That's in my opinion why the Swiss rejected a similar popular initative last November and accepted this legislation instead: the popular initiative included hard decommissioning deadlines which would have shut down some nuclear power plants much earlier than necessary. The approved legislation will phase out nuclear power plants when they'll reach end of life.
The headline didn't lie: two votes are actually 2 completely separate issues:
The vote from November was about a popular initiative of hard exit from nuclear energy: it was not initiated by the government but by Swiss citizens, which means it was actually an amendment of the Swiss Constitution, including the hard prohibition to use nuclear power plants and hard deadlines about which existing plant had to be decommissioned, some of them as soon as 1 year after th vote. It was quick, simple (complete amended text in german here) but in my opinion pretty wrong as approach. It was rejected.
The vote from last November was about a referendum of parliament legislation. The legislation was proposed by the government, voted by the parliament and had to be voted by Swiss citizens, so not an amendment of the Swiss Constitution but standard legislation. This second vote was about a much broader energy policy, still including a phase-out of nuclear energy but without any hard deadline of nuclear power plant decommissioning and with actually a long term plan about what to do to cover the missing energy production. It was approved.
That's because you disrespected them, but some parents only care about that and couldn't care less if you disrespect somebody else. They don't teach to respect others, they teach not to hurt their overinflated ego.
They are going up because the bad deals are still in force and will be for a long time:
There is relatively little the government can do to lower rates through more lasting, structural means, mostly because the Liberals have tied up so much of the system in 20-year contracts.
To be clear, I don't question that the energy policy in Ontario has been a disaster, I question attributing the failure to "renewable don't work" when the issues in Ontario are broader in scope and didn't affect only renewables.
No energy policy is going to work well if you implement it with bad planning and through overpriced non-renegotiable bad deals to private companies, be it renewables, nuclear, coal or whatever.
Électricité de France (EDF) – the country's main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country's nuclear power plants. EDF is substantially owned by the French government, with around 85% of EDF shares in government hands.
78.9% of Areva shares are owned by the French public sector company CEA and are therefore in public ownership.
EDF remains heavily in debt. Its profitability suffered during the recession which began in 2008. It made €3.9 billion in 2009, which fell to €1.02 billion in 2010, with provisions set aside amounting to €2.9 billion.
The Nuclear industry has been accused of significant cost overruns and failing to cover the total costs of operation, including waste management and decommissioning.
In 2016, the European Commission assessed that France's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded, with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74.1 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs.
But, wary of the previous cost overruns at Ontario Hydro, the government decided to outsource the work of building and running the new power plants to the private sector. The private sector would be responsible for cost overruns and other construction problems in exchange for 20-year contracts from the province. The contracts essentially guaranteed that the companies would receive a certain amount of revenue – no matter how much electricity their plants produced (though they would be paid more if the province used their electricity).
The first major wave of private power plants was fuelled with natural gas. Later plants were tied to the Green Energy Act, which provided lucrative terms for wind and solar plants in a bid to build a renewable-power industry in the province.
Ultimately, the province built more plants than it actually needed. In 2014, according to the Auditor-General, Ontario had the capacity to produce 30,203 megawatts of power – but only needed 15,959 on an average day. (Even on the busiest day of the year, the province only required 22,774 megawatts.)
So the province has a massive surplus of generating capacity, but because much of it is tied up in private, 20-year contracts, Ontarians have to pay for all that electricity – whether they need it or not.
And Ontarians are still paying for the nuclear plants Ontario Hydro built in the eighties and nineties. When Ontario Hydro was broken up, its debt was hived off into an item called the “stranded debt,” which is being paid down by electricity users.
Countries investing in renewables know perfectly well the strategy means higher prices in the short term, so prices being higher today is actually part of the strategy and by no means evidence it's "not working": it's actually working as planned... I actually think the US should have higher electricity costs to finance a long term energy strategy too, whatever it will be (not necessarily renewables).
It's my understanding in the US the focus is much more on the short term advantages, but countries investing in new energy strategies are planning with the next 20-30 years in mind, not "next quarter".
Amanda Knox was only one of the suspects, together with Raffaele Sollecito (Italian, acquitted) and Rudy Guede (Ivorian, convicted). A judicial mess might have been, but it doesn't seem "wanting to get the evil American" to me.
In Italy, that's the whole point of the Guardia di Finanza, which is a military police force working under the Minister of Economy and Finance with the specific goal of dealing with financial crimes. They are not responsible for tax collection, but definitely for tax evasion investigations.
Not to be confused with the Polizia di Stato (State Police), which is the Italian civil police force working under the Minister of Interior dealing with law enforcement in general.
With tax avoidance, the worst that can happen is that the tax office changes what you have to pay. You cannot be prosecuted for tax avoidance. With tax evasion, you can go to jail.
In Italy you cannot have a penal prosecution for tax avoidance, but you can incur in administrative sanctions on top of having to pay back the "avoided" taxes.
The accusation is of tax evasion, not avoidance.
Well, that is assuming that whoever translated it from Italian got it right. There have been plenty of cases where things just get reported wrong.
Reports are correct. Note that in Italy in the recent past there has been a crack down on big companies allegedly evading taxes, with similar accusations to Google and Apple. The accusation is basically to having omitted to report revenues to the tax authority.
Not sure about the case against Google, but Apple was on the hook for about 800 millions and after a negotiation settled the case by paying around 320 millions.
Not sure which countries you are talking about: in most European countries I know medical malpractice is always open to huge liabilities. I think you are confusing malpractice with accident: in case of medical accidents nobody is at fault, so nobody is liable. In case of malpractice somebody it's at fault, usually due to some form of negligence. This leads to liability and could easily even lead to criminal charges.
In most jurisdictions a request of voluntary termination of parental rights needs to be evaluated and accepted by a court, which often denies such requests unless there is "good cause" (typically to allow adoption). Without good cause the request is denied no matter what the parents want or agree, since it would free one of them of his obligations to support the child, which is not in the child's best interest, which is the absolute priority.
No, that is already the standard. It's how corporations work, it's how foundations work, it's how businesses work. It's how in fact all relationships work, paid or unpaid. If someone doesn't want you associated with them, they get rid of you. That's what voluntary association is all about. Are you opposed to voluntary association?
Often associations have rules determining why and how a member can be kicked out and it's usually not "because the boss says so", especially when a Code of Conduct exists and disagrees with the boss.
Even in business an employer might not always be able to fire an employee without just cause. In some countries this even means an employer might be required by law to reinstate a fired employee, even if he wants to "get rid" of him.
Once you sack a person, you cannot re-instate them. They hold grudges for being sacked, they act like they're bigger than their boss and many other personality traits make it impossible.
That's only if they are being unprofessional and let their beliefs interfere with their work... which is actually the employer's problem in this case.
About re-instating employees not working, actually in some countries if an employer unlawfully sacks an employee he might be forced by law to re-instate him and no, the employer might not be able to avoid re-instatement by offering different forms of compensations.
Even this in most countries this would be illegal. E.g. here by law an employee may not be required to work on call for more than seven days in any period of four weeks. On top of that, you are entitled at least 11 hours of uninterrupted rest time every day which can be reduced to 8 hours only once a week.
Most companies actually *bar* you from exceeding these limits since violations would result in very harsh penalties not to mention the reputation damage.
Post doesn't assert that the Vatican denies evolution. Post doesn't even mention evolution.
The post's *content* might not, but the post's *title* surely does.
Post asserts that Vatican is under threat from knowledge. Something you've just illustrated with your reference to the theory of evolution. At least I guess it's a reference to the theory, rather than the facts of evolution.
That's absolutely *not* the case: the Vatican's position is that science and the scientific method are absolutely valid and compatible with faith since it consider science and faith to pertain inherently different domains. Actually it consider scientific discoveries to be an important challenge to the faith and humanity to better understand itself.
The "threat" to the Vatican is not from knowledge, it's from not understanding social changes until it's too disconnected from the people it preaches to. It's a danger well known to an organization thousands years old which might be conservative, but in context it *did* change a great deal to adapt to completely different societies since its inception. Technology is definitely a player in such changes, which is why the Vatican wants to study them.
Vatican does *not* deny evolution: it actually stated it doesn't conflict with chatolic faith in 1950 and accepted it as "more than hypothesis" in 1996.
Apple was abiding with a special deal Ireland made with them but the deal was illegal according to EU regulations. What the EU did is basically tell Ireland "you cannot treat Apple favourably compared to other companies since it would be unfair to the companies not getting the special deal, so your special deal is null and void and your own regular taxation applies instead".
They can trust the data by recovering it from the tamper-proof archived backups they *should* have. If they lack them, they failed and in this case it seems they failed big time.
A backup implies exactly that regardless of medium or location, and if the backup runs after the infection, then you're doing nothing but backing up (ransomware) encrypted data.
The end result is you're still fucked.
Only if you foolishly overwrite all previous backups so that only the last version remains. If that's how their backup works, then it's severely lacking given the importance of the data in question. What if you need a file and discover it got corrupted, and it might have been corrupted months ago?
Slashdot Mirror
That's in my opinion why the Swiss rejected a similar popular initative last November and accepted this legislation instead: the popular initiative included hard decommissioning deadlines which would have shut down some nuclear power plants much earlier than necessary. The approved legislation will phase out nuclear power plants when they'll reach end of life.
The headline didn't lie: two votes are actually 2 completely separate issues:
The vote from November was about a popular initiative of hard exit from nuclear energy: it was not initiated by the government but by Swiss citizens, which means it was actually an amendment of the Swiss Constitution, including the hard prohibition to use nuclear power plants and hard deadlines about which existing plant had to be decommissioned, some of them as soon as 1 year after th vote. It was quick, simple (complete amended text in german here) but in my opinion pretty wrong as approach. It was rejected.
The vote from last November was about a referendum of parliament legislation. The legislation was proposed by the government, voted by the parliament and had to be voted by Swiss citizens, so not an amendment of the Swiss Constitution but standard legislation. This second vote was about a much broader energy policy, still including a phase-out of nuclear energy but without any hard deadline of nuclear power plant decommissioning and with actually a long term plan about what to do to cover the missing energy production. It was approved.
That's because you disrespected them, but some parents only care about that and couldn't care less if you disrespect somebody else. They don't teach to respect others, they teach not to hurt their overinflated ego.
There is relatively little the government can do to lower rates through more lasting, structural means, mostly because the Liberals have tied up so much of the system in 20-year contracts.
To be clear, I don't question that the energy policy in Ontario has been a disaster, I question attributing the failure to "renewable don't work" when the issues in Ontario are broader in scope and didn't affect only renewables.
No energy policy is going to work well if you implement it with bad planning and through overpriced non-renegotiable bad deals to private companies, be it renewables, nuclear, coal or whatever.
Électricité de France (EDF) – the country's main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country's nuclear power plants. EDF is substantially owned by the French government, with around 85% of EDF shares in government hands.
78.9% of Areva shares are owned by the French public sector company CEA and are therefore in public ownership.
EDF remains heavily in debt. Its profitability suffered during the recession which began in 2008. It made €3.9 billion in 2009, which fell to €1.02 billion in 2010, with provisions set aside amounting to €2.9 billion.
The Nuclear industry has been accused of significant cost overruns and failing to cover the total costs of operation, including waste management and decommissioning.
In 2016, the European Commission assessed that France's nuclear decommissioning liabilities were seriously underfunded, with only 23 billion euros of earmarked assets to cover 74.1 billion euros of expected decommissioning costs.
But, wary of the previous cost overruns at Ontario Hydro, the government decided to outsource the work of building and running the new power plants to the private sector. The private sector would be responsible for cost overruns and other construction problems in exchange for 20-year contracts from the province. The contracts essentially guaranteed that the companies would receive a certain amount of revenue – no matter how much electricity their plants produced (though they would be paid more if the province used their electricity).
The first major wave of private power plants was fuelled with natural gas. Later plants were tied to the Green Energy Act, which provided lucrative terms for wind and solar plants in a bid to build a renewable-power industry in the province.
Ultimately, the province built more plants than it actually needed. In 2014, according to the Auditor-General, Ontario had the capacity to produce 30,203 megawatts of power – but only needed 15,959 on an average day. (Even on the busiest day of the year, the province only required 22,774 megawatts.)
So the province has a massive surplus of generating capacity, but because much of it is tied up in private, 20-year contracts, Ontarians have to pay for all that electricity – whether they need it or not.
And Ontarians are still paying for the nuclear plants Ontario Hydro built in the eighties and nineties. When Ontario Hydro was broken up, its debt was hived off into an item called the “stranded debt,” which is being paid down by electricity users.
Countries investing in renewables know perfectly well the strategy means higher prices in the short term, so prices being higher today is actually part of the strategy and by no means evidence it's "not working": it's actually working as planned... I actually think the US should have higher electricity costs to finance a long term energy strategy too, whatever it will be (not necessarily renewables).
It's my understanding in the US the focus is much more on the short term advantages, but countries investing in new energy strategies are planning with the next 20-30 years in mind, not "next quarter".
Amanda Knox was only one of the suspects, together with Raffaele Sollecito (Italian, acquitted) and Rudy Guede (Ivorian, convicted). A judicial mess might have been, but it doesn't seem "wanting to get the evil American" to me.
In Italy, that's the whole point of the Guardia di Finanza, which is a military police force working under the Minister of Economy and Finance with the specific goal of dealing with financial crimes. They are not responsible for tax collection, but definitely for tax evasion investigations.
Not to be confused with the Polizia di Stato (State Police), which is the Italian civil police force working under the Minister of Interior dealing with law enforcement in general.
With tax avoidance, the worst that can happen is that the tax office changes what you have to pay. You cannot be prosecuted for tax avoidance. With tax evasion, you can go to jail.
In Italy you cannot have a penal prosecution for tax avoidance, but you can incur in administrative sanctions on top of having to pay back the "avoided" taxes.
The accusation is of tax evasion, not avoidance.
Well, that is assuming that whoever translated it from Italian got it right. There have been plenty of cases where things just get reported wrong.
Reports are correct. Note that in Italy in the recent past there has been a crack down on big companies allegedly evading taxes, with similar accusations to Google and Apple. The accusation is basically to having omitted to report revenues to the tax authority.
Not sure about the case against Google, but Apple was on the hook for about 800 millions and after a negotiation settled the case by paying around 320 millions.
By that logic I should fire my company for making me work after hours and weekends on their projects.
If the company refuses to properly compensate you for your after hours work, yes you should stop working for them.
Not sure which countries you are talking about: in most European countries I know medical malpractice is always open to huge liabilities. I think you are confusing malpractice with accident: in case of medical accidents nobody is at fault, so nobody is liable. In case of malpractice somebody it's at fault, usually due to some form of negligence. This leads to liability and could easily even lead to criminal charges.
In most jurisdictions a request of voluntary termination of parental rights needs to be evaluated and accepted by a court, which often denies such requests unless there is "good cause" (typically to allow adoption). Without good cause the request is denied no matter what the parents want or agree, since it would free one of them of his obligations to support the child, which is not in the child's best interest, which is the absolute priority.
No, that is already the standard. It's how corporations work, it's how foundations work, it's how businesses work. It's how in fact all relationships work, paid or unpaid. If someone doesn't want you associated with them, they get rid of you. That's what voluntary association is all about. Are you opposed to voluntary association?
Often associations have rules determining why and how a member can be kicked out and it's usually not "because the boss says so", especially when a Code of Conduct exists and disagrees with the boss.
Even in business an employer might not always be able to fire an employee without just cause. In some countries this even means an employer might be required by law to reinstate a fired employee, even if he wants to "get rid" of him.
Once you sack a person, you cannot re-instate them. They hold grudges for being sacked, they act like they're bigger than their boss and many other personality traits make it impossible.
That's only if they are being unprofessional and let their beliefs interfere with their work... which is actually the employer's problem in this case.
About re-instating employees not working, actually in some countries if an employer unlawfully sacks an employee he might be forced by law to re-instate him and no, the employer might not be able to avoid re-instatement by offering different forms of compensations.
Either it's patented (and thus disclosed) or it's a trade secret. You cannot have it both ways.
Even this in most countries this would be illegal. E.g. here by law an employee may not be required to work on call for more than seven days in any period of four weeks. On top of that, you are entitled at least 11 hours of uninterrupted rest time every day which can be reduced to 8 hours only once a week.
Most companies actually *bar* you from exceeding these limits since violations would result in very harsh penalties not to mention the reputation damage.
Post doesn't assert that the Vatican denies evolution. Post doesn't even mention evolution.
The post's *content* might not, but the post's *title* surely does.
Post asserts that Vatican is under threat from knowledge. Something you've just illustrated with your reference to the theory of evolution. At least I guess it's a reference to the theory, rather than the facts of evolution.
That's absolutely *not* the case: the Vatican's position is that science and the scientific method are absolutely valid and compatible with faith since it consider science and faith to pertain inherently different domains. Actually it consider scientific discoveries to be an important challenge to the faith and humanity to better understand itself.
The "threat" to the Vatican is not from knowledge, it's from not understanding social changes until it's too disconnected from the people it preaches to. It's a danger well known to an organization thousands years old which might be conservative, but in context it *did* change a great deal to adapt to completely different societies since its inception. Technology is definitely a player in such changes, which is why the Vatican wants to study them.
Vatican does *not* deny evolution: it actually stated it doesn't conflict with chatolic faith in 1950 and accepted it as "more than hypothesis" in 1996.
Apple was abiding with a special deal Ireland made with them but the deal was illegal according to EU regulations. What the EU did is basically tell Ireland "you cannot treat Apple favourably compared to other companies since it would be unfair to the companies not getting the special deal, so your special deal is null and void and your own regular taxation applies instead".
Then subsidize them: if it works like with mass-transit it would be a win given that subsidizing mass-transit is a *very* effective policy.
Oh, death threats aren't illegal if they're sent by stupid people? Is that case law somewhere?.
Kinda. Check Supreme Court decision in Elonis v. United States
They can trust the data by recovering it from the tamper-proof archived backups they *should* have. If they lack them, they failed and in this case it seems they failed big time.
A backup implies exactly that regardless of medium or location, and if the backup runs after the infection, then you're doing nothing but backing up (ransomware) encrypted data.
The end result is you're still fucked.
Only if you foolishly overwrite all previous backups so that only the last version remains. If that's how their backup works, then it's severely lacking given the importance of the data in question. What if you need a file and discover it got corrupted, and it might have been corrupted months ago?
Not to mention archived backups from various points in time.