The continuous, driving rain, the dysfunctional inhabitants and the general misery of life in Manchester probably makes the surgeons think it's still 1912. (I know, I know...Manchester has never got over the sense of entitlement it got from having the world's first stored-program practical digital computer, and having had Alan Turing as its star programmer.
I should add, in fairness, that both Archer and McNab had the ideas; I'm not suggesting for a moment that their books were ghostwritten. They weren't. (according to a publisher I used to know). And I used to work with a Cambridge First in English who really could not spell - his writing was basically just the shape of the words. He wrote quite successful detective novels in his spare time. His publisher never complained. Successful writing is usually a collaboration.
Jeffrey Archer made a lot of money for his publishers despite the cost of the editorial team and the proofreaders. As did "Andy McNab". A nice big cheque to keep your mouth shut as to who really wrote what removes any need for other people to feel sympathetic.
Marx wanted the State to "wither away". He believed that if people were sufficiently educated and brought up to understand the idea of community, there would be no need for a State. Take away the "educated" and the "community" and you have the US Republican far right.
However, in reality this is all a bit paranoid. Most of this is the Praetorian Guard of MI5, the Home Office and the Met panicking about how they can protect themselves and their political masters from the London mobs, of any creed or colour you care to mention. Understandable, really. If you had to live in London on the average national income, I imagine you would be beside yourself with fury much of the time. Get outside our rather nasty three main conurbations and things are very different.
Like the American political system, there are good guys and bad guys. However, they do not split along party lines. As an old lefty it annoys me that I have to approve strongly of people like Tomlinson, David Davis, John Bercow and Geoffrey Bacon (all Conservatives) while maintaining a deep loathing for most of the Labour leadership. But that's real life: people's standards of behaviour and their expressed opinions are often at variance.
This was the City of London police, who are traditionally less prone to corruption than the Met*. Because they investigate sensitive fraud cases and the like, and because many of the criminals in the City have vast resources, the expected standard of police behaviour is much higher. If this officer did not file a proper report on the lunch, he should have done. (I don't know whether he did or not, so I have no opinion on that aspect of the matter.)
*To understand the Metropolitan Police, read the history of the Praetorian Guard in Rome. Boris Johnson knows his classics, and I suspect that is one reason why he fired the head of the Met soon after taking office.
This has all the vulnerability of a motorcycle on the road, and all the risks of a Jesus nut in the air. In short, the combined safety defects of the most dangerous forms of transport in their respective groups. All it needs now is submarine capability to create a perfect Bermuda Triangle. It is going to need to travel from locked garage to locked garage, because even gated suburbs don't have the security of an airport. It's a pity; the only way I can imagine a flying car safe enough for the public would require fixed wings, which obviously won't work.
Some military equipment has long been covered in ablative paint. Laser strikes, creates cloud of of particles which diffuse the beam preventing further damage. The identification of materials with suitable oxides or nitrides is left as an exercise for the reader.
I can tell you with considerably confidence that insulating our walls and greatly improving the attic insulation reduced heating loss by around 40%. We have also done the other stuff (high efficiency German water heater, pipe insulation, high efficiency oven and heating stove) and installed solar PV. The result is that our net energy consumption excluding vehicles costs around $600 a year, a saving of roughly $2000, for a total investment of around $20000. A ten year payback may not sound that good, but the investment has a lifecycle of roughly 25 years and energy costs are only going up.
It used to be reckoned in the UK that engineers bought to last. The result was that, 10 years or so into their marriages, they were better off than other people on similar incomes who bought for fashion.
The other thing is that, with time, good quality stuff is getting relatively more expensive. The relative price of hardwoods, real stone and so on is constantly rising. Therefore, buying good furniture as soon as you can afford it costs much less in the long run.
The best things for a high tech house are excellent insulation, properly designed ventilation, solar PV panels where appropriate, low maintenance walls and flooring. And learn to do some of it yourself where labor costs are high.
Incidentally, I paid off my mortgage 18 years ago. Each subsequent move, we have paid the difference in cash. Until you have done it, you cannot imagine how worth while it will seem once you have saved to pay off the mortgage; the simple fact that you are no longer desperate to keep your job in a recession is worth more than all the toys combined.
Contrary to what he asserts, Maxime Faget, who designed the Mercury capsule, was born in British Honduras and educated in the USA. Given that he was an extraordinarily brilliant and successful engineer, we would all be better off in the EU if there were indeed Fagets all over the place, including our parliaments. We'd probably have a colony on Mars by now (sustaining itself by grants from the Common Agricultural Policy).
Talk about different premises! Liberals are neither of the left nor the right; they are supposed to distrust all dogma, rely on the results of testable research, and allow people to do whatever does no harm to others. I'm not going to get into a slanging match on Conservatives or the Left, but both seek to impose their will on other people while relying on dogma, whether it's the Bible or Kapital. Both seek to persuade the masses that following them will be to their benefit, whereas in both cases it is only about benefiting a small minority.
Reality has a liberal bias because only liberals are interested in pursuing research wherever it leads. Both the US Right and the Soviet Left, for instance, at some point opposed the theory of evolution for dogmatic reasons.
Many years ago, in the UK, my wife volunteered to do the school crossing patrol. She was nearly killed (along with several kids) when a man drove straight across the crossing without slowing down. But she got the number and called the police.
Later she was called to the police station to make a statement. The police had arrested the driver. He said he had not seen the crossing because there was thick fog (mildly overcast). Then they discovered that he was registered partially sighted. He had cataracts.
He was convicted of:
Careless driving
Driving while unfit
Driving while uninsured (because his insurance was invalid from the moment he lied on the form).
His comment to my wife at the police station? "You've spoiled my day". He simply did not realise how serious his offense was.
So I applaud what Google is doing, because I've worked with computers for nearly 35 years, and human beings for over 40, and if the system is designed I would trust the computer over the human being any day of the week, and double on Sundays (drunks with hangovers).
If you believe that everybody in your generation could read a map, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you might like to purchase from me. I will even, generously, exclude children with actual learning difficulties. If your geography teacher is still alive, perhaps you should enquire and report back.
North London grammar school, 1960s. I think the age range was roughly equivalent to your 7th grade. This was top set geography, i.e. approx. the top 7% of the cohort by standard academic test. About 50% passed the practical.
I can only conclude that if 100% of your ability range could read a map, as you claim, Scandinavian superiority is fully established and the extreme backwardness of England is fully demonstrated. Permit me, however, to retain an element of scepticism.
Those skills were never common. When I was at school, map reading was, basically, taught to about the top 10% of the ability range. The rest were probably not going to be able to afford cars or become Army officers. Then (I am writing about Europe) cars were democratised. It obviously makes far more sense to deskill navigation, making roads safer, than try to get the incapable to learn effective map reading. And not just the incapable...I once worked with a sales director who never learned to read a map, giving rise to a memorable occasion in Switzerland where I realised we had just driven the wrong way along the autobahn for 50km because he didn't actually realise that the sun rose in the East, we were heading into the sunrise, and we were meant to be going West.
In the 1940s, what it took to be a great physicist was, among other things, ability at mental arithmetic. Nowadays, fundamental physics is completely beyond mental arithmetic. Are you suggesting that CERN or the Tevatron are a step back from the Manhattan Project?
Because we are a squashed little island, there isn't room for large, well designed junctions like you have in the USA. This week we went round a junction in Leeds which would confuse a knot theorist; later on my phone I counted eight roads meeting. In London there are frequently two or more left turns off the same road junction. The road signs are so dense as to be completely unreadable. My satnav puts up a picture of the junction, indicates the path through it and tells me when to turn, but the visual display is often very necessary - and far less distracting than staring at a huge overhead sign and muttering "Do I want Dewsbury?"
The high pitched whine you hear is Marx spinning in his grave. Lenin would be too, if he wasn't being held down.
China is what happens when technocrats come to power in a largely illiterate country. Call it any ism you like, but it can be reduced to "democracy? Steam engines don't need democracy, and they work perfectly."
Nice once had a very corrupt mayor (Medecin) who had to exit suddenly to South America. He was corrupt but he was quite good at raising money for the city, and he stayed in power for some time. Very Nice...anyway, the week after his exit I was visiting Nice on business and was talking to the taxi driver on the way from the airport. I naturally asked him what he thought of M. Medecine. His reply? "C'est un vieux con, mais c'est notre con a nous." (more or less a literal translation of your post.)
I don't have the exact figures, but at one time most oil futures were all about the actual users of the oil - refineries and so on - and were perfectly legitimate. Futures are what is needed to get farmers to raise hogs and grow corn, after all. Things went wrong when the futures were taken out by people who were not in the supply chain at all. This could be made illegal, but hedge funds have enormous political power.
Speculation of this kind has a long history. G K Chesterton, nearly a hundred years ago, referring in passing to the scandal of the time, wheat futures buyers who were not millers or grocers trying to buy up the entire wheat crop in order to raise prices to whatever they thought would not actually collapse civilisation while making them rich. Currently, I believe, over 70% of oil production is accounted for by hedge fund futures. It is a classical cornering of the market - but it could only be addressed by sending gunboats to banana republics like the Bahamas, the Channel Islands, the State of Delaware and the City of London.
That is because they are from other manufacturers. I'm not even sure if HP actually makes the DesignJets any more. And apparently the firmware has been farmed out...there have been a number of inconsistencies in recent HP SNMP MIBs which suggest a possible lack of QA.
The fact that workers are better off in these factories doesn't mean much, given that China is a brutal, repressive dictatorship. If the Chinese authorities leave conditions in the country so bad that near slavery in towns is better, despite their need for farming, then the desire of workers to escape the countryside is unsurprising. "Encouraging" the population to move to the towns to replicate the Industrial Revolution makes sense for the Chinese global strategy, but giving people a choice between agrarian near-slavery and urban better paid near-slavery isn't exactly validated by their preferring the frying pan to the fire.
Slashdot Mirror
The continuous, driving rain, the dysfunctional inhabitants and the general misery of life in Manchester probably makes the surgeons think it's still 1912. (I know, I know...Manchester has never got over the sense of entitlement it got from having the world's first stored-program practical digital computer, and having had Alan Turing as its star programmer.
Our MP will be out come the next election, and in the meantime he will seemingly support anything that keeps his ministerial salary intact.
I should add, in fairness, that both Archer and McNab had the ideas; I'm not suggesting for a moment that their books were ghostwritten. They weren't. (according to a publisher I used to know). And I used to work with a Cambridge First in English who really could not spell - his writing was basically just the shape of the words. He wrote quite successful detective novels in his spare time. His publisher never complained. Successful writing is usually a collaboration.
Jeffrey Archer made a lot of money for his publishers despite the cost of the editorial team and the proofreaders. As did "Andy McNab". A nice big cheque to keep your mouth shut as to who really wrote what removes any need for other people to feel sympathetic.
However, in reality this is all a bit paranoid. Most of this is the Praetorian Guard of MI5, the Home Office and the Met panicking about how they can protect themselves and their political masters from the London mobs, of any creed or colour you care to mention. Understandable, really. If you had to live in London on the average national income, I imagine you would be beside yourself with fury much of the time. Get outside our rather nasty three main conurbations and things are very different.
Like the American political system, there are good guys and bad guys. However, they do not split along party lines. As an old lefty it annoys me that I have to approve strongly of people like Tomlinson, David Davis, John Bercow and Geoffrey Bacon (all Conservatives) while maintaining a deep loathing for most of the Labour leadership. But that's real life: people's standards of behaviour and their expressed opinions are often at variance.
*To understand the Metropolitan Police, read the history of the Praetorian Guard in Rome. Boris Johnson knows his classics, and I suspect that is one reason why he fired the head of the Met soon after taking office.
This has all the vulnerability of a motorcycle on the road, and all the risks of a Jesus nut in the air. In short, the combined safety defects of the most dangerous forms of transport in their respective groups. All it needs now is submarine capability to create a perfect Bermuda Triangle. It is going to need to travel from locked garage to locked garage, because even gated suburbs don't have the security of an airport. It's a pity; the only way I can imagine a flying car safe enough for the public would require fixed wings, which obviously won't work.
Some military equipment has long been covered in ablative paint. Laser strikes, creates cloud of of particles which diffuse the beam preventing further damage. The identification of materials with suitable oxides or nitrides is left as an exercise for the reader.
I can tell you with considerably confidence that insulating our walls and greatly improving the attic insulation reduced heating loss by around 40%. We have also done the other stuff (high efficiency German water heater, pipe insulation, high efficiency oven and heating stove) and installed solar PV. The result is that our net energy consumption excluding vehicles costs around $600 a year, a saving of roughly $2000, for a total investment of around $20000. A ten year payback may not sound that good, but the investment has a lifecycle of roughly 25 years and energy costs are only going up.
The other thing is that, with time, good quality stuff is getting relatively more expensive. The relative price of hardwoods, real stone and so on is constantly rising. Therefore, buying good furniture as soon as you can afford it costs much less in the long run.
The best things for a high tech house are excellent insulation, properly designed ventilation, solar PV panels where appropriate, low maintenance walls and flooring. And learn to do some of it yourself where labor costs are high.
Incidentally, I paid off my mortgage 18 years ago. Each subsequent move, we have paid the difference in cash. Until you have done it, you cannot imagine how worth while it will seem once you have saved to pay off the mortgage; the simple fact that you are no longer desperate to keep your job in a recession is worth more than all the toys combined.
Contrary to what he asserts, Maxime Faget, who designed the Mercury capsule, was born in British Honduras and educated in the USA. Given that he was an extraordinarily brilliant and successful engineer, we would all be better off in the EU if there were indeed Fagets all over the place, including our parliaments. We'd probably have a colony on Mars by now (sustaining itself by grants from the Common Agricultural Policy).
Reality has a liberal bias because only liberals are interested in pursuing research wherever it leads. Both the US Right and the Soviet Left, for instance, at some point opposed the theory of evolution for dogmatic reasons.
Later she was called to the police station to make a statement. The police had arrested the driver. He said he had not seen the crossing because there was thick fog (mildly overcast). Then they discovered that he was registered partially sighted. He had cataracts.
He was convicted of:
His comment to my wife at the police station? "You've spoiled my day". He simply did not realise how serious his offense was.
So I applaud what Google is doing, because I've worked with computers for nearly 35 years, and human beings for over 40, and if the system is designed I would trust the computer over the human being any day of the week, and double on Sundays (drunks with hangovers).
If you believe that everybody in your generation could read a map, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that you might like to purchase from me. I will even, generously, exclude children with actual learning difficulties. If your geography teacher is still alive, perhaps you should enquire and report back.
I can only conclude that if 100% of your ability range could read a map, as you claim, Scandinavian superiority is fully established and the extreme backwardness of England is fully demonstrated. Permit me, however, to retain an element of scepticism.
My backside does that for me far more effectively than a speedometer needle. If you can't feel the G force, really you should not be driving.
In the 1940s, what it took to be a great physicist was, among other things, ability at mental arithmetic. Nowadays, fundamental physics is completely beyond mental arithmetic. Are you suggesting that CERN or the Tevatron are a step back from the Manhattan Project?
Because we are a squashed little island, there isn't room for large, well designed junctions like you have in the USA. This week we went round a junction in Leeds which would confuse a knot theorist; later on my phone I counted eight roads meeting. In London there are frequently two or more left turns off the same road junction. The road signs are so dense as to be completely unreadable. My satnav puts up a picture of the junction, indicates the path through it and tells me when to turn, but the visual display is often very necessary - and far less distracting than staring at a huge overhead sign and muttering "Do I want Dewsbury?"
China is what happens when technocrats come to power in a largely illiterate country. Call it any ism you like, but it can be reduced to "democracy? Steam engines don't need democracy, and they work perfectly."
Nice once had a very corrupt mayor (Medecin) who had to exit suddenly to South America. He was corrupt but he was quite good at raising money for the city, and he stayed in power for some time. Very Nice...anyway, the week after his exit I was visiting Nice on business and was talking to the taxi driver on the way from the airport. I naturally asked him what he thought of M. Medecine. His reply? "C'est un vieux con, mais c'est notre con a nous." (more or less a literal translation of your post.)
You need to have a Mordor Car.
Speculation of this kind has a long history. G K Chesterton, nearly a hundred years ago, referring in passing to the scandal of the time, wheat futures buyers who were not millers or grocers trying to buy up the entire wheat crop in order to raise prices to whatever they thought would not actually collapse civilisation while making them rich. Currently, I believe, over 70% of oil production is accounted for by hedge fund futures. It is a classical cornering of the market - but it could only be addressed by sending gunboats to banana republics like the Bahamas, the Channel Islands, the State of Delaware and the City of London.
That is because they are from other manufacturers. I'm not even sure if HP actually makes the DesignJets any more. And apparently the firmware has been farmed out...there have been a number of inconsistencies in recent HP SNMP MIBs which suggest a possible lack of QA.
The fact that workers are better off in these factories doesn't mean much, given that China is a brutal, repressive dictatorship. If the Chinese authorities leave conditions in the country so bad that near slavery in towns is better, despite their need for farming, then the desire of workers to escape the countryside is unsurprising. "Encouraging" the population to move to the towns to replicate the Industrial Revolution makes sense for the Chinese global strategy, but giving people a choice between agrarian near-slavery and urban better paid near-slavery isn't exactly validated by their preferring the frying pan to the fire.