software than the conventional Ruby vm and therefore despite the overhead of compiling Ruby into jvm bytecode in Java it still manages to match the performance.
I'm not sure what the "ruby-to-native C translations" are that you're talking about. CRuby takes a ruby file transforms it into an intermediate bytecode and runs that bytecode in its own vm. Same as JRuby except JRuby uses the JVM. Almost the same as Java as well except that Java is compiled ("transformed") into bytecode prior to running
Even if all your facts had been right your statement still would've failed basic logic 101. Why would all the "crap" that Ruby's filled with (apparently according to you) make the "ruby-to-native C translations" (See above for an explanation of what actually happens) slower than Ruby-JVM which would presumably also have to deal with Ruby's "crap"
The best you could hope for is getting adopted by Apple and re-branded iRuby since those apple fans will seemingly buy into anything as long as someone in a black turtleneck tells them to. iRuby won't be any less craptacular than Ruby, but it will have a home...
Ahhh... going for a troll mod I see
So calling it Mirah or JRuby isn't going to matter... it deserves the JVM and good luck to it I say.
Obviously you found the summary difficult to comprehend. So let me help yo
It's an honor thing. It's not that Japan is being stubborn or just refusing to accept help for no good reason. For them, accepting help would be a display of weakness, which is heavily frowned upon. The Japanese highly value honor and humbleness. They don't like to ask others for things like that because it feels like taking charity. They see more honor in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and overcoming through their own hard work and solidarity.
What a load of bullshit honestly. There is already US search teams on the ground in Japan and US search aircraft carriers of the coast of Japan providing landing platforms and US airbases provided backup airfields for commercial flights that couldn't land. Hardly seems like not accepting aid to me.
Remember that these are a people who, for many centuries, had a proud tradition of disemboweling themselves when they screwed up in order to restore their family's honor. That's pretty hardcore dedication to honor. So I don't figure their refusal for help as unkindness or stubbornness. It's just their tradition and ways, and I respect that, so I really don't feel offended at all at their saying "No thanks."
Seppuku was a warrior tradition started around the 12th century which lasted for about 700 years. It probably started with a belief that the soul is contained in the stomach and was thus linked to religious practice and later evolved into an honorable way to serve out a death sentence. It's worth remembering though that at the height of their power and refinement in the Edo era, the warrior class never made up more than 10% of the population and even then were mostly bureaucrats and it's doubtful that every warrior believed in the practice of seppuku. It was only in the Meiji-era that it was elevated and romanticized as a form of traditional martial morality and national morality. In other words, 90% of the population never practiced it in the first place. Of the remaining 10% who made up the warrior class for many it was probably a gruesome and fearful but honorable way to serve out a death sentence and not something they would consider otherwise. Or in other words nobody anywhere near serious about sociology or at all knowledgeable about Japan uses a hugely romanticized and elevated in pop. culture custom to judge the actions of modern Japanese (except maybe to matters of support for the death sentence as a form of criminal punishment although even that is questionable. After all lots of other countries also support it). It's like using the extremes of Victorian upper class moral codes as a lens through which to judge the modern British.
Here let me give you some more realistic reasons, which have actually been discussed in the Japanese media, as to why foreign aid workers aren't so helpful:
Language barriers make communication more difficult
No procedures in place to coordinate large foreign rescue contingents
Overlapping capacities make the rescue contingents less necessary. E.g. I can't see how teams of foreign nuclear engineers could have helped in Japan's reactor crisis. It was simply a matter of making appropriate responses to an evolving situation which the Japanese did. In regards to the coolant they did try and bring in some from America however the situation evolved too quickly.
In regards to the current power crisis I can't see how foreign aid would be any use at all. What are they going to do ship over power plants?
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away, but installing newer plants, which would be of the modern and inherently safe designs, would allow the old ones to be decommissioned or at least overhauled. Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan) and an increasing energy demand that is already taxing our current grid at times (again, in the US, especially on the west coast), we simply can't afford to take the older plants offline.
No such limitations on new plant construction exist in Japan. ja.wikipedia.org lists 3 new plants in construction in Japan as of Jan 2008. I'm not sure why they were still using an old GE design. Japanese companies are now leading constructors of nuclear plants overseas... Either way you can't blame anti-nuclear proponents for this.
Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict.
I don't know about that but the internet has been awesome in surviving natural disasters. I'm in Japan and when the earthquake hit on Friday the phonelines where almost immediately locked up but thanks to mobile phone emails I was able to confirm the safety of friends near effected areas and thanks to the internet I was able to message my family in Australia. As of yesterday evening I still couldn't dial Japan->Aus but I could do a full video-call to my family over skype... Perhaps the most amusing thing in an otherwise dreadful situation was that I remembered reading a book by a communications "expert" in Japan a few years ago saying that email would go down before phonelines (can't remember what the reason given was) but at the time I thought it strange and it's rather amusing thinking about how red-faced that "expert" must be now.
Like the digital media producers of the world, these Australian retailers would rather shift the earth than themselves.
Really what would you have them do? Pack up and move overseas so they can avoid the GST?
For the record GST on overseas purchases alone won't save them, but why should businesses have to compete with a business that faces a different set of tax rules to them?
Yeah you're right I should say it's unfair to Aussie online retailers as well, but that's the point the Aussie retailers have to pay GST on any goods they sell you. It's nice not to pay tax, but it would also be nice to have a tax system not structured in such a way that it puts Australian businesses at a disadvantage over their overseas competitors and potentially forces them and the jobs they create off shore.
Either you're charging GST on every purchase or your not.
For the record I don't think this will rescue Harvey Norman or Myer or anyone. They're price gouging arseholes, but I don't think the government should be taxing some business and not others.
It seems unfair to have one set of rules for online retailers and another for brick and mortar retailers. I can't blame them for complaining. Why should they have to compete with a store that faces a lower tax rate?
The u.s. is like the decline of Rome. Most of the budget spent on the military to little gain.
When will we realize we need to spend those billions on educating new engineers and scientists,
repair our education system and bring industry back home? Do we value having $1.00 stores so much
we will slit our own throats to save 0.50 cents on plastic goods? China's power is there is no individual, there
is only the state. Need a new bridge? Seize houses. New factory? Take land. We need to realize what we are
up against and adjust our outdated ideals about business. There is no more free market, there is the chinese
way, of the western way where people and property are respected and protected. We need to set up protective
measures to protect what is left of our industry.
What does it mean for the US to be on top? What does it mean for it to be second place? Is it better or worse for it to be on top? Would the Chinese military becoming more powerful than the US military be a threat to world security or a boon? The Roman empire weakened from within and then was over-run by "barbarians" (for lack of a better term). Would a relative weakening of the US lead to the same result? Why would the Chinese want to invade the US? What would they gain from attacking a nuclear power? Even in a world with China firmly on top it would seem like a hugely costly and risky adventure to gain what? Open access to markets? They already have that. Places to build their factories? The US would welcome it.
There's little point worrying about collapse of Rome scenarios. Whether the US is at the top of its game or in internal strife China will almost certainly surpass it economically. There are 1.3 billion people in China compared to 300 million in the US. For ease of calculations let's say there's only 1.2 billion people in China though:
If/When the average Chinese citizen reaches just 1/4 of the productivity (measured by monetary production) of the average American, the Chinese economy will equal the US in size.
At 1/3 of the productivity China would be producing the equivalent of the US if it had a population of 400 million. Or in other words would have an economy fully 1/3 large than the US.
If it were to reach half the productivity of the US then the Chinese economy would be fully twice the size of that of the US!
Better to ask Japan what it is like to be a defeated power in second place! Although I hope we never see an actual military confrontation between the US and China that one might just be the end of humanity.
You're assuming that they're being pressured by some political agency.
Don't. They are the, single biggest financial organization in the world next to the Federal Reserve. Not even the World Bank is as big as MC.
MC can look every single world leader directly in the eye, whip out their privates right in front of the cameras, and urinate directly into those eyes, one at a time, and nobody would DARE do or say anything. More than a few would swallow.
They're doing this because they found a way to make it profitable.
Mastercard:
- Net assets: 7.47 Billion
- Net income: 1.46 Billion
- Criticism by world leaders:
Sued for anti-trust by the EU in 2009 and forced to reduce its fees to 0.2% of purchase
Criticised this year by members of the European Parliament for cutting of payments to Wikileaks.
Federal Reserve:
Total Assets: 2.34 Trillion
Total Liabilities: 1.348 Trillion
Net Equity: 56.78 Billion
Also holds about 6.4 Trillion dollars worth off securities of the balance sheet.
Mastercard is a piddly little company. I'd be surprised if it was even in the biggest 100 financial institutions in the world. Infact it's not even a money lender. It's just one of the large world-wide transaction processing networks. Although by no-means the largest or globally accepted.
oh, you tube.
i should read the articles occasionally before replying.
but that would be less fun.
You didn't have to read the article to know it was youtube. It says it =twice= in the article summary. It even says it in the article title, which, at least for me, is displayed in 4 different places on screen. 3 of which are visible no matter where you scroll to (window title, task bar icon, tab name)!
Living in Japan I find it to be little more than a poor substitute for a proper cash card. Unfortunately though proper electronic payment services are woefully under-developed here:(
In Tokyo you can also use train passes to pay at vending machines and at department stores near the train station. Seems really high tech until you realise that it's just another ad-hoc solution to the fundamental problem of crappy electronic payment services.
If you want somewhere to be jealous of take a look at somewhere like Australia. You can pay just about anywhere with an eftpos card. They charge a straight fee rather than a percentage of the price. They require a PIN rather than signing. You can withdraw money when paying with cards at shops and you can use them at any ATM in the country. Thanks to proper direct debit systems when making online purchases, rather than asking for your card details most Australian retailers just asked you to deposit money in their account with a reference number attached. No need to trust their credit card handling infrastructure.
Anything less than that just seems at least a decade out of date. Even if it does involve your mobile phone. Or in this case your mobile phone + a long list of internet buzzwords.
I bought a PS3 recently thinking it would be nice to try some gaming in my down time. Despite a few attempts to sit down and enjoy them, no game has really caught my attention. I don't think it's a problem with the game titles. I don't think I found any of the games boring.. There was just nothing that made me want to dedicate my attention to them.
I guess a certain percentage of gamers grow out of it. Probably there's also a certain percentage of non-gamers who grow into it as well. That's life and if you're not into games anymore then who cares? Save your money / spend it elsewhere. Reading, traveling, eating out, gym/sports/other exercise.etc. are all fun ways to spend your down time.
Next time someone tells you that we shouldn't tax the rich because they deserve the money they earn, link them to this story.
The guys a fool living of his great-grand fathers success. It sounds in some ways like the scamers did more work for the money than he did. (Not that I think we should be rewarding them for being a-grade assholes)
Slashdot Mirror
Please, name ONE policy with isn't tax, heading toward less CO2 emissions. Give me one example of a country that wants to ban petrol-based cars, or at least push for electric. The profit here, is simply going through a tax, and the enslavement of poor people having no choice but to use fossil fuel for their car, because there's simply no other alternative available, and that nobody cares to make policies to push for such a change. Open your eyes!
1. Australia is looking at introducing an emissions trading scheme not a carbon tax.
2. You're opposed to a tax on carbon because of its effect on poor people, yet you're proposing banning petrol cars? You don't think that might have some effect on all those poor people who have to use them "because there's simply no other choices available"?
3. As far as promoting electric cars go, Japan had a scheme promoting hybrids for a while, although I think it has been wound down now. It's not electric but Brazil has been promoting biofuels for decades. That's off the top of my head. There's probably others. Other than that there are plenty of countries investing heavily in public transportation. Japan, France, Germany, Korea, Spain and China have all invested heavily in bullet trains (I'm sure there are others). It's not as shiny as bullet trains but plenty (most?) cities around the world have been working hard to build up intra-city train/tram networks. All of this is irrelevant though firms not individuals are being targeted by the ETS.
4. Even in Australia government direct investment in "green" industries and targeted schemes have been touted as an alternative by the opposition leader. However, most economists have ridiculed the idea preferring an ETS which encourages market led innovation rather than the government attempting to pick winners (and all the incompetence and corruption that implies).
Are these the same guys who've been refusing SOI/FOIA requests because they claim that their work which is publically funded is 'proprietary'? Or are these the same ones from aussieland that made up the shit including forging the emails that they were being harassed.
No and even if they were that wouldn't justify sending them death threats. Also it doesn't seem to have come up on Slashdot yet, but the CSIRO has opened a site at http://www.csiro.au/greenhouse-gases/ where you can view the raw information about green house gas concentrations that has been collected in Australia.
Then again I can't really feel too much sympathy. People will only take a decade or two(maybe three) of doom and gloom based on fudged numbers, and corrupted policies. Especially when they realize that what you're proposing will effectively bankrupt the entire country and turn it into a 3rd world dirt farming nation.
Step 1. Build a global conspiracy supported by every major research organisation world wide suggesting that emitting large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere is going to affect the climate and don't forget to suppress the voices of the brave and heroic rouge scientists and oil company researchers who attempt to reveal your conspiracy.
Step 2. Have governments world-wide introduces nation-bankrupting schemes to charge (some) people who bump lots of carbon into the atmosphere for that privilege.
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit!
Or something like that right? Looking at other countries, like for example NZ, which has a very very similar scheme to what is being discussed in Australia, the results so far have been positive, or is that just more misinformation?
Hell you don't even need to believe in climate change to see the need to encourage the uptake of more renewable energies. Global coal, oil, gas and uranium stocks are predicted to run out in the next few hundred years. In the meantime as demand continues to rise, prices will go up and countries which don't have alternatives will hurt (a lot in the nation bankrupting sense).
On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.
iPhones are =assembled= in China. Most of the insides are from Japan, Korea, Germany, Taiwan and even a few parts from the US. All those iPhones being shipped from China go down as a massive trade deficit between the US and China, but when you look at the value added in China it's only a few dollars and, the US is actually mostly running a deficit with Japan, Korea, Germany .etc. Ditto. for playstation 3 and all those other high tech gadgets made in China.
Made in China label doesn't mean that it's actually made in China!
This is VERY bad news to an already weakened dollar.
The dollar has been overvalued for decades, and look at the result: manufacturing jobs have moved overseas, and a vastly negative trade balance. With an over valued currency, It's simply cheaper to import something than to produce it locally.
A high exchange rate doesn't make a currency strong anyway, long term stability and low inflation are more important.
"Overvalued" currencies are a silly excuse for the US's poor trade performance. If currency valuation was the determining factor in the size of trade surpluses then post-plaza accord Japan's trade surplus should have narrowed significantly. In fact it's been rising and falling without much change in the average at all. Or Germany wouldn't run a huge trade surplus with the rest of the EU even though they trade in the same currency.
Furthermore there's a lot of evidence out that a large part of US trade-deficit with China with its undervalued currency is actually a deficit with Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Germany. China is becoming an end point for the assembling of products (iphone, ps3 .etc. etc.) but the reality is that the internals of those products are actually coming from Japan .etc. http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6335 has a good analysis. The iPhone alone adds 1.9billion to the US trade deficit with China. However the reality is that the value added in China was only 3.6% of the total manufacturing costs. The rest of the value was added elsewhere and imported into China. Looked at like that the real deficit between the US and China in iPhone trade is only $73 million dollars. The rest is a deficit to 1. Resource exporting nations (Australia .etc. which btw. runs a trade surplus with all the East Asian economies and has a very strong currency while actually running a deficit with the US!) 2. High Tech manufacturers (Japan, Germany .etc.). Or in other words the Euro and the Yen are high but the US is still running a trade deficit with Japan and Germany. It just now gets hidden as a trade deficit with China.
The rest of the world is getting pretty sick of the US moaning about "undervalued" currencies as well. Here's the governor of the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) calling out the falacy in the US's constant whining about the Yuan: http://www.smh.com.au/business/rba-to-usa-wake-up-yer-drongos-20110415-1dgye.html
The reason the US hasn't succeeded as an exporter is because it has systemically failed to make the long-term capital investments necessary to make its industries competitive. It's easier for a CEO to fire 10,000 workers claim a massive increase in profits collecting outrageously huge performance-bonuses (or non-performance please just go away bonuses aka. "golden parachutes") than it is for them to make serious long term investments than sacrifice immediate profit for future-benefit. I'd blame a tax-structure that doesn't provide strong incentives for corporations to bring profits back onshore and reinvest them in infrastructure and employing new workers and an (ultra) short-term focused stock market.
If you had been watching the Japanese news you would know what you are reporting is both old news and garbled. There were many highly inaccurate reports in the Western media. IMO the Western media is completely unreliable re Fukushima.
I'm in Japan and I _only_ watch (or more specifically read) the Japanese news. The figures I gave were reported in Asahi newspaper yesterday. I admit though that I confused that report with the report about water leaking into the sea. They were separate issues. So my apologies.
Literally thousands of tons of highly radioactive water have gotten past containment already. They are planning to pump it into barges and ships with a total capacity of 15,000 tons. A lot of the radioactive water is 100,000 times more radioactive than water found in a functioning nuclear reactor.
That implies that the water that has got past containment is 100,000x more radioactive. Following your advice I checked out NHK. They say that the water found inside the turbine building of the second reactor is 100,000x more reactive (not the water leaking out). The water found in "the pit" the facility outside containment where the crack was found was 10,000x more radioactive. Further, that implies that they're going to use barges to remove the water that has escaped containment. From what I've heard the barges are for water that is in the turbine buildings which are inside the containment (Correct me if I'm wrong but that is what was reported). In regards to the water in the pit they're trying to close the holes. They were unable to cement it so they're going to try some other "chemical substance"
The authorities don't know how the water is leaking out and don't know the upper bound on the total amount of radioactivity released. The lower bound is already rather staggering. In addition, radioactive materials have already leaked into the ocean and the ground water. TEPCO said the level they measured in the ground water was the similar to the high levels found in the turbine buildings and the tunnels outside the plants. The Japanese Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said those readings were way too high so they asked TEPCO to measure again more carefully.
Here's where the Asahi article comes in. Those figures (ground water) were measured from a pumping-station (not the turbine building) used to remove underground water to stabilize the reactor. Following the Asahi news article (just reporting what the nuclear safety agency said) the current explanation is that that got there through dust carried on the rain and isn't indicative of a leak.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
Okay I haven't heard any reportage about the specific (or rough) tonnage of the amount of water that has escaped (at least not in the last 3 days news at http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/genpatsu-fukushima/ which I just flicked through), but given a 20cm crack that would seem like a likely figure. So now we have to be clear what we're talking about. The contamination discovered at the pumping station (not the turbine building) in the underground water is believed to have been caused by radioactive materials carried on the rain. The contamination escaping into the sea water is from a 10-20cm crack in a facility called "the (/a) pit" (Japanese version) near the sluice gate for sea-water connected to the second reactor.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thous
You mean like when you have backups of your computer which you haven't tested? Or maybe when you make backups on magnetic media to weather a solar storm?
Did you deliberately ignore the part where I said "Geological surveys in the region showed apparently no records of such tsunamis occurring"? And how by the way do you test systems for a mega-earthquake followed by a mega-tsunami? If we had the ability to actually generate the kind of energy needed to properly simulate those conditions we wouldn't need to worry about some puny little gigawatt level power plant...
Building walls to hold the ocean back from an island is a sad joke guaranteed to have a painful punchline.
I guess we should get to and eliminate all nuclear reactors from islands then. We can start with Three Mile. Oh wait is that not an area known for 15m Tsunamis? Well neither was Fukushima! It's damn easy to tell everyone what they should have done with the benefit of hindsight. But practically there's a point between reasonable risk management and unreasonable risk management. I mean what if a nuclear reactor got hit by a meteor? Should we speculate about that as well?
Oh and further on the subject of risk-management the second plant not far from the first plant has been fine. Which imo further suggests just that this was quite a freaky accident.
Jeeze Louise. Literally thousands of tons of highly radioactive water have gotten past containment already. They are planning to pump it into barges and ships with a total capacity of 15,000 tons. A lot of the radioactive water is 100,000 times more radioactive than water found in a functioning nuclear reactor. The only way this radioactivity could have escaped is if the fuel rods melted or broke contaminating the water and then the water escaped through leaks in the secondary stainless steel containment vessel.
Eh? Current explanation is that the iodine-131 detected at levels _10,000_ times the normal legal limit where found in a pumping station used to remove underground water to prevent the reactor being moved around due to water buoyancy. TEPCO believes that there's no leak into the underground water and that the iodine entered the water supply through dust carried on the rain. Same as the iodine detected everywhere else.
The only specific theory I've heard of how the thousands of tons of highly radioactive water got out of the containment vessel is that it got out via graphite seals in the bottom of the vessel. There are holes there for control rods and the holes are blocked with graphite seals. The seals will fail at high temperatures and melted fuel rods falling to the bottom of the vessel would provide more than enough heat to cause the seals to fail. If it is any solace, reactors that don't contain melted fuel rods probably don't have leaks all over the bottom of the containment vessel.
Or it didn't. So far the water that is going to be pumped is the water that has pooled in the pump room. The pump room is inside the containment It's believed that it leaked out of broken pipes between the reactor and the cooling pump. No need to panic about a breached containment. Monitoring is slowly coming back online (keep in mind the hugely difficult conditions they're working in). As more monitoring comes online we should get a clearer picture. Until then we've just got speculation.
From what I read Tepco, their regulators and the general government in Japan has ignored all 3 items in my subject. For doing that they will pay the huge price of a 10-20 year cleanup with enormous damage to their economy and the respect the people have for their institutions. It is not only the Middle East that may see governmental changes in the near future.
Living in Japan and talking to the average Japanese person that is not what they think _at all_. Most people here think that you should listen to what the government has to say and not overreact and so far they've been spot on. The reaction of the overseas media has been a matter of some scorn even amongst Japanese entertainment/news programs. Rolling blackouts and massive Tsunami devastation will have a far bigger economic impact but it will be only temporary.
As for Transparency, Cooperation & Risk Management. Could you be specific about which areas you found lacking and how if presented with the same _evolving_ view of the situation without the benefit of knowing what would happen next you would have handled the situation differently?
They haven't kept radiation levels secret. They haven't kept the detection of radioactive elements secret. They haven't kept explosions secret. They've provided constant updates on what steps they're taking. The IAEA has said that there information sharing has met international standards.
In terms of risk management what would you have had them do differently (without having the benefit of hindsight)? They had a multi-stage backup system which was working till it was flattened by a mega-tsuanmi. Geological surveys in the region showed apparently no records of such tsunamis occurring. When those systems failed they moved onto the next stage of manual cooling it while they worked to get power back.
on the contrary.. I'm saying you should be afraid that 'your' government isn't keeping things running well and keeping up. I'm saying if your in the USA you should be afraid of your government, not China.
With all due respect then, perhaps you should consider wording yourself more clearly than "take it you didn't loose your house then?" Especially when you consider that the grandfather post, which I was replying to, was stating that US industry was harmed by Japanese research.
Now as for your overall assertion, I'm not sure exactly where it is that you're saying the US government isn't keeping things running well and keeping up. If you're suggesting that the government should support workers who've lost their jobs because of technological advance or help companies who are losing their markets because they can't keep up with technological advance, I think that is a matter of your own political philosophy. Libertarians would almost certainly disagree, although many others may agree. I won't bore you with the details of my personal beliefs.
If you're suggesting that the fact that China is catching up with the US in scientific output is because of a failure of the US government, then I would have to disagree. It's simply a mater of scale. China has more than 4x the population of the US. If the average Chinese citizen is 1/4 as economically productive as the average US citizen then the Chinese economy will be larger than the US economy. Same scale applies roughly enough to scientific output, as long as the Chinese can get their house reasonably in order, then it is natural that China will produce more research than the US. Now there are almost certainly problems with science in the US some of which are almost certainly problems with the government. However, based on population, the natural state of affairs is that China will produce more scientific research than the US.
take it you didn't loose your house then?
Should we have been afraid of the development of cars because horse and carriage makers might loose their jobs? Saying we should be afraid of scientific advancement because companies can't keep up is saying that we should be afraid of the advancement of humanity because un-innovative companies can't compete.
Was US industry harmed when Japan started taking research seriously, and applying it to their products? Absolutely.
Was the average US consumer harmed? No. They benefited from cheaper, better quality, more functional products. The fact that US companies couldn't keep up is a problem with US companies. It would be extremely stupid to be afraid of others increasing the knowledge pool of humanity because we want to live in a time warp where companies incapable of innovating are protected from having to.
See the plain truth is that the JVM is a least-common-denominator. It is an interpreter for gawd's sake, and one that knows it is sufficiently crap that it has a "just in time compiler" so that it can set itself aside whenever it realizes that it is too much crap for the code it is running. But it still suffers from the conceit that it is ever _not_ too much crap... why not just JIT the entire code base? And if that, why not just compile the code base once to begin wiht? Yes, then it woudlnt' be a "VM" but come on, competing with runtime to run a compiler? Really? Because you know that compiled code would be "better"? But "not always"? REALLY?
Because JIT compiling allows the optimizer to take advantage of features like SMD4 without having to compile for that, and allows you to perform optimizations based on run-time analysis. The LLVM project is JIT vm written specifically to take advantage of these sorts of potential optimisations. Despite being a relatively young project C/C++ code compiled into LLVM bytecodes has shown better performance than code compiled into native-binaries using GCC.
In the case of Java, the JVM in server mode beats out plenty of compiled languages and comes quite close to C/C++ on the programming language shootout. A lot of the difference could easily come down to the fact that with the JVM array bounds checking, RTTI and virtual methods are unavoidable (and very nice to have imo).
Aside from potential performance advantages using a VM also has the advantage that it gives you nice run-time errors with things like a NullPointerException with a nice stack trace rather than just getting a seg-fault. This IMO is probably the biggest plus.
If Ruby, the language, wasn't full of... um... "crap"... the ruby-to-native-C translations would _naturally_ run much faster than the ruby-to-JVM JRuby just by virtue of not being in the VM. But lo and behold, that's not the case Ruby is _modeled_ on the mistakes of Java and its ilk. Perl-to-C has many of the same problems, and likely Python would as well. They just don't labor under the misapprehension that if they could just find the right platform things would be better. They make themselves the best version of themselves possible. Perl does a damn good job of being Perl, and Python "does okay" for being plagued by that stupid white-space thing, and having a completely unstable incompatability between V2.X and V3.
This is just completely, entirely wrong.
Firstly JRuby is fast because it compiles (presumably on the fly) the Ruby code into jvm bytecode and then uses the jvm to run the byte-code. The JVM (written in C++ I believe) is a much a better piece of software than the conventional Ruby vm and therefore despite the overhead of compiling Ruby into jvm bytecode in Java it still manages to match the performance.
I'm not sure what the "ruby-to-native C translations" are that you're talking about. CRuby takes a ruby file transforms it into an intermediate bytecode and runs that bytecode in its own vm. Same as JRuby except JRuby uses the JVM. Almost the same as Java as well except that Java is compiled ("transformed") into bytecode prior to running
Even if all your facts had been right your statement still would've failed basic logic 101. Why would all the "crap" that Ruby's filled with (apparently according to you) make the "ruby-to-native C translations" (See above for an explanation of what actually happens) slower than Ruby-JVM which would presumably also have to deal with Ruby's "crap"
The best you could hope for is getting adopted by Apple and re-branded iRuby since those apple fans will seemingly buy into anything as long as someone in a black turtleneck tells them to. iRuby won't be any less craptacular than Ruby, but it will have a home...
Ahhh... going for a troll mod I see
So calling it Mirah or JRuby isn't going to matter... it deserves the JVM and good luck to it I say.
Obviously you found the summary difficult to comprehend. So let me help yo
It's an honor thing. It's not that Japan is being stubborn or just refusing to accept help for no good reason. For them, accepting help would be a display of weakness, which is heavily frowned upon. The Japanese highly value honor and humbleness. They don't like to ask others for things like that because it feels like taking charity. They see more honor in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and overcoming through their own hard work and solidarity.
What a load of bullshit honestly. There is already US search teams on the ground in Japan and US search aircraft carriers of the coast of Japan providing landing platforms and US airbases provided backup airfields for commercial flights that couldn't land. Hardly seems like not accepting aid to me.
Remember that these are a people who, for many centuries, had a proud tradition of disemboweling themselves when they screwed up in order to restore their family's honor. That's pretty hardcore dedication to honor. So I don't figure their refusal for help as unkindness or stubbornness. It's just their tradition and ways, and I respect that, so I really don't feel offended at all at their saying "No thanks."
Seppuku was a warrior tradition started around the 12th century which lasted for about 700 years. It probably started with a belief that the soul is contained in the stomach and was thus linked to religious practice and later evolved into an honorable way to serve out a death sentence. It's worth remembering though that at the height of their power and refinement in the Edo era, the warrior class never made up more than 10% of the population and even then were mostly bureaucrats and it's doubtful that every warrior believed in the practice of seppuku. It was only in the Meiji-era that it was elevated and romanticized as a form of traditional martial morality and national morality. In other words, 90% of the population never practiced it in the first place. Of the remaining 10% who made up the warrior class for many it was probably a gruesome and fearful but honorable way to serve out a death sentence and not something they would consider otherwise. Or in other words nobody anywhere near serious about sociology or at all knowledgeable about Japan uses a hugely romanticized and elevated in pop. culture custom to judge the actions of modern Japanese (except maybe to matters of support for the death sentence as a form of criminal punishment although even that is questionable. After all lots of other countries also support it). It's like using the extremes of Victorian upper class moral codes as a lens through which to judge the modern British.
Here let me give you some more realistic reasons, which have actually been discussed in the Japanese media, as to why foreign aid workers aren't so helpful:
Ironically, the anti-nuclear proponents are their own worst enemies if they actually want to prevent things like this. The demand for power isn't going away, but installing newer plants, which would be of the modern and inherently safe designs, would allow the old ones to be decommissioned or at least overhauled. Instead, between a near-ban on new construction (in the US at least, I'm not sure about Japan) and an increasing energy demand that is already taxing our current grid at times (again, in the US, especially on the west coast), we simply can't afford to take the older plants offline.
No such limitations on new plant construction exist in Japan. ja.wikipedia.org lists 3 new plants in construction in Japan as of Jan 2008. I'm not sure why they were still using an old GE design. Japanese companies are now leading constructors of nuclear plants overseas... Either way you can't blame anti-nuclear proponents for this.
Should the Doomsday Clock ever strike midnight, we may well discover, finally, whether or not the internet really could survive a nuclear conflict.
I don't know about that but the internet has been awesome in surviving natural disasters. I'm in Japan and when the earthquake hit on Friday the phonelines where almost immediately locked up but thanks to mobile phone emails I was able to confirm the safety of friends near effected areas and thanks to the internet I was able to message my family in Australia. As of yesterday evening I still couldn't dial Japan->Aus but I could do a full video-call to my family over skype... Perhaps the most amusing thing in an otherwise dreadful situation was that I remembered reading a book by a communications "expert" in Japan a few years ago saying that email would go down before phonelines (can't remember what the reason given was) but at the time I thought it strange and it's rather amusing thinking about how red-faced that "expert" must be now.
Like the digital media producers of the world, these Australian retailers would rather shift the earth than themselves.
Really what would you have them do? Pack up and move overseas so they can avoid the GST?
For the record GST on overseas purchases alone won't save them, but why should businesses have to compete with a business that faces a different set of tax rules to them?
Yeah you're right I should say it's unfair to Aussie online retailers as well, but that's the point the Aussie retailers have to pay GST on any goods they sell you. It's nice not to pay tax, but it would also be nice to have a tax system not structured in such a way that it puts Australian businesses at a disadvantage over their overseas competitors and potentially forces them and the jobs they create off shore.
Either you're charging GST on every purchase or your not.
For the record I don't think this will rescue Harvey Norman or Myer or anyone. They're price gouging arseholes, but I don't think the government should be taxing some business and not others.
It seems unfair to have one set of rules for online retailers and another for brick and mortar retailers. I can't blame them for complaining. Why should they have to compete with a store that faces a lower tax rate?
The u.s. is like the decline of Rome. Most of the budget spent on the military to little gain. When will we realize we need to spend those billions on educating new engineers and scientists, repair our education system and bring industry back home? Do we value having $1.00 stores so much we will slit our own throats to save 0.50 cents on plastic goods? China's power is there is no individual, there is only the state. Need a new bridge? Seize houses. New factory? Take land. We need to realize what we are up against and adjust our outdated ideals about business. There is no more free market, there is the chinese way, of the western way where people and property are respected and protected. We need to set up protective measures to protect what is left of our industry.
What does it mean for the US to be on top? What does it mean for it to be second place? Is it better or worse for it to be on top? Would the Chinese military becoming more powerful than the US military be a threat to world security or a boon? The Roman empire weakened from within and then was over-run by "barbarians" (for lack of a better term). Would a relative weakening of the US lead to the same result? Why would the Chinese want to invade the US? What would they gain from attacking a nuclear power? Even in a world with China firmly on top it would seem like a hugely costly and risky adventure to gain what? Open access to markets? They already have that. Places to build their factories? The US would welcome it.
There's little point worrying about collapse of Rome scenarios. Whether the US is at the top of its game or in internal strife China will almost certainly surpass it economically. There are 1.3 billion people in China compared to 300 million in the US. For ease of calculations let's say there's only 1.2 billion people in China though:
If/When the average Chinese citizen reaches just 1/4 of the productivity (measured by monetary production) of the average American, the Chinese economy will equal the US in size.
At 1/3 of the productivity China would be producing the equivalent of the US if it had a population of 400 million. Or in other words would have an economy fully 1/3 large than the US.
If it were to reach half the productivity of the US then the Chinese economy would be fully twice the size of that of the US!
Better to ask Japan what it is like to be a defeated power in second place! Although I hope we never see an actual military confrontation between the US and China that one might just be the end of humanity.
You're assuming that they're being pressured by some political agency.
Don't. They are the, single biggest financial organization in the world next to the Federal Reserve. Not even the World Bank is as big as MC.
MC can look every single world leader directly in the eye, whip out their privates right in front of the cameras, and urinate directly into those eyes, one at a time, and nobody would DARE do or say anything. More than a few would swallow.
They're doing this because they found a way to make it profitable.
Mastercard: - Net assets: 7.47 Billion
- Net income: 1.46 Billion
- Criticism by world leaders:
Sued for anti-trust by the EU in 2009 and forced to reduce its fees to 0.2% of purchase
Criticised this year by members of the European Parliament for cutting of payments to Wikileaks.
Federal Reserve:
Total Assets: 2.34 Trillion
Total Liabilities: 1.348 Trillion
Net Equity: 56.78 Billion
Also holds about 6.4 Trillion dollars worth off securities of the balance sheet.
Mastercard is a piddly little company. I'd be surprised if it was even in the biggest 100 financial institutions in the world. Infact it's not even a money lender. It's just one of the large world-wide transaction processing networks. Although by no-means the largest or globally accepted.
oh, you tube. i should read the articles occasionally before replying. but that would be less fun.
You didn't have to read the article to know it was youtube. It says it =twice= in the article summary. It even says it in the article title, which, at least for me, is displayed in 4 different places on screen. 3 of which are visible no matter where you scroll to (window title, task bar icon, tab name)!
Actually, with providers only giving you a limited amount of bandwidth, they are wasting your bandwidth.
The solution to that would be to not use their free online video service. Maybe try a different one in protest?
Living in Japan I find it to be little more than a poor substitute for a proper cash card. Unfortunately though proper electronic payment services are woefully under-developed here :(
In Tokyo you can also use train passes to pay at vending machines and at department stores near the train station. Seems really high tech until you realise that it's just another ad-hoc solution to the fundamental problem of crappy electronic payment services.
If you want somewhere to be jealous of take a look at somewhere like Australia. You can pay just about anywhere with an eftpos card. They charge a straight fee rather than a percentage of the price. They require a PIN rather than signing. You can withdraw money when paying with cards at shops and you can use them at any ATM in the country. Thanks to proper direct debit systems when making online purchases, rather than asking for your card details most Australian retailers just asked you to deposit money in their account with a reference number attached. No need to trust their credit card handling infrastructure.
Anything less than that just seems at least a decade out of date. Even if it does involve your mobile phone. Or in this case your mobile phone + a long list of internet buzzwords.
I bought a PS3 recently thinking it would be nice to try some gaming in my down time. Despite a few attempts to sit down and enjoy them, no game has really caught my attention. I don't think it's a problem with the game titles. I don't think I found any of the games boring.. There was just nothing that made me want to dedicate my attention to them.
.etc. are all fun ways to spend your down time.
I guess a certain percentage of gamers grow out of it. Probably there's also a certain percentage of non-gamers who grow into it as well. That's life and if you're not into games anymore then who cares? Save your money / spend it elsewhere. Reading, traveling, eating out, gym/sports/other exercise
Next time someone tells you that we shouldn't tax the rich because they deserve the money they earn, link them to this story.
The guys a fool living of his great-grand fathers success. It sounds in some ways like the scamers did more work for the money than he did. (Not that I think we should be rewarding them for being a-grade assholes)